[diath]

> If those "popular websites" are the likes of Facebook and Instagram, I don't see that as a big loss.

Personally I wouldn't mind either but my point is that they probably want to cater to the average person, and not just security conscious tech savvy people, and if that's the case, then you really can't exclude FB/IG/YT and others from working properly in your browser.

[roughly]

> they probably want to cater to the average person, and not just security conscious tech savvy people

Why? The average person is well served by large existing players, whereas security conscious tech people are extremely underserved and often actually willing to pay.

[ulyssys]

Specific numbers aside, one possible reason is they want to increase adoption to gain user volume, in order to have an effect on the larger ecosystem.

Once you have non-trivial network effects, you could continue to influence the ecosystem (see: MSIE, Firefox in its early days, and Google Chrome). There are probably multiple paths to this. This is one.

[drnick1]

Firefox tries to position itself as that secure and private alternative, but this is mostly marketing. For a long time, Chromium had better site isolation, and the default Firefox settings are permissive when it comes to fingerprinting. Out of the box, it seems that Brave wins here, but for now using Brave means accepting a lot of extra commercial stuff that should not be in a browser in the first place (and that increases the attack surface). I have been using the Arkenfox user.js for Firefox, but it's unclear how much good it does or if it isn't counterproductive (by making the the user stand out).