Firefox

Yeah it's a weird thing to say. Google pays Mozilla a HUGE amount of money to be Firefox's default search engine. Although the main reason they're happy to pay so much for that is that they WANT to keep at least one Chrome competitor alive, so they don't end up in an anti-trust shitfest like Microsoft did with Internet Explorer.

The bigger point here is that Go doesn't really compete with Rust or C++. Chromium is written in C++, not Go.

You expect too much from "tech journalists".

Firefox become popular originally because it differentiated itself from other browsers (well, mainly one particular browser) by offering great useful features that the others didn't have. Many of them were targeted at power users who went on to evangelise Firefox to others.

These days Mozilla only seems to get publicity and attention for gimmicks, or for removing features. The few useful ideas it has produced, like Containers, languish in obscurity. In the face of Google's aggressive moves with Chrome, Firefox has withered has a result.

A change of direction is sorely needed.

Not sure I follow, there are plenty of Firefox-based browsers:

Tor, Mullvad, LibreWolf, Floorp, Pulse, Mull, Waterfox, Mercury, Ghostery, IceCat, Iceraven, etc.

"Bundling extensions" sounds to me like a poor description of what I think is the right idea, which is to incorporate things that can currently be done with extensions into the browser in a simpler way. As time goes by it seems like more and more extensions are required just to replace functionality as Mozilla removes it. On upgrading to 115ESR for instance, which has just made it to Debian stable, I find that I need "New Tab Homepage" in order to continue having new tabs be a blank page with a dark background. Other extensions that I think would be worth including as basic browser functions include "Disable Page Visibility", "Disallow console.clear", "Redirector", "RSSPreview", and "SuperStop". That's not counting things I haven't found extensions to replace such as disabling select events, or various simple UI customizations that can now be done only in userChrome.css, requiring additional steps to maintain them with every upgrade. There are also more complicated things like some features from JShelter which I think would also be deserving of inclusion. And of course as mentioned in the article, the always popular "vertical tabs" although I don't care for it myself.

They've cluttered up the UI in this new ESR release with a bunch of redundant "Can always read and change data on this site" text reminding us all of the security risk of having lots of extensions from a variety of sources any of which could one day sell out and turn malicious. There exist at least some "power users" who do not appreciate having to so frequently add new ones just to maintain existing functionality and to do what seem like very basic and essential things.

I don't see the point, especially when there's Tauri, which is a slim wrapper around whatever the default web view is on the target platform. That's about as slim as you can get.

Mozilla making it would merely be a Firefox-based Electron competitor, which would probably end up being similar in terms of size. I think that should happen, but the goal shouldn't be to make apps slimmer, but to make a real Electron competitor (i.e. something that packages the browser with the executable).