>> He says he could begin to block ad blockers in Firefox and estimates that’d bring in another $150 million, but he doesn’t want to do that. It feels off-mission.
> It may be just me, but I read this as “I don't want to but I'll kill AdBlockers in Firefox for buckerinos ”.
Yes, that does seem like a pretty uncharitable interpretation of that quote. I read it as "we won't do it, even though it would bring in $150M USD".
I have used Firefox as my default browser through thick and thin for damn near two decades.
If Mozilla killed andblocking extensions I’d switch to Helium Browser in a heartbeat since they’re maintaining manifest v2 support for uBO and even ship it OOTB.
Ads and page level analytics aren’t the only thing gathering data.
There is server-side now (and previously) hosted by the site owner.
It’s a lost cause to fight this. I admire you all for using FF because uBO just for the experience, but it’s only a partial data block. Serverside and thumbprinting- you can’t be anonymous even with Tor, VPN, etc.
It's kind of crazy that a popup like "we and our 1244 partners want to share your data to better serve you". That's the kind of dystopian event you would think only visible as caricatural SF, but it's the kind of thing one can actually see on a daily level just browsing around.
They really take the piss, even supposedly essential cookies get lumbered with hundreds of "partners" with "legitimate interests" harvesting your data.
The one and only time I ever got a machine infected with malware in my 30+ years of using the internet was when I fell for Forbes.com's request to please disable my adblocker. I promptly got hit by a trojan carried in one of their unvetted ads. Browsing without an adblocker is a critical security issue, and I will drop Firefox without a second thought if they ever cripple blockers like Google did.
Is there an extension that limits JS to things that actually improve websites (like the bare minimum needed to render a page usable under most metrics)
(- it's kind of behavior extension on tag level, yet has JS - and it's orthogonal, like CSS or XSLT (BTW. see that hack: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41245159), unlike JS which is.. untamed and invasive; i.e. there is video (any) tag but you could (+)DIY not touching the document - like custom playing with MPlayer or VLC as a plugin there for all AV formats or sorting filtering editing whatever, all aside custompacks? :)
- or, what about the other way, like a firewall ??
+1 for NoScript. It is kind of a pain for the first few days when you have to spend 10-30 seconds reloading sites to allow the minimum needed. It is also eye opening to see how much bloat is added and how fast pages load without all the extra bs.
Thats my problem though, I don't want to have to allow the minimum for each site. I wish there was a noscript-like extension that used a public database of sorts to allow what's needed and block everything else, including things that are "needed" but suck so bad you shouldn't use the site
uMatrix, from the same author of uBO. It's been officially unsupported for years but it still works and it's UI is better then the UI of NoScript and of course much better than the incomprehensible subsystem of uBO that should have replaced uMatrix.
It doesn't "still work" if you're on Firefox. uMatrix has bugs that cause it to randomly delete your cookies, or occasionally fail to block a request (race condition? Looking at logger shows an incorrect domain on some requests)
There are community-made forks which fix the cookies problem, like nuTensor.
Thanks, I'll check nuTensor. I'm using uMatrix with Firefox on both Linux and Android and I didn't notice anything strange but maybe some of those bugs were hidden under the normal hiccups of finding the right combination of rows with trial and errors.
Not my experience at all. I run uMatrix on every computer I have and it is awesome. Still annoyed it was replaced by uBo which is quite good, but nowhere as nice as uMatrix. Luckily uMatrix still works great.
I wish they'd just scrap the uBo interface and replace it with the uMatrix interface which is far superior.
They do different things. I'm using both: uBO for ads and hiding UI elements, uMatrix for JS. I wish that the author could support both but time is limited and I'm OK with that.
By the way, I realized that most of the tabs where I'm logged into something run inside their own tab container, so that limits the damage that any bug on handling cookies can do.
It probably won't work in new Chrome versions. I'm pretty sure it's a Manifest V2 extension (it would have to be in order to dynamically block requests in the way it does), and Chrome stopped supporting MV2 extensions this year[0].
Unusable for the commenter perhaps, based on his choices, but not unusable in an absolute sense
For example, I have been using the web without an adblock for several decades.^1 I see no ads
Adblocking is only necessary when one uses a popular graphical web browser
When I use an HTTP generator and a TCP client then no "adblock" is necessary
When I use a text-only browser then no "adblock" is necessary
Websites that comprise "the web" are only one half of the ad delivery system
The other half is the client <--- user choice
Firefox is controlled and distribuited by an entity that advocates for a "healthy online advertising ecosystem" and sends search query data to an online advertising services company called Google in exchange for payment. Ex-Mozilla employees left to join Google and start another browser called "Chrome"
These browsers are designed to deliver advertising. That's why an "adblock" extension is needed
When one uses a client that is not controlled and distributed by a company that profits from advertising services, that is not designed to deliver advertising, then an "adblock" may not be needed. I also control DNS and use a local forward proxy
The web is "usable" with such clients. For example, I read all HN submissions using clients that do not deliver or display ads. I am submitting this comment without using a popular graphical web browser
1. Obviously there are some exceptions, e.g., online banking, e-commerce, etc. For me, this is a small minority of web usage
The web is usuable with a variety of clients, not only the ones designed to deliver ads
You know that your long-winded and patronizing response in no way is a solution to the problem that you claim it is for the audience you're talking about.
Why do you pawn off an obviously non-solution as a solution? What does this get you?
I use a text-only browser as an offline HTML reader
I make HTTP requests with a TCP client
There are no "false positives"
I only request the resources that I want, e.g., the HTML from the primary domain, JSON from the API domain, etc.
I also use custom filters written in C to extract the information I want from the retreived HTML or JSON and transform it into SQL or "pretty print"
There is nothing to "block" because I'm not using software that automatically tries to request resources I do not want from domains I never indicated I wanted to contact
In terms of majorities and minorities, HN commenters do not represent "almost all users"
There are some web users who are online 24/7
There are others who may prefer to stay offline
A wide variety of people use the web for a wide variety of purposes
HN commenters are a tiny sliver of "all users" and "all purposes"
As such, HN commenters are not qualified to opine on behalf of "almost all users" as almost all users do not comment on HN or elsewhere on the web. Almost all users prefer to express their opinions about the web, if any, offline
I tried switching to Ungoogled Chromium lately but had to switch back because, even on 32 GB of RAM, having another chromium process running meant that all my apps were getting killed left right and centre. Do too much browsing and VS Code gets killed. Restart VS Code and do a build and Slack gets killed. Open Zoom and Chromium gets killed.
Now I'm back to Firefox again and nothing has died so far.
Exactly. And I’m one of those that uses Firefox sync, and prefers all the things Firefox comes with, including the developer tools. The only thing it lacks is the integrated Google Lighthouse reporting.
It's definitely better than nothing, and greatly improves things, but UBO is better. Try watching a youtube video in a browser with UBO, and the android app on a network with pi-hole, etc.
Except by that point you've executed all their JavaScript. The FBI recommends ad blockers as a safety measure. Bouncing on the site still exposes you to risk.
Yeah but they haven't and they're not going to, so what's the point of fantasizing about what you would do in that situation? It's like tough guy syndrome, where a person constantly fantasizes about what they would do in the imaginary situation where one of their friends or family is disrespected, or doomsday preppers who spend their life imagining what they would do in an apocalypse that never comes.
That stuff belongs on archiveofourown.com, not news.ycombinator.com.
Relax, man. It's perfectly reasonable to say that you would stop using a browser if they killed adblock support. Saying so is not "tough guy" syndrome because switching which browser you use is not a tough thing to do.
It is tough guy syndrome, because it's projecting a hypothetical scenario to performatively declare what you would do in that hypothetical, attempting to hold a third party accountable for something they're not actually doing. Try to follow the ball instead of lecturing me to relax ;)
Yeah, otherwise it’d weird the new CEO had such a precise idea of the amount of money it could bring in. It makes it sound like Mozilla definitely had either considered offers from advertisers or done the maths themselves to work out potential revenue.
And for the record, as a Firefox user, count me in with the others who would switch and just use Safari on my Mac if they went through with it!
Constantly Fantasizing? I was responding to a hypothetical based on interpretations of real statements made by the new CEO. It's a public forum for discussion. Firefox is something that is central and essential to my digital life.
I think the only person fantasizing here is you, about what random strangers on discussion forums do all day when not responding directly to topics at hand.
You literally just agreed that you did the thing I'm describing and then insisted I was fantasizing. And you're right, it's a public forum for discussion, hence my criticism of attempting to hold Mozilla accountable for a fictional hypothetical that they explicitly said they're not doing.
I'm all for fanfiction, but as I noted before, it seems that these days archiveofourown.com is where people publish that stuff, not Hacker News. It's easy to sign up and if your fiction is creative people will give you positive reviews. But you might need to spice it up by implying a conspiracy to cooperate with Google or something.
Firefox on Android mobile is also useful because it allows extensions - especially uBlock Origin (UBO), Ghostery, No script, etc. Some mobile browsers (e.g., Samsung Internet) used to allow extensions also, but they've become crap or dropped such support, so their usage has fallen.
I like Firefox (for safety) and Vivaldi (Chromium browser, it's easier to use) on Android mobile. On iOS, Safari is simple and sufficient, but I would prefer UBO there, however we all know Apple will never allow extensions for Safari.
Ever since Google moved to Manifest v3, Chrome is a no go.
I’ve found Wipr 2.0 has been able to block all ads (even YouTube) but it’s unable to hide itself so there are sites that block my ability to read them.
Same. Without uBlock Origin I'll drop Firefox. There are very few reasons to put up with its "niche browser that nobody tests" status if they won't even allow me to block ads. They should just give up and end Firefox development already if they're going down that route.
I'm doing as much to keep Firefox alive as anybody.
Wherever I've worked as a dev in a decade I've always developed Firefox-first and let the testers turn up Chrome issues. So the products that I am involved with just work with Firefox all the time.
I know there are a lot of people like me, people who are passionate and engaged with technology but have problems with "big tech" and if they turn people like me away than it really will be a "niche browser that nobody tests"
I developed and tested my personal site on Firefox. If I were a professional web developer, I'd work just like you do.
But let's not kid ourselves. We're an absolute minority. For every one of us, there are hundreds, thousands of developers who literally do not give a shit so long as their paychecks hit their accounts. Actually they're likely to write Firefox off as some irrelevant niche market the company can afford to lose because it's less work for them if they do.
(1) I like to think that professional web developers are foxier than average
(2) It just takes one on the team to make the difference
(3) Practically compatibility with Firefox is pretty good. Maybe once a month I use an e-commerce site or other e-business site where I have to drop down to Chrome, Edge or Safari.
I haven't compared it in years, but Firefox's bookmark sync is better than Google's, it is a reason why I have stuck with it.
I think Firefox manages hundreds of tabs better than Chrome does as far as memory usage goes. I haven't used Chrome seriously in years, but people continue to complain about how RAM hungry Chrome is so I assume it is still an issue.
But Mozilla has been doing odd things that makes me question them. I would move to some Chromium based browser if ublock origin was... blocked... pun intended... because the web does prefer Chrome over Firefox. If this 3rd party browser is able to integrate some of the functionality of ublock origin that Firefox chose to remove; I would use it over the reasons I listed above in a heartbeat.
It's only Firefox that is never satiated with however much memory I throw at it. Any time my machine slows, the solution is to kill Firefox. Not sure what exactly they are doing wrong.
Set `browser.low_commit_space_threshold_mb` and/or `browser.low_commit_space_threshold_percent` to something you'd prefer, and confirm that `browser.tabs.unloadOnLowMemory` is set (I think it is by default).
The default settings are to allow it to acquire memory until memory pressure on the system reaches 5% free, at which point it will begin freeing memory. You can set a custom percentage or a specific amount of memory.
That or just run it in a cgroup with a memory limit.
Are you sure it is not malware? When was the last time you changed the profile?
Also, I have a ton of bookmarks and as I been slowly deleting them Firefox's performance has improved. This same giant size of bookmarks Chrome seems to sync out of order causing their placement to change.
Ublock origin also does slow down the browser a bit on websites that.. don't.. have ads.
Go to about:processes and kill whichever website's subprocess is using the most memory. Sometimes it's the main process but more commonly it's a specific site. Looking at You, Tube.
I want to take this opportunity to thank Raymond Hill for his enormous gift to humanity. I've done this many times over the years, and it's always worth the time to do it again.
Thank you, gorhill! And thanks to all the people maintaining it and all the filter lists!
Most adblocker developers throughout history have routinely taken millions of dollars to weaken their adblockers, though. That's why we're all using uBO instead of uB.
They say everyone has a price. Wouldn't you for ten million? A hundred million? A billion dollars? It would be extremely irrational not to. You could always donate 70% of it to Ladybird, and still come out ahead.
You could always secretly continue helping the adblocking mission under a different name. Even if you signed a contract not to.
It's like, what's someone price to commit a genocide? There are people out there, they will stubbornly refuse to engage in such a practice, no matter what amount of economical wealth is promised. It doesn't need to be rational. Rationality is not self justifying anyway. The will to help to build better societies is only marginally rational, all it takes is people with some empathy. Rationality is just better to tackle the logistic, it doesn't provide the constraints on what is deemed valuable.
Incorrect, Raymond Hill authored both extensions, both being forks of HTTP Switchboard.
Raymond got overwhelmed with managing an open source project of uBlock's size and let Chris Aljoudi take over. Adblock later purchased it from Chris.
Meanwhile, Raymond had forked uBlock, creating uBO, and continued to improve it on his own terms. After seeing what happened with Adblock, he has no intention of selling either uMatrix or uBO.
> Incorrect, Raymond Hill authored both extensions, both being forks of HTTP Switchboard.
You're right, let me try to amend my statement: at the point uBlock Origin was forked, Raymond disowned the earlier uBlock, and it had become unrelated to him, hence "not the same author" (even if it was started by him). My point was that Raymond didn't want to become involved in the pay-per-ads-let-through scheme the commenter I was replying to mentioned.
I think uMatrix is the better extension. I use it in tandem with uBO.
But yeah, Raymond didn't have the resources to develop both at once and chose uBO which offered a more digestible, install-and-forget experience palatable to a wider audience.
Raymond basically said uMatrix was feature complete. But there could be bugs.
I use both uBO and NoScript and wondered if I really needed uBO if I blocked YouTube as I've planned.
However, it leads to Mozilla's earlier weird design choice where you have to install addon if you only want to disable JavaScript on sites - or allow it from only the selected domains.
Years later I haven't found a sensible explanation why they ditched that choice.
I've understood that you can still do it in Chrom(e/ium) and combined with a good updated blocklist in /etc/hosts or like it would provide most of the functionality of an adblock.
Is Brave so persona-non-grata? I find that it's a 'don't ask don't tell' because of some ancient politics. If Firefox is becoming suspect, WHAT is left?
I found Chrome+adblockers NOT good enough. I like (and hate) Brave's shield, as I never figured out how to use wildcards to whitelist a whole domain / subdomain, it seems per-host. But that Brave shield WORKS.
Too bad arnaud42 over on XDA Developers quit supporting Kiwi, even though was Chromium. It was my favorite browser ever for Android.
Hopefully, someone will pick up the torch and keep it going soon.
You can disable all that stuff. We used to have email clients, newsgroup clients, HTML editors, etc. built into our browsers. It used to be about creating a suite of tools to meet all your needs on the web. Since then, all that stuff just moved to web apps that you access using the browser so that's mostly all that remains. Vivaldi still has an email client available. A crypto wallet isn't the end of the world. I look at it as sort of a modern throwback to Netscape Communicator, which Brendan Eich helped create.
The BAT stuff is definitely more controversial, but mostly only because Brave blocks others' ads in lieu of their own. It was an interesting idea to present an alternative method for a privacy-respecting ad-supported web. Personally, I wouldn't be as aggressive in blocking ads if they weren't so intrusive and didn't compromise my privacy or security. I look at that whole thing as a swing and miss. I'm not going to beat them up for trying something new when we can all see that the modern web is a cesspool.
You can still turn all that crap off, which is what I do when I use Brave, and you have a pretty solid browser.
do you have stats on how many others that is? Because I run FF and I don't run uBO, so.. I mean I understand the feeling based on one's own situation that it would kill the browser but just like Pauline Kael thinking nobody voted for Nixon so how could he win the fact that you think it would kill the browser does not mean that they are out of touch for saying they won't do it despite it bringing in money.
Who selects these CEOs? It almost seems like a caste system at this point. You can be a complete clown, but it's the best we have in our small caste so you're the one.
Right now, Firefox's market share is a rounding error compared to Chrome. Users are starting to switch away from Chrome because it's currently in step 3 (in spades). That trend will not continue if Firefox beats Chrome to the bottom of the pig-pen. Firefox's current focus on AI is concerning enough, but mirroring Chrome's shift to Manifest v3 (i.e. What killed full-blooded ad blocking in Chrome) would be outright suicide.
Mozilla needs to listen to their users. Most don't particularly want "let me run that through an AI for you" popups everywhere. Practically nobody running Firefox wants to be cut off from effective ad blocking.
Monetization is hard, for Mozilla in particular. It was always weird that most of their funding came from Google. Now that Google is yanking it, Mozilla needs to find alternative sources of filthy lucre. However, if they destroy their product's only competitive advantages, there will be nothing left to monetize. If Firefox remains a browser that can provide decent privacy and ad-blocking then Mozilla has a chance to find alternative revenue streams. If, instead, Mozilla throws those advantages away to make a quick buck, that's the last buck they'll ever make.
Indeed, Mozilla has a particular bad habit of not listening to customers.
It shows even in the UI design. Features like tab pinning and tab groups work in ways that are sub-optimal to how users want to use them. A pinned tab should not be tied to a specific URL. If you go their forums you see a lot complaints, and weird thing is all the nonsensical arguments that their reps advance as to how these features should work the way they currently are. I as a longtime Firefox user can immediately see what is wrong with these features as implemented, but the devs won't listen. I wonder if they use FF themselves.
Firefox is also the only app on my MacBook that consistently brings the system to a crawl. Almost every single time my machines slows down, the solution is to kill Firefox. It's got to the point I don't even need to use Activity Monitor, I just kill Firefox and and system recovers.
It's gotten to the point I'm seriously looking at alternatives, trying out Orion and Helium browsers.
It took them AGES to finally implement tab groups and vertical tabs, two of the most requested features that pretty much all browsers browsers had at that point. They can barely hear Firefox users over the sound of google's millions filling up their bank.
I'm confused, because I desperately want pinned tabs to stay on their URL, but that's not what happens, and I end up with random URLs in these tabs because I click links. Is there a config flag I flipped without thinking?
It seems they have listened to users and allow pinned tabs to navigate to any url.
Initially this is how pinning worked, and along the way they changed it so that if you navigated to a different domain from the one you pinned, it opened in a new (unpinned) tab, which was jarring.
Now it seems they have reverted that change. So they seem to vacillate on the implementation.
Yeah, I don't get why I'd want to pin a tab and then change the url (which I do accidentally for a pinned tab every couple of weeks or so). When it's not the site I pinned, it's just...a tab?
From my experience I want to pin tabs because I simply want a set of tab available for use that remain visible when I scroll through a lot of tab headers to the right.
It's very annoying to be on a pinned tab, navigate to even just another server on the same root domain, and suddenly be pushed to another (un-pinned) tab. Even if navigate to a totally different url, I do no want to be pushed to another tab.
The enforcement of the url remaining the same should be done by myself, not the browser trying to second-guess me.
As far as I can tell, it's literally the only way I use pinned tabs (other than when I accidentally do navigate away on them due to the lack of enforcement). I have several pages I always want open (e.g. my email, a couple of messaging platforms, Spotify, the web portal for texting via my Android phone), and then I have some varying number of other tabs open that I use for anything else I'm currently using my browser for. I guess this is one of those things where everyone's preference is different, because to me, having a static set of pages I always want open is pretty much the ideal use case for a pinned tab. I can't really wrap my head around wanting to use them any other way; if they can navigate away, they're just like any other tab but harder to close, and I don't really have a use case for enforcing the minimum number of tabs to be larger than zero unless it's literally to force a specific page to always be open. I find it far more annoying to have to navigate a tab back to the state it was previously than to reopen a page from a tab I accidentally closed, so having an extra layer of protection on closing a tab isn't nearly as useful as if it also had that extra layer of protection on what the tab itself was showing.
edit: I don't see it as the browser second-guessing me as much as following what I'm already trying to do in the first place. I don't pin a tab if I don't actually want to keep that specific page open, and taking an action to preserve a state that I opted into isn't going around my specified intention, but following it.
1. Let's imagine I have pinned a dashboard url in my bank's website. After some time, I go back to it, it sees I've lost my session, redirects me to the login page, and bam, that login page open up in a random, un-pinned tab. How is that a good experience?? You might say I should pin the login url, but no, after login I always want to get to a specific dashboard page.
2. In my view, pinned tabs are not for specific urls; that is what the toolbar is for. Pinned tabs are, for me, simply a way to have the most important tabs you are working easily available. And that makes sense, because the set of tabs that are most important changes a lot from time to time. I frequently have hundreds, probably a thousand, tabs open. If I have to pin every single url I'd like to go back to, I'll quickly run out of room in no time.
So let's say depending on what I'm working in this month, suddenly I find myself using Github a lot, or Notion. Then it is far easier for me to open some of my pinned tab and just navigate to the new urls I want, rather that have to close each of them , then create new pinned tabs, and hope that if I click on something on the page that is minor, I will not be rudely pushed into another tab.
Summary: I think you are using pinned tabs for what the toolbar was designed for.
