The answer to “what is Firefox?” on Mozilla’s FAQ page about its browser used to read:
The Firefox Browser is the only major browser backed by a not-for-profit that doesn’t sell your personal data to advertisers while helping you protect your personal information.
Now it just says:
The Firefox Browser, the only major browser backed by a not-for-profit, helps you protect your personal information.
In other words, Mozilla is no longer willing to commit to not selling your personal data to advertisers.
A related change was also highlighted by mozilla.org commenter jkaelin, who linked direct to the source code for that FAQ page. To answer the question, “is Firefox free?” Moz used to say:
Yep! The Firefox Browser is free. Super free, actually. No hidden costs or anything. You don’t pay anything to use it, and we don’t sell your personal data.
Now it simply reads:
Yep! The Firefox Browser is free. Super free, actually. No hidden costs or anything. You don’t pay anything to use it.
Again, a pledge to not sell people’s data has disappeared. Varma insisted this is the result of the fluid definition of “sell” in the context of data sharing and privacy.
Ladybird has some serious backing and employed developers working on their engine and has been worked on for years (Ladybird started life as the SerenityOS browser)
And even after all that time and money, it’s still not even ready for general use. Their roadmap has them having a public release ready in 2028 iirc
And fragmentation? Really? LMAO there needs to be some competition in browser engines, if there was we wouldn’t be in this mess to begin with.
There are only 2 modern, open source and fully working engines. Chromium and FF, that’s not fragmentation, that’s a duopoly
That’s like calling Linux on the server a monopoly. It’s open source, with many distros (forks). Anyone can fork the engine.
Distros are not kernel forks. Distros simply take the kernel, and bundle it with many utilities for the end-user. It is the equivalent of taking a puzzle set and assembling the pieces together. Sure, many distros maintain their own programs (such as a package manager), but it is an entirely different thing to maintain pacman than to maintain the freaking kernel.
Even the Linux kernel is not as much of a beast that a browser engine is, I’ve seen estimates that a dedicated small team could build a new modern Linux kernel from scratch and generally usable in about 2-3 years
A browser engine takes years more, again, ladybird’s engine is built from scratch, and it’s currently in year 3 targeting an alpha release in 2026 or Year 4. With it projected to be generally usable in 2028 a full 6 years later.
And there are actually a couple different independent kernels, so no it’s not a monopoly