Enshitified product exists - > good alternative arises to meet demand - > good alternative becomes popular - > good alternative either becomes enshitified to maximize profits or is purchased by owner of original enshitified product.

The capitalist way.

Zen: is Firefox

Floorp: is Firefox

Waterfox: is Firefox

Librewolf: is Firefox

They are all dependent on Mozilla and its choices.

One note about Waterfox is that I would have liked if it was added to the official Arch Linux repos. I installed fine with the AUR, but still.

Same for LibreWolf.

Bonus: Waterfox is available on Android! 🥳

I was thinking I should ditch android FF, too...

Is waterfox independent of system1 now?

ETA: they are apparently: www.farside.link/reddit.com/r/waterfox/comments/14phsyl/a_new_chapter_for_waterfox/

Their Swiss CEO decided that supporting an authoritarian American neo nazi regime was a good idea

The creator is pro-Trump and they also recently stopped posting updates to Mastodon citing "they don't have the resources" for it, or something like that.

Correct me if I have missed something; I've got no skin in the game, I just see the drama a lot.

There are several Firefox forks. Waterfox (based in Europe UK), Librewolf, Zen etc.

Self-hosting and FOSS are the way to go. We saw this demonstrated when Raspberry Pi started acting stupidly as a company. There are so many alternatives that it is easy to switch. Unfortunately some things are pretty tough to self-host, like email and anonymizing VPN. But there are a lot of low-hanging fruit that makes it less painful to divest from bad companies.

It's a generally recognised principle in economics that we want competition to take place, and for consumers to have a choice - for a plethora of reasons too large to list here. The most important IMO is a political one though: we don't want monopolies for the same reason we don't want monarchies and dictatorships. Being the sole provider of any very important product puts an obscene amount of power in the hand of a single corporation (or a handful of them). We never want that much power to be so concentrated in so few individuals, because it's fundamentally injust, and always leads to catastrophe. Also consider that if that power is a corporation or a "private" individual, they're not accountable to anyone but their shareholders (who, in turn never want the corp to be anything other than a money making machine). Even a dictator is more accountable to his subjects than a multinational corporation is to anyone. So there you have it, that's why we need alternatives.

PLENTY of reasons if they oppose enshitification... but if they embrace it, then yes, they'll just be another pimple in the ass of enshitificated software

They took out the clause in their policy about not selling user data.

It's pretty obvious what follows that