many privacy-minded users use Firefox forks on desktop and possibly mobile. Without Mozilla the organization, said forks may or may not be able to continue individually on their own. However, it seems hard to argue that they would fare better if a "main" Firefox continued, possibly under the umbrella of some pre-existing group like Canonical or Linux Foundation. Better yet if Mozilla were to reverse course from its user data cash-in moves and increase its long-term stability.
i went out of my way to avoid stating any hope of FF becoming the most popular.
like you said, i actually was thinking of them capturing about 5-10% more of the market. i think that would be a significant and worthy goal. it's enough to increase interest from potential large donors, at least slightly.
I've been feeling that they were getting ready to turn FF into something more commercial, and if that didn't stabilize/increase funding enough, to shut it down entirely. so a slight and sustainable increase of users and funding is the best near term outcome, in my mind.
here are my 4 non-Foss apps, out of 27 total on dock (yes on the dock, using folders)
🚫nordvpn
🚫obsidian (sync disabled)
🚫@voice aloud tts
🚫MS Swiftkey settings (true privacy threat i know, but Asian lang. support is essential & it runs w/o internet perm., w/o play services, and kept in incognito.)
not sure exactly what features you need but there are
losslesscut
avidemux
mkvmerge and mkvmergegui
if command line is OK, ffmpeg is the most versatile and customizable and tons of support docs and question forums (superuser, stackoverflow, askubuntu) for every conceivable niche one-off operation
apparently Uk govt has never played watch dogs legion, nor seen Equilibrium (C Bale movie), nor Minority Report, nor Richard III, nor read Brave New World, nor the billion other movies, novels, games, poems, songs, Banksy art, social videos, cave paintings, etc that specifically warned UK not to (re)become the villain (over and over again)
it's like the 2nd most popular culture topic.... after "love" or something
those ceos and rich ppl who as kids get away with saying "the dog ate my homework"
they're probably so used to that, the "underperformance" was probably part of the original plan. cuz they're so accustomed to the shareholder hype cycle, they just plan cyclical hiring and layoffs in the same meeting.
I think the way to do that is: instead of having separate realities/universes linked together by search and federation, try to unite those universes into a shared multiverse, to the greatest possible.
In other words
❌ merely give all federated users access to the same articles
✅ automatically link and embed similar articles into each other by default (collapsed, but expandable). similarity can be determined by authors'/contributors' intentional citations, by instance owners' filter rules, by LLM, etc.
of course, there may be attempts to obfuscate relatedness, astroturfing, brigading, whatnot. I wonder if its possible to visualize voting results for each duplicated/linked article along with the originating instance. I think this would function as a pseudo version of 'community fact-checking'. Maybe a better name would be 'reality-checking' or 'sanity-checking' or whatever.
i wish i could get my home lab efforts (re)started. the memory of corrupted sd cards and pi hole config mistakes is debilitating...
not to mention financial anxiety about possibly needing replacement components regularly....