Regarding the state of Firefox, and the reaction of an angry user base:

The privacy-focused community is too paranoid. I would have liked for Mozilla to have stuck to their word, but you ought to be pragmatic at times; it’s about the fucking monopoly, but sure, just give it to google served on a silver platter. Normal users are either leaving or not installing because they don’t understand the consequences, and technical users are being way too pedantic imo. But sure, let’s just fork FF all the way to hell and back, let’s just shit and piss up and down the backs of all those people who maintained and expanded all that infrastructure — RUNNING ALL THE WAY BACK TO YE OLDEN DAYS OF FRECKING NETSCAPE; FLUSH IT ALL DOWN THE TOILET, BURN IT TO THE GROUND, WHO EVEN GIVES A SHIT ANYWAYS.

Edge — I don’t even need to talk about Edge. (ARRRRHH, maybe you’d actually have to explain that to a regular, non-technical user)

Chrome — Down on your knees and get to work, kid! If you do a good job, the billionaire will even let you load into YouTube about 2 seconds faster!! He’ll call you a good boy/girl once you finish, and he’ll even let you have your speedy-weedy wittle youbie-tubie, because you have been such a good boy or girl and made the correct browser choice; You’ll just have to provide him with your personal ID, driver’s license, home address; and also, he has this really cool product he needs to show you.

Brave? — May have a lion mascot, but to me they look more like a wolf in sheep’s clothing; Chromium-based, crypto-loving, AI-sucking, data-selling freaks. (If you use Brave, you’re the reason why normal people don’t get into tech.)

TOR — Respect. They’re doing a good thing. Wouldn’t want it to be my main, but go off, queen!

FF Forks — I see the appeal: Privacy defaults, customizable keyboard shortcuts, that sounds sweet, honestly. HOWEVER, I do consider every single last one of them (except TOR) blood-sucking leeches. Yes, I wish FF had time to implement all these nice additions that are sprouting from all these little flavors, but you know what? I think Firefox got bigger fish to fry. But maybe that’s a little hard to understand if you just fork a browser and exist for all of 2 seconds. Well, let’s see how long they last.

Opera GX — How nice. Are you running that on POP! ? navigating with the aide of your glow-in-the-dark rainbow vomit Razor mouse? (Opera: a 14-year-old’s idea of “cool” GUI)

The rest of the small fry — who? what’s-her-face? sure. Very nice, even cute. Now go play on the highway.

Ladybird — THE SECOND COMING OF CHRIST. And you know that for a fact, isn’t even out yet, but somehow you just know.

Blatantly just ripping this, but: If there’s 10 million Firefox users, I am one them. If there’s a thousand Firefox users, I am one of them. If there’s zero Firefox users left in the world, I am dead. If they go down, I’m going down with them.

Which is exactly the point. Firefox actually has a chance of failing. When big tech does shady shit, they go all in. When Firefox does, they do it to stay afloat, and they do it to the smallest extent possible. Yet users still love being extremely hyperbolic and pedantic about it.

I just wished people would the smallest consideration to what it actually means to maintain infrastructure of this size.

And as a last hurrah to all the paranoia freaks: The minute you even consider “going dark” is the minute they’ll start paying you attention. If they really wanted to, they no doubt would find you. So just use Firefox. It has cute logo and everything.