I'm not sure I understand how the toolbar can solve this problem. Unless I'm misunderstanding, I'd have to reopen the page every time when I click on the icons in the toolbar, in addition to not being able to interact with them in the same way as other tabs (e.g. using the keyboard to jump between them rather than needing to click). It's probable that the developer intent is closer to what you're describing, but I still maintain that what I'm looking for would be more useful for than the toolbar and that I don't personally have any use for what you're describing.
Maybe the difference here is that I don't ever have more than maybe a dozen tabs open total (including the half dozen pinned ones). To me, it seems more that you're using tabs for what browser history was designed for, and that you're using pinned tabs in a way that doesn't make sense unless you are using tabs in that way.
Google pays Mozilla, basically to make Google the default search engine for everything in Firefox. Previously, it looked like an antitrust case was going to force them to stop doing that, but it didn't turn out that way.
Mozilla is still getting most of their money from Google and they shouldn't need to kneecap themselves to pay the rent. Still, you can't help but wonder what might happen if Firefox starts eating too much of Chrome's market share. Mozilla should be trying to branch out, but in a user friendly way.
I definitely heard there was a risk of that happening, but you're right that it seems not to have materialized. I'm honestly not sure what remedy they landed on or if they are still deliberating but I think a fascinating option that follows precedent would be a pop-up browser picker in Android instead of rolling Chrome as default, as that has precedent in other antitrust cases and could potentially change the market share issue overnight.
Another interesting one would be truly spinning off Chrome, but paying a search licensing fee to them, too. Actually, that's fascinating to consider in this context, because I know that option (spinning off the browser into its own company) has been criticized on the grounds that it would be unrealistic to assume a browser can simply monetize itself. Ironic given the Mozilla criticism.
Is it him or is it you? I'd think within the Mozilla organization is a data trove of telemetry which renders a fairly good picture of how many users actually are using ad blockers.
Yep, and that's how he arrived at the $number. If a small number of people were using ad blockers, the cited sum would approach $0 since disabling ad blockers would affect very few page views, right?
As a decades long Mozilla fan, who has stayed true to the fox even with the rise of Chrome, Mozilla breaking adblocking would make me uninstall the fox and never come back. I feel that many of the so called greybeards here feel similar. Once adblocking is gone, users will be too and Mozilla will fall faster than Nokia did
I think it is him. Chrome making blocking harder is one of the issues that has been pushing some users away (and a good portion of those in the direction of FF). If FF is not better is that regard then those moving away for that reason will go elsewhere, and those who are there already at least in part for that reason will move away.
If this happened it would be the final straw for me, if I wasn't already looking to change because of them confirming the plan to further descend into the great “AI” cult.
Not sure what your point is? It doesn't matter the number of users, because the GP's point is that those users are going to immediately bail, for a browser thsy supports ad block.
So that extra money will never materialize. And usage numbers will again crater. This is the point.
(You can disagree with that assessment, but that has nothing to do with telemetry, which cannot gauge users hanging around with blocked .. adblockers)
Firefox has a market share around 3%. Even most technologists stopped using it long ago. Many banks and government websites don’t even support it anymore and loudly tell people to use Chrome instead, especially in developing countries.
Nothing can kill Firefox, because it’s already dead for all practical purposes.
I use Firefox as my daily browser. If i have a website that fails to work, I might try chrome maybe once every two months. And then it usually also doesn't work. So for all browsing I do on the internet, Firefox works like a charm
Get the OneTab extension. It'll save and close all those tabs. That way you won't have Firefox crashing during startup once you exceed the number of tabs it can handle (a few thousand).
Tip: the crashing is caused by certain extensions such as OneTab and All Tabs Helper which for some reason seem to cause all the tabs to load, just when restoring a session. Temporarily disable these extensions before restoring, then you can reenable.
Reading comments here about problems using Firefox is odd to me as I never run into them. I feel like people are taking about totally different browsers. I don't remember the last time I had page rendering issues or was asked to use a different browser.
I've been using Linux on my desktop for ten years and I definitely experience bugs and performance issues with Firefox from time to time that don't occur in Chrome. It's rare but common enough to keep Chrome around as a fallback.
A few: Developer tools are quite slow; Airline websites often break during checkout; JS games and video players sometimes stutter or use a lot of CPU
My favorite anecdote on this front: someone posted a comment on Lemmy, a fediverse alternative to Reddit, claiming Arch was "broken" and Linux users were delusional for thinking it was functional for the average person.
And when people ask them what they meant, they revealed that they used some package from the arch user repository that apparently required manual compiling for every update.
And instead of thinking that this wasn't the unusual behavior of a particular package, they insisted that this was the normal Linux packaging experience, which was why Linux as a whole was a terrible operating system.
A bunch of commenters chimed in emphasizing that the whole package distribution system in Linux is designed to among other things, handle dependencies and avoid manual compiling (though it's available as an option), and they were all dismissed as just being fanboy apologists.
Same. I mean, I'm sure there have been cases where I've switched to Chrome for certain things. I just got a custom viewfinder for my partner for Christmas, is showing a bunch of photos of the cruise that we went on. And they have an online editor for it, but the editor seemed to be glitching when using Firefox. So I moved to Chrome. Later I realized I was just misunderstanding and it actually just worked fine in Firefox.
And I'm able to access my bank, my credit cards, my utility bills, in Firefox without issue. So I'm not sure what people are talking about.
One thing I am familiar with though in the aftermath of gamergate was a bunch of motivated reasoning to complain about games and insist that they had design flaws or bugs, when really? The bugs weren't real but were kind of just a different way of saying We Don't Like This Game. And so reports of perceived bugs in some cases are as much a social phenomenon as they are a sincere representation of software functionality.
I don't want to say there's no bugs but for every one person's unsubstantiated anecdote, I seem to be able to find two people able to reproduce a functional version of the experience without issue. And just to zoom in on the bank login issue in particular, I use a credit union with an old decrepit HTTP site that was recently updated to a slightly less old and decrepit HTTP site. Plaid is unable to successfully log in, but the web interface works perfectly fine on Firefox mobile.
Most of the service sites I use are fine in Firefox running on Linux. The only thing I use that is problematic is the Microsoft 365 with Teams portal an employer uses. So I have Chromium just for that one.
Yes, I wonder if the rise of the Web Platform Tests have made browser behaviour much more consistent?
It happens so rarely, I don’t keep Chrome installed and have to download a new version of Ungoogled Chromium when I need to see if something only works in Chrome, which I can only remember doing about twice in the last year!
It's not page rendering issues, usually, since Firefox and Chrome pretty much support all the same things.
What you run into the most is the website saying, hey, it looks like you are not using a browser we have tested against, so we are not going to let you log in. Please come back when you have Chrome, edge, or Safari.
That happens quite often these days. Last week I was filling in a govt form (EU country), submit button didn't work in FF, so I had to resort to using Microsoft Chrome. On my company's training platform videos aren't rendered in FF. Another shitty corporate portal which shows my salary and holidays doesn't work in FF at all, completely. What else... A few smaller payment providers weren't working in FF over past two years. Ghost of the Skype before being finally killed only worked in Chrome clones. Stadia only worked in Chrome (yes, I used it and it was fine).
Also many sites show significant degradation in FF lately. Youtube works like shit in FF, once every 10 page opens it just gets stuck half way with part of the background loaded, like black with black empty frames on top. Or just empty page. No, it never finishes loading from that state, and neither it can reload on F5. But opening a new tab works fine and YT loads normally.
And to finish off this rant, FF has now started corrupting my open tabs after opening FF with saved session. This never happened since this feature was implemented and in 2025 has happened 3 times already. And in mozilla bugtracker all tickets about this are ignored for years now. Meanwhile they are developing some crappy bells and whistles, instead of fixing fundamental bugs.
If not for Chrome monopoly, I would consider switching browsers. Ladybird can't come soon enough. Mozilla has lost touch with reality.
Having switched to Firefox about 10 months ago, one thing I notice is every site I visit works but a lot of sites load way slower than Chrome. YouTube is a big one.
How much of that is Firefox rendering being worse vs artificial slowdowns by Google owned sites kind of doesn't matter in the end. Objectively it's a slower browsing experience but I solely use it for uBlock Origin.
I've been using Orion browser (WebKit-based with support for Chrome and Firefox extensions) for quite some time and haven't had this issue with YouTube, but I've definitely experienced the same with Firefox. If it's an issue of artificial slowdowns, you'd think they'd apply it to anything not running on Chrome's engine, which makes me think it's specifically Firefox's rendering causing this issue.
For me the biggest offender are usually Google products and sometimes the lazy-coded website written by incompetents and whose audience is the tech illiterate (i.e. some websites involving schools/teaching) that just tell you "use latest Chrome just to be sure, download here" to, well, just be sure.
Notable mentions for government websites that are like 10 years in the past and that are still on the "Supports Firefox" side because, well, they are just always late to everything.
Usually that's because of third party cookies the government websites love to use for authentication. FF and Safari by default blocks them but both can be disabled temporarily to use those websites. Chrome is more lax on them since ad networks love cross origin cookies as well.
While governments battle big tech on some issues, they are very much on the same side on others. They both want more tracking for example - the governments want to regulate it, and there is a battle for control of the data, but both want the data to be collected by someone.
3% market share is 150 million active users give or take. That's no death by any count in the software world.
Gosh, I really wish Mozilla would just dig into their user-base and find a way to adequately become sustainable... or find a way to make it work better as a foundation that is NOT maintained by Google, ie like the Wiki Foundation. I do spend a LOT of time in FF, can't anyone see there's a value beyond selling ads and personal info that could make Mozilla more sustainable, dependable and resilient?
I think you're right, but it's important to emphasize many of these attempts to tell the story of market share get major facts catastrophically wrong. The decline in Firefox market share from like 33% to below 10% is mostly because the world pivoted to mobile, and Firefox "dominance" was in a world of desktop browsers. It was defaults and distribution lock-in as the world pivoted to mobile that led to the change in market share. As well as the web as a whole effectively tripling in number of users, and Google leveraging its search monopoly and pushing out Chromebooks effectively at cost.
For some reason that part of the story always seems to get omitted, which I find bizarre. But the web pivoted to mobile and Google flexed its monopoly powers. I would argue that upwards of 95% of the change in market share is explained by those two factors.
No, the decline of Firefox market share happened in the early 2010s, on desktop, when everyone switched to Chrome because it felt way faster. I say "everyone" - this is the subset of "everyone" who were switched on enough to use a non-default browser in the first place. The rest used IE or Safari, dependent on platform.
What happened in the last 6 months or so to affect those numbers? According to them, Chrome increased in percentage quite a but recently and the others all got "compressed" towards 0.
Looking at the last 10 years gives a different perspective (not great for Firefox but maybe underscores something is different recently in general):
I can't imagine browsing the web on my phone and tablet without Firefox mobile. That would honestly be the biggest loss once this CEO takes this nonsense to the logical end.
I'm genuinely curious. What does FireFox mobile have over it's competition?
You can't install UBlock Origin on mobile.
Like I still use FireFox on mobile, just purely out of habit. I don't really see anything better about it (I am quite inexperienced when it comes to phones).
Pretty sure even back then, uBO was on the list of vetted extensions. I remember using it prior to 2023 (since like 2019), on my old OnePlus 6. There may have been a period it wasn’t available, but surely it wasn’t gone for too long.
I use several extensions on Fennec mobile: AdGuard AdBlocker, Google & YouTube cookie consent popup blocking, NoScript, Privacy Badger, Translate this page, Web Archives, uBlacklist
> Many banks and government websites don’t even support it
Because their web developers are too lazy to write anything to proper standards. They're doing some kind of lazy "Check for Chrome, because everyone must be running that, if not, redirect to an Unsupported page".
I've yet to find a website that "refuses" to work in Firefox which doesn't work just fine when I use a user agent switching extension to present a standard Chrome on MacOS or Chrome on Windows useragent.
When they say "don't support it anymore", does that mean they're back to the IE era of using Chrome specific technologies so it doesn't work in any browser, do they use user-agent sniffing and show a big popup, or is it just that they're not testing it in FF anymore? The latter shouldn't be an issue as long as they use standards, the only thing they would run into in this day and age is browser specific bugs - but Safari seems to have that the most.
Have not used Chrome-based browsers 3+ years and never had problem with Firefox. Sometimes Safari was not working 100% - but nothing serious. Maybe it is because, only page from google I use is Youtube; however Firefox has best experience there, even better than Chrome - thanks to proper uBlock Origin.
Yeah, every website has different stats about user-agents, depends a lot on the types of users you attract. I bet HN has Firefox usage ratio above 15% for sure, while sites like Instagram probably has way below the global average.
Global browser marketshare never made much sense. You need to figure out what your users use, then aim to be compatible for most of those, and ignore any global stats.
As of December 7th, Firefox is 10.3% of traffic there. This makes it the #2 browser, after Chrome (at 62.2%) -- a spot it has been dueling with Edge over for the last year or so.
I'm inclined to think that "people visiting wikipedia" is a fairly representative sample of "normal users", overall.
Given the current state of the Chrome family of browsers and the anti adblocker stance from Google, i'd think that alone would guarantee Firefox a steady user base.
Not sure how users cope with Chrome-based browsers and intrusive ads.
That's just a wishful thinking. Too many ordinary users accept ads as inevitable annoyances and don't even know about the very existence of adblockers.
You could suggest installing Firefox next to Chrome and install uBlock Origin on it. Open YouTube and show them that there are zero ads. They will likely see a contrast.
I've tried a few times to convince people in my life who would self describe as "bad with computers" to download an adblocker, but they usually find the friction too high. Adding extensions is unfamiliar for most, and even if it seems very basic for us, the non-tech people I know don't really want to deal with the risk of unknown unknowns from that, let alone switching to a healthier browser. (Perhaps reasonable since it feels like these days half the extensions on the Chrome Web Store are spyware or adware behind the scenes.)
I also suspect that those who lived through the days of frequent Windows errors and Chrome running out of memory all the time often expect software to fail in weird and unexpected ways, and a lot of people adopt a "don't fix it if it isn't broken" mindset.
Still, uBlock Lite and Brave browser are definitely easy wins and I'm glad to see more random people in my life using them than I would have expected. :)
If it's the computer of an older family member or something, just put Firefox and ubo on their system for them and be done with it. They will use whatever software is preloaded, and being shown how to use it is a much lower barrier to entry than the cognitive load of finding, vetting, installing, and configuring new software.
I used to try to patiently explain why people should do xyz. Now I explain to people why I'm going to change xyz on their device, and if they don't slam the breaks I just do what needs to be done right then. If someone doesn't know what an adblocker is they are getting one so they can see for themselves and reflect on what companies have been putting them through for years to make some incremental amount of money.
That's really funny. Yes, in case it wasn't clear for others reading this and thinking about installing these, it's almost certain that uBlock Origin and Brave browser will not cause you any problems and if you're using stock Chrome I really encourage you improve your situation dramatically for ~5 minutes worth of effort.
that 3% is of total users including mobile which chrome is king because it's basically force fed to users. this is important because there is no choice with browsers for the common mobile user, most of them don't know what is a browser even if they used it every day.
also in the 2000s IE was king because guess what? that was what came preinstalled with winxp
Exactly! I keep banging this drum but I'm fascinated by the possibility of Android being required to have a pop-up where people can choose different browsers, as a potential remedy to Google's monopoly. Because engineering a path dependency on Google search, from mobile hardware, to software, to default browsers, to default search on the browser, I think is part of how they've enforced their monopoly. There's been a legal judgment that they are, in fact a monopoly, but I don't think any remedy has been decided on yet. And there's a lot of historical precedent for a pop-up to select a default as a remedy to software monopolies.
Granted in Google's case, it seems that the Monopoly judgment was with respect to ad markets, but locking people into search to serve ads might be understood as part of the structure of that monopoly.
Most of those sites are doing a little move called "lying". I occasionally (once every couple of months) run into a site claiming to not support Firefox. I can't recall a single site that wasn't a tech demo of some bleeding edge feature of Chrome that didn't magically start working when I turned on my Chrome UserAgent.
(Hey, if you work at Snapchat: fix your shit. Your desktop site is by far the most mainstream website I've come across that lies like this)
This is completely untrue in my experience. I use firfox exclusively on my personal laptop and have done exclusively for years. I don’t even have chromium installed.
I can’t remember the last time a website was unusable on firefox. It’s certainly not common.
My software stopped working because its drawing on canvas in a way that causes firefox to glitch with hw acceleration enabled. Not one of my customers/users complained
The only reasons I've ever put effort into Firefox support in my software was A) I find it helps push me to write towards standards better if I include multiple browser engines, which makes it more likely I'll support Safari without extra effort, which is difficult for me to test on because I don't daily drive any Apple devices (works about 80% of the time), and B) to avoid the shit-fit I would receive if I ever posted it as a "Show HN." It has never come up as an actual user requirement.
This is academic discussion, where you think when X is said it means this, somebody (others here) think its that and so on. Grasping straws and all. I guess when around Christmas work churn slows down and some people spend more (too much?) time here.
> No, it will just kill the browser. The fact he thinks otherwise tells me how out of touch he is.
Believe me when I say this but 99.99999% of the human population does not give a shit what is Firefox, Chrome, Edge, Brave, whatever.
Their survival is completely detached from how "good" it is. As long as it runs, opens a page, opens picture, plays video.
We all live in the tech bubble, to them its an "app" that is "annoying me with ads". And that if they know its an ad, not just part of the page. That is if they even know its a page, not just something my son told me to click if I want to go to "Facebook".
It's a common cognitive error called Moral Thought-Action Fusion. The idea is that thinking about an action implies a desire to perform the action. You will see these in other circumstances as well. One place it is commonly used is in describing non-religious moral systems that must form their moral bases without axioms from God. A non-religious person may form a considered position against murder, for instance, but the fact that they state the pros and cons before choosing against is considered evidence that they wanted to.
The core reasoning system here is probably moral intuitionism: if you have an explanation for why something is bad, it is not something you consider intuitively bad and consequently you must be wanting to do it.
I think I've seen it in online communities a lot more in the last couple of decades, and I suspect it's just a characteristic of the endless march of Eternal September.
Don't really agree here. The point against him is thinking in a very shallow way that stopping ad block means bringing in so much, which I guess is true in a certain basic level, but ignores how shitty that would contribute to making the internet.
And believe it or not, human behavior is such that something that is not even i in the space of possibilities is much less likely to occur that something that has been considered and rejected. It might have been rejected ow, but what the calculus changes?
> which I guess is true in a certain basic level...
Which is the level he's acknowledging it on. Short term profit that cannibalises product value and user goodwill is all-too-common in the modern corporate climate, and he's acknowledging the elephant in the room.
> ...but ignores how shitty that would contribute to making the internet
Presumably, that would be the reason "he considers it "off-mission""
While I agree that him phrasing his reason not to so weakly instead of "doing so would kill firefox" is a little concerning, a CEO probably doesn't want to be overly honest about the other, less investor-friendly elephant in the room, "the only reason anyone uses Firefox is for uBO".
But also, we don't actually know how exactly he said it, since it's not a direct quote. For all we know, it was an offhanded remark, or he said it in a tone that meant he knew what a terrible idea it was. We're trying to read tea-leaves from a single paraphrased remark.
To some extent I agree, but if someone is deep in the weeds of speculation, not just saying pros and cons of murder in general but also having drawn up lists of people with pros and cons of murdering each of them and possible ways of doing so, then that's starting to get a little suspicious. Perhaps not bad in itself, but suspicious.
I don't think HN comments have an irrational burning pit of hate for Mozilla. If Mozilla was shaped more like the Tor foundation in their words and actions I think a lot more people would be supportive.
There is no "HN comments". Each commenter has its own sensibilities. Some of them just saw the word Adblock from new ceo and went full defense mode without trying to understand that the guy was just talking about what he feels is good, and there is no need to come with the worst possible interpretation of each sentence.
Yeah, the article's quoting didn't help its case. It doesn't seem fair to quote someone saying [I don't think X is a good idea] as evidence they are about to do X.
That being said, in the original context [0] it does sound a lot more like an option on the table. That original article presents it as the weakest of a list of things they're about to explore - but who knows, maybe the journalist has butchered what was said. It is an ambiguous idea without more context about how close it is to Mozilla trying to make life hard for ad-blockers.
In addition "off-mission" is a pretty weak way to describe completely destroying your credibility and betraying your user base. Building the Firefox phone was off mission. Buying Pocket was off mission. Maybe it's just me, but selling your remaining faithful users down the river to make a quick buck from advertisers seems a little, I don't know... worse than that?
It might just as well have been something that was supposed to sound young and fun ("I don't want to do that") and ends up leaving too much room for interpretation.
If you have the power to do something, saying you might do it but that you don't want to makes people imagine you'd do it. If you have a knife and talk about how you "might stab people, but don't want to", that's a very different message than having a knife and saying "obviously I'm not going to stab people, violence is not an option".
The latter reassures, the former depends heavily on what the recipient of the message thinks of you, and whether they can imagine you stabbing people.
If that quote was accurate, then either he just said something and wanted to wing it, or they should reconsider their communication strategists.
The part about making money through advertising and selling data to 3rd parties (though "search and AI placement deals") is already not a good sign. Planning to make their money through ads and surveillance capitalism is already making it impossible to say "I always know my data is in my control. I can turn the thing off, and they’re not going to do anything sketchy"
Except that expressing loud doubts about something ethically dubious is often a sign that an opposite action will be taken. So many business people want this moral excuse "but I had doubts" while being totally cynical
Logically that is setting up an argument where no matter what the CEO says you're going to assume they're going to take an action. If they say yea, obviously it is a yes. If they say nay, it means they're thinking about it which is basically a yes! That is a completely reasonable position, often it makes sense to ignore what someone says and focus only on their capabilities. But if that is the situation then it doesn't make any sense to quote what someone says because it is about to be ignored.
