I'm in rant mode. You've been warned. Wasn't Mozilla that got me started either. It was a tree, but that's slightly different story.
Since when do YouTube videos have ads? You seen what the interwebs look like lately? Without an ad blocker i mean? Holly crap i'm still seeing flashy things when i slam my peekers shut. How do people tolerate that obnoxious in-your-face pop-up bubble blinking animated garbage?
The other day the M@Ms (that's short for 'Morons @ Mozilla', corporate i mean) let a security certificate expire that's used to sign add-ons, the result being that pretty much everybody around pretty much the whole earth (apparently) had pretty much all of their Firefox add-ons disabled. F'n REALLY!?!? You couldn't have a CRON job to remind someone when a cert is due for resurrection? A calendar app? A sticky note? A mental note? Do you guys remember to change the oil in your Veyron's?
I was using Firefox yesterday and writing something extremely (un)important (because somebody on the interwebs was wrong...again) when all of sudden i saw what a ton of other Firefox users saw; a sickening yellow warning bar sliding slowly down from the top of my screen notifying me that MY browser just disabled some of MY add-ons because... stupid stuff. WTF just happened i wondered, and so i went surfing for answers.
Among the disabled add-ons, which of course Mozilla made sure COULD NOT BE IMMEDIATELY RE-ENABLED, was uBlock Origin, my fav ad/crap blocker. I can't remember the last time i surfed the web without an ad blocker. 15 years ago? 50? What a joke! There's ads everywhere and they stick 'em in every nook and cranny possible. Luckily i quickly found a hack to rectify the problem and so i don't think i was exposed to the viri long enough to result in permanent brain damage, other than permanently hating Mozilla corporate a little more than i hated them the day before and i don't even know if that's who was actually responsible for the Big Blunder, but when you're pissed, you're pissed, and so you really don't care if the f-bombs land slightly off-target so long as the enemy takes some well deserved shrapnel.
And this elevated level of intense dislike, by the way, puts me pretty close to the threshold of that which is required before i say 'F U You Bunch Of Idiots' and move on to............. to what? Chrome? HA! Brave? Vivaldi? Pale Moon? Waterfox? Not even. What else is there that's as hackable and well suited to the plethora of config tweaks and extensions required in order to realize some degree of control over your web surfing privacy? Seriously, i'm not aware of any other browser that would meet my needs. Why do ya think the TOR project uses Firefox? Because they think it's the daises? I'll bet it's because they see it as the lessor evil. They're probably stuck with it like the rest of us privacy geeks are, for the time being anyway.
Firefox USED to be a "good" browser. Why the quotes? Because it never was a really good browser, but it was the most hackable-by-noobs mainstream browser out there back in the day. The ratio was like 2:5, the 2 because of how it (failed to) preform and the 5 because it was so wonderfully hackable, and that made it a "good" browser. I think it was sort of a niche browser for a small but very dedicated bunch of tweak geeks and privacy phreaks. I think i still have my Firefox 1.0 T-shirt. I got some gas and a Bic too (the tree thing), so i hope i still have it. Well, let me tell you my friend, that ratio has flipped. Nowadays Firefox IS a good browser from a performance and capability POV, but it's becoming less and less hackable. But it's not just that it's less hackable, no no no. You see, Firefox used to be thought of as a community project and i think that's another reason why it was loved so, but it's not loved as much anymore, at least not by some of us. These days Mozilla rakes in HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF DOLLARS ANNUALLY because the M@Ms that vomit all the nice doo-doo that we like to rub ourselves in, like "Mozilla puts people before profit", think it's more profitable to put profit before people, and for the time being they're right, but we'll see who runs shit 'round here in the long run.
Don't get me wrong; i think there are some/many very talented Firefox devs spending a lot of time staring at glowing rectangles and pumping out really good code with a focus on privacy and security, but there seems to be a gap between the engineers and the idiots upstairs, as there often is in any corporation, and that gap seems to be widening to canyon proportions. I wonder what the engineers think about some of the lunatic ideas that the M@Ms at corporate come up with, like that whole Pocket fiasco where they decided to essentially bundle proprietary code in their "open source" browser and then make excuses all over the place when users revolted? Or how about the time when they decided it was a good idea to spy on their users (which they still do) and then make excuses all over the place when users revolted? Or the time when they bundled malware with the browser and then made excuses all over the place when users revolted?
Ya see where this is going? How many more hits can Mozilla absorb in their seemingly desperate quest to find the next goofy gimmick that will backfire in their faces before they become the red-headed step child for good? Absent a major shift in goals and ETHICS, Firefox's days are numbered, posits i, and frankly, i'm giving less of a damn every day. I wonder how many (more) developers are beginning to look out their windows at the corporate offices across the street while the M@Ms predictably trod along on their decent to DOOM?
These greedy sons-a-bitches will never learn.
Oh, and on a side note...
Remember all that "mad cow disease" media-hype bullshit and how it all quietly disappeared all of sudden? That's because the disease wasn't contagious; it was caused by a chemical that was used to target some parasite and when they figured this out and stopped using the chemical, mad cow disease disappeared. Just thought you might wanna know :)