Mozilla Has a Plan to Save the Internet from Big Tech ⭐️

I grew up with Star Wars, a movie about the battle between good and evil, where a small band of rebels could against all odds thwart a powerful empire. And while it's easy to be idealistic when you're young, before the weight of experience becomes more of a burden than an advantage, I feel like that message stuck with me through the years.

Today, Big Tech monopolies and duopolies are collectively a real-world evil empire enshittifying their products and services while they steal all the value in the market for themselves. The antidote to their voracious behavior, the rebel alliance of our era, is what I call Little Tech, a group of smaller companies that competes the old fashioned way, by actually listening to what their customers want and then delivering on it. And there is no organization more OG to Little Tech, so to speak, than Mozilla.

Mozilla has been fighting the good fight since it was first created in 1998 in a last-ditch effort by Netscape to thwart Microsoft and its plan to embrace and extend the web for its own nefarious purposes. Mozilla's original offering was an open source and free version of the Netscape Communicator suite of Internet apps. But the suite was bloated and slow, and so Mozilla split up the apps to focus on the Thunderbird email client and what was then called Phoenix, the web browser.

I was a big fan of Phoenix. And so when Mozilla changed the name of this product to Firefox and marched forward to version 1.0 of this streamlined new app, I went along for the ride. In 2006, with Mozilla gearing up for Firefox 1.0, it placed a two-page "Spread Firefox" ad in The New York Times celebrating the release and the community of users who contributed financially to its success. My name is among the thousands on that ad, in tiny type, just to the left of the "o" in Firefox.

Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) controlled over 90 percent of the web browser market when Mozilla released Firefox 1.0 in late 2006. But the intervening history is messy. Microsoft had essentially stopped actively developing IE so that it could focus on its proprietary "Longhorn" and .NET technologies. And though it had recovered from that mistake by the time Firefox was stable, by then it was too late: IE usage share plummeted each year from then on. Briefly, it seemed that Firefox and the open web would win, but in 2008, Microsoft and IE were replaced by Google and Chrome.

Today, Google Chrome is dominant on both desktop and mobile, and there are only three main web browser efforts, each with its own rendering engine and other underlying technologies: Chrome and Blink, Apple Safari and WebKit, and Firefox and Gecko. Chrome directly controls almost 70 percent of the market and most third-party browsers--including Microsoft Edge, Brave, Opera, Vivaldi, and countless others--use the same underlying Chromium codebase. Safari sits a bit north of 15 percent, thanks largely to the success of Apple's mobile devices. And Firefox, sadly...