"feels off mission" exposes how little conviction there is behind this position.
That is a flimsy tissue paper statement about a concept that should be a bedrock principle.
It's irrationally charitable to give it any credit at all. Especially in context where anyone who's awake should understand they need to be delivering an unquestionably clear message about unquestionably clear goals and core values, because this ain't that.
Or rather, it is a clear message, just a different message to a different audience.
Part of being CEO/running a business is considering all options, but it doesn't mean it will ever move beyond the ROI/risk phase. Ever read one of the risk assessments in a companies public filings? It's the same thing.
All options that are in line with the organization’s mission.
The CEO of an organization like Mozilla even considering blocking adblockers for profit is like the president of Amnesty International considering to sell lists of dissidents to the secret police.
> The CEO of an organization like Mozilla even considering blocking adblockers for profit is like the president of Amnesty International considering to sell lists of dissidents to the secret police.
No, for Amnesty International it would be more like not considering somebody a political prisoner because the country that took the prisoner is a 1st world country and they don't want to expose themselves on a matter that would risk the donations from a certain population.
Yes, that happened in the aftermath of the Catalan attempt at peaceful independence in October 2017 by Amnesty International Spain.
Yes, the problem is that it is considered an option at all. Are they running ROIs on harvesting passwords, blackmailing users and infecting all clients with malware?
It's not hard to imagine the last default search contract negotiation had Google go "we'll give you $x if you kill manifest v2, $x-$150 million if you don't."
for it to be considered, somebody must have offered to pay that 150M. Or he considered going to somebody (we all know that somebody is Google) and asking them for that money in return for killing ad blockers.
> You wouldn't calculate the expected RoI of killing adblockers if killing adblockers was never considered.
I agree, although if someone isn't the kind of person who would calculate that, they're probably not the person who will become the CEO of a company that size in the first place. I don't think organizations have the right incentives in place to push people with those values to the top.
You wouldn't calculate a figure and publish it as the first step in any reasonable price negotiation. Any pricing you mention publicly would be double or triple the number you are willing to accept. By the time you are talking publicly about realistic numbers you are well into the private negotiations.
I agree with all the people saying it would drive a lot of the remaining users away, and I hope they don't do it. But I'm not remotely surprised that they considered following what their biggest competitor (Chrome) already did.
Because Chrome was built by the world's biggest advertising company. If the World Wildlife Fund started selling ivory to pay the bills, would that not be surprising?
That analogy doesn't really work, though: Mozilla's goal is not specifically to fight against online advertising. Ad-blocking is connected to their goals, definitely, but they clearly have to make compromises, and I'm not that surprised that they'd think about that one.
Why? They have ample free cashflow. They haven't had money problems in 10 years. If they're worried about Google withdrawing support they should save money in an endowment, not do things to help Google.
“I wouldn’t sell sexual services. I’ve spent an evening checking the going market rate for someone my age in my area and it’s 2k! Can you believe that? That’s a ton of money! Totally not going to do it though”.
It’s an eyebrow raising comment at the very least.
That's supposedly The Verge paraphrasing the CEO (Unfortunately I can't verify because the full article requires subscription.) I would like to know what the CEO actually said because "it feels off-mission" is a strange thing for the leader of the mission to say. I would hope that they know the mission inside out. No need to go by feels.
> In our conversation, Enzor-DeMeo returns often to two things: that Mozilla cares about and wants to preserve the open web, and that the open web needs new business models. Mozilla’s ad business is important and growing, he says, and he worries “about things going behind paywalls, becoming more closed off.” He says the internet’s content business isn’t exactly his fight, but that Mozilla believes in the value of an open and free (and thus ad-supported) web.
> At some point, though, Enzor-DeMeo will have to tend to Mozilla’s own business. “I do think we need revenue diversification away from Google,” he says, “but I don’t necessarily believe we need revenue diversification away from the browser.” It seems he thinks a combination of subscription revenue, advertising, and maybe a few search and AI placement deals can get that done. He’s also bullish that things like built-in VPN and a privacy service called Monitor can get more people to pay for their browser. He says he could begin to block ad blockers in Firefox and estimates that’d bring in another $150 million, but he doesn’t want to do that. It feels off-mission.
> One way to solve many of these problems is to get a lot more people using Firefox. And Enzor-DeMeo is convinced Mozilla can get there, that people want what the company is selling. “There is something to be said about, when I have a Mozilla product, I always know my data is in my control. I can turn the thing off, and they’re not going to do anything sketchy. I think that is needed in the market, and that’s what I hope to do.”
I don't like how he assumes that a free internet must be ad-supported. The ad-supported web is hideous, even with their ads removed. A long, convoluted, inane mess of content.
On the other hand, the clean web feels more direct, to the point, and passionate. I prefer to read content written by passion, not by money seeking purposes.
That's not correct. Linux is free, almost all open source is, many projects, websites are done out of passion.
I contribute to open source projects and nobody "gave me something", as I did it because I wanted to make it better. Like me, there are many others. Nobody is "the product" there.
What the saying you are misrepresenting means is "carefully check free things as you may be the product". Not "free things cannot exist, you either are the product or you pay".
Linux development is paid for either directly or in-kind by companies including Red Hat, IBM, Canonical, Oracle, and others. It's free to use and mostly open source but if it existed only on passion it would be something far less than it actually is.
People need to eat and have a roof over their heads.
Those companies pay the improvements they want for their usage case, which is usually far removed from what normal users want. I don't really need support for thousands of CPUs and terabytes of RAM.
Do you remember what Linux was like before the big corporations started contributing/supporting it? Just getting X11 working with your video card and monitor could take hours or days. Setting up a single server could easily be a "project" taking weeks. And god forbid you ever had to update it.
That in particular was thanks to the X.Org foundation. And while it made things easier, it didn't take "days" setting up a graphics, it took hours at most. And setting up a server didn't take weeks, it was an 1-2 day task at worst.
> If something is free (en masse), you are probably a product.
If something being free ever mattered to your privacy, it hasn't for a long time. Today no matter how expensive something is you are probably a product anyway. Unethical and greedy companies don't care how much money you paid them, they'll want the additional cash they'll get from selling you out at every opportunity. Much of my favorite software is free and doesn't compromise my privacy.
Fine, but don't make my machine do work as part of the agreement between host and advertiser (the only reason I can utilize an ad blocker in the first place). And definitely don't try to make it so my machine can't object to you trying. On top of all that, most places want to take my money, AND force ads, AND make my machine part of the process.
I thought the "free" in "free web" was supposed to mean "free as in freedom," not "free as in beer." Have we really reached the point where the CEO of Mozilla no longer understands or cares about that distinction?
like hoping for the best, but planning for the worst, you must interpret people's intentions using the same methodology. By quoting that axing adblock could be bringing $150mil, but also saying that he doesn't want to do it, it's advertising that a higher price would work - it's a way to deniably solicit an offer.
So then we should interpret Bruno adopting this uncharitable interpretation as evidence they are intentionally trying to ruin Mozillas reputation rather than sincerely analysing an interview, right?
And in turn my comment above is not a honest remark that your suggested interpretation strategy seems to be selectively applied, but rather an attempt to hurt your standing with your peers.
Do you really harbor so much charity towards tech CEOs that you can't see its other meaning as at least equally as likely?
It costs Mozilla literally nothing to reassure its privacy and user-controlled principles. Instead we got a jk...unless... type of response. This is cowardice and like another commenter has said, a negotiation offer disguised as a mission statement.
"Uncharitable interpretation" is putting it mildly. I don't know the context for the quote but imagine being the CEO. You might give one hour interview outlining the tradeoffs you need to do to keep things running, and a random blogger takes a 5 second clip, makes an absurd interpretation and ends up on hackernews.
Right, I was ready for the headline to be this like deep dive into the history of letting go of several engineers, or assessing the costs of purchasing pocket, or a deep dive into source code changes related to dabbling in ad tech or something.
You know, actual reporting sourcing something new. But in truth, it was just extrapolating a bunch of sweet nothings from the freezing of a quote already published in The Verge. It reminds me of Boston media market sports reporting. You're a sports writer, you have a deadline, and you have to take Curt Schilling's press conference and try and turn it into a story. So take something he said and squeeze it dry, trying to extract some implication of clubhouse drama, to drive the next new cycle and survive to your next paycheck as a reporter. That's the grift, that's the grind.
The original quote was apparently said without an understanding of the customer base as if ad blockers were not a core piece of their value proposition.
This person doesn't understand their customer if they think it's going to bring in more money to cut ad blockers... It would bring in far less money because they would lose most of their customer base. It's not off mission: it's off Target.
I would go as far to say that ad blockers are the primary value proposition of Firefox at this point. If they lose that, I have little reason to use it on my phone or my workstations.
I'm concerned about the original quote which has a very weak sentiment. "it feels off-mission". Not something strong like "I'm completely against it" or "we'll never do that".
Even better would be similar to the article sentiment: "we could get 150 million now but degrade one of our few features that distinguishes us from other browsers + break a lot user trust, which would bring greater losses in the long term".
That just seems like an ordinary case of purity test syndrome. What they said is they don't want to do it, but they're being convicted of a hypothetical belief in wanting to hypothetically do it maybe, maybe which is the last refuge of scoundrels who have no stronger sourcing for more well-grounded accusations. But in internet comment sections there's no need for accountability or charitable interpretation, and so you can accuse someone of practically anything and it's their job to bend over backwards against the most skeptical interpretations to pass the purity test. So there's a metagame not just of indicating your values but of extrapolating as to all the possible permutations of uncharitable interpretation that could lead to accusations so that you have to artfully construct your phrasing to get out ahead of that. It's never on the internet trolls making the accusation to be accountable to ordinary norms of charitable interpretation.
I wish the CEO of Mozilla could have stated the commitment a little more strongly than “it feels off-mission”. Privacy, user control, and security of the web browsing experience are (or should be) the CORE of Mozilla's mission. This isn’t a decision to take lightly on vibes. Allowing ad-blockers (or any content manipulation plugins users want) should be a deep commitment.
It isn't even true that it would bring $150M. This is a calculation accounting on users staying on Firefox.
If they do that, most of the remaining users would flee and goodbye to your millions if you don't have any userbase anymore to justify asking money to anyone.
CEOs are well known for turning down money, and always resisting the urge to squeeze every last drop of good will from an acquired property, right?
I think it's an apt warning, I'd have to read the literal interview transcripts to really draw a conclusion one way or the other. But the simple fact that this is on his mind, and felt like mentioning killing ad block was something Mozilla could do, and is considering doing, was a safe thing to say to a journalist... There's not a chance in hell I'd say anything remotely like that to a journalist.
When someone tells you who they are, believe them.
That's peanuts. Google would pay them a lot more to disable adblocking for good. And it sounds like this guy would do it for the right amount. That said, it is kind of a lackluster article.
"It feels off-mission" is incredibly weak opposition to something that would go against core values. It just means this guy's price is higher than 150 million dollars.
Everybody has their price. I'm ideologically opposed to advertising but if someone put 150 million dollars on my table and told me to stop making an issue out of it I think I'd take the money. Being set for life trumps being called a hypocrite.
They don't care if their plans cause long term harm as long as they can cash out after the short term profits come in. As long as there are new companies/products to jump to and exploit next they're making money which is all they care about.
The estimate does sound reasonable if it's an one-off payment. I agree that no one would pay that amount of money each year to keep adblocking from Firefox.
It's not impossible that people would pay Firefox that much yearly to keep their current user-base from using ad blockers. However, what is impossible is to imagine Firefox would have anything close to their current user base if people were prevented from using ad blockers. Most likely they would shrink to almost 0 users overnight if they did this. There are very few reasons to use Firefox over Chrome or Safari (or even Edge) other than the much better ad blocking (or any ad blocking, on mobile).
That doesn't explain the apparent market share of 2--3%, which is still quite large if you think about.
I believe most non-techie users are just lingering, using Firefox just because they used to. Since Firefox doesn't have a built-in ad blocking and the knowledge about adblocking is not universal (see my other comment), it is possible that there are a large portion of Firefox users who don't use adblockers and conversely adblocking users are in a minority. If this is indeed the case, Mozilla can (technically) take such a bet as such policy will affect a smaller portion of users. But that would work only once; Mozilla doesn't have any more option like that after all. That's why I see $150M is plausible, but only once.
Of course, I don't know the actual percent of FF users that use ad block. But I think it's far more likely that it is a majority of current FF users, rather than it being a negligible minority. I think 2-3% of web users is not an implausible approximation of how many people use ad block overall on the web. It's not an obscure technology, it's quite well known, even if few people bother with it.
Edit: actually I'm way off - it seems estimates are typically around 30-40% of overall users on the web having some kind of ad blocker. So, the Firefox percentage being 60-80+% seems almost a given to me.
Can someone explain how banning ad blockers from Firefox would bring in money for Mozilla? I can see how it would bring in money for other actors such as news outlets, YouTube, etc., but Mozilla doesn't have a big website where they are showing ads.
I have seen these discussions in companies where privacy is the selling point.
These kind of questions usually come from non-engineers, people in product or sales who see privacy as a feature or marketing point, and if the ROI is higher they don't give a fuck and would pitch anything that would make a buck
I only use Firefox over Chrome because it has adblock. So where does the $150 million comes from if people won't use it without adblock? Seems comrade didn't think this through...
No, they are accurately observing that the "I don't want to do it" and "feels off mission" statements are FAR weaker than they can be and should be.
Such weak statements are either a real mistake or show movement away from those principles which should be bedrock for Mozilla and towards some justification to abandon those principles.
It's not like the industry has no precedents on this. "Don't Be Evil" was the motto of a company that is now one of the apex predators in the surveillance capitalism ecosystem.
Unwise to try to dismiss and laugh off legitimate alarms.
Instead of criticizing an actual contract to engage with a third party or a code push or an affirmative statement, you're attempting to parse a random combination of tea leaves and chicken entrails to indict Mozilla for a hypothetical thing that they explicitly said they're not doing. If that's not scraping the bottom of the barrel, it's only because you're able to imagine an even lower bottom than that that you're willing to reach for.
>>you're attempting to parse a random combination of tea leaves and chicken entrails
It is exactly the opposite — it is reading the actual language used for its intended meaning.
Every CEO is expected to not only understand the issues he faces and is managing, but to ALSO carefully choose the words to describe the situation and the intentions of the organization he leads.
When a CEO makes a statement about what should be a core fundamental principle of an organization, we can certainly expect that CEO to choose their words carefully.
Those words are, or at least should be, the exact opposite of "tea leaves and chicken entrails".
If the CEO is sloppy and the chosen words should actually be considered "tea leaves and chicken entrails", that is a different problem of a less-than-competent CEO.
If those words were actually chosen carefully, consider these two statements:
The actual statement: "[I don't] want to do that. It feels off-mission"
A different statement: "This is a core fundamental principle of Mozilla and I will not lead the company in that direction — not on my watch".
One could technically say "they both say 'Not today'".
But that would be absurd, and stupidly throwing out significant meaning in what the CEO chose to say and how he chose to say it.
He made the first vague statement with weasel words instead of something resembling the bold and unambiguous statement resembling the second statement.
The statement he did make is "I don't want to", which type of statement has often preceded an eventual "sorry, we had to".
There is a lot to make Firefox users nervous, and his choice of statement here did not help matters.
> It's not like the industry has no precedents on this. "Don't Be Evil" was the motto of a company that is now one of the apex predators in the surveillance capitalism ecosystem.
How is this precedent? "Don't Be Evil" strikes me as extremely explicit. This seems like a counter-example to me.
Yes. The point is that it started out as a wonderfully explicit and expansive statement.
And even THAT explicit and expansive statement was abandoned to the point where the very same company is now a global leader in surveillance capitalism, which is widely considered a massive net-negative for society if not flat-out evil.
So, when a CEO won't even make anything more than wish-washy "I don't want to do it" and "feels off mission" statements, people should be concerned that those weak good intentions will hold up even less well.
"we won't do this" But you didn't say you'd never do this.
"okay we'll never do this" But you didn't say you'd never ever do this.
"fine we'll never ever do this" But you didn't say that it's never entered your mind once.
They said they won't do it and your interpretation is to demand they said it with more words? Come on, let's stop this nonsense. Can Firefox users ever be happy?
It costs the CEO of Mozilla nothing to make hard, convicted statements that all their users agree with. If it was me, the quote would be something like "but then they'd need to find a new CEO, because I'd be in prison for what I'd do to anyone who even suggested it".
Literally the only people who talk about Mozilla, or read things about what Mozilla is up to, are unusually motivated power users who really, really care about ad blocking and privacy. They may still have other users, but those people are coasting on momentum from when their grandkid installed Firefox on their computer years ago. They're not reading interviews with the new CEO. Yet Mozilla seems to consistently fail utterly at messaging to their only engaged users.
It's not even that they're doing evil shit, they're just absolutely terrible at proclaiming that they are committed to not doing evil shit.
I’d happily pay $100 a year for Firefox WITH an adblocker as long as part of the money is put towards ongoing internet freedom and preventing attestation
As with all the comments about "I'd pay X dollars to not be the product", it's been shown over and over again that paying money is not going to void corporate desire to simply double dip by raising prices while also showing ads.
Or for a similar point, it's been shown over and over that attempting to crowdsource the revenue is a staggeringly unrealistic response with no real world precedent in the history either of browsers or online crowdsourced funding. You would think that would matter to people who point to that as a possible panacea.
Actual attempts to get users to pay for the browser itself, like what Opera did, simply didn't work and led to the insolvency of the browser and having to sell it off to someone harvesting its users as data.
I just don't think one can seriously say "Orion browser is a thing" if it is definitely not a thing for 95% desktops out there (the exact % may be different depending on the source of data, etc.). And Windows (around 70% of the market share) version is not expected until late 2026.
I mean, that's also exactly what you would say if you had a $150M offer on the table, had received a lot of push back and were now just checking the waters and waiting to consolidate your position.
Imagine you are in a marriage and your spouse say: "I can sleep with other people, doesn’t want to do that. It feels off-mission".
I don't understand context, but my honest reaction will be: "WTF, you just said? What type of relationship you think we have if we discuss such things?"
I definitely understand why people worry. This is just crazy to weight trust in money. If this is on the table and discussed internally, then what we are talking about?
Yeah, I've once said in a relationship "Look, sure, she maybe pretty, but I want to be with you, so no, I am not going to reach out to her, don't worry". Apparently, it was a poor way to word this idea.
Yes, people tend to try to dig out additional information from the particular wording (talk about a hidden channel) based on how they would phrase the same message themselves. That's why communication is hard.
It's kinda frustrating that Mozilla's CEO thinks that axing ad-blockers would be financially beneficial for them. Quite the opposite is true (I believe) since a ton of users would leave Firefox for alternatives.
The whole web ecosystem was first run by VC money and everything was great until every corner was taken, the land grab was complete and the time to recoup the investment has come.
Once the users were trapped for exploitation, it doesn’t make sense to have a browser that blocks ads. How are they supposed to pay software salaries and keep the lights on? People don’t like paying for software, demand constant updates and hate subscriptions. They all end up doing one of those since the incentives are perverse, that’s why Google didn’t just ride the Firefox till the end and instead created the Chrome.
It doesn’t make sense to have trillion dollars companies and everything to be free. The free part is until monopolies are created and walled gardens are full with people. Then comes the monetization and those companies don’t have some moral compass etc, they have KPI stock values and analytics and it’s very obvious that blocking ads isn’t good financially.
I agree with the untrue and revisionism bit, but I disagree with it being the opposite of what happened.
People were trying to figure out how to make money off of the Internet from the early days of the Internet being publicly accessible (rather than a tool used by academic and military institutions). It can be attributed to the downfall of Gopher. It can be attributed to the rise of Netscape and Internet Explorer. While the early web was nowhere near as commercial as it is today, we quickly saw the development of search engines and (ad supported) hosting services that were. By the time 2000's hit, VC money was very much starting to drive the game. In the minds of most people, the Internet was only 5 to 10 years old at that point. (The actual Internet may be much older, but few people took notice of it until the mid-1990's.)
> People don’t like paying for software, demand constant updates and hate subscriptions.
Yes, No, Yes?
I don't demand constant updates. I don't want constant updates. Usually when a company updates software it becomes worse. I am happy with the initial version of 90% of the software I use, and all I want is bug fixes and security updates.
GP wasn't differentiating between different types of updates in their argument, because it doesn't make sense - they're discussing the economics of it, which doesn't care if you're fixing bugs or not.
>> How are they supposed to pay software salaries and keep the lights on? People don’t like paying for software, demand constant updates and hate subscriptions.
I suspect then it doesn't matter whether Mozilla kills itself or not. You should be fine with the current release of Firefox. Maybe you'd lose the installer, so all you have to do is put it somewhere safe and you're good.
while i may agree with the first line, rest are little skewed perspective.
> People don’t like paying for software, demand constant updates and hate subscriptions.
hate subscription?? may be. if it's anything like Adobe then yes, people will hate.
that constant update, is something planted by these corporates, and their behavior manipulation tactics.
People were happily paying for perpetual software, which they can "own" in a cd//dvd.
People weren't happily paying, there was huge pirate business that was run on porn, gambling ads and spyware revenue. Then there were organizations with lots of lawyers paid by the "pay once use forever" companies to enforce the pay part because people didn't want to pay.
One time fee software ment that once your growth slows down you no longer make money and have plenty of customers to support for free. That's why this model was destroyed by the subscription and ad based "free" software.
The last example is Affinity which was the champion of pay once use forever model, very recently they end up getting acquired and their software turned into "free" + subscription.
It wasn’t one time fee though.
The one time fee bought a copy of the software and its patches.
A couple of years later a new version would come out and people had the choice between keeping using the old version or buying the new one.
