Okay hear me out. What if we all chipped in 5 bucks to @firefox? How many people would it take to fund it well enough so they don’t have to do layoffs? I get it, the FOSS community wants the “F” part but we all should contribute some for good infrastructure. And the idea that search engine payments from Google is what keeps Firefox afloat should worry us all. We need browser engine diversity if the web is going to stay open and not littered with walled gardens any more than it already is.
They failed too much and it could be too late for Firefox, being years behind Chromium in terms of security and performance. Focusing on AI is another failure attempt, we have AI allready and bringing one to Firefox won’t solve anything at all.
Security and performance are hard to measure but it’s at least questionable that they’re behind in either.
AI has many good uses, for example the local translation capability that allows for privacy-preserving translations of websites is AI and already in Firefox, and makes it possible to translate in environments that do not allow sending data out for security reasons.
Firefox misses multiple security features Chromium had for years, altough they did add some like site isolation though mutliple processes. The following link showed up first after searching. [1]
Security isn’t everything though. I love how Firefox has local translations, which I’ve wanted for many years.
[1] https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/firefox-chromium.html#sandboxing