Returning to Mozilla

I have been using Brave as my primary browser for about three years. It is technically competent. The privacy defaults are good, the ad blocking is built in, and it has been genuinely fast. I switched from Firefox because at the time Brave felt like a better answer to the same set of problems.

I am going back to Firefox.

The reason is not technical. Brave’s browser is fine. The reason is Brendan Eich.

Eich is Brave’s CEO and co-founder. He is also the person who resigned from the Mozilla CEO role in 2014 after it became public that he had donated to Proposition 8, the California ballot measure that sought to ban same-sex marriage. The donation was from 2008. The resignation came when Mozilla’s own community made clear they could not work under his leadership given what that donation represented.

I knew this history when I switched to Brave. I told myself it was the product that mattered, not the person running it. That the privacy features were separable from who built them. That using a browser was not an endorsement.

I am less comfortable with that reasoning now. Especially when you see the list of controversies surrounding Brave browser outlined in a detailed manner here.

I am non-binary and in the process of navigating a gender clinic referral that has been a long time coming. The question of whose infrastructure I build my digital life on feels less abstract than it did three years ago. Brave’s CEO has a documented history of opposing equal rights for people like me. That history has not been repudiated. The company has not changed leadership. The browser I open several hundred times a day is, in a small but not insignificant way, financially beneficial to a person whose political values are directly opposed to my right to exist fully.

I am not naive enough to think that consumer choices are a meaningful form of political action in isolation. But this one is easy. I have an alternative that is technically capable, actively developed, and led by an organisation whose mission I actually believe in.

Mozilla is imperfect. It has made questionable decisions over the years and has had its share of controversies. But its foundational commitment to an open, accessible, user-respecting web is genuine and consistent. It is a non-profit. It exists because the web as a commons is worth defending. That is a mission I want to support.

Firefox has also improved considerably. The Firefox I am returning to is not the one I left. The memory usage is better. The developer tools are excellent. Containers are built in, which matters for how I think about separating contexts online. The extension ecosystem has remained strong.

The practical migration is not complicated. KeePassXC has a Firefox extension. The themes and layout are configurable. My bookmarks will transfer. The muscle memory will take a week.

What takes longer is sitting with the fact that I spent three years using a product whose leadership I would not have chosen to support if I had thought more carefully about it at the time. I am thinking more carefully about it now.