This is a poor analogy. There are thousands of people to meet and bond with, so you do have a choice. But there are less than a handful of fundamentally different browsers.

Derivative browsers don't really count here, as they depend on the upstream to not hurt them. For instance, if the parent project completely removes something essential for privacy, it it a lot of work to keep it in your code. The Manifest v2 removal is an example. Over time, when other changes are built on the removal, this creates an increasingly high burden. Eventually, the child project is starved. You simply do not want to be in this position.

> This is a poor analogy. There are thousands of people to meet and bond with, so you do have a choice. But there are less than a handful of fundamentally different browsers.

This is because users decided that they want a browser that spies on them.

At least in Germany in hacker and IT-affine circles, you will often be frowned upon if you voluntarily use Chrome or Edge (except if you have a really good reason).

> At least in Germany in hacker and IT-affine circles, you will often be frowned upon if you voluntarily use Chrome or Edge (except if you have a really good reason).

That's largely the same here, at least for anyone worth their salt. But how does that matter when Mozilla's pulling things like this?

For years now your only browser choices are "Google", and "funded by Google", and it shows.

I can't even give someone too hard of a time for using vanilla chromium or similar anymore; Not like it's any worse than literally every other browser offering nowadays, minus rare exceptions like librewolf or ungoogled chromium that also add a whole host of minor technical complications to use.

I don't think the analogy is weakened by bringing numbers/quantity into it. The dynamics work for any number of principals. Take a 3 player game, where Alice trusts Bob but is better off with Bill, however Bill is not visible to her because of chaff/disinfo/noise broadcast by Bob or Bob's confederates.

It's not what Mozilla does, it's about what Mozilla says/claims.

Mozilla is a deceptive/defective entity here.

The numbers matter because they affect whether there actually is a better option.

What happens when Alice is with Bill, but Bill is also abusive to a lesser extent? And "don't have a browser" is not an option.

You only need one better browser to switch to. I guess you're getting at a Hobson's choice [0], that there really is only one browser and all others are copies of the same harmful set of properties, so moving isn't worth the overhead (switch cost is a factor in this that we often ignore). To my mind, there must be at least one browser out there that is "less undesirable" than that case. Just iterate your way into your comfort zone.

So often arguments on this axis come down to how much convenience are you going to give up for the trust relation you desire. We get stuck if we mistake convenience for necessity thereby bringing absolutes into a continuous trade-off problem.

I wouldn't say there's only one, but there are two main clusters for anyone not on a mac, and a handful of teams large enough to do a solid job of running their own variant. There's precious little iteration to do.

I'm not a typical user [0] but am very mindful of the typical user. Maybe I'd not realised how much the browser space has shrunk and that the experience of "browsing", the abstract task, now breaks down into more specialised tasks.

I'm thinking lately the myth of the "browser" and "web" as coherent data spaces is something even Sir Tim gave up on, right? If the centre cannot hold constellations of specialised clients (which are already "apps" in a sense) look like enduring in the near future at the expense of interoperability and standards. The "best browser" will be the one that strikes the most deals with the parts of the network people want to connect to. It's just like the best "game console".

That seems really bleak for the Internet qua people's network.

No doubt http/s and the worlds of port 80/443 will endure eternal, but the "Universal" search and information space the pioneers and then proto-Google aspired to now seems so remote that the idea of a "browser" is itself a little ridiculous to beards like me. I think today the "browser" has become a clique of PKI suites and CAs, at the behest of banking and retail, backed by broken but well meaning regulation, and unwittingly creating this monster we still call "The Browser". anyway, peace.

[0] I use w3m for 99% of my daily drive and a sandboxed degoogled chromium for any of the "messy stuff"

So, where is the better Bill of browsers that Mozilla is preventing me learning about?

Okay. So why don't you tell us what the better choice(s) are?