Having worked at Mozilla a while ago, the CEO role is one I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy. Success is oddly defined: it's a non-profit (well, a for-profit owned by a non-profit) that needs to make a big profit in a short amount of time. And anything done to make that profit will annoy the community.
I hope Anthony leans into what makes Mozilla special. The past few years, Mozilla's business model has been to just meekly "us-too!" trends... IoT, Firefox OS, and more recently AI.
What Mozilla is good at, though, is taking complex things the average user doesn't really understand, and making it palpable and safe. They did this with web standards... nobody cared about web standards, but Mozilla focused on usability.
(Slide aside, it's not a coincidence the best CEO Mozilla ever had was a designer.)
I'm not an AI hater, but I don't think Mozilla can compete here. There's just too much good stuff already, and it's not the type of thing Mozilla will shine with.
Instead, if I were CEO, I'd go the opposite way: I'd focus on privacy. Not AI privacy, but privacy in general. Buy a really great email provider, and start to own "identity on the internet". As there's more bots and less privacy, identity is going to be incredibly important over the years.. and right now, Google defacto owns identity. Make it free, but also give people a way to pay.
Would this work? I don't know. But like I said, it's not a job I envy.
> - Mozilla Search - metasearch that isn't based on Bing/DDG/Google
As much hate as Brave gets overall, I think Mozilla should take a page from Brave's book if they're going to make a search engine. I think they should have their own index, possibly supplemented by Bing or Google. Let people opt-in to using their browsers to help crawl for the search engine index, like Brave does. Then add in some power-user features like goggles and custom ranking, and they'd have a pretty compelling search engine. They should even be able to subsidize it somewhat with advertising: DDG and Brave Search are the only two websites I allow ads on, because they're usually relevant and they're never intrusive.
They could partner with Kagi. Pretty much everyone trusts Kagi, so if Mozilla convinces them to get on board, Mozilla must be actually serious about being trustworthy.
I wouldn't partner with them, but if they do make a search engine they should take a page out of their book and focus on giving quality results. They can start by blacklisting any seo blogspammy site and instead try and direct you to the best results for any search first (for example, a wikipedia article or relevant docs)
...on a forum run by its investors whose goal is to push Kagi, sure. Outside of this forum, nobody knows about a fringe little search engine that is paywalled and only has 62k users.
For a brand like Mozilla, even something as dumb as Ecosia would be a better fit, as they have about 250x the number of users of Kagi.
They are not VC funded afaik, and esp not YC funded.
> 250x the number of users
If you offer the service for free and serve ads in "privacy respecting way" sure you get more users. But anyway this is a mozilla's states goal too, so it would fit.
Third paragraph. They didn't go down the official YC route, they just let their initial users invest in it. How many of those investors do you think are among us here pushing it at every opportunity because it's in their (undisclosed) financial interest to do so? Even when it makes no sense to do so like here?
> How many of those investors do you think are among us here pushing it
Probably a bunch are users here, but
1. the amount of money (~2.5m) gathered in a 2-year period from 93 people seem peanuts in VC terms, if we are talking about YC itself rather than random users
2. their whole approach and strategy seems to aim towards a sustainable, long term development rather than quick profit (so far)
3. there does not seem to be any obvious link between them and YC itself in general
4. even if some of the 93 people are "pushing it" here, quite a few other users do the same without being investors (I have done/do it), and the former would probably do it without being investors anyway. There are bigger problems than some random people who invested in some company write once in a while supporting comments in some forum online.
I guess "forum run by its investors" can be interpreted as either the users of the forum are investors or the admins/owners are, so I tried to address both.
I think it is more like that users here are more prone to like kagi and want to pay for search (they spend more time online on a computer, they have jobs where web search is important to them etc), so you have people saying how great kagi is, but their experience does not necessarily extend to the general population as much because most people do not care as much about these things to think they are worth paying. Rather than most of them being actually kagi investors and trying to get people subscribe to kagi for their investment to grow. People can also just be satisfied with a product/service and talk about it.
Why is Brave getting hate? Their browsers are treating me very well on mobile and desktop. I am always horrified when I see how the web looks for other people with all ads.
This was in 2020. Brendan Eich addressed this in a blogpost iirc, with a perfectly plausible explanation. It seemed like a bad/unfortunate design decision, which happens all the time in software development and not the conspiracy theory people claimed it to be. It was fixed in a matter of days.
If this is the main reason to not use Brave then I'm genuinly interested in hearing about the other reasons. I might learn something I wasn't aware of.
I don't understand all the hate Brave gets either. It passes pretty much all privacy tests ootb and I see 0 ads, on desktop and mobile. This is what actually matters to me.
I don't think the past controversies were just unfortunate, "mistakes" or conspiracy theories, but products of their business model + opportunistic execution. I just don't trust brave and think I have better options for a browser. If I had to choose between brave and chrome, I would use brave. If you like/prefer using brave, honestly good for you.
> Let people opt-in to using their browsers to help crawl for the search engine index, like Brave does.
This is really cool.
I'd be happy with a re-branded SearX/SearXNG, with a paid cloud hosted instance from Mozilla that uses a shared base index plus your own crawled pages or optionally contribute your crawls back to the shared index.
As a US corporation, Mozilla cannot compete on privacy focused services. If they want to focus on privacy (which I think is great), they should ship software that improves privacy, not offer services.
They can compete where the alternatives are also US based services.
They can compete in the US.
There are also many people who are more concerned about privacy from businesses than from governments. There are also people who are more concerned about privacy from their own government than a foreign government.
Although the Cloud Act and similar issues with the US are much discussed here, I see no sign it loses American big tech much business.
> There are also many people who are more concerned about privacy from businesses than from governments.
We're living in an interesting time that may (or may well not!) turn out to be a pivot point in this question. People being ICE'd based on data traces they leave in commercial products may well make this kind of question more tangible to non-technical folks.
> Although the Cloud Act and similar issues with the US are much discussed here, I see no sign it loses American big tech much business.
If that is true (which it may or may not be) then it would also mean competing on privacy isn't a winning move, whether within or outside the US.
It's not all or nothing. Depending on your threat model, Apple's services might be fine. But I guess most people don't think enough about the implications of storing many years worth of data at a US company like Apple.
Apple has actually proven itself over a long period of time on this issue. Maybe Mozilla has as well (do they encrypt telemetry logs etc for people with a Mozilla login?) but I haven't heard so much about that.
Did you really forgot about Snowden's Apple slide? Also their phones are routinely mirrored at the border. Just to support the unconstitutional government agenda of policing thoughts and speech.
How about: Mozilla HTTPS To My Router (or printer or any other physically present local object) in a way that does not utterly suck?
Seriously, there’s a major security and usability problem, it affects individual users and corporations, and neither Google nor Apple nor Microsoft shows the slightest inclination to do anything about it, and Mozilla controls a browser that could add a nice solution. I bet one could even find a creative solution that encourages vendors, inoffensively, to pay Mozilla a bit of money to solve this problem for them.
Also:
> Thunderbird for iOS - why is this not a thing yet?
Indeed. Apple’s mail app is so amazingly bad that there’s plenty of opportunity here.
When you tap one of those fields it bounces you to a contact card. If it is an existing contact (for example, yourself), you just get the full contact card. If that contact card has multiple addresses (my contact card lists ten), you get no indication of which one it was sent to.
At some point in time the actual email address used was flagged with a little “recent” badge - by itself a confusingly-worded tag - but even that doesn’t show up consistently.
It’s stupid because there’s really no reason to play hide and seek with the email address - that’s an identifier that people should generally be familiar with (since you have to use it reasonably often), and lots of people have multiple addresses that they can receive mail at.
> We’ve also seen the overwhelming demand to build a version of Thunderbird for the iOS community. Unlike the Android app, the iOS app is being built from the ground up.
> All seemingly low-hanging fruit with brand alignment.
Genuinely interested: are you a developer? Doesn't sound like low-hanging fruit to me.
There are already many alternatives to Gmail, I don't think Mozilla would make a lot of money there. And I don't know if they are making a lot of money with their Mozilla VPN (which I understand is a wrapper around Mullvad): why would I pay Mozilla instead of Mullvad?
There are alternative search engines, like Kagi in the US and Qwant/Ecosia in Europe (though only Qwant seems to keep the servers in Europe).
What I want from Mozilla, really, is a browser. And I would love to donate to that specifically, but I don't think I can.
It is certainly not low hanging fruit in the development effort space, but they can utilise open source projects in ways that MS cannot due to licensing, and therefore have much more resources overall in terms of community dev contributions.
A reliable, corporate-friendly, with advanced support model alternative of Exchange + AD is something that could sink a titan like Microsoft in 2 decades, at least its non-cloud business (but then for cloud alone they are just one of many, nothing special there).
Literally everybody is fu*king fed up with M$ arrogance. But you can't get rid of Active Directory and Exchange. Make comparable alternative (with say 80% of most used use cases, no need to die on some corner case hill) and many many corporations will come.
This won't come from some startup, it has to be a company like Mozilla.
Are you sure of that? There have been alternatives to Microsoft Office for decades. Yet most businesses use and pay for Microsoft Office, even though their employees most likely don't need anything that doesn't exist in those alternatives.
I don't think you understand what I was writing about - none of that is MS Office. Thats another topic, but without this (and say some sort of domain propagation rules) bigger corporations will never move out of MS.
My understanding is that you say "someone could make an alternative to X and that would kill Microsoft because everybody hates Microsoft".
My answer is "there have been examples of alternatives to Microsoft products for decades, and it hasn't killed Microsoft at all, so I don't see why it would be different for another service (in your case, email)".
> A reliable, corporate-friendly, with advanced support model alternative of Exchange + AD is something that could sink a titan like Microsoft in 2 decades, at least its non-cloud business (but then for cloud alone they are just one of many, nothing special there).
Ooh, imagine if they also threw in some kind of Teams alternative, maybe based on XMPP or Matrix! That might get a lot of attention.
> Thunderbird for iOS - why is this not a thing yet?
They are building Thunderbird Android over K9 Mail, which is an Android app. They would have to start from scratch on iOS, which of course is feasible but it takes more time.
Re-launch FirefoxOS -- not for smartphones, but as a privacy-focused ChromeOS competitor. Give students Mozilla/Firefox brand awareness while prying them out of Google's clutches.
I'm thinking more at an SMB level, not necessarily for secure mail, PGP and the like.
IMAP + CalDev + CardDev sat on-top of cPanel is getting a bit long in the tooth for companies that want exchange-like mail solutions outside of the big two. Unfortunately MS and Google run the "spam" filters as well, so you really need an established company that they can't afford to irritate to enter the space - see Mozilla - to reliably force acceptance of enterprise mail outside the Duopoly they have.
Zoho is trying their best also in this space - not sure how successful they have been on the trusted email provider and integration front.
> That's like saying, "Nobody wants Adwords; people want Chrome."
Bad comparison, but I understand your point.
> Salaries have to be paid somehow.
I would be interested in knowing how much of what Mozilla does brings money. Isn't it almost exclusively the Google contract with Firefox?
As a non-profit, Mozilla does not seem to be succeeding with Firefox. Mozilla does a lot of other things (I think?) but I can't name one off the top of my head. Is Google paying for all of that, or are the non-Firefox projects succeeding? Like would they survive if Firefox was branched off of Mozilla?
And then would enough people ever contribute to Firefox if it stopped getting life support from Google? Not clear either.
It's a difficult situation: I use Firefox but I regularly have to visit a website on Chrom(ium) because it only works there. It doesn't sound right that Google owns the web and Firefox runs behind, but if Chrome was split from Google, would it be profitable?
I'm not sure why you think so; it seems pretty close to me. Chrome and Firefox are exact competitors; both require a large amount of development investment. Neither one are being charged for, which means their development needs to be supported some other way.
The people using Chrome don't want Adwords, but it's Adwords that is paying for Chrome's development. People using Firefox don't want email or Mozilla certificates or what-not, but something needs to fund Firefox's development.
> ...if Chrome was split from Google, would it be profitable?
They'd have to figure out a different business model, wouldn't they?
I predict the next gen search engines will be a return to form of the early web-directory style of known good pages and having to be vetted to appear in results
I'm still sad they shelved Mozilla Persona due to low adoption. There is a hole in the market around privacy and identity, and Mozilla would be a natural choice to fill it, but it's going to be an uphill battle to get major sites and end users on board. Not a job to be envious about indeed.
And just to add, I kind of mourn FirefoxOS. We couldn't have guessed it at the time, but as of 2025, Google is pushing developer verification and stepping closer and closer to ecosystem lockdown. It would have been a great time for an alternative mobile OS 10+ years in the making, to welcome all the energy that has gone into beautiful projects like F-Droid.
If I could time travel into the past, in addition to preventing all the bad things (e.g. Young Sheldon), I might have told Yahoo they should flex some financial muscle while they still had relevance and worked to mobilize (no pun intended) developer time, energy, etc and perhaps even provide a baseline ecosystem of stock apps to support FirefoxOS.
> We couldn't have guessed it at the time, but as of 2025, Google is pushing developer verification and stepping closer and closer to ecosystem lockdown.
We did guess it. Google were already past their “don’t be evil” days in 2013. They were possibly better than other companies of similar scale, but the decline was already clearly beginning. People had long warned that Google could not be trusted to keep Android open in the long term, that eventually their benevolence would fade. A good chunk of the enthusiasm around Firefox OS was in breaking the duopoly and the idea of a platform that would be much harder to lock down.
Fair point, I think I have to concede that you're right that it was perhaps perceivable at that time. In my defense, I will say that we are seeing some pretty concrete actions out in the wild in 2025 that we were only speculating on in 2013 heightening the urgency of the issue.
The main problem with Firefox OS was that it was really slow. At the same time it was targeting budget phones.
But on the other hand progress was quite good. Back in the days I was maintaining unofficial images for Alcatel Fire. Each version was a little bit faster, but you really can't do much when the whole OS is a browser running on a device with with 256MB of RAM and a single core CPU.
Wasn't webOS effectively an OS built on web standards and effectively just a browser engine?
The Pre had 256MB and something like a 600mHZ processor. While it was no speed demon, I was always impressed with the animations and multitasking they pulled off with it.
I use it as my primary phone for 2 years, first with the Flame, then with a Z3C.
For me Firefox OS was the finale move of Mozilla, either it successes and Mozilla becomes a major actor again or it fails and they slowly die. And thebmy decided to kill it right when it was becoming stable enough.
It's another damned if you do, damned if you don't. FirefoxOS is regularly listed by commenters as an example of a wasteful side bet, whereas my feeling is more along the lines of yours, that it was striding greatly, as the saying goes, and attempting to be a major actor.
A big part of the market share loss was due to monopoly and distribution lockdown of a controlled platform tightly tied to hardware, so I can certainly see the strategic wisdom of the attempt. I suspect they didn't have the resources to press forward, they had a lot less money then than they do now. Which makes it all the more maddening that Yahoo's role as a partner was so muted; it could have made the difference for both of them.
As with most new operating systems, its biggest problem was lack of apps. Mozilla seemed to abandon Firefox OS right as Progressive Web Apps were starting to take off, which would have done a lot to fix that problem.
If I want to interact with modern society, I have to use banking apps, the NHS app, WhatsApp, numerous IoT apps... The list is endless. Many of these will refuse to run on rooted phones.
Google and Apple won. We can learn from this and hope the next big thing to come along has some competition from the truly open source side of computing.
They didn't 'win' - use a laptop. Phones are decent for certain things but no, you don't need to use WhatsApp, IoT apps -- most have bluetooth, and you don't have to 'interact with modern society'
Interact with good circles of people and stuff. I mean, it's cool that my pixel is some mini high powered TPU computer that can run apps, F-Droid etc, but I only really care about the 5g data link within it.
If any app refuses to run due to rooted phone -> open a browser go to the web version.
I know that you know these things and I'm not trying to make any point other than: no, you don't have to use those things. but if you want to, you can.
the next big thing to come is already here, Linux with its infinite mix of desktop environments, user environments, distros with pre-set up things. You can have a device use your SIM/e-SIMS.
Google and Apple's push notification system being locked for what they deem allowed and control the push tokens, browsers have push notifications too.
All I'm saying is: Google and Apple didn't win anything and there's great things like GrapheneOS, plus Google's TPU chips are awesome.
But, they most certainly didn't 'Win' and 'modern society' is crazy.
When feasible, this sounds like a great reason to switch banks. If enough people did this, banks would all offer web apps instead of forcing native apps.
Well that's a fantastic point, and interesting in this context because the whole gambit of FirefoxOS was to use progressive web apps. The browser rather than the Linux ecosystem becomes the trusted execution environment and PWAs actually ask less of your bank or (insert security agency) than even Android or iOS development.
Too late for what? Librem 5 is my daily driver. Would you also say that in the 90s Windows "won" and "it was too late"? Please stop with the security/privacy nihilism, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27897975
The two places it's mind boggling that Mozilla doesn't have a product are (1) identity (especially as a provider to 3rd parties) and (2) instant messaging (especially on mobile).
They were important 10 years ago, they're more important today, and the existing providers all have huge privacy concerns.
Signal is already ostensibly private, available, and popular enough, and doesn't have ads... why compete?
IMO Mozilla should just double down on the browser and do everything they can to keep it as a lifeline for Free Software devices to be able to participate on the internet as first class citizens.
Signal intentionally made their messaging rely on a single, central point of failure, perfect for targeting by all sorts of criminals and governments. If Mozilla provides a Matrix server, I will seriously consider it.
It does, but it's mostly for coordinating development rather than a consumer facing product. Personally I'm not convinced Mozilla IM would make sense though. It's a crowded msrket with lots of other options.
There are not many options for a secure, e2e messaging not relying on a single point of failure (including Signal), with a good UX and a possibility of video calls. I only know of Matrix. A AFAIK there are not so many trusted servers.
You don't really seem to be trying to fairly describe the problem.
With Pocket, Mozilla forced it on everyone, then two years later they bought the service, then many years later they eventually killed it for everyone. They didn't even try the approach of making it an opt-in extension that users could install if they desired. The unoffensive strategy was obvious all along, and they just didn't choose that route. The concerns of Mozilla partnering with and promoting a proprietary service were easily anticipated, and the solution (buying Pocket) was clearly an option since they did that step eventually.
Yes, Mozilla may be in a hard place trying to diversify and find success with their other ventures. But they're clearly making plenty of unforced errors along the way.
That unforced error was particularly egregious considering that tab containers and Facebook containers are optional addons that are well integrated into the browser.
They literally forced every user to either accept the invasion of the proprietary service, or have to take extra steps to disable it on each of their devices. Neither of those is actually a reasonable, respectful way to treat your users.
Sure, living with the nuisance of the advertising and UI clutter is an option, as I said. But the fact that they were relatively minor nuisances compared to eg. Windows 11's BS doesn't change the fact that they were still unwelcome and unnecessary and disrespectful.
I don't think there's anything radical about my stance that a new toolbar button showing up—with advertising calling attention to it—integrating a proprietary service into my open-source browser is inappropriate behavior on Mozilla's part.
Anything requiring messing with about:config is an unreasonable way to treat non-technical users. And the point I've already made that you're ignoring is that the complexity of the workaround is not the problem—the necessity of taking action to disable Pocket is what was most concerning about what Mozilla did.
I simply removed it from the toolbar, same as I did with the Firefox sync icon. Out of sight, out of mind. Granted, they were much more pushy about other features and services. Much less pushy than other vendors and it was, in some respects, understandable. (How do you convince people your product is relevant if they think it does less than the competition because they aren't aware of what's there?)
I found no value in Pocket and it was annoying to have to disable it once per machine but you didn't have to "live with it" as claimed. That's just ridiculously overdramatic.
The broader discussion but especially this little exchange reminds me of a similar situation with Ubuntu.
At one point they were the darling of the desktop Linux space and much beloved by an online community of highly principled people who didn't pay them anything.
Those same people then utterly blasted them when they tried a few monetization/promotion features that fell flat, like the Amazon lens in Unity. I had no love for that lens but it was easy to remove.
Shuttleworth gave a fairly telling interview afterwards which basically amounted to "Fuck these guys, you can never make them happy."
Canonical proceeded to focus on the server side where there's more money, fewer loud freeloaders, and now they're somewhat more evil.
There is also a whole strain of thought in SaaS which says don't ever have a free version because those guys always end up being the biggest complainers.
I think you have to accept that no company is going to get it 100% perfect and if you're too loud, annoying, and you're not giving them anything in return, they may just take their ball and go home.
Being the company that does the right thing is arguably not worth it, the devil's advocate argument is, some guy online is going to ride you even harder because you said you were trying to do the right thing, so better to stay quiet, or even cultivate an air of vague evil instead, then they won't bother.
Perhaps also related: the idea that riots are stupid, because rioters are inevitably protesting someone/something that's far away, even as they set fire to local businesses owned by members of their own community.
Ubuntu freeloaded on Debian so its fairly reasonable to consider the ubuntu skin to not be worth having if the result is advertisements being pushed onto users.
Companies that want to freeload on a free software community will always have a hard time. They may be praised in the beginning if they bring fresh and new energy, but trust is only going to work for so long until the "monetization features" starts being pushed. Historically that only works if the company reforms the original in such a way that it essentially is a completely different thing. Ubuntu today is still just a skin over Debian that users can easily replace.
Accidentally the best thing Ubuntu brought to Debian was the release schedule, which the Debian community adapted. Without that advantage there isn't much point to Ubuntu unless Canonical continuously pour a lot of money and developer time for free into the ecosystem. A lot of people commented at the time that such a thing wasn't sustainable.
> There is also a whole strain of thought in SaaS which says don't ever have a free version because those guys always end up being the biggest complainers.
Not just free, but also cheap. I have found the less someone pays the higher the likelihood they are a problem customer.
Look at them all downvoting us for saying it. It's like a force of nature, the reaction to comments about it proves that it's true - the complainers sure enough come onto the free forum and blast down comments about it :)
I like free stuff as much as the next guy but I think this is just some fundamental aspect of psychology, like you don't value something as much if you didn't pay for it. Within our business we see this all the time, customers who pay a lot tend to be satisfied and limit their criticism to the things that really matter, customers who pay a little or are just proposal shopping will take up a huge amount of time and have a lot of minor complaints. I have heard about this at many other businesses
If no company can make a fully free and user respecting browser then Mozilla the foundation should dissolve Mozilla the corporation because it doesn't fit into the state goals of the foundation.
> It's damned if you do, damned if you don't. Basically every product Mozilla releases is immediately met with extreme scourn and scepticism. While everyone else seems to get the benefit of the doubt, including the likes of Google, Mozilla seems to get the exact opposite of that.
You have any evidence for this - that is, that the same subsets of users are being hard on Mozilla and soft on Google? Because that's pretty easy to quantify if you have evidence, which I notice you haven't presented.
Right now all you have is a gut feeling disguised as an factual claim about reality - which is worse than worthless because it's biased by your feelings, as opposed to being a wild guess.
Of course it's probably not the same user base. But the point imo is that users did use it and get value out of it, even if die hard users cried hard their browser was invaded and that Mozilla lost the plot.
We even have commenters here saying Pocket lost Firefox some market share (without any evidence or argument in favor, so a gut feeling too), but nobody to say that maybe the feature was used by some? And maybe that was a pull for Firefox vs Chrome. (I'm not saying it was, I'm just saying we don't know)
I believe that this is just the typical pattern of groupies being more toxic than band-members or crew. If you go to /r/rust, every announcement of a donation to the Rust Software Foundation is met with derision for the donor. In fact, if you go there today, you'll see it's got some extraordinary drama going on - primarily from non-programmers. If you look at the latest Arduino developments, it's the same story with non-users enacting some purity ritual and users being more sedate.
The reality of the thing is that community-oriented projects have the problem that the groupie-layer of the community are a group that are so marginally attached to the organization that the death of the organization won't affect them but are sufficiently attached to the organization that they can affect the org.
A population like that will naturally tend towards extraction of all surplus from the organization - if the org dies as a result, it doesn't matter, but if they don't do this they're "leaving money on the table" so to speak. With the rise of social media, the groupie layer of people can be extraordinarily large since forums with centralized sign-on allow for a variety of subjects to be posted and consequently being in the fandom is cheap - you don't have to seek news, it'll be there for you to have an opinion on. Hacker News, Reddit, etc. lead to a grouping point for people to have opinions on things they care so little about they would never seek it without it being thrust upon them by The Feed.
So I agree with you. It's challenging. I don't think it's because the community is special, though. I think it's just the structure of communities today because of the dynamics of social media.
I must have seen other sides of the community, since all I seen has been a consistent criticism that Mozilla neglects the two main products Firefox and Thunderbird, while focusing community money and focus on new products that does nothing to improve Firefox and Thunderbird. When new products get released it is indeed met with extreme scorn, and when they eventually fail, they will anew get criticized for wasting money.
There is a market share costs that pocket had on Firefox. Lost developer time, money and community trust mean that product pushed Firefox just that bit further into marginalization. Basically every product Mozilla releases is the same story when they fail to make their core product better.
It is not damned if you do, damned if you don't. Google could abandon Chrome, gmail or any other product like that and they would still be Google (and be profitable). Mozilla would not exist without Firefox, and the trust the community has with Mozilla is directly tied with Firefox.
> Basically every product Mozilla releases is immediately met with extreme scourn and scepticism. While everyone else seems to get the benefit of the doubt
Literally nobody skeptical of Mozilla is giving MS and Google the benefit of the doubt. Mozilla gets skepticism from people exactly because they don't want Mozilla to become like those companies.
Pocket in particular was a breech of trust. It brought ads and surveillance to firefox, when many users had turned to firefox in the first place to avoid those same things. Of course that was going to draw criticism.
Google and MS are never going to do anything other than sell out their users for profit. Firefox users are more fiercely critical of the introduction of anti-features and enshittification because they don't really have anywhere else to turn to. Every other browser is just openly collecting your personal data, pushing ads in your face and shoving AI down your throat. The best alternatives we have to Firefox as a browser that respects its users at all are forks of Firefox. If firefox fails because it becomes a chrome clone that's also bad for privacy people will stop using Firefox and if Firefox dies off there are real questions about how many of the forks will continue to be actively maintained.
The browser ecosystem needs an alternative to chrome. Users want a browser that doesn't push ads, collect data, and allows customization. People complain about Firefox because the stakes are high.
In all of these cases, 95% of the comments are by <1% of the users and are probably less relevant goals to Mozilla than us power users would like them to be. Someone is always going to be angry, that doesn't really decide whether you're damned if you do/don't though. I honestly wonder if "internet privacy" is even something the average user is truly interested in either.
I wouldn't be surprised if 'lame' things like "videos look a lot more vivid in Chrome" (due to the years of lag getting HDR support in Mac/Windows) lost Firefox more users than they gained for maintaining support for MV3 uBO. I.e. fewer than 10% of FF installs have uBO installed, even after Chrome dropped it, but the volume of comments about MV3 would have led you to believe this is all browser makers need to consider to be successful.
I am sorry sir. Somebody who says they want to put back control to people using Internet and someone saying humans over profit cant NOT expect pushback for their actions. They are going against the entire community. You cant go for the saviour of the open internet, BS the community and not get push back.
I would argue mozilla doesnt have general audience like google chrome. They have OSS enthusiasts, privacy enthusiasts, power users kind of crowd. Buying a behavioural ads company which will do data surveillance or shoving ai is not what we want.
Not to mention, I and many stuck with Firefox despite being it being horrible until quantum release because Mozilla was aligned with community. But their tech is better now but they aren't aligned with community.
It was the community that made Firefox overtake IE. They seem to forget that.
Unless its gonna come pre-installed like chrome, they need community make the user base grow. They are absolutely dumb for going after a crowd who are happy with Chrome while shitting on the crowd which want to be with them.
I'm not saying whether they should/shouldn't get pushback about these things - just that 95% of this pushback in places like this comes from <1% of their userbase and isn't as relevant to Mozilla as those making the feedback would like to believe. Meanwhile, the main portion of the userbase is leaving for completely different reasons and doesn't even know what this kind of stuff like MV3 is, let alone care about it.
Firefox definitely has a general audience much larger than any measure of power users. More than half of the users don't have a single extension installed, and that counts language pack extensions. Half have <= 4 cores, <= 16 GB of RAM, or a 1080p screen. The most common OS is Windows 11 at 44% - with Windows 10 at 34.5% and Windows 7 still above Linux. Over 1/3 of their ~200 million userbase is in the US, and even if every tech-literate power user or privacy fiend in the US used Firefox (they don't) it still wouldn't amount to that many people.
The average Firefox user is nothing like you or I, nor will they find their community in catering to privacy. The community over IE was that IE wa plain awful to use and Firefox just did everything better. It didn't matter if you cared about privacy, performance, standards, community, customizability, compatibility, or whatever - it just mopped the floor with the popular option. That's not going to be the situation with Chrom*, it's actually active and well funded, nor is focusing on a single minority which demands to exclude things other groups care about (even if you and I would prefer not to have them) going to bring them back to the forefront.
Most people who has Firefox installed is either installing because that's what they have always used or is using because someone recommended it. They have to be explicitly installed. Keep that in mind. Don't you remember firefox installation fest and stuff? That 1% pushes Firefox to non-users at home, in their companies and where not. That 1% is responsible for a lot of the rest of the 99%.
The folks Mozilla is trying to attract don't care for all of these. Their biggest selling point is privacy and being community friendly. If it's getting deteriorated, why should the general folks who don't know what Manifest V3 is install it?
Especially when tech enthusiasts are talking bad about it. What impression does it make to a non-tech guy who woke up one day drinking filter coffee and thought... Huh! From today onwards, I want privacy!!??
I agree most either have used it for a long time or because someone recommended it. It's nearly tautological. I disagree the recommendations for the average user only/primarily come from <1% of the user base or that's what makes the installs stick when they do. Power users desperately want to feel key to the success, but the reality is people stick with a browser based on what it does for them not how much it does for their power user friend who recommended it 20 years ago. The same is true in reverse: power users can comment here all they want about privacy nits or what Mozilla should do blah blah but it doesn't matter to the average user because they aren't reading tech forums for opinions on browsers. Most Firefox users probably couldn't tell you what Mozilla even is in relation to Firefox.
The 200 million normal users can also recommend trying to use Firefox all the time to their friends again, they just don't have a reason to do so because often, for their cares, Chrome and others are the ones with better target to them. Pre-installs is definitely a problem, as it always has been, but it never stopped Firefox before.
If the non-tech person wakes up one day and decides privacy is a key concern for the browser then they join the few that learn about each in this detail and pick from there and the niche has a new member. When things like 1,000,000,000 people wake up and decided mobile performance and battery life were important for years it resulted in Firefox having next to no presence on mobile more than any other reason.
Naturally - losing a few hundred million users is likely why they are trying to find a different strategy than focusing on privacy or what power users comment on in the following decade and expecting better results for some reason.
Mozilla's funding comes almost entirely from the Google search deal. They can't afford to let the user count continue to dwindle on a principled stance alone. They either need to find workable alternative income of the same scale (which they've tried at least a dozen things that didn't pan out) or try to focus on what the average user wants in a browser rather than what the GNU fan power user comments in tech forums. They don't need a few principled people to stick with it, they need to be popular with the average person again.
See this is kind of hitting the nail on the head here.
Mozilla is treated like a PhD holder and nobel prize winner, and Google is treated as a stupid baby.
When the stupid baby shits his pants, nobody cares. In fact, they expect it. But when the PhD student gets a tiny piece of information wrong about the French revolution, they're crucified and called an idiot.
Mozilla makes mistakes, but the objective reality is that even if you add up alllll the mistakes, they're MILES ahead of Google when it comes to how they treat their users.
Google Chrome users get fucked up the ass and then beg for more. Firefox users get sent flowers and chocolate and then complain the chocolate has nuts.
The stupid boy is working in bad faith. Everybody knows. And nobody has invested even quarter the time with the stupid boy like the community has with Mozilla.
Mozilla is also not making mistakes. They are changing direction.
They started this by taking privileges and power from community leaders around 2015/16? There was a huge exodus of community then if ypu remember. And one after the other it reached until they bought a behavioural ad company. Its directly in conflict of interest with the humans over profit BS they are whining in marketing.
They have been in bad faith for so long. I dont see mistakes, I see pivoting. So, they can't just piggy back good PR while talking giving power back to internet users BS. Come on dude, they can't have it both ways.
They are yet another bad faith company saying they are not evil. That is it. Bare minimum, they should at least stop virtue signalling.
> Basically every product Mozilla releases is immediately met with extreme scourn and scepticism. While everyone else seems to get the benefit of the doubt, including the likes of Google, Mozilla seems to get the exact opposite of that.
I've been thinking about this for a while, ever since The Framework DHH incident.
Basically, framework sent DHH a free laptop and funded his ruby conference and "arch distro." DHH meanwhile has some white supremacist musings on his blog. The Framework community flips out, talks about betrayal. There's people in the forums talking about how they were about to buy a fleet of machines but now will have to go back to Dell or whoever.
I was in the thread trying to understand - ok, we're doing ethical math here, right? We liked Framework because ostensibly buying from them reduced our e waste in the long run, and maybe is long run cheaper since we can do our own repairs on easily available parts. Meanwhile, Framework turns around and gives maybe 10k to someone who is prominently pulling a shitload of people into Linux world with Omarchy, who happens to have some disgusting opinions on his blog. I feel like switching to the main companies like Dell or HP or whoever, comes with way darker ethical implications. I mean one of these companies are the ones that provision the IDF, some of them have donated to Trump's ballroom wayyy more than the Ruby conf donation, they all have horrifying supply chains, and not to mention, don't come with any of the environmental benefits of a Framework machine.
So, why is Framework examined under a more critical lense?
My takeaway was twofold: first, people seem ok to dip their toes in activist progressivism to a degree, but are basically primed to throw their hands up and say, "I knew it, default capitalism really is insurmountable, oh well, back to the devil I know, no point in trying ANYTHING!" Second, people seem deeply focused on aesthetics rather than practical outcomes. Framework's far larger contributions to Linux space are instantly nullified by one relatively small donation to a guy who himself has massive contributions to FOSS but also a couple of really gross blog posts. It's not ok to cut away the gross bits: the entire thing is polluted.
I tried to point out the dangerous game being played since I can guarantee I can find a more ethically pure environmental anarchist than any supposed progressive on the forum - after all, the more environmental decision isn't to buy a Framework, it's to rescue a Thinkpad from a landfill, and by the way, anybody here still driving to work instead of taking the bus? And so on. People were, politely, shutting me down. "It's not the same, all framework has to do is apologize for the DHH thing and it'll all be ok." Sure, until it gets out that the CEO was at Trump's inauguration, or that the local Taiwanese office works with super shady parts suppliers, or... Seems to me the best thing to do is try to make a rough ethical calculation based on practicalities rather than purity testing, but nah.
So, if you're going to do something good in this society, you need to not just be much more ethical than the heteronormative capitalist participants, you need to be unimpeachable.
I'm by no means defending throwing the baby out with the bathwater - which is what's happening when someone abandons a less-aligned company for a completely unaligned one - but I have a somewhat different perspective on what, exactly, ticks these people off so much with Framework but not Dell, even though Dell is ostensibly worse (from their perspective), and it's not all that unreasonable emotionally, but it leads to bad outcomes, and it is very much not rational.
For them, it's a problem of (perceived) hypocrisy. You see, Dell never claimed to be good. Nor did HP. They're big corporations, they've got contracts with the military, IDF, what have you. Their appeal, as it were, is the product/service itself. Their only ideal is the Capital, and they never pretended otherwise.
In comes Framework; claiming to be sustainable, different from the others, caring about society/the world/etc., instead of just in it for the Capital, like all the others - regardless of whether they really claimed this or not, it is how they're perceived by these people - and then they go and "do something like that", so they go back to Dell/HP, because at least those didn't lie about who they were. This is exactly what happens with Mozilla vs Google/Microsoft.
This is very much a reflection of a fair few Leftist political spaces. Two people may agree on pretty much everything in how a society should be ran, but one of them believes that private property is inherently theft, and another one would like to maintain private property. That singular difference, one that could be set aside until all other goals are achieved - if ever - will cause endless debate, drama, and ultimately a schism which will leave both sides weaker.
Nice summation of the tech product world
And the political situation at the same time!
It is amazing that small schisms on the good side, are so highly beneficial to the dark side.
Tale as old as time. See: the fall of anarcho-syndicalist Spain, at the hand of their erstwhile allies, the Spanish Communists. And in the end the fascists won, most likely as a result.
It's because, I think, these people need moral plausible deniability.
I think maybe they truly, deep down, want to use dell - for their convenience, availability, sleekness, and mainstream appeal. But they can't just do that. They need to find the right place to jump from their moral high ground. So they basically search for any excuse at all to ditch.
I know people who were so upset, supposedly, with Mozilla that they switched to chrome. Fucking chrome, dude.
I don't care how much you think pocket is advertisement. Chrome is basically 3 ads in a trenchcoat. Can we please be for real?
I think it’s also related to bike shedding. No one wants to do the hard work of understanding the nuance of ethics and timing, and it’s easier to argue about this single event must equal evil.
See also how the left in American politics is known to eat its own. IMO, this led to the rise of MAGA and Trump.
But the issue is browsers don't make money. You can't charge for it, you can't add ads to it, etc. You're competing with the biggest companies in the world (Google, Apple), all of whom are happy to subsidize a browser for other reasons.
They could try. I just keep hearing people who would pay for no extra features as long as it paid for actual Firefox development and not the random unrelated Mozilla projects. I would pay a subscription. But they don't let me.
The problem I (and others that I see here) have is the lack of trust in mozilla's model, esp long term. Their economic reliance in google, their repeatedly stated goals of trying to engineer ad-delivery systems that "respect privacy", their very high CEO salaries, and their random ventures do not inspire much trust, confidence and alignment in their goals. And also the unclear relationships with their for and non-profit parts.
If they can convince me that some subscription for firefox will strictly go for firefox development, that firefox will not pivot to ads (privacy respecting or not), and all the other stuff they have, including executives' salaries and whatnot, are completely separated, I would be more than happy to subscribe.
You can't effectively paywall it because not only is it open source, but there are many nearly equivalent competitors all of which are free. Any subscribers would essentially be donors.
There are people like yourself who would be happy to donate, but not nearly enough. Replacing MoCo's current revenue with donors would require donations at the level of Doctors without Borders, American Cancer Society, or the Make-a-Wish Foundation.
Turning into one of the largest charities in America overnight simply isn't realistic. A drastic downsizing to subsist on donor revenue also isn't wise when Mozilla already has to compete with a smaller team. And "Ladybird does it" isn't a real argument until and unless it graduates from cool project to usable and competitive browser.
Oh no, it would be a donation and it's not going to completely replace all the funding of the parent entity of the project mentioned, therefore it's not realistic or worth trying. Right... That's a lot of arguments unrelated to what I wrote.
> That's a lot of arguments unrelated to what I wrote.
What I understand they are saying is that donations wouldn't be nearly enough. Which is related to what you wrote, which is that you would gladly donate to Firefox (not Mozilla, but Firefox).
They compared it to the largest non-profits in America, presumably because if we look at the money spent by Mozilla every year, that's similar. Right now Google pays for Mozilla, and if you wanted to replace that with donations, it would have to become one of the biggest charities in America. Which does not sound plausible.
I think the point is that if it was open source but free, it would require donations. And given the money that Mozilla spends every year, it would mean that the amount of donations they would need to receive would make them one of the biggest charities in America. Which sounds implausible.
What?! Browsers might as well be money printers! Have you heard how much money Google pays Apple to be the default search engine in Safari?
The higher Firefox’s user numbers, the more money Mozilla can make from search engine deals. Conversely, if Mozilla keeps trying to push a bunch of other initiatives while Firefox languishes and bleeds users, Mozilla will make less money.
If you don’t like this form of revenue… well, I don’t know what to tell you, because this is how web browsers make money. And trying other stuff doesn’t seem to be working.
You can and you should. There are people that are happy to pay for email, for search, for videos, for news, for music. I don't see why there wouldn't be people happy to pay for a browser.
The idea that software is free is completely wrong and should be something that an organization like Mozilla should combat. If software is free, there can be no privacy, it's as simple as that.
> I don't see why there wouldn't be people happy to pay for a browser.
I admittedly didn't check the numbers, but a comment in a sibling thread says that if Mozilla was to replace their revenue with donations, they would have to become one of the biggest charities in America.
Is that even realistic? Like would they make that kind of money just from donations?
> The idea that software is free is completely wrong
> If software is free, there can be no privacy, it's as simple as that.
Strongly agreed. Free software, either $0 or through stronger licenses like the GPL, have their economics completely shifted as an unintended side effect. Those new economics tend to favor clandestine funding sources (eg ads or malicious supply chain code).
But sustainable funding honestly isn't Mozilla's strong suite (or tech's in general, for that matter).
Based on comments in here and people willing to pay I wonder why they haven't got the Wikipedia route of getting donations, would that piss off a lot of users? I do think most people would understand a non-profit needs donations.
I've daily driven Thunderbird for over a decade. You have very few options for having a single program manage multiple email accounts outside of Outlook and Thunderbird anymore. Maybe Apple Mail on Mac (and whatever Microsoft is preloading on Windows these days), but that's it.
>Firefox - the one thing they do not want to work on
I'm sorry but this is complete nonsense. Just this year they pushed 12 major releases, with thousands of patches, including WebGPU efficiency improvements, updated PDF engine, numerous security fixes, amounting to millions of lines of new code. They maintain a codebase that rivals that of Chrome and of the Linux Kernel and push the equivalent of Rust's entire codebase on a monthly basis.
> They maintain a codebase that rivals that of Chrome and of the Linux Kernel and push the equivalent of Rust's entire codebase on a monthly basis.
Is that comparison supposed to make their management of the code base seem better or worse? Chrome, Linux and Rust are arguably colossi in their niches (Rust having the weakest claim). Firefox's niche is Chrome's and it doesn't do that well. It used to be that at least Firefox had it's own little area with more interesting extensions but obviously that was too hard for them to handle - yes I'm still grumpy about ChatZilla.
You might be interested to know that there are still some legacy extensions that work on today's Firefox. Specifically, when Firefox breaks VimFX, I'm done with it. But while it works, I'm sticking with Firefox. It's like having the power of Qutebrowser but with the extensions and performance of Firefox.
Well I replied to a comment suggesting they weren't working on Firefox, by noting how much work is being done on Firefox. But you seem like you want to change the subject to a different one, which is the extent to which you can gauge "success" relative to competitors, or infer management efficiency, which is fine but orthogonal to my point.
The job was always very easy, fire all of the pure managers and sock the google money into an endowment before it runs out. Then focus on privacy as you mentioned.
They’ve taken in several billion dollars by now. Let that sink in. They're supposedly a non-profit, so this plan is the well-trodden playbook.
But of course no Manager instance could imagine such a thing. Cue Upton Sinclair quote.
If they were on a sustainable trajectory they wouldn't be selling their soul for advertising money and other ill-advised revenue projects that contradict their stated mission.
Okay, but now you're changing the subject. The claim was that they don't have an endowment or that they're not investing it. But they are.
The truth is the vast majority of organizations with an endowment are not able to rely on it in perpetuity, I think there's a small subset of organizations that basically amounts to a bunch of elite universities. So it's not the intended or functional or actual purpose of any endowment to be permanent firewall against any conceivable financial hazard for all eternity. Having at one point worked for a non-profit myself that had an endowment, generally, what you do is you calculate how long an organization's operations could be funded by that endowment, and is one of a portfolio of metrics for gauging the financial health of a non-profit. It's more properly understood as a firewall to create some breathing space in the face of financial uncertainty. Again, reaching back to my limited stint at a non-profit, they withdrew a little bit from their endowment during the 2008-2009 financial crisis, as well as during covid. It's rarely the case that an endowment can fund an organization in perpetuity.
And maybe I'm crazy but if someone falsely accuses Mozilla of not maintaining an endowment, it seems relevant to point out that they do actually have one.
No—they did not cut costs enough to build a sufficient endowment. Again, income of several billion dollars.
That is plenty for an endowment to build a browser+ in perpetuity... like an order of magnitude in excess. Ladybird/servo are successfully building on perhaps 1% of that?
I'm sure they have some money in the bank and it gets interest, but obviously not enough or handled well enough to avoid the temptation to start an advertising project due to their unsustainable spending rate.
You keep trying to make it sound like they "did everything they could." No, they did not by a long shot.
They could be on a sustainable trajectory and still sell their soul purely out of greed. I'm not suggesting that Mozilla is actually doing that, I just wanted to point out the possibility.
Yep. Mozilla is effectively just a tax dodge for Google anymore.
Heck, this AI first announcement was probably strongly influenced behind the scenes by Google to create an appearance of competition similar to Microsoft's and Apple's relationship in the 1990s.
Also, ironically, I just switched full time to Brave only yesterday.
The "other things" is what most people seem to have problem with.
Mozilla burns a batshit amount of money on feel good fancies.
If it were focused on its core mission -- building great software in key areas -- it would see it can't afford this, because that's the same money that if saved would make them financially independent of Google.
> In 2018, Baker received $2,458,350 in compensation from Mozilla.
> In 2020, after returning to the position of CEO, Baker's salary was more than $3 million.
> In 2021, her salary rose again to more than $5.5 million,
> and again to over $6.9 million in 2022.
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker#Mozilla_Foundation_and_Mozilla_Corporation
Mozilla took in the money from the distant past all the way into the present. They have leaned into privacy the whole time, while not being perfect.
At some point they ease off the google money or it goes away itself. And they move forward on privacy.
Google was less demanding in the past as well; they continue to give Apple billions each year.
There are a number of privacy-oriented business models, as listed here: https://aol.codeberg.page/eci/status.html - while not as lucrative as some, combined with an endowment its a good living that many companies would envy.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
I agree with the person you're responding to. Decades of funding and they have zero savings to show for it.
Though it's questionable as to how much big players like Google would have continued to fund Mozilla if they had seen Mozilla making the financial moves that would have made it an independent and self-sufficient entity.
> Though it's questionable as to how much big players like Google would have continued to fund Mozilla if they had seen Mozilla making the financial moves that would have made it an independent and self-sufficient entity.
Look at how much money Google gave to Apple (Safari) vs Mozilla (FireFox) per year.
The CEO has unarguable been doing a poor job. Losing market share has lost them more potential revenue than any of their pet projects raised.
Well, they have over a billion in the bank. Which is both a ton of money, but also goes away quickly when you're a large company paying lots of money to salaries.
So if you have a billion in the bank, you can collect 5% return and never touch the money. So you get $50m a year to pay enough engineers to make a browser.
That's plenty of money if they recognize they need a super lean company with 0 bloat and a few highly paid experts who focus on correctness and not bullshit features.
Exactly! With such an endowment they should be able to develop a browser and maybe some other stuff with a small team that’s focused on tech and not social justice.
There are about 800 unique weekly committers to the Chromium project, so that's a start at gauging the number for that project. A little harder to find that same figure for Firefox, but Wikipedia says Mozilla Corp had about 750 employees as of 2020.
Anyway, if you have $50M, you can afford 500 people at $100k, or 250 people at $200k. So you simply declare, this is how many people it takes to make a browser, and set your goals and timetables accordingly. I feel like the goals and direction might be more important than the number of bodies you throw at it, but maybe that's naïve. But when the product is mature like Firefox (or Chrome for that matter) you do have some flexibility on the headcount.
You're significantly underestimating fully-loaded cost per person + other expenses. An engineer making a $200k salary is going to cost the company something like $300k, and there are some additional fixed overheads. And $200k is quite a bit less than your competitors are paying.
So you're looking at something more like 150 employees total of which <100 are going to be pure engineers, and that's stretching your budget and operations pretty aggressively while also fighting an uphill battle for recruiting skilled and experienced engineers. (And browser development definitely needs a core of experienced engineers with a relatively niche set of skills!)
Working at Mozilla should be more than money. $200k/year is more than enough to be happy in most of the world. You don't need to compete on rock stars that must live in San Francisco, and focus on people that are happy with a high paying job and have enough idealism to accept "only" $200k/year.
None of those figures are what the engineer makes, they're costs. And they're illustrative, not literal. You won't pay everyone at the same rate either for example, and not all will be engineers either, and I totally left both those facts out of it. Oh no! And also omitted the fact that a company whose vision and ideals people agree with can hire said people for less money, which again brings us back around to the point that the vision might be more important.
Maybe they should quit their presence in the Bay Area. The rent is insanely high. Not just of an office, also the workers. Besides, freedom of speech, liberty, DEI are each under pressure in USA. Mozilla is very much welcome here in Europe :-)
Another comment observed your cost estimates were low.
> But when the product is mature like Firefox (or Chrome for that matter) you do have some flexibility on the headcount.
Google could reduce Chrome development to maintenance and remain dominant for years. It would be much like Internet Explorer 6. Firefox falling too far behind in performance or compatibility would be fatal.
