A lot of money is made through the 'web'; the vast majority of users access the web via a browser: control the browser and you can direct that insane flow of capital. Which is actually a bit strange, because you'd think you'd get a lot of competing vendors, but the global market is served by two really: Google or Firefox.

Google basically shapes the web. They propose new standards and everyone has to go along with them, because they don't have a choice: Google has their own web-browser. If the other's don't like proposal X Google can go ahead and implement it anyway. Now your users will claim your browser is broken, because "it works on Chrome".

Web-devs are just people--lazy and stupid. As memories fade some devs think the web is "Google Chrome" and just design for that, which can make it incompatible with other browsers. "But bro, 90% of my traffic comes from Google Chrome. I'm going to lock in and dial it up to 100%. Hail Google!"

Capital accumulates and now you find yourself in a technocracy, because you were previously fooled into believing capitalism is the way.

I recently read a witty remark that went something like this: two nations were destroyed via British colonialism. They eventually revolted and threw their colonialists out. One chose the capitalist road, the other communism. Both have obscenely large populations: China and India. Which one would you prefer to live in?

Ah... the point I was trying to make, is there's an obscene amount of money on 'the web'. Users are seen as chattel to be sold and brought. I've seen glimpses of how laypeople use the internet: it is horrible. It's more accurately described as how tech-companies abuse their users. The more abuse you can get away with the more capital you can accrue. It leads to a general trend of web-browsers getting caught up in 'controversies' and general degeneracy. There's a lot of money in this game and tech-corps will attempt to overthrow governments to maintain their monopolies. But sure, let's pretend the browser is just an innocent thing used to look up cute cat pictures:

Can you please have a better title. Why the clickbait?

Firefox is really good but makes money with many stupid things. Hardened and debloated it is a good browser, like Ironfox or Librewolf / arkenfox user.js / phoenix.

Use either LibreWolf or IceCat.

Im not seeing Waterfox being named here, Is there something wrong wuth It?

Firefox is fine. Quick security updates are more important than having to occasionally click a toggle on a feature I don't like

One of the problems is that Firefox is often compared with soft-fork browsers.

Mozilla needs to develop the whole browser. They have to pay hundreds of devs. For that, they do need search engine deals and ad placements and all that.
That also means, they have to retain mainstream appeal, so they will ship features that some idealists may not like, like the recent AI features.
That's where virtually all criticism comes from, that Mozilla needs to make money to continue developing the browser.

And that even though all this stuff is easy to disable. Firefox forks like LibreWolf are cool, because they offer a configuration preset you can point people to.
What's not cool, is that lots of folks consider it a moral failing of Mozilla, that they don't ship LibreWolf's defaults. If they did, there would be no Firefox anymore and no LibreWolf.

Browsers are insanely hard to make. They are very complex systems. That means resource heavy to maintain in general. What makes them costly. This construct derails so easily.

With that being said, from an ethical standpoint it's probably somewhat like this currently:

• Servo
• Librewolf
• Other FF forks (Zen, Waterfox, Glide)
• Firefox
• Orion
• Vivaldi
• Safari
• Chromium
• Ladybird
• Edge
• Chrome
• Brave

Mozilla is not cool/super, but also not the worst.

Try DuckDuckGo browser, with AI disabled.

yes, there is no really good browser any more.

google and some others have made web standards so complex that a team of a few people can't build a new browser (that works on most sites) from scratch any more.

additionally, malicious actors have forced ppl to use challenges to protect their sites from spam. easy captcha don't work well any more. those challenges check things like SSL handshakes and JS capability etc. to determine the browser. that makes new browsers get blocked at first, until the challange devs allow it.

IMO a complete overhaul of the internet is in order, with new standards made from scratch, with the aim to stay minimal and easy to implement.

there are already "smallweb" enthusiasts trying to make simpler sites etc., but it's getting harder every day. at some point, they will probably have to separate from the regular internet.

I've been a Libre Wolf user for many years.

If and only if I come across a real pain in the arse website then I use Brave.

IMO “ungoogled chrome” is the best I have tried so far. In particular I use helium.

If you want firefox, then Zen is also pretty good.

The thing about these more niche browsers is that 1. They get updates less frequently 2. They don’t have widevine support, meaning netflix and other DRM locked streamers won’t work (YT will tho).