Mozilla CEO quits, org pivots, but what about Firefox?

Lets just take Firefox and make it the open source standard. If we all get behind it like we did for Blender, we might succeed.

I doubt it tbh.

For blender it's fine, but for browser engines it's different because of their sheer size, complexity, need to adhere and collaborate with others to form web standards, need for security experts, day one vulnerability patches, etc.

If Mozilla dies, random volunteers or existing projects like LibreWolf can't just pick up the slack.

Volunteers can't run a modern web engine, it takes hundreds of millions per year to upkeep.

There's a reason why we're down to just Google, Apple, and Mozilla. Nobody wants to foot the massive bill unless they have a damn good reason for doing so.

It's probably more expensive to maintain a browser engine than a full operating system at this point. It's truly insane how large and costly they are.
- I'm sure Linus was told the same at some point.
- Check out Ladybird tho, from serenity os project (it also works in Linux). It's developed by an open source community, and some companies are sponsoring it's development. It's not at a usable point, but it's development has been impressive. If more money is donated by other companies it could be an alternative, maybe
- Of course they can't compete on the adversary's field when that adversary has bigger resources and monopoly in many areas.
  
  What I don't understand is why nobody has tried to sell the idea of an alternative Web to the wider audience?
  
  Like Gemini, only without the "minimal" and "non-commercial hobbyist" parts.
  
  Without trying to follow Google/MS/etc on the path intentionally chosen to not be passable for others.
The issue is that Firefox needs an org to get the Widevine DRM from its vendor (Google). Without it, they can't support Netflix or Apple TV or YouTube.
- Yet more proof that the DMCA needs to be repealed and DRM needs to be illegal.
- Or we can just drop DRM from the Standard. It's honestly about 15 years past about time.

Why? Well, it was Chrome. Yes, I know many of you spit at the very name. Get over it.

OK, boomer (yes, "surprise! surprise!", this harticle – for "hate driven article" – was written by a boomer, and one that writes for several online publications, too).

This article is not only a (staggering) failure from the aforementioned boomer to grasp what really is at play here, but it also shows a significant, shocking lack of quality assurance in the way "theregister" determines what gets published. This piece isn't an opinion as much as a flaming bag of shit, meant to stink everyone's shoes, and motivated only by the author's ineptitude-fuelled frustration in what seems a textbook example of the Dunning–Kruger effect.

Lemme first address my primary point, in relation to what I quoted at the top, I'll get to illustrating the various failures of the author after that.

No, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, we will not "get over it".

The first inaccuracy is in depicting Mozilla Firefox as "a browser". It isn't merely just another browser. Firefox is the last widespread multiplatform browser that isn't using the Blink engine (yes I know GNOME Web and Konqueror use WebKit, which is Blink's ancestor, BTW[^1] , but they are hardly widespread. And safari isn't multiplatform).

Why does that matter? Because the engine is essentially all that a browser is, once you strip away the cosmetics. So the actual contest here isn't between a dozen of browsers, but between two engines, and Firefox's (Gecko) is, indeed, in a dire position. But if we let it go further, it will, as Steven puts it, fall into irrelevance (the inaccuracy here is that the harticle depicts Firefox as already irrelevant).

And if we ever come to the point where only one engine prevails, where services necessary for administrations, citizenship, and life in general, can drop support for anything else than Blink, it is the end of the open web, and of open source web browsers in general[^2].

You will then have to input intimate personal information into a proprietary software, by law.

If you don't see this as a problem, you are part of the problem.

And this is why we can't "get over it".

The internet is much more than just the web. But 100% (rounded from 99.999+%) of users are unaware of that.

The web is much more than browsing. But 100% (rounded) of users are unaware of that.

We are getting our technology reduced to the lowest common denominator, and this denominator is set by people who fail to open PDFs.

Now, as to the other blunders I mentioned above, here are a bunch:

"Mozilla's revenue dropped from $527,585,000 to $510,389,000".

This is a 3% drop. Significant? Yes. But hardly a game ender.
"So, where is all that money coming from? Google".

I know it, you know it, we all have known that for a decade by now, and yes, it is a problem, yes, we need public FOSS funding, but that is neither news, nor relevant. Firefox, as the last major browser not directly controlled by Google, can find funding elsewhere. If I'm correct, and the stakes are so high, when Google pulls out, the public will step in (🤞), in the form of institutions, such as the EU.
"[...] she wants to draw attention to our increasingly malicious online world [...] I don't know what that has to do with the Mozilla Foundation".