> Ladybird had fewer devs, so what were these devs at Vivaldi doing?
The Ladybird developers have not produced a browser comparable to Firefox or Vivaldi. Vivaldi have not produced a browser engine comparable to Ladybird of course.
> I don't think your argument has a lot of merit. 28 is not a magic number.
28 is a magic number was not a reasonable interpretation of my comment.
I just want to note that this is what is sometimes called carouseling. Which is, instead of acknowledging the original accusation was not correct, which is what should be happening, this comment just proceeds right on to the next accusation.
What is happening, psychologically speaking, that is causing a mass of people to spew one confidently wrong accusation after another? They don't have an endowment (they do!). Well they're not investing it! (they are). Well they're not working on the browser! (they shipped 12 major releases with thousands of patches per release with everything from new tab grouping and stacking to improved gpu performance to security fixes)
There's nothing to acknowledge. You're asking everyone to accept the presumption embedded in the statement that a billion dollars "goes away quickly when you're a large company paying lots of money to salaries", namely that Mozilla should be a large company and should rely on a steady stream of outside money instead of seeking sustainable financial independence. But Mozilla's lack of focus and excessive spending on side projects is a major part of the complaints against Mozilla, and you aren't even trying to make a reasonable case that Mozilla needs to be spending money like that.
That isn't really the best way to think about not-for-profit schemes like Mozilla. Every organisation eventually becomes corrupted (as in fact we see with Mozilla), so creating an eternal pot of money for something is not strategically sensible.
If good people are in charge, they'll just spend everything and rely on ongoing donations. If nobody thinks it is worth donating too then it is time to close up shop. Keep a bit of a buffer for the practical issue of bad years, sure, but the idea shouldn't be to set up an endowment.
On the Matrix side we would love for Mozilla (or MZLA) to become a paid Matrix hosting provider. Element has ended up focusing on digitally-sovereign govtech (https://element.io/en/sectors) in order to prevail, and it's left a hole in the market.
You can trust your doctor much more about your knee and much less about their billing. Trust isn't binary and isn't per person/organization/object, but varies by person and (activity?).
And anything will be trusted more or less by different people. Is there evidence of who trusts Mozilla with what, and how much? The the fact that you don't trust them or that some on HN don't trust them isn't evidence.
Also, each of us is both commentator and agent. When we say 'I trust X' or 'I don't trust X', we both communicate our thoughts and change others' thoughts.
That's a great question, honestly, and I like your framing of trust.
I do not trust Mozilla to keep a product alive. I was frustrated by Firefox OS and more recently Pocket, but everything they've tried or acquired aside from the browser itself (and Thunderbird I guess?) has failed and been shut down. That has burned a lot of people along the way.
For this reason I can't see myself becoming a user of any future Mozilla projects.
That makes much more sense. I wonder what the non-HN public thinks - most of those products, like Firefox OS, were essentially unknown outside HN-like populations. Pocket was better known.
But yes, that is part of trust and I'd like to see them address it.
Firefox is still heavily used by Linux OSes as the default browser. But I think that's mostly momentum at this point. If more people knew about Mozilla's organizational challenges, then I think Firefox would get ditched.
Do they like the browser, or do they like the fact that it's not owned by Google?
When I use Firefox, either it's because I don't have a choice (my distro doesn't ship Chromium in a way I like, i.e. not Flatpak) or because I make an effort to "support" Firefox. But once in a while, I need to use Chrom(ium) because the website doesn't work on Firefox. Not that it is necessarily Firefox' fault, but the fact remains that if Chrome was an independent non-profit, I would most likely use Chrome and not Firefox.
I think a tangential interesting question is: how many monthly active users does Firefox have, that choose to use Firefox? Not people who "click the internet icon", etc.
Like you, I suspect the brand recognition and loyalty is much, much lower than many people in this thread believe it to be. Not talking about among the highly-technical HN audience; just at large.
That's a fair question. It's of course my opinion, not hard fact, but here goes:
- They have for years been trying to add stuff to Firefox that nobody wants, and were privacy violations. The "marketing studies" come to mind.
- They have for decades been wasting their time and money on everything BUT Firefox, and failing at literally all of it. You can't help but notice the stellar incompetence of Mozilla leadership.
- They have for a long time been raking in hundreds of millions of dollars a year from Google, pissing it away on useless stuff, but mostly on enriching the management layer. How can somebody like Mitchell Baker be making millions of dollars a year while simultaneously seeing Firefox market share drop to damn near zero? This is a thoroughly corrupt organization.
> They have for decades been wasting their time and money on everything BUT Firefox
They invest the vast majority of their resources in Firefox. And they have had some incredible successes: Rust, Let's Encrypt ...
> How can somebody like Mitchell Baker be making millions of dollars a year while simultaneously seeing Firefox market share drop to damn near zero?
Maybe there was no realistic way to do better. Maybe thanks to Baker, Mozilla still exists.
With Firefox market share plummeting, and little prospect for competing with Google on a free commodity product, Mozilla needed and needs to find other products and not just watch the ship go down.
What's your solution? Do you really think they could make Firefox so good that the non-technical public would go through the effort of dropping Chrome, despite Google's enormous marketing advantage?
> They invest the vast majority of their resources in Firefox.
Says who? I have never seen figures that show this. It also doesn't excuse the gigantic amounts of money wasted on irrelevant things, or executive salaries.
> And they have had some incredible successes: Rust, Let's Encrypt ...
That's pretty charitable. LE was a wider industry initiative, and while Rust was incubated in Mozilla AFAIK, they also let it slip through their fingers.
> Maybe there was no realistic way to do better. Maybe thanks to Baker, Mozilla still exists.
How on earth are you defending her behavior? It was utterly shameless and indefensible. Do you work for Mozilla?
> Mozilla needed and needs to find other products
No, it doesn't. It needs to bank its giant wad of cash and learn to live off the interest plus whatever it can get in donations. Mozilla does not need to be a for-profit company, it needs to be a non-profit making a browser. That was always supposed to be the mission, from day one.
> Do you really think they could make Firefox so good that the non-technical public would go through the effort of dropping Chrome
They did when IE was shoved down people's throats, and Firefox was the better browser. They did when Chrome came around and started taking over. Most people even now get pushed to Edge or Safari, yet still end up using Chrome. People switching browsers is a thing.
Any other belief or possibility is "utterly shameless and indefensible", and therefore of suspect motivation. Doubt is difficult, but certainty is ridiculous (said someone).
A privacy play would be more successful from Mozilla if I were paying them for it. The incentives would be aligned. I cannot pay google for privacy, because they are incentivized against that.
Paying a company for something doesn't mean that the company isn't going to also sell every scrap of your data they can get their hands on. If the company is unethical you are always going to be the product. Mozilla is either going to be an ethical company or it isn't and how much money you give them won't make any difference. Mozilla has not always been an ethical company, but I don't think it's too late for them to turn that around, even if it will take time for trust to be rebuilt. I still want them to be the hero we need them to be.
Trust is relative and it is subjective meaning that I trust Mozilla more than I trust google but I also trust them in general, enough at least that they support most of my internet browsing. Unless you mean something else ?
I'd love to be able to modify JS at runtime on random websites. Too often there's a bug, or a "feature" that prevents me from using a service, that I could fix by removing an event or something in the JS code.
Firemail should be the name of a free and privacy oriented email client wholly owned by Mozilla with a web and mobile app. I would sign up instantly and gradually migrate from gmail, while being assured for its sustainability.
I've been perfectly willing to spend an hour making countless changes using about:config to beat Firefox (or its forks) into submission on every install, but that only works while they continue to give us the ability.
Adding my 2 cents worth to this: why is there not a Mozilla family internet suite of privacy browser, VPN, relay, tracker blocker, etc for one price? I already pay for family plans for other services, so this is a no brainer if it exists.
Right now, all of Mozilla's products are not even available in a standardised form in key countries. For example, I pay for Mozilla relay and VPN, and these are not available in the same countries!
Mind you, I'm lucky to have actual access to several countries, and so I can work around this. But really, why can't this team just put everything in one place for me?
Besides relay and Mozilla VPN, I am also paying for Bit warden password manager.
I'm also willing to pay for a privacy-first email(though I haven't done so yet), and please have a family plan that bundles all of this together!
If Norton can have an Internet Suite, why can't Mozilla?
Don't you have this already? Chrome and Firefox both have these. Devices have solid password manager integration, I use mine across 3 OSes and who knows how many devices.
I would love if there was some magic way I could share my passwords between my desktop and phone Firefox installs without a damn login or account, because I don't want a damn account.
Super well stated and interesting point regarding (general) privacy.
I miss the days where Mozilla (Firefox) was known to be the "fastest browser." It worked and such an easy transition for users (including myself) who were tired of the bloated browser experience.
> And anything done to make that profit will annoy the community.
I don't keep close track of this, but as far as I remember they haven't tried donations that go only to Firefox/Thunderbird/etc of the person's choice, instead of Mozilla as a whole. That's what people always claim they want in these threads. I doubt donations would be enough, but I think doing it like that would at least be a step in a direction people like instead of are annoyed by, as long as they don't go nagging like Wikipedia.
Thunderbird is entirely funded by donations for some years now and is more than enough. In 2024, Thunderbird received $10.3M (19% increase over the previous year) in donations which was used to employ 43 people.
Merge Mozilla (including Firefox Relay, Mozilla VPN, etc ) with FastMail or Proton, price it reasonably and I’d be on board. If it worked well I’d recommend it to anyone I could.
I understand email isn’t easy but it difficult to imagine why Mozilla didn’t seize the opportunity.
> Instead, if I were CEO, I'd go the opposite way: I'd focus on privacy.
Where it comes to AI in that regard, I would also focus on direct human connection. Where AI encapsulates people in bubbles of tech isolation and social indirection.
I wouldn’t mind privacy-focused AI tools, either (as long as they don’t cram it in our faces). On its AI search assist, DDG has a button to open up a private session with GPT, which I use on occasion.
Privacy, identity, and more importantly, anonymity are one of those things I keep thinking about. A few months back I had this idea of comparing the need to that of credit reporting agencies. You have the big 3 - Equifax, Experian, TransUnion. They provide credit information to companies that want it. You request the info, they provide it. There's a fee for retrieving it. I think our personal identities should be treated similarly. We sign up for various online services and provide some PII, but not much. Why should the website be able to store that information? Maybe they shouldn't be able to. Instead, lets permit these identity brokers to control our private information. Name, address, email, etc. Then whenever a companies needs that info, for whatever reason, they query the identity broker, get select info they need and be done. Token based access could permit the site to certain data, for certain periods of time. You can review the tokens at a later date and make sure only the ones you care about get the info. Large companies that already participate in this space (Google, Microsoft, etc.) can separate out this business function and have it be isolated from their core products. I was thinking it'd require an act of congress to get implemented, and that may be possible. But instead of having that as a hard requirement, maybe just a branding/badge/logo on services. Say your product respects your privacy and uses data brokers for your privacy.
Going a step further, how do we encourage use? Aside from personal privacy, what if social media sites allowed us to use our identities to validate comments or attachments? Similar to the idea of a token, we upload a photo of our cat. We permit FB access to that cat pic, generate the token, say it's good until we revoke it. We revoke it, and now that picture will fail to load. We can also restrict access to our cat picture. By requesting access to the cat pic, another user provides their identity as well. If their identity is allowed to view it, then it can render. Similar to comments. It's just a string, but we can invalidate a token and make access to it no longer possible.
What about digital hoarding? Can't we screenshot everything or scrape the website and store it for later? Yes. But that's no longer a trusted source. Everything can be faked, especially as AI tools advance. Instead, by using the identity broker, you can verify if a statement was actually said. This will be a mindshift. Similar to how wikipedia isn't a credible source in a term paper, a screenshot is not proof of anything.
Identity brokers can also facilitate anonymous streams. Similar to a crypto wallet, separate personas can be generated by an identity. An anonymous comment can be produced and associated with that randomized persona. The identity broker can store the private key for the persona, possibly encrypted by the identity in some manner, or it can be stored elsewhere, free for the identity to resume using should they want to.
i work for a for-profit owned by a non-profit. This is a weird take. You can shape a product, sure you need to bring in a profit, but there are options of working with your owner (the non-profit) that you just don't have in a publicly traded company.
I am sure people would queue up for the job, fully aware of what it entails.
His point (which I agree with - softly) is that Mozilla could approach this from a more nuanced perspective that others cannot, like not anti-AI but anti "Big AI". Facilitate what people are already doing (and outside of the HN bubble everyone is using AI all the time, even if it's just what we think is "dumb" stuff) throught the FF lens. Like a local LLM that runs entirely in an extension or similar. THere's no shortage of hard, valuable things that big tech won't do because of $$$.
From the article: "AI should always be a choice — something people can easily turn off" and "Firefox will remain our anchor. It will evolve into a modern AI browser". I highly doubt you will be able to turn of the transformer tech features in an AI browser imo. And they won't make a separate browser for this.
This really feels like the beginning of the end for Mozilla, sadly.
Are there any true alternatives (not dependent on financing or any engines from third parties) to Google, if you wish to use the web in 2025?
What even is an "AI browser"? It's a browser, it's mainly supposed to render web pages / web apps. There is no obvious reason why it would need any AI features.
A browser with current definition obviously doesn't "need" AI. And we also know all too well how it's going to turn out - they will both use the AI to push ads onto us and also collect and sell our personal data.
However, a strong locally-executed AI would have potential to vastly improve our experience of web! So much work is done in browsers could be enhanced or automated with custom agents. You'd no longer need any browser extensions (which are privacy nightmare when the ownership secretly changes hands). Your agents could browse local shops for personalized gifts or discounts, you could set up very complex watches on classified ads. You could work around any lacking features of any website or a combination of several websites, to get exactly what you seek and to filter out anything that is noise to you. You would be able to seamlessly communicate with the Polish internet subculture, or with Gen Alpha, all without feeling the physical pain. With an AGI-level AI maybe even the Reddit could be made usable again.
Of course this is all assuming that the web doesn't adapt to become even more closed and hostile.
These are all the same sort of vaporware promises that come straight from every AI booster. These features will never exist and you should feel bad for pretending they might.
man not a single one of those examples sounds like something I'd need, or even need an AI agent to do.
I keep seeing the ads for AI browsers and the only thing I can think about is the complete and utter lack of a use case, and your post only solidifies that further.
not that I'm disagreeing with you per se, I'm sure some people have a workflow they can't automate easily and they need a more complicated and expensive puppateer.js to do it.
I just dont know what the heck I'd use it for.
I find it very hard to believe that either every site you interact with works exactly as you want it to work, or that you have the time/capacity to adjust them all with custom extensions. I get that there are downsides but you don't see any upsides?
I have extensions for the sites that need them and everything else is fine? occasionally I guess there'll be something in another language I want translated but I just copy paste the text into google translate or similar.
what sites out there are so unusable you'd need an LLM to fix them for use?
Right now all the sites I frequent are good enough, otherwise I'd drop them. I don't interact with Discord, Bluesky, X, Instagram at all, and I feel like I'm missing out on a lot of high quality interpersonal communication because I have low tolerance for their UX and their lack of respect for users.
Again, what can an LLM possibly do to help? Summarize the page I'm already reading? I don't want a summary, that's dumb. People who think their time is so precious they have to optimize a five minute read into a ten cent API call and one minute read of possibly wrong output are just silly. You aren't "freeing up time", you are selling your reality.
Buy stuff for me? Why? Buying shit online is so easy most people do it on the toilet. I've bought things on the internet while blackout drunk. I also have a particular view of "Value" that no LLM will ever replicate, and not only do I have no interest in giving someone else access to my checkbook, I certainly do not want to give it to a third party who could make money off that relationship.
How would I no longer need browser extensions? You're saying the LLM would reliably block ads and that functionality will be managed by the single human being who has reliably done that for decades like uBlock origin? How will LLMs replace my gesture based navigation that all these hyper-productivity focused fools don't even seem to know exists? It certainly won't replace my corporate required password manager.
>You would be able to seamlessly communicate with the Polish internet subculture, or with Gen Alpha, all without feeling the physical pain
Come on, get over yourself.
> With an AGI-level AI
So Mozilla, who isn't even allowed to spend $6 million on a CEO is somehow magically going to invent super AI that runs locally? Get a grip.
I also hate concept of summaries, as well as related concept of AI text inflation.
I'm also against any third party being involved here. I'm pointing out the potential of AI in the browser, but for me it has to be locally run or it is a no go.
My point is that browser plays a central role in our digital interactions. Extensions help with smoothing out the experience. LLMs could write those extensions, or serve as an agent to further make the online interactions more pleasant. I could see myself using it to either optimize my existing experience, or to vastly broaden the communication surface in directions that currently hold too much friction.
The rest was a joke, sorry if it made your day worse.
Live captions? Didn’t ask for that, wouldn’t use it.
Dubbing? Ditto.
Summary? Wouldn’t trust an AI for that, plus it’s just more tik-tokification. No fucking thanks. I don’t need to experience life as short blips of everything.
Rewrite text better? Might as well kill myself once I’m ready to let a predictive text bot write shit in my place.
Yes, Translate is the only one I want - and we already have that!
The worst is anything that tries to suggest stuff in text fields or puts buttons etc. to try and get you to "rewrite with AI" or any nonsense like that - makes me just want to burn anything like that to the ground.
But that’s exactly my point - addons already solve these problems without baking them in natively. Adding AI just creates bloatware/privacy/security/maintenance problems that are already solved by users being able to customise the browser for their own needs.
I do get that and I'm like 60% with you, but I'm just saying that it is easy to get a bit in a bubble and Mozilla needs to cater to the average person. And let's be honest, we aren't the average user.
Personally I'm fine as long as it continues to be easy to disable and remove. Yeah, I'd rather it be opt-in instead of opt-out but it's not a big price to pay to avoid giving Chrome more power over the internet. At the end of the day these issues are pretty small fish in comparison.
I mean, Chrome/Google have already won the browser wars and it isn't even close. 'Average' persons don't use Firefox, period - they use Chrome. I dunno when you last looked at browser market share, but Firefox is already extremely niche. Trying to cater to the 'average user' when your entire userbase consists of power users is asinine but Mozilla clearly doesn't understand this. They think it's still 2008 or something.
I've successfully migrated my girlfriend, parents, and several friends. Half those friends don't even know how to program. So yes, normal people can use Firefox and they really don't notice the difference.
> Chrome/Google have already won the browser wars
It isn't over till its over. It's trivial to make a stand in this fight. It is beyond me why a large portion of HN users aren't using FF or one of its derivatives. Of all people they should be more likely to understand what's at stake here...
Yes I use FF. You’ve completely misunderstood my point.
Your comment about how YOU had to get the people close to you to use FF was exactly my point. Techies are the only people who use FF now without it being foisted onto them by their techie friends.
You personally wouldn't use live captions and dubbing, so there's no point building it for the millions of people who need it as an accessibility feature?
Couldn’t care less about any of that. English is the world’s dominant language and will remain so for the foreseeable future. There’s nothing wrong with that. And subtitles exist already or can be generated by addons. Most people don’t use them. So, once again, maybe don’t inconvenience the vast majority of users for some small subset of the population.
> English is the world’s dominant language and will remain so for the foreseeable future.
Based on the fact that you said this I'm going to assume you can't read/write Mandarin, apologies if that's incorrect because that leads to my second assumption which is that you're unaware of the astonishingly vast amount of content and conversation related to open source and AI/ML you're missing out on as a result of not being able to read/write Mandarin.
What does what you wrote have to do with what I wrote, or the comment I was replying to? Literally every reasonably educated Chinese person speaks English as a 2nd language.
I'm missing out on all sorts of shit I'd find interesting by virtue of not being a prodigious polyglot. That fact has nothing to do with English being the global language for literally everything in every domain, nor with the fact that in-browser language translation doesn't require baked-in AI.
I mean, sure. I don’t generally give a shit about other people. That’s also not really relevant here. There will always be a dominant language. Currently, it happens to be English and it will remain English into the near future (250+ years). If you attend even a shitty school in a third world country today you are taught English as a second language. Look at the Philippines or sub-Saharan African countries. Everybody speaks English + their native language.
Crying about English’s global penetration is super weird while also being pointless, since it’s a fait accompli at this point.
I get very annoyed by generative AI, but to be fair I could imagine an AI-powered "Ctrl+F" which searches text by looser meaning-based matches, rather than strict character matches; for example Ctrl+AI+F "number of victims" in a news article, or Ctrl+AI+F "at least 900 W" when sorting through a list of microwave ovens on Walmart.
Or searching for text in images with OCR. Or searching my own browsing history for that article about that thing.
>"at least 900 W" when sorting through a list of microwave ovens on Walmart.
Newegg has that as a built in filter.
Why do you people keep insisting I "need" an LLM to do things that are standard features?
I find shopping online for clothes to suck, but there's nothing an LLM can do to fix that because it's not a magic machine and I cannot try on clothes at home. So instead, I just sucked it up and went to Old Navy.
Like, these things are still lying to my face every single day. I only use them when there's no alternative, like quickly porting code from python to Java for an emergency project. Was the code correctly ported? Nope, it silently dropped things of course, but "it doesn't need to be perfect" was the spec.
>Or searching for text in images with OCR.
That thing that was a mainline feature of Microsoft OneNote in 2007 and worked just fine and I STILL never used? I thought it was the neatest feature but even my friend who runs everything out of OneNote doesn't use it much. Back in middle school we had a very similar Digital Notebook application that predates OneNote with a similar feature set, including the teachers being able to distribute Master copies of notes for their students, and I also did not use OCR there.
The ONE actual good use case of LLMs that anyone has offered me did not come from techbros who think "Tesla has good software" is not only an accurate statement but an important point for a car, it came from my mom. Turns out, the text generation machine is pretty good at generating text in French to make tests! Her moronic (really rich of course, one of the richest in the state) school district refused to buy her any materials at all for her French classes, so she's been using ChatGPT. It does a great job, because that's what these machines are actually built for, and she only has to fix up the output occasionally, but that task is ACTUALLY easy to verify, unlike most of the things people use these LLMs for.
She STILL wouldn't pay $20 monthly for it. That shouldn't be surprising, because "Test generator" for a high school class is a one time payment of $300 historically, and came with your textbook purchase. If she wasn't planning on retiring she would probably just do it the long way. A course like that is a durable good.
Not at all. If you want or need a feature it's not some "my browser has to support it or my OS does" dichotomy.
As a couple parents up stated, there's no technical reason a browser has to have a transformer embedded into it. There might be a business reason like "we made a dumb choice and don't have the manpower to fix it", but I doubt this is something they will accept, at least with a mission statement like they have.
I much prefer every individual piece of software and website I interact with implement their own proprietary AI features that compete for my attention and interfer with each other.
Cool, and some DEs make it possible to start implementing this for most applications today. But Mozilla is not KDE or Gnome, so the most they can do is to make this on their software, and make it easy to copy for the entire system.
> Sounds like a web site, not a browser feature.
Sounds like a bit of lack of imagination on your part. Do you think the same for text search?
Exactly. Would be nicer if they did their own features somewhat right (including interfaces for configuration and disabling approachable for non-engineers) before they scope-creep the entire desktop.
No, even when they switched to machine learning their translations still made mistakes that would have made you look goofy. And even today their models still make mistakes that are just weird.
It is especially baffling because Google has much better data sets and much more compute than their competitors.
What tech CEO says is "a text box with magic" Google translate fulfills that and there are ways to integrate with LLM if technology marketing is important.
Unless it is nVidia's CEO, who wants to sell specific hardware, they mostly care about the buzz of the term, not a specific technology, though.
It has everything to do with it. Mozilla explicitly talked about AI in the context of their relatively new translation feature a year or two back. Live captions also uses "AI". The term AI includes machine learning in marketing speech.
If that was the case that means Firefox is already an AI browser. But he wouldn’t be talking about AI browsers if he planned on maintaining the current features and approach, would he?
They just existed before the GenAI craze and no one cared because AI wasn't a buzzword at the time. Google Translate absolutely was based on ML before OpenAI made it a big deal to have things "based on AI".
But just putting stuff in your browser that hooks into third-party services that use ML isn't enough anymore. It has to be front and center otherwise, you're losing the interest of... well, someone. I'm not sure who at this point. I don't care, personally.
Many of these things were "AI" but the marketing hype hadn't gotten there yet. E.g. the local translation in FF is a transformer model, as was Google translate in the cloud since 2018 (and still "AI" looong before that, just not transformer based).
Safari does most of this by leveraging system-level AI features, some of which are entirely local (and in turn, can be and do get used elsewhere throughout the system and native apps). This model makes a lot more sense to me than building the browser around an LLM.
Firefox uses local models for translation, summarisation and possibly other stuff. As it is not restricted on one platform, I guess that it has to use its own tools, while apple (or macos/ios focused software in general) can use system level APIs. But the logic I guess is the same.
It is really incredibly nice to be able to highlight a passage, right click on it, and select "Summarize" or "Explain this." That's all FireFox does at the moment. It's an option on the right-click menu. You can ignore it. If nobody told you the evil AI thingy was there, you would probably never notice it.
At the risk of becoming the infamous iPod and Dropbox posters, I really don't think so. My browser having an LLM directly integrated adds nothing for my use cases that couldn't be accomplished with a web service or dedicated tool/app. For me, an integrated LLM running concurrently with my browser just represents a whole lot of compute and/or network calls with little added value and I don't think that this is unusual.
Better yet, if an LLM does add value to the use cases why is it that I have one "integrated" LLM when editing a document in the webpage, another "integrated" LLM in the browser, and then an "integrated" LLM in the OS. If there is value to be had I want it to integrate with the different things on the system as they exist just like I do, not be shoehorned into whatever company abc decided to bundle with just their product(s) too.
Yep. I mention this in my other reply, but having the LLM be system-level (and preferably, user replaceable) and leveraged as needed by applications (and thus, not redundant) is clearly the best model. Apple is currently the closest to this, offering system level third party LLM integrations, but a Linux distribution would be the best positioned to achieve that goal to its fullest extent.
Having something that read everything I read and could talk with me about it, help remember things and synthesize? That’s awesome. Follow links and check references.
This use case feels better served by a dedicated utility with a specialized UI rather than shoehorned into a browser. It'd fit the macOS services model (which adds items to context and application menus, e.g. "Research this…" when right-clicking a link or text selection) and could optionally also be summoned by the system app launcher (like Spotlight).
I recently learned of Flow, and I don't understand why people group it together with Ladybird and Servo, which are both developing the browser engine from scratch mostly, while Flow seems to be based on Chromium. Is Flow doing anything different compared to the numerous other Chromium-based browsers? Genuinely curious.
Are you talking about https://flow-browser.com ? I wasn't aware of this project before, but it appears to a new chromium based browser.
The Flow people are talking about when they talk about Ladybird and Servo is https://www.ekioh.com/flow-browser/ which does have it's own engine. It has a similar level of standards compliance to Servo and Ladybird, although it's not open source which puts it in a somewhat different category.
LibreWolf ftw, I switched to it, installed my extensions and am not looking back. Would be nice to have a mobile Firefox(LibreWolf) with all extensions, I should go look around F Droid again.
in ff if you're reading this go to about:config and type privacy - why these aren't immediately obvious in the Settings is beyond me
> This really feels like the beginning of the end for Mozilla, sadly.
The moment Mozilla failed to stop being dependent on Google's money whilst being true to their own mission in being a 'privacy first browser' it already was the end and the damage in trust was done.
In 2007, the CEO at the time said they could live without Google's money - Now, their entire survival was tied to Google funding them [0] and got rewarded for failure whilst laying off hundreds of engineers working on Firefox.
Other than the change in leadership after 17 years of mis-direction, the financial situation has still not changed.
Do you still trust them now?
> Are there any true alternatives (not dependent on financing or any engines from third parties) to Google, if you wish to use the web in 2025?
After thinking about it, the only viable browser that is not funded by Google (Firefox 75%, Safari (>20%) and Chrome) is Ladybird. [1]
> The moment Mozilla failed to stop being dependent on Google's money whilst being true to their own mission in being a 'privacy first browser' it already was the end and the damage in trust was done.
I understand your position but what is the alternative funding source that could keep a company making a free browser running?
Apple funds Safari's development but it's basically a side project for them, Google funds Chrome's development as side project to their ad business, Edge is the same for Microsoft.
Obviously we don't want Firefox to become ad-supported so that leaves either donations which to be honest does not work (see all the OS projects that ask for donations when you install NPM packages for reference) or they need to start charging money (we know how well that worked out for Netscape) or finally find another corporate sponsor willing to shove billions of dollars each year into a product that will not improve their bottom line.
I am all for alternatives and I agree with you that something needs to change but the real question is how?
Maybe I am presumptuous in this assumption but I am pretty sure that if Mozilla had another palatable solution on the table, they would have probably implemented it by now.
> After thinking about it, the only viable browser that is not funded by Google (Firefox 75%, Safari (>20%) and Chrome) is Ladybird.
Ladybird is sponsored by many big companies as well. What makes you think that somehow their fate will be any different than Firefox? Do you believe that Shopify for example is more altruistic than Google and therefore should be trusted more?
I personally don't.
In my opinion the problem is the expectation that things should be free always on the internet and we can thank Google and Facebook for that. Most people these days who are not in the tech world simply have no idea how many hours and how much money it takes to create something, having it used by people and iterating on it day in day out until it is in a good shape and can be used by the general public.
Therefore besides a small cohort of users in tech (like Kagi's customers for example who understand that a good search engine is not free), the vast majority of people will not accept to have to pay for a browser. Which brings us back to the question I asked above.
Who will fund this supposedly free for all browser that does not track you, that does not show you any ads, that does not incorporate AI features, that does not try to up-sell you or scam you? From my vantage point it's not like there are 100s of solutions to get out of this conundrum.
I believe you stated the problem in a way that its unsolvable. Charge your customers money, so you can work for them. I'm not nearly as certain as you are that Netscape failed because it was charging money. Netscape just stopped updating for multiple years at the height of the browser wars.
For Firefox in particular, I would 100% be willing to pay for it. Individuals like me who will pay are rare, but companies that will pay aren't. I think the answer for modern Mozilla is a Red Hat style model. Charge a reasonable amount of money. Accept that someone is going to immediately create a downstream fork. Don't fight that fork, just ignore it. Let the fork figure out its own future around the online services a modern browser wants to provide.
Then, lean hard into the enterprise world. Figure out what enterprise customers want. The answer to that is always for things to never, ever change and the ability to tightly control their users. That isn't fun code to write, but its profitable and doesn't run counter to Mozilla's mission. That keeps Mozilla stable and financially independent.
Mozilla will maintain lots of influence to push forward their mission, because hopefully their enterprise customer base is big, but also they are the ones actually doing the work to make the downstream fork possible.
> I believe you stated the problem in a way that its unsolvable.
I think you misunderstood me. I asked a question because the answer is far from obvious. If the solution to this problem was obvious, we wouldn't be having the same discussion on HN every 6 months when a new press release from Mozilla comes out.
I am very much interested by what people think the solution should be. Now, you mentioned Enterprise customers which is interesting because usually what I have read on this sort of threads was that Mozilla had made many mistakes (I agree), Mozilla should change their ways by removing this feature or adding this feature but almost everyone conveniently forgets that at the end of the day someone has to pay for all this stuff.
> Charge your customers money, so you can work for them.
Which is what I mentioned in my comment. Start charging people. The problem is how do you convince the general public to use Firefox instead of Chrome or Edge, especially is you need to pay for the software?
If privacy was a selling point, then Meta would have closed shop many years ago.
> I'm not nearly as certain as you are that Netscape failed because it was charging money. Netscape just stopped updating for multiple years at the height of the browser wars.
It doesnt matter because we will never know. The reality is that people expect to browse the internet for free. Asking them for cash has never been done at this scale.
If Mozilla was to start charging money tomorrow, you would find that many people would object to that and most people would simply move to Chrome because why not?
> Then, lean hard into the enterprise world. Figure out what enterprise customers want. The answer to that is always for things to never, ever change and the ability to tightly control their users. That isn't fun code to write, but its profitable and doesn't run counter to Mozilla's mission. That keeps Mozilla stable and financially independent.
I understand the comparison with Red hat but I am doubtful that this model will work. Red Hat helps companies ship stuff, it makes people more productive, it increases the bottom line. What would a paid version of Firefox do that makes people more productive or makes companies money that they couldn't get from Chrome? I am genuinely asking because again, it's mot very clear to me.
> Mozilla will maintain lots of influence to push forward their mission, because hopefully their enterprise customer base is big, but also they are the ones actually doing the work to make the downstream fork possible.
That is big assumption that has not been proven at this time. I think that making any sort of plans based on hypothetical paid version is highly speculative.
> Apple funds Safari's development but it's basically a side project for them, Google funds Chrome's development as side project to their ad business, Edge is the same for Microsoft.
Edge is a Chromium fork so essentially they don't have that much work in keeping up.
I was going to say a similar thing. I'm still not sure I have seen an example of a browser at the scale of Firefox (hundreds of millions of users, 30 million lines of code) being successfully monetized, basically ever, unless it was entirely subsidized by a trillion dollar company that was turning its users into the product. Or alternatively, succeeding by selling off its users for telemetry or coasting off of Chromium and tying their destiny to Google.
All the "just monetize differently" comments are coming from a place of magical thinking that nobody has actually thought through. Donations are a feel good side hustle, but completely unprecedented for any but Wikipedia to raise money that's even the right order of magnitude. Any attempts at offering monetized services run into delusional and contradictory complaints from people who treat them to "focus on the browser" but also to branch out and monetize. Hank Green has used the term hedonic skepticism for the psychology of seeking to criticize for its entertainment value, which I think is a large part of what this is.
For a more serious answer on funding, I think the most interesting thing in this space is their VC fund. Mozilla has been brilliant in building up and carefully investing their nest egg from nearly two decades of search licensing, and while it's not Ycombinator, they have the beginnings of a VC fund that may be a very interesting kind of Third Way, so to speak, depending on how that goes.
I am glad I am not the only one who is asking the tough questions regarding this problem.
In reality it boils down to replacing 1 income stream provided by Google with one or more new income streams.
That means that Mozilla needs something to sell and quickly.
Or use their VC funds as you said, but we know VC funds need to deploy a lot of capital and then hope that one of their companies makes it big to recoup their investments and eventually make a profit.
I am not sure if betting the entire future of Mozilla on this VC venture would be a wise move to be honest. It's just too unpredictable.
> Hank Green has used the term hedonic skepticism for the psychology of seeking to criticize for its entertainment value, which I think is a large part of what this is.
I'm fascinated by this concept. Us it expanded anywhere?
I agree, it's fascinating and I believe a necessary term. I just recall him using it on his tik tokk. And come to think of it it might have actually been John Green (oops).
But basically his idea was that hedonic skepticism. Was this kind of like reflexive unthinking doubt of the sincerity of any institutional effort to do any form of social good whatsoever. It seems to over correct towards skepticism and is motivated, not by factual veracity but by the kind of entertainment value of being skeptical and jaded about everything. And so the idea that the center for disease control might really sincerely want to stop the spread of measles, if you're a hedonic skeptic, you laugh at how ridiculous and naive. It is to believe that they might have your best interests at heart. Which I think overlooks the simple possibility that sometimes we stand up institutions in response to real societal needs, and that you can have an appropriate and healthy skepticism of politicians and policy makers acting in their own self-interest while also appreciating that there do exist purpose-driven organizations that roll out programs and policies based on a genuine interest in solving problems.
I think Firefox has a sizable minority of users that are aware of its importance and would donate for "a fucking browser".
Tbh I would also donate for a nagging team that publicly pressures various corporate sites into continuing to support firefox (like my cell phone provider, i can't download invoices with FF since 3 months).
What I wouldn't donate for is "me too" initiatives like "AI" and corporate bullshit. Or even charity initiatives if done by Mozilla. It's not Mozilla's job. Their job is to keep a working browser alternative up.
And as it's been stated in techie discussions time and time again, they don't need to be that large for just "a fucking browser". But that would diminish the CEO's status so we get what we have now instead.
they don't? There's no company, or rather - a lot of them, Linux kernel moves forward like 80% by corporate contributors. For some of them it's critical part of their infrastructure, some of them need to get their device drivers mainlined, for some of them it's gpl magic at work.
Linux desktop experience, however, leaves a lot to be desired.
Companies aren't interested to contribute to a browser when they can just reskin chromium or build on blink directly and community cannot match the pace.
I think you are comparing apples to oranges here. Linux is made of many distros, each one with their own strong points and features. Many different maintainers matain them. There is no single point of funding for them.
Mozilla on the other hand makes basically one semi well-known product (and other even less known stuff) and gives it away for free.
If tomorrow Google pulls the plug, who will pay for the salaries of the engineers who maintain Firefox? The general public does not care if Firefox lives or dies. In my circle of friends and family, I am the only one who uses Firefox. Most people are on Chrome or Brave. That's it.
Someone in the comments above mentioned that Mozilla could release a paid version for Enterprise customers, imitating Red Hat in a way, but I am highly skeptical that Enterprise customers in times such as these will be willing to pay for something that they can get for free from Google or Microsoft.
> I am highly skeptical that Enterprise customers in times such as these will be willing to pay for something that they can get for free from Google or Microsoft.
They would have to build a better enterprise offering. Companies like Chrome because can use Google as their IDP, and when their employees log in with their company account the company can push certs and security politicies to their Chrome install.
Firefox doesn't have that level of integration with Google security services.
1) Linux is made of many distros, each one with their own strong points and features. Many different maintainers matain them. There is no single point of funding for them.
2) Mozilla on the other hand makes basically one semi well-known product.
the way i see it mozilla has one thing to do, and didnt do it very well.
the linux GNU gang has a mountain to contend with and has has moved a mountain.
so what would be the secret sauce that mozilla doesnt have.
I honestly think the answer is tax money. It should be clear by now, that a browser is (critical) infrastructure and it should be funded as such. Ideally by multiple, non-aligned states.
Kagi's Orion browser is 1.0 on Mac and working on the first full Linux release - it's built on WebKit.
That WebKit is a "third party" dependency but it's still a break from the browser monoculture and it doesn't seem like Mozilla has as much interest in pushing the browser engine space forward after pulling back from Servo.
I switched to Brave. Even with its cryptocurrency stuff bundled, it's easily disabled and not in your face at all. And their adblock tech is an amazing uBlock successor.
> This really feels like the beginning of the end for Mozilla, sadly.
I really feel like every time Mozilla announces something, someone gets paid to leave comments like this around. I've seen many "beginning of the end" comments like this, and so far, it hasn't happened.
What I do see is a lot of bashing, and hypocrisy, and excuses for why its OK that you don't personally try to do better...
Even as someone who is still a Firefox user - the browser now has about half the browser market share as Edge... Absolutely nobody needs to be paid to write these kind of comments!
Honestly the last 5-10 years has been a disaster for Firefox...
Perhaps not paid, but. I think even if it's natural (I myself have been known to make a disparaging remark in their direction), I still suspect some level of manipulation (why was I saying these things? Out of frustration or because I'd heard something worrying and negative news sticks better than positive?).
Sure, firefox has had some issues, and nobody is denying the market share is an issue but:
1) It has worked reliably for the past 10 years
2) Mozilla and firefox have not disappeared, in fact it has created a number of useful services worth paying for.
Meanwhile, I keep hearing these negative "the world is ending" comments regarding what amounts to a "force for good" in this world, and I have to wonder.
How many of these people making these comments recently switched to chrome, and are saying this as an excuse?
The vast majority of these people complaining are using something like Brave or just plain Chrome.
They aren't expressing genuine criticisms for the most part.
Tons of them literally work at google.
Like, there's a poster a couple threads over insisting "Brave is great, you just have to ignore the crypto shit and change a bunch of settings" and like, somehow brave doesn't get regular 600 post long threads about how it's "Dead" and "It's the end" and "I have never used Firefox in my life but I certainly wont now!"
It's absurd.
"Mozilla's CEO makes $6 million" says people who get very angry if you suggest we should pay the managerial class less of the worlds money and also never seem to complain about any other CEO making that money and don't say anything about how much the CEO of Brave makes or how much money Google as a whole sucks out of reality to do whatever they want with, including subsidizing a browser to kill any competition.
Firefox got big because every young tech nerd installed it on everyone's machine and then a few years later, google literally paid tons of installers to also bundle and install Chrome and make it the default browser and everyone here always insists that people who did not choose to use firefox and did not even notice they now use chrome are somehow going to pay real money for firefox?
Meanwhile Opera is showing how nobody gives a shit about any of this "Privacy" nonsense in the market, and the important features are things like "you can install a theme your favorite youtuber made for shits and giggles" and "Advertising to children"
You want browser engine diversity? Guess what, that's Firefox right now. There is nothing else. That's why I use Firefox. There's nowhere else to go.
Even in a compromised state, if given the choice between Firefox and Brave, I would choose Firefox 10 out of 10 times. A closed source chromium fork put out by a business that still isn't sure what its business model is and already has a fair number of "whoopsies" under its belt is a complete non-starter for me.
That is, given the choice between Firefox and Brave. For what it's worth, my current browser is Zen, and I'm quite happy with it.
Fair enough. I'd still be very hesitant to use it on account of it being a chrome fork. Moreover, I don't really understand how Brave expects to be a viable business without deeply betraying their userbase at some point.
It admittedly is a gut feeling, but Brave started out with a browser and some handwavy crypto magic beans and seemed like it careened from idea to idea looking for a business model, occasionally stepping on toes along the way. They have products like AI integration, a VPN and a firewall, but those aren't particularly stand-out products in a very crowded market.
As a point of comparison, Kagi started out with a product that people were willing to pay for, and grew other services from there. I feel comfortable giving them money, and I'd be willing to at least try their browser - if it ever releases for Windows.
Your points are valid. But what made me finally switch was that it is open source, that it has been out for roughly a decade now, and that Brendan Eich's opinions from 2014 are mostly based on his Catholic faith at the time (which obviously is likely to have changed/evolved now that we're a decade later).
> Moreover, I don't really understand how Brave expects to be a viable business without deeply betraying their userbase at some point.
They have a way better merch store than Mozilla. They should expand that.
"MERCHANDISING! Where the real money from the movie is made!"
I tried Orion about a year ago. I tried using the profile sandboxing. Logging into my google account in one profile also logged me in in another profile.
I can definitely excuse some bugs (there were crashes for example that I didn’t overly mind; I understand I was using prerelease software). But something like account containers should be built fundamentally to disallow any data sharing. If data sharing is a bug, and not fundamentally disallowed by the architecture, then it’s going to happen again later.
I'd be interested if the issue you ran into was actually due to poor architecture or just something not fully implemented in the pre-release. Unfortunately, it's closed source - so hard to tell from the outside.
Well it was definitely a bug. It worked in some cases (I think it even worked in google at first, and then a few days later it manifested). And the feature was advertised, even though, again, they never claimed the software to be release quality.
But my point is that, similar to security, you don't want to build this kind of feature piece meal. Either the containers are fundamentally walled off or they aren't.
I understand what your claim is, I just disagree it's that blanket. You could e.g. absolutely build the UI for a profile switcher before your implementation of the backend changes are merged without carrying implications of how well that will handle isolation in the same way in security you could implement the null cipher in TLS to test that portion of the code without it forever implying you have bad encryption.
google is what it is because they have shareholders and need to make money. Maybe Kagi gets around that by setting up as a PBC, I hope so. I am not holding my breath.
Not sure why you're getting downvoted. Orion has matured as a browser and just hit 1.0. It's mac- and ios-only for now, but linux and windows ports are in the works. It has ad-blocking out of the box and has zero telemetry. I use it every day.
My two cents - I'm not doing the "proprietary browser" shtick again. Unless I have real assurance that the software isn't going to become a $50/month SaaS, why should I leave my perfectly good current browser?
I get the feeling this kind of product will only appeal to unconscious iOS and macOS users. Windows and Linux users have much better (and freer) options than a WebKit wrapper.
But Orion has the exact same issue that we are facing now with Chrome and Edge and Firefox. Orion is funded by Kagi, so it's a money losing venture. If Kagi folds tomorrow, who will pick the pieces and continue its' development?
Replace Orion with Chrome and Kagi with Google and you will find that we are in the same exact boat. Browsers cost money to maintain. Money has to come from somewhere. If the general public does not want to pay then who does?
Furthermore, what makes you think that Kagi will not one day do the same exact thing that Google has done with Chrome? Are you willing to bet that it won't happen?
And I am not here to bash on Kagi, I am one of their customers but I will not use Orion for the same reason I don't use Chrome.
Safari has like 20% market share right now. The only thing holding it back is that it's Mac only. If Apple got a Windows version going again, it'd eat Chrome for lunch.
Does anyone else feel like the "Trust" angle is the only card they have left to play? Technically, Chrome is faster on JS benchmarks. Edge has better OS integration on Windows and comes by default. Safari wins on battery life on Mac. Firefox's only unique selling point is "We aren't a massive data vampire." If they clutter the browser with AI which inherently requires data processing, often in the cloud, they dilute their only true differentiator.
Since its birth, Firefox is still the only browser that manage multiple ( hundreds or in some cases, thousands! [1] ) tabs better than any browser. And in my view in the past 12 - 24 months Firefox has managed to be as fast as chrome. While Chrome also improved on its multiple Tab browsing experience.
Safari.... I dont know why this battery life argument keeps coming up because it is not the case. It hasn't been so for at least 5 - 6 years.
Mozilla could have played the trust angle when they have the good will and money. They could have invested into SaaS that provides better revenue generations other than getting it from Google. They could also have partnered with Wikipedia before they got rotten. But now I am not even sure if they still have the "trust" card anymore. Gekco is still hard to be embedded, XULRunner could have been Electron. They will need to get into survival mode and think about what is next.
No doubt the browsers are constantly leapfrogging each other, so this isn't always the case. But, anecdotally: switching from Chrome to Safari actually felt like I got a new computer. The difference was that apparent.
Safari is fast and performant but once you load a heavy web app that uses a lot of memory safari will kill the tab. It’s incredibly frustrating to have a page reload with a banner simply saying the site was using too much memory and was reloaded. Especially when you’re on a maxed out MacBook with plenty of resources.
I agree, in practice I see this occasionally on gigantic GitHub pull requests with 1000+ files, or very clunky Atlassian/Confluence pages. I'd say both sides need to work on their resource management!
(On that note, many complaints about Safari I hear from developers fall on my ears as "I don't care about web compatibility!" as it has never NOT been the case on the web that you need to care about feature support and resource management.)
I will also note that Safari is almost /too/ deeply integrated in the system, when I'm running a high-stress task elsewhere, my browser would jitter or hang, the same couldn't be said for chromium, for some reason.
> Safari.... I dont know why this battery life argument keeps coming up because it is not the case. It hasn't been so for at least 5 - 6 years.
I can assure you, this is still true. I use Chrome when plugged in at my desk and Safari for everything else on the go. Chrome still isn't great on memory or battery life.
Have you compared with something else than Chrome? Otherwise it might be that Chrome is just very power hungry compared to Safari, but maybe Firefox is more efficient by now? Chrome has slowly turned into a monster on it's own, not unlike what they competed against initially when Chrome first arrived.
>It's even more obvious when watching video where safari will be 5 to 10 points lower than Firefox.
Safari uses macOS for video so the points will be on macOS. Firefox uses it own internal video decoder. That is why image and video codec support on Safari is dependent on macOS upgrade not Safari.
> Safari.... I dont know why this battery life argument keeps coming up because it is not the case. It hasn't been so for at least 5 - 6 years.
I mean, observably, this is still the case.
Now, luckily the M-series laptops have such insane battery life that it barely matters compared to before... but I can still observe about an hour of battery life difference between Safari and Chrome on an M2 Macbook Air (running Sequoia). Now, my battery life is still in the region of 7.5 hours, so even if it's a large difference it's not impacting my workday yet (though the battery is at 90% max design capacity from wear).
I know this, because there are days where I only use chrome, and days where I only use Safari, and I do roughly the same work on each of those days.
I suspect that the people making these claims that Safari is no longer the most battery efficient are not Apple users. It's quite easy to empirically validate which browsers are most efficient by looking at the average energy impact in Activity Monitor. Safari is the winner, Chrome/Brave are not far behind, and Firefox is the clear loser.
Safari loses out when you run with a lot of Tabs. Both Chrome and Firefox knows when to unload tabs. ( Firefox even have about:unloads to tell you the order of Tabs it will unload! )
Try opening Tab Overview in Safari and it will start loading all the website for thumbnails, paging out to disk due to low memory, writing hundreds of GB to page. It also put Tabs on low running priority in the background rather than pausing them like Firefox or Chrome. ( Not sure if that is still the case with Safari 26, at least it was with 18 ). To combat that, restarting the browser time to time helps.
Safari is well tuned for iOS as a single tab, single page usage. On MacOS when doing many tabs it start to get slow and inefficient. And this is very much a Safari issue not an Webkit issue because Orion is a lot better at it.
