The thing is, Let’s say that there’s a foolproof system in place which makes you press an “ok” button every time is going to take an action on your behalf…how many people are actually going to check everything that it’s going to do every single time it asks? And for those that do, is it actually going to save them any time?

Just look at cookie pop ups. I have Consent-O-Matic and when that fails i manually reject and on those sites where you have to individually untick 100 boxes I just find another site, but i can’t tell you the number of people I’ve seen just accept everything because it’s quicker. That’s exactly how most people would treat a “do you want me to do this?” prompt from an agentic AI without checking what it’s actually asking to do.

It's...complicated.

On one end, a clear sign of "f*** you" with such decisions is important. On the other, Mozilla is already in a rough place, and with so many genuinely good projects, including Waterfox, depending on Firefox or at least Gecko, this is akin to biting the hand that feeds you.

All these teams cannot maintain their own browser engine, and without it, they may as well turn to dust. Thereby, maintaining their upstream is in their best interest.

Librewolf and IronFox (android) both work like a charm! Well, in IronFox's case you might have to tweak JIT and WASM to ensure some niche extensions work, but I'm pretty sure it's a me thing.

I also used Fennec (android) for a hot second, and that has extensions too.