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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Don't worry, they've fully thought this through. They'll just hold a big bake sale or get kids to stand on the corner and do a car wash. That should raise $500MM.
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.
"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.
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)
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.
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!)
> 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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 $$$.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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
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.
> 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 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And a 15 second look at that page makes it extremely obvious that (as expected) all this feedback is coming from the 1% of extremely vocal terminally online losers who haven't left their house in the past 6 months and spend their free time consuming furry porn and "tooting" on Mastodon, and for whom hating AI is 75% of their personality. Not actual normal people.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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 :(
- 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. 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.
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 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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'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!
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.
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 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
> 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
"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.
> 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.
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.
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.)
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
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
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General Manager of Firefox
Jul 2025 - Dec 2025 · 6 mos
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SVP of Firefox
Dec 2024 - Jul 2025 · 8 mos
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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.
> 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)?
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.
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?
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
"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.
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.
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?
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Today, we have Mobian, postmarketOS, PureOS and many more GNU/Linux OSes for smartphones.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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/
Their revenue is only $52M so kinda what Mozilla would earn off their endowment.
[0] https://getlatka.com/companies/brave.com
Brave make a Chromium fork and a search engine. Does a search engine or a web browser engine require more people?
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.
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!)
I don't think your argument has a lot of merit. 28 is not a magic number.
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.
There is no reason to believe manager pay is even 10% of the total expense.
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.
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.
How much?
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’s real hard to compete with Google who happily gives out free email and browser because they can monetize attention.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Why? might be I'm just missing something, but I don't understand why this needs to be a goal of theirs?
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 would love that. that said, right now firefox unstoppably and constantly phones home
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.
Even secure, privacy-respecting versions!
They don't need this much money, but it means more layoffs and cutting scope drastically. It's expensive to run a modern browser.
In a nonprofit, you don’t need layoffs unless you’re losing money (negative profit), normally.
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?
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.
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/
Or searching for text in images with OCR. Or searching my own browsing history for that article about that thing.
Don't like Libreoffice's implementation of Word support? Install Koffice. I take it you've never installed non-OEM software on your computer?
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.
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.
Translation specifically was pretty bad before Google applied machine learning methods to it around 2007 when it became very good almost overnight.
Where it excels is quantity. Often, niche languages are only available on Google Translate.
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.
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.
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.
Mozilla having unique features is what made it popular in the first place (tabbed browsing versus IE6).
These stories just look compelling and obvious in retrospect, when we can see how the dice landed.
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.
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
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...
Servo is still a work in progress, but their current positions give a great deal of hope.
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.
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.
https://github.com/brave
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.
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.
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/
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 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
i wonder how linux does it?
linus and anthony should have a head to head.
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.
No, it does not.
It is a wonderful world fill of variety, choice and diversity
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.
> 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.
Edge is a Chromium fork so essentially they don't have that much work in keeping up.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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...
(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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Fines are only the slightest punishment.
Maybe I'm just lucky, but even this argument is quite ... meh
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.
You won't "feel" this in your day-to-day browsing, but if you're concerned about your data being collected, v2 matters.
I'm sure this will all change eventually though and YouTube has a loophole planned so ad blocking on manifest 2.0 is impossible.
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/advertising/solutions/
https://brave.com/brave-ads/browser/
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.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/sponsor-privacy
So really, there's no point in singling it out.
Also it’s the only browser on my phone that I can use to browse the web without ads…
Also blocking is not as good as intentionally poisoning with something like Ad Nauseum
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/building-ai-the-f...
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.
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.
Regarding WASM at least, it seems to depend. https://arewefastyet.com/
No MBA type is going to be able to do anything of the sort.
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 find the accusations of sexism towards anyone who dares question her as excessive as some of the comments that were made towards her.
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.
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 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?
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.
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.
Anything left ?
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).
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.
While conveniently and regrettably unavoidably nerfing ad blockers :(
For your safety of course.
- 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.
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.
There is no excuse to what is going on.
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 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?
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/
Various AI initiatives (Mozilla.ai, Orbit, etc.)
Mozilla VPN
Mozilla Monitor
Pocket
Firefox Relay
Fakespot
Mozilla Social
Mozilla Hubs
... just to name a few.
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. But for you, the obvious problem is they're wasting all that capacity on side projects and not putting enough effort in the browser.
Also, speaking of trust, return the "never sell your data" to the FAQ.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A built in adblocker would probably help Firefox attract those users, but might destroy their Google revenue stream.
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!
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 doesn't mean they believe in the awful things their clients do.
How could you expect those staff to work under and trust a CEO opposed to their very existence as equal members of society?
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.
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.
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.
Sure it is. I've lived and worked in the Middle East and in China. People do it all the time.
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.
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'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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
In either case I have no idea how to make it clearer for you. Good luck.
Brendan is the one that crossed a line.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_Landmesser
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.
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#:~:...).
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.)
Joe Biden voted for the "Defense of Marriage Act", Yet many LGBT people supported him becoming president.
It is like blaming me for giving $10 to an bump without checking what he was gonna do with it.
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.
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.
(Which for the record, is less important than physical freedom).
That makes it more difficult to create "free internet" type projects.
Come off it, as if he is the only one who can save us. Spare me.
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?
"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 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...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Eich#Appointment_to_CE...
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.
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.
[0]: https://ladybird.org/
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.
Exciting project nonetheless.
Unlike Mozilla which Firefox is completely funded with Google's money.
[0] https://donorbox.org/ladybird
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
> 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.
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 wonder how much the new CEO is making now.
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.
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.
Please don't.
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.
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.)
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
https://openai.com/index/new-chatgpt-images-is-here/
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/
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)?
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.
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?
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.
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?
> ...investing in AI...
Ugh, nevermind.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Literally 5 sentences later:
> [Firefox] will evolve into a modern AI browser…
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.
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.
https://www.quora.com/How-do-I-disable-sponsored-suggestions...
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.
https://www.theverge.com/tech/845216/mozilla-ceo-anthony-enz... (https://archive.ph/li0ig)
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
It comes from search ads on google.com
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?
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'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.
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.
"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.
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.