And yes I have filed Radar report for many of the issues but I have come to the conclusion Apple doesn't care about multi tab usage on desktop Safari.
I think the difference is fundamental to the engine and the gap will be hard to close, too (I mean, how long has it been and the gap remains?). WebKit-based ultralight browsers remain usable after you’ve cranked hardware specs down far enough that nothing based on Chrome or Firefox’s engines do. Resource use among the three engines seems to differ at some kind of low, basic architecture level.
What does "faster JS" actually get me? Youtube is probably the most heavy site I and I think most people use, I'm certainly not trying to do heavy scientific computation in my browser, so what difference does it really make?
Anyway, Firefox's killer feature is still extensions, despite everything that's happened on that front. There's nothing like Tree Style Tabs for Chrome (not usably implemented anyway) and while I think maybe Brave has it, Firefox has uMatrix which is better than anything Brave uses (Brave may share lists or even code with that, but the uMatrix UI is where its at.)
The wider point here is that you can only use FF as long as Mozilla can fund it and Mozilla can only fund it as long as Google funds them. At some point, it will be cheaper for Google to pay monopoly fines than funding Mozilla.
Technically, both Chrome and Firefox are adware too, since Google's main business is ads, and Firefox/Mozilla get a lot of money from Google to display Google as a search engine in Firefox (an ad :) )
Firefox doesn't sell BATs, in-browser notification ads, or new tab takeovers. The closest you can get is a pinned site in the new tab page (new installs only) and ads in Pocket, or whatever they're calling that new tab thing these days.
Calling Firefox adware is a stretch at best, and disingenuous at worst. Adware doesn't mean that the software survives because of one advertisement that that user can turn off.
Looks like I'm getting a ProtonMail ad every few new tabs. I never noticed because I've never looked at the new tab page. Doesn't noticeably slow it down to have the ad there, luckily.
I love how quickly the goalpost moves from "No ads" to "Only opt in ads" to "Ads can be disabled with two clicks."
Quit coping and just admit it, Brave is adware. If you like it, that's cool, totally your choice. It's fast, performant adware. But it's adware all the same.
When we're talking about reasons to switch browsers, then saying they both have the same behavior is not whataboutism. It's extremely important context to the complaint.
It's good enough when some terrible lazy web designer only tested on Chrome. It does nothing to protect against the future when Google decides they are sick of people trying to get around their Ad Block ban and change the license because no one has any real alternatives anymore.
Also blocking is not as good as intentionally poisoning with something like Ad Nauseum
No Chromium fork developer not called Microsoft have the resources to maintain a web browser engine.
But focus on the license overlooks a more important threat. Google made Web Environment Integrity so services could require approved devices, operating systems, and browsers. Resistance led Google to remove it from desktop for now. But they kept something like it in Android. And they will try again.
I've been using Chrome with uBlock Origin Lite and not even once I found a case when this version of uBlock was behaving differently (as less efficient) than the "full" uBlock Origin
Maybe I'm just lucky, but even this argument is quite ... meh
I've found it a bit like "what car did you drive in to work with today" in that any typical current and working car is not going to be a stark difference to a high end car in terms of how fast you get there... but you'd definitely notice a piece of crap with a donut, broken heating, and screeching brakes causing you problems if that's what you were comparing instead.
I.e. I can count the number of times I said "wow, uBO Lite didn't make this site usable but loading up Firefox with uBO and it worked fine" on one hand. At the same time, if I ever look and compare how much is actually getting blocked, uBO is definitely blocking way more. Doing a side by side compare of dozens of sites it becomes easier to see minor differences I wouldn't otherwise have noted, but may not have mattered as much.
I commented about this a few weeks ago here about this, but essentially: v2 allows you to block things you can't see, but you still probably don't want, like folks hiding cloud analytics behind CNAME cloaking to allow it to appear as a first-party site rather than Google Analytics, for example.
You won't "feel" this in your day-to-day browsing, but if you're concerned about your data being collected, v2 matters.
That's not sucking at blocking thats YouTube intentionally adding a delay to make it seem like their experience is degraded when it isn't. If you turn the slider up to full it only happens very rarely.
I'm sure this will all change eventually though and YouTube has a loophole planned so ad blocking on manifest 2.0 is impossible.
I'm not really sure of the actual mechanism, but on Firefox with a fully updated block list the delay doesn't seem to happen for me. Whereas I could never quite get rid of it on Chrome. This was a while ago, though, when they first introduced it.
I use uBlock Origin with Firefox on Linux, and it seems like that delay happens maybe on 30% of the YouTube videos for me, with no rhyme or reason to which ones. And reloading the same video multiple times show consistent behavior if it loads fast/slow, not sure what's going on.
AFAIK Manifest v2 is still part of the chromium codebase, and there is an intention to continue supporting it, depending on how difficult that turns out to be.
Looking at their strategy doc, it doesn't seem like they hear their users at all. It's riddled with AI. In fact their aspiration is "doing for AI what we did for the web." Oh boy!
Nobody wants three or four corporations manipulating and controlling information (with a mix of hallucinations) all behind a subscription. The large tech companies have nearly universally lost all trust.
The models I've run recently on Ollama seem to about as good as the models I was running at work a year ago. The tech isn't there yet, but I see a path. I would be fine with that enhancing, not replacing, my usage.
>I will eat my hat if Google had nothing to do with the demise of Mozilla
One has to be truly naive to think they get half a bi a year from Google "just because." They have less than 5% of desktop market share and ZERO mobile presence.
IMHO, they wouldn't get this kind of money if they had a competent, technical C-suite that actually cared about creating a truly competitive free browser. The money is flowing because, not in spite of, the current C-suite.
Yeah, but there's a selection bias present in most feedback like this, isn't there? People are more motivated to submit feedback when something annoys them. This is speaking as someone who is also annoyed by AI features.
That's a slightly different question, but an important one: the presence of a group criticizing a feature doesn't mean the absence of a different group requesting it!
When Mozilla initially made the Connect forums, it was to solicit requests for new features. I can't stress enough how few people joined the forum to request more AI in their browser.
They are looking at OperaGX and Brave selling literal spyware and still growing marketshare and correctly recognizing that the only people willing to switch browsers in the current day do not give a shit about any of that stuff and are weirdos looking for "features"
Look at all the people in this very comment section insisting that Mozilla is just the worst while using fucking chrome or chromium. Mozilla knows they will never get that market back, because that market just hates Mozilla for "reasons", usually "They fired a guy for being openly hostile"
The thing google did to cause the demise of firefox was pay to bundle chrome with tons of things users installed, and put a giant "Install Chrome for BEST EXPERIENCE" banner on every single page they control. Sane governments would have broken them up for their clear anti-competitive practices, but at the same time the vast majority of the users they "lost" never knew they had firefox in the first place and didn't notice when it got changed.
These users never even noticed when conficker changed their browsers to literal adware FFS, they certainly didn't "Choose" a browser freely.
Mozilla (in its previous form) has long been doomed. Mobile cemented it, I think. Browsers are part of the operating system and getting users to switch from the default is an incredible uphill climb. Especially when browsers are essentially utilities, there are so few unique compelling features.
That lack of connection to tech giants is a strength in the trust angle. And I think they’re right to be thinking about AI: people are using it and there does need to be an alternative to tech giants/VC funded monsters
Will they be successful? The odds are stacked against them. But if they’re not going to even try then what purpose will they serve any more?
It's interesting that most people on Windows PCs switch to Chrome when Edge is the default. It was obvious why people switched from IE6 to Firefox and later from IE7 to Chrome; IE was terrible; Firefox was better; Chrome was better still. Edge is not obsolete, unstable, or a security nightmare the way IE was.
Chrome even has significant user share on Mac OS; the numbers I'm finding are around 40%.
It's hard to guess whether people are much less inclined to switch browsers on mobile than on desktop, or if they just like Chrome. Either way, the odds are against anyone who tries to compete with it.
> It's interesting that most people on Windows PCs switch to Chrome when Edge is the default
This is primarily because most people on Windows use Gmail and other Google services, and any time you visit a Google web property from a non-Chrome browser, there’s a prominent “Install Chrome” button that’s placed on those. Without Google’s web properties pushing Chrome even to this day, Chrome may not continue to be as big.
Right. The myth that keeps getting confidently repeated in HN comment sections is that Mozilla supposedly lost market share due to a series of strategic missteps. But it basically was about the pivot to mobile, and the monopoly lock-in of Google. Actually think one fantastic remedy for Google's search monopoly might be allowing the use of alternative browsers on Android via a pop-up rather than preloading and privileging Chrome. Because browsers and mobile are part of the strategy of creating a path dependency tied to Google search.
But to your point, I think the simple reality is that LLMs are increasingly taking the place of search and so having all your funding based on search licensing might be risky when it's at least possible that we're going to be in a new paradigm sooner than later.
I honestly think AI in the browser right now is generally very half-baked and doesn't have any well thought out applications, and raises all kinds of trust issues. I can think of good applications (eg browse the Kindle unlimited store for critically acclaimed hard sci-fi books), but there might be better ones that I'm not thinking of. It just might make sense to be involved so you went caught flat-footed by some new application that quickly progresses into something people expect. And of course because HN commenters are famously self-contradictory in response to literally everything Mozilla does, it's a damned if they do damned if they don't situation: if they load AI into the browser it's pointless feature bloat. If they don't then they were sitting on their thumbs while the world moved on when they should have been reinventing themselves and finding new paths to revenue.
They are still the only browser I know, which has actual useful chrome like changing the stylesheet, is CUA compliant and behaves and feel like a native GTK+ app (now-a-days only after restoring the OS window bar and enabling the menubar).
They also have useful keyboard behaviour and provide both a search and a URL bar, which makes it effortless to search locally and perform additional refinery searches while hunting down something, because you can change the search term without returning to the search website. Searching via the search engines portal is also often slower than via the search bar on crappy connections. Their search provider integration is also great (not sure how other browsers are in this regard) which makes opening a Wikipedia or MDN page about a specific topic a single action, without needing to look at a search result list.
There Profile Manager is also a breeze (not the new crap), it allows to open any URL in any Profile by clicking on any link in another program.
The extension system and the advanced configuration is also quite good.
No, it doesn't do what I expect, the list of the default rebindable keybinds is small, can't bind multiple shortcuts to a single function, can't bind without modifiers- if I recall correctly after trying it out a while ago.
> Like not being able to change the default shortcuts?
Sure, I would also love if Firefox would work like Emacs or some configurable KDE program, but at least I can access most things without needing to touch a mouse and bulk operation actually work unlike Thunderbird where they basically broke the whole UI a few years back and haven't fixed it since.
Do you know another browser that supports somewhat up-to-date non-Chrome-specific Web features and is better on the features I listed?
I find that any performance benefits Chrome and Safari have are more than offset by the performance benefits Firefox gets by being massively better at blocking ads and the huge amount of JS and tracking garbage that comes with them.
Firefox always feels snappier to me, and I think most of that comes from less time downloading a bunch of ad shit I don't want anyway.
Meanwhile, in the real world, a JS engine can be half the speed of the Chrome one and the browser can still be faster, because blocking ads is what gives you the biggest speed up.
All the performance advantages in the world fail to matter if you're still loading ads.
On my Android phone, Chrome opens web pages noticeably (and consistently) faster than Firefox. And I wasn't using a stopwatch. I am literally making a sacrifice to use Firefox.
As a semi Rust hater, but Firefox user, I believe Mozilla should go absolutely all-in on Rust, for a mixture of direct and indirect effects. That and/or launch an open source e-Reader development project.
No MBA type is going to be able to do anything of the sort.
What sort? Inquiring minds and all that... like a "Good Witch of the North"? Or a Hermione Granger type? Or the kind that own crystal shops that serve tea from renewed storefronts in quaint coastal towns?
Not sure who or how, but someone somewhere confused Gnome for Mozilla/Firefox. The claim was that Mozilla has had an "literal witch as CEO" but that article is about Gnome.
I can only assume you're referring to Mitchell Baker? Mitchell Baker has gotten a /lot/ of negative comments on HN, and some for good reason, but the constant ask of "how she won the position" and the like just shows the ignorance of the commenters...
Mitchell Baker co-founded Mozilla, and was the legal mind that structured both the split from Netscape that salvaged the code and wrote the majority of the Mozilla Public License and the legal/philosophical stance of the organization. She's an attorney with a specific background in intellectual property law, and without her contributions the entire world would be poorer for it. Mozilla, long before Firefox, was instrumental in the early parts of the open-source movement helping to define what it even meant to being open-source and creating a more rigorous and legally tested framework.
I am not a huge fan of Mitchell, so I understand and agree with much of the criticism, but it stinks of sexism or some other ulterior motive when people "wonderingly" suppose "how she won the position". Is anyone curious how Mark Zuckerberg became CEO of Meta, even though he's mostly blown through billions of dollars on boondoggles and acted in unethical ways? No, not at all, because he's the (co-)founder. So why is a different standard applied for Mitchell? Is it only because she's a woman, or is there some other reason?
I can question the qualifications of a person as it relates to a specific position (e.g. CEO), but that doesn't mean I don't respect their past contributions.
I find the accusations of sexism towards anyone who dares question her as excessive as some of the comments that were made towards her.
The accusations aren't "towards anyone who dares question her", they're towards people who assume that she had come in after the fact and unfairly got into somebody else's role, which is ignorant (and easily cleared up by glancing at a Wikipedia article) and also a common refrain aimed at any woman in any position of authority.
I'm not a fan of Baker for many reasons, but "how did she even get that role?" always pings my shithead radar, and isn't a question I hear for incompetent male CEOs, who are assumed to be just incompetent, while the women are assumed to be incompetent infiltrators who were hired on the basis of their sex.
> I can question the qualifications of a person as it relates to a specific position
Sure, but do people generally question the qualifications of founders that successfully grew something from inception? Or is it only for people who are women? Because I definitely see a trend in the comment threads in HN over the last many years.
Founders don’t face any competition when they get the job at their own companies, and they often have ownership to force it as an outcome if there’s ever a debate.
Baker, to her credit, probably faced brutal competition to get to the top job. It’s not out there to wonder why she was picked, and the answer cannot be because « she was there from the beginning ».
HN tends to like people who have a certain understanding of product and technology. Baker’s legal background probably didn’t help put forward her other skills, hence the questions.
If the argument is based on trends your personally noticed on HN, then I’m afraid there’s not much to discuss.
> Baker, to her credit, probably faced brutal competition to get to the top job. It’s not out there to wonder why she was picked, and the answer cannot be because « she was there from the beginning ».
Baker was Mozilla Foundation's president from founding to 2025. She was Mozilla Corporation's CEO from founding to 2008, interim CEO from 2019 to 2020, and CEO from 2020 to 2024.
You think there was brutal competition for Mozilla Corporation CEO in 2020?
> Baker, to her credit, probably faced brutal competition to get to the top job. It’s not out there to wonder why she was picked, and the answer cannot be because « she was there from the beginning ».
You are completely discounting her founder status. She wasn't "there from the beginning", she /created/ the Mozilla Foundation and led it from inception to 2025 and later orchestrated the Mozilla Foundation / Mozilla Corporation split structure (which was the first of its kind and has later been used by other institutions). She was the primary author of the Mozilla Public License. She was the Legal mind behind rescuing the codebase from Netscape by going open source.
In one breath you say this has nothing to do with founder status, because founders are founders, and then completely discount that Mitchell is a founder.
There are MANY valid reasons to criticize Mitchell's tenure at Mozilla, and I haven't seen anyone in this larger thread bring up anything of substance when there are several such things available and well known. Instead this is just a "just asking questions" style of shade-throwing that is unequally applied, and can only be presumed to be because Mitchell is a woman.
It turns out the person I originally replied to didn't even get their women in open source correct, because they were talking about GNOME Foundation and not Mozilla, but I can be forgiven for the mistake as I thought them calling Mitchell a "witch" was a joke about her legal first name Winifred, that she has avoided going by in part due to people taking her more seriously because Mitchell is a gender-ambiguous name. Clearly they have no rational and real basis for criticism if they can't even accurately identify which woman they want to make sexist comments about.
I would encourage you and the person I originally wrote my reply to to both pause and do better.
I'm not discounting her founder status. My point is that it's orthogonal to one's ability to run a company. Founders don't automatically make good CEOs. Plenty of founders step aside for professional management, and plenty stay on and struggle.
Questioning whether someone was the right fit for a role isn't an attack on their legitimacy or their earlier contributions, no matter how pivotal they were. Steve Ballmer at Microsoft had a quasi-founder status, and he received the exact same backlash and hate throughout his tenure because he was perceived as someone who "didn't get it".
If the argument is that any skepticism of a female CEO's performance must be sexist, that shuts down legitimate discussion. I'd rather focus on outcomes rather than on trying to divine each other's motives.
Lastly, Your "pause and do better" is exactly what I'm objecting to: framing disagreement as moral failure. Question Baker? Sexist. Disagree with me? You're not doing enough for the cause.
Zuckerberg's founder status is known because he was Facebook's most visible person always. Baker's founder status is less known because she was not Mozilla's most visible person most years.
"Trust" is just community goodwill, and Mozilla has steadily been chipping away at that goodwill by pivoting to AI and ad businesses, and occasionally implying that it's the community that wants things like AI, and it's the community's fault for misunderstanding their poorly written license agreement.
Fitefox has faster WASM and WebGPU at least.
Kind of doesn't matter since Chrome has bloated the standard so much that many websites only work in chrome
And, a different way of stating the same thing, they're actually way ahead of everybody in shipping production Rust code in the browser, which is a big part of the efficiency gains in recent years.
To me, Firefox has way better dev tools than Chrome. I don't even mention Safari here - who can stand their horrible dev tools? Firefox has a fantastic add on marketplace which competes with Chrome's. Firefox without too many addons actually do not drain battery life on MacOS. Firefox has "native" profile management with real separation of cookies. JS benchmarks provide no value to me, since I try to avoid heavy-JS web apps anyway.
I don't know. As a dev and user, Firefox wins on every single aspect for me. I understand that every user is different. But I'm glad it exists.
> Firefox's only unique selling point is "We aren't a massive data vampire."
The fact that they haven't moved away from apparently needing 90%+ of their money to come from Google, after more than a decade of that being an issue, means that claim is a moot point. This "AI first" move was probably heavily influenced by Google behind the scenes too.
>Firefox's only unique selling point is "We aren't a massive data vampire."
That's a big selling point. Along with "still allows ad-blocking extensions".
Besides being able to turn off all online AI features, and the fact that forks like Librewolf will inevitably strip it out, I am stunned by how HN readers think "Translate this for me immediately and accurately" and related functions are not desirable to the average person.
Confidential compute (intel, amd and nvidia) already is a thing and has nothing to do with mozilla. Without such drastic measures, no, it IS impossible with regular cloud processing.
> If they clutter the browser with AI which inherently requires data processing, often in the cloud
Where are you getting the “often in the cloud” from? So far Firefox has some local models for certain features. Using a specific cloud based AI is a conscious decision by the user within the sidebar.
It's the only realistic alternative to a chromium-based browser if someone wants to make their own fork. I use the Zen browser, and it strips out some stuff I'm not a huge fan of in baseline Firefox. Manifest v3 not rearing its ugly head is also a huge plus, as a competent adblocker is essential these days.
It is the angle that is important to ME, a European user. I would happily throw moneydollars at the browser project but the Mozilla suits won't allow me to, for whatever-the-fuck reason.
It's interesting because I've heard Manifest 3 was an effort to not make extensions quite have full trust capability and isn't as odious as it sounds but it's also Google, so...
Ah Manifest 3: Will still happily allow an extension to silently transmit all of your browsing and AI chat history to data brokers to be packaged and sold to the highest bidder.
While conveniently and regrettably unavoidably nerfing ad blockers :(
Everyone is reacting negatively to the focus on AI, but does Mozilla really have a choice? This is going to be a rehash of the same dynamic that has happened in all the browser wars: Leading browser introduces new feature, websites and extensions start using that feature, runner-up browsers have no choice but to introduce that feature or further lose marketshare.
Chrome and Edge have already integrated LLM capabilities natively, and webpages and extensions will soon start using them widely:
Soon you will have pages that are "Best viewed in Chrome / Edge" and eventually these APIs will be standardized. Only a small but passionate minority of users will run a non-AI browser. I don't think that's the niche Firefox wants to be in.
I agree that Mozilla should take the charge on being THE privacy-focused browser, but they can also do so in the AI age. As an example, provide a sandbox and security features that prevent your prompts and any conversations with the AI from being exfiltrated for "analytics." Because you know that is coming.
Of course they have a choice. Just don't do it. All you said are predictions of what may or may not happen in the future. The opposite could be true - the audience at large may get sick of AI tools being pushed on them and prefer the browser that doesn't. No one knows. But even if you are right, supporting an hypothetical API that extensions and websites may or may not use and pushing opt-out AI tooling in the browser itself are very different things.
Sure, these features may never catch on... but if they do, consider the risk to Firefox: an underdog with dwindling market share that is now years behind capabilities taken for granted in other browsers. On the other hand, if these features don't pan out, they could always be deprecated with little hit to marketshare.
Strategically I think Mozilla cannot take that risk, especially as it can get feature parity for relatively low cost by embracing open-source / open-weights models.
As an aside, a local on-device AI is greatly preferable from a privacy perspective, even though some harder tasks may need to be sent to hosted frontier models. I expect the industry to converge on a hybrid local/remote model, largely because it lets them offload inference to the users' device.
There's not much I could do about a hosted LLM, but at least for the local model it would be nice to have one from a company not reliant on monetizing my data.
> Everyone is reacting negatively to the focus on AI, but does Mozilla really have a choice?
Do these type of also-ran strategies actually work for a competitor the size of Mozilla? Is AI integration required for them to grow or at least maintain?
My hunch is this will hurt Firefox more than help it. Even if I were to believe their was a meaningful demand for these kind of features in the browser I doubt Mozilla is capable of competing with the likes of Google & Microsoft in meaningful matter in the AI arena.
I think Mozilla can get pretty far with one of the smaller open source models. Alternatively, they could even just use the models that will inevitably come bundled with the underlying OS, although their challenge then would be in providing a homogenous experience across platforms.
I don't think Mozilla should get into the game of training their own models. If they did I'd bet it's just because they want to capitalize on the hype and try to get those crazy high AI valuations.
But the rate at which even the smaller models are getting better, I think the only competitive advantage for the big AI players would be left in the hosted frontier models that will be extremely jealously guarded and too big to run on-device anyway. The local, on-device models will likely converge to the same level of capabilities, and would be comparable for any of the browsers.
I think you're right but there's also an opportunity to sell picks when everyone is digging for gold. Like AI-driven VS Code forks, you have AI companies releasing their own browsers left and right. I wonder if Mozilla could offer a sort of white-labeling and contracting service where they offer the engine and some customization services to whatever AI companies want their own in-house browsers. But continue to offer Firefox itself as the "dumb" (from an AI perspective) reference version. I'm not sure exactly what they could offer over just forking Chromium/Firefox without support but it would be a great way to have their cake and eat it too.
Of course they have a choice. Firefox started going downhill IMO because they kept copying Chrome. Vivaldi decided not to include AI until a good use case was found for it. This announcement was met with a lot of positivity.
I think youre mixing up two seperate concerns: functionality and standards. It seems to me that there could absolutely be a "dumb browser" that sticks to (and develops) web standards and is also relatively popular
- focus 100% on Firefox Desktop & Mobile
- just a fast solid minimalist browser (no AI, no BS)
- other features should be addons
- privacy centric
- builtin, first-class, adblocker
- run on donations
- partner with Kagi
- layoff 80% of the non-tech employees
I worked for them for many years, I guarantee you that Mozilla will be fine without all the non-sense people, just put engineers in charge.
Donations only get you so far. Take a mid-sized project, that needs $500k per year (a few devs, very modestly paid, zero expenses). It's a lot of money. It requires a huge user base. Say you have 500k users, and 5% donate $25 per year (I'm optimistic). And that's just $500k US, a few devs, zero expenses. A project that size probably has audit requirements, hosting costs, accounting, legal, trademarks, etc.
I see finances for a few free software projects, and many of them really struggle to get donations year after year, in a way that helps make the project predictable and sustainable.
For the US, people want you to be a 501c3, and then you need a EU equivalent. Canadians are unlikely to give to a US org (especially these days), but the market is too small to setup a local charity. So you need partners. All that has many compliance requirements and paperwork, so you need non-tech employees for the fundraising and accounting.
Eventually your big donors start blackmailing the project if you don't do what they want, and often their interests are not aligned with most users. You need various income sources.
With 1.3b in reserves, it's enough for funding development for many years to come if they fire most of management and close irrelevant to the browser things.
It would be organizational suicide to spend down their endowment just because they can. Right now it exists as a firewall to buy them some time in the event that search licensing goes away, which I think is exactly what they should have done with it.
And it's been talked to death before but the idea that the browser side bets are at some prohibitive cost is an unsubstantiated myth, conjured into existence by vibes in comment sections. It's the HN equivalent of American voters who think foreign aid is 50% of the federal budget.
Do you realize what 1.300.000.000$ is? Say you invest most of it in a safe way to get you inflation + 2%. That gives you 26.000.000$ every year. You can pay 100 engineers with this. Firefox is a browser. Sure a browser is complicated but 100 motivated and talented engineers is more than enough to make a good product if you focus on what matters.
How do you think they got that money in the first place? They've been growing this fund from $100MM in the 2010s to where it is now, by carefully managing and investing it.
Hilariously, you're here presenting something Mozilla has already been doing for nearly two decades like it's a new idea that only you have thought of. Yes, I realize how much that is: enough to cover their operating costs for like 2.5 years.
And sure, it's amazing how much an endowment can do if you give up and wipe out most of their staff and embrace magical thinking.
The point is that the organization is bloated because of the search money.
The sustainable way forward for Mozilla is to fire most of their staff, keep a reasonable number of engineers, and focus on building a solid privacy focused browser instead of trend chasing like they’re doing now. Reduce operational costs and live off of the profits on their investments.
Props for citing real numbers! I hope other people reading this thread are looking at your comment and understanding that this is how you make reality based comments. One tidbit I will add: that's more than they have ever spent on development historically, including after adjusting for inflation. IIRC it's about quadruple what they spent back when browsers were desktop only when they had their highest market share.
I think you're probably about as dead wrong as it's possible to be on this front. First they ship millions of new LoC to Firefox on a monthly basis so the engineering efforts are open for all the world to see.
Secondly, if more than half(!?!) was spent on, say, Pocket, or Fakespot, then you would see a rise and fall in spending coinciding with the onramp and closure of those programs over their lifetimes. But in reality we have seen a steady upward march in spending, and so the interpretation that passes the sanity check is that they fold these into their existing budget with the existing development capacity they have which is variously assigned to different projects, including(!!) Firefox, where again, their annual code output is monumental and rivals Google.
Again I have to note the blizzard of contradictory accusations throughout this thread. According to one commenter the problem is they are biting off more than they can chew and need to scale back all of the excessive Firefox development they are doing (and I recall previous commenters speculating that 30+ million LoC was not evidence of their hard work but "bloat" that was excessive and that they probably could cut a lot of it out without losing functionality). But for you, the obvious problem is they're wasting all that capacity on side projects and not putting enough effort in the browser.
To expand on Firefox mobile: if you haven’t tried it, give it a shot. uBlock Origin works just like on desktop. I have seen maybe five ads on my phone browser (including Youtube!) since buying it in 2019.
But many browsers on iOS support ad blockers. Most like Brave and Vivaldi have it built in. Others like Orion and Edge have added support for extensions. Firefox is one of the only that does not have any support for an ad blocker.
My only complaint about Firefox on Android is it's slow even with ad blocking. Chrome is noticeably faster. Brave gives you the best of both worlds: speed and ad blocking.
The only issue is that Firefox on mobile is visibly breaking a couple of sites every now and then; if you can put up with that for no ads (I can), then its great.
> I guarantee you that Mozilla will be fine without all the non-sense people
> just put engineers in charge
I would like that but is that even possible? Look at Wikipedia. Look at schools. Once an organization develops a bad case of fat "administrator" class, can it be cured or is it terminal?
> Mozilla will be fine without all the non-sense people, just put engineers in charge.
That's always said by the engineers and never seems more than the obvious egocentric bias: What I do is important, everyone and everythying else is pointless.
Who provides resources to the Es and Ds? Who hires new ones? Who raises money from investors and banks, and ensures you have cash flow and ROI? How do you manage 100 Es and Ds without a PM?
Small teams are more efficient but (obviously) can't produce at scale. When you scale up, there's enough HR or finance or marketing, or PM, etc. work for full-time specialists. And larger orgs need bureaucracy - if you have a way around that, the world is yours.
What you call scaling up sounds more like monetization. Others (especially customers) might call it enshittification instead. Youtube is a great example of how bad it can get.
Why Mozilla won't let people financially contribute directly to Firefox development and continues to pursue these stupid monetization paths is a mystery.
DDG uses Bing instead, that's not really any better. Ideally a Browser should not partner with any websites. It's always been a deal with the devil even when Google was not as evil.
I don't know that a partnership with Kagi is the move, as great as the two work for me. The last thing you want users to see when starting up a new browser is a paywall. It would be rad to see Firefox treat Kagi as a first-class citizen, but I think a true partnership would be detrimental to both.
Frankly, looking at the shape of Firefox I don't think that Mozilla cares for it at all - they just hold the brand because it's really well-established.
What would be the best solution today is to convince all these Firefox spinoff projects into combining forces and fully forking Firefox away from Mozilla, and don't look back. But seeing what happens around, how various projects - even the smallest ones are being lead, the moods in communities, I highly doubt that's actually possible.
Chrome is able to capture the mass consumer market, due to Google’s dark pattern to nag you to install Chrome anytime you’re on a Google property.
Edge target enterprise Fortune 500 user, who is required to use Microsoft/Office 365 at work (and its deep security permission ties to SharePoint).
Safari has Mac/iOS audience via being the default on those platform (and deep platform integration).
Brave (based on Chromium), and LibreWolf (based on Firefox) has even carved out those user who value privacy.
---
What’s Firefox target user?
Long ago, Firefox was the better IE, and it had great plugins for web developers. But that was before Chrome existed and Google capturing the mass market. And the developers needed to follow its users.
So what target user is left for a Firefox?
Note: not trolling. I loved Firefox. I just don’t genuine understand who it’s for anymore.
Ostensibly nerds. Linux users and maybe Mac users. Technical people who understand more about the software industry than all Mozilla Corp management since Brendan.
It's difficult to monetize us when the product is a zero dollar intangible, especially when trust has been eroded such that we've all fled to Librewolf like you said.
It's difficult to monetize normies when they don't use the software due to years of continuous mismanagement.
I think giving Mozilla a new CEO is like assigning a new captain to the Titanic. I will be surprised if this company still exists by 2030.
Right and to your point, there's not a whole lot of precedent for browsers successfully funding themselves when the browser itself is the primary product.
Opera was the lightweight high performance extension rich, diversely funded, portable, adapted to niche hardware, early to mobile browser practically built from the dreams of niche users who want customization and privacy. They're a perfect natural experiment for what it looks like to get most, if not all decisions right in terms of both of features users want, as well as creative attempts to diversify revenue. But unfortunately, by the same token also the perfect refutation of the fantasy that making the right decisions means you have a path to revenue. If that was how it worked, Opera would be a trillion dollar company right now.
But it didn't work because the economics of web browsers basically doesn't exist. You have to be a trillion dollar company already, and dominate distribution of a given platform and force preload your browser.
Browsers are practically full scale operating systems these days with tens of millions of lines of code, distribued for free. Donations don't work, paying for the browser doesn't work. If it did, Opera (the og Opera, not the new ownership they got sold to) would still be here.
> Browsers are practically full scale operating systems these days with tens of millions of lines of code, distributed for free.
Well there's your problem! Google owns the server, the client, and the standards body, so ever-increasing complexity is inevitable if you play by their rules. Tens of thousands of lines of code could render the useful parts of the web.
Can you say more? I do think Google has effectively pushed embrace-extend-extinguish, changing the rules so that it's a game they can win. And I do think part of the point of web standards protocols is to limit complexity. So I agree the rules as they exist now favor Google. I think the "real" solution was for the standards bodies to stay in control but seems like that horse left the barn.
Yes, I would literally pay a nominal fee for Firefox if I were confident in the org's direction. As things stand though, the trust is gone as you said.
Mozilla is (or at least started as) a nonprofit. Even corporation is only there to fulfill the nonprofit goals. They shouldn't even be thinking about monetization they should be thinking about getting donations and securing grants.
It seems as if you ask Mozilla, the answer would be "Not current Firefox users."
I really don't know the answer to this question, and I don't know if Mozilla has defined it internally, which probably leads to a lot of the problems that the browser is facing. Is it the privacy focused individual? They seem to be working very hard against that. Is it the ad-sensitive user? Maybe, but they're not doing a lot to win that crowd over.
It kind of feels like Firefox is not targeted at anyone in particular. But long gone are the days when you can just be an alternative browser.
Maybe the target user is someone who wants to use Firefox, regardless of what that means.
I've been using Firefox for a long time, longer than it's had that name, and it used to be excellent for my tab hoarding habits. Specifically, it could handle a large number of tabs, and every couple of months it would crash and lose all of them. I would have to start over from scratch, with an amazing sense of catharsis and freedom, and I never had to make the decision on my own that I would never be able to make.
Now, it's no better than the others. I'm at 1919 tabs right now, and it hasn't lost any for many years. It's rock solid, it's good at unloading the tabs so I don't even need to rely on non-tab-losing crash/restarts to speed things up, and it doesn't even burn enough memory on them to force me to reconsider my ways.
This is a perfect example of how Mozilla's mismanagement has driven Firefox into the ground. Bring back involuntary tab bankruptcy and spacebar heating!
It seems to me Android users who want to block ads are a strong target market. Desktop Chrome has extensions and despite the nerf, it has adblockers that mostly work; Android Chrome doesn't have extensions.
A built in adblocker would probably help Firefox attract those users, but might destroy their Google revenue stream.
I think the problem with that is that Firefox Android with uBO still feels like it has worse First Contentful Paint than Chrome Android. Even on a high-end phone the difference can feel ridiculous; sites render after 1-2s on Chrome but sometimes I can count up to 5 with FF.
The benefits of having uBO might matter more to you and me, but let's not forget that faster rendering was arguably the main reason Chrome Desktop got popular 20 years ago, which caused Firefox to rewrite its engine 2 (3?) times since then to catch up. 20 years later this company still hasn't learned with Android.
Maybe I'm less sensitive to that, but I hadn't really noticed on a phone that wasn't high-end in 2020 and certainly isn't now. I'll have to pay attention to sites being slow and compare a Chromium-based browser next time I notice one.
I switched from Firefox desktop to Chrome when Chrome was new because it was multi-process and one janky page couldn't hang or crash the whole browser. I vaguely remember the renderer being a little faster, but multi-process was transformative. Firefox took years to catch up with that.
I'm very sensitive to ads though. If a browser doesn't have a decent adblocker, I'm not using it. Perhaps surprisingly, the Chromium browser with good extension support on Android is Edge.
Somehow its target user group includes my father, who is 90 years old. As far as I can recall, we got him using Firefox years ago and he became a committed user.
I wish more browsers would target seniors. Accessibility and usability is universally a nightmare.
Firefox users are people who would use LibreWolf, but installed it, tried it, saw it doesn't have dark mode, and figured that Firefox was good enough after all.
> people agency in how it works. Privacy, data use, and AI must be clear and understandable. Controls must be simple. AI should always be a choice — something people can easily turn off. People should know why a feature works the way it does and what value they get from it.
> Second: our business model must align with trust. We will grow through transparent monetization that people recognize and value.
> Third: Firefox will grow from a browser into a broader ecosystem of trusted software. Firefox will remain our anchor. It will evolve into a modern AI browser and support a portfolio of new and trusted software additions.
I like what the interim CEO was doing, focusing more on the browser and forgetting these side projects that leads to nowhere, but it seems it's back to business with this one.
And people don't have to all agree on the same things. People can get together to work towards cause X and then individually believe in mutually exclusive causes alpha, beta, gamma.
Queer people aren't causes, they're people. Imagine I worked on the Brave browser, and in my personal time maintained a website aimed at discouraging personal relationships with him. This would probably make me difficult to work with, despite my personal views not impacting the quality of my work. You might say these examples aren't one-to-one, and you're right. My example doesn't actually push any legislation forbidding him from having a relationship with a consenting person, and it costs a hell of a lot less than $1000.
I dunno. Public Defenders (and defense attorneys in general, but PDs don't get oodles of cash) have to work with some pretty reprehensible people sometimes.
I used to live in Bahrain while my wife worked in oil and gas, and a lot of her colleagues had some... pretty different... views from us but we still got along. Hell, the country itself has a pretty significant Sunni / Shia divide, with employees being one or the other and they managed to work with each other just fine.
I think in general people should be able to work with others that they have significant differences in opinion with. Now, in tech, we've been privileged to be in a seller's (of labor) market, where we can exercise some selectivity in where we work, so it's certainly a headwind in hiring if the CEO is undesirable (for whatever reason), but plenty of people still will for the cause or the pay or whatever. You just have to balance whether the hiring problems the CEO may or may not cause are worth whatever else they bring to the table.
That's exactly my point. They are able to do their job despite not believing in their clients, which for public defenders even means trying to let their clients go free, which is a fair bit further than is asked of a tech employee who disagrees with their CEO.
If you were on a hiring committee, and your otherwise-qualified-candidate had a political opinion you objected to in this way, perhaps with a similar donation, would you refuse to hire them?
If it’s about government fiscal policy, probably not. If it’s more along the lines of discriminating against or undermining people’s rights, then yeah I would refuse to hire them.
If you were about to hire a candidate and then found out that they donate regularly to the “Arrest kbelder and deport them to El Salvador” fund, would you hire them?
Marriages aren't people. And you probably unknowingly depend on a lot of people that despise many things you consider part of your identity. Touch grass and let people have opinions different from your own.
Ive worked with Catholics and my views on sola scriptura and the authority of the Pope never came up once. Ive worked with Muslims, and it was never an issue. Ive worked with Hindus. Ive worked with Chinese, Pakistanis, Indians, Bangladeshis, Nigerians, Brazilians, Kenyans, Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, Ghanans, Mexicans, and many other nationalities. I have been on many teams and in my companies with a combinatorial explosion of fundamentally incompatible beliefs.
So yes I do expect staff to work under a ceo that is opposed to gay marriage, an idea that I would bet globally has a less than 50% popular support.
Have you donated to anti-Muslim, anti-Christian etc. platforms in a public fashion while working with them? Because you would've found quite quickly how that changes the interactions.
I don't mind working with someone who has incompatible views with me, but I'd be quite unhappy working with someone who was actively working on undermining my rights.
That depends. I have donated to Religious missionary work publicly, that could be seen by an extremist of any other religion who sees this as a zero sum game as anti their religion. But I don't bring this up in work because that is uncouth and not what my job is about, and would expect the same from co-workers. Eich also didn't donate publicly, this was dug up and then foisted upon him. If someone were to dig through records they could find my donations and party affiliations, which is what they did to him. He was being professional, they were the ones that were taking his private views and forcing them into the public sphere.
> taking his private views and forcing them into the public sphere
Donations in an effort to change the law are fundamentally a public action, whether or not the government requires the fact of your donation to be publicly disclosed. Seeking to use the law to hurt people is not a private view.
I don't think childless couples (of any gender) should get any societal advantages yet I have no problem working with people that disagree. Why has everything to be black-or-white, left-or-right, with us or against us? That's not a productive way to think about others.
If there's nothing fundamental about marriage and it's just some weird coliving arrangement, then why ban it for only some groups in the first place? Nothing productive or even rational about it.
Why is the reaction seen as irrational or immature but not the action that triggered it?
> Why is the reaction seen as irrational or immature but not the action that triggered it?
The analogous (but with an opposite direction) action would be campaigning to make gay marriage legal. Nobody has a problem with people doing that. The reason people object to Eich's firing is because it is a very clear escalation in the culture war, not because they have strong opinions about gay marriage.
It has to be us vs against us because that's what law is all about -- outlawing certain actions.
It's one thing to believe as you do, it's quite another to push for legislation that would (in your example) deny childless couples societal advantages, whatever that actually means.
If you're not in favor of a-or-b arguments the answer is to allow a and b, eh?
For one, being childless is a choice (mostly, especially since adoption is a possibility). It's indeed OK to have different opinions for what how laws apply differently to people based on their choices. Being gay is not a choice, it is rather similar to race/ethnic background, and it's generally not OK to have laws that treat people differently based on something like that. I'm sure there are more nuances to add, but it seems to me that makes it quite a different situation.
I don't think everyone agrees that being gay is not a choice. There are no outward physical indicators of a person's sexual orientation. It's entirely behavorial and therefore plausibly under the conscious control of the person. Now, I would agree that a person doesn't choose which gender he is attracted to, but it not something than anyone else can see and immediately understand as an inborn characteristic.
Clearly being black, or hispanic, or asian, or white are physical characteristics. Far fewer people would argue that there is any element of choice in that.
If you think for a moment, you'll realise that it's irrelevant whether marriage is important to you - it's important to many.
So when a person wishes to deny this important institution to a minority, they are creating an out-group and discriminating against them.
By that logic, we can put those discriminators themselves in an out-group and discriminate against them. We can deny them institutions such as directorships. Fair's fair.
It's more than fair - despite what conversion camps want to sell, being queer is an intransigent characteristic. Being a bully is just a choice. Discriminating against bullies is as morally just as discriminating against the incompetent.
In a liberal context, marriage means nothing except for being a symbol of a union between two people. But all rules, obligations and rights that make marriage a meaningful institution are rooted in religion, and are hence not always respected outside of religion.
You could argue that there are laws that only apply to married couples, and that THAT brings meaning to marriage. But:
Firstly, generally speaking, even the most important features of a marriage are not protected by law, most notably: fidelity. So the law is disjoint from what's traditionally considered to be obligations within marriage. That leaves the legal definition at the whims of contemporary polititians. Therefore, law cannot assign the word "marriage" any consistent meaning throughout time.
Secondly, to my limited knowledge, the line between a married couple and two people living together is increasingly getting blurred by laws that apply marriage legal obligations even to non-married couples if they have lived together for long enough. It suggests that law-makers do not consider a ceremony and a "marriage" announcement to be what should really activate these laws, but rather other factors. Although, they seem to acknowledge that an announcement of a marriage implies the factors needed to activate these laws. If that makes sense...
So marriage is inherently a religious institution that in a religious context comes with rules, obligations and rights. Hence why people who take religion seriously will find it offensive that somebody that completely disregards these rules calls themselves married.
The main benefits are tax free gifts between partners and filing jointly, both of which seem very reasonable and wouldn't be of value to single people.
The actual tax breaks most people think about are tied to dependents in your household, not marriage.
That's right. To get a bit philosophical, it's interesting to see some people's justifications about how they are right to be intolerant in the ways they want to be, while still believing that they are free-thinking and tolerant. A lot of convoluted arguments are really about keeping one's self-image intact, justifying beliefs that are contradictory but which the person really wants to believe. I think that is a trap that is more dangerous for intelligent people.
For what it's worth, I support and supported gay marriage at the time, but don't think people should be forced out of their job for believing otherwise. Thoughts and words you disagree with should be met with alternative thoughts and words.
And how many Mozilla were fired while the CEO increased her pay to more than $7M per year?
How can staff members feel trust and been seen as equals when they get fired to make place for someone that is already earning 70x their wage. All while tanking the company to new lows.
If you think adults marrying other adults and adults marrying children are in any way equivalent, as you imply, then yes your thinking is deeply disordered.
That's not what he said or implied, he's merely responding to your argument 'Donating any amount of money to prevent people you don't know from marrying each other'. I think you might have a justifiable argument here, but it's not clear at all to me what it is.
I cannot imagine the mental model you're working with if my observation is not crystal clear despite omitting the word "adults" in my initial post. Both your and Y_Y's responses read as bad faith to me, but it could be extraordinary ignorance.
In either case I have no idea how to make it clearer for you. Good luck.
Yes people can and should have differences of opinion but a line is crossed when you openly campaign to eliminate the differences of opinion by curtailing the freedoms of the people you disagree with.
So pretty much any law that is opposed by someone. Shop lifting shouldn't be legal because there are people who like free stuff. Curltailing the freedom of people who want free stuff improves society by protecting people's property.
Just because people can get together to work towards a cause while believing in mutually exclusive ideals, that doesn't mean it's the most effective way for people to work together. The ability to do a thing and the ability to do a thing well is a big difference.
The point was not "whatever the majority wants is therefore good". The point is that if you were to apply the "you get fired from your job for this" standard evenly, the majority of the country would've had to get fired from their jobs. That is a pretty unreasonable standard to apply, imo.
Also, come on man. It's in really bad taste to compare stuff to the Holocaust. Nobody was being murdered here, it's not remotely the same.
> The point is that if you were to apply the "you get fired from your job for this" standard evenly, the majority of the country would've had to get fired from their jobs.
Standards should be higher for folks with more power. The cashier at the grocery store expressing bigoted beliefs won't harm me much; my boss doing it is more serious.
> Nobody was being murdered here, it's not remotely the same.
I assure you, homophobia has its murder victims. (Including a good number of Holocaust ones.)
Obama opposed gay marriage as well. As did many prominent politicians, left and right.
The swing from opposing it to supporting it was a huge cultural shift, and I'm not sure I've seen anything like that happen so quickly, except maybe during a time of war. It went from being opposed by a strong majority to supported by a strong majority in... maybe 5-8 years? It was pretty impressive, and I think it's a sign that the marketplace of ideas can still function.
It helps a lot that it's really a harmless thing. It's giving people more freedom, not taking any away from anyone, and so as soon as it became clear that it wasn't causing a problem, everybody shrugged and went 'ok'.
I wonder if in hindsight he's embarrassed to have been on the wrong side of history. Imagine spending your time and money fighting inevitable social change. Fighting gay marriage is just a time-shifted fight against women voting or interracial marriage.
Wikipedia also says he's Catholic. From what I understand, the Church's positions on such things have evolved at least somewhat since then. His views could have totally changed or evolved since then (can't find anything publicly myself).
No part of this is true, fwiw. His salary at Mozilla was not high and he was a strong advocate of keeping executive compensation low (and as supporting evidence, that compensation shot up soon after he left). He may have made more from Brave, but that was obviously well after the donation. He also never backed down from his donation and the directly implied opposition to gay marriage, only stating that it comes from his personal beliefs and that he refused to discuss those openly. (I disagree with his position on gay marriage, or at least the position that I can infer from his donation, but I agree with his right and decision to keep it a private matter.)
I had... complex but mostly positive feelings about Eich in the time I worked for him (indirectly), but I can state unequivocally that he's not someone who would bend his principles as a result of getting cornered at a party.
What I meant is he is a guy who have evolved in the center of the tech revolution in the 90s and 2000s. If he is not horribly bad with money he probably made a lot at least in various investments.
So I would guess $1000 was almost nothing to him. He is not really supporting anything by donating $1000.
I listened to him in a interview once, he really feel like a nice guy.
Yes, because (1) they spent that money badly as can be seen from the non-Google revenue numbers of Mozilla and Firefox's market share and (2) people are comparing practices of a company that gets $500M for free and a practices of a company that is essentially bootstrapped, which makes no sense.
But then he went on to make Yet Another Chromium Fork, so it doesn't seem like he was particularly attached to Gecko or what it stands for in the browser engine market anyway. What's to say that Mozilla wouldn't have given up the fight and pivoted to Chromium, like Opera and Edge did, if he was still in charge?
They originally started with Gecko and switched to Chromium.
"There were a ton of issues using Gecko, starting with (at the time) no CDM (HTML5 DRM module) so no HD video content from the major studios, Netflix, Amazon, etc. -- Firefox had an Adobe deal but it was not transferable or transferred to any other browser that used Gecko -- and running the gamut of paper-cuts to major web incompatibilities especially on mobile, vs. WebKit-lineage engines such as Chromium/Blink."
And he went in on integrating trendy things like Ads that pay crypto and AI integrated into the browser, so it's not like there wouldn't be AI if he were in charge.
Is there a name for the fallacy where you assume the path not taken is much better? Because I agree, this is that. Mozilla’s challenges are foundational, Eich as CEO wouldn’t have made a dramatic difference in outcomes.
It isn't really Yet Another Chromium Fork, they're the company that does most anti-ad research / development. Stuff like Project Sugarcoat[0]. Their adblocking engine is also native and does not depend on Manifest V2, making it work better than any blocker that has to switch to MV3 when Google removes MV2.
And they're the only browser that has a functional alternative for webpage-based ads. Active right now. And you can instead fund pages / creators by buying BAT directly instead of watching private ads.
On top of that, Brave's defaults are much more privacy-protecting than Firefox's, you only get good protection on Firefox if you harden the config by mucking about in about:config.