That's on you, buddy. Understanding the matter at hand should be a prerequisite for publishing on theregister. But I digress. The maliciousness has a lot more to do with software than with users. And the root of said software aren't in "the algorithms", but really in actual, user facing software, that runs in our physical machines, where our microphones, cameras, GPS, and various other sensors are plugged...
"Somehow, all this will be meant to help Mozilla in "restoring public trust in institutions, governments, and the fabric of the internet." That sounds good, but what does that have to do with Firefox?".

Again, it's on you. Seriously, WTF. I get that you, the author, are American, and that decades of misinformation about "socialism", and "public ownership" will do that to a motherfucker, but Firefox does need funding aside from verdammt Google. You even highlighted that point yourself... How do you suppose they would get public funding if the government, or the public, doesn't trust Mozilla? Because replacing Google by another corporation only moves the problem, it hardly solves anything. While I'm at it, quick history lesson here: the "fabric of the internet" has been publicly funded. All of it. The internet was designed by DARPA funded researchers. Public money. Developed by universities. Public money. The web was invented at the CERN, by a researcher. Paid with public money. As a tech writer, how do you not know that?

[^1]: WebKit is only partially different from Blink, since Blink is a fork of WebKit. So, as far as "interoperability through competing implementations" goes, WebKit is of rather limited relevance, unfortunately.
[^2]: Only chromium and brave are available as open source software, chromium is maintained by Google as a courtesy, they can pull the plug any time, it will probably only affect their revenue positively. Brave is 3 times less popular than Firefox.

Thanks for the breakdown. YOU could write for the register.
- Thank you 🙏
  
  But I hardly doubt I would be given a voice. I'm just a random millennial struggling to make rent... (no avocado toast involved tho)
Nice rebuttal, I felt chastised and I didn't even write the thing
Thank you for this, it's a great breakdown. One question lingers for me:

You will then have to input intimate personal information into a proprietary software, by law.

Isn't Blink also FOSS? As you mentioned Chromium is open source, and my (weak) understanding is that Google are themselves bound by LGPL when it comes to Blink. So it's hyperbole - or just false - to say you'd be required to use proprietary software. It's developed by a shoddy company but it's not proprietary software - so long as other browsers exist that use the engine, of which there are plenty.
- AOSP is under the Apache 2.0. Yet, if you ever used a "de-googled" lineageos phone, you probably know that the OS you get is a far cry from the commercially supported versions (extremely bare-bones, lots of missing features, lots of apps that don't work, etc). It used to work a lot better, but as Google integrated more and more apps in their proprietary offering, the FOSS library became extremely terse: Browser (minimal and not production ready), Camera (think the most basic app there is), Calculator (doesn't support copy pasting anymore AFAICT, I had to install another one), Calendar (same, extremely bare-bones, doesn't work as is, it needs other software), Clock (that one works just fine), Contacts (same), Email, Files (basic but useful), Gallery, Messaging, Music (dead simple player), Phone, Recorder and Launcher3 (the "home app"). Anything else and you will need to side-load f-droid.
  
  So much so that commercial implementations such as /e/OS have to use alternative implementations such as microG, and put extensive effort in going around the limitations the hard way (providing their own store, etc). In my experience, they are really buggy, and not a commercially viable alternative to using the Google services.
  
  In the end, I use LineageOS as my daily driver on my phone, I have since 2013, but it isn't without sacrifices (and it is terrible enough that I decided to eventually migrate away from smartphones entirely: the alternative of using a non FOSS phone doesn't work for me).
  
  One important fact, as I wrote above, is that prior to android 6 (AFAIR), the AOSP offering was a lot more consequent. Google likely realized it cost them money (in dev time), but more importantly opportunities (people using degoogled phones isn't exactly in their best commercial interest), so they dropped the support for most apps. For example, the launcher app, launcher3, has been unmaintained in quite a while, and ROM distributors, such as Lineage, provide users with their own.
  
  Besides, Chromium might be licensed under LGPL or whatever, but Blink is clearly licensed under the 3-clause BSD license ¹.
  
  So, when you say
  
  Google are themselves bound by LGPL when it comes to Blink.
  