To convince people to buy they had to add genuinely useful features. I would have bought a new version with new features and better performance. I wouldn’t have bought a new version same as the previous one with AI crammmed in it
If a time comes when there are zero free browser with effective ad-blocking, it will create space for a non-free browser that does it. It would create a whole ecosystem.
I currently pay zero for ad-blocking (FF + uBlock Origin) and it works perfectly; but I would pay if I had to.
I think they are trying to balance it between making as much as money possible, risking being sued for monopolistic practices and risking exodus. Microsoft once overplayed their hand and the anger and consumer dissatisfaction was so strong that people left Internet Explorer en masse.
So the best situation for google would be to have borderline monopoly where they pay for the existence of their competition and the competition(Firefox) blocks adblockers too by default but leaving Chrome and Firefox is harder than forcing installin adblockers through the unofficial way.
So basically, all the people who swear they never clicked ads manage to block ads, Firefox and Chrome print money by making sure that ads are shown and clocked by the masses.
The long tail of the web, likely consisting of mostly small or noncommercial sites, are currently numerically huge but individually low traffic. Meanwhile, user attention is dominated by a relatively small set of commercial and platform sites.
That was ine inception age when very few people were online, its not the stage of mass adoption. The mass adoption starts with the dot.com era with mass infrastructure build up.
But sure, if you think that we should start counting from these years you can do that and add a "public funded" era at the beginning.
I came to the web after dotcom and most of the content (accessibke trough search) was blogs and forums. It wasn’t until SEO that fake content started to grow like weeds.
There were companies that were making some money but those were killed or acquired by companies that give their services for free. Google killed the blogs by killing their RSS reader since they were long into making money stage and their analytics probably demonstrated that it is better people search stuff than directly going to the latest blog posts.
It's the same thing everywhere, the whole industry is like that. Uber loses money until there's no longer viable competition then lose less money by jacking up the prices. The tech is very monopolistic, Peter Thiel is right about the tech business.
The existing online mass is what attracted the VC in the first place, same as it ever was. It was mostly privately funded and very much a confederacy (AOL vs Prodigy vs BBS) at the time, much like now.
The only reason Mozilla matters in the eyes of Google is because it gives the impression there's competition in the browser market.
But Firefox's users are the kind who choose the browser, not use whatever is there. And that choice is driven in part by having solid ad-blockers. People stick with Firefox despite the issues for the ad-blocker. Take that away and Firefox's userbase dwindles to even lower numbers to the point where nobody can pretend they are "competition". That's when they lose any value for Google.
Without the best-of-the-best ad-blocking I will drop Firefox like a rock and move to the next best thing, which will have to be a Chromium based browser. I'll even have a better overall experience on the web when it comes to the engine itself, to give me consolation for not having the best ad-blocker.
It might be financial beneficial once as an up-front payment,
but long term, as others have mentioned, really not good for the project to remove the only feature that gives firefox a defensible way to fill it's niche in the market.
> Quite the opposite is true (I believe) since a ton of users would leave Firefox for alternatives.
Yes but keep in mind that’s not an individual problem that is solved by switching browsers. If a browser engine dies, the walls get closer and the room smaller. With only Chromium and WebKit left, we may soon have a corporate owned browsers pulling in whatever direction Google and Apple wants. I can think of many things that are good for them but bad for us. For instance, ”Web Integrity” and other DRM.
I think people like to imagine it's not viable because the most commonly known adblocker refuses to release the version for it. Negative news somehow stick better.
Fortunately it's not the only one and for example Adguard works perfectly fine.
Maybe, maybe not. It's getting dangerously close to the modern day IE, where some websites just don't work right and everyone has to do arcane shit to make their websites cross platform.
It's also a closed source browser developed by Apple. It's not competing with Firefox. Everyone contemplating switching to safari over Firefox are not being honest - they're not even on the same playing field.
> It's getting dangerously close to the modern day I.E.
This line gets thrown around a lot, but if you look at the supported features, Safari is honestly pretty up-to-date on the actual ratified web standards.
What it doesn't tend to do is implement a bunch of the (often ad-tech focused) drafts Google keeps trying to push through the standards committee
The only way you can possibly view Safari as "the modern day IE" is if you consider the authoritative source for What Features Should Be Supported to be Chrome.
You should probably think about that for a bit, in light of why IE was IE back in the day.
> The only way you can possibly view Safari as "the modern day IE" is if you consider the authoritative source for What Features Should Be Supported to be Chrome.
No. Safari is the modern IE in the sense that it's the default browser on a widely used OS, and it's update cycle is tied to the update of the OS itself by the user, and it drags the web behind by many years because you cannot not support its captive user-base.
It's even worse than IE in a sense, because Apple prevents the existence of an alternative browser on that particular OS (every non-safari OSes on iOS are just a UI on top of Safari).
But this can only be by comparison to something. And Apple is very good at keeping Safari up to date on the actual standards. You know—the thing that IE was absolutely not doing, that made it a scourge of the web.
So if it's not Chrome, what is your basis for comparison??
> But this can only be by comparison to something.
The something being the other browsers. Chrome and Firefox. Safari was even behind the latest IE before the switch to Chromium by the way.
> the thing that IE was absolutely not doing, that made it a scourge of the web.
You're misremembering, IE also kept improving its support for modern standards. The two main problems were that it was always behind (like Safari) and that it people were still using old versions because it was tied to Windows, like Safari with iOS. When people don't update their iPhone because they know it will become slow as hell as soon as you use the new iOS version on an old iPhone or just because they don't want their UI to change AGAIN, they're stuck on an old version of Safari.
I'm sorry, but you're wrong. I am not remotely misremembering, and I'll thank you not to tell me what's happening in my own head.
IE 6 stood stagnant for years, while the W3C moved on without them, and there was no new version.
> The something being the other browsers. Chrome and Firefox.
And can you name a single thing Firefox does right, that Chrome didn't do first, or that came from an actual accepted web standard (not a proposal, not a de-facto standard because Chrome does it), that Safari doesn't do?
The reason why IE 6 kept haunting us all was because later versions were never available on Windows XP.
> actual accepted web standard
The only thing for which there is an actual standard that matters is JavaScript itself (or rather ECMAScript) and on that front Apple has pretty much always been a laggard.
Saying “Apple is compliant with all of W3C standards” is a bit ridiculous when this organization was obsolete long before Microsoft ditched IE. And Apple itself acknowledge that, themselves being one of the founding parties of the organization that effectively superseded W3C (WHATWG).
> The reason why IE 6 kept haunting us all was because later versions were never available on Windows XP.
First of all, according to the IE Wikipedia page, that's not true—7 & 8 were available for XP.
Second of all, this ignores the fact that for five years, there was only IE6. And IE6 was pretty awful.
> Saying “Apple is compliant with all of W3C standards” is a bit ridiculous when this organization was obsolete long before Microsoft ditched IE. And Apple itself acknowledge that, themselves being one of the founding parties of the organization that effectively superseded W3C (WHATWG).
And now you have identified a major component of the problem: in the 2000s, the W3C was the source of web standards. Safari, once it existed, was pretty good at following them; IE (especially IE6) was not.
Now, there effectively are no new standards except for what the big 3 (Safari, Chrome, and Firefox) all implement. And Firefox effectively never adds new web features themselves; they follow what the other two do.
So when you say "Safari is holding the web back," what you are saying is "Safari is not implementing all the things that Google puts into Chrome." Which is true! And there is some reason to be concerned about it! But it is also vital to acknowledge that Google is a competitor of Apple's, and many of the features they implement in Chrome, whether or not Google has published proposed standards for them, are being implemented unilaterally by Google, not based on any larger agreement with a standards body.
So painting it as if Apple is deliberately refusing to implement features that otherwise have the support of an impartial standards body, in order to cripple the web and push people to build native iOS apps, is, at the very best, poorly supported by evidence.
I prefer Firefox over Chromium. But I much more prefer having a working ad blocker. Therefore I support that statement and when Firefox starts removing support for that, I'm out and there's enough alternatives I can go to, even tho they're Chromium based.
I use the Duck Duck Go browser for almost everything. I is open source for iOS/Android/macOS platforms, but I think there are parts of their platform that are not. The DDG browser hits all my privacy requirements.
Apple doesn't collect your browsing data, they build in privacy controls that are pretty much as strong as they can manage given the state of the world, and while it doesn't support uBO, it supports a variety of pretty solid adblockers (I use AdGuard, which, AFAICT, Just Works™ and even blocks YouTube ads most of the time, despite their arms race).
That's what their marketing want you to believe, at least.
Their privacy policy is very clear it's not the case though:
> we may collect a variety of information, including:
> […]
> Usage Data. Data about your activity on and use of our offerings, such as app launches within our services, including browsing history; search history;
And users would flee not just because they're seeing the ads but because Firefox is obviously the slowest browser again. Stripping the ads is a big performance boost, so right now Firefox feels snappier than Chrome on ad-laden pages.
You can't even imagine how little the rest of the world cares about this.
Do people in California care that slightly under 50% of my state's population are at or below poverty level? Do they care that most of the rest spend 55-60% of our income on food? Do they care that our life expectancy is 15 years lower than that in California, mostly because of terrible pollution caused by extraction and processing of minerals which our beloved government then sells to the US and several European countries, and pockets the money?
Do they care about conflict minerals in general, used to build electronics for their enjoyment? Have they done anything about this?
This American political bickering does not even register on our radars when choosing a web browser.
"Europe's problems are the world's problems but the world's problems are not Europe's problems.", as India's Mr. Jaishankar is fond of saying.
Amazing how they continue not to cater to their core audience. They literally have lost 90% of their market share from their peak, I guess I can see the temptation to try to regain it by reaching out to others, but doing that at the expense of your core is a terrible business strategy. It's not like those users are all that sticky, they're leaving as Mozilla pisses them off, and likely Mozilla are going to be left with what they stand for - which these days is nothing.
It's sad, I'm sure there was a better path Mozilla could have taken, but they've had a decade or more of terrible management. I wonder if the non-profit / corp structure hasn't helped, or if it's just a later-stage company with a management layer who are disconnected from the original company's mission and strategy.
> Amazing how they continue not to cater to their core audience.
Who is Mozilla's core audience? From what I remember, it's not addon-users, as most users never have used even just a single addon.
> They literally have lost 90% of their market share from their peak,
To be fair, it's not entirely their own fault. Competition is strong, especially from Google and Apple. Even with perfect decisions, they likely would still have lost big since their peak. The market for alternative Browsers isn't as big any more as it used to be.
> From what I remember, it's not addon-users, as most users never have used even just a single addon.
If most users who install Firefox do so for superior adblocking and those same users are also very likely to turn off telemetry (which I think some privacy/adblock extensions probably do by default?), then at Mozilla's end one might get the impression that "most users don't use extensions" - even though the vast majority of users do.
So to answer the questions of:
> Who is Mozilla's core audience?
It's probably the kind of user that has telemetry off. You don't know much if anything about them.
Update-checks are not included in telemetry. And I would think most people using addons still do update their addons from time to time, or even have the auto-check active. There is also the download-stats from their server-side, so I would think they do have a good enough picture of their numbers. Might be they could be 10% off, but surely are there not tens or even hundreds of millions of stealth-users around.
> It's probably the kind of user that has telemetry off. You don't know much if anything about them.
Don't think so, most people don't give a f** about this. Tech-people on that level are even in the industry a minority. And on the other side, those stealth-users are worthless for Mozilla, because they can't make money from google with them. So for a project needing to make money with usersnumbers, everyone who is out of this, isn't core audience anyway.
> It's probably the kind of user that has telemetry off.
If less than 4% of users use uBO, which the kind of users you're referencing claim is the primary reason they use Firefox, I doubt many users disable telemetry either.
I believe some Linux distributions patch Firefox to change default settings including disabling telemetry. Probably not a big factor, but still something to think about.
Thanks, I think this was what I was searching. Strange that it's not appearing in my search-results.
Relevant part from the site: [..]Add-on usage measured here reflects multiple facets of browser customization, including web extensions, language packs, and themes.[..]
40% is a big minority, but not really what I would call core audience, especially when language packs and themes are also counted here. And 5 of the top 10-addons in that statistic are language packs.
Though, UBlock Origin is #1 with 9.6% user-share, and it's shown to have 10.5 million users on the store-page, which means there are at best only around 100 Million users left with Firefox on desktop? Seems worse than I thought.
I am thinking of it as: people who care about privacy and/or an independent web browser. That seems mostly in line with what the Mozilla Foundation's principles are stated to be.
Maybe it's not that. But if not, what is it? How do they otherwise have any positive differentiation versus their competition? It surely can't be claimed to be any sense of "users who want an AI browser" because surely those people are going to use ChatGPT's browser, not Mozilla's.
Remember when the whole reason people liked Firefox is that it was super customizable? There was a time when it was THE power user browser. Things only went sideways after Chrome came out.
Firefox literally was a mainstream browser at one point. Internet Explorer sucked. Safari didn't suck but it was nobody's favorite either except some really hard-core Apple fans.
Yes, Chrome was revolutionary when it came out. And yes, Firefox seemed to struggle with legacy architectural decisions that limited their ability to catch up. But Firefox was still differentiated and had a loyal fan base. Loyal fan base is exactly what can keep a project or product alive through a downturn. All they had to do was focus on the browser. They did some great things along the way like popularizing DoH. But it's 2025 and there's still no UI for switching profiles that any normal person might be able or want to use. Can you really blame people for giving up?
> To be fair, it's not entirely their own fault. Competition is strong, especially from Google and Apple. Even with perfect decisions, they likely would still have lost big since their peak. The market for alternative Browsers isn't as big any more as it used to be.
Their peak in share was also pre-chrome. They've basically been losing the battle slowly for over a decade.
Ublock Origin has 10,488,339 Users listed on it's Mozilla store-page at the moment, AdBlock Plus has 3,188,401 Users. And Firefox has surely still far more than those ~14 million users.
There was an article from Mozilla, some years ago, going more into the details about this, but I'm not sure where. Though, I found another one[1] from 2021, which starts with only one third of the users having installed an addon.
> Amazing how they continue not to cater to their core audience.
I’ve seen this across several industries now.
The “core audience” is too small and too particular. There is another audience, much easier to please, much much larger, much more money can be made off them. Why stick to your niche “core audience”?
No, it's not much easier to please. You will compete with Chrome and you will lose. It is the core audience that is much easier to please, because those are loyal users that trust you and all you have to do is respect this trust by providing a stable service without nasty surprises.
Every tech CEO loves to cosplay as "announcing the iPhone" 2007 Steve Jobs but nobody ever tries to cosplay as the "pulling Apple back from the brink by focusing on core competencies" 1997 Steve Jobs.
Conspiracy theory: Mozilla leadership is bad on purpose as a form of sabotage. Erode the fan base until it just wears away and dies on its own. Then there will be no one to challenge the Microsoft Google Apple hegemony.
> He says he could begin to block ad blockers in Firefox and estimates that’d bring in another $150 million, but he doesn’t want to do that. It feels off-mission.
LOL the day that Firefox stops me from running what I want is the day I'll get rid of it.
I still think it was a mistake for Firefox to dump its old plugin model. The customisation was a USP for Firefox and many useful tweaks and minor features have never been replaced.
Today the ability to run proper content blockers is still a selling point for Firefox but obviously wouldn't be if they started to meddle with that as well. (Has there ever been a more obvious case of anticompetitive behaviour than the biggest browser nerfing ad blocking because it's owned by one of the biggest ad companies?)
Other than customisation the only real advantage I see for Firefox today is the privacy angle. But again that would obviously be compromised if they started breaking tools like content blockers that help to provide that protection.
They...already do that? They stopped allowing unsigned addons, even if you allow them in about:config (a power-user feature). Even Chrome allows you to toggle the option to do that -- in a more user-friendly way! -- and actually honors it, so I don't think it's the massive security hole everyone claims.
The web without ublock origin is a hellscape. Whenever I try another browser, I immediately go back to firefox.
Do these people even know their users?
For example:
Fedora Silverblue default Firefox install had an issue with some Youtube videos due to codecs. So I tried watching youtube on Chromium. Ads were so annoying I stopped watching by the second time I tried to watch a video. Stopped watching youtube until I uninstalled default firefox install and added Firefox from flathub. If the option to use a good adblocker gets taken away I 'll most likely dramatically reduce my web browsing.
P.S. Maybe someone ports Vanadium to desktop Linux? If firefox goes away that 'd be my best case desktop browser. Using it on my mobile ;)
It's amusing how much ads hurt, once you're weaned off of them.
Even with traditional TV, growing up, I didn't really mind ads. Then I setup MythTV years ago, and had commercial skip... and of course just downloaded things without commercials too.
When I'd visit my parents back then, any commercial felt like intense agony. So this isn't just about the web, it's really about useless annoying juke being fed to you, when you're used to not having it.
The closest I can compare it to, is once I rented an airb&b which was under a freeway, beside a bridge, and adjacent to another freeway. Yet after a while I just sort of got used to most of the noise.
I wonder if the CEO of Mozilla doesn't use adblock, and just doesn't, literally, understand.
I think people are wildly overreacting. There is a new CEO and he wants to make a splash so the throws around "AI" that's it. Of course there will be AI related features in firefox, there already are! Wait and see what the actual specifics are before reacting?
Also, a small minor detail here: We're not paying for firefox! why are so many people feeling entitled? Mozilla has to do something other than beg Google to survive. Perhaps we need a fork of firefox that is sustained by donations and is backed by a non-profit explicilty chartered to make decisions based on community feedback? I don't see a problem with that wikipedia-like approach, I don't think any of the forks today have a good/viable org structure that is fully non-profit (as in it won't seek profit at all). Mozilla has bade some bad decisions recently, but they're a far cry from the world-ended outcry they're getting.
If we don't donate to Mozilla and we don't pay them money, then we have to be the product at some point. Even if they don't it to be that way, they have to placate to some other business interests.
I hope the EU also pays attention, perhaps some of their OSS funding can help setup an alternate org.
Waiting until the thing is done to voice your opinions on the thing is a very poor strategy if you want to have any influence over what the thing turns out to even be.
>>> Also, a small minor detail here: We're not paying for firefox! why are so many people feeling entitled? Mozilla has to do something other than beg Google to survive.
Because some of us have supported, donated to, advocated for, and participated in the firefox and mozilla communities over the years, and feel betrayed by the abandonment of principles, kowtowing to adtech surveillance "features", and overall enshittification of a once beloved browser that we hoped would allow for an alternative to the chrome blob, as they once were to the atrocity that was internet explorer.
It's perfectly reasonable to call out foundations and organizations that utterly abandon and fail to live up to principles. Mozilla is just a PR wing for Alphabet and whitewashing the chromification of all browsers, at this point.
Ladybug and some other alternatives will come around. I don't see any future in which Mozilla returns to principles - the people leeching off / running the foundation won't ever be interested in returning to a principled stance, but to change the brand, or pursue profit, or some other outcome that is divergent from the expectations and consideration of the original supporters. They keep trying to commodify and branch out and waste insane amounts of money on nonsense, and hire CEOs that lose the plot before they ever start the job. Mozilla is functionally dead, for whatever vision of it a lot of us might once have had.
By the time they'd have a chance to fix anything, maybe it'll be practical to have an AI whip up a new browser engine and we'll all have bespoke, feature complete privacy respecting browsers built on the fly.
I think all of firefox's alternatives depend on firefox as an upstream. firefox itself has low adaption right now. I'm all for any approach that isn't google/chrome being the only browser standards driver. This type of knee-jerking doesn't help with that goal.. I don't care so much about mozilla's past or how terrible an "ai browser" will be, as much as having viable alternatives and not having a monopoly for browser standards. a fork and alternative browsers will do nothing to help with that. Either there is an alternative to Mozilla or there isn't.
This isn't kneejerk, it's bone deep weariness of year over year of failure and corporate schlock and weasel words and trying to rebrand firefox and sucking on the google teat while pretending they have a purpose. They're doing anything and everything but seriously putting in the time and effort to distinguish themselves and be a viable competitor. All of the good stuff happens downstream; firefox development is a continual disappointment and enshittification, and they don't even profit from it. They enshittify on behalf of google and the adtech blob.
The downstream projects constantly have to tear out features the mozilla team try to jam in, for no good reason, almost like there's an arms race and the adtech blob is just trying to slip one past all the people who want simple privacy preserving software.
Unfortunately, it’s impossible to donate to Firefox development. Donations to Mozilla expressly do not got to pay for Firefox since Firefox is for-profit and they’ve decided to not accept money from users. So I guess we are already “the product.”
I liked it the few times it worked but so many times it's chosen to do things like translate Japanese into Spanish when I speak English natively and never would've chosen Spanish as the target language. It just feels convoluted and poorly implemented, like most AI features in most software.
I don't give a shit about the specifics. I don't want AI in my browser period.
Yes, AI is already in Firefox. That does not on any way make more AI any less unacceptable.
I don't want to opt out. I don't want to dismiss nags. I don't want to fuck around with internal configs and hope that the options do what they say (they often don't).
I want a browser that renders websites. That's it. Anything else is detracting from Firefox's core value proposition: being a good web browser.
I want a web browser. I do not want, need, nor am I interested in entertaining an ""AI browser"", whatever the hell that even means. I want to browse the goddamn web, not interact with "AI". We've had AI shoved into literally every conceivable corner of every piece of software. Nobody, nobody needs more AI in more places. We have ten million ways to access AI in absolutely every other program.
Just give me a fucking web browser. This is not that complicated.
Because the AI implementations they’ve already done are shit? Buttons on by default, features that are annoying to remove for normal users (the context menu ‘search with chatbot’).
It’s just garbage, get this shit out of here. Stop adding things to my window without permission and stop with the popups announcing them to me.