People love to hate on Brave because they made some weird grey area missteps in the past (injecting affiliate links on crypto sites and pre-installing a deactivated VPN) and they're involved in crypto. But its not like Firefox hasn't made some serious missteps in the past, but somehow Firefox stans have decided to forget about the surreptitiously installed extension for Mr. Robot injected ads (yes really).
If people could be objective for a second they'd see that Brave took over the torch from Firefox and has been carrying it for a long time now.
Not to have him cancelled in the first place. No need to pretend that doing something under the mob pressure is the same as doing something entirely willingly
Far, far more people have protested the positions of power held by (for example) Joe Rogan and Dave Chappelle. They ignored the cancellation attempts, and they're richer and more influential today than they were a few years ago.
"Cancellation" is a state of being famous enough that your controversial beliefs upset a large, loud number of people. In Eich's case, it threatened to have no effect on his career. He chose to change his career because of it.
Eich expressed his First Amendment rights, and other people expressed theirs in return. Why should either of them give up those rights for fear of offending the other?
Yes and he is writing like an MBA/Product Manager (or is it the AI?)
Actually he is most likely a drone. Meaning he is speaking like he believes he is the CEO of a public company talking to the shareholders, so of course he talks about how AI is changing software.
But guess what Mozilla is not a public company, there is no stock to pump and the thing it really miss is its users. Going from 30% to less than 5% market share in 15 years with a good product.
Actually I am pretty sure the users who left just do not want to much AI.
But he is an MBA drone so he is just gonna play the same music as every other MBA drone.
This site in general has a massive hate boner for any part of a corporate structure that isn't the engineering department. Sales, admin, marketing, legal, HR, etc... all get flak from the HN community for being irredeemably idiotic wastes of space.
"Hacker News commenters are frequently unaware that their use cases and customer preferences do not reflect the average customer demand in the market." - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46192577
One of my favorite examples of this is when HNers insist that if only an auto-manufacturer would make a simple car with tactile buttons and no screen or creature comforts it would sell like hotcakes.
I'm afraid they're delegated to coding nowadays and even open source projects are run like corporations with attached "foundations" parasites where funneling out money on unrelated stuff occurs.
This piece linked is a dry marketing and nothing else, and I don't believe in a single bit this guy is saying or will ever say.
The line about AI being always a choice that user can simply turn it off: I need to go to about:config registry to turn every occurrence of it in Firefox. So there's that.
I very much doubt that the track record of companies fronted by an hands-on engineer is much better. If anything they probably fail faster on average so we never hear about them.
> Firefox will grow from a browser into a broader ecosystem of trusted software. Firefox will remain our anchor. It will evolve into a modern AI browser and support a portfolio of new and trusted software additions.
Looking at his LinkedIn profile, he seems to be the MBA type, with little to no technical experience. For the past year he's been the SVP or GM of Firefox, whatever that means. Take that as you will...
It continues to amaze me how a company racking in over 500 million a year in revenue can continue to fail so spectacularly. With that income there's no reason they shouldn't be the leading browser. Doubling down on AI is only going to burn more money while they continue to lose market share.
Are you implying that the direct competitor, Chrome, is taking in the same or less? Chrome has a much larger staff (excluding the rest of Google), so I guess they must all be earning a small fraction of Mozilla staff salaries. Such dedicated people!
My point is Mozilla achieves practically nothing despite making half a billion ad dollars for free from Google. If Wikipedia's numbers are right, that's $730,000 per employee.
Ah, but your words say Mozilla should be doing more than nothing, they should in fact be winning:
> With that income there's no reason they shouldn't be the leading browser.
despite having less resources than their primary competitor.
Well, our primary competitor. I work for Mozilla. Which apparently means I'm making $730K. Maybe that's why I pay my house cleaner with a suitcase full of cash every week. Who isn't as happy about it as she could be, on account of not existing. Some people are picky about that.
I'd love to be growing our market share dramatically, since I put in a lot of work when I'm not on HN. Sadly I've been told that work is achieving practically nothing. I will point out that practically nothing does at least include still having enough sway in standards committees to hold the line against an ad-tech company whose incentives all push in the dystopic direction that everything is currently headed in. (Ok, maybe not fully holding the line...) If that stops being the case and Mozilla stops making a difference, then I believe I could still get a job elsewhere for a fair bit more than I'm currently making.
Oh wait, I forgot I'm already making $730K. Maybe not, then.
I'm reading HN on my laptop outside, and a ladybug landed on my screen right as I was reading this comment. It's sitting there as I write this. I know this doesn't contribute to the discussion in any way but it's so neat I just needed to share.
Fair, but I've been following Andreas Kling since he started (publically) with SerenityOS back a couple years ago, and he's a real hacker -- as real as they come.
I've watched hours of how he works on YouTube, it's fantastic, if anyone can lead a browser team, its him.
Not relevant here. Yes, you can donate to Mozilla.org and stipulate whatever you like, but Mozilla.org does not develop Firefox so telling them to use it for developing Firefox will do about as much good as telling them to use it to resurrect unicorns. Mozilla.org owns Mozilla Corporation, which is a for-profit entity that develops Firefox, but thus far the corporation hasn't wanted the complications and restrictions that would come from accepting donations.
Hm. I'm dumb so you'll need to spell it out for me.
MoFo and MoCo both have contributors, yes. Both have unpaid contributors, which apparently are not who you're talking about. Both also have paid people who work for them. Whether or not you call them "contributors" or "employees" doesn't matter much, I guess. But still, MoFo contributors, paid or not, do not work on Firefox. Firefox is not a MoFo product. Most MoCo contributors do work on Firefox. Firefox is a MoCo product. It's confusing because MoFo owns MoCo, but owning a company does not mean its products are your products, nor that you can freely assist with those products (especially in an arms-length setup involving taxes, which is the very reason for the MoFo/MoCo split in the first place.) MoFo does other things, non-Firefox things, like advocacy and pissing off HN commenters who assume that "Mozilla does X" headlines always mean MoCo is doing X.
One of us is confused. I have that uneasy sensation I get when something is going "whoosh!" over my head, so it might be me.
> Most MoCo contributors do work on Firefox. Firefox is a MoCo product.
This is true.
> But still, MoFo contributors, paid or not, do not work on Firefox.
This is not true, based on what I've read about it. Do you have personal experience with these orgs that suggests otherwise?
Regardless, nothing is stopping Foundation funds from being directed to Firefox development. If someone gave them, for example, $1M that could only be spent on Firefox, they could pay Corporation or an external consultancy to contribute to the open-source Firefox repositories.
This is already happening, either through Foundation or Corporation. One of the biggest Servo contributors works for a FOSS consultancy.
There are corollaries to what I'm describing in most large nonprofits in the US. You get money that a donor requires you to spend in a certain way, and you spend that money that way. If you can't do it with in-house people, you give it to consultants.
> This is not true, based on what I've read about it. Do you have personal experience with these orgs that suggests otherwise?
Yes, I work for MoCo.
> Regardless, nothing is stopping Foundation funds from being directed to Firefox development. If someone gave them, for example, $1M that could only be spent on Firefox, they could pay Corporation or an external consultancy to contribute to the open-source Firefox repositories.
I don't really understand the whole setup, but I believe tax law is what is stopping this. What you are describing would be fraud (or something like it; IANAL). Money flows MoCo->MoFo (via dividends). Paying MoCo for something directly or hiring consultants to provide value would be "private inurement" [1], a phrase which here means that lawyers like scary words. It is using tax-exempt money to enrich private individuals.
But the tl;dr is that the MoFo/MoCo split was created specifically so that money could flow MoCo->MoFo and not the other way around, in order for MoCo to do business-y stuff without jeopardizing MoFo's non-profit status. Nvidia's game where it pays companies to buy their chips would not fly in the non-profit sector.
> This is already happening, either through Foundation or Corporation. One of the biggest Servo contributors works for a FOSS consultancy.
Servo was split out from Mozilla during COVID, and sadly is now completely unaffiliated. It is in the Linux Foundation Europe now. (Igalia is great, though!)
"Mozilla's former CEO, Mitchell Baker, earned nearly $7 million in 2022, with compensation rising from around $3 million in 2020 to over $5.5 million in 2021 and $6.9 million in 2022"
Just to clarify how outrageous the Mozilla CEO compensation is, consider that Tim Cook makes 0.019% of Apple's revenue in compensation ($75M on $391BN of revenue). For Sundar Pichai (Google), it's 0.003%; Samsung is 0.0001%; Nadella at Microsoft is 0.032%.
For Mozilla? 1.18%! That's almost FORTY TIMES these other companies. Apple revolutionized mobile computing; Google revolutionized search, Microsoft owns enterprise software, and Samsung is one of the largest hardware manufacturers in the world. Mozilla makes a second-rate web browser whose sole distinguishing feature is supporting a community-built addon that does a great job blocking Youtube ads.
I could give $100k per year to Mozilla for the rest of my life, and my lifetime donation would cover less than half of the CEO's salary.
Yeah, considering how poorly it went and how much market share they lost I also always thought it was outrageous... Also so many people laid off and projects shut down. I don't have any insight, and I could be way off, but it always felt like the company was captured by bureaucracy and drained as long as it was possible. Again I could be way off, as I don't have any personal connections to it. I was a regular user until around 10 years ago, but Chrome just leapfrogged them and that was it. There was at one point nothing left other than nostalgia.
edit: I still remember using Mozilla which was this "good thing" but somehow clunky, and then getting so excited when trying Phoenix for the first time, which was then renamed to Firebird, and lastly Firefox. It was so "obviously" the right thing to use.
> People want software that is fast, modern, but also honest about what it does.
I want my browser to be able to run uBlock Origin, so therefore people want more than just what is specified above. I did quit using Google Chrome because they banned uBO (I know the command-line-flags hack still works, but for how long?).
If Firefox also bans uBO through removal of Manifest v2 without offering a proper alternative, then it's just as big of a piece of crap as Chrome is. Due to lack of real choices, I could as well move back to Chrome. I'm currently using Vivaldi.
The only answer is for them to go back to "plan A" and do their own things. Stop copying Chrome. Stop looking at Safari and Edge. Stop the rapid release nonsense. Go back to the fundamentals of speed, security, and stability on desktops and leave the rest to plugins. Once desktop is back on track, they should begin fixing mobile. When both are great, do nothing else except bugfix and performance fixes. We want this and nothing more.
> Firefox will remain our anchor. It will evolve into a modern AI browser
Aligning yourself with garbage generators is how you lose trust. Meanwhile, the top user requested features still point to basic deficiencies of browser UI
I find this whole "I gotta be able to turn off AI!" thing to be silly, personally. Do you also want to be able to turn off anything that uses binary search? Perhaps anything written in C++? Ooh, maybe it's nested for loops! Those kinda suck, give me an option to turn those off!
My indelicately expressed point is that the algorithm or processing model is not something anyone should care about. What matters? Things like: is my data sent off my device? Is there any way someone else can see what I'm doing or the data I'm generating? Am I burning large amounts of electricity? But none of those are "is it AI or not?"
Firefox already has a good story about what is processed locally vs being sent to a server, and gives you visibility and control over that. Why aren't the complaints about "cloud AI", at least? Why is it always "don't force-feed me AI in any form!"?
(To be clear, I'm no cheerleader for AI in the browser, and it bothers me when AI is injected as a solution without bothering to find a problem worth solving. But I'm not going to argue against on-device AI that does serve a useful purpose; I think that's great and we should find as many such opportunities as possible.)
IMO Zen Browser fixed a lot of the Firefox UI painpoints while keeping what I like about it. It would be a smart move to make the Zen UI the canonical version of Firefox. Especially since features like vertical tabs, folders, pins, split screen, and new tab previews are more in the power user use case and Chrome has entirely dominated the casual user demographic.
Copying portion of the comment I said under another comment:
I and many stuck with Firefox despite being it being horrible until quantum release because Mozilla was aligned with community. But their tech is better now but they aren't aligned with community.
It was the community that made Firefox overtake IE. They seem to forget that.
Unless its gonna come pre-installed like chrome, they need community make the user base grow. They are absolutely dumb for going after a crowd who are happy with Chrome while shitting on the crowd which want to be with them.
I switched back to Firefox around the quantum release and have been very happy with it since. I certainly have some complaints, but it's night and day compared to what Google wants me to deal with.
Ofcourse it is. But that also doesn't make my above comment wrong though. Not to mention, many were silent for so long against their actions. Now it looks like the entire community has started voicing against it. The ball is now on Mozilla's court.
Not to mention there is more than just technical aspect with Firefox and community. A lot of people have invested a ton of time in it.
Mozilla warrants all the flack they are getting. I am just saying they can't virtue signal their way through this. It wont work.
i feel like there ought to be a meaningfully large market for a "trusted" company where part of the brand identity is being able to form sentences that do not include the token "ai", especially with e.g. microsoft's recent excesses in this direction, but what do i know about the alleged realities of running a tech company in $YEAR
Got my first change in Firefox today that says "Nightly uses AI to read your Open Tabs". Says its local but I really have zero trust for telemetry on this kind of stuff.
I was on board with this until he said, Firefox would become a “modern AI browser.” I am not sure what that looks like or means, and I am not sure anyone really does. It feels like some kind of obligatory statement to appease someone somewhere.
Hopefully this translates into clearer direction for Firefox and better execution across the company, instead of pushing multiple micro products that are likely destined to fail, as Mozilla has done over the past 5+ years.
From his LinkedIn profile [1], his recent roles have been consistently centered on Firefox:
Chief Executive Officer
Dec 2025 - Present · 1 mo
-------
General Manager of Firefox
Jul 2025 - Dec 2025 · 6 mos
-------
SVP of Firefox
Dec 2024 - Jul 2025 · 8 mos
-------
He appears to have a solid background in product thinking, feature development, and UX. If his main focus remains on Firefox, that could be a positive sign for the product and its long term direction.
I think the fundamental problem with Firefox and Mozilla is, that people want an organization to maximize Firefox, but Mozilla is an organization maximizing something else while preserving Firefox.
The fundamental problem is expectation and reality mismatch, and is being 'solved' from two directions: new ideal browsers, or criticism of Mozilla in the hope that it improves.
Mozilla has been in a dire place for years. Notably someone years ago posted a chart showing how exec salary keeps going up while marketshare keeps going down [1].
In the Microsoft antitrust trial in the 1990s, the court established that having a browser monopoly was anticompetitive. Sadly, we've allowed this situation to repeat on mobile so Chrome and Safari now dominate. Windows has a lot of default Edge installs (and set as the default browser, particularly in corporate settings) but it's really just a Webkit skin at this point.
Now iOS does technically allow third-party browsers but they're just Safari skins and they're not as good (eg at different times they have more limited features like not havintg the latest Javascript engine).
I really think we need to end the bundled exclusive apps on mobile for certain things.
Until then I'm really not sure what Mozilla's path forward is. They've tried to pivot on things like privacy but I don't think any of these make sense or at least won't produce a revenue source to justify the investment. How do you fund something like Mozilla? And how do you create value for users?
The forks do not currently have the manpower to take up the full maintenance of a browser but that does not mean it's impossible that they'll be able to rally enough developers in case Mozilla implodes. A lot of people want a truly free browser to exist. Currently Firefox (barely) manages to fulfill that role and keeps many of those people from spending their time/money on alternatives.
fwiw I've been running brave for the past 5 years and it seems fine, they put a bunch of weird shit in it you need to turn off, but otherwise it...browses the internet well?
Mozilla needs to get back to just being a browser project with foundation-based corporate governance.
I don't get why everything has to include the latest trend. Do what the Linux kernel project does: be a bazaar. If someone wants to create deeper AI integration into Firefox, they'll pick up that task, put it in a branch, and the community will discuss whether it merits inclusion in the main. If it does, it'll be there; if not, it won't be.
Operate on donations of time and money with a clear goal of what the project should be.
I know quite a few non-tech firefox users. None of them want the AI integration. I am wary of confirmation bias, but I feel this is one of those simpsons headmaster meme moments: Am I wrong? No, I am right! the users are wrong! the users want me to spend millions developing AI for firefox instead of all the other things.
One of the secondary awful things about AI is that I have to hear news sources I like listening to complain about it constantly.
This AI hype is frustrating, but it's also frustrating that it dominates conversations with valid points that are identical to the last five times it was talked about.
At this point it's almost more annoying than the AI hype in the first place.
The hype by now at least seems pretty much self aware. It's mind-boggling to me that people don't realize all the Mozilla stuff is completely empty/PR fluff. You have to say you're an "AI first company" because that's the only thing investors want to hear in 2025. Everyone knows it's all fluff, they say it anyways. I will wait and see if it actually meaningfully affects their product or not.
The complaints meanwhile are spammed everywhere, and like you said, it's the same exact content every time. We get it, new features that you aren't going to use are annoying. Disable them or just don't use them, is is really that big a deal? The CEO literally says they will all be able to be disabled.
Oh, let's see who's going to be the leader of the organization that's going to save privacy on the internet. Bet he has a track record of valuing free information and user privacy.
Wait, just like the last CEO, the only way to find out anything about him is a LinkedIn page. I'd have to create an account, log in, and consent to letting them collect and do anything they want with my information.
Apparently Mozilla doesn't have the technical capability of displaying an html web page that doesn't require a login and surrendering to data collection in order to view. Now try to find information about Satya Nadella without giving up your privacy.
What would be nice is something like the Python foundation, people can be a reasonable membership to become "members" of the organisation with a right proposal and vote for decisions.
My wish list:
- A secure email (with optional encryption/signature, with whitelists)
- IM (with point to point encryption).
- identity management (I would love delegating the login/password ceremonial to Mozilla instead of reinventing the well for each site).
It seems I have trust in Mozilla.
> As Mozilla moves forward, we will focus on becoming the trusted software company.
Does this sentence feel incomplete to anyone else? Is it supposed to say "the most trusted software company" or is it supposed to be an emphasis (i.e. the trusted software company)?
"Trust" and "AI" are mutually exclusive. Not really impressed with this guy. My guess is the board vetted this guy to be more politically correct than anything else.
Because Mozilla is an explicitly mission driven non-profit. Linux doesn't really have a model, the closest equivalent is basically Chromium which is to say it's an open source project to which extremely large companies donate the vast majority of developer hours.
I think this is a great insight and great leadership.
While the for-profit world, and many others, have embraced extremes of predatory capitalism, contempt for users, and disinformation, Mozilla has a fantastic opportunity to compete on its unique capabilities:
It's not under pressure to adapt that business culture - no private equity, Wall Street, etc. pushing it; its culture is antithetical to those things; and its culture has always been geared toward service to the community and trust.
The insight and leadership is to find this word, which hasn't been used much (I think many in business or politics would laugh at it), is incredibly powerful and a fundamental social need, and is clear guidance for everyone and every activity at Mozilla and for customers.
Imagine using a company's products and not having to think about them trying to cheat you.
Neat! I didn't make it that far. Nice thing about red flags is, there's no value in continuing after you see them. Turns out, the thing the red flag made me accuse them of was their stated goal. Case in point!
I don't trust Mozilla. I don't trust them with my donation money. I don't trust their software any more than other browser vendors.
"Third: Firefox will grow from a browser into a broader ecosystem of trusted software. Firefox will remain our anchor. It will evolve into a modern AI browser and support a portfolio of new and trusted software additions."
Yeah, no. Just make a browser that doesn't suck. Mozilla has been wasting a ton of money, lost almost all of their market share, and have been focusing on making new products nobody wants for a VERY long time and this looks to continue.
I'm sure the new leader of the trojan horse (fox?) is not going to pivot to AI...
"...Third: Firefox will grow from a browser into a broader ecosystem of trusted software. Firefox will remain our anchor. It will evolve into a modern AI browser and support a portfolio of new and trusted software additions..."
"It will evolve into a modern AI browser"
and there it is, the most "trusted" software company pivoting to AI.
I for one, am grateful to Mozilla for still being around, pushing for an open web.
Their documentation is excellent, the improvements and roadmap for Thunderbird made me finally adopt it, and I appreciate their privacy-friendlier translation services. uBO works great in Firefox, and I can't stand using a browser without its full features.
About MBA types: the free software project I work for has an MBA type, which I initially resented as being an outsider. However, they manage the finances, think about team and project growth long-term (with heavy financial consequences), and ignore the daily technical debates (which are left to the lead devs), and listen to users, big and small. Some loud users like to complain that we don't listen to them, and sometimes we kick them out, because we do listen to users.
I don't know much about Mozilla internals, if I am to judge from the results: Mozilla is still here, despite everyone saying for 10+ years that they are going to die. They are still competitive. They are still holding big tech accountable, despite having a fraction of their power. I can imagine that they make a lot of people here very uncomfortable.
> despite everyone saying for 10+ years that they are going to die.
What many people have been saying in my experience is pretty much the opposite: that Mozilla isn't going anywhere because Google wants them (needs them) to be around. That it's their antitrust Trojan horse.
The only thing that gives some slight semblance of hope is that he at least acknowledges that Mozilla is vulnerable and he very very briefly mentions needing new sources of revenue.
No mention of an endowment (like Wikipedia has) or concrete plans to spend money efficiently or in a worthwhile way, and I sure hope ‘invest in AI’ doesn’t mean ‘piss away 9 figures that could have set up an endowment to give Mozilla some actual resilience’.
I hope is that he’s at least paranoid enough about Mozilla’s revenue sources to do anything about their current position that gives them resiliency. Mozilla has for well over a decade now been in a pathetic state where if Google turns off the taps it is quite simply over. He talks a lot about peoples’ trust in Mozilla. I don’t really remember what he’s talking about to be honest, but if Mozilla get to a point where they seem like they can exist without them simply being Google’s monopoly defence insurance, perhaps I’ll remember the feeling of trusting Mozilla. I miss it.
Firefox exists as long as uBlock exists. It’s a niche product and the only (thin) argument about using it is “don’t let Google become a monopoly" (the very same company that keeps Mozilla alive).
Its terrible management decisions, its questionable telemetry and at the end of the day, its performance are the reasons why it will never catch up and it will never get new users.
Lost me right about in the middle when he started chirping AI AI AI like a parrot. AI and trust do not go hand in hand. Focus on privacy, transparency and simplicity because instead. Good luck.
"It will evolve into a modern AI browser and support a portfolio of new and trusted software additions."
I stopped reading there. I just want a browser. Nothing else
Currently they spend millions of dollars (that mostly come from people wanting to support their browser) on huge salaries and projects that have nothing to do with their browser. At the same time they keep on taking steps to alienate those that are donating or using their products.
The bar for success is pretty low - stop wasting all them bucks, and stop alienating your users.
If you could do that, there is plenty of next steps.
I agree that most of their money comes from Google (at least for now).
But when you load their home page (https://www.mozillafoundation.org), the first thing you are greeted with is a banner that says they have raised over $6M in their last campaign alone.
So, it seems that millions are being donated by users.
The claim that most of those users want it to go to their browser is not supported or refuted by that page, but I have read a detailed breakdown of all their donations and attempts to guess what people really think they are donating for, and it matched my original statement - though I haven't got the time to search now, what do _you_ think people are donating for?
"Firefox will remain our anchor. It will evolve into a modern AI browser and support a portfolio of new and trusted software additions."
reading this genuinely disgusts me. I am so tired of this nonsense being shoved where it doesn't belong. I just want a fast browser that stays out of the way.
From my perspective, Firefox, a while back, just stopped working on issues that matter. They got into politics, they tried to do everything, but not as good.
If they just focused to produce a good browser, they would be way ahead. And time when you could get $100Ms from Google are slowly coming to an end. Money attracts grifters and this is what brought them down from my perspective.
Now, just to be honest, I wish they find a way. We always could use alternatives. Just don't expect this alternative to come from Mozilla.
So much BS and nitpicking isn't humanly possible to produce. We're looking at the work of corpo bot farms with deep pockets and deep experience in subversion.
I think it's more because they are too much "in the middle", so they get shit from both sides: the side that wants them completely disconnected from BigTech and the side that, well, just doesn't want them because BigTech is good (I presume?).
Every organization and every org leader make mistakes, often or less often, and Mozilla is no exception. But the sentiment here on HN towards it in every news that talks about Mozilla is frankly disappointing.
I will never understand the intense hatred people have for Mozilla and Firefox then go on to tell them how they should run the company. Which usually boils down to stuff they are already doing or fixing things they have no control over.
What product or market mozilla still relevant?
Of all the sites I manage, or companies I worked with in the last 5 years mozilla browsers were less than 1% of the userbase.
In Germany and France Mozilla has about the same market share as Edge, in Austria it's even more. Yes, Mozilla makes some dumb decision, but I think the bigger problem is that computer literacy has declined overall. Most people don't even realize they have a choice. Things like ad-blockers and privacy should be taught in schools.
Having worked at Mozilla a while ago, the CEO role is one I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy. Success is oddly defined: it's a non-profit (well, a for-profit owned by a non-profit) that needs to make a big profit in a short amount of time. And anything done to make that profit will annoy the community.
I hope Anthony leans into what makes Mozilla special. The past few years, Mozilla's business model has been to just meekly "us-too!" trends... IoT, Firefox OS, and more recently AI.
What Mozilla is good at, though, is taking complex things the average user doesn't really understand, and making it palpable and safe. They did this with web standards... nobody cared about web standards, but Mozilla focused on usability.
(Slide aside, it's not a coincidence the best CEO Mozilla ever had was a designer.)
I'm not an AI hater, but I don't think Mozilla can compete here. There's just too much good stuff already, and it's not the type of thing Mozilla will shine with.
Instead, if I were CEO, I'd go the opposite way: I'd focus on privacy. Not AI privacy, but privacy in general. Buy a really great email provider, and start to own "identity on the internet". As there's more bots and less privacy, identity is going to be incredibly important over the years.. and right now, Google defacto owns identity. Make it free, but also give people a way to pay.
Would this work? I don't know. But like I said, it's not a job I envy.
Fully agree with this.
- Mozilla SSL Certs - for corporations that don't want Let's Encrypt
- Mozilla Mail - a reliable Exchange/Google Mail alternative (desperately needed imo)
- Thunderbird for iOS - why is this not a thing yet?
- Mozilla Search - metasearch that isn't based on Bing/DDG/Google
- Mozilla HTTPS DNS - although Cloudflare will probably always do this better
All seemingly low-hanging fruit with brand alignment.
> - Mozilla Search - metasearch that isn't based on Bing/DDG/Google
As much hate as Brave gets overall, I think Mozilla should take a page from Brave's book if they're going to make a search engine. I think they should have their own index, possibly supplemented by Bing or Google. Let people opt-in to using their browsers to help crawl for the search engine index, like Brave does. Then add in some power-user features like goggles and custom ranking, and they'd have a pretty compelling search engine. They should even be able to subsidize it somewhat with advertising: DDG and Brave Search are the only two websites I allow ads on, because they're usually relevant and they're never intrusive.
They could partner with Kagi. Pretty much everyone trusts Kagi, so if Mozilla convinces them to get on board, Mozilla must be actually serious about being trustworthy.
Kagi is just an AI company. (That was always their stated goal...)
I wouldn't partner with them, but if they do make a search engine they should take a page out of their book and focus on giving quality results. They can start by blacklisting any seo blogspammy site and instead try and direct you to the best results for any search first (for example, a wikipedia article or relevant docs)
> Pretty much everyone trusts Kagi
...on a forum run by its investors whose goal is to push Kagi, sure. Outside of this forum, nobody knows about a fringe little search engine that is paywalled and only has 62k users.
For a brand like Mozilla, even something as dumb as Ecosia would be a better fit, as they have about 250x the number of users of Kagi.
> on a forum run by its investors
They are not VC funded afaik, and esp not YC funded.
> 250x the number of users
If you offer the service for free and serve ads in "privacy respecting way" sure you get more users. But anyway this is a mozilla's states goal too, so it would fit.
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/company/
Third paragraph. They didn't go down the official YC route, they just let their initial users invest in it. How many of those investors do you think are among us here pushing it at every opportunity because it's in their (undisclosed) financial interest to do so? Even when it makes no sense to do so like here?
> How many of those investors do you think are among us here pushing it
Probably a bunch are users here, but
1. the amount of money (~2.5m) gathered in a 2-year period from 93 people seem peanuts in VC terms, if we are talking about YC itself rather than random users
2. their whole approach and strategy seems to aim towards a sustainable, long term development rather than quick profit (so far)
3. there does not seem to be any obvious link between them and YC itself in general
4. even if some of the 93 people are "pushing it" here, quite a few other users do the same without being investors (I have done/do it), and the former would probably do it without being investors anyway. There are bigger problems than some random people who invested in some company write once in a while supporting comments in some forum online.
I guess "forum run by its investors" can be interpreted as either the users of the forum are investors or the admins/owners are, so I tried to address both.
I think it is more like that users here are more prone to like kagi and want to pay for search (they spend more time online on a computer, they have jobs where web search is important to them etc), so you have people saying how great kagi is, but their experience does not necessarily extend to the general population as much because most people do not care as much about these things to think they are worth paying. Rather than most of them being actually kagi investors and trying to get people subscribe to kagi for their investment to grow. People can also just be satisfied with a product/service and talk about it.
Meh, my trust in Kagi is kinda shot, given that they seem to have forgotten that sales tax existed[0].
[0]: https://d-shoot.net/kagi.html
Why is Brave getting hate? Their browsers are treating me very well on mobile and desktop. I am always horrified when I see how the web looks for other people with all ads.
For many reasons, one being that they were injecting urls with their affiliate codes to unsuspecting users.
This was in 2020. Brendan Eich addressed this in a blogpost iirc, with a perfectly plausible explanation. It seemed like a bad/unfortunate design decision, which happens all the time in software development and not the conspiracy theory people claimed it to be. It was fixed in a matter of days.
If this is the main reason to not use Brave then I'm genuinly interested in hearing about the other reasons. I might learn something I wasn't aware of.
I don't understand all the hate Brave gets either. It passes pretty much all privacy tests ootb and I see 0 ads, on desktop and mobile. This is what actually matters to me.
I don't think the past controversies were just unfortunate, "mistakes" or conspiracy theories, but products of their business model + opportunistic execution. I just don't trust brave and think I have better options for a browser. If I had to choose between brave and chrome, I would use brave. If you like/prefer using brave, honestly good for you.
> Let people opt-in to using their browsers to help crawl for the search engine index, like Brave does.
This is really cool.
I'd be happy with a re-branded SearX/SearXNG, with a paid cloud hosted instance from Mozilla that uses a shared base index plus your own crawled pages or optionally contribute your crawls back to the shared index.
As a US corporation, Mozilla cannot compete on privacy focused services. If they want to focus on privacy (which I think is great), they should ship software that improves privacy, not offer services.
Are you saying that a warrant canary isn't useful?
He is saying that no one outside of the US will trust them with their data, because of the US Cloud Act and similar legislation.
There is a reason Proton & Co are based in Switzerland and not in the US
They can compete where the alternatives are also US based services.
They can compete in the US.
There are also many people who are more concerned about privacy from businesses than from governments. There are also people who are more concerned about privacy from their own government than a foreign government.
Although the Cloud Act and similar issues with the US are much discussed here, I see no sign it loses American big tech much business.
> There are also many people who are more concerned about privacy from businesses than from governments.
We're living in an interesting time that may (or may well not!) turn out to be a pivot point in this question. People being ICE'd based on data traces they leave in commercial products may well make this kind of question more tangible to non-technical folks.
> Although the Cloud Act and similar issues with the US are much discussed here, I see no sign it loses American big tech much business.
If that is true (which it may or may not be) then it would also mean competing on privacy isn't a winning move, whether within or outside the US.
lots of people seem to trust apple
Marketing can do a lot to create trust.
It's not all or nothing. Depending on your threat model, Apple's services might be fine. But I guess most people don't think enough about the implications of storing many years worth of data at a US company like Apple.
Apple has actually proven itself over a long period of time on this issue. Maybe Mozilla has as well (do they encrypt telemetry logs etc for people with a Mozilla login?) but I haven't heard so much about that.
Did you really forgot about Snowden's Apple slide? Also their phones are routinely mirrored at the border. Just to support the unconstitutional government agenda of policing thoughts and speech.
> Did you really forgot about Snowden's Apple slide?
Was Apple coöperating or were they hacked? (I remember the smiley face for Gmail. Google, in that case, was hacked.)
https://sneak.berlin/20231005/apple-operating-system-surveil...
Wrong. Apple explicitly preserves a backdoor in the e2ee of iMessage for the USG.
Source?
https://www.reuters.com/article/world/exclusive-apple-droppe...
Yes but Apple is also avoiding collecting a huge amount of data, e.g. by doing things on-device.
Ok, keep telling yourself that as you can’t remove iCloud…
https://appleinsider.com/articles/24/04/10/apple-makes-it-re...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43047952
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42014588
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34299433
> Mozilla Mail - a reliable Exchange/Google Mail alternative (desperately needed imo)
Thunderbird Pro was announced a while back, still not GA though
How about: Mozilla HTTPS To My Router (or printer or any other physically present local object) in a way that does not utterly suck?
Seriously, there’s a major security and usability problem, it affects individual users and corporations, and neither Google nor Apple nor Microsoft shows the slightest inclination to do anything about it, and Mozilla controls a browser that could add a nice solution. I bet one could even find a creative solution that encourages vendors, inoffensively, to pay Mozilla a bit of money to solve this problem for them.
Also:
> Thunderbird for iOS - why is this not a thing yet?
Indeed. Apple’s mail app is so amazingly bad that there’s plenty of opportunity here.
Apple mail steadfastly refusing to permit me to see an email address so I can verify the source of an email.
Truly the most cursed.
It’s so stupid but what I do is click forward which reveals the email in the compose window.
How so? You can tap the from / to fields and it shows the addresses.
When you tap one of those fields it bounces you to a contact card. If it is an existing contact (for example, yourself), you just get the full contact card. If that contact card has multiple addresses (my contact card lists ten), you get no indication of which one it was sent to.
At some point in time the actual email address used was flagged with a little “recent” badge - by itself a confusingly-worded tag - but even that doesn’t show up consistently.
It’s stupid because there’s really no reason to play hide and seek with the email address - that’s an identifier that people should generally be familiar with (since you have to use it reasonably often), and lots of people have multiple addresses that they can receive mail at.
> When you tap one of those fields it bounces you to a contact card.
They've changed that behavior a few versions ago: https://i.imgur.com/J965L1Z.png
> Mozilla Mail
Aren't they already moving towards this? The Thunderbird team recently announced ThunderMail which will have an optional $9/year plan.
https://www.tb.pro/en-US/thundermail/
> Thunderbird for iOS
https://blog.thunderbird.net/2025/10/state-of-the-bird-2024-...
> We’ve also seen the overwhelming demand to build a version of Thunderbird for the iOS community. Unlike the Android app, the iOS app is being built from the ground up.
> All seemingly low-hanging fruit with brand alignment.
Genuinely interested: are you a developer? Doesn't sound like low-hanging fruit to me.
There are already many alternatives to Gmail, I don't think Mozilla would make a lot of money there. And I don't know if they are making a lot of money with their Mozilla VPN (which I understand is a wrapper around Mullvad): why would I pay Mozilla instead of Mullvad?
There are alternative search engines, like Kagi in the US and Qwant/Ecosia in Europe (though only Qwant seems to keep the servers in Europe).
What I want from Mozilla, really, is a browser. And I would love to donate to that specifically, but I don't think I can.
It is certainly not low hanging fruit in the development effort space, but they can utilise open source projects in ways that MS cannot due to licensing, and therefore have much more resources overall in terms of community dev contributions.
A reliable, corporate-friendly, with advanced support model alternative of Exchange + AD is something that could sink a titan like Microsoft in 2 decades, at least its non-cloud business (but then for cloud alone they are just one of many, nothing special there).
Literally everybody is fu*king fed up with M$ arrogance. But you can't get rid of Active Directory and Exchange. Make comparable alternative (with say 80% of most used use cases, no need to die on some corner case hill) and many many corporations will come.
This won't come from some startup, it has to be a company like Mozilla.
Are you sure of that? There have been alternatives to Microsoft Office for decades. Yet most businesses use and pay for Microsoft Office, even though their employees most likely don't need anything that doesn't exist in those alternatives.
Why would it be different with email?
Nobody got fired for buying ~~IBM~~ Microsoft. People trust Mozilla though, they've built their brand on not sucking as bad as M$ and Google
I don't think you understand what I was writing about - none of that is MS Office. Thats another topic, but without this (and say some sort of domain propagation rules) bigger corporations will never move out of MS.
My understanding is that you say "someone could make an alternative to X and that would kill Microsoft because everybody hates Microsoft".
My answer is "there have been examples of alternatives to Microsoft products for decades, and it hasn't killed Microsoft at all, so I don't see why it would be different for another service (in your case, email)".
Did I misunderstand your point?
> A reliable, corporate-friendly, with advanced support model alternative of Exchange + AD is something that could sink a titan like Microsoft in 2 decades, at least its non-cloud business (but then for cloud alone they are just one of many, nothing special there).
Ooh, imagine if they also threw in some kind of Teams alternative, maybe based on XMPP or Matrix! That might get a lot of attention.
> Thunderbird for iOS - why is this not a thing yet?
They are building Thunderbird Android over K9 Mail, which is an Android app. They would have to start from scratch on iOS, which of course is feasible but it takes more time.
Quant and Ecosia are already building their own (European) index in a joint venture. Mozilla Search is totally uninteresting (to me).
Nitpick: "Qwant"
Re-launch FirefoxOS -- not for smartphones, but as a privacy-focused ChromeOS competitor. Give students Mozilla/Firefox brand awareness while prying them out of Google's clutches.
> Thunderbird for iOS - why is this not a thing yet?
There's no release yet, but it's being worked on. https://github.com/thunderbird/thunderbird-ios
> Mozilla Mail - a reliable Exchange/Google Mail alternative (desperately needed imo)
I think the privacy industry is oversaturated we already have: ProtonMail, Tuta and Mailbox Mail
I'm thinking more at an SMB level, not necessarily for secure mail, PGP and the like.
IMAP + CalDev + CardDev sat on-top of cPanel is getting a bit long in the tooth for companies that want exchange-like mail solutions outside of the big two. Unfortunately MS and Google run the "spam" filters as well, so you really need an established company that they can't afford to irritate to enter the space - see Mozilla - to reliably force acceptance of enterprise mail outside the Duopoly they have.
Zoho is trying their best also in this space - not sure how successful they have been on the trusted email provider and integration front.
> IMAP + CalDev + CardDev sat on-top of cPanel is getting a bit long in the tooth
Why so?
- Very irritating to setup on mobile clients (iOS profiles are not a good solution)
- Usually hosted on shared VPSs where IP reputation is decimated (wonder how this will be affected by pure IPv6 hosts)
- Patching is often manual and forgotten about (n = 1)
- Backups are often an afterthought
Agreed, this is why I think they should buy.
Nobody wants this.
People want firefox.
That's like saying, "Nobody wants Adwords; people want Chrome." True but besides the point. Salaries have to be paid somehow.
Some options I can think of for paying salaries:
- Go the Wikipedia route, stay entirely free, and beg for donations on a regular basis
- Start charging for Firefox; or for Firefox Premium
- Use Firefox as a loss-leader to build a brand, and use that brand to sell other products (which is essentially what GP is suggesting).
How would you pay for developers' salaries while satisfying "people [who] want firefox"?
> That's like saying, "Nobody wants Adwords; people want Chrome."
Bad comparison, but I understand your point.
> Salaries have to be paid somehow.
I would be interested in knowing how much of what Mozilla does brings money. Isn't it almost exclusively the Google contract with Firefox?
As a non-profit, Mozilla does not seem to be succeeding with Firefox. Mozilla does a lot of other things (I think?) but I can't name one off the top of my head. Is Google paying for all of that, or are the non-Firefox projects succeeding? Like would they survive if Firefox was branched off of Mozilla?
And then would enough people ever contribute to Firefox if it stopped getting life support from Google? Not clear either.
It's a difficult situation: I use Firefox but I regularly have to visit a website on Chrom(ium) because it only works there. It doesn't sound right that Google owns the web and Firefox runs behind, but if Chrome was split from Google, would it be profitable?
> Bad comparison, but I understand your point.
I'm not sure why you think so; it seems pretty close to me. Chrome and Firefox are exact competitors; both require a large amount of development investment. Neither one are being charged for, which means their development needs to be supported some other way.
The people using Chrome don't want Adwords, but it's Adwords that is paying for Chrome's development. People using Firefox don't want email or Mozilla certificates or what-not, but something needs to fund Firefox's development.
> ...if Chrome was split from Google, would it be profitable?
They'd have to figure out a different business model, wouldn't they?
> They'd have to figure out a different business model, wouldn't they?
Doesn't mean that there exists a business model that would be profitable, does it?
Agree with a lot of this except Mozilla Search. Search is already or very soon going to be an entirely LLM driven space.
Precisely why we need a reliably working search engine without llm, ai and other nonsense
I predict the next gen search engines will be a return to form of the early web-directory style of known good pages and having to be vetted to appear in results
I'm still sad they shelved Mozilla Persona due to low adoption. There is a hole in the market around privacy and identity, and Mozilla would be a natural choice to fill it, but it's going to be an uphill battle to get major sites and end users on board. Not a job to be envious about indeed.
And just to add, I kind of mourn FirefoxOS. We couldn't have guessed it at the time, but as of 2025, Google is pushing developer verification and stepping closer and closer to ecosystem lockdown. It would have been a great time for an alternative mobile OS 10+ years in the making, to welcome all the energy that has gone into beautiful projects like F-Droid.
If I could time travel into the past, in addition to preventing all the bad things (e.g. Young Sheldon), I might have told Yahoo they should flex some financial muscle while they still had relevance and worked to mobilize (no pun intended) developer time, energy, etc and perhaps even provide a baseline ecosystem of stock apps to support FirefoxOS.
> We couldn't have guessed it at the time, but as of 2025, Google is pushing developer verification and stepping closer and closer to ecosystem lockdown.
We did guess it. Google were already past their “don’t be evil” days in 2013. They were possibly better than other companies of similar scale, but the decline was already clearly beginning. People had long warned that Google could not be trusted to keep Android open in the long term, that eventually their benevolence would fade. A good chunk of the enthusiasm around Firefox OS was in breaking the duopoly and the idea of a platform that would be much harder to lock down.
Fair point, I think I have to concede that you're right that it was perhaps perceivable at that time. In my defense, I will say that we are seeing some pretty concrete actions out in the wild in 2025 that we were only speculating on in 2013 heightening the urgency of the issue.
I installed FirefoxOS on a phone years ago, it wasn't even bad really.
The main problem with Firefox OS was that it was really slow. At the same time it was targeting budget phones.
But on the other hand progress was quite good. Back in the days I was maintaining unofficial images for Alcatel Fire. Each version was a little bit faster, but you really can't do much when the whole OS is a browser running on a device with with 256MB of RAM and a single core CPU.
Wasn't webOS effectively an OS built on web standards and effectively just a browser engine?
The Pre had 256MB and something like a 600mHZ processor. While it was no speed demon, I was always impressed with the animations and multitasking they pulled off with it.
People forget we used the web on 100mHz 486s with maybe 16MB of RAM and sites like Slashdot were plenty usable.
Granted sites like Slashdot didn't used react server components.
I use it as my primary phone for 2 years, first with the Flame, then with a Z3C. For me Firefox OS was the finale move of Mozilla, either it successes and Mozilla becomes a major actor again or it fails and they slowly die. And thebmy decided to kill it right when it was becoming stable enough.
It's another damned if you do, damned if you don't. FirefoxOS is regularly listed by commenters as an example of a wasteful side bet, whereas my feeling is more along the lines of yours, that it was striding greatly, as the saying goes, and attempting to be a major actor.
A big part of the market share loss was due to monopoly and distribution lockdown of a controlled platform tightly tied to hardware, so I can certainly see the strategic wisdom of the attempt. I suspect they didn't have the resources to press forward, they had a lot less money then than they do now. Which makes it all the more maddening that Yahoo's role as a partner was so muted; it could have made the difference for both of them.
As with most new operating systems, its biggest problem was lack of apps. Mozilla seemed to abandon Firefox OS right as Progressive Web Apps were starting to take off, which would have done a lot to fix that problem.
> And just to add, I kind of mourn FirefoxOS.
Today, we have Mobian, postmarketOS, PureOS and many more GNU/Linux OSes for smartphones.
It's too late.
If I want to interact with modern society, I have to use banking apps, the NHS app, WhatsApp, numerous IoT apps... The list is endless. Many of these will refuse to run on rooted phones.
Google and Apple won. We can learn from this and hope the next big thing to come along has some competition from the truly open source side of computing.
They didn't 'win' - use a laptop. Phones are decent for certain things but no, you don't need to use WhatsApp, IoT apps -- most have bluetooth, and you don't have to 'interact with modern society'
Interact with good circles of people and stuff. I mean, it's cool that my pixel is some mini high powered TPU computer that can run apps, F-Droid etc, but I only really care about the 5g data link within it.
If any app refuses to run due to rooted phone -> open a browser go to the web version.
I know that you know these things and I'm not trying to make any point other than: no, you don't have to use those things. but if you want to, you can.
the next big thing to come is already here, Linux with its infinite mix of desktop environments, user environments, distros with pre-set up things. You can have a device use your SIM/e-SIMS.
Google and Apple's push notification system being locked for what they deem allowed and control the push tokens, browsers have push notifications too.
All I'm saying is: Google and Apple didn't win anything and there's great things like GrapheneOS, plus Google's TPU chips are awesome.
But, they most certainly didn't 'Win' and 'modern society' is crazy.
Don't close your eyes from reality. I am forced to use a phone app to log in into any of the several banks that I use. There is no web version.
I use Librem 5 as a daily driver. I switched my bank to avoid an app. I do my banking on their website.
> I switched my bank to avoid an app.
When feasible, this sounds like a great reason to switch banks. If enough people did this, banks would all offer web apps instead of forcing native apps.
cool story, I can log in to all my banks on the web!
Well that's a fantastic point, and interesting in this context because the whole gambit of FirefoxOS was to use progressive web apps. The browser rather than the Linux ecosystem becomes the trusted execution environment and PWAs actually ask less of your bank or (insert security agency) than even Android or iOS development.
A law can fix that!
We need more politicians that aren't afraid of banks.
Sure, for those who has money for lobbying.
Or for those who support https://eff.org or similar.
> It's too late.
Too late for what? Librem 5 is my daily driver. Would you also say that in the 90s Windows "won" and "it was too late"? Please stop with the security/privacy nihilism, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27897975
Back then Firefox was a brand with decent recognition.
Isn't Debian today also such a brand? Mobian is just Debian with minimal changes to run on mobile.
1000%
The two places it's mind boggling that Mozilla doesn't have a product are (1) identity (especially as a provider to 3rd parties) and (2) instant messaging (especially on mobile).
They were important 10 years ago, they're more important today, and the existing providers all have huge privacy concerns.
What would be Mozilla's revenue model for instant messaging?
Ads?
Nothing says you have to track users, if you're not looking to optimize ad monetization per user.
And I daresay there are a fair number of companies who would love to get even blind exposure to Mozilla's userbase.
Why would people use Mozilla's app and not WhatsApp, iMessage, Signal, or others?
Privacy, availability, popularity respectively.
Signal is already ostensibly private, available, and popular enough, and doesn't have ads... why compete?
IMO Mozilla should just double down on the browser and do everything they can to keep it as a lifeline for Free Software devices to be able to participate on the internet as first class citizens.
Signal intentionally made their messaging rely on a single, central point of failure, perfect for targeting by all sorts of criminals and governments. If Mozilla provides a Matrix server, I will seriously consider it.
They could start acting like the nonprofit they are supposedly are instead of LARPing as silicon valley tech bros.
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> instant messaging
Doesn't Mozilla have their own Matrix server?
It does, but it's mostly for coordinating development rather than a consumer facing product. Personally I'm not convinced Mozilla IM would make sense though. It's a crowded msrket with lots of other options.
There are not many options for a secure, e2e messaging not relying on a single point of failure (including Signal), with a good UX and a possibility of video calls. I only know of Matrix. A AFAIK there are not so many trusted servers.
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You don't really seem to be trying to fairly describe the problem.
With Pocket, Mozilla forced it on everyone, then two years later they bought the service, then many years later they eventually killed it for everyone. They didn't even try the approach of making it an opt-in extension that users could install if they desired. The unoffensive strategy was obvious all along, and they just didn't choose that route. The concerns of Mozilla partnering with and promoting a proprietary service were easily anticipated, and the solution (buying Pocket) was clearly an option since they did that step eventually.
Yes, Mozilla may be in a hard place trying to diversify and find success with their other ventures. But they're clearly making plenty of unforced errors along the way.
That unforced error was particularly egregious considering that tab containers and Facebook containers are optional addons that are well integrated into the browser.
> With Pocket, Mozilla forced it on everyone,
It was ridiculously easy to turn off. Making a fairly non-obtrusive service opt-out instead of opt-in is not forcing it on everyone.