  It is incorrect. It is under a 3-clause BSD license, which does NOT give any warranty whatsoever with regards to sharing the source of components. Whenever Google decides to keep it proprietary, to relicense it, to stop updating the public repository, they can. No questions asked.
  
  Additionally, the affirmation (emphasis mine):
  
  so long as other browsers exist that use the engine, of which there are plenty.
  
  Strikes me as also incorrect. The only browsers that matter in this context are Open Source ones, and besides chromium, which is literally Google's product, I only know of Brave. But maybe you know others?
  
  I "diffed" that license against the 3-clause BSD, and as you can see with the following command, it is a match (don't blindly believe me, check the sed command, as you can see, the changes are minimal):
  
  $ _URL_REF="https://spdx.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause.txt"; \ _URL_CMP="https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/blink/+/refs/heads/main/LICENSE?format=text"; \ _ADDITIONAL_NOTICE="The Chromium Authors can be found at\nhttp://src.chromium.org/svn/trunk/src/AUTHORS" \ _F1="$(mktemp)"; _F2="$(mktemp)"; \ curl -SsL "$_URL_REF" | dos2unix | sed \ -e 's,(c) <<var;name=copyright;original= <year> <owner>;match=\.+>>,2014 The Chromium Authors,;' \ -e 's,reserved\. ,reserved.\n\n'"$_ADDITIONAL_NOTICE"',;' \ -e 's/<<var;name=organizationClause3;original=the copyright holder;match=\.+>>/Google Inc./;' \ -e 's/<<var;name=copyrightHolderAsIs;original=$[^;]*$;match=\.+>>/\1/;' \ -e 's/<<var;name=copyrightHolderLiability;original=$[A-Z ]*$HOLDER$[A-Z ]*$;match=\.+>>/\1OWNER\2/;' \ -e 's/"AS IS"/\n&/; s/FOR A/FOR\nA/; s/$reproduce the above$ $copyright notice$/\1\n\2/;' \ -e 's/$its$ $contributors$/\1\n\2/; s/[1-3]\. / * /;' \ | fold -s -w 72 | sed 's,^,// ,; s/ *$//; 12d; 17d; $s/$/\n/' > "$_F1"; \ curl -SsL "$_URL_CMP" | base64 -d > "$_F2"; \ diff -s -u "$_F1" "$_F2"; \ rm "$_F1"; rm "$_F2" Files /tmp/tmp.MQfi4Ya6P4 and /tmp/tmp.PmU8tsfiB0 are identical $
Love the clapback
Great post but I just wasn't able to let this go:

publicated

Published
- Thank you so much. 🙏
  
  I have no excuse, the autocorrect even underlined it...

Today, only a relative handful of Firefox users are left. According to the US federal government's Digital Analytics Program (DAP), which gives us the running count of the last 90 days of US government website visits, only 2.2 percent of visitors use Firefox.

Look, I know far fewer people use Firefox than Chrome, but basing it on who uses U.S. government websites in the last 90 days doesn't even make sense if Firefox users were only in the U.S.

I'm in the U.S. and use Firefox and I haven't been to a U.S. government website in the last 90 days as far as I know.

And, I don't know if the author knows this or not, but there's around 200 other countries out there.

Some of those government websites only work on chromium too, which is irritating
- You guys know of government websites that actually work?
- Back in the day it was the case with IE as well.
  
  The cause?
  
  At least in IE's case, deliberate siloing of non-standard features needed for table input.
  
  Microsoft didn't have to write it that way, but they did, knowing it would capture a fucktonne of government and regulatory sites.
  
  I had to support IE all the way to 2018 at one site because the only way they could pull permits was from an ancient government site that only supported IE.
Based off the User Agent varriable?

Opinion piece by a person who has little to say outside of ad-hominem.

Indeed. Article reads like a spoiled brat. "Get over it". The second something like that appears, it's crystal clear the writer thinks they're above the reader.
Yeah, and she didn't quit, she stepped down to get previous position on the board.

A lot of people in this thread seem to downplay the article with "yeah, that might be your opinion..." but two facts that are facts and not opinions are:

The market share Firefox hold is insignificant.
Mozilla's business is a near 100% dependency on one "customer", Google.

This means that if Google decides to stop bank rolling Mozilla it's game over. Firstly because other revenue streams are currently near insignificant when you look at the total expenses.

