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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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 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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ?
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.
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 $$$.
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.... 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.
> 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.
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.)
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
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!
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.
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.
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.
"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."
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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 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 :(
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Readit News
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 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.
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.
Thunderbird Pro was announced a while back, still not GA though
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.
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.
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.
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.
There's no release yet, but it's being worked on. https://github.com/thunderbird/thunderbird-ios
I think the privacy industry is oversaturated we already have: ProtonMail, Tuta and Mailbox Mail
People want firefox.
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.
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.
Dead Comment
Firefox - the one thing they do not want to work on is the only thing that makes them special.
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.
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’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.
They did that! Why are people proposing that like it's a new idea?
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.
There is no reason to believe manager pay is even 10% of the total expense.
But yeah, I agree that buying a great email provider would be a very interesting step. And perhaps partnering with Matrix.
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.
It’s real hard to compete with Google who happily gives out free email and browser because they can monetize attention.
I would love that. that said, right now firefox unstoppably and constantly phones home
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.
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?
Even secure, privacy-respecting versions!
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.
Can you please elaborate on this need to make a big profit? Where does the need come from?
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.
https://blog.thunderbird.net/2025/10/state-of-the-bird-2024-...
Why? might be I'm just missing something, but I don't understand why this needs to be a goal of theirs?
I understand email isn’t easy but it difficult to imagine why Mozilla didn’t seize the opportunity.
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.
They don't need this much money, but it means more layoffs and cutting scope drastically. It's expensive to run a modern browser.
Let me be the customer.
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.
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
I am sure people would queue up for the job, fully aware of what it entails.
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.
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 $$$.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.)
It definitely helps that it's also a great (though imperfect) browser.
Maybe I'm just lucky, but even this argument is quite ... meh
https://blog.mozilla.org/wp-content/blogs.dir/278/files/2025...
How incompetent can they be, how out of touch with their core (and arguably only) product ?
Nobody wants AI in firefox.
Deleted Comment
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?
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.
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.
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 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.
Like not being able to change the default shortcuts?
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.
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.
No MBA type is going to be able to do anything of the sort.
Rewrites tend to kill software projects. Even if you don't completely change the language to boot.
Dead Comment
Regarding WASM at least, it seems to depend. https://arewefastyet.com/
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.
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.
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.
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).
Anything left ?
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.
While conveniently and regrettably unavoidably nerfing ad blockers :(
For your safety of course.
Deleted Comment
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?
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.
Image search?
Live captions?
Dubbing?
Summary?
Rewrite text better?
Deleted Comment
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
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/
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.
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...
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...
Honestly the last 5-10 years has been a disaster for Firefox...
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.
Servo is still a work in progress, but their current positions give a great deal of hope.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
- 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.
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.
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.
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, …
> 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.
Agree with you on everything else, though.
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.
Also, speaking of trust, return the "never sell your data" to the FAQ.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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 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.
A built in adblocker would probably help Firefox attract those users, but might destroy their Google revenue stream.
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.
I wish more browsers would target seniors. Accessibility and usability is universally a nightmare.
> 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.
No thanks. Absolutely not.
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?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Eich#Appointment_to_CE...
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 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.
What Mozilla needs is a change in leadership direction, not another MBA.