They literally forced every user to either accept the invasion of the proprietary service, or have to take extra steps to disable it on each of their devices. Neither of those is actually a reasonable, respectful way to treat your users.
I just never used Pocket. I don’t think I had to change my habits or settings to do so.
Sure, living with the nuisance of the advertising and UI clutter is an option, as I said. But the fact that they were relatively minor nuisances compared to eg. Windows 11's BS doesn't change the fact that they were still unwelcome and unnecessary and disrespectful.
I don't think there's anything radical about my stance that a new toolbar button showing up—with advertising calling attention to it—integrating a proprietary service into my open-source browser is inappropriate behavior on Mozilla's part.
I found it unnecessary and annoying, but there was a toggle for it in the settings, it wasn't even hard to find.
> Sure, living with the nuisance of the advertising and UI clutter is an option
set to `false`.That's how hard that used to be.
Anything requiring messing with about:config is an unreasonable way to treat non-technical users. And the point I've already made that you're ignoring is that the complexity of the workaround is not the problem—the necessity of taking action to disable Pocket is what was most concerning about what Mozilla did.
I simply removed it from the toolbar, same as I did with the Firefox sync icon. Out of sight, out of mind. Granted, they were much more pushy about other features and services. Much less pushy than other vendors and it was, in some respects, understandable. (How do you convince people your product is relevant if they think it does less than the competition because they aren't aware of what's there?)
I found no value in Pocket and it was annoying to have to disable it once per machine but you didn't have to "live with it" as claimed. That's just ridiculously overdramatic.
How much are you paying, again?
That's not an argument when the Mozilla Foundation makes it structurally impossible to fund Firefox.
Price is irrelevant. Mozilla's behavior with Pocket was at odds with Mozilla's stated goals and values.
The broader discussion but especially this little exchange reminds me of a similar situation with Ubuntu.
At one point they were the darling of the desktop Linux space and much beloved by an online community of highly principled people who didn't pay them anything.
Those same people then utterly blasted them when they tried a few monetization/promotion features that fell flat, like the Amazon lens in Unity. I had no love for that lens but it was easy to remove.
Shuttleworth gave a fairly telling interview afterwards which basically amounted to "Fuck these guys, you can never make them happy."
Canonical proceeded to focus on the server side where there's more money, fewer loud freeloaders, and now they're somewhat more evil.
There is also a whole strain of thought in SaaS which says don't ever have a free version because those guys always end up being the biggest complainers.
I think you have to accept that no company is going to get it 100% perfect and if you're too loud, annoying, and you're not giving them anything in return, they may just take their ball and go home.
Being the company that does the right thing is arguably not worth it, the devil's advocate argument is, some guy online is going to ride you even harder because you said you were trying to do the right thing, so better to stay quiet, or even cultivate an air of vague evil instead, then they won't bother.
Perhaps also related: the idea that riots are stupid, because rioters are inevitably protesting someone/something that's far away, even as they set fire to local businesses owned by members of their own community.
Ubuntu freeloaded on Debian so its fairly reasonable to consider the ubuntu skin to not be worth having if the result is advertisements being pushed onto users.
Companies that want to freeload on a free software community will always have a hard time. They may be praised in the beginning if they bring fresh and new energy, but trust is only going to work for so long until the "monetization features" starts being pushed. Historically that only works if the company reforms the original in such a way that it essentially is a completely different thing. Ubuntu today is still just a skin over Debian that users can easily replace.
Accidentally the best thing Ubuntu brought to Debian was the release schedule, which the Debian community adapted. Without that advantage there isn't much point to Ubuntu unless Canonical continuously pour a lot of money and developer time for free into the ecosystem. A lot of people commented at the time that such a thing wasn't sustainable.
> There is also a whole strain of thought in SaaS which says don't ever have a free version because those guys always end up being the biggest complainers.
Not just free, but also cheap. I have found the less someone pays the higher the likelihood they are a problem customer.
Look at them all downvoting us for saying it. It's like a force of nature, the reaction to comments about it proves that it's true - the complainers sure enough come onto the free forum and blast down comments about it :)
I like free stuff as much as the next guy but I think this is just some fundamental aspect of psychology, like you don't value something as much if you didn't pay for it. Within our business we see this all the time, customers who pay a lot tend to be satisfied and limit their criticism to the things that really matter, customers who pay a little or are just proposal shopping will take up a huge amount of time and have a lot of minor complaints. I have heard about this at many other businesses
If no company can make a fully free and user respecting browser then Mozilla the foundation should dissolve Mozilla the corporation because it doesn't fit into the state goals of the foundation.
Full price!
> It's damned if you do, damned if you don't. Basically every product Mozilla releases is immediately met with extreme scourn and scepticism. While everyone else seems to get the benefit of the doubt, including the likes of Google, Mozilla seems to get the exact opposite of that.
You have any evidence for this - that is, that the same subsets of users are being hard on Mozilla and soft on Google? Because that's pretty easy to quantify if you have evidence, which I notice you haven't presented.
Right now all you have is a gut feeling disguised as an factual claim about reality - which is worse than worthless because it's biased by your feelings, as opposed to being a wild guess.
Of course it's probably not the same user base. But the point imo is that users did use it and get value out of it, even if die hard users cried hard their browser was invaded and that Mozilla lost the plot.
We even have commenters here saying Pocket lost Firefox some market share (without any evidence or argument in favor, so a gut feeling too), but nobody to say that maybe the feature was used by some? And maybe that was a pull for Firefox vs Chrome. (I'm not saying it was, I'm just saying we don't know)
I believe that this is just the typical pattern of groupies being more toxic than band-members or crew. If you go to /r/rust, every announcement of a donation to the Rust Software Foundation is met with derision for the donor. In fact, if you go there today, you'll see it's got some extraordinary drama going on - primarily from non-programmers. If you look at the latest Arduino developments, it's the same story with non-users enacting some purity ritual and users being more sedate.
The reality of the thing is that community-oriented projects have the problem that the groupie-layer of the community are a group that are so marginally attached to the organization that the death of the organization won't affect them but are sufficiently attached to the organization that they can affect the org.
A population like that will naturally tend towards extraction of all surplus from the organization - if the org dies as a result, it doesn't matter, but if they don't do this they're "leaving money on the table" so to speak. With the rise of social media, the groupie layer of people can be extraordinarily large since forums with centralized sign-on allow for a variety of subjects to be posted and consequently being in the fandom is cheap - you don't have to seek news, it'll be there for you to have an opinion on. Hacker News, Reddit, etc. lead to a grouping point for people to have opinions on things they care so little about they would never seek it without it being thrust upon them by The Feed.
So I agree with you. It's challenging. I don't think it's because the community is special, though. I think it's just the structure of communities today because of the dynamics of social media.
I must have seen other sides of the community, since all I seen has been a consistent criticism that Mozilla neglects the two main products Firefox and Thunderbird, while focusing community money and focus on new products that does nothing to improve Firefox and Thunderbird. When new products get released it is indeed met with extreme scorn, and when they eventually fail, they will anew get criticized for wasting money.
There is a market share costs that pocket had on Firefox. Lost developer time, money and community trust mean that product pushed Firefox just that bit further into marginalization. Basically every product Mozilla releases is the same story when they fail to make their core product better.
It is not damned if you do, damned if you don't. Google could abandon Chrome, gmail or any other product like that and they would still be Google (and be profitable). Mozilla would not exist without Firefox, and the trust the community has with Mozilla is directly tied with Firefox.
> There is a market share costs that pocket had on Firefox.
I don’t think you have any evidence of this.
> Basically every product Mozilla releases is immediately met with extreme scourn and scepticism. While everyone else seems to get the benefit of the doubt
Literally nobody skeptical of Mozilla is giving MS and Google the benefit of the doubt. Mozilla gets skepticism from people exactly because they don't want Mozilla to become like those companies.
Pocket in particular was a breech of trust. It brought ads and surveillance to firefox, when many users had turned to firefox in the first place to avoid those same things. Of course that was going to draw criticism.
Google and MS are never going to do anything other than sell out their users for profit. Firefox users are more fiercely critical of the introduction of anti-features and enshittification because they don't really have anywhere else to turn to. Every other browser is just openly collecting your personal data, pushing ads in your face and shoving AI down your throat. The best alternatives we have to Firefox as a browser that respects its users at all are forks of Firefox. If firefox fails because it becomes a chrome clone that's also bad for privacy people will stop using Firefox and if Firefox dies off there are real questions about how many of the forks will continue to be actively maintained.
The browser ecosystem needs an alternative to chrome. Users want a browser that doesn't push ads, collect data, and allows customization. People complain about Firefox because the stakes are high.
In all of these cases, 95% of the comments are by <1% of the users and are probably less relevant goals to Mozilla than us power users would like them to be. Someone is always going to be angry, that doesn't really decide whether you're damned if you do/don't though. I honestly wonder if "internet privacy" is even something the average user is truly interested in either.
I wouldn't be surprised if 'lame' things like "videos look a lot more vivid in Chrome" (due to the years of lag getting HDR support in Mac/Windows) lost Firefox more users than they gained for maintaining support for MV3 uBO. I.e. fewer than 10% of FF installs have uBO installed, even after Chrome dropped it, but the volume of comments about MV3 would have led you to believe this is all browser makers need to consider to be successful.
I am sorry sir. Somebody who says they want to put back control to people using Internet and someone saying humans over profit cant NOT expect pushback for their actions. They are going against the entire community. You cant go for the saviour of the open internet, BS the community and not get push back.
I would argue mozilla doesnt have general audience like google chrome. They have OSS enthusiasts, privacy enthusiasts, power users kind of crowd. Buying a behavioural ads company which will do data surveillance or shoving ai is not what we want.
Not to mention, I and many stuck with Firefox despite being it being horrible until quantum release because Mozilla was aligned with community. But their tech is better now but they aren't aligned with community.
It was the community that made Firefox overtake IE. They seem to forget that.
Unless its gonna come pre-installed like chrome, they need community make the user base grow. They are absolutely dumb for going after a crowd who are happy with Chrome while shitting on the crowd which want to be with them.
I'm not saying whether they should/shouldn't get pushback about these things - just that 95% of this pushback in places like this comes from <1% of their userbase and isn't as relevant to Mozilla as those making the feedback would like to believe. Meanwhile, the main portion of the userbase is leaving for completely different reasons and doesn't even know what this kind of stuff like MV3 is, let alone care about it.
Firefox definitely has a general audience much larger than any measure of power users. More than half of the users don't have a single extension installed, and that counts language pack extensions. Half have <= 4 cores, <= 16 GB of RAM, or a 1080p screen. The most common OS is Windows 11 at 44% - with Windows 10 at 34.5% and Windows 7 still above Linux. Over 1/3 of their ~200 million userbase is in the US, and even if every tech-literate power user or privacy fiend in the US used Firefox (they don't) it still wouldn't amount to that many people.
The average Firefox user is nothing like you or I, nor will they find their community in catering to privacy. The community over IE was that IE wa plain awful to use and Firefox just did everything better. It didn't matter if you cared about privacy, performance, standards, community, customizability, compatibility, or whatever - it just mopped the floor with the popular option. That's not going to be the situation with Chrom*, it's actually active and well funded, nor is focusing on a single minority which demands to exclude things other groups care about (even if you and I would prefer not to have them) going to bring them back to the forefront.
Most people who has Firefox installed is either installing because that's what they have always used or is using because someone recommended it. They have to be explicitly installed. Keep that in mind. Don't you remember firefox installation fest and stuff? That 1% pushes Firefox to non-users at home, in their companies and where not. That 1% is responsible for a lot of the rest of the 99%.
The folks Mozilla is trying to attract don't care for all of these. Their biggest selling point is privacy and being community friendly. If it's getting deteriorated, why should the general folks who don't know what Manifest V3 is install it?
Especially when tech enthusiasts are talking bad about it. What impression does it make to a non-tech guy who woke up one day drinking filter coffee and thought... Huh! From today onwards, I want privacy!!??
I agree most either have used it for a long time or because someone recommended it. It's nearly tautological. I disagree the recommendations for the average user only/primarily come from <1% of the user base or that's what makes the installs stick when they do. Power users desperately want to feel key to the success, but the reality is people stick with a browser based on what it does for them not how much it does for their power user friend who recommended it 20 years ago. The same is true in reverse: power users can comment here all they want about privacy nits or what Mozilla should do blah blah but it doesn't matter to the average user because they aren't reading tech forums for opinions on browsers. Most Firefox users probably couldn't tell you what Mozilla even is in relation to Firefox.
The 200 million normal users can also recommend trying to use Firefox all the time to their friends again, they just don't have a reason to do so because often, for their cares, Chrome and others are the ones with better target to them. Pre-installs is definitely a problem, as it always has been, but it never stopped Firefox before.
If the non-tech person wakes up one day and decides privacy is a key concern for the browser then they join the few that learn about each in this detail and pick from there and the niche has a new member. When things like 1,000,000,000 people wake up and decided mobile performance and battery life were important for years it resulted in Firefox having next to no presence on mobile more than any other reason.
You do realise their userbase has been consistently dwindling right? For the last decade almost.
Naturally - losing a few hundred million users is likely why they are trying to find a different strategy than focusing on privacy or what power users comment on in the following decade and expecting better results for some reason.
Mozilla's funding comes almost entirely from the Google search deal. They can't afford to let the user count continue to dwindle on a principled stance alone. They either need to find workable alternative income of the same scale (which they've tried at least a dozen things that didn't pan out) or try to focus on what the average user wants in a browser rather than what the GNU fan power user comments in tech forums. They don't need a few principled people to stick with it, they need to be popular with the average person again.
See this is kind of hitting the nail on the head here.
Mozilla is treated like a PhD holder and nobel prize winner, and Google is treated as a stupid baby.
When the stupid baby shits his pants, nobody cares. In fact, they expect it. But when the PhD student gets a tiny piece of information wrong about the French revolution, they're crucified and called an idiot.
Mozilla makes mistakes, but the objective reality is that even if you add up alllll the mistakes, they're MILES ahead of Google when it comes to how they treat their users.
Google Chrome users get fucked up the ass and then beg for more. Firefox users get sent flowers and chocolate and then complain the chocolate has nuts.
The stupid boy is working in bad faith. Everybody knows. And nobody has invested even quarter the time with the stupid boy like the community has with Mozilla.
Mozilla is also not making mistakes. They are changing direction.
They started this by taking privileges and power from community leaders around 2015/16? There was a huge exodus of community then if ypu remember. And one after the other it reached until they bought a behavioural ad company. Its directly in conflict of interest with the humans over profit BS they are whining in marketing.
They have been in bad faith for so long. I dont see mistakes, I see pivoting. So, they can't just piggy back good PR while talking giving power back to internet users BS. Come on dude, they can't have it both ways.
They are yet another bad faith company saying they are not evil. That is it. Bare minimum, they should at least stop virtue signalling.
It couldn't be that Mozilla keeps making bad decisions? No, it must be the community that's unreasonable.
Here is a hint: People who are OK with Google behavior don't use Firefox.
> Basically every product Mozilla releases is immediately met with extreme scourn and scepticism. While everyone else seems to get the benefit of the doubt, including the likes of Google, Mozilla seems to get the exact opposite of that.
I've been thinking about this for a while, ever since The Framework DHH incident.
Basically, framework sent DHH a free laptop and funded his ruby conference and "arch distro." DHH meanwhile has some white supremacist musings on his blog. The Framework community flips out, talks about betrayal. There's people in the forums talking about how they were about to buy a fleet of machines but now will have to go back to Dell or whoever.
I was in the thread trying to understand - ok, we're doing ethical math here, right? We liked Framework because ostensibly buying from them reduced our e waste in the long run, and maybe is long run cheaper since we can do our own repairs on easily available parts. Meanwhile, Framework turns around and gives maybe 10k to someone who is prominently pulling a shitload of people into Linux world with Omarchy, who happens to have some disgusting opinions on his blog. I feel like switching to the main companies like Dell or HP or whoever, comes with way darker ethical implications. I mean one of these companies are the ones that provision the IDF, some of them have donated to Trump's ballroom wayyy more than the Ruby conf donation, they all have horrifying supply chains, and not to mention, don't come with any of the environmental benefits of a Framework machine.
So, why is Framework examined under a more critical lense?
My takeaway was twofold: first, people seem ok to dip their toes in activist progressivism to a degree, but are basically primed to throw their hands up and say, "I knew it, default capitalism really is insurmountable, oh well, back to the devil I know, no point in trying ANYTHING!" Second, people seem deeply focused on aesthetics rather than practical outcomes. Framework's far larger contributions to Linux space are instantly nullified by one relatively small donation to a guy who himself has massive contributions to FOSS but also a couple of really gross blog posts. It's not ok to cut away the gross bits: the entire thing is polluted.
I tried to point out the dangerous game being played since I can guarantee I can find a more ethically pure environmental anarchist than any supposed progressive on the forum - after all, the more environmental decision isn't to buy a Framework, it's to rescue a Thinkpad from a landfill, and by the way, anybody here still driving to work instead of taking the bus? And so on. People were, politely, shutting me down. "It's not the same, all framework has to do is apologize for the DHH thing and it'll all be ok." Sure, until it gets out that the CEO was at Trump's inauguration, or that the local Taiwanese office works with super shady parts suppliers, or... Seems to me the best thing to do is try to make a rough ethical calculation based on practicalities rather than purity testing, but nah.
So, if you're going to do something good in this society, you need to not just be much more ethical than the heteronormative capitalist participants, you need to be unimpeachable.
I'm by no means defending throwing the baby out with the bathwater - which is what's happening when someone abandons a less-aligned company for a completely unaligned one - but I have a somewhat different perspective on what, exactly, ticks these people off so much with Framework but not Dell, even though Dell is ostensibly worse (from their perspective), and it's not all that unreasonable emotionally, but it leads to bad outcomes, and it is very much not rational.
For them, it's a problem of (perceived) hypocrisy. You see, Dell never claimed to be good. Nor did HP. They're big corporations, they've got contracts with the military, IDF, what have you. Their appeal, as it were, is the product/service itself. Their only ideal is the Capital, and they never pretended otherwise.
In comes Framework; claiming to be sustainable, different from the others, caring about society/the world/etc., instead of just in it for the Capital, like all the others - regardless of whether they really claimed this or not, it is how they're perceived by these people - and then they go and "do something like that", so they go back to Dell/HP, because at least those didn't lie about who they were. This is exactly what happens with Mozilla vs Google/Microsoft.
This is very much a reflection of a fair few Leftist political spaces. Two people may agree on pretty much everything in how a society should be ran, but one of them believes that private property is inherently theft, and another one would like to maintain private property. That singular difference, one that could be set aside until all other goals are achieved - if ever - will cause endless debate, drama, and ultimately a schism which will leave both sides weaker.
Nice summation of the tech product world And the political situation at the same time! It is amazing that small schisms on the good side, are so highly beneficial to the dark side.
Tale as old as time. See: the fall of anarcho-syndicalist Spain, at the hand of their erstwhile allies, the Spanish Communists. And in the end the fascists won, most likely as a result.
It's because, I think, these people need moral plausible deniability.
I think maybe they truly, deep down, want to use dell - for their convenience, availability, sleekness, and mainstream appeal. But they can't just do that. They need to find the right place to jump from their moral high ground. So they basically search for any excuse at all to ditch.
I know people who were so upset, supposedly, with Mozilla that they switched to chrome. Fucking chrome, dude.
I don't care how much you think pocket is advertisement. Chrome is basically 3 ads in a trenchcoat. Can we please be for real?
I think it’s also related to bike shedding. No one wants to do the hard work of understanding the nuance of ethics and timing, and it’s easier to argue about this single event must equal evil.
See also how the left in American politics is known to eat its own. IMO, this led to the rise of MAGA and Trump.
> What Mozilla is good at ...
Firefox - the one thing they do not want to work on is the only thing that makes them special.
They do work on it. A lot.
But the issue is browsers don't make money. You can't charge for it, you can't add ads to it, etc. You're competing with the biggest companies in the world (Google, Apple), all of whom are happy to subsidize a browser for other reasons.
> You can't charge for it
They could try. I just keep hearing people who would pay for no extra features as long as it paid for actual Firefox development and not the random unrelated Mozilla projects. I would pay a subscription. But they don't let me.
The problem I (and others that I see here) have is the lack of trust in mozilla's model, esp long term. Their economic reliance in google, their repeatedly stated goals of trying to engineer ad-delivery systems that "respect privacy", their very high CEO salaries, and their random ventures do not inspire much trust, confidence and alignment in their goals. And also the unclear relationships with their for and non-profit parts.
If they can convince me that some subscription for firefox will strictly go for firefox development, that firefox will not pivot to ads (privacy respecting or not), and all the other stuff they have, including executives' salaries and whatnot, are completely separated, I would be more than happy to subscribe.
They honestly should charge for it.
You can't effectively paywall it because not only is it open source, but there are many nearly equivalent competitors all of which are free. Any subscribers would essentially be donors.
There are people like yourself who would be happy to donate, but not nearly enough. Replacing MoCo's current revenue with donors would require donations at the level of Doctors without Borders, American Cancer Society, or the Make-a-Wish Foundation.
Turning into one of the largest charities in America overnight simply isn't realistic. A drastic downsizing to subsist on donor revenue also isn't wise when Mozilla already has to compete with a smaller team. And "Ladybird does it" isn't a real argument until and unless it graduates from cool project to usable and competitive browser.
Oh no, it would be a donation and it's not going to completely replace all the funding of the parent entity of the project mentioned, therefore it's not realistic or worth trying. Right... That's a lot of arguments unrelated to what I wrote.
> That's a lot of arguments unrelated to what I wrote.
What I understand they are saying is that donations wouldn't be nearly enough. Which is related to what you wrote, which is that you would gladly donate to Firefox (not Mozilla, but Firefox).
They compared it to the largest non-profits in America, presumably because if we look at the money spent by Mozilla every year, that's similar. Right now Google pays for Mozilla, and if you wanted to replace that with donations, it would have to become one of the biggest charities in America. Which does not sound plausible.
If I understood correctly, I'm not the OP :)
Thunderbird has succeeded at doing this and is in a somewhat similar spot (though huge asterisk there given the existence of Chrome)
> You can't effectively paywall it because not only is it open source, but there are many nearly equivalent competitors all of which are free.
You're forgetting that people will buy a product on brand identity alone. If the Firefox brand is solid enough, those forks won't matter.
I think the point is that if it was open source but free, it would require donations. And given the money that Mozilla spends every year, it would mean that the amount of donations they would need to receive would make them one of the biggest charities in America. Which sounds implausible.
I think the argument makes sense, to be honest.
Doesn't Firefox make them the lion's share of their profits just from the Google payments?
If they let Firefox atrophy to the point it will have no market share, let's see how that works out for them
> But the issue is browsers don't make money.
What?! Browsers might as well be money printers! Have you heard how much money Google pays Apple to be the default search engine in Safari?
The higher Firefox’s user numbers, the more money Mozilla can make from search engine deals. Conversely, if Mozilla keeps trying to push a bunch of other initiatives while Firefox languishes and bleeds users, Mozilla will make less money.
If you don’t like this form of revenue… well, I don’t know what to tell you, because this is how web browsers make money. And trying other stuff doesn’t seem to be working.
On the other hand, we typically find it unfair that Google can buy their search supremacy by being the default search engine.
We can't complain about Mozilla taking the money from Google and at the same time complain because they take the money from Google :-).
You can and you should. There are people that are happy to pay for email, for search, for videos, for news, for music. I don't see why there wouldn't be people happy to pay for a browser.
The idea that software is free is completely wrong and should be something that an organization like Mozilla should combat. If software is free, there can be no privacy, it's as simple as that.
> I don't see why there wouldn't be people happy to pay for a browser.
I admittedly didn't check the numbers, but a comment in a sibling thread says that if Mozilla was to replace their revenue with donations, they would have to become one of the biggest charities in America.
Is that even realistic? Like would they make that kind of money just from donations?
> The idea that software is free is completely wrong
> If software is free, there can be no privacy, it's as simple as that.
Strongly agreed. Free software, either $0 or through stronger licenses like the GPL, have their economics completely shifted as an unintended side effect. Those new economics tend to favor clandestine funding sources (eg ads or malicious supply chain code).
But sustainable funding honestly isn't Mozilla's strong suite (or tech's in general, for that matter).
They could make it so we could subsidize development like with Thunderbird.
That should not be a problem for a nonprofit which the Mozilla foundation supposedly is.
Non-profit doesn't mean non-revenue. They don't have to pay their investors, but they certainly need to pay their developers.
Most nonprofits don't generate "revenue" from their "product". They provide a valuable service and get paid by people who agree with the mission.
Based on comments in here and people willing to pay I wonder why they haven't got the Wikipedia route of getting donations, would that piss off a lot of users? I do think most people would understand a non-profit needs donations.
I might be in the minority here, but I actually like Thunderbird.
I've daily driven Thunderbird for over a decade. You have very few options for having a single program manage multiple email accounts outside of Outlook and Thunderbird anymore. Maybe Apple Mail on Mac (and whatever Microsoft is preloading on Windows these days), but that's it.
I assume they work on Firefox 10x more than anything else. Is there data?
>Firefox - the one thing they do not want to work on
I'm sorry but this is complete nonsense. Just this year they pushed 12 major releases, with thousands of patches, including WebGPU efficiency improvements, updated PDF engine, numerous security fixes, amounting to millions of lines of new code. They maintain a codebase that rivals that of Chrome and of the Linux Kernel and push the equivalent of Rust's entire codebase on a monthly basis.
> They maintain a codebase that rivals that of Chrome and of the Linux Kernel and push the equivalent of Rust's entire codebase on a monthly basis.
Is that comparison supposed to make their management of the code base seem better or worse? Chrome, Linux and Rust are arguably colossi in their niches (Rust having the weakest claim). Firefox's niche is Chrome's and it doesn't do that well. It used to be that at least Firefox had it's own little area with more interesting extensions but obviously that was too hard for them to handle - yes I'm still grumpy about ChatZilla.
You might be interested to know that there are still some legacy extensions that work on today's Firefox. Specifically, when Firefox breaks VimFX, I'm done with it. But while it works, I'm sticking with Firefox. It's like having the power of Qutebrowser but with the extensions and performance of Firefox.
Well I replied to a comment suggesting they weren't working on Firefox, by noting how much work is being done on Firefox. But you seem like you want to change the subject to a different one, which is the extent to which you can gauge "success" relative to competitors, or infer management efficiency, which is fine but orthogonal to my point.
The job was always very easy, fire all of the pure managers and sock the google money into an endowment before it runs out. Then focus on privacy as you mentioned.
They’ve taken in several billion dollars by now. Let that sink in. They're supposedly a non-profit, so this plan is the well-trodden playbook.
But of course no Manager instance could imagine such a thing. Cue Upton Sinclair quote.
Indeed - Google successfully undermined Mozilla here. It was a huge mistake to get addicted to the Google money; now it is too late to change it.
Technically the foundation could still change the direction. But they won't because leadership is essentially shared between the corp and foundation.
>sock the google money into an endowment before it runs out.
They did that! Why are people proposing that like it's a new idea?
If they were on a sustainable trajectory they wouldn't be selling their soul for advertising money and other ill-advised revenue projects that contradict their stated mission.
Okay, but now you're changing the subject. The claim was that they don't have an endowment or that they're not investing it. But they are.
The truth is the vast majority of organizations with an endowment are not able to rely on it in perpetuity, I think there's a small subset of organizations that basically amounts to a bunch of elite universities. So it's not the intended or functional or actual purpose of any endowment to be permanent firewall against any conceivable financial hazard for all eternity. Having at one point worked for a non-profit myself that had an endowment, generally, what you do is you calculate how long an organization's operations could be funded by that endowment, and is one of a portfolio of metrics for gauging the financial health of a non-profit. It's more properly understood as a firewall to create some breathing space in the face of financial uncertainty. Again, reaching back to my limited stint at a non-profit, they withdrew a little bit from their endowment during the 2008-2009 financial crisis, as well as during covid. It's rarely the case that an endowment can fund an organization in perpetuity.
And maybe I'm crazy but if someone falsely accuses Mozilla of not maintaining an endowment, it seems relevant to point out that they do actually have one.
No—they did not cut costs enough to build a sufficient endowment. Again, income of several billion dollars.
That is plenty for an endowment to build a browser+ in perpetuity... like an order of magnitude in excess. Ladybird/servo are successfully building on perhaps 1% of that?
I'm sure they have some money in the bank and it gets interest, but obviously not enough or handled well enough to avoid the temptation to start an advertising project due to their unsustainable spending rate.
You keep trying to make it sound like they "did everything they could." No, they did not by a long shot.
They could be on a sustainable trajectory and still sell their soul purely out of greed. I'm not suggesting that Mozilla is actually doing that, I just wanted to point out the possibility.
Yep. Mozilla is effectively just a tax dodge for Google anymore.
Heck, this AI first announcement was probably strongly influenced behind the scenes by Google to create an appearance of competition similar to Microsoft's and Apple's relationship in the 1990s.
Also, ironically, I just switched full time to Brave only yesterday.
Care to explain how would they get the money in the process you described? Selling privacy to Google or someone is the only money maker they have.
There is no reason to believe manager pay is even 10% of the total expense.
Google (currently) pays Mozilla $400-500 million a year to be the default search engine in firefox.
edit: in 2023 they took in $653M in total, $555M of which was from Google. They spent $260M on software development, and $236M on other things.
The "other things" is what most people seem to have problem with.
Mozilla burns a batshit amount of money on feel good fancies.
If it were focused on its core mission -- building great software in key areas -- it would see it can't afford this, because that's the same money that if saved would make them financially independent of Google.
> Mozilla burns a batshit amount of money on feel good fancies.
How much?
And what percent of revenue was this?
0.55% in 2018, rising to 1.1% in 2022
Saving 1.1% of revenue would make them financially independent of Google?
>$236M on other things This is from another poster. I'm guessing stuff not related to Firefox development.
$236M included facilities, administration, marketing, and so on.
Yes, they should trim most of that fat.
How much is fat?
Mozilla took in the money from the distant past all the way into the present. They have leaned into privacy the whole time, while not being perfect.
At some point they ease off the google money or it goes away itself. And they move forward on privacy.
Google was less demanding in the past as well; they continue to give Apple billions each year.
There are a number of privacy-oriented business models, as listed here: https://aol.codeberg.page/eci/status.html - while not as lucrative as some, combined with an endowment its a good living that many companies would envy.
What's the quote?
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
I agree with the person you're responding to. Decades of funding and they have zero savings to show for it.
Though it's questionable as to how much big players like Google would have continued to fund Mozilla if they had seen Mozilla making the financial moves that would have made it an independent and self-sufficient entity.
> Though it's questionable as to how much big players like Google would have continued to fund Mozilla if they had seen Mozilla making the financial moves that would have made it an independent and self-sufficient entity.
Look at how much money Google gave to Apple (Safari) vs Mozilla (FireFox) per year.
The CEO has unarguable been doing a poor job. Losing market share has lost them more potential revenue than any of their pet projects raised.
Well, they have over a billion in the bank. Which is both a ton of money, but also goes away quickly when you're a large company paying lots of money to salaries.
So if you have a billion in the bank, you can collect 5% return and never touch the money. So you get $50m a year to pay enough engineers to make a browser.
That's plenty of money if they recognize they need a super lean company with 0 bloat and a few highly paid experts who focus on correctness and not bullshit features.
Exactly! With such an endowment they should be able to develop a browser and maybe some other stuff with a small team that’s focused on tech and not social justice.
How many engineers are enough to make a browser? How do you know?
Vivaldi employ 28 developers and 33 others to make an unstable Chromium fork and email program.[1]
Bloat and bullshit features to you are minimum requirements to someone else.
[1] https://vivaldi.com/team/
There are about 800 unique weekly committers to the Chromium project, so that's a start at gauging the number for that project. A little harder to find that same figure for Firefox, but Wikipedia says Mozilla Corp had about 750 employees as of 2020.
Anyway, if you have $50M, you can afford 500 people at $100k, or 250 people at $200k. So you simply declare, this is how many people it takes to make a browser, and set your goals and timetables accordingly. I feel like the goals and direction might be more important than the number of bodies you throw at it, but maybe that's naïve. But when the product is mature like Firefox (or Chrome for that matter) you do have some flexibility on the headcount.
You're significantly underestimating fully-loaded cost per person + other expenses. An engineer making a $200k salary is going to cost the company something like $300k, and there are some additional fixed overheads. And $200k is quite a bit less than your competitors are paying.
So you're looking at something more like 150 employees total of which <100 are going to be pure engineers, and that's stretching your budget and operations pretty aggressively while also fighting an uphill battle for recruiting skilled and experienced engineers. (And browser development definitely needs a core of experienced engineers with a relatively niche set of skills!)
Working at Mozilla should be more than money. $200k/year is more than enough to be happy in most of the world. You don't need to compete on rock stars that must live in San Francisco, and focus on people that are happy with a high paying job and have enough idealism to accept "only" $200k/year.
Exactly. One of the biggest problems with Mozilla is that they see themselves as akin to Google et al.
None of those figures are what the engineer makes, they're costs. And they're illustrative, not literal. You won't pay everyone at the same rate either for example, and not all will be engineers either, and I totally left both those facts out of it. Oh no! And also omitted the fact that a company whose vision and ideals people agree with can hire said people for less money, which again brings us back around to the point that the vision might be more important.
Maybe they should quit their presence in the Bay Area. The rent is insanely high. Not just of an office, also the workers. Besides, freedom of speech, liberty, DEI are each under pressure in USA. Mozilla is very much welcome here in Europe :-)
Another comment observed your cost estimates were low.
> But when the product is mature like Firefox (or Chrome for that matter) you do have some flexibility on the headcount.
Google could reduce Chrome development to maintenance and remain dominant for years. It would be much like Internet Explorer 6. Firefox falling too far behind in performance or compatibility would be fatal.
Brave has about 300 employees and don’t break out engineers [0]. One of them is Brandon Eich so that counts for a bunch.
Their revenue is only $52M so kinda what Mozilla would earn off their endowment.
[0] https://getlatka.com/companies/brave.com
Latka are not reliable. And you assumed Brave were profitable?
Brave make a Chromium fork and a search engine. Does a search engine or a web browser engine require more people?
Brave doesn't make their own browser engine.
Ladybird had fewer devs, so what were these devs at Vivaldi doing?
I don't think your argument has a lot of merit. 28 is not a magic number.
> Ladybird had fewer devs, so what were these devs at Vivaldi doing?
The Ladybird developers have not produced a browser comparable to Firefox or Vivaldi. Vivaldi have not produced a browser engine comparable to Ladybird of course.
> I don't think your argument has a lot of merit. 28 is not a magic number.
28 is a magic number was not a reasonable interpretation of my comment.
Yet.
Yes. This discussion is now. Not in a future which may not arrive.
>So if you have a billion in the bank,
I just want to note that this is what is sometimes called carouseling. Which is, instead of acknowledging the original accusation was not correct, which is what should be happening, this comment just proceeds right on to the next accusation.
What is happening, psychologically speaking, that is causing a mass of people to spew one confidently wrong accusation after another? They don't have an endowment (they do!). Well they're not investing it! (they are). Well they're not working on the browser! (they shipped 12 major releases with thousands of patches per release with everything from new tab grouping and stacking to improved gpu performance to security fixes)
This is like a dancing sickness or something.
> "...if they had seen Mozilla making the financial moves that would have made it an independent and self-sufficient entity."
Does their endowment fund enable them to be an independent and self-sufficient entity?
In other words, Can they live off it in perpetuity?
The question is if their endowment can fund a competitive independent web browser in perpetuity. Looking at other web browsers suggests no.
Let's start with the acknowledgement of carouseling.
There's nothing to acknowledge. You're asking everyone to accept the presumption embedded in the statement that a billion dollars "goes away quickly when you're a large company paying lots of money to salaries", namely that Mozilla should be a large company and should rely on a steady stream of outside money instead of seeking sustainable financial independence. But Mozilla's lack of focus and excessive spending on side projects is a major part of the complaints against Mozilla, and you aren't even trying to make a reasonable case that Mozilla needs to be spending money like that.
I don't understand how what you're accusing me of pertains to anything I've written here today.
But then they can't LARP as a silicon valley tech giant with million dollar CEO salaries.
That isn't really the best way to think about not-for-profit schemes like Mozilla. Every organisation eventually becomes corrupted (as in fact we see with Mozilla), so creating an eternal pot of money for something is not strategically sensible.
If good people are in charge, they'll just spend everything and rely on ongoing donations. If nobody thinks it is worth donating too then it is time to close up shop. Keep a bit of a buffer for the practical issue of bad years, sure, but the idea shouldn't be to set up an endowment.
FWIW, I remember when Mozilla started experimenting with AI, and that was way ahead of the curve (around 2015, iirc?)
But yeah, I agree that buying a great email provider would be a very interesting step. And perhaps partnering with Matrix.
On the Matrix side we would love for Mozilla (or MZLA) to become a paid Matrix hosting provider. Element has ended up focusing on digitally-sovereign govtech (https://element.io/en/sectors) in order to prevail, and it's left a hole in the market.
They need to give Thunderbird more resources first.
You're assuming Mozilla would be successful at a privacy play because they are a trusted organization. I can't stress this enough: they are not.
What is that based on?
You can trust your doctor much more about your knee and much less about their billing. Trust isn't binary and isn't per person/organization/object, but varies by person and (activity?).
And anything will be trusted more or less by different people. Is there evidence of who trusts Mozilla with what, and how much? The the fact that you don't trust them or that some on HN don't trust them isn't evidence.
Also, each of us is both commentator and agent. When we say 'I trust X' or 'I don't trust X', we both communicate our thoughts and change others' thoughts.
That's a great question, honestly, and I like your framing of trust.
I do not trust Mozilla to keep a product alive. I was frustrated by Firefox OS and more recently Pocket, but everything they've tried or acquired aside from the browser itself (and Thunderbird I guess?) has failed and been shut down. That has burned a lot of people along the way.
For this reason I can't see myself becoming a user of any future Mozilla projects.
That makes much more sense. I wonder what the non-HN public thinks - most of those products, like Firefox OS, were essentially unknown outside HN-like populations. Pocket was better known.
But yes, that is part of trust and I'd like to see them address it.
Firefox is still heavily used by Linux OSes as the default browser. But I think that's mostly momentum at this point. If more people knew about Mozilla's organizational challenges, then I think Firefox would get ditched.
If they like the browser, why would they care about organizational challenges? Do Google's organization challenges cost them Chrome users?
Do they like the browser, or do they like the fact that it's not owned by Google?
When I use Firefox, either it's because I don't have a choice (my distro doesn't ship Chromium in a way I like, i.e. not Flatpak) or because I make an effort to "support" Firefox. But once in a while, I need to use Chrom(ium) because the website doesn't work on Firefox. Not that it is necessarily Firefox' fault, but the fact remains that if Chrome was an independent non-profit, I would most likely use Chrome and not Firefox.
I think a tangential interesting question is: how many monthly active users does Firefox have, that choose to use Firefox? Not people who "click the internet icon", etc.
Like you, I suspect the brand recognition and loyalty is much, much lower than many people in this thread believe it to be. Not talking about among the highly-technical HN audience; just at large.
That's a fair question. It's of course my opinion, not hard fact, but here goes:
- They have for years been trying to add stuff to Firefox that nobody wants, and were privacy violations. The "marketing studies" come to mind.
- They have for decades been wasting their time and money on everything BUT Firefox, and failing at literally all of it. You can't help but notice the stellar incompetence of Mozilla leadership.
- They have for a long time been raking in hundreds of millions of dollars a year from Google, pissing it away on useless stuff, but mostly on enriching the management layer. How can somebody like Mitchell Baker be making millions of dollars a year while simultaneously seeing Firefox market share drop to damn near zero? This is a thoroughly corrupt organization.
> They have for decades been wasting their time and money on everything BUT Firefox
They invest the vast majority of their resources in Firefox. And they have had some incredible successes: Rust, Let's Encrypt ...
> How can somebody like Mitchell Baker be making millions of dollars a year while simultaneously seeing Firefox market share drop to damn near zero?
Maybe there was no realistic way to do better. Maybe thanks to Baker, Mozilla still exists.
With Firefox market share plummeting, and little prospect for competing with Google on a free commodity product, Mozilla needed and needs to find other products and not just watch the ship go down.
What's your solution? Do you really think they could make Firefox so good that the non-technical public would go through the effort of dropping Chrome, despite Google's enormous marketing advantage?
> They invest the vast majority of their resources in Firefox.
Says who? I have never seen figures that show this. It also doesn't excuse the gigantic amounts of money wasted on irrelevant things, or executive salaries.
> And they have had some incredible successes: Rust, Let's Encrypt ...
That's pretty charitable. LE was a wider industry initiative, and while Rust was incubated in Mozilla AFAIK, they also let it slip through their fingers.
> Maybe there was no realistic way to do better. Maybe thanks to Baker, Mozilla still exists.
How on earth are you defending her behavior? It was utterly shameless and indefensible. Do you work for Mozilla?
> Mozilla needed and needs to find other products
No, it doesn't. It needs to bank its giant wad of cash and learn to live off the interest plus whatever it can get in donations. Mozilla does not need to be a for-profit company, it needs to be a non-profit making a browser. That was always supposed to be the mission, from day one.
> Do you really think they could make Firefox so good that the non-technical public would go through the effort of dropping Chrome
They did when IE was shoved down people's throats, and Firefox was the better browser. They did when Chrome came around and started taking over. Most people even now get pushed to Edge or Safari, yet still end up using Chrome. People switching browsers is a thing.
Any other belief or possibility is "utterly shameless and indefensible", and therefore of suspect motivation. Doubt is difficult, but certainty is ridiculous (said someone).
A privacy play would be more successful from Mozilla if I were paying them for it. The incentives would be aligned. I cannot pay google for privacy, because they are incentivized against that.
Paying a company for something doesn't mean that the company isn't going to also sell every scrap of your data they can get their hands on. If the company is unethical you are always going to be the product. Mozilla is either going to be an ethical company or it isn't and how much money you give them won't make any difference. Mozilla has not always been an ethical company, but I don't think it's too late for them to turn that around, even if it will take time for trust to be rebuilt. I still want them to be the hero we need them to be.
Trust is relative and it is subjective meaning that I trust Mozilla more than I trust google but I also trust them in general, enough at least that they support most of my internet browsing. Unless you mean something else ?
The best that Mozilla can do for AI is to make Firefox more headless and scriptable.
What would you like to see from Firefox to make it more headless and scriptable? Are there specific usecases you're interested in supporting?
I'd love to be able to modify JS at runtime on random websites. Too often there's a bug, or a "feature" that prevents me from using a service, that I could fix by removing an event or something in the JS code.
That's what development tools are for. Or Greasemonkey/Violentmonkey.
Firemail should be the name of a free and privacy oriented email client wholly owned by Mozilla with a web and mobile app. I would sign up instantly and gradually migrate from gmail, while being assured for its sustainability.
Maybe not exactly what you’re looking for but Thunderbird is working on a paid email service: https://www.tb.pro/en-US/
They were also supposedly working on mobile apps. I'd pay some solid money for Thunderbird mobile if it was a good product.
“Free”. Therein lies the Mozilla problem. Everyone wants everything free.
It’s real hard to compete with Google who happily gives out free email and browser because they can monetize attention.
A free and privacy-oriented hosted service that people have to pay to maintain? That is a confusing concept. How would the incentives be aligned?
> I'd focus on privacy.
I would love that. that said, right now firefox unstoppably and constantly phones home
Does this not work anymore? https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-stop-firefox-making...
I've been perfectly willing to spend an hour making countless changes using about:config to beat Firefox (or its forks) into submission on every install, but that only works while they continue to give us the ability.
> it's a non-profit (well, a for-profit owned by a non-profit) that needs to make a big profit in a short amount of time.
Can you please elaborate on this need to make a big profit? Where does the need come from?
Adding my 2 cents worth to this: why is there not a Mozilla family internet suite of privacy browser, VPN, relay, tracker blocker, etc for one price? I already pay for family plans for other services, so this is a no brainer if it exists.
Right now, all of Mozilla's products are not even available in a standardised form in key countries. For example, I pay for Mozilla relay and VPN, and these are not available in the same countries!
Mind you, I'm lucky to have actual access to several countries, and so I can work around this. But really, why can't this team just put everything in one place for me?
Besides relay and Mozilla VPN, I am also paying for Bit warden password manager.
I'm also willing to pay for a privacy-first email(though I haven't done so yet), and please have a family plan that bundles all of this together!
If Norton can have an Internet Suite, why can't Mozilla?
This. I want a password/passkey/auth and bookmark manager that work across platforms and devices.
Don't you have this already? Chrome and Firefox both have these. Devices have solid password manager integration, I use mine across 3 OSes and who knows how many devices.
No passkeys, no authenticators.
Bitwarden is spoken highly of!
I second Bitwarden. It works well, and it even has a business model.
I think password manager integration is pretty janky but that’s not something Mozilla can solve in general.
Well, then I’ve gotta bust your balls here and tell you to step away from the Win98 machine, because that’s been around for some time.
Even secure, privacy-respecting versions!
It's weird when someone's wish list is something you've been doing for years for free.
I would love if there was some magic way I could share my passwords between my desktop and phone Firefox installs without a damn login or account, because I don't want a damn account.
Maybe like a couple large QR codes or something.
But golly that's a niche request.
You’re looking for text files and self management over Wireguard.
Super well stated and interesting point regarding (general) privacy.
I miss the days where Mozilla (Firefox) was known to be the "fastest browser." It worked and such an easy transition for users (including myself) who were tired of the bloated browser experience.
> And anything done to make that profit will annoy the community.
I don't keep close track of this, but as far as I remember they haven't tried donations that go only to Firefox/Thunderbird/etc of the person's choice, instead of Mozilla as a whole. That's what people always claim they want in these threads. I doubt donations would be enough, but I think doing it like that would at least be a step in a direction people like instead of are annoyed by, as long as they don't go nagging like Wikipedia.
Thunderbird is entirely funded by donations for some years now and is more than enough. In 2024, Thunderbird received $10.3M (19% increase over the previous year) in donations which was used to employ 43 people.
https://blog.thunderbird.net/2025/10/state-of-the-bird-2024-...
They do that for Thunderbird now.
> that needs to make a big profit in a short amount of time
Why? might be I'm just missing something, but I don't understand why this needs to be a goal of theirs?
Why cant Mozilla go the same route with Firefox as Thunderbird where its community supported, I wonder?
Web standards move very quickly, the only other two parties that keep up today are Google with Blink and Apple with WebKit.
I would pay 20 euros per month forever if I could just have firefox, as a product, without all the tracking and tracing and dark patterns.
Let me be the customer.
Merge Mozilla (including Firefox Relay, Mozilla VPN, etc ) with FastMail or Proton, price it reasonably and I’d be on board. If it worked well I’d recommend it to anyone I could.
I understand email isn’t easy but it difficult to imagine why Mozilla didn’t seize the opportunity.
> Instead, if I were CEO, I'd go the opposite way: I'd focus on privacy.
Where it comes to AI in that regard, I would also focus on direct human connection. Where AI encapsulates people in bubbles of tech isolation and social indirection.
I wouldn’t mind privacy-focused AI tools, either (as long as they don’t cram it in our faces). On its AI search assist, DDG has a button to open up a private session with GPT, which I use on occasion.
Why is so much profit needed?
Depends on how you look at it. They made $653 million in 2023, most coming from their biggest competitor, Google.
They don't need this much money, but it means more layoffs and cutting scope drastically. It's expensive to run a modern browser.
Do you mean they need income, or do you actually mean profit?
In a nonprofit, you don’t need layoffs unless you’re losing money (negative profit), normally.
Yeah you're right, I said profit in the original post because it was a nice polyptoton, but I did indeed mean revenue. That's on me!
Just ask for money. 10 USD a year in the app store. I’d pay it.
Privacy, identity, and more importantly, anonymity are one of those things I keep thinking about. A few months back I had this idea of comparing the need to that of credit reporting agencies. You have the big 3 - Equifax, Experian, TransUnion. They provide credit information to companies that want it. You request the info, they provide it. There's a fee for retrieving it. I think our personal identities should be treated similarly. We sign up for various online services and provide some PII, but not much. Why should the website be able to store that information? Maybe they shouldn't be able to. Instead, lets permit these identity brokers to control our private information. Name, address, email, etc. Then whenever a companies needs that info, for whatever reason, they query the identity broker, get select info they need and be done. Token based access could permit the site to certain data, for certain periods of time. You can review the tokens at a later date and make sure only the ones you care about get the info. Large companies that already participate in this space (Google, Microsoft, etc.) can separate out this business function and have it be isolated from their core products. I was thinking it'd require an act of congress to get implemented, and that may be possible. But instead of having that as a hard requirement, maybe just a branding/badge/logo on services. Say your product respects your privacy and uses data brokers for your privacy.
