And in case anyone from Mozilla is listening, this could well be existential for you. Right now, your pro-privacy stance is a principal factor in users choosing Firefox over Chrome.

Follow Google - and all its shady practices - and you will lose a large chunk of those users. Many of them, to use current terminology, are "key influencers": technically savvy people who advise family and friends what to do. Lose them and the outlook is, I suspect, pretty grim.

You're clever people. You'll know this. Google has a good few smart folk too (even if their motivation is questionable). It's easy to see this is difficult for you: Google is your primary funding source. Fail to comply with their wishes, and that funding might well disappear.

As has been noted in other threads, the tension between privacy principles and funding is a huge threat.

For the good of the open web, I desperately want a successful Mozilla, and a technically excellent Firefox at the forefront of a pro-privacy, anti-surveillance re-balancing of the internet.

I don't doubt the difficulty in filling a $300M funding hole. I'd gladly pay $30 per year for a pro-privacy Firefox. Another 9,999,999 is a tall order. On the other hand, you have c250M users...

Since there is no visible way of leaving a +1 (or a +1000) on HN, I feel like I have to respond to this since it resonates so deeply with me.

Particularly on account of funding, I know I would also gladly pay $30 per year for a privacy, freedom and power use oriented Firefox instead of this new direction they keep taking it in. And so would many of my acquintances.

Perhaps there is merit to organizing a website for people to be able to pledge this.

This tech people influencing friends and family lore has been disproven many times. No non tech user is using duck duck go.

Where are you getting this information? Plenty of "tech" people influence their friends and family with respect to what software/hardware to consider. My entire immediate family uses DuckDuckGo as their search. All of their (Mozilla) browsers have DDG set as the default. Not a complaint from anybody; DDG does a damn fine job.

One data point doesn't change the fact that HN hasn't mass converted the world to use DDG. They may also be telling you they use DDG while they use !g or Google.

But similarly, one data point that DDG hasn't overtaken Google doesn't mean that tech people's preferences don't influence ordinary people.

I thought it was generally well-accepted that developers mass-moving friends and family off of IE 11 was part of the reason why other browsers ended up beating it.

Similarly, I thought it was mostly accepted that part of the reason so much of the web was optimized for Chrome was because Chrome had genuinely better developer tools, and developers preferred to optimize first in Chrome and second in other browsers.

Maybe there's more disagreement on those points than I realized.

Even on the subject of DuckDuckGo, which is probably not going to be mass-adopted any time soon (if at all), actual usage numbers are increasing faster than any other major search provider, including Google[0]. Whether or not those numbers are coming from ordinary people or tech people, clearly somebody is being convinced to use DDG. Is it going to be a revolution? Probably not. But it's not nothing.

I really wish people would stop defining success as a monopoly. Even in the browser space, the goal isn't to make Chrome vanish. We just want Firefox to have a big enough user-base across enough markets that it can't be ignored. Even 20-30% would probably do it. Mozilla doesn't have to kill Chrome.

Similarly, if every non-tech user keeps searching on Google, and DuckDuckGo just becomes a great search engine that every programmer prefers, that's a pretty big win. I would not call that a loss.

[0]: https://duckduckgo.com/traffic (of course saturation does play a role here)

I supplied one data point. You supplied...?

But now you're saying "mass converted the world" whereas before your goalposts were set at "friends and family."

I understand Google's motivation for nuking ad blockers, as well as their motivations for denying every which way that that is what they want to do under whatever security justifications they can bring up, even true ones.

I don't see Mozilla's motivation to remove that at the moment.

I mean, speaking for myself, I'd drop them both and follow a fork of the browser that lets uMatrix work, and that's not something I've considered very many times in the past 20 years. Control over what my browser actually connects to has become a top-3 feature concern for me. I was going to say "I suppose 'working' is technically more important to me", but then I mentally wargamed out whether I'd be willing to use a slightly nonfunctional browser to have uMatrix and noticed that I actually already put up with a slightly nonfunctional browser to use it, because uMatrix already breaks a number of sites until I do some whitelisting.

Even if there's a security impact to extensions having too much access to the web request cycle, there's a security impact to them not having enough access to the web request, too.

The majority of funding Mozilla’s comes from Google, including receiving a portion of all ad revenue through google search.

A “adopt manifest v3 or we cut your funding in half” could be behind the scenes.

I think that's an important thing to remember - we can always fork it and move on if they choose to remove the blocking webrequest API.

However, how long that fork can persist, remain secure and retain feature parity is an open question. Should Mozilla cave and the community fork be unpopular, Google will definitely have a monopoly on the browser space.

Or, potentially, it's an equivocation because they want to give Google the appearance of maybe caving later (or at least the inability for Google to claim that they had the opposite appearance), while secretly hoping something changes such that they don't have to cave (and also, possibly, applying pressure below the radar to achieve that end.) Politics!

I switched from Chrome to Firefox a couple of months ago when the Chrome adblocking changes were announced.

I'll happily find something other than Firefox if it goes down the same route.

I wouldn't want to claim that strongly that they won't remove it if I were Mozilla - for all they know, Chrome might still come up with a proper alternative that satisfies the use cases of all blocking extensions, but also performs better. Obviously Firefox would then transition as well.