The responses were not constructive. It is dfficult to argue with idealogues.

Community forks of Firefox and Chrome are not a long-term or sustainable solution. Even larger commercial forks cannot stand on their own without upstream development.

P.S. writing to you from Firefox.

I mean sure, he's not wrong. The downstream browsers are dependent on upstream for security patches but they're getting them. Waterfox ships security fixes less than 48 hours behind upstream and has occasionally has shipped security fixes before Firefox. I guess just do your homework when picking a downstream browser.

I don't think downstream browsers are trying to do anything other than strip out some user-unfriendly aspects like ads and make some minor superficial changes. I still am in shock Mozilla actually put ads in the URL bar.