Anyone who seriously wants this will seek it out. Leave the rest of us alone.
1. Why would I donate to Mozilla? Mozilla hates me.
2. When Mozilla was 30% of the browser market rather than 3%, they could have easily cleaned up on donations. If they had made whatever extension transition that they thought they needed to do but while protecting all contemporary extension capabilities and not using it as a power grab to limit user control, they'd still have 30% of the market. If they hadn't made the business decision to permanently be a wonky Chrome, people wouldn't think of them as a wonky Chrome.
3. Mozilla has plenty of money. If you can't create a sustainable browser with a billion and a half dollars in the bank and a fully-featured browser, it's because you don't want to. You already have the browser, you can't whine about how complicated it is to create a browser. Pay developers with the interest. Stop paying these useless weirdo executives a fortune.
But enough about Mozilla. If you're some Bitcoin or startup billionaire, I'll ask you the same thing. Firefox is sitting right there and licensed correctly. You want people to respect you and remember you nicely when you're dead? Take it, fork it, put that same billion and a half into a trust, and save an open door to the Internet at a time when it's really needed. You've won in life, it will be easy to make people trust you if your ambition is just to do good. Steal Firefox, put it on the right track, and people will flock back to it. I know Ladybird is interesting, but a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.
Genuinely can someone with knowledge of the business explain why they aren't simply doubling down on making Firefox better? Is there an existential problem facing them that they are trying to solve by adding AI into the browser?
Their Google dependency is their existential problem. They're limited by what they can do with "making Firefox better" while effectively being a client state. An off the books Google department. Doomed to forever being a worse funded Chrome because they can't do too much to anger their patron.
By selling browser UI real estate to AI companies[0] they reduce the power Google has over them. If they get to the point where no individual company makes up a majority of their revenue, it allows them to focus on their mission in a much broader way.
Yeah but is this entirely true though? It seems Google pays FF just for existing, to protect them from antitrust litigation (or what's left of it); so Google can't really stop paying FF and can't try to kill it, as its death would be extremely counter productive. FF may be freer than it thinks.
Same as for Apple, the amount Google pays will vary. Firefox will probably still exist with 10% of Google's money, except execs Mozilla execs would be in a very different situation.
Its not impossible that someday a new non-chromium browser reaches feature parity (or close enough) with the chromium browsers. At that point, Google could stop worrying about funding Firefox's development.
Google pay Mozilla hundreds of millions of dollars each year to place Google as the default browser. It's by far their biggest income stream. In 2023 it was reported as 75% of their revenue.
There's no world in which 75% of your revenue coming from Google doesn't influence what you do. Even if it's not the main driver of all decisions, pissing off Google is a huge risk for them.
If the plaintiff pays 500 million to the judge and the defendant goes to jail, there's no proof that the judge wouldn't have made the same decision without the 500 million. If you're a fool, you'll sneer and ask "Where's the proof?"
Well if you bring up law how about: innocent until proven guilty?
Google is not bribing Mozilla...they probably keep them alive to avoid all kinds of monopoly lawsuits. With their market share however, you would need more prove to justify further conspiracies...
I'm not sure how well know this is, but besides their contract with Google to be the default search option, Firefox does earn money through revenue share with all other default search options. A normal healthy company would just rely on those. Growing the user base would therefore grow the amount of rev-share income. So improving the product by itself, and thus attracting users, does make money - and probably enough to run Firefox and Mozilla. Just not enough to pay their CEO.
They don't really need money. Look at Mozilla's CEO compensation for example. It was 7 million USD in 2022. Seven. Million. For ruining a bastion of the open internet.
is that too much money for one person? well, apparently it depends on who do you ask. and even if the board members who approved it might thought it's too much, it still could have been cheaper than to fire the CEO and find a new one and keep Mozilla on track.
CEO compensation is usually a hedge against risks that are seen as even more costly, even if the performance of the CEO is objectively bad.
framing Mozilla/Firefox as some kind of bastion is simply silly - especially if it's supplied by the gigantic fortress kingdom of G, and makes more money on dividends and interest than on selling any actual products or services.
it's a ship at sea with a sail that's too big and a rudder that's unfortunately insignificant.
but whatever metaphor we pick it needs to transform into a sustainable ecosystem, be that donation or sales based.
Just because something bad has been normalized doesn't make it appropriate, though.
You can argue that they won't find another CEO for less money. To that I would posit that they won't find another CEO from the MBA crowd for less money, but that is a feature, not a bug.
it's a completely obvious "problem" -- more users are easier to monetize, even if they "simply" go the Wikipedia donations model
many people stated that they are happy to do targeted donations (ie. money earmarked strictly for Firefox development only, and it cannot be used for bullshit outreach programs and other fluff)
and if they figure out the funding for the browser (and other "value streams") then they can put the for-profit opt-in stuff on top
Google pays Mozilla, Mozilla has more money, Mozilla spends more money (especially in compensations to a bloated C-level), Mozilla needs more money, Google threatens with paying less, Mozilla will lube up and bend over.
You can't monetize a browser. They have to keep trying to create new products, but they inevitably fail. Pocket, FirefoxOS, Persona, all dead. This new stuff will fail too, because Mozilla has no USP and no way to create a best-in-class product in any market. So they rely on imitating what everyone else is doing, but with more "crunchy" vibes ("values", "trust", "we're a nonprofit") because that's the only angle they can compete on. They missed mobile completely so even their browser is bleeding users and dying.
The way to interpret Mozilla is that they're a dying/zombie company, fighting heroically to delay the inevitable.
I'd pay $10 a month for a browser, I pay that much for music and TV shows and I spend more time in a browser.
I'm sure the market doesn't agree with me but I pay more for things that are less useful.
You very much can if all the competitors are either a) ad-ridden, ai-infested, bloated monstrosities or b) don't provide the functionality people want. In that case, there's apparently lots of demand which could easily support either a pay-once or a low-subscription-fee model.
What they could do is get funding from sovereign tech funds.
I don't think the rest of the world likes their dependencies on US companies and their love for surveillance.
Of course, to do it right means ensuring there's enough non-US organizational structure with the know-how to take over the project should things go pear-shaped, and oversight to spot of the pear is taking shape.
But that's what governments can do, assuming they don't want to be under the thumb of the US. ("Oh, you think tariffs are bad? We'll do to you like we did those ICC judges and shut off all your accounts.")
They already do monetize it, every search engine included by default paid to be there. They forcefully remove those that don't pay from existing installations without the user's permission, as they did with yandex.
Fork Firefox, bundle uBlock Origin, Sponsor Block et el and sell it is a consumer web security product (that's not complete shit) with a monthly subscription. Use some of the proceeds to support the devs working on the underlying tech, similar to what Valve are doing for Wine, Proton and Fex.
Bonus points:
1. Multi layered approach to dealing with ads and other malware.
2. A committment to no AI or other bloat - that's not what I'm paying you for.
But I'm not pitching a browser. This is a web security product which people do pay for - it's a billion dollar product category in fact. The only functional difference is that the malware and fraud protection it provides is demonstrably superior to all of its competitors.
I think that's false, with the current state of internet, advertising everywhere, enshitification and monetization of users private data, some people are ready to pay for services that were considered "free".
I am paying for kagi, and I would pay for a good, private browser (I know they make onion but I'm on linux, not macos or windows).
Vivaldi is a decent option if you aren't specifically looking to get off Blink as the engine. It has an integrated adblocker and many other privacy-related features.
Please enlighten me. How does one make a browser "better" these days?
- They were ahead of the game with extensions. Then everyone copied them.
- They were ahead of the game with tabs. Then everyone copied them.
- They were ahead of the game with containers. Then everyone copied them.
- They are still the best browser to use for an ad free internet experience.
- The only flaw I can think of, is they are not leaders in performance. Chrome loads faster. But that's because Chrome cheats by stealing your memory on startup.
How would you make FireFox better? When you say they should be making FireFox better, what should they be doing? Maybe they should hire you for ideas.
Because to me, they seem to be constantly trying to make FireFox better. It's just hit or miss.
Extensions was a hit. Tabs was a hit. Containers was a hit. They had a shit tonne of misses over the decades. We just don't remember them.
The crypto and ai stuff just happens to be a miss.
First, I would stop breaking up the stuff that works. Firefox was ahead of the game with extensions, then deprecated the long tail for a rewrite that took three years [1] (during which Firefox mobile had a grand total of 9 extensions) and even then it's hard for me today to know which extensions work on mobile. They were similarly ahead of the game with containers, and yet they still don't work on private mode [2] and probably never will. That's two out of three hits where they tripped over their own two feet[3].
Second, do the one thing that users have been requesting for decades: let me donate to the browser development. Not to the Mozilla Foundation, not to internet freedom causes, to Firefox. The Mozilla foundation explicitly says that they don't want to be "the Firefox company", and yet I'd argue they should.
Third, go on the offensive. I get the impression that, with the exception of ad-blocking, Firefox is simply playing catch-up to any idea coming from Chrome regardless of whether it makes sense or not. Would Firefox had removed FTP support had Chrome not done it before?
And fourth, make all these weird experiments extensions.
> [3] I always associated tabs with Opera, though.
Yeah as someone who picked up Firefox when it was Phoenix, it was “free Opera with a less-odd-feeling UI”. That was basically the initial (great!) sales pitch.
What got me installing it on any computer belonging to a person I would have to help support was the auto-pop-blocking and that it performed a ton better than IE/Netscape/Mozilla. Opera also performed better and I think it also blocked pop ups out of the box, but it wasn’t free (well, kinda, but the free edition… had ads).
> - They were ahead of the game with extensions. Then everyone copied them.
They were ahead of the game with extensions, then they destroyed their own extensions. They copied everyone else, not the other way around.
> - They were ahead of the game with tabs. Then everyone copied them.
They were ahead of the game with tabs. Then while destroying their extensions they made vertical tabs harder, while still leaving it as a charitable contribution by the community instead of an internal project, and slow-walked it for a decade. I still have to do weird CSS to make them look right, because they decided to have an opinionated sidebar for no particular reason.
> - They are still the best browser to use for an ad free internet experience.
This, again, is not their fault. It's because of a man who they don't pay, who has had to battle with them on multiple occasions. Their only contribution is not accepting a Chrome standard completely. Imagine wanting to be given credit for not exactly copying your neighbor, after an enormous amount of pressure was brought to bear. It's my belief that Google decided that Firefox wouldn't kill ad blocking in the end, because it would have looked horrible in antitrust court. Now that's over (Obama judges don't believe in antitrust), and you can expect Firefox to kill it soon enough.
> Because to me, they seem to be constantly trying to make FireFox better. It's just hit or miss.
Nah. They kept telling me, while ignoring everyone's complaints about their actual experiences, that the most important thing was to reduce startup time for some unknown reason.
Make Firefox fully and exclusively a tool in service of the user.
Eliminate - both in code and by policy - anything that compromises privacy. If a new feature or support of a new technology reduces privacy, make it optional. Give me a switch to turn it off.
Stop opting the user into things. No more experiments. No more changing of preferences or behavior during upgrade.
Give the user more control; more opportunities for easy and powerful automation and integration.
Not only would this win me back as a user, I'd pay for the privilege. I'm paying for Kagi and happy to be doing so. I'd love to pay for an open source browser I could trust and respect.
In my experience Chrome does not just load faster, but it also uses less memory than Firefox because of its more aggressive tab hibernation that is enabled by default.
On my laptop I had to switch from Firefox to Chrome because it kept filling up all of my RAM resulting in other applications crashing.
I feel the problem they're trying to solve with that is "EB isn't sufficiently pissed off with the gradually deteriorating user experience yet so instead of actually displaying the page we'll have a big modal popup telling him how great the AI tools are and how he should try them!"
I do not want to try your AI tools, Mozilla, yours or anyone else's.
Yes it does. Having a browser that truly has the user's back, without always trying to compromise the user's interests in favor of advertisers - that would be a benefit to society.
Possibly, but that's an absurdly overbroad mission.
Organizations with clear, focused missions are much more likely to be able to achieve them than organizations that want to be everything to everybody.
"Make and maintain Firefox as the best browser for people who care about internet freedom, privacy, and extensibility" would be a perfectly reasonable mission.
Mozilla has hired a lot of execs from Meta and bought an ad company, looking through a lot of their privacy policy at the time, a lot of it involves rewriting it to say that they can serve you sponsored suggestions when you're searching for things in their search bar and stuff and sharing out some of that data with third parties etc.
Firefox was bringing in half a billion a year for the last decade, if they would've just invested that money in low risk money market accounts (instead of paying their csuite executives millions of dollars in salary and putting the rest on non-Firefox related related social causes), the company would be able to easily survive off the interest alone.
I've been using Firefox since 2006 and have defended it for decades even when they've made questionable decisions that have gotten everybody upset with them. But this time it wasn't just making stupid decisions to try and fund the company, this time they actuality sold out their own customers.
In public announcement in the above link explaining why they removed "we don't sell your data" from the FAQ, the rationality was that some jurisdictions define selling data weirdly, they cited California's definition as an example but California's definition is exactly what I would consider the definition of selling my personal data.
They're justifying this by saying that they need it to stay alive since they're not going to be getting money from Google anymore, but I argue that you shouldn't sell out your customer base on the very specific reason anyone would choose you. I would rather pay a monthly fee to use Firefox to support them, but even if you gave them $500 million today they would just squander it away like they've done since forever so I really don't have any solution I can think of which frustrates me.
I switched to Orion (and use Safari if a site doesn't work in Orion), which can be a little buggy at times but I'm happy that it's not based on chrome at least.
The funny thing about removing "we don't sell your data" is that Mozilla before that was giving your data away for free. Now they just could be compensated.
A decent chunk of the users who bothered installing an adblock would also be bothered enough to install a FF fork with adblock, so I doubt the revenue increase would be much.
As for calling it "off-mission": yes, what's even the point of FF if that's the route it goes on?
Do any of these forks have the ability to sync, either with Firefox or something self hosted? Or are they all just basically reskins with a single toggle added or such?
Yes you can actually self-host both Firefox sync server [1] and use Firefox accounts (which also can be self-hosted [2] and someone put something simpler in docker image [3]). And those can be used even with Firefox itself not only the forks.
Good point. I'd actually be happy to pay a couple of bucks a month for a good syncing solution based on an open source protocol, to make it easier for me to use the same history and preferences across browsers, IDEs and other such tools. It's actually a similar need and setup to that of a password manager, so I wonder if this is something Bitwarden could take on.
The day Mozilla fired Brendan Eich for political reasons, Firefox died. It just took a while for everyone to realise that. That was when they collectively decided that other things are more important to them than the quality and usability of Firefox.
The new CEO is just the final nail in their coffin.
I don't know, if the CEO of some software I used suddenly came out as anti-miscegenation, and started donating money to the cause, I'd stop using the software until the CEO was fired too.
Where this analogy breaks is that at the time (2008), Eich's position had majority support in the US. The proposition he wad funding passed with majority support. Mixed marriages by contrast had overwhelming support in 2008.
Eich didn't suddenly come out against anything in 2014. People dug up his prior funding.
Demanding permanent ostracization for supporting a majority position is fairly anti-democratic. You can beat someone in a process (Eich's side lost) without demanding total victory forever or declaring more than half of a whole society as permanent villains. In 2008 55% of the US opposed gay marriage, 36% supported it.
This is a non-sequitur. He didn't donate because it was the popular thing to do, he donated because it was consistent with his religious beliefs.
Christianity has never been a popularity contest. It has steadfastness in the face of rejection and martyrdom in the face of oppression baked into its fundamental fabric, borne from its oppression as a minority religion in the first centuries of its existence.
There's three options on every stance: support, oppose, and neutral. When in doubt, you should be neutral - not opposed.
Just because everyone else is opposing gay marriage, or integration, or emancipation, doesn't mean you should.
Maybe you don't have the time or energy to try to find out what path you should take. Okay, fair. You can always do nothing. You can literally say "I don't know enough about this to have an opinion".
But following the majority IS NOT that. You ARE taking a hard stance if you do that! You're making a choice, and that means you better understand that choice. You are responsible for it, accountable to it!
> Demanding permanent ostracization for supporting a majority position is fairly anti-democratic.
It depends a lot on what that position is. Donating your personal wealth to discriminate against a marginalized group, which includes many of your employees is worth calling out.
Segregation was once a "majority position" in this country. Shaming segregationists was a really effective way to change that. For example, George Wallace, who eventually redeemed himself.
So you agree: for you, it's more important that the Mozilla CEO shares your political views, than that Mozilla makes a quality product.
That's exactly what the parent post is talking about. When Mozilla started prioritizing political correctness over software quality, software quality predictably declined. That's why they are struggling now: they reduced their user base to the tiny group of political extremists that will put up with an inferior product for the sake of political signaling.
By the way, Eich didn't “come out” as anything. His private donation (a mere $1000) was exposed by people who wanted to cancel him for his political views. It wasn't Eich who forced the issue, it was his political opponents, who do not tolerate any viewpoint diversity. Eich's views weren't even fringe or extreme at the time: Proposition 8 passed with support from the majority of Californian voters.
I think the correct formulation is: "There are political views that the CEO of Mozilla could hold which would be sufficient for me to abandon the use of products that Mozilla makes". And I think that would be non-controversial for most people.
The problem with that formulation is that it denies the importance of the quantative aspect of the difference of opinion.
Of course there are views so extreme almost nobody would put up with them. But at the same time, being tolerant of differences of opinion is an important aspect of a free society and a functioning democracy. There is a word for people who cannot tolerate even the smallest difference of opinion: bigots.
But differences of opinion aren't binary; they lie on a spectrum. Similarly, bigotry lies on a spectrum. The person who doesn't brook the smallest disagreement is a greater bigot that only considers the most odious points of view beyond the pale.
For an extreme example, consider these cases: 1) A CEO is fired for arguing that the US government should round up all Jews and put them in extermination camps Nazi Germany style. 2) A CEO is fired for arguing that the local sales tax should be raised by 0.25 percentage points.
Are these cases exactly the same? You could argue in both cases the CEO gets fired for expressing sufficiently unorthodox political views, but that doesn't cut at the heart of the matter. Clearly it's necessary to quantify how extreme those views are. The extent to which the board that fires their CEO is bigoted depends on how unreasonable the CEO's views are; they are inversely proportional.
So now back to Eich. What was his sin? He donated $1000 to support Proposition 8, which restricted the legal definition of marriage to couples consisting of a man and a woman. This view was shared at the time by Barack Obama and a majority of California voters. It didn't strip gay couples of any formal rights: all the same rights could be obtained through a domestic partnership or an out-of-state marriage. It was just a nominal dispute about what the word “marriage” means.
Clearly this is a relatively unimportant issue; closer to a tax dispute than a genocide. You can disagree with Eich and the Californian public on this one, but being unable to tolerate their point of view doesn't make them monsters; it makes you a bigot.
The fact that Mozilla didn't allow their CEO to deviate from the majority point of view on this issue (again, a minority viewpoint in California at the time!) revealed Mozilla to be a heavily politicized, extremely bigoted corporation, that puts ideological conformity first.
I feel like we've awakened from a dream. I look around, and I see that the hyper-transphobe's book series has become a best-selling videogame. I wish I were asleep like you...
I think treating every human with equal dignity goes beyond politics. While the specific context here was political, but that is only the context, not the principle.
> So you agree: for you, it's more important that the Mozilla CEO shares your political views, than that Mozilla makes a quality product.
He doesn't have to share all of them, but we have to have enough overlap for him to consider me & my friends enough of a human being to share the same rights that he does.
As another commenter pointed out, there are beliefs heinous enough that will override the quality of optional software that I might choose to use.
In 2008. You know, the year the majority of Americans didn't approve of gay marriage? [1] The year Obama said that marriage is between a man and a woman? [2]
Applying modern sensibilities to history is stupid.
Are you referring to his donation to prop 8? Im a younger dev and a bit out of the loop but how would that be anti-miscegenation? Wasn’t that more related to gay marriage?
I used anti-miscegenation as a stand-in, as an example of a ludicrous, indefensible position to hold today, while there are still holdouts who apparently think that gay marriage is some sort of affront to the moral fabric of society.
Oh okay, I see. It is wild to see how much things change because amongst my generation your analogy makes sense, but at the time prop 8 was passed by a majority of Californians.
Eich was appointed Mozilla CEO in 2014. Not 2008. 2014 polls said 60% to 70% of Californians supported same sex marriage. Most California voters would not qualify for most jobs in any case. And Eich's 2008 discrimination support mattered less than his 2014 inability to say he wouldn't do it again.
As an example, Loving v Virginia, the Supreme Court case that struck down all anti-miscegenation laws, was in 1967. In 1968, a Gallup poll indicated that less that 20% of white Americans "approved of marriage between whites and non-whites."
Three decades later, in 2000, Alabama finally voted to repeal its (inactive) law, and a full 40% of voters voted to keep the racist, useless law in their state constitution.
State-declared marriage is an tax saving scheme, that the state does in expect for future tax payers. Not granting it to people who won't "produce" tax payers seems entirely reasonable to me.
Exactly. It's one thing to be an idiot on Twitter, it's another for you to donate money to a cause specifically designed to deny rights to people - a cause that was actually successful for a time. That's something that speaks to a fundamental lack of empathy that I'm not sure he's ever directly addressed.
But in any case, I've heard this argument before, and the timeline doesn't make sense. At the time he resigned, Chrome was very firmly ahead of Firefox, and given his track record with Brave, the idea that Eich would have single-handedly saved Mozilla is also pretty dubious to me.
It seems like a disingenuous and lazy talking point tailor made to blame the demise of Firefox on a culture war politics, when in reality it's the fact that Google was willing to throw much more time and resources at the browser market than a non-profit, unimpeded by the same sort of anti-trust and lack of development that brought Internet Explorer low.
