While these forks are nice and all, I'm not sure how meaningful it is in the bigger picture if 99% of the work done on it is still done (and paid) by the same people.
Similarly, I don't get those "I use brave instead of Firefox", as if that wasn't 99% chromium.
Don't get me wrong, I know there's not much choice. But that whole direction of "action" that people take just seems like a working marketing tarpit to me.
At least Brave is a profitable company that employs multiple people and they can keep up with Chromium's changes (Some manifest v2 extensions are kept available or certain UI features are reverted).
Most of the Firefox forks are 1-5 person gigs. They are not sustainable.
At this point, "marketing tarpit" seems like a pretty accurate description of Mozilla's stewardship of Firefox as well, so if I'm going to get sucked one, I'd rather it be the one that's taking a maybe untenable stand for something that I agree than the one that's trying to gaslight me about whether "disseminating user data to a third party for valuable consideration" is what most people would consider "selling user data".
That is an unreal standard to hold anyone to while using Microsoft or Google products, because this wouldn't even register compared to what these companies do on a regular basis. People are just less dependent on Mozilla so moral outage doesn't feel as pointless.
I'm not sure I understand your criticism. Are you arguing that I'm holding Mozilla to an unfair standard, or other users? I don't pretend to have any moral high ground about what I use versus other people; I just don't personally find the argument that using a fork of Firefox right now is a "marketing tarpit" to be compelling enough to convince me to change my mind about it.
Similarly, I don't get those "I use brave instead of Firefox", as if that wasn't 99% chromium.
Don't get me wrong, I know there's not much choice. But that whole direction of "action" that people take just seems like a working marketing tarpit to me.