No, the Internet I love is long gone, but that's not - by and large - Mozilla's fault.

What Mozilla can do is to retain their policy for allowing the user firm control over how their software behaves and what it's allowed to do, and maybe stop making their UI look like an early synthwave Winamp skin. Just focus on making Firefox fast, efficient and - first and foremost - secure.

Give me a reason. I want my browser to be just that: a browser that just does browser things. No bloat. No ads. No AI. No corporate interference. No take Firefox with you. No bullshit.

No? Then I'm staying off, thanks. Fix your game.

Edit: spelling

You talk like there's a viable alternative. Except for Firefox forks like Waterfox or LibreWolf everything else is much worse by comparison.
Brave runs a crypto miner and claims there are acceptable ads.
Chrome crippled its ad blockers and is basically the epitome of corporate interference and bloat.
Literally all other "big" browsers (edge, opera, Vivaldi, safari) are just re-skinned chrome.
The shimmer of hope for the future are indie projects like servo or ladybird, but for the time being they're not ready to be daily driven. They can't reliably render all pages and don't have plugin support, which is a KO criterion. No browser without ad blocker.

I'm not saying Firefox is perfect, but it's one of the better options.

Yes, youtubers from 20 years ago will make people want to use Firefox. Cringe.

I get it, but this is how we get a Chrome/chromium majority.

Everyone wants the ideal browser to do everything right, but they can't agree on what that is. What they can agree on is, they're willing to settle for a chromium browser despite it also not doing everything right. So they may want something better, but they're actively campaigning for a world in which chromium dominates.

In the meantime, you can harden Firefox, or you can use one of the forks.

Another thing about Chrome: not only did they cripple their own ad blockers, they actively try to defeat others.

If you're on iOS, or you're on Android but you don't have root, your ad blocking is via VPN/DNS. That's how you do it without superuser/root. If you have that, you block via HOSTS and IIRC Chrome can't beat that, but I'm not 100%. The point is, if you use DNS specifically (iOS does DNS over VPN, but I think VPN can override DNS on Android... Not sure), Chrome will actually use its own DNS to force ads on you. That makes it akin to malware in my book. Ad blocking is security software. Ads have been used to deliver malware for a long time now. Even ransomware. It's coming back in the news that ads are being used to deliver crypto miners, but they can deliver all kinds of malware. So you have to think of ad blocking as security. Anything that tries to defeat your machine's security is, by definition, your enemy, and you cannot wiggle on this. Because the people making money off ads, driving a nicer car than you, living in a nicer house, you tell them their ad put malware on your computer, they don't even wanna give you the time of day. It's your responsibility. So take it.

uBlock Origin works best on Firefox.

I couldn't give less of a shit about all the random crap Mozilla is trying to push, but the modern web is literally unusable without a good ad blocker, and Firefox + uBlock Origin is the best, full stop.