Secondly because since Firefox hold no significant market share, no one else would be interested in investing in Mozilla and the future of Firefox. After all, whatever Mozilla will throw up on the wall as the "grand masterplan for world dominance" would just end up in the question "Why didn't you do this before?".

I've been using Firefox for almost 20 years. I started using it because I saw what happens when one company controls the browser market. That web browser did so much damage and we only really got rid of it some year ago.

Chrome is a perfect example that the history repeats itself and that people are fucking stupid. People are actually acting surprised and complain about Google putting effort into making adblocking impossible in Chrome.

So all in all, if Mozilla doesn't find other revenue streams, Firefox is dead... It just doesn't know it yet.

Now, everyone yapping about that Linux was an insignificant player and still made it to the top just sound like enthusiasts who really doesn't know history and the harsh reality of doing business.

Linux was just a little more than hobby project (business wise) that essentially only Red Hat and Suse made real money from in the 90's.

Arguably you could say that the turning point was when the CEO of IBM, Lou Gerstner, shocked the world by saying that IBM was going to pump in 1 billion dollars in Linux during 2001. Now, that doesn't look like much today when just Red Hat has a yearly revenue of 3-4 billion, but that's how insignificant Linux was at that time.

After that milestone Linux went for the jugular on Windows Server. For ordinary people it would still take almost 10 years before they would hold something Linux in their hands.

The rocket engine that accelerated Linux and pieces that it was ready for end users was Google and Android in 2007. Linux's growth the last 20 years wasn't mainly driven by enthusiasts, it was business pumping in money in future opportunities.

What future opportunities can Mozilla sell to investors with the market share Firefox has today?

Yup. Mozilla really needs to diversify and find new revenue sources.

They've been trying, but it's proving difficult to do while still refraining from hoovering up and selling everybody's data. Nobody wants to pay.

To make matters worse, anytime Mozilla tries to make any money, people accuse them of selling out or say they should just focus on Firefox. Some of these people even say that Firefox needs to get rid of Google funding immediately to get rid of Google's influence.

But that means the death of Firefox. I don't really get what these people want.
- These people want to be rid of Google's influence, which is why they chose Firefox over Chrome to begin with. But they don't understand the position Mozilla is in..
- Some of these people even say that Firefox needs to get rid of Google funding immediately to get rid of Google’s influence.
  
  Which is an importnt factor, because Mozilla is currently being kept alive specifcally to lose.
  
  To be fair, those people (and lots others too) watch everyday some millionaires or billionaires just up and throwing money. Under that premise, it "should be as easy" as just convincing a random capitalist with narcissist complex to fund Mozilla. The problem with that is, people's memory on the internet tends to not be retrospeculative, so they don't notice if Mozilla did that they'd be in just about the same position eg.: Reddit was 5 years before 2023.
- The issue is biggest for web browsers, but I also feel like I see that issue for a whole lot of web industries. Journalism, for instance. Everyone wants everything for free, and so the "articles" you see are garbage half churned out from algorithms to optimize click rate, and blanketed with dozens of ads. To take another example, games, we have a market saturated with freemium games that encourage people to spend nothing (and then hundreds). Pirates would now claim it's a moral responsibility to pirate, but if we end up in that world, only a slim minority of people would ever make a living out of it.
  
  The general unwillingness/inability for consumers to pay for digital content definitely causes a lot of problems now. I personally attribute it to a generally low minimum wage, but it could be an issue going beyond that.
Arguably Google needs Firefox and co to not lose chrome in Europe due to anti monopoly rulings. Think that is sadly the best thing Firefox has to offer investors.
The rocket engine that accelerated Linux and pieces that it was ready for end users was Google and Android in 2007.

N-no. Correct about IBM though.

It seems that what made Linux and FreeBSD relevant was the late 90s' and early 00s' Web. And FreeBSD then lost to Linux, not to Windows Server or Solaris.

Linux’s growth the last 20 years wasn’t mainly driven by enthusiasts, it was business pumping in money in future opportunities.

Only there are different kinds of businesses, and the balance between them is becoming worse.
- Before IBM made that statement there were essentially no major software vendors that ported and supported their software on Linux.
  
  Yes, one might argue that Linux-Apache-MySql-Php revolutionized things but other than that a clear majority of things were run on solutions that put money in Microsoft's pockets.
  
