Hot take: Mozilla/Firefox has been controlled opposition run by Google or it’s acolytes (in-directly of course) in secret for many years. Their only purpose being to take regulatory heat off Google and to do so by making a browser but not one that seriously competes, one that oopsie’s itself into constant self-owns and mistakes and things that can be waved off as bad judgement but which allow Google to concentrate total control of the web more or less, to have major sway over web standards, to have only Apple standing in the way of them just deciding by themselves what standards are going to be as Microsoft tried to do in the 90s/early 2000s with websites that only work with Chrome, etc.

Part of this is obviously misallocation of resources, lavishly paying a CEO for a small company more than makes sense, pouring millions into dead end projects that no one wanted and which get killed off or flop hard.

It’s just that that bargain no longer makes sense for Google, the regulators went after them anyways but by cozying up to Trump they’ve probably saved themselves from being broken up but clearly there’s little point to funding Mozilla anymore. Whether my little conspiracy theory about Mozilla being controlled oppo is correct or not, one thing is certain and it is that they are in panic mode because their major funding from Google stands to be cut, there is no replacement and so they’ve decided to sell out, to do ads, to siphon data, to introduce incredibly privacy unfriendly terms of use and service that users are rightly skeptical of and to lie about it all, to say oh it’s business as normal they just need to do this for hand wave some sort of legal reasons, reasons that magically never existed until this moment for many years and which cannot be detailed to users.

The scary thing is once Firefox goes down, once it alienates its core privacy-conscious userbase and turns into spyware and then implodes, there will be no way for the downstream privacy conscious forks to maintain their code-bases, to maintain a secure, standards compliant web-browser. At that point Google needs only push a large ream of new complex standards through web bodies to bury the corpse of Firefox by overwhelming those maintainers at which point only Chrome and Safari/webkit will exist.

Apple is never going to make a browser for Windows or Linux, they’d rather sell you the hardware and ecosystem lock-in in order to give you some privacy compared to Google. So at that point everyone not on a Mac will be stuck with Chrome and Chrome derivatives. At which point Google can if they wish get more hostile, start burying privacy-invasive features deeper into the code of Chrome, making it more tedious to remove for privacy forks without breaking things and even go nuclear and close-source the code if they wish or attach some license demanding people that fork from it not remove certain mandatory spying components at which point they can just sue anyone who gets big enough to threaten their share of the pie and allow a few obscure privacy fanatic forks to linger on the periphery invisible to 98% of people.

It’s all part of a larger power-grab by the bourgeoisie and corporations I think, part of the larger boot coming down as the west’s unipolar hegemony unravels and they desperately try to maintain control while letting the mask and pretensions slip.