Going a step further, how do we encourage use? Aside from personal privacy, what if social media sites allowed us to use our identities to validate comments or attachments? Similar to the idea of a token, we upload a photo of our cat. We permit FB access to that cat pic, generate the token, say it's good until we revoke it. We revoke it, and now that picture will fail to load. We can also restrict access to our cat picture. By requesting access to the cat pic, another user provides their identity as well. If their identity is allowed to view it, then it can render. Similar to comments. It's just a string, but we can invalidate a token and make access to it no longer possible.
What about digital hoarding? Can't we screenshot everything or scrape the website and store it for later? Yes. But that's no longer a trusted source. Everything can be faked, especially as AI tools advance. Instead, by using the identity broker, you can verify if a statement was actually said. This will be a mindshift. Similar to how wikipedia isn't a credible source in a term paper, a screenshot is not proof of anything.
Identity brokers can also facilitate anonymous streams. Similar to a crypto wallet, separate personas can be generated by an identity. An anonymous comment can be produced and associated with that randomized persona. The identity broker can store the private key for the persona, possibly encrypted by the identity in some manner, or it can be stored elsewhere, free for the identity to resume using should they want to.
It's an interesting problem to think about.
I’m sorry but Mozilla is out of their league now.
Firefox is all they have. They know the web, but that’s where it ends. They haven’t been relevant outside of web standards for more than a decade.
i work for a for-profit owned by a non-profit. This is a weird take. You can shape a product, sure you need to bring in a profit, but there are options of working with your owner (the non-profit) that you just don't have in a publicly traded company.
I am sure people would queue up for the job, fully aware of what it entails.
Every time Mozilla CEO changes HN gets a set of "its so difficult" propaganda
Those CEOs get 6M per year and cannot figure out to focus on core product: Mozilla, keep a war chest, dont spend on politics.
Also cut all bullshit projects that are made for self promotion and dont help Mozilla as a browser.
When will real extensions return? Never?
Now they want to kill adblocks too
Anil Dash wrote something relevant recently: https://www.anildash.com/2025/11/14/wanting-not-to-want-ai/
His point (which I agree with - softly) is that Mozilla could approach this from a more nuanced perspective that others cannot, like not anti-AI but anti "Big AI". Facilitate what people are already doing (and outside of the HN bubble everyone is using AI all the time, even if it's just what we think is "dumb" stuff) throught the FF lens. Like a local LLM that runs entirely in an extension or similar. THere's no shortage of hard, valuable things that big tech won't do because of $$$.
I love Mozilla but this feels like marketing imo.
From the article: "AI should always be a choice — something people can easily turn off" and "Firefox will remain our anchor. It will evolve into a modern AI browser". I highly doubt you will be able to turn of the transformer tech features in an AI browser imo. And they won't make a separate browser for this.
This really feels like the beginning of the end for Mozilla, sadly.
Are there any true alternatives (not dependent on financing or any engines from third parties) to Google, if you wish to use the web in 2025?
What even is an "AI browser"? It's a browser, it's mainly supposed to render web pages / web apps. There is no obvious reason why it would need any AI features.
A browser with current definition obviously doesn't "need" AI. And we also know all too well how it's going to turn out - they will both use the AI to push ads onto us and also collect and sell our personal data.
However, a strong locally-executed AI would have potential to vastly improve our experience of web! So much work is done in browsers could be enhanced or automated with custom agents. You'd no longer need any browser extensions (which are privacy nightmare when the ownership secretly changes hands). Your agents could browse local shops for personalized gifts or discounts, you could set up very complex watches on classified ads. You could work around any lacking features of any website or a combination of several websites, to get exactly what you seek and to filter out anything that is noise to you. You would be able to seamlessly communicate with the Polish internet subculture, or with Gen Alpha, all without feeling the physical pain. With an AGI-level AI maybe even the Reddit could be made usable again.
Of course this is all assuming that the web doesn't adapt to become even more closed and hostile.
You must use extensions for very different things than I do.
These are all the same sort of vaporware promises that come straight from every AI booster. These features will never exist and you should feel bad for pretending they might.
man not a single one of those examples sounds like something I'd need, or even need an AI agent to do. I keep seeing the ads for AI browsers and the only thing I can think about is the complete and utter lack of a use case, and your post only solidifies that further. not that I'm disagreeing with you per se, I'm sure some people have a workflow they can't automate easily and they need a more complicated and expensive puppateer.js to do it. I just dont know what the heck I'd use it for.
I find it very hard to believe that either every site you interact with works exactly as you want it to work, or that you have the time/capacity to adjust them all with custom extensions. I get that there are downsides but you don't see any upsides?
I have extensions for the sites that need them and everything else is fine? occasionally I guess there'll be something in another language I want translated but I just copy paste the text into google translate or similar. what sites out there are so unusable you'd need an LLM to fix them for use?
Right now all the sites I frequent are good enough, otherwise I'd drop them. I don't interact with Discord, Bluesky, X, Instagram at all, and I feel like I'm missing out on a lot of high quality interpersonal communication because I have low tolerance for their UX and their lack of respect for users.
No. No upsides.
Again, what can an LLM possibly do to help? Summarize the page I'm already reading? I don't want a summary, that's dumb. People who think their time is so precious they have to optimize a five minute read into a ten cent API call and one minute read of possibly wrong output are just silly. You aren't "freeing up time", you are selling your reality.
Buy stuff for me? Why? Buying shit online is so easy most people do it on the toilet. I've bought things on the internet while blackout drunk. I also have a particular view of "Value" that no LLM will ever replicate, and not only do I have no interest in giving someone else access to my checkbook, I certainly do not want to give it to a third party who could make money off that relationship.
How would I no longer need browser extensions? You're saying the LLM would reliably block ads and that functionality will be managed by the single human being who has reliably done that for decades like uBlock origin? How will LLMs replace my gesture based navigation that all these hyper-productivity focused fools don't even seem to know exists? It certainly won't replace my corporate required password manager.
>You would be able to seamlessly communicate with the Polish internet subculture, or with Gen Alpha, all without feeling the physical pain
Come on, get over yourself.
> With an AGI-level AI
So Mozilla, who isn't even allowed to spend $6 million on a CEO is somehow magically going to invent super AI that runs locally? Get a grip.
I also hate concept of summaries, as well as related concept of AI text inflation.
I'm also against any third party being involved here. I'm pointing out the potential of AI in the browser, but for me it has to be locally run or it is a no go.
My point is that browser plays a central role in our digital interactions. Extensions help with smoothing out the experience. LLMs could write those extensions, or serve as an agent to further make the online interactions more pleasant. I could see myself using it to either optimize my existing experience, or to vastly broaden the communication surface in directions that currently hold too much friction.
The rest was a joke, sorry if it made your day worse.
[flagged]
If someone tries to sell you an AI browser, tell them I've got some pictures of apes to sell
Translation?
Image search?
Live captions?
Dubbing?
Summary?
Rewrite text better?
Translate sure.
Image search? I have a search engine for that.
Live captions? Didn’t ask for that, wouldn’t use it.
Dubbing? Ditto.
Summary? Wouldn’t trust an AI for that, plus it’s just more tik-tokification. No fucking thanks. I don’t need to experience life as short blips of everything.
Rewrite text better? Might as well kill myself once I’m ready to let a predictive text bot write shit in my place.
So… no thanks.
Yes, Translate is the only one I want - and we already have that!
The worst is anything that tries to suggest stuff in text fields or puts buttons etc. to try and get you to "rewrite with AI" or any nonsense like that - makes me just want to burn anything like that to the ground.
Plus, Search by Image[0] is one of the most popular extensions, with 3x as many people using it as tree-style tabs.
I don't use it but a grammar tool is the next most popular[1], so I could see this being quite a useful feature.
But the other stuff, I'm with you. I like translate but I personally don't care for dubbing, summarizing, or anything else.
[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/search_by_ima...
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/languagetool/
But that’s exactly my point - addons already solve these problems without baking them in natively. Adding AI just creates bloatware/privacy/security/maintenance problems that are already solved by users being able to customise the browser for their own needs.
I do get that and I'm like 60% with you, but I'm just saying that it is easy to get a bit in a bubble and Mozilla needs to cater to the average person. And let's be honest, we aren't the average user.
Personally I'm fine as long as it continues to be easy to disable and remove. Yeah, I'd rather it be opt-in instead of opt-out but it's not a big price to pay to avoid giving Chrome more power over the internet. At the end of the day these issues are pretty small fish in comparison.
I mean, Chrome/Google have already won the browser wars and it isn't even close. 'Average' persons don't use Firefox, period - they use Chrome. I dunno when you last looked at browser market share, but Firefox is already extremely niche. Trying to cater to the 'average user' when your entire userbase consists of power users is asinine but Mozilla clearly doesn't understand this. They think it's still 2008 or something.
Do you use Firefox?
If not, why not?
Do normal people use Firefox?
I've successfully migrated my girlfriend, parents, and several friends. Half those friends don't even know how to program. So yes, normal people can use Firefox and they really don't notice the difference.
It isn't over till its over. It's trivial to make a stand in this fight. It is beyond me why a large portion of HN users aren't using FF or one of its derivatives. Of all people they should be more likely to understand what's at stake here...Yes I use FF. You’ve completely misunderstood my point.
Your comment about how YOU had to get the people close to you to use FF was exactly my point. Techies are the only people who use FF now without it being foisted onto them by their techie friends.
Local RAG on your browsed pages (either automatically, manually or a mix (allow/disallow domains/url) ?
You personally wouldn't use live captions and dubbing, so there's no point building it for the millions of people who need it as an accessibility feature?
They can use addons, but it shouldn’t be built in to the browser. Not all that complicated.
Because of what?
Why it must be addon? Because Ai has negative connotations?
Bloat? Security? Privacy? Larger codebase to maintain? Lack of focus by a Browseer company? Speed?
Live captions and dubbing can be a game changer for:
- non native speakers - moving away from the english-centric web - impaired people
Couldn’t care less about any of that. English is the world’s dominant language and will remain so for the foreseeable future. There’s nothing wrong with that. And subtitles exist already or can be generated by addons. Most people don’t use them. So, once again, maybe don’t inconvenience the vast majority of users for some small subset of the population.
> English is the world’s dominant language and will remain so for the foreseeable future.
Based on the fact that you said this I'm going to assume you can't read/write Mandarin, apologies if that's incorrect because that leads to my second assumption which is that you're unaware of the astonishingly vast amount of content and conversation related to open source and AI/ML you're missing out on as a result of not being able to read/write Mandarin.
What does what you wrote have to do with what I wrote, or the comment I was replying to? Literally every reasonably educated Chinese person speaks English as a 2nd language.
I'm missing out on all sorts of shit I'd find interesting by virtue of not being a prodigious polyglot. That fact has nothing to do with English being the global language for literally everything in every domain, nor with the fact that in-browser language translation doesn't require baked-in AI.
Just say that you dont care about other ppl, that's it, lol.
English proficiency is pretty high bar. Thats multi year effort
I mean, sure. I don’t generally give a shit about other people. That’s also not really relevant here. There will always be a dominant language. Currently, it happens to be English and it will remain English into the near future (250+ years). If you attend even a shitty school in a third world country today you are taught English as a second language. Look at the Philippines or sub-Saharan African countries. Everybody speaks English + their native language.
Crying about English’s global penetration is super weird while also being pointless, since it’s a fait accompli at this point.
local LLM assisted 'tampermonkey' userscript generation?
I get very annoyed by generative AI, but to be fair I could imagine an AI-powered "Ctrl+F" which searches text by looser meaning-based matches, rather than strict character matches; for example Ctrl+AI+F "number of victims" in a news article, or Ctrl+AI+F "at least 900 W" when sorting through a list of microwave ovens on Walmart.
Or searching for text in images with OCR. Or searching my own browsing history for that article about that thing.
>"at least 900 W" when sorting through a list of microwave ovens on Walmart.
Newegg has that as a built in filter.
Why do you people keep insisting I "need" an LLM to do things that are standard features?
I find shopping online for clothes to suck, but there's nothing an LLM can do to fix that because it's not a magic machine and I cannot try on clothes at home. So instead, I just sucked it up and went to Old Navy.
Like, these things are still lying to my face every single day. I only use them when there's no alternative, like quickly porting code from python to Java for an emergency project. Was the code correctly ported? Nope, it silently dropped things of course, but "it doesn't need to be perfect" was the spec.
>Or searching for text in images with OCR.
That thing that was a mainline feature of Microsoft OneNote in 2007 and worked just fine and I STILL never used? I thought it was the neatest feature but even my friend who runs everything out of OneNote doesn't use it much. Back in middle school we had a very similar Digital Notebook application that predates OneNote with a similar feature set, including the teachers being able to distribute Master copies of notes for their students, and I also did not use OCR there.
The ONE actual good use case of LLMs that anyone has offered me did not come from techbros who think "Tesla has good software" is not only an accurate statement but an important point for a car, it came from my mom. Turns out, the text generation machine is pretty good at generating text in French to make tests! Her moronic (really rich of course, one of the richest in the state) school district refused to buy her any materials at all for her French classes, so she's been using ChatGPT. It does a great job, because that's what these machines are actually built for, and she only has to fix up the output occasionally, but that task is ACTUALLY easy to verify, unlike most of the things people use these LLMs for.
She STILL wouldn't pay $20 monthly for it. That shouldn't be surprising, because "Test generator" for a high school class is a one time payment of $300 historically, and came with your textbook purchase. If she wasn't planning on retiring she would probably just do it the long way. A course like that is a durable good.
So you're not going to get it until your OS decides to, and if its implementation is poor you're SOL?
Choose the implementation that you like, or contribute to help make one better. Just like all other software on your computer.
Don't like Libreoffice's implementation of Word support? Install Koffice. I take it you've never installed non-OEM software on your computer?
Why would anyone install Koffice when clearly they would wait for the OS to support Word directly?
Not at all. If you want or need a feature it's not some "my browser has to support it or my OS does" dichotomy.
As a couple parents up stated, there's no technical reason a browser has to have a transformer embedded into it. There might be a business reason like "we made a dumb choice and don't have the manpower to fix it", but I doubt this is something they will accept, at least with a mission statement like they have.
I much prefer every individual piece of software and website I interact with implement their own proprietary AI features that compete for my attention and interfer with each other.
The mindset of every browser vendor is that they are the OS now, and all that kernel and userland guff merely supporting infrastructure.
> Sounds like a great OS feature.
Cool, and some DEs make it possible to start implementing this for most applications today. But Mozilla is not KDE or Gnome, so the most they can do is to make this on their software, and make it easy to copy for the entire system.
> Sounds like a web site, not a browser feature.
Sounds like a bit of lack of imagination on your part. Do you think the same for text search?
>
> But Mozilla is not KDE or Gnome
Exactly. Would be nicer if they did their own features somewhat right (including interfaces for configuration and disabling approachable for non-engineers) before they scope-creep the entire desktop.
All those things we had before AI?
Most of those things weren't very good before AI was applied.
Translation specifically was pretty bad before Google applied machine learning methods to it around 2007 when it became very good almost overnight.
Google Translation never "became very good" and it still isn't when you compare it to DeepL or Kagi.
Where it excels is quantity. Often, niche languages are only available on Google Translate.
Google Translate became very good compared to what came before it. Other stuff is better now and one day we will say the tools of today are trash.
No, even when they switched to machine learning their translations still made mistakes that would have made you look goofy. And even today their models still make mistakes that are just weird.
It is especially baffling because Google has much better data sets and much more compute than their competitors.
Google Translate isn't what's meant when tech CEOs say "AI" in 2025.
What tech CEO says is "a text box with magic" Google translate fulfills that and there are ways to integrate with LLM if technology marketing is important.
Unless it is nVidia's CEO, who wants to sell specific hardware, they mostly care about the buzz of the term, not a specific technology, though.
Stop blurring the lines, google translate using machine learning has nothing to do with turning firefox into an ai browser
It has everything to do with it. Mozilla explicitly talked about AI in the context of their relatively new translation feature a year or two back. Live captions also uses "AI". The term AI includes machine learning in marketing speech.
If that was the case that means Firefox is already an AI browser. But he wouldn’t be talking about AI browsers if he planned on maintaining the current features and approach, would he?
Technically, many of those things often were AI.
They just existed before the GenAI craze and no one cared because AI wasn't a buzzword at the time. Google Translate absolutely was based on ML before OpenAI made it a big deal to have things "based on AI".
But just putting stuff in your browser that hooks into third-party services that use ML isn't enough anymore. It has to be front and center otherwise, you're losing the interest of... well, someone. I'm not sure who at this point. I don't care, personally.
Yes, tools have used machine learning, nobody is questioning or denying that.
But that’s not what the CEO of mozilla means when he says he will turn Firefox into an AI browser.
It means there will be stupid fucking LLMs shoved in your face.
Many of these things were "AI" but the marketing hype hadn't gotten there yet. E.g. the local translation in FF is a transformer model, as was Google translate in the cloud since 2018 (and still "AI" looong before that, just not transformer based).
Safari does most of this by leveraging system-level AI features, some of which are entirely local (and in turn, can be and do get used elsewhere throughout the system and native apps). This model makes a lot more sense to me than building the browser around an LLM.
Firefox uses local models for translation, summarisation and possibly other stuff. As it is not restricted on one platform, I guess that it has to use its own tools, while apple (or macos/ios focused software in general) can use system level APIs. But the logic I guess is the same.
Exactly. There’s doom and gloom in this thread but the truth is that the early adopters who are using AI-integrated browsers love them.
Mozilla having unique features is what made it popular in the first place (tabbed browsing versus IE6).
I’m not exactly surprised that AI grifters that have probably bet all their life savings on nvidia “love” their AI browsers.
Shit on it all you want, the utility of AI is undeniable. Laggards say exactly what you’re saying now.
It’s actually very deniable. Check this out i’m gonna do it now. AI has been a net negative to my life. Boom, denied.
A bored LLM that will constantly hit reload on hackernews hoping to see something new.
Why use a drinking bird pointed at your F5 key when data centers crammed full of GPUs (and a touch of global warming) will do?
If they can perfect that feature, then users can be done away with once and for all.
Technically, a browser is a “user agent”, and it could be argued that some AI features (with privacy) can help in being a better user agent.
It is really incredibly nice to be able to highlight a passage, right click on it, and select "Summarize" or "Explain this." That's all FireFox does at the moment. It's an option on the right-click menu. You can ignore it. If nobody told you the evil AI thingy was there, you would probably never notice it.
It's a lot nicer to exercise your brain and maybe learn something.
If Luddism is your idea of "learning something," well... other sites beckon.
Comet, for one
This is the equivalent of Blockbuster rejecting Netflix.
At the risk of becoming the infamous iPod and Dropbox posters, I really don't think so. My browser having an LLM directly integrated adds nothing for my use cases that couldn't be accomplished with a web service or dedicated tool/app. For me, an integrated LLM running concurrently with my browser just represents a whole lot of compute and/or network calls with little added value and I don't think that this is unusual.
Better yet, if an LLM does add value to the use cases why is it that I have one "integrated" LLM when editing a document in the webpage, another "integrated" LLM in the browser, and then an "integrated" LLM in the OS. If there is value to be had I want it to integrate with the different things on the system as they exist just like I do, not be shoehorned into whatever company abc decided to bundle with just their product(s) too.
Yep. I mention this in my other reply, but having the LLM be system-level (and preferably, user replaceable) and leveraged as needed by applications (and thus, not redundant) is clearly the best model. Apple is currently the closest to this, offering system level third party LLM integrations, but a Linux distribution would be the best positioned to achieve that goal to its fullest extent.
Having something that read everything I read and could talk with me about it, help remember things and synthesize? That’s awesome. Follow links and check references.
This use case feels better served by a dedicated utility with a specialized UI rather than shoehorned into a browser. It'd fit the macOS services model (which adds items to context and application menus, e.g. "Research this…" when right-clicking a link or text selection) and could optionally also be summoned by the system app launcher (like Spotlight).
Blockbuster could have bought Netflix, stifled the idea, and then lost to… whatever, Vine or YouTube or something.
These stories just look compelling and obvious in retrospect, when we can see how the dice landed.
Time will tell, but I doubt it.
This is why I'm hopeful that at least one of Ladybird, Flow, and Servo emerge as a viable alternative to the current crop.
I recently learned of Flow, and I don't understand why people group it together with Ladybird and Servo, which are both developing the browser engine from scratch mostly, while Flow seems to be based on Chromium. Is Flow doing anything different compared to the numerous other Chromium-based browsers? Genuinely curious.
Are you talking about https://flow-browser.com ? I wasn't aware of this project before, but it appears to a new chromium based browser.
The Flow people are talking about when they talk about Ladybird and Servo is https://www.ekioh.com/flow-browser/ which does have it's own engine. It has a similar level of standards compliance to Servo and Ladybird, although it's not open source which puts it in a somewhat different category.
This is why I've been using Firefox forks like Zen or LibreWolf. These forks will disable/strip out the AI stuff, so I never have to see it.
Palemoon still exists...
LibreWolf ftw, I switched to it, installed my extensions and am not looking back. Would be nice to have a mobile Firefox(LibreWolf) with all extensions, I should go look around F Droid again.
in ff if you're reading this go to about:config and type privacy - why these aren't immediately obvious in the Settings is beyond me
IronFox is essentially LibreWolf for mobile: https://gitlab.com/ironfox-oss/IronFox
> This really feels like the beginning of the end for Mozilla, sadly.
The moment Mozilla failed to stop being dependent on Google's money whilst being true to their own mission in being a 'privacy first browser' it already was the end and the damage in trust was done.
In 2007, the CEO at the time said they could live without Google's money - Now, their entire survival was tied to Google funding them [0] and got rewarded for failure whilst laying off hundreds of engineers working on Firefox.
Other than the change in leadership after 17 years of mis-direction, the financial situation has still not changed.
Do you still trust them now?
> Are there any true alternatives (not dependent on financing or any engines from third parties) to Google, if you wish to use the web in 2025?
After thinking about it, the only viable browser that is not funded by Google (Firefox 75%, Safari (>20%) and Chrome) is Ladybird. [1]
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20120105090543/https://www.compu...
[1] https://ladybird.org/
> The moment Mozilla failed to stop being dependent on Google's money whilst being true to their own mission in being a 'privacy first browser' it already was the end and the damage in trust was done.
I understand your position but what is the alternative funding source that could keep a company making a free browser running?
Apple funds Safari's development but it's basically a side project for them, Google funds Chrome's development as side project to their ad business, Edge is the same for Microsoft.
Obviously we don't want Firefox to become ad-supported so that leaves either donations which to be honest does not work (see all the OS projects that ask for donations when you install NPM packages for reference) or they need to start charging money (we know how well that worked out for Netscape) or finally find another corporate sponsor willing to shove billions of dollars each year into a product that will not improve their bottom line.
I am all for alternatives and I agree with you that something needs to change but the real question is how?
Maybe I am presumptuous in this assumption but I am pretty sure that if Mozilla had another palatable solution on the table, they would have probably implemented it by now.
> After thinking about it, the only viable browser that is not funded by Google (Firefox 75%, Safari (>20%) and Chrome) is Ladybird.
Ladybird is sponsored by many big companies as well. What makes you think that somehow their fate will be any different than Firefox? Do you believe that Shopify for example is more altruistic than Google and therefore should be trusted more?
I personally don't.
In my opinion the problem is the expectation that things should be free always on the internet and we can thank Google and Facebook for that. Most people these days who are not in the tech world simply have no idea how many hours and how much money it takes to create something, having it used by people and iterating on it day in day out until it is in a good shape and can be used by the general public.
Therefore besides a small cohort of users in tech (like Kagi's customers for example who understand that a good search engine is not free), the vast majority of people will not accept to have to pay for a browser. Which brings us back to the question I asked above.
Who will fund this supposedly free for all browser that does not track you, that does not show you any ads, that does not incorporate AI features, that does not try to up-sell you or scam you? From my vantage point it's not like there are 100s of solutions to get out of this conundrum.
I believe you stated the problem in a way that its unsolvable. Charge your customers money, so you can work for them. I'm not nearly as certain as you are that Netscape failed because it was charging money. Netscape just stopped updating for multiple years at the height of the browser wars.
For Firefox in particular, I would 100% be willing to pay for it. Individuals like me who will pay are rare, but companies that will pay aren't. I think the answer for modern Mozilla is a Red Hat style model. Charge a reasonable amount of money. Accept that someone is going to immediately create a downstream fork. Don't fight that fork, just ignore it. Let the fork figure out its own future around the online services a modern browser wants to provide.
Then, lean hard into the enterprise world. Figure out what enterprise customers want. The answer to that is always for things to never, ever change and the ability to tightly control their users. That isn't fun code to write, but its profitable and doesn't run counter to Mozilla's mission. That keeps Mozilla stable and financially independent.
Mozilla will maintain lots of influence to push forward their mission, because hopefully their enterprise customer base is big, but also they are the ones actually doing the work to make the downstream fork possible.
Firefox is reportedly rolling out an enterprise option in 2026 so we'll see how that goes.
> I believe you stated the problem in a way that its unsolvable.
I think you misunderstood me. I asked a question because the answer is far from obvious. If the solution to this problem was obvious, we wouldn't be having the same discussion on HN every 6 months when a new press release from Mozilla comes out.
I am very much interested by what people think the solution should be. Now, you mentioned Enterprise customers which is interesting because usually what I have read on this sort of threads was that Mozilla had made many mistakes (I agree), Mozilla should change their ways by removing this feature or adding this feature but almost everyone conveniently forgets that at the end of the day someone has to pay for all this stuff.
> Charge your customers money, so you can work for them.
Which is what I mentioned in my comment. Start charging people. The problem is how do you convince the general public to use Firefox instead of Chrome or Edge, especially is you need to pay for the software?
If privacy was a selling point, then Meta would have closed shop many years ago.
> I'm not nearly as certain as you are that Netscape failed because it was charging money. Netscape just stopped updating for multiple years at the height of the browser wars.
It doesnt matter because we will never know. The reality is that people expect to browse the internet for free. Asking them for cash has never been done at this scale.
If Mozilla was to start charging money tomorrow, you would find that many people would object to that and most people would simply move to Chrome because why not?
> Then, lean hard into the enterprise world. Figure out what enterprise customers want. The answer to that is always for things to never, ever change and the ability to tightly control their users. That isn't fun code to write, but its profitable and doesn't run counter to Mozilla's mission. That keeps Mozilla stable and financially independent.
I understand the comparison with Red hat but I am doubtful that this model will work. Red Hat helps companies ship stuff, it makes people more productive, it increases the bottom line. What would a paid version of Firefox do that makes people more productive or makes companies money that they couldn't get from Chrome? I am genuinely asking because again, it's mot very clear to me.
> Mozilla will maintain lots of influence to push forward their mission, because hopefully their enterprise customer base is big, but also they are the ones actually doing the work to make the downstream fork possible.
That is big assumption that has not been proven at this time. I think that making any sort of plans based on hypothetical paid version is highly speculative.
> Apple funds Safari's development but it's basically a side project for them, Google funds Chrome's development as side project to their ad business, Edge is the same for Microsoft.
Edge is a Chromium fork so essentially they don't have that much work in keeping up.
I was going to say a similar thing. I'm still not sure I have seen an example of a browser at the scale of Firefox (hundreds of millions of users, 30 million lines of code) being successfully monetized, basically ever, unless it was entirely subsidized by a trillion dollar company that was turning its users into the product. Or alternatively, succeeding by selling off its users for telemetry or coasting off of Chromium and tying their destiny to Google.
All the "just monetize differently" comments are coming from a place of magical thinking that nobody has actually thought through. Donations are a feel good side hustle, but completely unprecedented for any but Wikipedia to raise money that's even the right order of magnitude. Any attempts at offering monetized services run into delusional and contradictory complaints from people who treat them to "focus on the browser" but also to branch out and monetize. Hank Green has used the term hedonic skepticism for the psychology of seeking to criticize for its entertainment value, which I think is a large part of what this is.
For a more serious answer on funding, I think the most interesting thing in this space is their VC fund. Mozilla has been brilliant in building up and carefully investing their nest egg from nearly two decades of search licensing, and while it's not Ycombinator, they have the beginnings of a VC fund that may be a very interesting kind of Third Way, so to speak, depending on how that goes.
Thank you for your comment.
I am glad I am not the only one who is asking the tough questions regarding this problem.
In reality it boils down to replacing 1 income stream provided by Google with one or more new income streams.
That means that Mozilla needs something to sell and quickly.
Or use their VC funds as you said, but we know VC funds need to deploy a lot of capital and then hope that one of their companies makes it big to recoup their investments and eventually make a profit.
I am not sure if betting the entire future of Mozilla on this VC venture would be a wise move to be honest. It's just too unpredictable.
For sure. Like any side bet it should be staged and complementary rather than all or nothing.
> Hank Green has used the term hedonic skepticism for the psychology of seeking to criticize for its entertainment value, which I think is a large part of what this is.
I'm fascinated by this concept. Us it expanded anywhere?
I agree, it's fascinating and I believe a necessary term. I just recall him using it on his tik tokk. And come to think of it it might have actually been John Green (oops).
But basically his idea was that hedonic skepticism. Was this kind of like reflexive unthinking doubt of the sincerity of any institutional effort to do any form of social good whatsoever. It seems to over correct towards skepticism and is motivated, not by factual veracity but by the kind of entertainment value of being skeptical and jaded about everything. And so the idea that the center for disease control might really sincerely want to stop the spread of measles, if you're a hedonic skeptic, you laugh at how ridiculous and naive. It is to believe that they might have your best interests at heart. Which I think overlooks the simple possibility that sometimes we stand up institutions in response to real societal needs, and that you can have an appropriate and healthy skepticism of politicians and policy makers acting in their own self-interest while also appreciating that there do exist purpose-driven organizations that roll out programs and policies based on a genuine interest in solving problems.
> donations which to be honest does not work
It would work if I knew my donations go towards the fucking browser and not towards "AI" or whatever the craze was before it.
Since they refuse to do that, I don't donate.
How man large software projects do that? Blender and...?
Mozilla would have to become like Wikipedia, with a large fundraising focus. Its not like Wikipedia evades criticism for that approach.
I think Firefox has a sizable minority of users that are aware of its importance and would donate for "a fucking browser".
Tbh I would also donate for a nagging team that publicly pressures various corporate sites into continuing to support firefox (like my cell phone provider, i can't download invoices with FF since 3 months).
What I wouldn't donate for is "me too" initiatives like "AI" and corporate bullshit. Or even charity initiatives if done by Mozilla. It's not Mozilla's job. Their job is to keep a working browser alternative up.
And as it's been stated in techie discussions time and time again, they don't need to be that large for just "a fucking browser". But that would diminish the CEO's status so we get what we have now instead.
>what is the alternative funding source that could keep a company making a free browser running?<
i wonder how linux does it?
linus and anthony should have a head to head.
> i wonder how linux does it?
they don't? There's no company, or rather - a lot of them, Linux kernel moves forward like 80% by corporate contributors. For some of them it's critical part of their infrastructure, some of them need to get their device drivers mainlined, for some of them it's gpl magic at work. Linux desktop experience, however, leaves a lot to be desired.
Companies aren't interested to contribute to a browser when they can just reskin chromium or build on blink directly and community cannot match the pace.
> Linux desktop experience, however, leaves a lot to be desired.
No, it does not.
It is a wonderful world fill of variety, choice and diversity
Linux and FF have comparable desktop market share.
Moving in very different directions though.
I think you are comparing apples to oranges here. Linux is made of many distros, each one with their own strong points and features. Many different maintainers matain them. There is no single point of funding for them.
Mozilla on the other hand makes basically one semi well-known product (and other even less known stuff) and gives it away for free.
If tomorrow Google pulls the plug, who will pay for the salaries of the engineers who maintain Firefox? The general public does not care if Firefox lives or dies. In my circle of friends and family, I am the only one who uses Firefox. Most people are on Chrome or Brave. That's it.
Someone in the comments above mentioned that Mozilla could release a paid version for Enterprise customers, imitating Red Hat in a way, but I am highly skeptical that Enterprise customers in times such as these will be willing to pay for something that they can get for free from Google or Microsoft.
I guess we will have to wait and see.
> I am highly skeptical that Enterprise customers in times such as these will be willing to pay for something that they can get for free from Google or Microsoft.
They would have to build a better enterprise offering. Companies like Chrome because can use Google as their IDP, and when their employees log in with their company account the company can push certs and security politicies to their Chrome install.
Firefox doesn't have that level of integration with Google security services.
1) Linux is made of many distros, each one with their own strong points and features. Many different maintainers matain them. There is no single point of funding for them.
2) Mozilla on the other hand makes basically one semi well-known product.
the way i see it mozilla has one thing to do, and didnt do it very well.
the linux GNU gang has a mountain to contend with and has has moved a mountain.
so what would be the secret sauce that mozilla doesnt have.
> Google funds Chrome's development as side project to their ad business
> Obviously we don't want Firefox to become ad-supported
Firefox is currently ad-supported. They take an enormous amount of money from Google, an ad company.
I honestly think the answer is tax money. It should be clear by now, that a browser is (critical) infrastructure and it should be funded as such. Ideally by multiple, non-aligned states.
>In 2007, the CEO at the time said they could live without Google's money
Can you say more about where that quote came from? I'm seeing it as being from 2015.
https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/firefox-make...
It is from an archived link which is also in my comment and the article's date is from 2007: [0]
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20120105090543/https://www.compu...
Kagi's Orion browser is 1.0 on Mac and working on the first full Linux release - it's built on WebKit. That WebKit is a "third party" dependency but it's still a break from the browser monoculture and it doesn't seem like Mozilla has as much interest in pushing the browser engine space forward after pulling back from Servo.
The beginning of the end was a long time ago. We are well past the middle of the end of Mozilla.
I switched to Brave. Even with its cryptocurrency stuff bundled, it's easily disabled and not in your face at all. And their adblock tech is an amazing uBlock successor.
I stopped using Brave after they began to shove ads into the splash screen.
That is also easily disabled. I think there are five or six things that I need to disable in a fresh Brave installation and then it's perfect.
> This really feels like the beginning of the end for Mozilla, sadly.
I really feel like every time Mozilla announces something, someone gets paid to leave comments like this around. I've seen many "beginning of the end" comments like this, and so far, it hasn't happened.
What I do see is a lot of bashing, and hypocrisy, and excuses for why its OK that you don't personally try to do better...
Even as someone who is still a Firefox user - the browser now has about half the browser market share as Edge... Absolutely nobody needs to be paid to write these kind of comments!
Honestly the last 5-10 years has been a disaster for Firefox...
Perhaps not paid, but. I think even if it's natural (I myself have been known to make a disparaging remark in their direction), I still suspect some level of manipulation (why was I saying these things? Out of frustration or because I'd heard something worrying and negative news sticks better than positive?).
Sure, firefox has had some issues, and nobody is denying the market share is an issue but:
1) It has worked reliably for the past 10 years 2) Mozilla and firefox have not disappeared, in fact it has created a number of useful services worth paying for.
Meanwhile, I keep hearing these negative "the world is ending" comments regarding what amounts to a "force for good" in this world, and I have to wonder.
How many of these people making these comments recently switched to chrome, and are saying this as an excuse?
The vast majority of these people complaining are using something like Brave or just plain Chrome.
They aren't expressing genuine criticisms for the most part.
Tons of them literally work at google.
Like, there's a poster a couple threads over insisting "Brave is great, you just have to ignore the crypto shit and change a bunch of settings" and like, somehow brave doesn't get regular 600 post long threads about how it's "Dead" and "It's the end" and "I have never used Firefox in my life but I certainly wont now!"
It's absurd.
"Mozilla's CEO makes $6 million" says people who get very angry if you suggest we should pay the managerial class less of the worlds money and also never seem to complain about any other CEO making that money and don't say anything about how much the CEO of Brave makes or how much money Google as a whole sucks out of reality to do whatever they want with, including subsidizing a browser to kill any competition.
Firefox got big because every young tech nerd installed it on everyone's machine and then a few years later, google literally paid tons of installers to also bundle and install Chrome and make it the default browser and everyone here always insists that people who did not choose to use firefox and did not even notice they now use chrome are somehow going to pay real money for firefox?
Meanwhile Opera is showing how nobody gives a shit about any of this "Privacy" nonsense in the market, and the important features are things like "you can install a theme your favorite youtuber made for shits and giggles" and "Advertising to children"
You want browser engine diversity? Guess what, that's Firefox right now. There is nothing else. That's why I use Firefox. There's nowhere else to go.
Personally try to do what better? Run Mozilla? Make a browser?
Personally not support monopolies? If firefox is not working, do you have a solution/alternative?
Are you trying to say that complaining about Mozilla's mistakes supports monopolies?
If yes then that's an unreasonable standard to hold people to.
If no then I can't figure out what your comment means.
Not at all. To clarify, saying something is "over", without really saying what your plan is, is low effort.
"This is a problem, and here is what I/we should do", takes a bit more effort.
Firefox is still open source last I checked. You can still contribute, write bugs, write letters to the CEO, etc...
I'm only taking issue with tendency people have to throw shade without offering a solution.
"low effort" is a completely different statement from supporting monopolies. If that's what you actually meant, sure I guess.
But it's really hard for a normal person to do much about steering firefox other than helping raise a fuss.
Sometimes there isn't "a solution".
There may not be "a solution", but recognizing FUD for what it is, is a part of the "whole" solution.
If you don't have something to contribute (like a direction, suggestion, correction), then as they used to say, you are "part of the problem".
Shaming organizations into changing course sometimes works.
And even if it's useless that doesn't make it FUD.
The beginning of the end was getting rid Brendan Eich for wrongthink. This is the middle of the end.
He resigned April 3, 2014 after two weeks in the role.
According to https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/137ephs/firefoxs_d...
Google Chrome exceeded Firefox market share in early 2012 after a steady rise starting in 2009 afaict.
If his resignation was involved, it was a symptom and not a cause. The end was already forecasted at least two years earlier.
Having seen what Brave became, I'm extremely happy that Eich wasn't allowed to bring his "vision" to my favorite browser.
Even in a compromised state, if given the choice between Firefox and Brave, I would choose Firefox 10 out of 10 times. A closed source chromium fork put out by a business that still isn't sure what its business model is and already has a fair number of "whoopsies" under its belt is a complete non-starter for me.
That is, given the choice between Firefox and Brave. For what it's worth, my current browser is Zen, and I'm quite happy with it.
Brave is 100% FOSS. At least the client side, I've not looked into their server applications.
https://github.com/brave
Fair enough. I'd still be very hesitant to use it on account of it being a chrome fork. Moreover, I don't really understand how Brave expects to be a viable business without deeply betraying their userbase at some point.
It admittedly is a gut feeling, but Brave started out with a browser and some handwavy crypto magic beans and seemed like it careened from idea to idea looking for a business model, occasionally stepping on toes along the way. They have products like AI integration, a VPN and a firewall, but those aren't particularly stand-out products in a very crowded market.
As a point of comparison, Kagi started out with a product that people were willing to pay for, and grew other services from there. I feel comfortable giving them money, and I'd be willing to at least try their browser - if it ever releases for Windows.
Your points are valid. But what made me finally switch was that it is open source, that it has been out for roughly a decade now, and that Brendan Eich's opinions from 2014 are mostly based on his Catholic faith at the time (which obviously is likely to have changed/evolved now that we're a decade later).
> Moreover, I don't really understand how Brave expects to be a viable business without deeply betraying their userbase at some point.
They have a way better merch store than Mozilla. They should expand that.
"MERCHANDISING! Where the real money from the movie is made!"
> which obviously is likely to have changed/evolved now that we're a decade later
I refuse to make any assumptions there. Either he says he changed, or I treat him like he hasn't changed.
Brave is great. Takes just a few seconds to turn off the bloat. Anyone try Helium?
> Are there any true alternatives (not dependent on financing or any engines from third parties)
Servo is still a work in progress, but their current positions give a great deal of hope.
I still use Firefox, however it has been away from our browser matrix since 2019, very few customers worry with browsers under 5% market share.
"Anchor" is interesting. Because it could mean cornerstone or it could mean the thing weighing the company down.
> It will evolve into a modern AI browser
OMG, please, no! What are they thinking and who wants an "AI browser"?
> Are there any true alternatives
Firefox with blocked updates works pretty well.
Not updating works until an exploit fixed years ago exfiltrates your bank info
If that's the price to pay for having a working browser until then.
> This really feels like the beginning of the end for Mozilla, sadly.
This has been said numerous times over the decades anytime Mozilla has done something. Thankfully (at least for me), it hasn’t come true so far.
I'm excited about what Kagi is doing:
https://orionbrowser.com/
I have no illusions that they will turn into google the first chance they get, all companies do. But for now they seem pretty good.
I tried Orion about a year ago. I tried using the profile sandboxing. Logging into my google account in one profile also logged me in in another profile.
I can definitely excuse some bugs (there were crashes for example that I didn’t overly mind; I understand I was using prerelease software). But something like account containers should be built fundamentally to disallow any data sharing. If data sharing is a bug, and not fundamentally disallowed by the architecture, then it’s going to happen again later.
So for that reason I’m not bullish on orion.
I'd be interested if the issue you ran into was actually due to poor architecture or just something not fully implemented in the pre-release. Unfortunately, it's closed source - so hard to tell from the outside.
Well it was definitely a bug. It worked in some cases (I think it even worked in google at first, and then a few days later it manifested). And the feature was advertised, even though, again, they never claimed the software to be release quality.
But my point is that, similar to security, you don't want to build this kind of feature piece meal. Either the containers are fundamentally walled off or they aren't.
I understand what your claim is, I just disagree it's that blanket. You could e.g. absolutely build the UI for a profile switcher before your implementation of the backend changes are merged without carrying implications of how well that will handle isolation in the same way in security you could implement the null cipher in TLS to test that portion of the code without it forever implying you have bad encryption.
Google is what it is because of advertising. Kagi's whole raison d'etre is to have a search engine without advertising.
google is what it is because they have shareholders and need to make money. Maybe Kagi gets around that by setting up as a PBC, I hope so. I am not holding my breath.
Not sure why you're getting downvoted. Orion has matured as a browser and just hit 1.0. It's mac- and ios-only for now, but linux and windows ports are in the works. It has ad-blocking out of the box and has zero telemetry. I use it every day.
My two cents - I'm not doing the "proprietary browser" shtick again. Unless I have real assurance that the software isn't going to become a $50/month SaaS, why should I leave my perfectly good current browser?
I get the feeling this kind of product will only appeal to unconscious iOS and macOS users. Windows and Linux users have much better (and freer) options than a WebKit wrapper.
But Orion has the exact same issue that we are facing now with Chrome and Edge and Firefox. Orion is funded by Kagi, so it's a money losing venture. If Kagi folds tomorrow, who will pick the pieces and continue its' development?
Replace Orion with Chrome and Kagi with Google and you will find that we are in the same exact boat. Browsers cost money to maintain. Money has to come from somewhere. If the general public does not want to pay then who does?
Furthermore, what makes you think that Kagi will not one day do the same exact thing that Google has done with Chrome? Are you willing to bet that it won't happen?
And I am not here to bash on Kagi, I am one of their customers but I will not use Orion for the same reason I don't use Chrome.
If Kagi goes tits-up, you could switch to another browser. I don't see how this is a permanent decision.
> Not sure why you're getting downvoted
Orion browser is proprietary
That would be my guess.
That might be OK for you, but I have been burnt, as have many others, by proprietary software
If there is a choice, I make it
Safari lol
Safari has like 20% market share right now. The only thing holding it back is that it's Mac only. If Apple got a Windows version going again, it'd eat Chrome for lunch.
Does anyone else feel like the "Trust" angle is the only card they have left to play? Technically, Chrome is faster on JS benchmarks. Edge has better OS integration on Windows and comes by default. Safari wins on battery life on Mac. Firefox's only unique selling point is "We aren't a massive data vampire." If they clutter the browser with AI which inherently requires data processing, often in the cloud, they dilute their only true differentiator.
>Technically.....
Since its birth, Firefox is still the only browser that manage multiple ( hundreds or in some cases, thousands! [1] ) tabs better than any browser. And in my view in the past 12 - 24 months Firefox has managed to be as fast as chrome. While Chrome also improved on its multiple Tab browsing experience.
Safari.... I dont know why this battery life argument keeps coming up because it is not the case. It hasn't been so for at least 5 - 6 years.
Mozilla could have played the trust angle when they have the good will and money. They could have invested into SaaS that provides better revenue generations other than getting it from Google. They could also have partnered with Wikipedia before they got rotten. But now I am not even sure if they still have the "trust" card anymore. Gekco is still hard to be embedded, XULRunner could have been Electron. They will need to get into survival mode and think about what is next.
[1] https://www.tomshardware.com/software/mozilla-firefox/firefo...
No doubt the browsers are constantly leapfrogging each other, so this isn't always the case. But, anecdotally: switching from Chrome to Safari actually felt like I got a new computer. The difference was that apparent.
Safari is fast and performant but once you load a heavy web app that uses a lot of memory safari will kill the tab. It’s incredibly frustrating to have a page reload with a banner simply saying the site was using too much memory and was reloaded. Especially when you’re on a maxed out MacBook with plenty of resources.
I agree, in practice I see this occasionally on gigantic GitHub pull requests with 1000+ files, or very clunky Atlassian/Confluence pages. I'd say both sides need to work on their resource management!
(On that note, many complaints about Safari I hear from developers fall on my ears as "I don't care about web compatibility!" as it has never NOT been the case on the web that you need to care about feature support and resource management.)
I will also note that Safari is almost /too/ deeply integrated in the system, when I'm running a high-stress task elsewhere, my browser would jitter or hang, the same couldn't be said for chromium, for some reason.
> Safari.... I dont know why this battery life argument keeps coming up because it is not the case. It hasn't been so for at least 5 - 6 years.
I can assure you, this is still true. I use Chrome when plugged in at my desk and Safari for everything else on the go. Chrome still isn't great on memory or battery life.
Have you compared with something else than Chrome? Otherwise it might be that Chrome is just very power hungry compared to Safari, but maybe Firefox is more efficient by now? Chrome has slowly turned into a monster on it's own, not unlike what they competed against initially when Chrome first arrived.
Safari use less CPU power than Firefox, chrome being the worst of them all.
It's even more obvious when watching video where safari will be 5 to 10 points lower than Firefox.
Harder to say when it's rendering page but the fact of the matter is that I tried both for years, Firefox always drain the battery faster.
>It's even more obvious when watching video where safari will be 5 to 10 points lower than Firefox.
Safari uses macOS for video so the points will be on macOS. Firefox uses it own internal video decoder. That is why image and video codec support on Safari is dependent on macOS upgrade not Safari.
Safari uses OS frameworks but they're called from Safari subprocesses and counted as part of Safari.
I remember people saying that chromium is better at sandboxing than firefox, so more secure.
> Safari.... I dont know why this battery life argument keeps coming up because it is not the case. It hasn't been so for at least 5 - 6 years.
I mean, observably, this is still the case.
Now, luckily the M-series laptops have such insane battery life that it barely matters compared to before... but I can still observe about an hour of battery life difference between Safari and Chrome on an M2 Macbook Air (running Sequoia). Now, my battery life is still in the region of 7.5 hours, so even if it's a large difference it's not impacting my workday yet (though the battery is at 90% max design capacity from wear).
I know this, because there are days where I only use chrome, and days where I only use Safari, and I do roughly the same work on each of those days.
I suspect that the people making these claims that Safari is no longer the most battery efficient are not Apple users. It's quite easy to empirically validate which browsers are most efficient by looking at the average energy impact in Activity Monitor. Safari is the winner, Chrome/Brave are not far behind, and Firefox is the clear loser.
I use all three.
Safari loses out when you run with a lot of Tabs. Both Chrome and Firefox knows when to unload tabs. ( Firefox even have about:unloads to tell you the order of Tabs it will unload! )
Try opening Tab Overview in Safari and it will start loading all the website for thumbnails, paging out to disk due to low memory, writing hundreds of GB to page. It also put Tabs on low running priority in the background rather than pausing them like Firefox or Chrome. ( Not sure if that is still the case with Safari 26, at least it was with 18 ). To combat that, restarting the browser time to time helps.
Safari is well tuned for iOS as a single tab, single page usage. On MacOS when doing many tabs it start to get slow and inefficient. And this is very much a Safari issue not an Webkit issue because Orion is a lot better at it.
And yes I have filed Radar report for many of the issues but I have come to the conclusion Apple doesn't care about multi tab usage on desktop Safari.
I think the difference is fundamental to the engine and the gap will be hard to close, too (I mean, how long has it been and the gap remains?). WebKit-based ultralight browsers remain usable after you’ve cranked hardware specs down far enough that nothing based on Chrome or Firefox’s engines do. Resource use among the three engines seems to differ at some kind of low, basic architecture level.