A) Firing a CEO because there is an immediate, massive public shaming of them is entirely rational from a business perspective
B) This is the hill you want to die on? That being a bigot should be a protected status for CEOs?
> This is the hill you want to die on? That being a bigot should be a protected status for CEOs?
That is a wildly uncharitable take. I'm not OP, but I believe that nobody, CEOs or otherwise, should be fired for their activities outside of work. That can be political beliefs, but doesn't have to be either. And yes, that means that sometimes someone whose beliefs you find repugnant is going to have a good job. That is the price of a free society, and I think it's worth it.
Imagine, instead, the opinion he expressed outside of work is that Firefox sucks and nobody should use it. Should he be fired then?
As a CEO, your opinion and perspective is MARKETING. You determine if customers stay or leave. And causing customers to leave is obviously a fireable offense.
So Subway should bring back Jared and Jello should bring back Cosby? Freedom is not a one-way street that guarantees the right to be awful without social consequences.
The words "bigot" and "racist" have been so overused that they've lost all meaning. "Fascist" is not all that far behind. In a recent interview, Nick Fuentes (much more deserving of the bigot label than Eich) openly said he's a racist. I suspect he lost 0 supporters by doing this. Abusing the language like this has consequences - not good ones.
Definition of bigot from Oxford Languages: a person who is obstinately or unreasonably attached to a belief, opinion, or faction, especially one who is prejudiced against or antagonistic toward a person or people on the basis of their membership of a particular group.
Explain how the word isn't being used according to its definition.
> Nick Fuentes openly said he's a racist.
Do you doubt him? In March 2025, he said, "Jews are running society, women need to shut the fuck up, Blacks need to be imprisoned for the most part, and we would live in paradise ... White men need to run the household, they need to run the country, they need to run the companies. They just need to run everything, it's that simple. It's literally that simple."
> I suspect he lost 0 supporters by doing this.
You seem to believe that his supporters think he isn't actually racist.
I think GP's point isn't that Fuentes isn't racist, it's that the term "racist" lost a lot of its bite precisely because it was thrown around so recklessly and applied to people who obviously weren't "bad guys". So now you can actually go and openly say things like "I'm racist" and mean it, and there's still plenty of people who don't see a problem with that.
> So now you can actually go and openly say things like "I'm racist" and mean it, and there's still plenty of people who don't see a problem with that.
My point is that the people (Fuentes supporters) that he said see no problem with that are racists themselves, or why would they be Fuentes supporters? That's his whole schtick. They don't see a problem with him saying racist things, so why would they see a problem with him directly admitting he is a racist? https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/conservative-writer-says...
Firefox improved in quality significantly between 2014 and the recent decline. And it's not like Brave has shown incredibly good judgement in these areas.
Equivocating speech and crime as both being "violence" (of similar class, deserving similar response) is a fallacy that lets people justify murder in response to disagreement as long as it's deemed serious enough.
Yes it's not violence, but it's not speech either. Donating money is performing material harm. That might be an unfortunate reality, but it's undeniable. It's a different thing from just saying something.
Also, you can absolutely be fired for just saying something and that's been the case forever. As a CEO, you are essentially marketing your company. Marketing it poorly and losing customers can, and will, get you fired - in every company, ever.
Really? Having an opinion endorsed by the mainstream doctrine of several world religions with billions of adherents is the same as robbing a bank?
That being said, I disagree with Eich and it probably made sense for the org to let him go given how his views might impact public perception of Mozilla.
I'd say it's complicated. If you are running a company in San Francisco I think you want to be sensitive to the culture there. That cause of gay marriage that he opposed was not one of these radicalism for the sake of radicalism queer positions you see on Twitter-dervied platforms but something mainstream at the root. I think of how on The Bulwark podcasts you hear gay people with a conservative but never-Trump viewpoint describing their cozy family life and it just sounds so sweet... and mainstream making the opposition to it not seem so mainstream.
On the other hand I think San Francisco is part of the Mozilla problem because it is less than an hour on the 101 to go see people at Facebook and Google yet they are distant from the 99% of of web developers and web users that live somewhere else whose use Firefox because they don't like what Chrome stands for.
I wish Mozilla was in Boulder or Minneapolis or Cleveland or Dublin or some other second-tier but vibrant city where they might have the capacity to listen to us rather than be in the same monoculture that brings us Chrome and Instagram.
Yeah, I can't say I feel comfortable in the medtech culture around Boston. I worked remote at a clinical notes startup based in research triangle park -- our mission was "CRUSH EPIC!" and do that through user-centric thinking and I think medtech culture would be a buzzkill for that.
Yeah no, (1) Mozilla was going to be in for a tough go no matter what; I don't think Eich would have fared any better. But (2) you can't donate to stop your own employees and users from having civil rights without repercussions.
People with an axe to grind always hide what Brendan Eich did behind "politics" which is a dishonest slight of hand.
> Yeah no, (1) Mozilla was going to be in for a tough go no matter what; I don't think Eich would have fared any better.
Nobody knows this for sure. We do know that Eich was fired for political reasons, and not because of his technological direction.
This betrays a decision making process that prioritizes political correctness above leadership qualities and technical contributions.
> you can't donate to stop your own employees and users from having civil rights without repercussions.
Why not? Why can't the CEO of Mozilla have his own private political views just like anyone else, and donate his own private money to whatever democratic causes he likes?
This really isn't obvious to anyone except the people, like you, who view Mozilla as a political project first, and as a software project a distant second.
Firing your CEO for not being sufficiently aligned with the American Democratic Party only makes sense if you assume the purpose of Mozilla is to push American Democratic politics, rather than make good software that anyone in the world may use (spoiler alert: many users of open-source software are not American Democrats!)
We both know that CEOs are never fired, but there is a difference between resigning on their own accord and “resigning” because they had no organizational support. What happened to Eich was the CEO-equivalent of getting fired.
> Donations are public material support. Not private views.
Not really? Nobody would know what causes Eich donates to if they didn't make an effort to look it up and broadcast that information.
Even if you take that view, are you saying that nobody who works for Mozilla is allowed to make any political donations ever? Or are you simply saying that you Mozillians aren't allowed to donate money to conservative causes? Because it sounds a lot like the second one, and then we're back to the original allegation: that Mozilla today is a political project first, and a technological project second. Otherwise, how do you explain Mozilla caring so much about which political campaigns its employees donate to?
> We both know that CEOs are never fired, but there is a difference between resigning on their own accord and “resigning” because they had no organizational support.
CEOs are never fired is false objectively. CEOs must earn support. And there was no reason to state false information if you believed everyone would understand the context of the facts.
> Not really?
Really. Public records are public.
> Nobody would know what causes Eich donates to if they didn't make an effort to look it up and broadcast that information.
No one would know most news stories if someone didn't research and publish them. No one would know what Mozilla's CEO was paid if no one looked it up and published it.
> Even if you take that view, are you saying that nobody who works for Mozilla is allowed to make any political donations ever?
People are allowed to make donations. People are allowed to choose who they follow or support or not.
And jobs have different standards. Eich remained CTO years after his donation was published with little controversy.
> Otherwise, how do you explain Mozilla caring so much about which political campaigns its employees donate to?
Who are Mozilla to you? The board appointed Eich CEO years after his donation was published
>It's your own fault you lost this argument because you decided to attempt such a pathetically transparent lie, and you can't back-pedal enough to make up for that. Face it, you're just a dishonest bigot on the wrong side of history, still salty that gay marriage is finally legal, impotent to do anything about it besides being a lying keyboard warrior troll.
>I hope for your own family's sake that your own straight marriage isn't so fragile that it was undermined by gay marriage being legal, as Brendan's and other homophobic bigot's tired arguments claim is the insidious threat of gay marriage.
>Maybe you made bad life choices and want to punish people who didn't, but that's on you, so don't take it out on gay people, even if you're one of the jealous hateful closeted self loathing ones yourself.
This is a particularly egregious post that I think warrants more intervention than just a flag @dang. This user has been doing this quite a lot, over a period of many months, if you search his posts for the word "Eich" or "bigot".
> Firing your CEO for not being sufficiently aligned with the American Democratic Party
This is not what happened. He gave money to a cause with the explicit goal of using that money to prevent his coworkers and users from having equal civil rights based on an inalienable trait they were born with.
That's not an "American Democratic Party" alignment issue, and if you genuinely believe it is, your dog whistle may be broken. It's sounding an awful lot like a normal whistle.
He has a right to do that without fear of government retaliation. But Mozilla has a right to fire him for being a bad person because of it.
That's just factually wrong. Proposition 8 deprived nobody of any rights. Gay couples could get exactly the same rights as straight couples through a domestic partnership, or get married out of state, as even Wikipedia admits:
> A same-sex marriage lawfully performed in another state or foreign jurisdiction on or after November 5, 2008 was fully recognized in California, but Proposition 8 precluded California from designating these relationships with the word "marriage." These couples were afforded every single one of the legal rights, benefits, and obligations of marriage.
Note the last sentence!
Additionally, proposition 8 was not extreme. It was carried by a majority of California voters, and Barack Obama said at the time: “I personally believe that marriage is between a man and a woman” which is essentially what the proposition established too, though Obama opposed using a ballot proposition to settle the issue.
> He has a right to do that without fear of government retaliation. But Mozilla has a right to fire him for being a bad person because of it.
I never argued that Mozilla doesn't have the right to fire people for their political views. We're just establishing that Eich _was_ fired for his political views, and that that shows Mozilla had become a political organization first, and a technological company second.
In a politically neutral technology company there should be room for people who side with Barack Obama and the majority of Californian voters. The fact that that is not true of Mozilla proves it's not a politically neutral company; it's a political project that inherited a software project they are not particularly interested in maintaining except as a vehicle for further promoting their politics.
> That's just factually wrong. Proposition 8 deprived nobody of any rights. Gay couples could get exactly the same rights as straight couples through a domestic partnership, or get married out of state, as even Wikipedia admits:
The US rejected separate but equal since decades.
California domestic partnerships provided most of the same rights as marriage. Not all. The California legislature had to pass bills after to address this.[1]
The bill which afforded same sex couples married out of state the same rights as heterosexual couples married in state passed over 11 months after Proposition 8 took effect. The citation of the last sentence revealed this. You did not read it?
Heterosexual couples were not required to marry out of state.
> Additionally, proposition 8 was not extreme. It was carried by a majority of California voters
Most jobs have requirements which most California voters would not meet.
> Barack Obama said at the time: “I personally believe that marriage is between a man and a woman” which is essentially what the proposition established too, though Obama opposed using a ballot proposition to settle the issue.
Obama opposed stripping rights by vote is a significant difference.
And Obama changed his public position by 2014. Eich was unable to say he would not repeat his harmful action.
And many people suspected Obama's opposition to same sex marriage was a lie in 2008 even. 1 of his advisers claimed this later.
> Eich _was_ fired for his political views
Eich said he resigned because he could not be an effective leader under the circumstances.[2] Did he lie?
Let's say everything you said is right: Just because a heterosexual, Christian majority say they don't support "blacks" in their bathrooms and claim the black community should be happy with their "equal" bathrooms, does NOT mean that it is morally acceptable to financially support legal requirements for segregated bathrooms.
> Barack Obama said at the time: “I personally believe that marriage is between a man and a woman”
And yet he didn't force the country to only recognize marriages between men and women. Instead, he did the opposite. He voted against DOMA in 1996. He repealed Don't Ask Don't Tell in 2010.
He appointed judges who looked favorably on gay marriage and then told the justice department not to defend DOMA against constitutional attacks. Then he celebrated the Supreme Court's ruling against DOMA.
> In a politically neutral technology company there should be room for people who side with Barack Obama and the majority of Californian voters.
Barack Obama and California voters (64% of likely voters in 2013 according to PPIC) were on the other side in 2014 when Eich was appointed CEO. Eich remained (and remains to this day) on the wrong side.
Long-time Firefox user* here. If Mozilla weakens the ability to block ads or control content, and/or introduces intrusive AI features that I can't easily disable, then I'm done. I'll go to Waterfox or whatever. Tired of Mozilla's attitude.
* Windows and Android. I even pay for their vpn because there is apparently no way to pay for the browser, which is what I actually use.
I think it's too late for Mozilla, since it seems they already squandered most of their good will, userbase and money.
At any rate, I think their only good path of to get rid of Gecko.
The best would be to replace it with a finished version of Servo, which would give them a technically superior browser, assuming Google doesn't also drop Blink for Servo. It may be too late for this, but AI agents may perhaps make finishing Servo realistic.
The other path would be to switch to Chromium, which would free all the Gecko developers to work on differentiating a Chromium-based Firefox from Chrome, and guarantee that Firefox is always better than Chrome.
>The other path would be to switch to Chromium, which would free all the Gecko developers to work on differentiating a Chromium-based Firefox from Chrome, and guarantee that Firefox is always better than Chrome
No they would get fired, unless Firefox found a new big project to earn money from, which at the moment is not very likely.
I doubt AI agents are going to greatly accelerate the development of something as big and complex as Servo. It seems more realistic that Firefox would be built around either Blink (from Chromium) or Webkit to lean on Google/Apple.
I don't think it's too late at all. I mean, there's recurring outrage whenever Mozilla does something silly again but all through that Firefox is still a fantastic browser. Don't under-value the many quieter parts of Mozilla who just keep kicking ass day in day out.
There's nothing particularly wrong with it, but developing a browser engine and keeping up with new web standards is quite a bit of work. And web developers won't all test on a browser with 2-3% market share, so there's more risk of sites not rendering quite right because the engine is different.
While that would be miles better, there's still plenty wrong with it. Most advertising is designed to trick people into either buying something that they don't need at all (e.g. consuming more soda instead of drinking water, or getting some gadget, or more clothes than they need), or into buying the an objectively worse option (e.g. buying a more expensive fridge that will actually last less time). This is the goal of B2C advertising: tricking people to behave less rationally in their consumption behavior.
The only way to avoid this is to just block ads - even unobtrusive content-relevant ads. You may think ads can't trick you, but that has been shown time and time again to be false.
That's an even more evil ad than the obnoxious and irrelevant variety because something related to my interests has a higher chance of successfully manipulating me.
It's a distraction from the content that I actually want to see and I should not have to spend the bandwidth on loading it or the battery on rendering it.
Yeah I think that might be a worse statement than the one daydreaming about eliminating their remaining market share by abandoning the only thing keeping anyone around. It’s a gross premise to operate from. And bullshit.
The Mozilla Foundation does lots of "spreading awareness" but does not contribute to Firefox development.
That is the most vexing part. I want to donate for Firefox development. Not marketing, not side projects, let me just fund the devs. But no, that is not possible.
Blender is a huge success story relying on sponsors and donations, Wikipedia is swimming in money but no we can't just have a free browser.
No we need to have a Mozilla Corporation that lives on Google money for being the controlled opposition i.e. technically avoiding monopoly situation thing. After all CEOs can't get rich on donations, can they?
Ironically Wikimedia is also throwing money around to side projects, outreach, etc. But luckily for them their products are essentially run by volunteers.
The Foundation owns the trademarks, and mostly does evangelism. The (subsiduary) Corporation actually develops the browser (and accepts a bunch of revenue from Google for Search placement)
... and most of that money comes in the form of sponsored browser/search integration w/ their competitors.
In that set of circumstances, the main qualification for CEO is likely 'plays nice with Google'. Given that, I'm not surprised that Mozilla underperforms.
Beating Google in the browser market might be considered hostile to their sponsors.
Well, is no mistery that today the best versioins of Firefox are the non official versions like waterfox and zen.
NObody trusts mozilla anymore, specially after they turned into an add company and started paying their CEOs exorbitating ammounts, considering what was being invested in their core business (supposedly making a better browser).
I'm not familiar with Zen, but how do you reconcile that Waterfox frequently lags behind upstream Firefox in terms of security fixes? Yes, you get a perceived gain in privacy, but is that worth potentially exposing yourself to additional vulnerabilities?
> lags behind upstream Firefox in terms of security fixes
I’m not sure why this has become a thing - usually I either release Waterfox the week before ESR releases (the week the code freeze happens and new version gets tagged) or, if I’m actively working on features and they need to coincide with the next update I push, I will release on the same Tuesday the ESR releases.
You can check the GitHub tag history for Waterfox to see it’s been that way for a good while :)
Yes, you get a perceived gain in privacy, but is that worth potentially exposing yourself to additional vulnerabilities?
Speaking only for myself, and regardless of whether this is actually true (see sibling comment): yes. Absolutely. A non-privacy focused browser like Firefox has vulnerabilities/data leaks by design that are worse than hypothetical ones that I probably will not be subject to browsing my usual benign set of websites.
IT dosnet lag long, since both have pretty activity communities.
There are other variations that are a little faster in issueing the updates, but they are maintained by small teams, so they have more change of being corrupted by bullshit, specially this day and age where people take politics too damn serious.
Too be honest, except for niche uses, I just abandoned firefox. Their engine is behind, lags in sites that use too much javascript is visible, when even opening 3 or 4 tabs makes they browser lag behind.
I just keep it in my system this days to access some sites in my work computer and test UI rendering in firefox. Other than that, I had to surrender to chrome and its variations.
I just noticed last week that Chrome was putting multiple versions of some 4GB AI model [1] on my hard disk that I'd never asked for, so when I upgraded my laptop I took the opportunity to switch to Firefox, and now this.
My image of Mozilla as a bastion for user first software just shattered.
last I checked, firefox doesn't download AI models unless you try to use a (clearly-labeled) feature that requires them. you can also manage/uninstall them at about:addons
totally uncharitable interpretation of the quote linked here aside, how is providing an interface for using fully local models not user first software?
I think AI in the browser could be useful. It just isn't that useful now.
So far, the most useful "AI feature" Firefox has ever shipped is the page translation system, which uses a local AI to work. I wouldn't mind seeing more of things like that.
Eventually, "browser use" skill in AIs is going to get better too. And I'd trust Firefox with an official vendor agnostic "AI integration" interface, one that allows an AI of user's choice to drive it, over something like OpenAI's browser - made solely by one AI company for its own product.
Yeah I use a plugin for similar translation functionality, but with a local llama.cpp instance instead. Definitely useful and has increased my usage. Also works nicely on the Android version of the app.
There's an elephant in the room: why is maintaining a web browser costing $400M/y?
The web standards are growing faster than non-profit engines can implement them.
Google & Apple are bloating the web specs in what looks like regulatory capture.
If Blink/Webkit dominate for long enough, they will lock everything down with DRMs & WEI. Maybe it's time to work on lighter protocols like Gopher & Gemini that don't need 20GB of RAM to open 20 tabs ?
Having a "lighter standard" simply means people will have to write native apps, one per platform. I understand Apple wants this, but for Mozilla that should be the antithesis of what they're trying to achieve.
> There's an elephant in the room: why is maintaining a web browser costing $400M/y?
Is that actually the case though? I find it hard to believe that Mozilla has anywhere close to 1500 senior developers working on just Firefox. My guess is that the bulk of that money is spent on unrelated adventures and overhead.
Google Chrome is likely around $400M, while Mozilla's core browser team is around $200M but are technologically far behind. Hard to find precise numbers, it's just an order of magnitude estimate
In what sense is Mozilla behind? Chrome is an advertising delivery platform, they have fundamentally different goals and that $400M they spend on Chrome is not mostly going to technology that I want in my browser, that's the point. Just because Chrome builds telemetry features doesn't mean Mozilla needs them too.
They are probably a money laundy scheme this days. I used to donate every year to Mozilla. Of course, small ammounts because Im not rich. Today they would have to beat this money from my hands.
Is the whole issue not that they are less of a band of activists than they used to be. Now it is suddenly no longer about free and open source software, but more of means to run the whole machine, which is why they probably have profit oriented CEO as bad as that is.
IMO they need to be more a crew of activists than they are now. Fight against stuff like intrusion of AI in every single part of our lives and such.
They're not going to be able to make a case to Google that they need $500M annually to only spend on a browser. They're barely in charge of their own company.
It's so tiring how everything around us is being engineered to make us miserable for the sake of profit. That in itself creates misery, almost seemingly for the sake of misery. A just world would punish this behavior.
> He says he could begin to block ad blockers in Firefox and estimates that’d bring in another $150 million, but he doesn’t want to do that. It feels off-mission.
That's just miss interpretation. The way he told that was probably badly reported by the journalist and now it's getting miss understood.
Let's be honest and give this guy an honnest chance instead of witch hunting.
I really didn't like his interview and his blog post but even then, judge on the facts and not the talk !
What Firefox needs is a new steward and move out, literally. The unruly business practices aren't just normalized, they are an expectation. The blathering ceo wasn't even aware his job is to hide that. The fox will die in this toxic ecosystem.
Don't count on it. Have you ever seen how much time and effort has been put in making Firefox, Safari and Chrome compliant and performant? It'll take Ladybird ages to get anywhere near.
Someone could try to merge e,g, V8 and Servo, once that's in decent shape. But even then it'll be time consuming to build an acceptable UI, cookie and history management, plugin interface, etc.
Ladybird is pretty good today. A lot of web apps, even complex ones, just work. It's reached high compliance scores for web standards in a shockingly quick period. See here: https://youtu.be/VqzbqsIlaNI?si=YPdwbApq4nVYlPMQ&t=209
And servo: I wish that one would get more mention as it's quite far along. Having multiple competing browsers again that are not controlled by megacorps would be great. Ladybird for browsing, Servo for embedding.
Unfortunately Firefox is basically already dead, it has an incredibly small market share and it will never grow again because their leadership is affected by the corporate mind virus.
I know most HN users are on Firefox, but they should get used to an alternative now, not when its inevitable death happens.
