I will not say that you're not doing the right thing, but I'd suggest reading the financial statements of Mozilla. If you think the way they're steering Firefox is an issue, you may find a few surprises in there.

The money that goes in (and out) of Mozilla is well documented. At this point it's mostly google. And it mostly pays for administration of the corporation itself.

Yes, you can. The same way you can disable a lot of annoying things in other programs. Still an annoyance at the expense of users, and a gateway to more passive users to click on something unexpected.

Move, yeah. To Firefox… meh. The writing's not on the wall yet, but we're not going to ignore the very heavy signaling Mozilla has been doing for years now.

Spec says 4.

You're right, they aren't google. Not for lack of trying though.

You see posts putting some shade over Mozilla, and your immediate reaction is "it feels almost coordinated". Well, that may be. But it would be hard to distinguish a "coordinated attack" from a "that's just the things they're doing, and there's report on it" article, no? Especially when most of it can be fact-checked.

In this particular case, those abandoned projects got picked up by other… sometimes. And sometimes not. But they were abandoned. There's no denying that.

If you want some more hot water for Mozilla, since you're talking about privacy and security, you'd be interested in their recent switch regarding these points. Sure, the PR is all about protecting privacy and users, but looking into the acts, the message is a bit more diluted. And there's always a fair amount of people that are ready to do the opposite of what you claims; namely discarding all criticism because "Mozilla", when the same criticism are totally fair play when talking about other big companies.

Being keen on maintaining user privacy, system security, and trust, is not the same as picking a "champion" and sticking to it until the end. Mozilla have been doing shady things for half a decade now, and they should not get a free pass because they're still the lesser evil for now.

We've always been good at walking away, closing our ears, turning a blind eye…

From the outside it really seems that a large amount of the USA administration is actively working against the USA's interests. Which sounds weird.

There's a ton of great small scale things we can do with machine learning, and even LLM.

Unfortunately, it seems the main usages will be crushing people down even more.

I'm sure the evil intolerant mechanic guy wanted to remove them for some fake, made-up reasons like "you're gonna die if you ride with these".

As an outsider I'm always amazed at that "land of the free" that is insistent on censoring stuff, and "home of the brave" that will run through the mud someone standing for freedom and having principles.