Mozilla is trying to innovate and bring new features to Firefox, but the browser continues to lose users. Despite these concerning market trends, the company is actively...
Google was already doing that for years. Most of Firefox users use it because it’s leaner than Chrome and supports adblockers. None of these advantages will suddenly disappear, but Chrome will inevitably become worse all by itself, and more users will migrate away from it to Firefox.
So Firefox strategy should be to simply not screw up by adding unnecessary stuff like AI.
Again, this isn’t Microsoft, whom you can rely on for prompt footgunning. Chrome is still very fast, reasonably lean, and developed with more resources than Mozilla.
Hence Firefox could die before Alphabet starts to really tighten the screws. That’s what I’m most afraid of, as the next step for Alphabet would be “depreciating” Chromium, closing the source, and killing all the forks.
I don’t want a world where the only viable browser is a Chrome binary.
Google was already doing that for years. Most of Firefox users use it because it’s leaner than Chrome and supports adblockers. None of these advantages will suddenly disappear, but Chrome will inevitably become worse all by itself, and more users will migrate away from it to Firefox.
So Firefox strategy should be to simply not screw up by adding unnecessary stuff like AI.
But when?
Again, this isn’t Microsoft, whom you can rely on for prompt footgunning. Chrome is still very fast, reasonably lean, and developed with more resources than Mozilla.
Hence Firefox could die before Alphabet starts to really tighten the screws. That’s what I’m most afraid of, as the next step for Alphabet would be “depreciating” Chromium, closing the source, and killing all the forks.
I don’t want a world where the only viable browser is a Chrome binary.