  Feel free to name drop some major finance systems or similar enterprise systems you could run without Microsoft cashing in on the OS in some way between 1990-2005.
  
  As I wrote before, it took us 20 years to get rid of IE and a lot of proprietary server side junk Microsoft blessed us with. It's not an coincidence. 99% of all companies were stuck in development tools from Microsoft.
  
  It wasn't until the hardware really really caught up with Java requirements that things really changed.
Great write up, thank you very much!

I expect Google to keep Mozilla/Firefox on the lifeline indefinitely to avoid antitrust issues in the states and EU, so Mozilla/Firefox won't go anywhere.

Still, this doesn't mean anything, because I often need Chrome or Safari to access some websites.

In the end it is quite funny: Moving a lot of stuff to the web made Linux a more realistic desktop option, at the same time to access a lot of stuff on the web one needs to run a Blink browser.

IMHO the most annoying thing is, that we could have at least some laws, which mandate that every government service must be available to Open Source users and every government paid software must run on at least Linux. Thanks to lobbying and power this will never happen.

Edit: To state it more clearly: Firefox is IMHO in bad shape and in a bad situation. Firefox won't die, but at the same time right now I already need Chrome/Safari browsers, because Firefox support is broken on many sites. I see no way Firefox can gain significant market share, especially seeing what regular consumers tolerate from Microsoft/Edge and Google/Chrome.
- One big problem, even if Google continues to pour money into Mozilla, is that more and more sites and systems drops support for Firefox. When I say "drop" I mean implement measures for making it harder to use a service if you use Firefox. Even Google does this.
Really appreciate the perspective, thank you for sharing
- It's just sad. I love my Firefox and will always do....
Solid write up and a great question!

This sure is an opinion.

Lol, that sentence sure describes The Register in general
- Never even heard of The Register before right now. Been using Firefox for most of my life. This checks out.

My only question is, why do so few people use Firefox?

Most internet usage is mobile and people use whatever's preinstalled on their phone because it just works is my guess.
- And also Firefox on mobile is kind of a hot mess. Videos regularly are unable to play and dark mode is wonky until you restart the app.
- I see, yeah that makes sense. Especially because mobile firefox really wasn't that good as a normal browser anyway.
I wonder if it's the diversification within the Chromium user space.

There are a ton of browsers based on Chromium each with their own little gimmick.

On the other side there's basically just Firefox.

From a casual point of view, I don't think there's much reason to go for Firefox. It doesn't really stand out from that point of view.
Website incompatibility keeps me from using it 100%. Certain websites are simply non-functional except in a Chrome-based browser and I don't have the shits to give to swap only for those sites. I might start the day with Firefox and by the end I'm using Brave.
- I switched back to Firefox about 2 years ago, and I've only encountered a few sites that don't work properly.
  
  With the exception of ONE annoying SaaS site I need at work (which I might use a ton for a week then not again for weeks), I've only had to open a site in Chrome/edge maybe once a month. That includes running Firefox on my phone in addition to my work and personal desktop/laptops.
- Do some websites refuse to function even with useragent spoofing?

Nice try Manifest v3 pushers

I just like the cute fox picture

Firefox will live on regardless of Mozilla's support. Since it's FOSS the community will keep it alive

Will it though? Seems like the kind of task that requires a huge amount of effort, way beyond the kind of capacity you get from casual contributions in peoples' spare time...might be difficult to maintain feature parity and implement new standards without a full time team on it.
- couldnt you say the same about linux?
True, but web designers already treat Firefox and its offshoots as an afterthought. Do you think without Mozilla it would get even worse?
the corporate world seems desperate to kill it. its chrome/edge or GTFO
- In swear this mainly has to do with it's about:config being so much more robust and vast than chromium's //flags settings. The fact so many privacy related forks (Librewolf, Mullvad, Mull, Tor) are based off of firefox and not chromium (Ungoogled Chromium) should point to why these corporations are seething at it.
  
  Google was/is keeping Firefox afloat via funding as the article points out. This is mainly due to the fact that Google didn't have a real competitor in the browser space for some time until Microsoft got Edge off the ground and finally killed Internet Explorer.
  
