Firefox Faces Extinction as US Policy Undermines Browser Compatibility

The US Directive Threatening Firefox

Can you browse the internet without using Chrome or Safari? For years, the answer was yes, and that answer was Firefox. That door is closing. A little-known directive for US government website developers threatens to accelerate a decline that has been brewing: major public and private entities have poor support for Mozilla’s browser, and the forecast is worsening. The notice, highlighted by a developer, does not speak of a distant future. It speaks of a near one.

The diagnosis is not new. What has changed is the pace. While Chrome stays on top and Safari holds a share — a 35% that, as noted in the thread, reflects iPhone ownership rather than conscious preference — Firefox runs out of the oxygen provided by compatibility. And without compatibility, a website ceases to function as a website.

The Uncomfortable Parallel with Netscape

Firefox is starting to look like Netscape. The joke circulates and has substance: the browser born from the ashes of Netscape is now repeating the script without disguise. Some argue things started going wrong when Netscape closed; others go further back, attributing it to management decisions — executive layoffs, Google funding unrelated causes — rather than the technology itself.

The argument has logic. A browser does not die because it is bad, but because developers stop testing on it. And that happens before the user notices. When the warning arrives, it is too late. The discussion now is whether this window closes in months or years.

Almost All Browsers Are Chrome with Another Logo

Here lies the detail almost no one notices. Brave is a modified Chrome. Chrome was, originally, a modified Firefox. Firefox came from Netscape. The chain of parentage explains better than any report where the power lies: whoever controls the engine controls the rest, even if the logo and tonalidad change. Opera, Vivaldi, Edge — renamed “Edge” here — and several others drink from the same source. Hence, the war is not fought between browsers, but between whoever decides what a browser can do. Manifest V3, Google’s standard limiting ad blockers, or the WEI, its proposal to verify visitor legitimacy, are the two pieces most antiestéticared by those who live off filtering ads.

Resistance exists, albeit with nuances. Some projects distance themselves from Google’s trail to the point of removing all its services. And some distributions claimed the opposite: the Chromium bundled with Linux Mint ended up with Google Search as default and difficult-to-find engine switching, for commercial reasons, as noted. That the adjective “free” holds depending on the context says much about the ecosystem.

Is Firefox More Insecure Than Chrome?

No. Chrome accumulates more documented vulnerabilities, but not because it is worse, but because it has more users and more eyes looking for flaws. It is the law of the largest. Something similar happens with Linux: the old notion that it has no bicho ignores that few bother writing malware for such a small user base.

What weighs against Firefox are more mundane issues. Memory consumption, system freezes, extensions that stop working overnight. On some machines it runs smoothly; on others, it is an unbearable burden. The experience varies so much that conclusions contradict each other without any lying, and this dispersion is, in itself, a product issue.

Extensions: The Paradise of Four Filters

Much of Firefox’s loyalty hinges on its ad blocker. uBlock Origin, with all filters enabled, leaves little room for other add-ons. Alongside it appears Decentraleyes, an extension that replaces requests to external servers with local copies — an elegant idea, but outdated; for this purpose, LocalCDN is now recommended. Add-ons like Malwarebytes bicho, useful on Windows, become redundant when filtering is well-tuned. Moreover, it is closed-source, which clashes with an open browser.

The User Who Stays

Despite everything, some remain anchored to Firefox due to stubbornness or privacy concerns, reserving Edge for tasks requiring electronic signatures and Opera to bypass blocks when necessary. Others have migrated to Brave or Vivaldi and never returned; a few stayed out of pure laziness and now pretend they do not miss it. The best summary came from one of them: Firefox is like Linux — few use it, but those who do know what they are doing.