I think Brave has the potential to be the next Firefox if they can run their company right.
> Safari.... I dont know why this battery life argument keeps coming up because it is not the case. It hasn't been so for at least 5 - 6 years.
Uhh, not my experience. I default any video watching longer than a short clip to safari. It is still the best browser for video IME.
What does "faster JS" actually get me? Youtube is probably the most heavy site I and I think most people use, I'm certainly not trying to do heavy scientific computation in my browser, so what difference does it really make?
Anyway, Firefox's killer feature is still extensions, despite everything that's happened on that front. There's nothing like Tree Style Tabs for Chrome (not usably implemented anyway) and while I think maybe Brave has it, Firefox has uMatrix which is better than anything Brave uses (Brave may share lists or even code with that, but the uMatrix UI is where its at.)
They also have the "extensions that can do real ad blocking" angle.
Indeed, manifest v2 support alone is a killer feature that will keep me on FF as long as they support it.
It definitely helps that it's also a great (though imperfect) browser.
The wider point here is that you can only use FF as long as Mozilla can fund it and Mozilla can only fund it as long as Google funds them. At some point, it will be cheaper for Google to pay monopoly fines than funding Mozilla.
Fines aren't a way to just buy your way out of obeying the law. At some point if they persist in monopolistic activities then they will get broken up.
I don't think the FTC prioritizes that right now
I don't think they've prioritized that ever in recent memory, or they would have already been broken up a long time ago.
There's penalties other than fines for abusive monopolies.
Fines are only the slightest punishment.
I can't remember the last time a monopoly got punished properly
Yes, although they can't go all in on that because it doesn't help monetization...
Have you tried Brave?
Brave is adware.
Technically, both Chrome and Firefox are adware too, since Google's main business is ads, and Firefox/Mozilla get a lot of money from Google to display Google as a search engine in Firefox (an ad :) )
Firefox doesn't sell BATs, in-browser notification ads, or new tab takeovers. The closest you can get is a pinned site in the new tab page (new installs only) and ads in Pocket, or whatever they're calling that new tab thing these days.
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/advertising/solutions/
https://brave.com/brave-ads/browser/
Calling Firefox adware is a stretch at best, and disingenuous at worst. Adware doesn't mean that the software survives because of one advertisement that that user can turn off.
Only if you opt-in to that misfeature, last I checked. It's opt-in, not opt-out.
I don't know, Brave says it's every third new tab. https://brave.com/brave-ads/browser/
Looks like I'm getting a ProtonMail ad every few new tabs. I never noticed because I've never looked at the new tab page. Doesn't noticeably slow it down to have the ad there, luckily.
So, to reiterate: Brave is adware.
The new tab ads can be disabled with 2 clicks.
I love how quickly the goalpost moves from "No ads" to "Only opt in ads" to "Ads can be disabled with two clicks."
Quit coping and just admit it, Brave is adware. If you like it, that's cool, totally your choice. It's fast, performant adware. But it's adware all the same.
Firefox has ads in the same places.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/sponsor-privacy
whataboutism gets you nowhere. Brave is still adware.
As is Firefox, and Chrome.
So really, there's no point in singling it out.
It's strange you're so adamant to label Brave adware while dismissing concerns that Firefox engages in very similar "adware" practices.
It might be adware but I’ve actually never noticed the ads!
Also it’s the only browser on my phone that I can use to browse the web without ads…
When we're talking about reasons to switch browsers, then saying they both have the same behavior is not whataboutism. It's extremely important context to the complaint.
Been running it since 2021. The adblocker is simply great. A d keeps getting better.
and*
It's good enough when some terrible lazy web designer only tested on Chrome. It does nothing to protect against the future when Google decides they are sick of people trying to get around their Ad Block ban and change the license because no one has any real alternatives anymore.
Also blocking is not as good as intentionally poisoning with something like Ad Nauseum
What’s the current licensing mode? Can they fork their own version at that point in time and develop it open source ?
No Chromium fork developer not called Microsoft have the resources to maintain a web browser engine.
But focus on the license overlooks a more important threat. Google made Web Environment Integrity so services could require approved devices, operating systems, and browsers. Resistance led Google to remove it from desktop for now. But they kept something like it in Android. And they will try again.
Chromium uses the BSD license. Google could take Chromium closed source tomorrow without needing to change the license.
A few years ago. Crashed constantly and didn’t support tagging bookmarks.
Never crashed once for me.
I've been using Chrome with uBlock Origin Lite and not even once I found a case when this version of uBlock was behaving differently (as less efficient) than the "full" uBlock Origin
Maybe I'm just lucky, but even this argument is quite ... meh
I've found it a bit like "what car did you drive in to work with today" in that any typical current and working car is not going to be a stark difference to a high end car in terms of how fast you get there... but you'd definitely notice a piece of crap with a donut, broken heating, and screeching brakes causing you problems if that's what you were comparing instead.
I.e. I can count the number of times I said "wow, uBO Lite didn't make this site usable but loading up Firefox with uBO and it worked fine" on one hand. At the same time, if I ever look and compare how much is actually getting blocked, uBO is definitely blocking way more. Doing a side by side compare of dozens of sites it becomes easier to see minor differences I wouldn't otherwise have noted, but may not have mattered as much.
I commented about this a few weeks ago here about this, but essentially: v2 allows you to block things you can't see, but you still probably don't want, like folks hiding cloud analytics behind CNAME cloaking to allow it to appear as a first-party site rather than Google Analytics, for example.
You won't "feel" this in your day-to-day browsing, but if you're concerned about your data being collected, v2 matters.
Does it not still suck at blocking YouTube video ads? As in, you get a delay before videos start playing.
That's not sucking at blocking thats YouTube intentionally adding a delay to make it seem like their experience is degraded when it isn't. If you turn the slider up to full it only happens very rarely.
I'm sure this will all change eventually though and YouTube has a loophole planned so ad blocking on manifest 2.0 is impossible.
I'm not really sure of the actual mechanism, but on Firefox with a fully updated block list the delay doesn't seem to happen for me. Whereas I could never quite get rid of it on Chrome. This was a while ago, though, when they first introduced it.
I use uBlock Origin with Firefox on Linux, and it seems like that delay happens maybe on 30% of the YouTube videos for me, with no rhyme or reason to which ones. And reloading the same video multiple times show consistent behavior if it loads fast/slow, not sure what's going on.
I don't even have this issue with uBlock Origin Lite on mobile Safari. I'm fully browser-based on mobile for YouTube these days. No ads, no delay.
There are a lot more Manifest V2 only extensions than only Adblockers.
How's that work for you on Android? Firefox on Android with uBlock is the huge win.
I have a device wide adblocker
Doesn't work for Prime Video ads. Tbh I don't mind that too much.
chromium-ungoogled works perfectly fine with "extensions that can do real ad blocking" ;)
Ungoogled Chromium is maintaining Manifest V2 support in the fork?
AFAIK Manifest v2 is still part of the chromium codebase, and there is an intention to continue supporting it, depending on how difficult that turns out to be.
Looking at their strategy doc, it doesn't seem like they hear their users at all. It's riddled with AI. In fact their aspiration is "doing for AI what we did for the web." Oh boy!
https://blog.mozilla.org/wp-content/blogs.dir/278/files/2025...
I will eat my hat if Google had nothing to do with the demise of Mozilla, what an absolute disgrace.
How incompetent can they be, how out of touch with their core (and arguably only) product ?
Nobody wants AI in firefox.
Nobody wants three or four corporations manipulating and controlling information (with a mix of hallucinations) all behind a subscription. The large tech companies have nearly universally lost all trust.
The models I've run recently on Ollama seem to about as good as the models I was running at work a year ago. The tech isn't there yet, but I see a path. I would be fine with that enhancing, not replacing, my usage.
>I will eat my hat if Google had nothing to do with the demise of Mozilla
One has to be truly naive to think they get half a bi a year from Google "just because." They have less than 5% of desktop market share and ZERO mobile presence.
IMHO, they wouldn't get this kind of money if they had a competent, technical C-suite that actually cared about creating a truly competitive free browser. The money is flowing because, not in spite of, the current C-suite.
I want a good AI integration with Firefox. The current chatgpt shim is horrible, something more refined would be nice.
Would you pay $20 a month for it? Like Cursor but for your browser?
Why though?
Leaving XSLT in web standards and in Firefox would let it keep some comfy useful niche.
Is that right if Google don't want to keep it - then no one can have it ?!
BTW JavaScript (to replace it all) _is not_ a _web standard_ (but it is Oracle trademark).
Do we know for a fact that 'nobody wants AI in Firefox'?
We know for a fact that whenever Mozilla solicits feedback for AI additions, it heavily leans negative.
https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/building-ai-the-f...
Yeah, but there's a selection bias present in most feedback like this, isn't there? People are more motivated to submit feedback when something annoys them. This is speaking as someone who is also annoyed by AI features.
That's a slightly different question, but an important one: the presence of a group criticizing a feature doesn't mean the absence of a different group requesting it!
When Mozilla initially made the Connect forums, it was to solicit requests for new features. I can't stress enough how few people joined the forum to request more AI in their browser.
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Please don't fulminate or sneer like this on HN. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
They are looking at OperaGX and Brave selling literal spyware and still growing marketshare and correctly recognizing that the only people willing to switch browsers in the current day do not give a shit about any of that stuff and are weirdos looking for "features"
Look at all the people in this very comment section insisting that Mozilla is just the worst while using fucking chrome or chromium. Mozilla knows they will never get that market back, because that market just hates Mozilla for "reasons", usually "They fired a guy for being openly hostile"
The thing google did to cause the demise of firefox was pay to bundle chrome with tons of things users installed, and put a giant "Install Chrome for BEST EXPERIENCE" banner on every single page they control. Sane governments would have broken them up for their clear anti-competitive practices, but at the same time the vast majority of the users they "lost" never knew they had firefox in the first place and didn't notice when it got changed.
These users never even noticed when conficker changed their browsers to literal adware FFS, they certainly didn't "Choose" a browser freely.
Mozilla (in its previous form) has long been doomed. Mobile cemented it, I think. Browsers are part of the operating system and getting users to switch from the default is an incredible uphill climb. Especially when browsers are essentially utilities, there are so few unique compelling features.
That lack of connection to tech giants is a strength in the trust angle. And I think they’re right to be thinking about AI: people are using it and there does need to be an alternative to tech giants/VC funded monsters
Will they be successful? The odds are stacked against them. But if they’re not going to even try then what purpose will they serve any more?
It's interesting that most people on Windows PCs switch to Chrome when Edge is the default. It was obvious why people switched from IE6 to Firefox and later from IE7 to Chrome; IE was terrible; Firefox was better; Chrome was better still. Edge is not obsolete, unstable, or a security nightmare the way IE was.
Chrome even has significant user share on Mac OS; the numbers I'm finding are around 40%.
It's hard to guess whether people are much less inclined to switch browsers on mobile than on desktop, or if they just like Chrome. Either way, the odds are against anyone who tries to compete with it.
> It's interesting that most people on Windows PCs switch to Chrome when Edge is the default
This is primarily because most people on Windows use Gmail and other Google services, and any time you visit a Google web property from a non-Chrome browser, there’s a prominent “Install Chrome” button that’s placed on those. Without Google’s web properties pushing Chrome even to this day, Chrome may not continue to be as big.
Exactly.
Unfortunately, we live in a time when anti-trust regulations mean nothing.
The fact that it's difficult to separate Chrome from Android dooms most competitors, which is bad for everyone.
IDK. I tried Orion on iOS and within five minutes I knew I was never going back to Safari.
Right. The myth that keeps getting confidently repeated in HN comment sections is that Mozilla supposedly lost market share due to a series of strategic missteps. But it basically was about the pivot to mobile, and the monopoly lock-in of Google. Actually think one fantastic remedy for Google's search monopoly might be allowing the use of alternative browsers on Android via a pop-up rather than preloading and privileging Chrome. Because browsers and mobile are part of the strategy of creating a path dependency tied to Google search.
But to your point, I think the simple reality is that LLMs are increasingly taking the place of search and so having all your funding based on search licensing might be risky when it's at least possible that we're going to be in a new paradigm sooner than later.
I honestly think AI in the browser right now is generally very half-baked and doesn't have any well thought out applications, and raises all kinds of trust issues. I can think of good applications (eg browse the Kindle unlimited store for critically acclaimed hard sci-fi books), but there might be better ones that I'm not thinking of. It just might make sense to be involved so you went caught flat-footed by some new application that quickly progresses into something people expect. And of course because HN commenters are famously self-contradictory in response to literally everything Mozilla does, it's a damned if they do damned if they don't situation: if they load AI into the browser it's pointless feature bloat. If they don't then they were sitting on their thumbs while the world moved on when they should have been reinventing themselves and finding new paths to revenue.
You said it better than me. This is the real reason Firefox has declined, and it's basically because of a monopoly.
They are still the only browser I know, which has actual useful chrome like changing the stylesheet, is CUA compliant and behaves and feel like a native GTK+ app (now-a-days only after restoring the OS window bar and enabling the menubar).
They also have useful keyboard behaviour and provide both a search and a URL bar, which makes it effortless to search locally and perform additional refinery searches while hunting down something, because you can change the search term without returning to the search website. Searching via the search engines portal is also often slower than via the search bar on crappy connections. Their search provider integration is also great (not sure how other browsers are in this regard) which makes opening a Wikipedia or MDN page about a specific topic a single action, without needing to look at a search result list.
There Profile Manager is also a breeze (not the new crap), it allows to open any URL in any Profile by clicking on any link in another program.
The extension system and the advanced configuration is also quite good.
> They also have useful keyboard behaviour
Like not being able to change the default shortcuts?
We're implementing it though: about:keyboard in a Nightly build does what you expect, this is tracked in https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2000731 and dependencies.
No, it doesn't do what I expect, the list of the default rebindable keybinds is small, can't bind multiple shortcuts to a single function, can't bind without modifiers- if I recall correctly after trying it out a while ago.
Thanks for sharing this! Went and changed some keybinds right away.
> Like not being able to change the default shortcuts?
Sure, I would also love if Firefox would work like Emacs or some configurable KDE program, but at least I can access most things without needing to touch a mouse and bulk operation actually work unlike Thunderbird where they basically broke the whole UI a few years back and haven't fixed it since.
Do you know another browser that supports somewhat up-to-date non-Chrome-specific Web features and is better on the features I listed?
I find that any performance benefits Chrome and Safari have are more than offset by the performance benefits Firefox gets by being massively better at blocking ads and the huge amount of JS and tracking garbage that comes with them.
Firefox always feels snappier to me, and I think most of that comes from less time downloading a bunch of ad shit I don't want anyway.
> Technically, Chrome is faster on JS benchmarks.
I'm not browsing benchmarks :-/
When I do then chrome will have an advantage.
Meanwhile, in the real world, a JS engine can be half the speed of the Chrome one and the browser can still be faster, because blocking ads is what gives you the biggest speed up.
All the performance advantages in the world fail to matter if you're still loading ads.
On my Android phone, Chrome opens web pages noticeably (and consistently) faster than Firefox. And I wasn't using a stopwatch. I am literally making a sacrifice to use Firefox.
Not my experience. They feel similar, even with 16 tabs in Firefox and 1 in Chrome
> On my Android phone, Chrome opens web pages noticeably (and consistently) faster than Firefox.
How fast a page opens is irrelevant if that page contains ads.
As a semi Rust hater, but Firefox user, I believe Mozilla should go absolutely all-in on Rust, for a mixture of direct and indirect effects. That and/or launch an open source e-Reader development project.
No MBA type is going to be able to do anything of the sort.
Setting aside questions like "is Rust a religion or actually useful"...
Rewrites tend to kill software projects. Even if you don't completely change the language to boot.
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You've confused them with GNOME. The witch is out, she did not last long.
Oopsie. Yeah that was GNOME. My bad.
What sort? Inquiring minds and all that... like a "Good Witch of the North"? Or a Hermione Granger type? Or the kind that own crystal shops that serve tea from renewed storefronts in quaint coastal towns?
https://www.theregister.com/2023/10/24/holly_million_gnome/
Not sure who or how, but someone somewhere confused Gnome for Mozilla/Firefox. The claim was that Mozilla has had an "literal witch as CEO" but that article is about Gnome.
I can only assume you're referring to Mitchell Baker? Mitchell Baker has gotten a /lot/ of negative comments on HN, and some for good reason, but the constant ask of "how she won the position" and the like just shows the ignorance of the commenters...
Mitchell Baker co-founded Mozilla, and was the legal mind that structured both the split from Netscape that salvaged the code and wrote the majority of the Mozilla Public License and the legal/philosophical stance of the organization. She's an attorney with a specific background in intellectual property law, and without her contributions the entire world would be poorer for it. Mozilla, long before Firefox, was instrumental in the early parts of the open-source movement helping to define what it even meant to being open-source and creating a more rigorous and legally tested framework.
I am not a huge fan of Mitchell, so I understand and agree with much of the criticism, but it stinks of sexism or some other ulterior motive when people "wonderingly" suppose "how she won the position". Is anyone curious how Mark Zuckerberg became CEO of Meta, even though he's mostly blown through billions of dollars on boondoggles and acted in unethical ways? No, not at all, because he's the (co-)founder. So why is a different standard applied for Mitchell? Is it only because she's a woman, or is there some other reason?
I can question the qualifications of a person as it relates to a specific position (e.g. CEO), but that doesn't mean I don't respect their past contributions.
I find the accusations of sexism towards anyone who dares question her as excessive as some of the comments that were made towards her.
The accusations aren't "towards anyone who dares question her", they're towards people who assume that she had come in after the fact and unfairly got into somebody else's role, which is ignorant (and easily cleared up by glancing at a Wikipedia article) and also a common refrain aimed at any woman in any position of authority.
I'm not a fan of Baker for many reasons, but "how did she even get that role?" always pings my shithead radar, and isn't a question I hear for incompetent male CEOs, who are assumed to be just incompetent, while the women are assumed to be incompetent infiltrators who were hired on the basis of their sex.
> I can question the qualifications of a person as it relates to a specific position
Sure, but do people generally question the qualifications of founders that successfully grew something from inception? Or is it only for people who are women? Because I definitely see a trend in the comment threads in HN over the last many years.
This has nothing to do with the founder status.
Founders don’t face any competition when they get the job at their own companies, and they often have ownership to force it as an outcome if there’s ever a debate.
Baker, to her credit, probably faced brutal competition to get to the top job. It’s not out there to wonder why she was picked, and the answer cannot be because « she was there from the beginning ».
HN tends to like people who have a certain understanding of product and technology. Baker’s legal background probably didn’t help put forward her other skills, hence the questions.
If the argument is based on trends your personally noticed on HN, then I’m afraid there’s not much to discuss.
> Baker, to her credit, probably faced brutal competition to get to the top job. It’s not out there to wonder why she was picked, and the answer cannot be because « she was there from the beginning ».
Baker was Mozilla Foundation's president from founding to 2025. She was Mozilla Corporation's CEO from founding to 2008, interim CEO from 2019 to 2020, and CEO from 2020 to 2024.
You think there was brutal competition for Mozilla Corporation CEO in 2020?
> Baker, to her credit, probably faced brutal competition to get to the top job. It’s not out there to wonder why she was picked, and the answer cannot be because « she was there from the beginning ».
You are completely discounting her founder status. She wasn't "there from the beginning", she /created/ the Mozilla Foundation and led it from inception to 2025 and later orchestrated the Mozilla Foundation / Mozilla Corporation split structure (which was the first of its kind and has later been used by other institutions). She was the primary author of the Mozilla Public License. She was the Legal mind behind rescuing the codebase from Netscape by going open source.
In one breath you say this has nothing to do with founder status, because founders are founders, and then completely discount that Mitchell is a founder.
There are MANY valid reasons to criticize Mitchell's tenure at Mozilla, and I haven't seen anyone in this larger thread bring up anything of substance when there are several such things available and well known. Instead this is just a "just asking questions" style of shade-throwing that is unequally applied, and can only be presumed to be because Mitchell is a woman.
It turns out the person I originally replied to didn't even get their women in open source correct, because they were talking about GNOME Foundation and not Mozilla, but I can be forgiven for the mistake as I thought them calling Mitchell a "witch" was a joke about her legal first name Winifred, that she has avoided going by in part due to people taking her more seriously because Mitchell is a gender-ambiguous name. Clearly they have no rational and real basis for criticism if they can't even accurately identify which woman they want to make sexist comments about.
I would encourage you and the person I originally wrote my reply to to both pause and do better.
I'm not discounting her founder status. My point is that it's orthogonal to one's ability to run a company. Founders don't automatically make good CEOs. Plenty of founders step aside for professional management, and plenty stay on and struggle.
Questioning whether someone was the right fit for a role isn't an attack on their legitimacy or their earlier contributions, no matter how pivotal they were. Steve Ballmer at Microsoft had a quasi-founder status, and he received the exact same backlash and hate throughout his tenure because he was perceived as someone who "didn't get it".
If the argument is that any skepticism of a female CEO's performance must be sexist, that shuts down legitimate discussion. I'd rather focus on outcomes rather than on trying to divine each other's motives.
Lastly, Your "pause and do better" is exactly what I'm objecting to: framing disagreement as moral failure. Question Baker? Sexist. Disagree with me? You're not doing enough for the cause.
Zuckerberg's founder status is known because he was Facebook's most visible person always. Baker's founder status is less known because she was not Mozilla's most visible person most years.
Obviously through pagan rituals
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Irrationally?
"Trust" is just community goodwill, and Mozilla has steadily been chipping away at that goodwill by pivoting to AI and ad businesses, and occasionally implying that it's the community that wants things like AI, and it's the community's fault for misunderstanding their poorly written license agreement.
Fitefox has faster WASM and WebGPU at least. Kind of doesn't matter since Chrome has bloated the standard so much that many websites only work in chrome
And, a different way of stating the same thing, they're actually way ahead of everybody in shipping production Rust code in the browser, which is a big part of the efficiency gains in recent years.
> faster WASM and WebGPU
Regarding WASM at least, it seems to depend. https://arewefastyet.com/
To me, Firefox has way better dev tools than Chrome. I don't even mention Safari here - who can stand their horrible dev tools? Firefox has a fantastic add on marketplace which competes with Chrome's. Firefox without too many addons actually do not drain battery life on MacOS. Firefox has "native" profile management with real separation of cookies. JS benchmarks provide no value to me, since I try to avoid heavy-JS web apps anyway.
I don't know. As a dev and user, Firefox wins on every single aspect for me. I understand that every user is different. But I'm glad it exists.
Firefox is the only browser that actually blocks all ads effectively using ublock origin. Even youtube, etc.
> Firefox's only unique selling point is "We aren't a massive data vampire."
The fact that they haven't moved away from apparently needing 90%+ of their money to come from Google, after more than a decade of that being an issue, means that claim is a moot point. This "AI first" move was probably heavily influenced by Google behind the scenes too.
>Firefox's only unique selling point is "We aren't a massive data vampire."
That's a big selling point. Along with "still allows ad-blocking extensions".
Besides being able to turn off all online AI features, and the fact that forks like Librewolf will inevitably strip it out, I am stunned by how HN readers think "Translate this for me immediately and accurately" and related functions are not desirable to the average person.
Well, that's kind of their whole point-- can AI be done in a way that guards privacy. It's not impossible even with cloud processing.
And "Trust" should be a big deal-- unfortunately most people don't care and Chrome has a much bigger marketing budget (and monopoly on Android).
Confidential compute (intel, amd and nvidia) already is a thing and has nothing to do with mozilla. Without such drastic measures, no, it IS impossible with regular cloud processing.
Extension (adblock) support on mobile is worth more to me than anything you just listed off.
> If they clutter the browser with AI which inherently requires data processing, often in the cloud
Where are you getting the “often in the cloud” from? So far Firefox has some local models for certain features. Using a specific cloud based AI is a conscious decision by the user within the sidebar.
Yes, there is no more: plugins, XBL, original extensions, and XSLT is removed not from Chrome but from the web standards !
Anything left ?
It's the only realistic alternative to a chromium-based browser if someone wants to make their own fork. I use the Zen browser, and it strips out some stuff I'm not a huge fan of in baseline Firefox. Manifest v3 not rearing its ugly head is also a huge plus, as a competent adblocker is essential these days.
It is the angle that is important to ME, a European user. I would happily throw moneydollars at the browser project but the Mozilla suits won't allow me to, for whatever-the-fuck reason.
Why do you need THAT fast js for? Firefox is amazing speed even if second in the benchmarks.
It's interesting because I've heard Manifest 3 was an effort to not make extensions quite have full trust capability and isn't as odious as it sounds but it's also Google, so...
Ah Manifest 3: Will still happily allow an extension to silently transmit all of your browsing and AI chat history to data brokers to be packaged and sold to the highest bidder.
While conveniently and regrettably unavoidably nerfing ad blockers :(
For your safety of course.
Have you tried using Manifest V3 adblockers on Chrome? They're not nearly as capable or useful as the old ones.
They also still lack significant security improvements that Chrome has.
Everyone is reacting negatively to the focus on AI, but does Mozilla really have a choice? This is going to be a rehash of the same dynamic that has happened in all the browser wars: Leading browser introduces new feature, websites and extensions start using that feature, runner-up browsers have no choice but to introduce that feature or further lose marketshare.
Chrome and Edge have already integrated LLM capabilities natively, and webpages and extensions will soon start using them widely:
- https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/built-in
- https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2025/05/19/introducing-t...
Soon you will have pages that are "Best viewed in Chrome / Edge" and eventually these APIs will be standardized. Only a small but passionate minority of users will run a non-AI browser. I don't think that's the niche Firefox wants to be in.
I agree that Mozilla should take the charge on being THE privacy-focused browser, but they can also do so in the AI age. As an example, provide a sandbox and security features that prevent your prompts and any conversations with the AI from being exfiltrated for "analytics." Because you know that is coming.
Of course they have a choice. Just don't do it. All you said are predictions of what may or may not happen in the future. The opposite could be true - the audience at large may get sick of AI tools being pushed on them and prefer the browser that doesn't. No one knows. But even if you are right, supporting an hypothetical API that extensions and websites may or may not use and pushing opt-out AI tooling in the browser itself are very different things.
Sure, these features may never catch on... but if they do, consider the risk to Firefox: an underdog with dwindling market share that is now years behind capabilities taken for granted in other browsers. On the other hand, if these features don't pan out, they could always be deprecated with little hit to marketshare.
Strategically I think Mozilla cannot take that risk, especially as it can get feature parity for relatively low cost by embracing open-source / open-weights models.
As an aside, a local on-device AI is greatly preferable from a privacy perspective, even though some harder tasks may need to be sent to hosted frontier models. I expect the industry to converge on a hybrid local/remote model, largely because it lets them offload inference to the users' device.
There's not much I could do about a hosted LLM, but at least for the local model it would be nice to have one from a company not reliant on monetizing my data.
> Everyone is reacting negatively to the focus on AI, but does Mozilla really have a choice?
Do these type of also-ran strategies actually work for a competitor the size of Mozilla? Is AI integration required for them to grow or at least maintain?
My hunch is this will hurt Firefox more than help it. Even if I were to believe their was a meaningful demand for these kind of features in the browser I doubt Mozilla is capable of competing with the likes of Google & Microsoft in meaningful matter in the AI arena.
I think Mozilla can get pretty far with one of the smaller open source models. Alternatively, they could even just use the models that will inevitably come bundled with the underlying OS, although their challenge then would be in providing a homogenous experience across platforms.
I don't think Mozilla should get into the game of training their own models. If they did I'd bet it's just because they want to capitalize on the hype and try to get those crazy high AI valuations.
But the rate at which even the smaller models are getting better, I think the only competitive advantage for the big AI players would be left in the hosted frontier models that will be extremely jealously guarded and too big to run on-device anyway. The local, on-device models will likely converge to the same level of capabilities, and would be comparable for any of the browsers.
I think you're right but there's also an opportunity to sell picks when everyone is digging for gold. Like AI-driven VS Code forks, you have AI companies releasing their own browsers left and right. I wonder if Mozilla could offer a sort of white-labeling and contracting service where they offer the engine and some customization services to whatever AI companies want their own in-house browsers. But continue to offer Firefox itself as the "dumb" (from an AI perspective) reference version. I'm not sure exactly what they could offer over just forking Chromium/Firefox without support but it would be a great way to have their cake and eat it too.
Of course they have a choice. Firefox started going downhill IMO because they kept copying Chrome. Vivaldi decided not to include AI until a good use case was found for it. This announcement was met with a lot of positivity.
I think youre mixing up two seperate concerns: functionality and standards. It seems to me that there could absolutely be a "dumb browser" that sticks to (and develops) web standards and is also relatively popular
What is the use case with these? Even larger models skip details. Small models are terrible at summarizing and writing.
If I were the CEO, I would:
- focus 100% on Firefox Desktop & Mobile - just a fast solid minimalist browser (no AI, no BS) - other features should be addons - privacy centric - builtin, first-class, adblocker - run on donations - partner with Kagi - layoff 80% of the non-tech employees
I worked for them for many years, I guarantee you that Mozilla will be fine without all the non-sense people, just put engineers in charge.
Donations only get you so far. Take a mid-sized project, that needs $500k per year (a few devs, very modestly paid, zero expenses). It's a lot of money. It requires a huge user base. Say you have 500k users, and 5% donate $25 per year (I'm optimistic). And that's just $500k US, a few devs, zero expenses. A project that size probably has audit requirements, hosting costs, accounting, legal, trademarks, etc.
I see finances for a few free software projects, and many of them really struggle to get donations year after year, in a way that helps make the project predictable and sustainable.
For the US, people want you to be a 501c3, and then you need a EU equivalent. Canadians are unlikely to give to a US org (especially these days), but the market is too small to setup a local charity. So you need partners. All that has many compliance requirements and paperwork, so you need non-tech employees for the fundraising and accounting.
Eventually your big donors start blackmailing the project if you don't do what they want, and often their interests are not aligned with most users. You need various income sources.
With 1.3b in reserves, it's enough for funding development for many years to come if they fire most of management and close irrelevant to the browser things.
It would be organizational suicide to spend down their endowment just because they can. Right now it exists as a firewall to buy them some time in the event that search licensing goes away, which I think is exactly what they should have done with it.
And it's been talked to death before but the idea that the browser side bets are at some prohibitive cost is an unsubstantiated myth, conjured into existence by vibes in comment sections. It's the HN equivalent of American voters who think foreign aid is 50% of the federal budget.
Do you realize what 1.300.000.000$ is? Say you invest most of it in a safe way to get you inflation + 2%. That gives you 26.000.000$ every year. You can pay 100 engineers with this. Firefox is a browser. Sure a browser is complicated but 100 motivated and talented engineers is more than enough to make a good product if you focus on what matters.
There is no excuse to what is going on.
How do you think they got that money in the first place? They've been growing this fund from $100MM in the 2010s to where it is now, by carefully managing and investing it.
Hilariously, you're here presenting something Mozilla has already been doing for nearly two decades like it's a new idea that only you have thought of. Yes, I realize how much that is: enough to cover their operating costs for like 2.5 years.
And sure, it's amazing how much an endowment can do if you give up and wipe out most of their staff and embrace magical thinking.
The point is that the organization is bloated because of the search money.
The sustainable way forward for Mozilla is to fire most of their staff, keep a reasonable number of engineers, and focus on building a solid privacy focused browser instead of trend chasing like they’re doing now. Reduce operational costs and live off of the profits on their investments.
Exactly what about that is magical thinking?
I dont even think they employ close to 100 FTE devs actually working on Firefox at this point.
Mozilla spent $260 million on software development in 2023.[1] How do you believe they spent it?
Vivaldi employ 28 developers to produce an unstable Chromium fork and email program for comparison.[2]
[1] https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2024/mozilla-fdn-202...
[2] https://vivaldi.com/team/
Props for citing real numbers! I hope other people reading this thread are looking at your comment and understanding that this is how you make reality based comments. One tidbit I will add: that's more than they have ever spent on development historically, including after adjusting for inflation. IIRC it's about quadruple what they spent back when browsers were desktop only when they had their highest market share.
Well, I do not believe $260 million went to Firefox development. I would be surprised if the majority of that went to other non-Firefox projects like:
Various AI initiatives (Mozilla.ai, Orbit, etc.)
Mozilla VPN
Mozilla Monitor
Pocket
Firefox Relay
Fakespot
Mozilla Social
Mozilla Hubs
... just to name a few.
I think you're probably about as dead wrong as it's possible to be on this front. First they ship millions of new LoC to Firefox on a monthly basis so the engineering efforts are open for all the world to see.
Secondly, if more than half(!?!) was spent on, say, Pocket, or Fakespot, then you would see a rise and fall in spending coinciding with the onramp and closure of those programs over their lifetimes. But in reality we have seen a steady upward march in spending, and so the interpretation that passes the sanity check is that they fold these into their existing budget with the existing development capacity they have which is variously assigned to different projects, including(!!) Firefox, where again, their annual code output is monumental and rivals Google.
Again I have to note the blizzard of contradictory accusations throughout this thread. According to one commenter the problem is they are biting off more than they can chew and need to scale back all of the excessive Firefox development they are doing (and I recall previous commenters speculating that 30+ million LoC was not evidence of their hard work but "bloat" that was excessive and that they probably could cut a lot of it out without losing functionality). But for you, the obvious problem is they're wasting all that capacity on side projects and not putting enough effort in the browser.
> First they ship millions of new LoC to Firefox on a monthly basis so the engineering efforts are open for all the world to see.
Who is they? You mean the thousands of unpaid developers?[0]
[0]https://openhub.net/p/firefox/factoids
Most of these projects are open source. Anyone can see how much more active Firefox development is.
Mozilla.ai's featured projects sounded like things Firefox's AI features would use.
Orbit was a Firefox extension. Firefox integrated its features. You considered this not Firefox development?
Mozilla VPN and Mozilla Monitor are interfaces to other companies' services. And they are non Google revenue sources.
Mozilla Social was a Mastodon instance. How much software development did you believe running a Mastodon instance required?
You forgot CEO comp: 7.000.000 in 2022[0]
[0]: https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2022/mozilla-fdn-990...
Oh no a nonprofit has to do nonprofit things. Can't be done, I tell you. Impossible.
To expand on Firefox mobile: if you haven’t tried it, give it a shot. uBlock Origin works just like on desktop. I have seen maybe five ads on my phone browser (including Youtube!) since buying it in 2019.
Yes! I can confirm it works just like on desktop. I'm shocked when I have to use other people's phones. How do they put up with all these ads?
This! So many times!
Can I get details on ad blocking in Firefox on iOS? I have an ad blocker which works well in Safari but not Firefox. What am I missing?
It doesn't work on iOS. All browsers in iOS are Safari with a different frontend. Apple doesn't allow it to be any different.
But many browsers on iOS support ad blockers. Most like Brave and Vivaldi have it built in. Others like Orion and Edge have added support for extensions. Firefox is one of the only that does not have any support for an ad blocker.
I think you might need to use Nightly version for this.
My only complaint about Firefox on Android is it's slow even with ad blocking. Chrome is noticeably faster. Brave gives you the best of both worlds: speed and ad blocking.
The only issue is that Firefox on mobile is visibly breaking a couple of sites every now and then; if you can put up with that for no ads (I can), then its great.
Which? I've never seen this through many years of daily use.
...on android.
> I guarantee you that Mozilla will be fine without all the non-sense people
> just put engineers in charge
I would like that but is that even possible? Look at Wikipedia. Look at schools. Once an organization develops a bad case of fat "administrator" class, can it be cured or is it terminal?
I don't want to get my hopes up for nothing.
> Mozilla will be fine without all the non-sense people, just put engineers in charge.
That's always said by the engineers and never seems more than the obvious egocentric bias: What I do is important, everyone and everythying else is pointless.
Yep. I’ll die on the hill. Engineer and designers. That’s all we really need.
We started with a very very small team and did all the heavy lifting. Then they started adding PM, marketing, market people, HR, …
We were striving when we were not drowning in meetings, KPIs, management, emails, …
Who provides resources to the Es and Ds? Who hires new ones? Who raises money from investors and banks, and ensures you have cash flow and ROI? How do you manage 100 Es and Ds without a PM?
Small teams are more efficient but (obviously) can't produce at scale. When you scale up, there's enough HR or finance or marketing, or PM, etc. work for full-time specialists. And larger orgs need bureaucracy - if you have a way around that, the world is yours.
What you call scaling up sounds more like monetization. Others (especially customers) might call it enshittification instead. Youtube is a great example of how bad it can get.
Why Mozilla won't let people financially contribute directly to Firefox development and continues to pursue these stupid monetization paths is a mystery.
I mean scaling up - growing the organization.
That should not be a goal of a nonprofit. The goal should be to make a browser, not a vehicle to justify the CEO's obscene salary.
lol - you are really looking for a fight.
Kagi already has their own WebKit based browser, not sure they'd be interested in that partnership.
No. Kagi uses Google results behind the scenes. Partner with Duckduckgo, yes. Or others. But please stop fueling Google, even indirectly.
DDG uses Bing instead, that's not really any better. Ideally a Browser should not partner with any websites. It's always been a deal with the devil even when Google was not as evil.
I don't know that a partnership with Kagi is the move, as great as the two work for me. The last thing you want users to see when starting up a new browser is a paywall. It would be rad to see Firefox treat Kagi as a first-class citizen, but I think a true partnership would be detrimental to both.
Agree with you on everything else, though.
Frankly, looking at the shape of Firefox I don't think that Mozilla cares for it at all - they just hold the brand because it's really well-established.
What would be the best solution today is to convince all these Firefox spinoff projects into combining forces and fully forking Firefox away from Mozilla, and don't look back. But seeing what happens around, how various projects - even the smallest ones are being lead, the moods in communities, I highly doubt that's actually possible.
Good, agreed. Let's just hope Anthony will read this.
Also, speaking of trust, return the "never sell your data" to the FAQ.
Dumb question: who’s Firefox target user?
Chrome is able to capture the mass consumer market, due to Google’s dark pattern to nag you to install Chrome anytime you’re on a Google property.
Edge target enterprise Fortune 500 user, who is required to use Microsoft/Office 365 at work (and its deep security permission ties to SharePoint).
Safari has Mac/iOS audience via being the default on those platform (and deep platform integration).
Brave (based on Chromium), and LibreWolf (based on Firefox) has even carved out those user who value privacy.
---
What’s Firefox target user?
Long ago, Firefox was the better IE, and it had great plugins for web developers. But that was before Chrome existed and Google capturing the mass market. And the developers needed to follow its users.
So what target user is left for a Firefox?
Note: not trolling. I loved Firefox. I just don’t genuine understand who it’s for anymore.
> Dumb question: who’s Firefox target user?
These days, it seems to be people who:
* Don't want to be using a browser owned by an ethically dubious corporation
* Want a fully functional ad blocker
* Prefer vertical tabs
> Want a fully functional ad blocker
My main reason but also
* want to ensure competition because I'm sure that once it's chromium all the way, we're gonna have a bad time.
The problem is the list keeps shrinking since now Mozilla Corp is an ethically dubious corporation.
Mind you, you can get all that and more in a browser like vivaldi. And that market is.. small. Vivaldi doesn't have to develop a browser engine
* But don't really care about privacy that much
> Want a fully functional ad blocker
Is this even the case? UBO has ~10 million users going by the extension store, Firefox has over 150 million users.
So less than 10% of Firefox installs also have UBO.
Brave already has an adblocker built into the browser itself and supports vertical tabs.
Ostensibly nerds. Linux users and maybe Mac users. Technical people who understand more about the software industry than all Mozilla Corp management since Brendan.
It's difficult to monetize us when the product is a zero dollar intangible, especially when trust has been eroded such that we've all fled to Librewolf like you said.
It's difficult to monetize normies when they don't use the software due to years of continuous mismanagement.
I think giving Mozilla a new CEO is like assigning a new captain to the Titanic. I will be surprised if this company still exists by 2030.
Right and to your point, there's not a whole lot of precedent for browsers successfully funding themselves when the browser itself is the primary product.
Opera was the lightweight high performance extension rich, diversely funded, portable, adapted to niche hardware, early to mobile browser practically built from the dreams of niche users who want customization and privacy. They're a perfect natural experiment for what it looks like to get most, if not all decisions right in terms of both of features users want, as well as creative attempts to diversify revenue. But unfortunately, by the same token also the perfect refutation of the fantasy that making the right decisions means you have a path to revenue. If that was how it worked, Opera would be a trillion dollar company right now.
But it didn't work because the economics of web browsers basically doesn't exist. You have to be a trillion dollar company already, and dominate distribution of a given platform and force preload your browser.
Browsers are practically full scale operating systems these days with tens of millions of lines of code, distribued for free. Donations don't work, paying for the browser doesn't work. If it did, Opera (the og Opera, not the new ownership they got sold to) would still be here.
> Browsers are practically full scale operating systems these days with tens of millions of lines of code, distributed for free.
Well there's your problem! Google owns the server, the client, and the standards body, so ever-increasing complexity is inevitable if you play by their rules. Tens of thousands of lines of code could render the useful parts of the web.
Can you say more? I do think Google has effectively pushed embrace-extend-extinguish, changing the rules so that it's a game they can win. And I do think part of the point of web standards protocols is to limit complexity. So I agree the rules as they exist now favor Google. I think the "real" solution was for the standards bodies to stay in control but seems like that horse left the barn.
Yes, I would literally pay a nominal fee for Firefox if I were confident in the org's direction. As things stand though, the trust is gone as you said.
Mozilla is (or at least started as) a nonprofit. Even corporation is only there to fulfill the nonprofit goals. They shouldn't even be thinking about monetization they should be thinking about getting donations and securing grants.
> What’s Firefox target user?
It seems as if you ask Mozilla, the answer would be "Not current Firefox users."
I really don't know the answer to this question, and I don't know if Mozilla has defined it internally, which probably leads to a lot of the problems that the browser is facing. Is it the privacy focused individual? They seem to be working very hard against that. Is it the ad-sensitive user? Maybe, but they're not doing a lot to win that crowd over.
It kind of feels like Firefox is not targeted at anyone in particular. But long gone are the days when you can just be an alternative browser.
Maybe the target user is someone who wants to use Firefox, regardless of what that means.
I use Firefox because I don't want to use a browser provided by an advertising company e.g. Chrome.
Yet ... with firefox that is exactly what you are using. Except there's a proxy in the middle (Mozilla).
It isn't even indirect anymore since Mozilla bought an advertising company.
I'm raising my hands, you got me.
Just one that is entirely funded by an advertising company?
There are three browsers: FF, Chrome, Safari. I'm not on Apple so FF is the least worst option.
> Dumb question: who’s Firefox target user?
Partly me. It's the only browser where I can disable AV1 support to work around broken HW acceleration on Steam Deck.
Also tab hoarders. (I migrated to Chrome 3 years ago to try and get rid of my tab hoarding)
I've been using Firefox for a long time, longer than it's had that name, and it used to be excellent for my tab hoarding habits. Specifically, it could handle a large number of tabs, and every couple of months it would crash and lose all of them. I would have to start over from scratch, with an amazing sense of catharsis and freedom, and I never had to make the decision on my own that I would never be able to make.
Now, it's no better than the others. I'm at 1919 tabs right now, and it hasn't lost any for many years. It's rock solid, it's good at unloading the tabs so I don't even need to rely on non-tab-losing crash/restarts to speed things up, and it doesn't even burn enough memory on them to force me to reconsider my ways.
This is a perfect example of how Mozilla's mismanagement has driven Firefox into the ground. Bring back involuntary tab bankruptcy and spacebar heating!
Me! I want the best thing that's not Google or Chromium. Right now that's Firefox. Maybe someday it will be Ladybird.
> I just don’t genuine understand who it’s for anymore.
It still gets bundled a TON on Linux. So if you use Linux a lot, Firefox gets into your muscle memory.
But honestly, that bundling is likely just momentum from the 2010s. Better tech exists now.
It seems to me Android users who want to block ads are a strong target market. Desktop Chrome has extensions and despite the nerf, it has adblockers that mostly work; Android Chrome doesn't have extensions.
A built in adblocker would probably help Firefox attract those users, but might destroy their Google revenue stream.
I think the problem with that is that Firefox Android with uBO still feels like it has worse First Contentful Paint than Chrome Android. Even on a high-end phone the difference can feel ridiculous; sites render after 1-2s on Chrome but sometimes I can count up to 5 with FF.
The benefits of having uBO might matter more to you and me, but let's not forget that faster rendering was arguably the main reason Chrome Desktop got popular 20 years ago, which caused Firefox to rewrite its engine 2 (3?) times since then to catch up. 20 years later this company still hasn't learned with Android.
Maybe I'm less sensitive to that, but I hadn't really noticed on a phone that wasn't high-end in 2020 and certainly isn't now. I'll have to pay attention to sites being slow and compare a Chromium-based browser next time I notice one.
I switched from Firefox desktop to Chrome when Chrome was new because it was multi-process and one janky page couldn't hang or crash the whole browser. I vaguely remember the renderer being a little faster, but multi-process was transformative. Firefox took years to catch up with that.
I'm very sensitive to ads though. If a browser doesn't have a decent adblocker, I'm not using it. Perhaps surprisingly, the Chromium browser with good extension support on Android is Edge.
Somehow its target user group includes my father, who is 90 years old. As far as I can recall, we got him using Firefox years ago and he became a committed user.
I wish more browsers would target seniors. Accessibility and usability is universally a nightmare.
Non-laptop users.
It's an island of trust in an ocean of predatory capitalism.
It was that once.
Firefox users are people who would use LibreWolf, but installed it, tried it, saw it doesn't have dark mode, and figured that Firefox was good enough after all.
> people agency in how it works. Privacy, data use, and AI must be clear and understandable. Controls must be simple. AI should always be a choice — something people can easily turn off. People should know why a feature works the way it does and what value they get from it.
> Second: our business model must align with trust. We will grow through transparent monetization that people recognize and value.
> Third: Firefox will grow from a browser into a broader ecosystem of trusted software. Firefox will remain our anchor. It will evolve into a modern AI browser and support a portfolio of new and trusted software additions.
I like what the interim CEO was doing, focusing more on the browser and forgetting these side projects that leads to nowhere, but it seems it's back to business with this one.
> "a modern AI browser"
No thanks. Absolutely not.
It looks like they chose a Product Manager and MBA. Why can't we get a software engineer or computer scientist?
They had one. Until he made a fatal mistake of giving a tenner to the wrong people.
He gave $1000 donation to support a ban on gay marriage, to be clear.
And people don't have to all agree on the same things. People can get together to work towards cause X and then individually believe in mutually exclusive causes alpha, beta, gamma.
Queer people aren't causes, they're people. Imagine I worked on the Brave browser, and in my personal time maintained a website aimed at discouraging personal relationships with him. This would probably make me difficult to work with, despite my personal views not impacting the quality of my work. You might say these examples aren't one-to-one, and you're right. My example doesn't actually push any legislation forbidding him from having a relationship with a consenting person, and it costs a hell of a lot less than $1000.
I dunno. Public Defenders (and defense attorneys in general, but PDs don't get oodles of cash) have to work with some pretty reprehensible people sometimes.
I used to live in Bahrain while my wife worked in oil and gas, and a lot of her colleagues had some... pretty different... views from us but we still got along. Hell, the country itself has a pretty significant Sunni / Shia divide, with employees being one or the other and they managed to work with each other just fine.
I think in general people should be able to work with others that they have significant differences in opinion with. Now, in tech, we've been privileged to be in a seller's (of labor) market, where we can exercise some selectivity in where we work, so it's certainly a headwind in hiring if the CEO is undesirable (for whatever reason), but plenty of people still will for the cause or the pay or whatever. You just have to balance whether the hiring problems the CEO may or may not cause are worth whatever else they bring to the table.
That's kind of the point of PDs, though. There's nothing similar in the corporate context.
> Public Defenders (and defense attorneys in general, but PDs don't get oodles of cash) have to work with some pretty reprehensible people sometimes.
That doesn't mean they believe in the awful things their clients do.
That's the point. You don't need an alignment of beliefs to work together.
That's exactly my point. They are able to do their job despite not believing in their clients, which for public defenders even means trying to let their clients go free, which is a fair bit further than is asked of a tech employee who disagrees with their CEO.
Public Defenders do not have a choice at who they defend.
If you were on a hiring committee, and your otherwise-qualified-candidate had a political opinion you objected to in this way, perhaps with a similar donation, would you refuse to hire them?
Depends what you mean by “political opinion”.
If it’s about government fiscal policy, probably not. If it’s more along the lines of discriminating against or undermining people’s rights, then yeah I would refuse to hire them.
Perhaps we need stronger laws against discrimination then.
If you were about to hire a candidate and then found out that they donate regularly to the “Arrest kbelder and deport them to El Salvador” fund, would you hire them?
Is that a no?
