This isn’t the Internet from 15 years ago, much less the Internet from 25 years ago.

Web pages aren’t built by Internet people to be viewed by Internet people using devices and software that have been carefully optimized by Internet people. Websites run on prefab templates used as value-extraction tools to harvest either consumer dollars or consumer data which can be turned into dollars. Most web browsing is done on phones.

Most people are “on the Internet” in some way pretty much every minute of the day, whether they think of it that way or not.
When the average person says they care about “privacy”, what they really mean is they don’t want their information stolen to make purchases or open lines of credit in their name. They don’t actually mean “I want to keep my life, and communications, and activities private”. So privacy features really are not the motivator tech people believe them to be.

Most people have been rewired into pure convenience-seeking consumer drones. Whatever browser opens the quickest and easiest, with the least amount of setup and the highest integration into other apps/OSes, and feels the most familiar, that’s the browser they will use. I wager that a significant percentage of, say, iPhone users, wouldn’t even know “Safari” is the name of a web browser. They just know the method to get to a website — go tap on that blue circle compass thing in a specific spot on their home screen. Or people use their phone’s app-switching shortcut to move among apps without launching a fresh browser instance.

What does Firefox have that would pierce the fog of convenience strongly enough to grab a modern person’s attention and hold it long enough for them to be bothered to take several minutes minutes and half a dozen taps/clicks to install an “alternative browser” and switch their integration to use it instead? I don’t mean Firefox the program with a set of features which can be compared to other programs in a Wikipedia chart. I mean “Firefox” as a integrated way to do things in modern life the way “Google” is.

Face it, the future belongs to a small handful of monopolists leveraging their products and their partner products. The monetization of the Internet has won. The fringe power-users have lost. Have a nice day.

To quote a random schmuck from Slashdot.

I really want my web 1.0 back. And a phone made of bakelite!!!