Now that Mozilla will start selling ads what is the best Firefox alternative?

Way way way too early to say we need to ditch firefox.

What we know is that Mozilla, firefox's parent, bought an ad company with the stated goal to make privacy friendly advertisements.

Also this week (I believe, maybe a bit earlier) Firefox announced that they are holding to manifest v2's rules for adblocking, that they are encouraging ublock and other apps to still block ads.

Firefox needs money to continue development though to be competitive with Chrome. Ads are the only real way to make money on the internet. There is nothing that suggests that they are adding ads to firefox, to me it sounds more like they want sites to use their privacy focused ad service to fund their development of firefox because they weren't receiving enough donations - which makes sense.

I'm not going to ditch my browser of 20 years over fear that something might happen. If something happens like that, then sure I'll change to something else. Remember though, all of the alternatives are chromium based, which is mostly controlled by Google. By giving up Firefox you're allowing Google to make their monopoly, because Firefox is the only other real browser engine out there.

So, rather than be reactionary, I'd say let's give them the benefit of the doubt and see where it goes.

Most level-headed reaction to the issue I've seen to date. Thanks for saying it.

If a company has had a decent record to date, I prefer to wait to see if they hang themselves with their own rope rather than rage quitting on insufficient information.

They've done some questionable things in the past that can be explained by over-zealous PMs and such, so I'll wait to see how this plays out.
@scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech Maybe I should rephrase It might be a bit early, but I don't think there is going to be any benefit from this course of action for the users.
- We don't even know if this is for Firefox yet. As far as we know this is a completely separate entity selling adspace on other websites and places completely separate from Firefox. They have said literally nothing about doing anything like adding ads to Firefox.
  
  Let's cross that bridge if and when we get to it. Otherwise this is all just a slippery slope argument. Yes, they can add ads to Firefox, but they have not done that or even implied that they might do that. If they do that, we'll deal with it then.

fork it if it starts to suck

Still Firefox.

Just remember, the Mozilla Corporation who owns the Mozilla Foundation who owns Firefox purchased the ad provider. Not Firefox themselves.

FWIW, it's the Mozilla Foundation that owns the Mozilla Corporation. It's a minor nit, but also an important distinction, as the non-profit has more control (the opposite of many "<company> foundation" structures).
Mozilla Foundation owns Mozilla Corporation.

Mozilla Corporation, which is responsible for Firefox, is what also purchased Anonym.
@slazer2au@lemmy.world I can't prove it, but it is likely you will start seeing ads in a near future in your browser, I wouldn't be shocked.
- Well, then I'll have a bone to pick with my adblocker.
- It's open-source, people will strip it right out if it happens.
- "I can't prove it just trust me bro". Yeah okay.

Your conclusion is premature at this point. There's no indication that Firefox will no longer be the best.

@morphballganon@lemmy.world I can't prove it, but the fact they bought an ad company surely is an indication.

Probably still Firefox. The web is shit.

Librewolf

All of the Firefox forks are Firefox with a user.js added to it. So just use Firefox with a user.js. Here's three user.js'.

Probably some fork of Firefox if Mozilla starts doing evil stuff

a fork

maybe Gnome Web aka Epiphany

A little late to this one but Librewolf is a pretty solid privacy based fork of Firefox that comes prepackedwith UBO and hardened security settings on by default