this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2026
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Privacy
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I think the sponsored links, promotions and Ai efforts come from their crisis trying to make money and to depend less on Googles money. While trying to focus on privacy and not sell user data. That's a tricky situation to be in, if the browser isn't making money. I wouldn't call Firefox bloatware, as it is bloated like any other modern browser.
And it's not like I wouldn't have an issue with Firefox either. For long time I am looking for an alternative, and almost switched over to Librewolf. But unfortunately Librewolf have removed the internal password manager of Firefox, and they recommend to use an external manager. Which is the deal breaker for me. So even if Firefox is flawed, I'll stay with it and do the customization and settings myself, which is a lot.
I don't have any issue with Firefox trying to make some money by doing such things, but all these features are causing the system to use a lot of RAM too. Once we praised Firefox as being the less memory-hogging browser in Linux, but if it is going this way, not anymore.
I called it bloatware because nowadays it is filled with bloat features no matter what.
We said Vivaldi is closed source just because they didn't publish some part (the unique design) of their code.
We call Brave Bloat because of its crypto stuff.
Now Firefox has promotional links, suggestions, tracking stuff, etc.; then why not call Firefox a bloatware?
By the way, if the contract with Google ended, then why is the default search engine still Google? Also, what is perplexity doing there?
Because it is a bloatware. Like, what is the point of using Firefox? It's faster? It was never because of speed. Less RAM usage? No. It was because of privacy. Peoples started hating on Chrome because Google became evil. Then they went after adblockers. Google search became bloated with garbage results, DDG became a better alternative, also marketed as privacy-focused.
It just happens to be that out of all other web browsers, there were no better alternatives, and Firefox seemed the best option at that time. Opera was a spyware. Brave was still fresh. Actually, Brendan Eich, the founder of Brave who also founded Mozilla and created JavaScript, was called out for making an anti-LGBTQ donation, so many people hesitated using Brave when it released. Needless to say, anything Microsoft was hated with a passion.
That's why people need to keep reinventing the wheel.
Having competition in browser engines is important. Imagine no Firefox was available, everyone was at the mercy of Googles work on the core. I don't want to use any Chromium based browser, so only a Firefox based alternative it is for me. I also highly liked the way Mozilla and Firefox was operating, but in recent years it gotten worse. And using forks has some trust issues too to me. I can't trust most forks, but I'm currently reavaluating the situation.
To me Firefox is still the best browser out of all available options. The only thing I would consider is a fork like Librewolf, that still is Firefox with some bullshit removed or disabled. That's as far as I would go.