My key problem is not knowing what the real good alternatives are? I've trusted Mozilla for so long that I've fallen out of touch with a market that never really changed as much as it has in the last few years.
Disabling ad blocking goes hand in hand with an "AI Browser" strategy.
Ad blocking relies on the ability to use filters to block network requests at the browser level, and visual elements at the DOM level. "AI Browsers" are designed to add bloat to the browsing experience, by offering to summarize something, or providing contextual information like say, a product recommendation that pulls data from a third party site. Network request and DOM element blocking would instantly negate that.
On the contrary, ad blockers and 'AI browsers' goes hand in hand. On one side is naive browser that displays pages as-is, on the other is user agent that shows what is relevant to the user. Ad blockers are just more static / more deterministic variants of that.
What centralized organization with a budget and a CEO is ever going to do that? They are all under pressure to not piss off the giant advertising octopus that has its tentacles in every part of the tech industry.
I think the sentiment of the headline statement is off. What you expect a CEO to say is "OBVIOUSLY the one thing which is completely off the table, because of it's lack of alignment with our mission and vision..."
Instead of which he inverts it "we'd get like $150m if we did this thing we won't do because well.. we haven't decided to." with the implicit "... yet"
And I agree with comments below: he discounts risk side loss of income because of people walking away.
Part of the "problem" is that people don't care about any of those products, except Firefox.
Mozilla needs to figure out how much they need to maintain Firefox, nothing else. I suspect that's not the entirety of the $200 million they currently spend on "development costs". Everything else they receive in donations and partnership fees should go directly into an investment portfolio which will be used to keep Firefox development active in the future.
If they didn't care about anything else, the Google money could fund Firefox for at least two years per yearly fee.
Yeap. It's mentioned in their financial reports that user donations represent more than 99.9% of our annual revenue[0]. Also seems their staff is mainly engineers/developers, and all the expenses are concentrated to their product*. Thunderbird doing what Firefox should.
As of right now Thunderbird doesn't make any money, it relies on 'Donations' which isn't at all sustainable.
I can see Thunderbird is planning to do a pro plan, but it is behind a waitlist so the total sum of revenue Thunderbird is making relative to Google's $500M deal is close to zero.
When someone working for A is doing something that would clearly harm A to the benefit of B, I usually start wondering if that someone really works for A or there's something fishy going on. Mozilla is wasting a huge load of money coming from the Google agreement (another conflict of interests) to pay huge salaries to their CEO over the years. If there's something they lack it's openness about goals, not money.
Firefox has been lagging in Web features for a long time. I have been a Zen browser user for about a year, and recently moved back to Arc just because almost all interactive websites look bad on the Firefox engine; somehow, they don't have the same level of JS API support as Chrome does, especially for WebRTC, Audio, or Video. And this is frustrating that they think the problem is the AdBlockers!
Right, saying that something which is completely against the company's fundamental principles "feels off mission" gives us a very secure feeling of this CEO.
> I've been using Firefox before it was called that.
Call me petty but I still can't let this one go. At the time they basically stole the Firebird name from the database project and did not hesitate to use AOL's lawyers to bully the established owners of the name. So they didn't actually become shady over night. It's in their DNA.
Let's assume that Mozilla is not doing super hot and that's why their CEO is contemplating this topic.
Obviously we are not happy about ads, but we all understand that having money is pretty neat (if only to pay ones salary). Help the CEO fella: What great, unused options is Mozilla missing to generate revenue through their browser?
I feel like some day, YouTube and all video streaming are likely to move to apps and just drop browser support (replace with redirect to app). It feels like the logical conclusion of the ad blocking arms race. This is just one step forward down that road.
If Mozilla were to kill adblockers, there's basically no reason to not use Chromium. It's pretty much the only relevant difference between Chromium and Firefox these days.
It's truly impressive how they've managed to do every user-hostile trick Google Chrome also did over the years, except for no real clear reason besides contempt for their users autonomy I suppose. Right now the sole hill Mozilla really has left is adblockers, and they've talked about wanting to sacrifice that?
It truly boggles the mind to even consider this. That's not 150 million, that's the sound of losing all your users.
There's very little money in running a browser for users who want ad blocking, performance, and features but don't want to let the browser company make money the same way most of the internet does - advertising. Most people don't care about seeing ads.
If killing ad blocker support is what keeps Firefox alive, I understand the move and would probably make the same call.
I understand where people are coming from with these takes... but look at the details, Mozilla is practically dead already. They are almost solely funded by Google.
Look at browser stats, what they're doing is not working and asking them to continue doing it will kill them. They have to change or they will die.
Their core audience (people on this site) is shrinking constantly. You can not save them.
I feel like this is a case where a bunch of smart people like something so much, or the idea of something, that they've completely blinded themselves to the facts.
I'm a daily Firefox user, but its to the point where I'm waiting for someone to make a serious hard fork that only has a non-profit that funds the project and nothing else.
Sincerely, I'm just using Firefox ATM because of Sidebery.
If I could use something similar on Brave, I would go back in an instant.
My main issues with FF are that it is a battery hog on MacOS, doesn't have AV1 playing capabilities (or it has, but I would need to go through some configuring that I don't need to do in other browsers) and sometimes it stalls in certain pages (that's probably not FF fault, but that the web developers don't optimize for it... but still, it's not a problem on Brave, so, I don't really care for apologising for it).
Isn't it kind of telling how incredibly complicated modern web browsing is, that a web browser is seen as one of the most difficult general purpose projects a developer could imagine building, aside from an entire desktop environment or a kernel?
You know what would be neat? If the Gemini protocol were slightly expanded for video/image embeds, and then having Firefox/Ladybird support it out of the box.
Clearly Google have an iron hand over Mozilla. They want it to remain semi-alive for competitiveness purposes but also ad-block free in order to keep the last user's attention to ads. There might be an under the table agreement between G and the CEO that we will never find. After a while Firefox might become abandoned because nobody in power wants it any more.
What are some good alternatives to Firefox? I have loved the browser for years, but the future isn’t looking bright. Waterfox is on my radar. Any others I should be aware/you guys are using?
edit: in the past you would always get blocked, now I don't get blocked anymore when visiting lobste.rs with Brave. Anyway, do with this information as you please.
I feel like this question has been valid for almost as long as I can remember (e.g. the Mr. Robot extension incident). I find myself struggling to tell if Mozilla is an inherently flawed company or if it's just inherent to trying to survive in such a space.
It really seems like all large tech corporations are trying their hardest to kill themselves, and failing because the market is so rigged.
Remember when Kodak ignored digital cameras and became irrelevant? That was bad because it decreased shareholder value. That will not be allowed to happen again.
It feels like the only reasonable path forward would be for the EU to buy Mozilla and fund it as a public resource.
Capital extraction is fundamentally opposed to user freedom. If we want an open web, we, the people need to be maintaining it and not rely on MBA types to do it for us.
No, thanks. I don't want my taxes to fund a(nother) failed Corp. If they aren't able to stay afloat (after 20 years of miliking billons from the evil Google), just let them sink.
I think the writing for Mozilla was on the wall for a solid decade now. The time to look for alternatives and to switch to other (pretty unknown) niche browsers was at least 5 years ago. I don't even remember the time when I downloaded and used Firefox anymore.
I would stop using Firefox if Enzor-DeMeo would block or cripple ad blockers.
While it is not my main browser (Vivaldi is), I have 5 installs of Firefox Portable for different things, like one for YouTube, one for testing pages against Firefox and so on.
Mozilla/ Firefox is irrelevant and ultimately doomed to ever smaller numbers.
That's because their users are driven by opinions and principles, and those are the worst, most disloyal kind of users. They're always threatening to leave, and will take the slightest offense to do so.
Chrome wins because its user base doesn't care. The browser is just a tool, not a religion. It's installed, they use it, they're barely aware it exists and most of Joe Public doesn't even know Google makes it.
So sure. For you it's ad blockers. For someone else it's their donation plan. Or Google funding. Or their corporate structure. Or their management.
When your marketing is about something else, other than the product itself, you always end up with edge-case-customers.
People use Chrome because it's the best browser. Less than 3% use Firefox. And all I read from Firefox users is how bad everything is (or will be).
No, Firefox's market share isn't a foil to monopoly (Safari has 5 times more users. Crumbs Edge has twice the users.)
I care about Firefox, but I really just wish all the whiners would just do what they threaten and use something else. But they won't because everything else is worse (for some or other principles reason.)
Now I fully expect to be downvoted because the only people reading this article in the first place are Firefox whiners. Which is kinda my point.
It's pretty hard to recommend Firefox to others when everything written by existing users is so negative.
An ad blocker is a very useful tool. Being able to block ads effectively makes the browser much better. I'm not sure how you can call that "religion".
> People use Chrome because it's the best browser.
No they don't. They use Chrome because every Google service nags the shit out of them to use Chrome. People aren't as rational as you make them out to be.
> He says he could begin to block ad blockers in Firefox and estimates that’d bring in another $150 million, but he doesn’t want to do that. It feels off-mission.
It would be amusing if the only browser left that could run ad-blockers was Safari.
>> He says he could begin to block ad blockers in Firefox and estimates that’d bring in another $150 million, but he doesn’t want to do that. It feels off-mission.
> I read this as “I don't want to but I'll kill AdBlockers in Firefox for buckerinos ”.
I completely disagree. First of all the original quote is paraphrasing, so we don't know in which tone it was delivered, but calling something "off-mission" doesn't at all sound like "we'd do it for money" to me.
This is how I read it too, feels like a misinterpreted quote taken out of context. Everyone at Mozilla is probably well aware that removing adblockers would make them lose probably the majority of their users.
You can block adverts on the network level at the gateway in your routers web app. You can also use libre wolf which also uses the gecko rendering engine if you run Linux.
You can also block ads on the network level at the gateway on your router. If you run Linux you can run libre wolf instead of Firefox both still use gecko for rendering.
I exclusively used Firefox for 20 years. I moved over to Edge and haven't looked back. Mozilla and the people still using it seem to think maintaining your own rendering engine with Gecko is somehow keeping the internet free. Wrong abstraction layer of freedom to worry about. It's the most bizarre thing I've ever seen. It should have moved to Webkit or Blink many years ago, and focused on user experience. Such as extensions to keep MV2 addons working, and even expanding on the capabilities, like the old XUL/XPCOM Firefox extensions. Those things are why people like me used Firefox, not because of all the money and work put into Gecko. Which is just redundant in the end.
Moving to Blink or Webkit, keeping MV2 and XUL, was where the effort should have been placed. Also, I never understood Pocket or any of their other decisions. Now it's being floated to ban adblockers. Poorly run organization that given its direction and decisions, deserves to die.
1. The ad blocker.
2. The sense of superiority over the normies (because of the ad blocker)
3. Theming
If adblockers are killed, that removed points 1 and 2. I am pretty sure I can do the same theming in Chrome (I have simple tastes) so that makes 3 a non-factor. And combined with the companies that refuse to make their sites work with firefox, there is no reason not to use chrome. Privacy is a non-factor since my identity is already wholly linked to my google account. I would have to first switch off off there and I am not putting in the effort for that.
They're between a rock and a hard place. Introduce AI and alienate whatever users you have left. Do not introduce AI and alienate whatever investors you have left.
I think blocking ad blockers (the whole FFing point of using Firefox is freedom to do use those) would be the shortest path for him out of the door as a CEO.
It's so tone deaf that it is likely to probe the community into drastic action if he were to attempt to push that through. Including probably much of the developer community. I'm talking the kind of action that boils down to forking and taking a large part of the user base along. Which is why that would be very inadvisable.
The problem with being a CEO of a for profit corporation, which is what he is, is that his loyalty is to shareholders, not to users. The Mozilla Foundation and the corporation are hopelessly inter dependent at this point. The foundation looks increasingly like a paper tiger given the decision making and apparent disconnect with its user base which it is supposed to serve.
All the bloated budgets, mis-spending on offices, failed projects, fancy offices, juicy executive salaries at a time where revenue from Google continued to be substantial all while downsizing developer teams and actually laying some off isn't a great look. Stuff like this just adds to the impression that they are increasingly self serving hacks that don't care about the core product: Firefox. This new CEO isn't off to a great start here.
yeah pretty sure its a private corp under the ownership of the parent foundation. no shareholders so not sure why they new guy said what he said.. theres no one to impress
Sorry to get on one of my political hobby horses but...
We actually need to consider the possibility that yes, it is. More precisely, that the new CEO is trying to do that.
It doesn't take a grand conspiracy to join an organisation on false premises. It's totally easy. You can, today, go join a political party without agreeing with them at all, with the intent to sabotage them. Or another organization, including a workplace.
And just like some people just lie for amazingly little reason, I'm increasingly convinced some people do this. Maybe for a sense of control, maybe because they think they'll get rewarded. For every person who holds a crazy belief in public, there's probably one who holds the same belief but doesn't feel the need to let others in on it. As the world gets more paranoid, it'll get worse, open fears are the top of the iceberg.
If Enzor-Demeo ends up tanking Mozilla, there are plenty of people who will be happy with that. It's not as if his career will be over, far from it. Ask Nick Clegg or Stephen Elop. We all need to wake up to the idea that maybe the people who are supposed to be on our side aren't actually guaranteed to be unless we have solid mechanisms in place to ensure it.
I see you're familiar with Stephen Elop. Also, remember that the people who hired Elop probably hired him with the intention of making a fortune off of that destruction.
It's not that he's some secret agent or some mentally ill person who wants to destroy the company while twirling his mustache, it's that he's a person carefully chosen by people who have made large fortunes from Firefox through indirect means. He would be chosen to destroy it in a way optimized for their gain, like Elop was chosen by the board to turn Nokia into a cheap, obvious Microsoft buy, Clegg was chosen to enable the Tory government, or Sturgeon to make sure that indyref2 never happened.
Google is under no antitrust threat at all anymore. Obama judges don't believe in antitrust. Google wants to get out of paying that 500M/yr, and shitting up Firefox is a great way to do it. They'd be more than happy to throw a couple dozen of those Ms to Enzor-DeMeo or whoever will help them get that done.
How much you willing to bet that he becomes Mozilla's highest paid CEO in history, ruins the product completely, then leaves and ends up an exec at Google or some 80% owned by Google offshoot founded by a Google alum?
With DNS over https Firefox has the answer against you already built in. And back then they were very keen on implementing it as soon as possible. They even sold it as helping against censorship. It's maybe just a question of time how long good old Firefox will allow you to censor ads...
We are missing the context how the statement was said in the interview. The CEO is new and not used to the scrutiny that position brings, especially for Mozillas CEO given their purported ideals. It is quite possible he said this as something absurd -> "If making money was our only goal we would have some other options. We could for example disable all adblockers, to get more money from our advertising sponsor Google, at least 150 million USD. But we can not and won't do that, as it would feel completely off-mission for everyone and harm us long-term. So we always keep our mission in mind." Then the journalists shortens it to the blip in the verge article and the reaction twists it around a bit more, assuming disabling adblockers was on the table as a serious suggestion.
Or it could be it really was on the table since they just entered the advertising business and think AI is the future of Mozilla, a "fuck those freeloaders", heartfelt from the Porsche driving MBAs in Mozilla's management. Who knows. But it's a choice which interpretation one assumes.
For fuck sake, for-profit side of Mozilla, get a damn grip!
Update, since this is getting traction on Reddit
I'm not against Mozilla making money. Like a regular citizen needs to make money, companies and even nonprofits need it too.
Don't second guess yourself OP. Firefox is not a product. It's an open-source project countless people have contributed their time and dime to over the years. The Mozilla corporation didn't create Firefox, the open-source community did. Mozilla was entrusted to be the stewards of the project and have repeatedly violated that trust. Mozilla is commoditizing other people's hard work while enriching themselves in the process at the expense of the community and abused the trust we placed in them to get away with it.
I realize that a FOSS browser is an absolutely enormous monstrosity of a project. An undertaking akin to a whole FOSS OS. But it's also comparably important, especially when no FOSS alternatives exist in the browser space. We (I mean that very loosely, not having contributed anything myself) have managed to produce _several_ FOSS OS-es. Why are we seemingly completely fucked if Mozilla does in fact kill itself/Firefox? I don't doubt that we are, I just don't understand.
> Killing one of its advantages over the Chromium engine, being able to have a fucking adblocker that's actually useful, and that nowadays is a fucking security feature due to malvertising, will be another nail in the coffin, IMHO.
Well, it would be a shot in the head. What would be the point of using Firefox if it can't block ads better than Chrome, and on mobile as well???
Doing so would not "bring in an additional 150 millions, or 50 millions, or 1 million! It would kill the product instantly.
This Mozilla fiasco has convinced me that being a nonprofit isn't enough. We need a web browser that is actively hostile towards corporations and surveillance capitalism.
Corporations, private equity, the ever encroaching monopolies and centralization of economic power, the steady march towards authoritarianism... all of these things are connected and are making our lives shittier. We should oppose them.
> This Mozilla fiasco has convinced me that being a nonprofit isn't enough
I'm not sure to what extent Mozilla actually functions as a nonprofit. All the bits one cares about (i.e. FireFox) are developed by the for-profit subsidiary, which is at least somewhat beholden to Google/Microsoft for revenue...
How so? Corporate and surveillance capitalism's infrastructure is built on copyleft software. The equivocation of license dogmatism with social good and sustainability that those movements were never actually aligned with is part of what's left socially minded technologies and communities so vulnerable to the predation that led the web to this current mess.
I dont know how anyone could take mozilla seriously after they integrated google analytics into it about 10 years ago for no reason I can fathom. It immediately made me think somethings off, and I never used it again.
Instead I thought screw it and just went nuts deep into chrome, atleast it was more functional.
ps - ( apparently mozilla took it out sometime later , but to me the damage to its reputation was done)
yes I explained the irony it’s clear you missed if you read my comment again you will understand that I decided to opt for full functionality albeit at the expense of loss of total privacy after being let down my Mozilla.
If you’re still struggling you can use an llm to try and explain my comment to you.
It was already dying and with no chances of making up share, most online usage comes from mobile, nobody cares about installing Firefox there but us nerds.
You can't kill ad-blockers in a browser, unless you don't allow running AI models in browsers (which will become very soon an integral part of your browsing usage - for some of us it already is, mostly through extension).
I will one day just add "Remove all ads on the page I am browsing" into my BROWSER_AI.md file.
>> He says he could begin to block ad blockers in Firefox and estimates that’d bring in another $150 million, but he doesn’t want to do that. It feels off-mission.
> It may be just me, but I read this as “I don't want to but I'll kill AdBlockers in Firefox for buckerinos ”.
Yes, that does seem like a pretty uncharitable interpretation of that quote. I read it as "we won't do it, even though it would bring in $150M USD".
The interpretation is not the problem. Whether he will do it, is actually secondary to the fact that he thinks cutting adblock can bringing in money.
No, it will just kill the browser. The fact he thinks otherwise tells me how out of touch he is.
Like many others, the ability to run uBO is the main reason I use Firefox. Otherwise I'd use Chrome or Safari.
I have used Firefox as my default browser through thick and thin for damn near two decades.
If Mozilla killed andblocking extensions I’d switch to Helium Browser in a heartbeat since they’re maintaining manifest v2 support for uBO and even ship it OOTB.
The web is unusable without a proper Adblock.
> The web is unusable without a proper Adblock.
It's a privacy nightmare as well. Few people reason how much data they give away to a host of shady companies just by letting ads display.
Ads and page level analytics aren’t the only thing gathering data.
There is server-side now (and previously) hosted by the site owner.
It’s a lost cause to fight this. I admire you all for using FF because uBO just for the experience, but it’s only a partial data block. Serverside and thumbprinting- you can’t be anonymous even with Tor, VPN, etc.
Any privacy benefits of blocking ads are incidental compared to the usability improvements it brings. I have near zero tolerance for ads.
Blocking even part of it is a win. Not sure why we should treat this as a dichotomy
uBo + tamper monkey is needed just to block popups. Adblock on brave is basically non existent compared to uBO
It's kind of crazy that a popup like "we and our 1244 partners want to share your data to better serve you". That's the kind of dystopian event you would think only visible as caricatural SF, but it's the kind of thing one can actually see on a daily level just browsing around.
They really take the piss, even supposedly essential cookies get lumbered with hundreds of "partners" with "legitimate interests" harvesting your data.
> It's a privacy nightmare as well. Few people reason how much data they give away to a host of shady companies just by letting ads display.
Imagine all the data Cloudflare vacuums.
The one and only time I ever got a machine infected with malware in my 30+ years of using the internet was when I fell for Forbes.com's request to please disable my adblocker. I promptly got hit by a trojan carried in one of their unvetted ads. Browsing without an adblocker is a critical security issue, and I will drop Firefox without a second thought if they ever cripple blockers like Google did.
Tell us more about the web ad based trojan!
I am also really curious how GP was able to pinpoint the event. Or was it more, "Well this is the one weird thing I did on my machine this week."
The web was usable without JavaScript once.
(JS has few good uses, but is too excessive. Less code is always better - and an art.)
Is there an extension that limits JS to things that actually improve websites (like the bare minimum needed to render a page usable under most metrics)
That would be (progressive??) XBL. (!)
(- it's kind of behavior extension on tag level, yet has JS - and it's orthogonal, like CSS or XSLT (BTW. see that hack: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41245159), unlike JS which is.. untamed and invasive; i.e. there is video (any) tag but you could (+)DIY not touching the document - like custom playing with MPlayer or VLC as a plugin there for all AV formats or sorting filtering editing whatever, all aside custompacks? :)
- or, what about the other way, like a firewall ??
NoScript, but you can only control it per domain.
+1 for NoScript. It is kind of a pain for the first few days when you have to spend 10-30 seconds reloading sites to allow the minimum needed. It is also eye opening to see how much bloat is added and how fast pages load without all the extra bs.