It’s easy to claim neutrality when it’s other people being oppressed
Ok. I actually think you ought to be able to refuse to hire somebody you disagree with like that. I think you would be very wrong in doing so, though.
Would it be wrong to refuse to hire a neonazi? What kind of people do you think your organization will attract if you start hiring neonazis?
Ones that are sane enough not to bring culture war drama to the office.
I guess “kill all jews” is culture war drama now
Marriages aren't people. And you probably unknowingly depend on a lot of people that despise many things you consider part of your identity. Touch grass and let people have opinions different from your own.
It's not really possible to do that when the opposing beliefs are so fundamental. Mozilla had, and has, a lot of LGBT staff.
How could you expect those staff to work under and trust a CEO opposed to their very existence as equal members of society?
Ive worked with Catholics and my views on sola scriptura and the authority of the Pope never came up once. Ive worked with Muslims, and it was never an issue. Ive worked with Hindus. Ive worked with Chinese, Pakistanis, Indians, Bangladeshis, Nigerians, Brazilians, Kenyans, Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, Ghanans, Mexicans, and many other nationalities. I have been on many teams and in my companies with a combinatorial explosion of fundamentally incompatible beliefs.
So yes I do expect staff to work under a ceo that is opposed to gay marriage, an idea that I would bet globally has a less than 50% popular support.
Have you donated to anti-Muslim, anti-Christian etc. platforms in a public fashion while working with them? Because you would've found quite quickly how that changes the interactions.
I don't mind working with someone who has incompatible views with me, but I'd be quite unhappy working with someone who was actively working on undermining my rights.
That depends. I have donated to Religious missionary work publicly, that could be seen by an extremist of any other religion who sees this as a zero sum game as anti their religion. But I don't bring this up in work because that is uncouth and not what my job is about, and would expect the same from co-workers. Eich also didn't donate publicly, this was dug up and then foisted upon him. If someone were to dig through records they could find my donations and party affiliations, which is what they did to him. He was being professional, they were the ones that were taking his private views and forcing them into the public sphere.
> taking his private views and forcing them into the public sphere
Donations in an effort to change the law are fundamentally a public action, whether or not the government requires the fact of your donation to be publicly disclosed. Seeking to use the law to hurt people is not a private view.
What's so fundamental about marriage?
I don't think childless couples (of any gender) should get any societal advantages yet I have no problem working with people that disagree. Why has everything to be black-or-white, left-or-right, with us or against us? That's not a productive way to think about others.
If there's nothing fundamental about marriage and it's just some weird coliving arrangement, then why ban it for only some groups in the first place? Nothing productive or even rational about it.
Why is the reaction seen as irrational or immature but not the action that triggered it?
> Why is the reaction seen as irrational or immature but not the action that triggered it?
The analogous (but with an opposite direction) action would be campaigning to make gay marriage legal. Nobody has a problem with people doing that. The reason people object to Eich's firing is because it is a very clear escalation in the culture war, not because they have strong opinions about gay marriage.
It has to be us vs against us because that's what law is all about -- outlawing certain actions.
It's one thing to believe as you do, it's quite another to push for legislation that would (in your example) deny childless couples societal advantages, whatever that actually means.
If you're not in favor of a-or-b arguments the answer is to allow a and b, eh?
For one, being childless is a choice (mostly, especially since adoption is a possibility). It's indeed OK to have different opinions for what how laws apply differently to people based on their choices. Being gay is not a choice, it is rather similar to race/ethnic background, and it's generally not OK to have laws that treat people differently based on something like that. I'm sure there are more nuances to add, but it seems to me that makes it quite a different situation.
I don't think everyone agrees that being gay is not a choice. There are no outward physical indicators of a person's sexual orientation. It's entirely behavorial and therefore plausibly under the conscious control of the person. Now, I would agree that a person doesn't choose which gender he is attracted to, but it not something than anyone else can see and immediately understand as an inborn characteristic.
Clearly being black, or hispanic, or asian, or white are physical characteristics. Far fewer people would argue that there is any element of choice in that.
This is the craziest example of “if I can’t see it, it [might not] exist” I have ever witnessed.
It doesn't even matter if being gay is a choice or not. PEOPLE STILL DESERVE THE FREEDOM TO CHOOSE WHO THEY MARRY. It's basic human rights.
Your thinking applies equally to all people. His donation tries to take away a right from a minority group. They're quite different.
If you think for a moment, you'll realise that it's irrelevant whether marriage is important to you - it's important to many.
So when a person wishes to deny this important institution to a minority, they are creating an out-group and discriminating against them.
By that logic, we can put those discriminators themselves in an out-group and discriminate against them. We can deny them institutions such as directorships. Fair's fair.
It's more than fair - despite what conversion camps want to sell, being queer is an intransigent characteristic. Being a bully is just a choice. Discriminating against bullies is as morally just as discriminating against the incompetent.
Obviously it's fine to campaign against marriage.
In a liberal context, marriage means nothing except for being a symbol of a union between two people. But all rules, obligations and rights that make marriage a meaningful institution are rooted in religion, and are hence not always respected outside of religion.
You could argue that there are laws that only apply to married couples, and that THAT brings meaning to marriage. But:
Firstly, generally speaking, even the most important features of a marriage are not protected by law, most notably: fidelity. So the law is disjoint from what's traditionally considered to be obligations within marriage. That leaves the legal definition at the whims of contemporary polititians. Therefore, law cannot assign the word "marriage" any consistent meaning throughout time.
Secondly, to my limited knowledge, the line between a married couple and two people living together is increasingly getting blurred by laws that apply marriage legal obligations even to non-married couples if they have lived together for long enough. It suggests that law-makers do not consider a ceremony and a "marriage" announcement to be what should really activate these laws, but rather other factors. Although, they seem to acknowledge that an announcement of a marriage implies the factors needed to activate these laws. If that makes sense...
So marriage is inherently a religious institution that in a religious context comes with rules, obligations and rights. Hence why people who take religion seriously will find it offensive that somebody that completely disregards these rules calls themselves married.
So you're also against Atheist Marriage, then?
Of course not.
What unjust "advantages" do you think childless couples get that you would want to get rid?
Pretty much all of the legal benefits of marriage are contractual, not financial, and come at no cost to the public.
Things like spousal medical rights, a joint estate, etc don't come at the expense of anybody else.
Taxes would be a big one. There are substantial tax benefits to being married.
The tax benefits are sorta oversold.
The main benefits are tax free gifts between partners and filing jointly, both of which seem very reasonable and wouldn't be of value to single people.
The actual tax breaks most people think about are tied to dependents in your household, not marriage.
No, there aren’t. In fact, there was a tax penalty for being married until 2017 TCJA.
> It's not really possible to do that when the opposing beliefs are so fundamental.
Sure it is. I've lived and worked in the Middle East and in China. People do it all the time.
It's basic tolerance, it's not that hard. You do your job and collect your paycheck at the end of the week, same as everyone else.
>It's basic tolerance, it's not that hard.
That's right. To get a bit philosophical, it's interesting to see some people's justifications about how they are right to be intolerant in the ways they want to be, while still believing that they are free-thinking and tolerant. A lot of convoluted arguments are really about keeping one's self-image intact, justifying beliefs that are contradictory but which the person really wants to believe. I think that is a trap that is more dangerous for intelligent people.
For what it's worth, I support and supported gay marriage at the time, but don't think people should be forced out of their job for believing otherwise. Thoughts and words you disagree with should be met with alternative thoughts and words.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
Could you summarize this into an argument of your own?
"I want to discriminate against others but still claim to be righteous."
And how many Mozilla were fired while the CEO increased her pay to more than $7M per year?
How can staff members feel trust and been seen as equals when they get fired to make place for someone that is already earning 70x their wage. All while tanking the company to new lows.
Donating any amount of money to prevent people you don't know from marrying each other is a clear sign of disordered thinking. Nothing more or less.
I'd donate to a campaign to ban child marraige, is that disordered?
If you think adults marrying other adults and adults marrying children are in any way equivalent, as you imply, then yes your thinking is deeply disordered.
That's not what he said or implied, he's merely responding to your argument 'Donating any amount of money to prevent people you don't know from marrying each other'. I think you might have a justifiable argument here, but it's not clear at all to me what it is.
I cannot imagine the mental model you're working with if my observation is not crystal clear despite omitting the word "adults" in my initial post. Both your and Y_Y's responses read as bad faith to me, but it could be extraordinary ignorance.
In either case I have no idea how to make it clearer for you. Good luck.
Yes people can and should have differences of opinion but a line is crossed when you openly campaign to eliminate the differences of opinion by curtailing the freedoms of the people you disagree with.
Brendan is the one that crossed a line.
>curtailing the freedoms you disagree with
So pretty much any law that is opposed by someone. Shop lifting shouldn't be legal because there are people who like free stuff. Curltailing the freedom of people who want free stuff improves society by protecting people's property.
Who's rights are gay people impeding on in this analogy?
There doesn't have to be any for my analogy to make sense.
Saying that a law is bad because it prohibits someone from doing something is a position of anarchy.
I didn't say a law was bad.
Okay, I assumed that was meant by "cross a line."
Just because people can get together to work towards a cause while believing in mutually exclusive ideals, that doesn't mean it's the most effective way for people to work together. The ability to do a thing and the ability to do a thing well is a big difference.
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A ban that was supported by the majority at the time and the donation was six years old at the time he became CEO. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44461541
To Godwin a little, sometimes the right thing is not the majority thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_Landmesser
The point was not "whatever the majority wants is therefore good". The point is that if you were to apply the "you get fired from your job for this" standard evenly, the majority of the country would've had to get fired from their jobs. That is a pretty unreasonable standard to apply, imo.
Also, come on man. It's in really bad taste to compare stuff to the Holocaust. Nobody was being murdered here, it's not remotely the same.
There is a difference between having an opinion and spending money to promote it.
Also, beside the direct murders as @ceejayoz mentioned, the social exclusion of LGBT folks drives far too many of them to many of them to suicide.
The legalization of same sex marriage cause a noticeable drop in their suicide rate (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_among_LGBTQ_people#:~:...).
> The point is that if you were to apply the "you get fired from your job for this" standard evenly, the majority of the country would've had to get fired from their jobs.
Standards should be higher for folks with more power. The cashier at the grocery store expressing bigoted beliefs won't harm me much; my boss doing it is more serious.
> Nobody was being murdered here, it's not remotely the same.
I assure you, homophobia has its murder victims. (Including a good number of Holocaust ones.)
> Standards should be higher for folks with more power.
Joe Biden voted for the "Defense of Marriage Act", Yet many LGBT people supported him becoming president.
Obama opposed gay marriage as well. As did many prominent politicians, left and right.
The swing from opposing it to supporting it was a huge cultural shift, and I'm not sure I've seen anything like that happen so quickly, except maybe during a time of war. It went from being opposed by a strong majority to supported by a strong majority in... maybe 5-8 years? It was pretty impressive, and I think it's a sign that the marketplace of ideas can still function.
It helps a lot that it's really a harmless thing. It's giving people more freedom, not taking any away from anyone, and so as soon as it became clear that it wasn't causing a problem, everybody shrugged and went 'ok'.
Supporting one of two candidates in a first past the post election is simply supporting the lesser evil. There is no other information to glean.
Same goes for CEOs.
I wonder if in hindsight he's embarrassed to have been on the wrong side of history. Imagine spending your time and money fighting inevitable social change. Fighting gay marriage is just a time-shifted fight against women voting or interracial marriage.
No, those are all completely separate things.
they really are kind of the same thing: basic human rights.
Only to bigots.
In 2014, which is over a decade ago now.
Wikipedia also says he's Catholic. From what I understand, the Church's positions on such things have evolved at least somewhat since then. His views could have totally changed or evolved since then (can't find anything publicly myself).
Brendan Eich is a rich nerd who probably got cornered in a party by someone smart and signed $1000 check.
It is like blaming me for giving $10 to an bump without checking what he was gonna do with it.
No part of this is true, fwiw. His salary at Mozilla was not high and he was a strong advocate of keeping executive compensation low (and as supporting evidence, that compensation shot up soon after he left). He may have made more from Brave, but that was obviously well after the donation. He also never backed down from his donation and the directly implied opposition to gay marriage, only stating that it comes from his personal beliefs and that he refused to discuss those openly. (I disagree with his position on gay marriage, or at least the position that I can infer from his donation, but I agree with his right and decision to keep it a private matter.)
I had... complex but mostly positive feelings about Eich in the time I worked for him (indirectly), but I can state unequivocally that he's not someone who would bend his principles as a result of getting cornered at a party.
What I meant is he is a guy who have evolved in the center of the tech revolution in the 90s and 2000s. If he is not horribly bad with money he probably made a lot at least in various investments.
So I would guess $1000 was almost nothing to him. He is not really supporting anything by donating $1000.
I listened to him in a interview once, he really feel like a nice guy.
In political terms $1000 is basically nothing.
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Oh yes, totally worth it to risk THE FREE INTERNET because of that.
He's not defending "THE FREE INTERNET" at his new place.
(Which for the record, is less important than physical freedom).
Maybe that has to do with Brave not getting a free check to the tune iof $500M Google every year.
That makes it more difficult to create "free internet" type projects.
Probably comes from the Crypto scam integrated into the browser.
I find it funny some people shit on Firefox for adding Pocket, but defend Brave for adding crypto scams to the browser.
I don't defend Brave adding this feature or believe that it is even a good idea but how does this constitute a scam?
> I don't defend Brave
Maybe not, but you spend quite some time spitting on Mozilla for taking money from Google.
Yes, because (1) they spent that money badly as can be seen from the non-Google revenue numbers of Mozilla and Firefox's market share and (2) people are comparing practices of a company that gets $500M for free and a practices of a company that is essentially bootstrapped, which makes no sense.
> risk THE FREE INTERNET because of that
Come off it, as if he is the only one who can save us. Spare me.
But then he went on to make Yet Another Chromium Fork, so it doesn't seem like he was particularly attached to Gecko or what it stands for in the browser engine market anyway. What's to say that Mozilla wouldn't have given up the fight and pivoted to Chromium, like Opera and Edge did, if he was still in charge?
They originally started with Gecko and switched to Chromium.
"There were a ton of issues using Gecko, starting with (at the time) no CDM (HTML5 DRM module) so no HD video content from the major studios, Netflix, Amazon, etc. -- Firefox had an Adobe deal but it was not transferable or transferred to any other browser that used Gecko -- and running the gamut of paper-cuts to major web incompatibilities especially on mobile, vs. WebKit-lineage engines such as Chromium/Blink."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28941623
And nowadays, I'd argue that there's more human eyeballs watching the Chromium source code vs the Firefox code.
And he went in on integrating trendy things like Ads that pay crypto and AI integrated into the browser, so it's not like there wouldn't be AI if he were in charge.
Maybe that was necessary because they don't get a $500M check every year. Kinda makes things more difficult.
Is there a name for the fallacy where you assume the path not taken is much better? Because I agree, this is that. Mozilla’s challenges are foundational, Eich as CEO wouldn’t have made a dramatic difference in outcomes.
It isn't really Yet Another Chromium Fork, they're the company that does most anti-ad research / development. Stuff like Project Sugarcoat[0]. Their adblocking engine is also native and does not depend on Manifest V2, making it work better than any blocker that has to switch to MV3 when Google removes MV2.
And they're the only browser that has a functional alternative for webpage-based ads. Active right now. And you can instead fund pages / creators by buying BAT directly instead of watching private ads.
On top of that, Brave's defaults are much more privacy-protecting than Firefox's, you only get good protection on Firefox if you harden the config by mucking about in about:config.
People love to hate on Brave because they made some weird grey area missteps in the past (injecting affiliate links on crypto sites and pre-installing a deactivated VPN) and they're involved in crypto. But its not like Firefox hasn't made some serious missteps in the past, but somehow Firefox stans have decided to forget about the surreptitiously installed extension for Mr. Robot injected ads (yes really).
If people could be objective for a second they'd see that Brave took over the torch from Firefox and has been carrying it for a long time now.
[0] https://brave.com/research/sugarcoat-programmatically-genera...
Yeah, I realized this recently. I want rendering engine competition, but it's clear that Mozilla isn't capable of doing that anymore.
Eich chose to resign due to internal and external protest in the form of petitions and resignations.
No one forced him to do anything, and Mozilla itself certainly didn't force him out.
His free speech was met with the free speech of others, and he decided it was too painful to stay in that spotlight.
How would you prefer it to have gone?
Not to have him cancelled in the first place. No need to pretend that doing something under the mob pressure is the same as doing something entirely willingly
Far, far more people have protested the positions of power held by (for example) Joe Rogan and Dave Chappelle. They ignored the cancellation attempts, and they're richer and more influential today than they were a few years ago.
"Cancellation" is a state of being famous enough that your controversial beliefs upset a large, loud number of people. In Eich's case, it threatened to have no effect on his career. He chose to change his career because of it.
Eich expressed his First Amendment rights, and other people expressed theirs in return. Why should either of them give up those rights for fear of offending the other?
Translation: he had donated to ban same-sex marriage in California[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Eich#Appointment_to_CE...
Yes and he is writing like an MBA/Product Manager (or is it the AI?)
Actually he is most likely a drone. Meaning he is speaking like he believes he is the CEO of a public company talking to the shareholders, so of course he talks about how AI is changing software.
But guess what Mozilla is not a public company, there is no stock to pump and the thing it really miss is its users. Going from 30% to less than 5% market share in 15 years with a good product. Actually I am pretty sure the users who left just do not want to much AI.
But he is an MBA drone so he is just gonna play the same music as every other MBA drone.
Why do you think a software engineer or computer scientist would be more qualified?
This site in general has a massive hate boner for any part of a corporate structure that isn't the engineering department. Sales, admin, marketing, legal, HR, etc... all get flak from the HN community for being irredeemably idiotic wastes of space.
"Hacker News commenters are frequently unaware that their use cases and customer preferences do not reflect the average customer demand in the market." - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46192577
There's a reason I put that in my profile. :^)
One of my favorite examples of this is when HNers insist that if only an auto-manufacturer would make a simple car with tactile buttons and no screen or creature comforts it would sell like hotcakes.
Sounds like HN users represent an underserved and untapped market and are being rational market actors while discussing their preferences.
They need to build a great product as well as somehow fund the project. Seem like those credentials match the requirements.
I'm afraid they're delegated to coding nowadays and even open source projects are run like corporations with attached "foundations" parasites where funneling out money on unrelated stuff occurs.
This piece linked is a dry marketing and nothing else, and I don't believe in a single bit this guy is saying or will ever say.
The line about AI being always a choice that user can simply turn it off: I need to go to about:config registry to turn every occurrence of it in Firefox. So there's that.
Wouldn't it make more sense to have them program and let a product person handle big picture ideas
The track record of MBA's destroying companies says otherwise.
What Mozilla needs is a change in leadership direction, not another MBA.
I very much doubt that the track record of companies fronted by an hands-on engineer is much better. If anything they probably fail faster on average so we never hear about them.
Most of the big tech companies were started and led by technical people.
> Firefox will grow from a browser into a broader ecosystem of trusted software. Firefox will remain our anchor. It will evolve into a modern AI browser and support a portfolio of new and trusted software additions.
Please don't.
Looking at his LinkedIn profile, he seems to be the MBA type, with little to no technical experience. For the past year he's been the SVP or GM of Firefox, whatever that means. Take that as you will...
His one technical skill is building PowerPoint decks...
It continues to amaze me how a company racking in over 500 million a year in revenue can continue to fail so spectacularly. With that income there's no reason they shouldn't be the leading browser. Doubling down on AI is only going to burn more money while they continue to lose market share.
Are you implying that the direct competitor, Chrome, is taking in the same or less? Chrome has a much larger staff (excluding the rest of Google), so I guess they must all be earning a small fraction of Mozilla staff salaries. Such dedicated people!
My point is Mozilla achieves practically nothing despite making half a billion ad dollars for free from Google. If Wikipedia's numbers are right, that's $730,000 per employee.
Ah, but your words say Mozilla should be doing more than nothing, they should in fact be winning:
> With that income there's no reason they shouldn't be the leading browser.
despite having less resources than their primary competitor.
Well, our primary competitor. I work for Mozilla. Which apparently means I'm making $730K. Maybe that's why I pay my house cleaner with a suitcase full of cash every week. Who isn't as happy about it as she could be, on account of not existing. Some people are picky about that.
I'd love to be growing our market share dramatically, since I put in a lot of work when I'm not on HN. Sadly I've been told that work is achieving practically nothing. I will point out that practically nothing does at least include still having enough sway in standards committees to hold the line against an ad-tech company whose incentives all push in the dystopic direction that everything is currently headed in. (Ok, maybe not fully holding the line...) If that stops being the case and Mozilla stops making a difference, then I believe I could still get a job elsewhere for a fair bit more than I'm currently making.
Oh wait, I forgot I'm already making $730K. Maybe not, then.
They're the only modern usable browser engine not developed by a multi-trillion dollar corp. I'd say that's a pretty big achievement.
They're developed by a billion dollar corp riding on their past success from when they challenged the leader of that time, Microsoft.
And their engine is still around, how's the leader of the times web engine going?
Well Ladybird [0] it is
[0]: https://ladybird.org/
I'm reading HN on my laptop outside, and a ladybug landed on my screen right as I was reading this comment. It's sitting there as I write this. I know this doesn't contribute to the discussion in any way but it's so neat I just needed to share.
> it is
You must be meaning "will be". Because the first alpha release is promised some time in 2026. So hopefully by 2028 it will be solid enough.
You can use it right now if you build it from source, in fact I am writing this HN comment from it.
Is this usable day to day yet? I built it a few months ago and there were showstopper bugs on any nontrivial website.
Exciting project nonetheless.
I know it's very shallow but the marketing page gives me the ick. I have been Pavlov'd that websites with such designs are scams/vaporware.
Fair, but I've been following Andreas Kling since he started (publically) with SerenityOS back a couple years ago, and he's a real hacker -- as real as they come.
I've watched hours of how he works on YouTube, it's fantastic, if anyone can lead a browser team, its him.
And we can at least donate directly to Ladybird's development [0]
Unlike Mozilla which Firefox is completely funded with Google's money.
[0] https://donorbox.org/ladybird
You can donate to any nonprofit and stipulate that your money be used only for a certain purpose, and they're legally bound by it.
Not relevant here. Yes, you can donate to Mozilla.org and stipulate whatever you like, but Mozilla.org does not develop Firefox so telling them to use it for developing Firefox will do about as much good as telling them to use it to resurrect unicorns. Mozilla.org owns Mozilla Corporation, which is a for-profit entity that develops Firefox, but thus far the corporation hasn't wanted the complications and restrictions that would come from accepting donations.
Everything I can find online says that there are contributors working for both Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation
Contributors are people. Donations are dollars. People ≠ dollars.
Unless you grind them up and eat them as sausages, but don't do that. The anti-theft threads will get stuck in your teeth.
The contributors are paid by Mozilla Foundation. This is not complicated.
Hm. I'm dumb so you'll need to spell it out for me.
MoFo and MoCo both have contributors, yes. Both have unpaid contributors, which apparently are not who you're talking about. Both also have paid people who work for them. Whether or not you call them "contributors" or "employees" doesn't matter much, I guess. But still, MoFo contributors, paid or not, do not work on Firefox. Firefox is not a MoFo product. Most MoCo contributors do work on Firefox. Firefox is a MoCo product. It's confusing because MoFo owns MoCo, but owning a company does not mean its products are your products, nor that you can freely assist with those products (especially in an arms-length setup involving taxes, which is the very reason for the MoFo/MoCo split in the first place.) MoFo does other things, non-Firefox things, like advocacy and pissing off HN commenters who assume that "Mozilla does X" headlines always mean MoCo is doing X.
One of us is confused. I have that uneasy sensation I get when something is going "whoosh!" over my head, so it might be me.
> Most MoCo contributors do work on Firefox. Firefox is a MoCo product.
This is true.
> But still, MoFo contributors, paid or not, do not work on Firefox.
This is not true, based on what I've read about it. Do you have personal experience with these orgs that suggests otherwise?
Regardless, nothing is stopping Foundation funds from being directed to Firefox development. If someone gave them, for example, $1M that could only be spent on Firefox, they could pay Corporation or an external consultancy to contribute to the open-source Firefox repositories.
This is already happening, either through Foundation or Corporation. One of the biggest Servo contributors works for a FOSS consultancy.
There are corollaries to what I'm describing in most large nonprofits in the US. You get money that a donor requires you to spend in a certain way, and you spend that money that way. If you can't do it with in-house people, you give it to consultants.
> This is not true, based on what I've read about it. Do you have personal experience with these orgs that suggests otherwise?
Yes, I work for MoCo.
> Regardless, nothing is stopping Foundation funds from being directed to Firefox development. If someone gave them, for example, $1M that could only be spent on Firefox, they could pay Corporation or an external consultancy to contribute to the open-source Firefox repositories.
I don't really understand the whole setup, but I believe tax law is what is stopping this. What you are describing would be fraud (or something like it; IANAL). Money flows MoCo->MoFo (via dividends). Paying MoCo for something directly or hiring consultants to provide value would be "private inurement" [1], a phrase which here means that lawyers like scary words. It is using tax-exempt money to enrich private individuals.
But the tl;dr is that the MoFo/MoCo split was created specifically so that money could flow MoCo->MoFo and not the other way around, in order for MoCo to do business-y stuff without jeopardizing MoFo's non-profit status. Nvidia's game where it pays companies to buy their chips would not fly in the non-profit sector.
> This is already happening, either through Foundation or Corporation. One of the biggest Servo contributors works for a FOSS consultancy.
Servo was split out from Mozilla during COVID, and sadly is now completely unaffiliated. It is in the Linux Foundation Europe now. (Igalia is great, though!)
[1] https://legalclarity.org/private-inurement-definition-exampl...
> Aspiration: doing for AI what we did for the web.
> Strength: $1.3B in reserves + diverse operating models (product, deep tech, venture, philanthropy) make Mozilla unusually free to bet long-term.
> Strategy: Pillar 1: AI. Pillar 2: AI. Pillar 3: AI.
Oh yes.
"Mozilla's former CEO, Mitchell Baker, earned nearly $7 million in 2022, with compensation rising from around $3 million in 2020 to over $5.5 million in 2021 and $6.9 million in 2022"
I wonder how much the new CEO is making now.
Just to clarify how outrageous the Mozilla CEO compensation is, consider that Tim Cook makes 0.019% of Apple's revenue in compensation ($75M on $391BN of revenue). For Sundar Pichai (Google), it's 0.003%; Samsung is 0.0001%; Nadella at Microsoft is 0.032%.
For Mozilla? 1.18%! That's almost FORTY TIMES these other companies. Apple revolutionized mobile computing; Google revolutionized search, Microsoft owns enterprise software, and Samsung is one of the largest hardware manufacturers in the world. Mozilla makes a second-rate web browser whose sole distinguishing feature is supporting a community-built addon that does a great job blocking Youtube ads.
I could give $100k per year to Mozilla for the rest of my life, and my lifetime donation would cover less than half of the CEO's salary.
Yeah, considering how poorly it went and how much market share they lost I also always thought it was outrageous... Also so many people laid off and projects shut down. I don't have any insight, and I could be way off, but it always felt like the company was captured by bureaucracy and drained as long as it was possible. Again I could be way off, as I don't have any personal connections to it. I was a regular user until around 10 years ago, but Chrome just leapfrogged them and that was it. There was at one point nothing left other than nostalgia.
edit: I still remember using Mozilla which was this "good thing" but somehow clunky, and then getting so excited when trying Phoenix for the first time, which was then renamed to Firebird, and lastly Firefox. It was so "obviously" the right thing to use.
I wonder what the percentage would be if you were to remove the $500M yearly check by Google.
Compensation for employees is not based solely on revenue. CEOs of major global organizations cost a lot of money.
> People want software that is fast, modern, but also honest about what it does.
I want my browser to be able to run uBlock Origin, so therefore people want more than just what is specified above. I did quit using Google Chrome because they banned uBO (I know the command-line-flags hack still works, but for how long?).
If Firefox also bans uBO through removal of Manifest v2 without offering a proper alternative, then it's just as big of a piece of crap as Chrome is. Due to lack of real choices, I could as well move back to Chrome. I'm currently using Vivaldi.
The only answer is for them to go back to "plan A" and do their own things. Stop copying Chrome. Stop looking at Safari and Edge. Stop the rapid release nonsense. Go back to the fundamentals of speed, security, and stability on desktops and leave the rest to plugins. Once desktop is back on track, they should begin fixing mobile. When both are great, do nothing else except bugfix and performance fixes. We want this and nothing more.
> Firefox will remain our anchor. It will evolve into a modern AI browser
Aligning yourself with garbage generators is how you lose trust. Meanwhile, the top user requested features still point to basic deficiencies of browser UI
If AI feature are on by default then no thanks!
This is how to burn what little trust remains: "AI should always be a choice — something people can easily turn off."
It has to be opt-in or you're not worthy of trust.
I find this whole "I gotta be able to turn off AI!" thing to be silly, personally. Do you also want to be able to turn off anything that uses binary search? Perhaps anything written in C++? Ooh, maybe it's nested for loops! Those kinda suck, give me an option to turn those off!
My indelicately expressed point is that the algorithm or processing model is not something anyone should care about. What matters? Things like: is my data sent off my device? Is there any way someone else can see what I'm doing or the data I'm generating? Am I burning large amounts of electricity? But none of those are "is it AI or not?"
Firefox already has a good story about what is processed locally vs being sent to a server, and gives you visibility and control over that. Why aren't the complaints about "cloud AI", at least? Why is it always "don't force-feed me AI in any form!"?
(To be clear, I'm no cheerleader for AI in the browser, and it bothers me when AI is injected as a solution without bothering to find a problem worth solving. But I'm not going to argue against on-device AI that does serve a useful purpose; I think that's great and we should find as many such opportunities as possible.)
IMO Zen Browser fixed a lot of the Firefox UI painpoints while keeping what I like about it. It would be a smart move to make the Zen UI the canonical version of Firefox. Especially since features like vertical tabs, folders, pins, split screen, and new tab previews are more in the power user use case and Chrome has entirely dominated the casual user demographic.
Rather than develop its own AI (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45926779), Firefox should develop a system to pipe your html rendered browsing history in real time so external local services can process it (https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/archive-your-browser-hi...). See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45743918
Firefox probably won't suddenly have the best AI, but it could be the only browser that does this. Previous: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46018789
Copying portion of the comment I said under another comment:
I and many stuck with Firefox despite being it being horrible until quantum release because Mozilla was aligned with community. But their tech is better now but they aren't aligned with community.
It was the community that made Firefox overtake IE. They seem to forget that.
Unless its gonna come pre-installed like chrome, they need community make the user base grow. They are absolutely dumb for going after a crowd who are happy with Chrome while shitting on the crowd which want to be with them.
I switched back to Firefox around the quantum release and have been very happy with it since. I certainly have some complaints, but it's night and day compared to what Google wants me to deal with.
Ofcourse it is. But that also doesn't make my above comment wrong though. Not to mention, many were silent for so long against their actions. Now it looks like the entire community has started voicing against it. The ball is now on Mozilla's court.
Not to mention there is more than just technical aspect with Firefox and community. A lot of people have invested a ton of time in it.
Mozilla warrants all the flack they are getting. I am just saying they can't virtue signal their way through this. It wont work.
i feel like there ought to be a meaningfully large market for a "trusted" company where part of the brand identity is being able to form sentences that do not include the token "ai", especially with e.g. microsoft's recent excesses in this direction, but what do i know about the alleged realities of running a tech company in $YEAR
I swear I've heard this trust angle used by so many CEOs throughout the years. When I hear this I know nothing good is on the way.
Got my first change in Firefox today that says "Nightly uses AI to read your Open Tabs". Says its local but I really have zero trust for telemetry on this kind of stuff.
I was on board with this until he said, Firefox would become a “modern AI browser.” I am not sure what that looks like or means, and I am not sure anyone really does. It feels like some kind of obligatory statement to appease someone somewhere.
At least he seems focused on Firefox.
Hopefully this translates into clearer direction for Firefox and better execution across the company, instead of pushing multiple micro products that are likely destined to fail, as Mozilla has done over the past 5+ years.
From his LinkedIn profile [1], his recent roles have been consistently centered on Firefox:
Chief Executive Officer
Dec 2025 - Present · 1 mo
-------
General Manager of Firefox
Jul 2025 - Dec 2025 · 6 mos
-------
SVP of Firefox
Dec 2024 - Jul 2025 · 8 mos
-------
He appears to have a solid background in product thinking, feature development, and UX. If his main focus remains on Firefox, that could be a positive sign for the product and its long term direction.
[1] https://www.linkedin.com/in/anthonyed/
He rarely held a job for more than a year and a half throughout his entire career...
> It will evolve into a modern AI browser
Next time I run into Richard Stallman I should ask him for tips on browsing the web
I think the fundamental problem with Firefox and Mozilla is, that people want an organization to maximize Firefox, but Mozilla is an organization maximizing something else while preserving Firefox.
The fundamental problem is expectation and reality mismatch, and is being 'solved' from two directions: new ideal browsers, or criticism of Mozilla in the hope that it improves.
Mozilla has been in a dire place for years. Notably someone years ago posted a chart showing how exec salary keeps going up while marketshare keeps going down [1].
In the Microsoft antitrust trial in the 1990s, the court established that having a browser monopoly was anticompetitive. Sadly, we've allowed this situation to repeat on mobile so Chrome and Safari now dominate. Windows has a lot of default Edge installs (and set as the default browser, particularly in corporate settings) but it's really just a Webkit skin at this point.
Now iOS does technically allow third-party browsers but they're just Safari skins and they're not as good (eg at different times they have more limited features like not havintg the latest Javascript engine).
I really think we need to end the bundled exclusive apps on mobile for certain things.
Until then I'm really not sure what Mozilla's path forward is. They've tried to pivot on things like privacy but I don't think any of these make sense or at least won't produce a revenue source to justify the investment. How do you fund something like Mozilla? And how do you create value for users?
[1]: https://itdm.com/mozilla-firefox-usage-down-85-but-why-are-e...
What browser should I use then? I quit chrome in a futile attempt to be tracked less. They killed support for my adblocker.
Brave. It's a Chromium fork with a built-in ad blocker that's equivalent to uBlock Origin. It works great on Android too.
It is sad that the choice is either an AI browser or a Blockchain browser
Librewolf
Would any of these soft forks survive without Mozilla working on Firefox?
Depends, will I win the jackpot?
The forks do not currently have the manpower to take up the full maintenance of a browser but that does not mean it's impossible that they'll be able to rally enough developers in case Mozilla implodes. A lot of people want a truly free browser to exist. Currently Firefox (barely) manages to fulfill that role and keeps many of those people from spending their time/money on alternatives.
No
fwiw I've been running brave for the past 5 years and it seems fine, they put a bunch of weird shit in it you need to turn off, but otherwise it...browses the internet well?
Mozilla needs to get back to just being a browser project with foundation-based corporate governance.
I don't get why everything has to include the latest trend. Do what the Linux kernel project does: be a bazaar. If someone wants to create deeper AI integration into Firefox, they'll pick up that task, put it in a branch, and the community will discuss whether it merits inclusion in the main. If it does, it'll be there; if not, it won't be.
Operate on donations of time and money with a clear goal of what the project should be.
Yes but then how do you justify a multi-million dollar CEO salary.
I know quite a few non-tech firefox users. None of them want the AI integration. I am wary of confirmation bias, but I feel this is one of those simpsons headmaster meme moments: Am I wrong? No, I am right! the users are wrong! the users want me to spend millions developing AI for firefox instead of all the other things.
One of the secondary awful things about AI is that I have to hear news sources I like listening to complain about it constantly.
This AI hype is frustrating, but it's also frustrating that it dominates conversations with valid points that are identical to the last five times it was talked about.
At this point it's almost more annoying than the AI hype in the first place.
The hype by now at least seems pretty much self aware. It's mind-boggling to me that people don't realize all the Mozilla stuff is completely empty/PR fluff. You have to say you're an "AI first company" because that's the only thing investors want to hear in 2025. Everyone knows it's all fluff, they say it anyways. I will wait and see if it actually meaningfully affects their product or not.
The complaints meanwhile are spammed everywhere, and like you said, it's the same exact content every time. We get it, new features that you aren't going to use are annoying. Disable them or just don't use them, is is really that big a deal? The CEO literally says they will all be able to be disabled.
If the next update fails to remove ads on by default we can assume these are empty promises.
https://www.quora.com/How-do-I-disable-sponsored-suggestions...
[dead]
Oh, let's see who's going to be the leader of the organization that's going to save privacy on the internet. Bet he has a track record of valuing free information and user privacy.
Wait, just like the last CEO, the only way to find out anything about him is a LinkedIn page. I'd have to create an account, log in, and consent to letting them collect and do anything they want with my information.
Apparently Mozilla doesn't have the technical capability of displaying an html web page that doesn't require a login and surrendering to data collection in order to view. Now try to find information about Satya Nadella without giving up your privacy.
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/leadership/#anthony-enzo...
Is he even real? Probably just bad filters but that picture looks almost AI generated.
What would be nice is something like the Python foundation, people can be a reasonable membership to become "members" of the organisation with a right proposal and vote for decisions.
My wish list: - A secure email (with optional encryption/signature, with whitelists) - IM (with point to point encryption). - identity management (I would love delegating the login/password ceremonial to Mozilla instead of reinventing the well for each site). It seems I have trust in Mozilla.
Fire fix usage went from I forget what but really significant down to the level people don't build site for it anymore.
Pretty sure it's because they made security changes that broke the Intranet.
What you want una browser is that it t works. Not some security pop-up telling it doesn't work. Especially if you wrote the website.
Still annoying evert time https://127.0.0.1 is flagged as insecure
#6 in hacker news ChatGPT images announcement doesn't work in Firefox Android as a perfect example.
https://openai.com/index/new-chatgpt-images-is-here/
You want "Trust"?
Cut executive pay 75% back to what Brendan was getting paid, and invest that money in the company instead of lining your own pockets.
Ditch the AI crap that nobody wants or needs and focus on making a good browser and email application, and advertising them to increase user count.
Anything less than this is not trustworthy, it's just another lecherous MBA who is hastening the death of Mozilla.
I have a laptop with 4 GB of ram and firefox keeps crashing. I wish they'd fix this instead of saddling me with AI features I don't need.
Mozilla should restructure its governance such that leadership is elected by their employees - preferably their software developers.
Verge interview with some comments about AI:
https://www.theverge.com/tech/845216/mozilla-ceo-anthony-enz... (https://archive.ph/li0ig)
> As Mozilla moves forward, we will focus on becoming the trusted software company.
Does this sentence feel incomplete to anyone else? Is it supposed to say "the most trusted software company" or is it supposed to be an emphasis (i.e. the trusted software company)?
"Trust" and "AI" are mutually exclusive. Not really impressed with this guy. My guess is the board vetted this guy to be more politically correct than anything else.
Why does firefox need a CEO? Is the Linux model not feasible?
The Linux Foundation has an executive director, which is the usual title (not CEO) for the head of a non-profit.
Because Mozilla is an explicitly mission driven non-profit. Linux doesn't really have a model, the closest equivalent is basically Chromium which is to say it's an open source project to which extremely large companies donate the vast majority of developer hours.
I hope like hell Mozilla leadership can just go back to focusing on what is actually important: making a free, fast, secure, private web browser.
I think this is a great insight and great leadership.
While the for-profit world, and many others, have embraced extremes of predatory capitalism, contempt for users, and disinformation, Mozilla has a fantastic opportunity to compete on its unique capabilities:
It's not under pressure to adapt that business culture - no private equity, Wall Street, etc. pushing it; its culture is antithetical to those things; and its culture has always been geared toward service to the community and trust.
The insight and leadership is to find this word, which hasn't been used much (I think many in business or politics would laugh at it), is incredibly powerful and a fundamental social need, and is clear guidance for everyone and every activity at Mozilla and for customers.
Imagine using a company's products and not having to think about them trying to cheat you.
Well it surely cannot get any wor-
> ...investing in AI...
Ugh, nevermind.
> AI should always be a choice — something people can easily turn off.
Welp. Starting off on the wrong foot. "AI should always be a choice - something people can easily opt in to".
Can't teach what there's profit in not learning, etc. Oh well.
> AI should always be a choice — something people can easily turn off.
Literally 5 sentences later:
> [Firefox] will evolve into a modern AI browser…
Neat! I didn't make it that far. Nice thing about red flags is, there's no value in continuing after you see them. Turns out, the thing the red flag made me accuse them of was their stated goal. Case in point!
Same with tabs, sandboxing or pop-up blocking. All of the features should be opt-in.
I don't trust Mozilla. I don't trust them with my donation money. I don't trust their software any more than other browser vendors.
"Third: Firefox will grow from a browser into a broader ecosystem of trusted software. Firefox will remain our anchor. It will evolve into a modern AI browser and support a portfolio of new and trusted software additions."
Yeah, no. Just make a browser that doesn't suck. Mozilla has been wasting a ton of money, lost almost all of their market share, and have been focusing on making new products nobody wants for a VERY long time and this looks to continue.
"The World’s Most Trusted Software Company"
I'm sure the new leader of the trojan horse (fox?) is not going to pivot to AI...
"...Third: Firefox will grow from a browser into a broader ecosystem of trusted software. Firefox will remain our anchor. It will evolve into a modern AI browser and support a portfolio of new and trusted software additions..."
"It will evolve into a modern AI browser"
and there it is, the most "trusted" software company pivoting to AI.
i wouldn't touch anything from Mozilla with a twenty-foot pole
I for one, am grateful to Mozilla for still being around, pushing for an open web.
Their documentation is excellent, the improvements and roadmap for Thunderbird made me finally adopt it, and I appreciate their privacy-friendlier translation services. uBO works great in Firefox, and I can't stand using a browser without its full features.
About MBA types: the free software project I work for has an MBA type, which I initially resented as being an outsider. However, they manage the finances, think about team and project growth long-term (with heavy financial consequences), and ignore the daily technical debates (which are left to the lead devs), and listen to users, big and small. Some loud users like to complain that we don't listen to them, and sometimes we kick them out, because we do listen to users.
I don't know much about Mozilla internals, if I am to judge from the results: Mozilla is still here, despite everyone saying for 10+ years that they are going to die. They are still competitive. They are still holding big tech accountable, despite having a fraction of their power. I can imagine that they make a lot of people here very uncomfortable.
> despite everyone saying for 10+ years that they are going to die.
What many people have been saying in my experience is pretty much the opposite: that Mozilla isn't going anywhere because Google wants them (needs them) to be around. That it's their antitrust Trojan horse.
They dont need an anti trust trojan horse the US gov has 0 intention of enforcing anti trust.
The only thing that gives some slight semblance of hope is that he at least acknowledges that Mozilla is vulnerable and he very very briefly mentions needing new sources of revenue.
No mention of an endowment (like Wikipedia has) or concrete plans to spend money efficiently or in a worthwhile way, and I sure hope ‘invest in AI’ doesn’t mean ‘piss away 9 figures that could have set up an endowment to give Mozilla some actual resilience’.
I hope is that he’s at least paranoid enough about Mozilla’s revenue sources to do anything about their current position that gives them resiliency. Mozilla has for well over a decade now been in a pathetic state where if Google turns off the taps it is quite simply over. He talks a lot about peoples’ trust in Mozilla. I don’t really remember what he’s talking about to be honest, but if Mozilla get to a point where they seem like they can exist without them simply being Google’s monopoly defence insurance, perhaps I’ll remember the feeling of trusting Mozilla. I miss it.
Firefox exists as long as uBlock exists. It’s a niche product and the only (thin) argument about using it is “don’t let Google become a monopoly" (the very same company that keeps Mozilla alive). Its terrible management decisions, its questionable telemetry and at the end of the day, its performance are the reasons why it will never catch up and it will never get new users.
Mozilla for the love of God I do not want “AI features” in the tool I use to do my online banking. Stop this madness.
Nobody is switching away from Firefox because it’s not agentic.
But there might be a small amount of people willing to switch away from Chromium slop browsers BECAUSE IT ISNT.
Why do you think Waterfox and Librewolf leave this crap out?
Lost me right about in the middle when he started chirping AI AI AI like a parrot. AI and trust do not go hand in hand. Focus on privacy, transparency and simplicity because instead. Good luck.
"It will evolve into a modern AI browser and support a portfolio of new and trusted software additions." I stopped reading there. I just want a browser. Nothing else
> AI should always be a choice — something people can easily turn off
and a couple of lines below
> It will evolve into a modern AI browser
Besides the obvious "what the fuck is an AI browser?" aren't the two mutually exclusive?
Good for them.
Currently they spend millions of dollars (that mostly come from people wanting to support their browser) on huge salaries and projects that have nothing to do with their browser. At the same time they keep on taking steps to alienate those that are donating or using their products.
The bar for success is pretty low - stop wasting all them bucks, and stop alienating your users.
If you could do that, there is plenty of next steps.
Good luck
No, their millions of dollars dont come mostly from people wanting to support their browser.
It comes from search ads on google.com
I agree that most of their money comes from Google (at least for now).
But when you load their home page (https://www.mozillafoundation.org), the first thing you are greeted with is a banner that says they have raised over $6M in their last campaign alone.
So, it seems that millions are being donated by users.
The claim that most of those users want it to go to their browser is not supported or refuted by that page, but I have read a detailed breakdown of all their donations and attempts to guess what people really think they are donating for, and it matched my original statement - though I haven't got the time to search now, what do _you_ think people are donating for?
It's literally impossible to donate to Mozilla for Firefox.
Money calls
What does Mozilla do these days?
Now they put a LinkedIn cowboy in charge. Great.
DEI and ESG don't work anymore, now people are latching onto AI wherever they can
they're all just marketing scams. if these people actually implement AI in ways that isn't needed it just kills the product
the built-in language translation feature of firefox is great, because it's locally ran
i don't want my browser fetching commands from random servers just to implement AI in a browser that was working fine without it
"Firefox will remain our anchor. It will evolve into a modern AI browser and support a portfolio of new and trusted software additions."
reading this genuinely disgusts me. I am so tired of this nonsense being shoved where it doesn't belong. I just want a fast browser that stays out of the way.
> AI should always be a choice — something people can easily turn off.
One sentence later:
> It will evolve into a modern AI browser
One more sentence later:
> In the next three years, that means investing in AI that reflects the Mozilla Manifesto
I mean if you wanted to concretely see how much ignoring their users is in their DNA.
What a daring approach. Truly worth the millions he's gonna earn.
You really only need to make $2M before you can live off the interest forever. That's the goal of these people imo.
The mozilla exec salaries are way higher than that.
Bring back Mozilla OS - Android based! Privacy focused.
Mozilla went to shit after Brendan Eich was ousted.
> As Mozilla moves forward, we will focus on becoming the trusted software company.
That's what I'd do.
The question is whether they really mean it.
Mozilla will have to recover from some history of disingenuous and incompetent leadership.
Now Mozilla only needs to find a CEO that understands tech.
From my perspective, Firefox, a while back, just stopped working on issues that matter. They got into politics, they tried to do everything, but not as good.
If they just focused to produce a good browser, they would be way ahead. And time when you could get $100Ms from Google are slowly coming to an end. Money attracts grifters and this is what brought them down from my perspective.
Now, just to be honest, I wish they find a way. We always could use alternatives. Just don't expect this alternative to come from Mozilla.
I've never understood their massive activism arm, it's always seemed bloated and ineffective compared to organizations I donate money to like the EFF
just grifters siphooning money
What I want to see instead of all this AI nonsense is replacing Gecko with Servo and implementing Vulkan rendering.
Well good luck with those 3%, assuming that incrementing market share is actually the main goal for the new CEO.
Can't imagine a worse angle for regaining trust than doubling down on AI slop.
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So much BS and nitpicking isn't humanly possible to produce. We're looking at the work of corpo bot farms with deep pockets and deep experience in subversion.
But enough about the last 10 years of Mozilla leadership.
I think it's more because they are too much "in the middle", so they get shit from both sides: the side that wants them completely disconnected from BigTech and the side that, well, just doesn't want them because BigTech is good (I presume?).
Every organization and every org leader make mistakes, often or less often, and Mozilla is no exception. But the sentiment here on HN towards it in every news that talks about Mozilla is frankly disappointing.
I will never understand the intense hatred people have for Mozilla and Firefox then go on to tell them how they should run the company. Which usually boils down to stuff they are already doing or fixing things they have no control over.
What product or market mozilla still relevant? Of all the sites I manage, or companies I worked with in the last 5 years mozilla browsers were less than 1% of the userbase.
In Germany and France Mozilla has about the same market share as Edge, in Austria it's even more. Yes, Mozilla makes some dumb decision, but I think the bigger problem is that computer literacy has declined overall. Most people don't even realize they have a choice. Things like ad-blockers and privacy should be taught in schools.
1% of all internet users is an absolutely gigantic user base.