The Decline of Firefox Should Concern Everyone

Thousands of tech community posts proclaim “what’s all the Chromium hate about, when it’s open source, fast, and industry-standard?” It is a fair question with a valid point, one that even die-hard Firefox users find hard to attack.

It has been a decade since Google Chrome conquered the end-users’ web. It pushed strong contenders such as Internet Explorer (!), Firefox and Opera to account for nearly 65% of all web browsers.

But Chrome’s outreach is perhaps stronger in its engine, Chromium. Every browser requires a rendering engine to draw server responses as a graphic web page, and engines can be shared among different browsers. Chrome developers created the Blink rendering engine, also known as Chromium. The straight, hard facts: Chromium is usually the most performant engine we have, it’s open source, and it’s ubiquitously compatible.

Microsoft, after discontinuing IE, swallowed its pride and decided to use Chromium in their Edge browser. But a handful of even privacy-focused browsers use Chromium – including Brave, Opera, Ecosia, Arc, DuckDuckGo Browser, Vivaldi, Atlas, Comet, and more. If Chrome conquered end users, Chromium conquered browser developers.

The only two notable alternatives are Apple’s WebKit and Mozilla’s Gecko engines. The Gecko engine used by Firefox is the only community-driven open source engine, with most of WebKit development being centered around Apple products. While a handful of Gecko browsers exist, including Zen (my primary browser) and the Tor Browser, the dominance of Chromium threatens Gecko’s already brittle market share.

The United States v. Google LLC (2020) antitrust lawsuit forbade Google from paying enormous sums of money to Mozilla (and Apple) in return for making Google its default search engine. For Apple, the loss of this funding is of little concern. For Mozilla, it means 80% of their revenue disintegrating into thin air.

Mozilla’s brittle income structure and its projected financial catastrophies leave many users in doubt of Firefox’s future. I hope that Firefox, and in turn the Gecko engine, takes a trajectory similar to that of Blender’s; after the owning company discarded the project, maintenance was taken up by the community open source developers.

But what if that’s not the case? Then, we have a grave problem of a browser engine monopoly, one that cannot be mitigated by open source Chromium browsers such as Brave. That is because Chromium is maintained by the company whose existence depends on advertisement revenue. The browsing experience and privacy matter, but if and only if it improves their survival in the browser market. Google has made this policy clear through its recent forced adoption of Manifest V3 in Chrome web extensions. The API change is clearly made to cripple ad blockers, by exposing less means of determining tracker components in each loaded website.

Chrome has long had problems that deter privacy-aware end users from daily-driving it. The dominance of Chromium makes it even more threatening.