This is a nonsensical and unrealistic fear/threat to be putting at the top of your list.

The biggest problems are happening right now not in some 90s sci fi films.

One of those threats is automated weaponry and mass surveillance, but not in the comic relief way you speak about it.

Thats the beauty to silly idealists who pretend they can’t understand that hundreds of employees getting paid full time wont materialize out of thin air to keep a massive project like a web browser alive in the absence of that structure.

In that individuals can be, and that its very difficult to actually do a broad search because content that might exist in one might not exist in another, and that the types of people to run them often dont want search engines indexing them

Firefox then

Whoo it is chained by googles search engine deal

This is some serious self eating idealist talk here.

In life you must realize there are many situations where you think about the context and consequences of your choices, and you choose the closest to viable option.

Firefox is that.

It sucks that there is that google deal, but ultimately the world effects of firefox dying are wide reaching despite its diminishing numbers and so much greater than so many casually Mozilla doomer takes realize.

Do people realize that if Firefox dies (in the many ways that could be interpreted), all of these downstream forks will also die right?

Like, the work to in essence remove unwanted parts of a code base is admirable but its an utterly miniscule fraction of the work that goes into maintaining a modern browser, keeping up with standards, sending people to be voices at conventions, etc.

Literally Firefox.

I feel like the reasons are obvious and I am constantly amazed at people who choose offshoots that end up having problems jsut as bad or worse than Chrome.

• Firefox actually uses an engine independent of Chromium

• Firefox keeps developer documentation for the actual open web in a a clear fashion better than anyone else with MDN.

• Firefox is responsible for all of the heavy lifting for any of the browsers downstream of it that people seem to want to switch to so that Mozilla is less supported and the browsers they are on also break (which is bizzare footgun behaviour in my opinion, and exactly why the people who are idealists inherently can’t win. They shoot themselves in the foot with idealism so hard that companeis don’t even have to care about their opinions).

• Firefox has more resistant than the engine makers of any other browser to anti autonomy web changes like Chromes manifest 3, tvarious new tracking mechanisms and more.

Excuse a little bit of snark at hypothetical responses below, but Im just so frustrated Ill let off a little steam here:

bUt Ai.

So they have a few AI features you have to purposefully find or stumble into, and that means you are going to do everything in your power to make sure your last actual chance to avoid completely Google domination dies too?

You are basically begging for the even more intense enshitification that will come if Firefox actually dies.

bUt SoMeOnE eLsE cAn CoNtInUe DeVeLoPmEnT

Oh yeah? Someone else is going to take on this project with a massive amount of legacy code, inside knowledge and hundreds of people working on it constantly to keep it completely up to date??

You must have been confused when I mentioned above Mozilla does the heavy lifting for the browsers down stream. Just because someone makes a fork that removes features doesnt mean they are equipped to handle the level of work done in the code they are downstream of.

Anyways, the bottom line is, for now, if you actually value open source, the answer is Firefox.

Also, I don’t see locking data from search engines as a bad thing. The fediverse isn’t search engine searchable either

The fediverse not being searchable is one of the biggest flaws with it, and make it similarly ephemeral to Discord, except its actually worse because the sizes of communities are just in that goldilocks area of awfulness where there are echo chambers, and people are rude and toxic. Whatsmore, availability due to the small size is relatively mediocre.

However, it’s free and they have to support it somehow.

These arguments might just give me an aneurysm.

This has let so many horrible free to play games off the hook while they literally make billions in profits and have astounding profit margins.

Discord makes money.

In a non hyper greed infested world, they could simply coast at the level of wealth they are at now, still making free money for their investors, paying their workers, and improving the service, without making peoples lives shittier.

There is no reason to justify this shit.

Have you not seen the world? Everything, no matter how horrific, can always get infinitely worse.

The PIF could buy it and ban gay people. Israel could buy it and persecute people against genocide. A rich right wing billionaire could buy it and force even more nazi memes upon the youth. They could make a monetized limit to how many servers one can join that is purposefully below any sane reasonable or normal level. They could make PMs pay per message.

There are infinite ways it can get worse. Infinite.

It also makes giving or getting any kind of support a hellish time sink, but that’s almost besides the point…

You know, this comment just made me realize this might actually be the point for some companies.

Its a cheap way to pretend that you care about customer service, while actually dissuading customers strongly from actually trying. Its also completely easy to bot vs having a human on a phone line.

A great problem of our society is there being too many problems to have any group of people focus on enough to get any of them solved.

If every issue has just 2% of people caring about it, companies can easily just write those 2% off and do business as usual.

This is why to not have an enshitifed world it has to be top down, and people have to participate in politics logically as opposed to based on which groups of people they hate.

The basic maths of it just doesn’t work for any sort of bottom up action.

It would have to be a relative time of quiet and one company sticking out like a sore thumb for long enough for them to be damaged.

You have seen how rapidly things are getting worse.

There is not going to be that happening, and even if there were, it wouldn’t be enough as there are thousands more issues.

I don’t do the work to back up somebody else’s opinion.

Yet you expect others to do that here for you.

You are sealioning right now. You’re asking someone else to do a shit ton of work under the guise of “just asking questions” pretending to have healthy discourse.

A lot of this sites people suck and its filled with people justifying absurd things, but right here, you are asking a question so open ended its tantamount to asking for a thesis paper, and those would still be scrutinized.

Your troll shtick doesn’t work once its revealed you’re a troll. You no longer enrage, you just look foolish.

I think you are pretty much agreeing with my message.

Of course, it would be better if they didn’t, but can you really blame them when the system is stacked against us?

Yes, specifically when they use even a tiny bit of that little free time to beat down others who actually try, or when they don’t pay attention to the only ways they could possibly lessen the awful situation.

You personalized this beyond all reason. There was no malicious reading just someone trying to understand what you where trying to say.

Oh right, thats where the “You are worried someone is going to take this comment personally, get hurt, and then run to their corporate overlords” comes from. From you not being malicious at all.

Apparently, I was dead on

You are obviously a troll at this point. Obviously being completely wrong in every conceivable way confirms you were actually right…

Calling someone a bootlicker for telling people that solidarity is better than inner class fighting is so absurd you being a troll is the only logical conclusion.

Given you have another comment that goes like this::

I made statements, you can choose to do whatever you want with them. Trying to simplify this into good and bad is definitely a failing on your part.

I have spent decades studying this stuff so my perspective will be informed and wildly different than yours. That is okay.

I was raised Republican, became a Democrat, and now I vote Independent based on policy not feelings. I am very aware how all sides think.

I think its pretty much confirmed you are indeed a troll.

vote Independent based on policy not feelings.

Lol

Never had one actually. Like I might have created some temp at some point, but I’ve never really used it.

Just about the only social media I do is either anonymous, person to person (like discord) or linked in because well… for obvious reasons.

As is almost all the case when people say they don’t want “politics” in things. Politics just means whatever they don’t like/find valuable.

In our world of people dismissing any issue that isn’t their own, nothing matters, and only the worst people win.

If people didn’t leave before this, this or that group getting pissed off won’t be the death of it then either.

We don’t need everyone to care about everything, but the current paradigm of not only apathy, but actively fighting against other peoples causes because they aren’t your own has really doomed us.