Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014)
Easy path to success for Firefox is to continue to beef up security and privacy tooling for their users and have sane defaults. They&#x27;ve been winning a lot of users who feel abandoned by the big companies in this space.<p>A problem and conflict of interest for them regarding this is that they are funded mainly by Google. Firefox has a conflict of interest here because they are not doing all they can here because that would cut off their main source of revenue.<p>So, for example, they have sort of a mute option for sound (just like other browsers) but they don&#x27;t allow you to mute video by default (without blanket turning it off for all websites). I don&#x27;t know anyone who loves being bombarded with video content when they want to read an article. I find the moving stuff to be distracting; even if the sound is off. Also the bandwidth is kind of not nice, especially on mobile. The BBC has started putting multiple video previews in their articles. This kind of attention whoring is highly annoying. This is not news to anyone of course.<p>The obvious fix allow people to whitelist sites to allow autoplaying video (youtube, netflix, and other websites where people go specifically to enjoy video content) and switch that off for everything else. All the extenions for that claim to do this are basically a combination of broken or simply setting the config property that blanket bans all autoplay video for every website (just preempting the inevitable comment to try extension X here).<p>Similarly, the containers extension is great. This should be baked into the browser and improved to the point where the default container is a private container unless you whitelist the domain. Right now private browsing happens in a separate window. It&#x27;s an obvious thing to do: every site by default is private until you say otherwise.<p>Both kind of are in direct conflict with how Google, and by extension, how Mozilla monetizes. This is the main reason this is made hard to do. I&#x27;m sure if this was easier, there&#x27;d be countless extensions doing exactly that. Instead people sort of emulate private browsing with stuff like noscript and other extensions that throw away cookies. Also nice but not user friendly.<p>Doing all this in fool proof, user friendly way would be a great way for Firefox to differentiate. It would unfortunately cut them off from Google funding probably.