  Personally I see Firefox as being the superior browser for privacy and customization. I also don't think it's going anywhere, but it's funding relying so heavily on one entity is an issue. If Google decides to pull it's funding of Firefox and no other major corporation steps in to provide the needed cash flow... well who knows, guess it'll be a chromium world after all.
- They all want to FULLY control the end user.
  
  probe and profile the device used
  
  force unstoppable ads
  
  require GPS location and maybe 2fa to make sure it's you that is watching the ads. -web assembly alone will make script blocking impossible and enable scammers to run anything they want.
  
  The end result will be something like the DVD menus from the 90s and 00s. The difference is that it will have full access to all the data on your computer or device.
A huge portion of Firefox code is ancient. Never mind that the codebase is gigantic. Small FOSS projects fail to organize properly, I can't imagine maintaining Firefox without Mozilla would be a small feat.
People like this scare me.
- I scare me too
- I often can't tell if they are just saying stuff like that to cope or they are really that optimistic/naive. It's a similar mentality to people constantly giving benefit of the doubt to kickstarter / early access projects that have like a 1% chance of actually living up to the made promises.

The feds should mandate that all websites must be accessible by Firefox. Plus, they should completely switch to Firefox internally.

How would you define "accessible"? The web app I'm working on works in Firefox, but a few text labels are misaligned with their input controls due to slight CSS deviation from Chromium. It's those things that are most of the problems for supporting both browsers, functionality-wise they're very close (except newer features that Firefox hasn't implemented yet or Google-specific features like WebUSB).
- I thought it was funny when cockpit a web interface for Linux servers said my Firefox browser was out of date. It locked me out for security reasons until I accessed it with an updated version of Firefox. I was using archlinux and ran updates that morning.
  
  It wasn't that inconvenient I just SSH into my server for whatever I was doing and they fixed it in about a week.

Kinda disappointed in The Register of all things adopting this faux personal life story reporting style on such a matter.

This is the opinion column.

Here's the actual article on this event.

Fox

Firefox

The firefox looks more like foxkeh from the old japanese firefox site.

I found the stats re Firefox usage a little surprising/hard to believe so I double-checked them. Indeed, most rankings show Firefox use hovering at around 2.5%. The open web is sort of already dead, I think. It's honestly not that uncommon now that I come across websites that don't work in Firefox and there are zero hints or info that you need to use Chrome. It's like the world has already forgotten that the web isn't just an app you access through Chrome.

Google's been working on this more or less since they launched Chrome, so it's not surprising, but wow, that fucking sucks.

I blocked this website on my news feed because of this article. It's opinion piece written by an asshat.

It's a bit worrying that the journalist doesn't point out that it's ALL chrome. Safari, Edge, they all use the chrome engine. A complete monopolization of web features. Most recently we've seen the problems with that in trying to ditch good innovations like jpegXL.

Safari has its own engine WebKit

This is the best summary I could come up with:

And when I see Mozilla Corp's CEO Mitchell Baker stepping down, I wonder if it's really because she'll be more useful devoting all her time to the foundation than overseeing Firefox's decline into a web browser afterthought.

Almost ten years after Chrome appeared, in 2017, Mozilla CEO Chris Beard admitted, "Firefox did not keep up with the market and what people really want.

Baker told Fortune she decided to step down as CEO because she wants to draw attention to our increasingly malicious online world "and how humans are engaging with each other and technology."

In Baker's subsequent blog post, she announced that Laura Chambers, a Mozilla board member and entrepreneur with experience at Airbnb, PayPal, and eBay, will step in as interim CEO to run operations until a permanent replacement is found.

In Fortune, Chambers was more forthcoming: She'll "focus on building out new products that address growing privacy concerns while actively looking for a full-time CEO."

It's hard to buy that all's well with Mozilla, given Baker's poor results at shepherding Firefox forward and the lack of a real replacement CEO.

The original article contains 777 words, the summary contains 182 words. Saved 77%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

I'm all for an EU founded browser and other countries can use it too if they contribute. Same with a YouTube alternative. Yeah politics do whatever politics do, but a perfect solution doesn't exist once Firefox is gone. And I'd rather see competition than a monopoly.

Honestly, Firefox isn't bad but it has fallen behind when looking at even Chromium, much less Edge or Chrome.

In what ways? Genuinely curious, I've been using Firefox as my daily driver for most of a decade and haven't even looked at other browsers recently because it's never given me a problem or lacked a feature.
What do you mean i use chrome at work (forced) and firefox at home and I find firefox technologically better than chrome.
I'm gonna go with... no u.