@Havn Arc Browser for the win!

@numericcitizen Yeah, I think that's the best one! But touches on why I stopped using it, and also links to another post where I go into more detail.

Also, this from the post:

If someone asks me how good I think macOS is — should I answer how good I think it is out-of-the-box (“State A”), or after I’ve customised it and added a bunch of third-party software (“State B”)? I think State B is the most relevant — but I also think it’s relevant how hard/expensive it is to get it there.

In State A, Firefox is slightly worse than Safari, and much worse than Arc. On the plus side, the other two browsers can’t be improved that much — while Firefox’s State B is a huge improvement. Then I’d say it’s better than Safari and on par with Arc. However, getting it there is far too difficult (but luckily not expensive).

@Havn I'm repeatedly going through that both on the desktop (Linux) and mobile (Android). Given, too, Mozillas dependency on Google advertising deals adds to this problem. These days, I use Brave on most devices for merely pragmatic reasons and without too much enthusiasm, considering the browser world not a choice of "the best" but rather of the "least bad" option. 😔

@z428 Yeah, I feel you... I'm obviously woefully unqualified to be the Mozilla CEO - even though I have some things I wished they did. But one of the thousand things I don't know what I'd do about, is the Google deal. Like, what would they lose if they cancelled it and lost that income? When should we just say "OK, Google is propping up Mozilla, Weekend at Bernie's style - nice!" and just take the money and try to do something good with it? :P

Check out floorp.app/en/ btw! Seems like a pretty neat Firefox fork, that actually focuses on features and usability, and not just privacy. (Which is also important, but yeah.)

@Havn Yes... I'm also really really uneasy voicing opinions on that. Taking that money and use it for the best of all definitely seems a good approach. From another angle, however, how sustainable is such a model, given the only real competitor to the Google browser engine also depends to a dangerous degree on Google funding - what happens to these models, services, solutions the very day Google pulls the plug on that? And, too: A lot of the issues arising from "surveillance capitalism" these days essentially stem from solutions being "gratis" (and using ads, tracking, user data to fund themselves) so I wonder whether much much more focus should or needs to be not just on that question of "open-ness" of a particular solution but also on "independence" or "sustainability" in terms of funding. That's one of my main reasons, actually, to throw money at platforms like micro.blog, and I definitely would pay for a sustainable, privacy-preserving, stable browser... .

@z428 Several great points! I guess my approach as CEO would be something like "How can we use this money to get rid of our dependence on it?"

Yeah, in another thread I said that I would easily pay $5/month to Mozilla with no other bonus features than knowing every piece of it went to "making Firefox a nice browser on all platforms". (Actually especially if it didn't include any other features - as I would like all the niceness to be available to everyone. But I guess they could throw in some badges and icons. :P )