this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2025
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Yeah it's bad. Most of the points made in that article are valid.
And once Firefox is gone, all the LibreWolfs and IronFoxs are gone too.
At some point in time FF was a normal project. A good project even. It could be in theory forked as easily as INN, or LibreOffice, or Xorg (oops, never mind), or whatever else big and "classical". It was open to contributors, open in leadership. It was kinda anarchist.
Like a good FOSS project, they considered all the tinkery\hobbyist use cases, having xulrunner and XUL in general. Like a good FOSS project, they didn't treat what's now normal there as normal.
They had a sane UI. They supported the SeaMonkey project, because why be a jerk when you need not.
But then at some point they made a deal with Google. So that's a lesson - any deal works both ways.
For me dropping XUL was the first firm sign of FF's death, because they didn't replace it with anything as good. It almost felt as if the main technical merit of dropping XUL was inability to tinker with it, and XUL's problems with security and parallelism were used as excuses. They could have made an incompatible, but just as functional replacement, not just for my convenience, but for their own too.
So, IMHO, if FF hadn't died, they'd just split paths with the commercial web as far as a decade ago. Probably come up with something like what's Gemini project is doing now, except much more.
BTW, FF was a big enough browser to even affect de facto web standards, were it a good thing to use while ignoring Google's bullshit. Instead they decided to track the bullshit and make the FF itself crappier and "more like Chrome" to compete for Chrome users.