Thats my problem though, I don't want to have to allow the minimum for each site. I wish there was a noscript-like extension that used a public database of sorts to allow what's needed and block everything else, including things that are "needed" but suck so bad you shouldn't use the site
uMatrix, from the same author of uBO. It's been officially unsupported for years but it still works and it's UI is better then the UI of NoScript and of course much better than the incomprehensible subsystem of uBO that should have replaced uMatrix.
It doesn't "still work" if you're on Firefox. uMatrix has bugs that cause it to randomly delete your cookies, or occasionally fail to block a request (race condition? Looking at logger shows an incorrect domain on some requests)
There are community-made forks which fix the cookies problem, like nuTensor.
Thanks, I'll check nuTensor. I'm using uMatrix with Firefox on both Linux and Android and I didn't notice anything strange but maybe some of those bugs were hidden under the normal hiccups of finding the right combination of rows with trial and errors.
> It doesn't "still work" if you're on Firefox.
Not my experience at all. I run uMatrix on every computer I have and it is awesome. Still annoyed it was replaced by uBo which is quite good, but nowhere as nice as uMatrix. Luckily uMatrix still works great.
I wish they'd just scrap the uBo interface and replace it with the uMatrix interface which is far superior.
They do different things. I'm using both: uBO for ads and hiding UI elements, uMatrix for JS. I wish that the author could support both but time is limited and I'm OK with that.
By the way, I realized that most of the tabs where I'm logged into something run inside their own tab container, so that limits the damage that any bug on handling cookies can do.
[dead]
It probably won't work in new Chrome versions. I'm pretty sure it's a Manifest V2 extension (it would have to be in order to dynamically block requests in the way it does), and Chrome stopped supporting MV2 extensions this year[0].
[0] https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/develop/migrate...
Didn't one of those extensions had an option to regexp replace content of JS files ? (Now how to do that: with parsing - or with magical chains ??:)
Right, that could be nice use of AI to extract only the good parts - or, at least, to adjust the rules for https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/requestcontro... by function.
"The web is unusable without a proper Adblock"
Unusable for the commenter perhaps, based on his choices, but not unusable in an absolute sense
For example, I have been using the web without an adblock for several decades.^1 I see no ads
Adblocking is only necessary when one uses a popular graphical web browser
When I use an HTTP generator and a TCP client then no "adblock" is necessary
When I use a text-only browser then no "adblock" is necessary
Websites that comprise "the web" are only one half of the ad delivery system
The other half is the client <--- user choice
Firefox is controlled and distribuited by an entity that advocates for a "healthy online advertising ecosystem" and sends search query data to an online advertising services company called Google in exchange for payment. Ex-Mozilla employees left to join Google and start another browser called "Chrome"
These browsers are designed to deliver advertising. That's why an "adblock" extension is needed
When one uses a client that is not controlled and distributed by a company that profits from advertising services, that is not designed to deliver advertising, then an "adblock" may not be needed. I also control DNS and use a local forward proxy
The web is "usable" with such clients. For example, I read all HN submissions using clients that do not deliver or display ads. I am submitting this comment without using a popular graphical web browser
1. Obviously there are some exceptions, e.g., online banking, e-commerce, etc. For me, this is a small minority of web usage
The web is usuable with a variety of clients, not only the ones designed to deliver ads
For almost all purposes and users this is the same as saying "just close your eyes"/"just stay offline".
Why do people make posts like this?
You know that your long-winded and patronizing response in no way is a solution to the problem that you claim it is for the audience you're talking about.
Why do you pawn off an obviously non-solution as a solution? What does this get you?
The GP comment was excellent and exactly the sort of unconventional but informed thinking (about tech) that I like to see on HN
I use a text-only browser as an offline HTML reader
I make HTTP requests with a TCP client
There are no "false positives"
I only request the resources that I want, e.g., the HTML from the primary domain, JSON from the API domain, etc.
I also use custom filters written in C to extract the information I want from the retreived HTML or JSON and transform it into SQL or "pretty print"
There is nothing to "block" because I'm not using software that automatically tries to request resources I do not want from domains I never indicated I wanted to contact
Using a text-only browser is equivalent to using an ad blocker that has a lot of false positives.
If you’re happy with it, carry on. But you are using the equivalent of an ad blocker.
Original web clients were not designed for (today's) ads. Graphics were optional. There was no Javascript
I even still use the original line mode browser and other utilties in the 1995 w3c-libwww from time to time
The "modern" protocols are handled by the local forward proxy not the client
TLS1.3, HTTP/2, QUIC, etc.
In terms of majorities and minorities, HN commenters do not represent "almost all users"
There are some web users who are online 24/7
There are others who may prefer to stay offline
A wide variety of people use the web for a wide variety of purposes
HN commenters are a tiny sliver of "all users" and "all purposes"
As such, HN commenters are not qualified to opine on behalf of "almost all users" as almost all users do not comment on HN or elsewhere on the web. Almost all users prefer to express their opinions about the web, if any, offline
"When I use a text-only browser then no "adblock" is necessary"
So you browser as if it were 1999? Yup, no ads back then.
The first ad blocker was released in 1996 [1] and in 1999 we had a lot of shiny, blinking and very colorful ads already [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_blocking#History
[2] https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/exhibitions/web-banners-in-t...
Yes, but there is no song with the line: party like it's 1996. Simply doesn't work.
1996 is a surprise, I thought WebWasher (http local proxy ad remover) was first.
I tried switching to Ungoogled Chromium lately but had to switch back because, even on 32 GB of RAM, having another chromium process running meant that all my apps were getting killed left right and centre. Do too much browsing and VS Code gets killed. Restart VS Code and do a build and Slack gets killed. Open Zoom and Chromium gets killed.
Now I'm back to Firefox again and nothing has died so far.
Exactly. And I’m one of those that uses Firefox sync, and prefers all the things Firefox comes with, including the developer tools. The only thing it lacks is the integrated Google Lighthouse reporting.
have you tried using pi-hole or adblock plus running on a raspberry pi on your network?
whenever i'm off my home wifi network, i have wireguard configured to connect home and get me that ad blocking. it's so nice.
yes, i prefer to use brave for personal stuff and i use edge for work stuff (reasons,,, don't ask)
It's definitely better than nothing, and greatly improves things, but UBO is better. Try watching a youtube video in a browser with UBO, and the android app on a network with pi-hole, etc.
I ran AdGuard Home for a while but it was causing too many problems for everyone else at home so I stopped.
These days I’m using AdGuard on iOS and ublock origin with Firefox on everything else.
It took me a long time to get the allow lists dialed in, but I think it was still worth it. My wife may disagree since she was the most common victim.
It amazes me that every link the kid's school sends is a tracking link, and not always the same tracker.
There's also Palemoon...
Though uBlock Origin Lite in Chrome actually works quite well.
Thanks for referencing Helium -- it looks great!
>The web is unusable without a proper Adblock.
And yet somehow most people in the world use it every day without an adblocker...
How many limit themselves to a few apps owned by the GAFAM?
Trillions of flies eat shit...
I close any website covered in ads. Problem solved
Except by that point you've executed all their JavaScript. The FBI recommends ad blockers as a safety measure. Bouncing on the site still exposes you to risk.
>If Mozilla killed andblocking extensions
Yeah but they haven't and they're not going to, so what's the point of fantasizing about what you would do in that situation? It's like tough guy syndrome, where a person constantly fantasizes about what they would do in the imaginary situation where one of their friends or family is disrespected, or doomsday preppers who spend their life imagining what they would do in an apocalypse that never comes.
That stuff belongs on archiveofourown.com, not news.ycombinator.com.
Relax, man. It's perfectly reasonable to say that you would stop using a browser if they killed adblock support. Saying so is not "tough guy" syndrome because switching which browser you use is not a tough thing to do.
It is tough guy syndrome, because it's projecting a hypothetical scenario to performatively declare what you would do in that hypothetical, attempting to hold a third party accountable for something they're not actually doing. Try to follow the ball instead of lecturing me to relax ;)
Did you read the post? They are clearly considering doing it.
Yeah, otherwise it’d weird the new CEO had such a precise idea of the amount of money it could bring in. It makes it sound like Mozilla definitely had either considered offers from advertisers or done the maths themselves to work out potential revenue.
And for the record, as a Firefox user, count me in with the others who would switch and just use Safari on my Mac if they went through with it!
Same. I use Safari even with the ads because it has the profiles thing. Only reason I use Firefox is the ad blocker.
Constantly Fantasizing? I was responding to a hypothetical based on interpretations of real statements made by the new CEO. It's a public forum for discussion. Firefox is something that is central and essential to my digital life.
I think the only person fantasizing here is you, about what random strangers on discussion forums do all day when not responding directly to topics at hand.
You literally just agreed that you did the thing I'm describing and then insisted I was fantasizing. And you're right, it's a public forum for discussion, hence my criticism of attempting to hold Mozilla accountable for a fictional hypothetical that they explicitly said they're not doing.
I'm all for fanfiction, but as I noted before, it seems that these days archiveofourown.com is where people publish that stuff, not Hacker News. It's easy to sign up and if your fiction is creative people will give you positive reviews. But you might need to spice it up by implying a conspiracy to cooperate with Google or something.
Firefox on Android mobile is also useful because it allows extensions - especially uBlock Origin (UBO), Ghostery, No script, etc. Some mobile browsers (e.g., Samsung Internet) used to allow extensions also, but they've become crap or dropped such support, so their usage has fallen.
I like Firefox (for safety) and Vivaldi (Chromium browser, it's easier to use) on Android mobile. On iOS, Safari is simple and sufficient, but I would prefer UBO there, however we all know Apple will never allow extensions for Safari.
Ever since Google moved to Manifest v3, Chrome is a no go.
>On iOS, Safari is simple and sufficient, but I would prefer UBO there, however we all know Apple will never allow extensions for Safari.
fwiw Safari on iOS does allow some extensions and uBlock Origin Lite is free in the iOS App Store.
ublock origin lite is the knee-capped version that is also available in chrome. I haven't tried it, but it is technically not able to block all ads.
I’ve found Wipr 2.0 has been able to block all ads (even YouTube) but it’s unable to hide itself so there are sites that block my ability to read them.
Yep. It’s not great but it’s not terrible. Hopefully Apple expands Safari extension support in the future
Works much better than I thought it would. It's rather rare when I see an add in Chrome.
Same. Without uBlock Origin I'll drop Firefox. There are very few reasons to put up with its "niche browser that nobody tests" status if they won't even allow me to block ads. They should just give up and end Firefox development already if they're going down that route.
I'm doing as much to keep Firefox alive as anybody.
Wherever I've worked as a dev in a decade I've always developed Firefox-first and let the testers turn up Chrome issues. So the products that I am involved with just work with Firefox all the time.
I know there are a lot of people like me, people who are passionate and engaged with technology but have problems with "big tech" and if they turn people like me away than it really will be a "niche browser that nobody tests"
I developed and tested my personal site on Firefox. If I were a professional web developer, I'd work just like you do.
But let's not kid ourselves. We're an absolute minority. For every one of us, there are hundreds, thousands of developers who literally do not give a shit so long as their paychecks hit their accounts. Actually they're likely to write Firefox off as some irrelevant niche market the company can afford to lose because it's less work for them if they do.
(1) I like to think that professional web developers are foxier than average
(2) It just takes one on the team to make the difference
(3) Practically compatibility with Firefox is pretty good. Maybe once a month I use an e-commerce site or other e-business site where I have to drop down to Chrome, Edge or Safari.
> For every one of us, there are hundreds, thousands of developers who literally do not give a shit so long as their paychecks hit their accounts
May our new AI co-workers put those thousands into the poorhouse for shoddy worksmanship.
There are a few reasons:
I haven't compared it in years, but Firefox's bookmark sync is better than Google's, it is a reason why I have stuck with it.
I think Firefox manages hundreds of tabs better than Chrome does as far as memory usage goes. I haven't used Chrome seriously in years, but people continue to complain about how RAM hungry Chrome is so I assume it is still an issue.
But Mozilla has been doing odd things that makes me question them. I would move to some Chromium based browser if ublock origin was... blocked... pun intended... because the web does prefer Chrome over Firefox. If this 3rd party browser is able to integrate some of the functionality of ublock origin that Firefox chose to remove; I would use it over the reasons I listed above in a heartbeat.
It's only Firefox that is never satiated with however much memory I throw at it. Any time my machine slows, the solution is to kill Firefox. Not sure what exactly they are doing wrong.
Set `browser.low_commit_space_threshold_mb` and/or `browser.low_commit_space_threshold_percent` to something you'd prefer, and confirm that `browser.tabs.unloadOnLowMemory` is set (I think it is by default).
The default settings are to allow it to acquire memory until memory pressure on the system reaches 5% free, at which point it will begin freeing memory. You can set a custom percentage or a specific amount of memory.
That or just run it in a cgroup with a memory limit.
Are you sure it is not malware? When was the last time you changed the profile?
Also, I have a ton of bookmarks and as I been slowly deleting them Firefox's performance has improved. This same giant size of bookmarks Chrome seems to sync out of order causing their placement to change.
Ublock origin also does slow down the browser a bit on websites that.. don't.. have ads.
Do you use Auto Tab Discard?
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-disc...
Go to about:processes and kill whichever website's subprocess is using the most memory. Sometimes it's the main process but more commonly it's a specific site. Looking at You, Tube.
and funnily enough uBO author didn't want any money even though he's making our lives a lot better
I want to take this opportunity to thank Raymond Hill for his enormous gift to humanity. I've done this many times over the years, and it's always worth the time to do it again.
Thank you, gorhill! And thanks to all the people maintaining it and all the filter lists!
seconded
Most adblocker developers throughout history have routinely taken millions of dollars to weaken their adblockers, though. That's why we're all using uBO instead of uB.
Must be hard to resist letting some ads through for life changing money...
They say everyone has a price. Wouldn't you for ten million? A hundred million? A billion dollars? It would be extremely irrational not to. You could always donate 70% of it to Ladybird, and still come out ahead.
You could always secretly continue helping the adblocking mission under a different name. Even if you signed a contract not to.
It's like, what's someone price to commit a genocide? There are people out there, they will stubbornly refuse to engage in such a practice, no matter what amount of economical wealth is promised. It doesn't need to be rational. Rationality is not self justifying anyway. The will to help to build better societies is only marginally rational, all it takes is people with some empathy. Rationality is just better to tackle the logistic, it doesn't provide the constraints on what is deemed valuable.
lots of possible paths indeed
Not the same author.
Incorrect, Raymond Hill authored both extensions, both being forks of HTTP Switchboard.
Raymond got overwhelmed with managing an open source project of uBlock's size and let Chris Aljoudi take over. Adblock later purchased it from Chris.
Meanwhile, Raymond had forked uBlock, creating uBO, and continued to improve it on his own terms. After seeing what happened with Adblock, he has no intention of selling either uMatrix or uBO.
> Incorrect, Raymond Hill authored both extensions, both being forks of HTTP Switchboard.
You're right, let me try to amend my statement: at the point uBlock Origin was forked, Raymond disowned the earlier uBlock, and it had become unrelated to him, hence "not the same author" (even if it was started by him). My point was that Raymond didn't want to become involved in the pay-per-ads-let-through scheme the commenter I was replying to mentioned.
I love uMatrix, but all evidence is that they stopped developing it in 2021.
https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix
I don't know the implications of that, it's the only tool I've ever found that lets me feel in control of what programs my browser is executing.
I think uMatrix is the better extension. I use it in tandem with uBO.
But yeah, Raymond didn't have the resources to develop both at once and chose uBO which offered a more digestible, install-and-forget experience palatable to a wider audience.
Raymond basically said uMatrix was feature complete. But there could be bugs.
I use both uBO and NoScript and wondered if I really needed uBO if I blocked YouTube as I've planned.
However, it leads to Mozilla's earlier weird design choice where you have to install addon if you only want to disable JavaScript on sites - or allow it from only the selected domains.
Years later I haven't found a sensible explanation why they ditched that choice.
I've understood that you can still do it in Chrom(e/ium) and combined with a good updated blocklist in /etc/hosts or like it would provide most of the functionality of an adblock.
On my desktop i use just NoScript and i do not need uBO, as almost no ad is shown without JS.
There is a variant of uBO working in Safari again, if that is of any interest to you. Created by the same dev and all. I've had great results with it.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ublock-origin-lite/id674534269...
Is Brave so persona-non-grata? I find that it's a 'don't ask don't tell' because of some ancient politics. If Firefox is becoming suspect, WHAT is left?
I found Chrome+adblockers NOT good enough. I like (and hate) Brave's shield, as I never figured out how to use wildcards to whitelist a whole domain / subdomain, it seems per-host. But that Brave shield WORKS.
Now people are going back to Chrome? Really?
Brave is just one of the dozen Chromium-based browsers. It's still Chromium.
It's Chromium-based, sure. But it blocks ads and does it well
Too bad arnaud42 over on XDA Developers quit supporting Kiwi, even though was Chromium. It was my favorite browser ever for Android. Hopefully, someone will pick up the torch and keep it going soon.
The crypto bullshit Brave was (and somehow still is) pulling is way worse than Firefox's enshittificAItion.
You can disable all that stuff. We used to have email clients, newsgroup clients, HTML editors, etc. built into our browsers. It used to be about creating a suite of tools to meet all your needs on the web. Since then, all that stuff just moved to web apps that you access using the browser so that's mostly all that remains. Vivaldi still has an email client available. A crypto wallet isn't the end of the world. I look at it as sort of a modern throwback to Netscape Communicator, which Brendan Eich helped create.
The BAT stuff is definitely more controversial, but mostly only because Brave blocks others' ads in lieu of their own. It was an interesting idea to present an alternative method for a privacy-respecting ad-supported web. Personally, I wouldn't be as aggressive in blocking ads if they weren't so intrusive and didn't compromise my privacy or security. I look at that whole thing as a swing and miss. I'm not going to beat them up for trying something new when we can all see that the modern web is a cesspool.
You can still turn all that crap off, which is what I do when I use Brave, and you have a pretty solid browser.
Not really. You can use Brave completely ignoring crypto side, and it won't complain.
the crypto stuff is completely opt-in.
[flagged]
Oh? I'm installing it now, thank you!
do you have stats on how many others that is? Because I run FF and I don't run uBO, so.. I mean I understand the feeling based on one's own situation that it would kill the browser but just like Pauline Kael thinking nobody voted for Nixon so how could he win the fact that you think it would kill the browser does not mean that they are out of touch for saying they won't do it despite it bringing in money.
uBO works fine in Edge too.
Who selects these CEOs? It almost seems like a caste system at this point. You can be a complete clown, but it's the best we have in our small caste so you're the one.
They're selected by the board.
Meaning they select each other, because they're all on each other's board.
The current pattern in software is, sadly:
1. Innovate
2. Dominate
3. Enshitify to cash in.
You can't skip step #2.
Right now, Firefox's market share is a rounding error compared to Chrome. Users are starting to switch away from Chrome because it's currently in step 3 (in spades). That trend will not continue if Firefox beats Chrome to the bottom of the pig-pen. Firefox's current focus on AI is concerning enough, but mirroring Chrome's shift to Manifest v3 (i.e. What killed full-blooded ad blocking in Chrome) would be outright suicide.
Mozilla needs to listen to their users. Most don't particularly want "let me run that through an AI for you" popups everywhere. Practically nobody running Firefox wants to be cut off from effective ad blocking.
Monetization is hard, for Mozilla in particular. It was always weird that most of their funding came from Google. Now that Google is yanking it, Mozilla needs to find alternative sources of filthy lucre. However, if they destroy their product's only competitive advantages, there will be nothing left to monetize. If Firefox remains a browser that can provide decent privacy and ad-blocking then Mozilla has a chance to find alternative revenue streams. If, instead, Mozilla throws those advantages away to make a quick buck, that's the last buck they'll ever make.
Indeed, Mozilla has a particular bad habit of not listening to customers.
It shows even in the UI design. Features like tab pinning and tab groups work in ways that are sub-optimal to how users want to use them. A pinned tab should not be tied to a specific URL. If you go their forums you see a lot complaints, and weird thing is all the nonsensical arguments that their reps advance as to how these features should work the way they currently are. I as a longtime Firefox user can immediately see what is wrong with these features as implemented, but the devs won't listen. I wonder if they use FF themselves.
Firefox is also the only app on my MacBook that consistently brings the system to a crawl. Almost every single time my machines slows down, the solution is to kill Firefox. It's got to the point I don't even need to use Activity Monitor, I just kill Firefox and and system recovers.
It's gotten to the point I'm seriously looking at alternatives, trying out Orion and Helium browsers.
It took them AGES to finally implement tab groups and vertical tabs, two of the most requested features that pretty much all browsers browsers had at that point. They can barely hear Firefox users over the sound of google's millions filling up their bank.
I'm confused, because I desperately want pinned tabs to stay on their URL, but that's not what happens, and I end up with random URLs in these tabs because I click links. Is there a config flag I flipped without thinking?
It seems they have listened to users and allow pinned tabs to navigate to any url.
Initially this is how pinning worked, and along the way they changed it so that if you navigated to a different domain from the one you pinned, it opened in a new (unpinned) tab, which was jarring.
Now it seems they have reverted that change. So they seem to vacillate on the implementation.
Yeah, I don't get why I'd want to pin a tab and then change the url (which I do accidentally for a pinned tab every couple of weeks or so). When it's not the site I pinned, it's just...a tab?
Do you actually use the feature much?
From my experience I want to pin tabs because I simply want a set of tab available for use that remain visible when I scroll through a lot of tab headers to the right.
It's very annoying to be on a pinned tab, navigate to even just another server on the same root domain, and suddenly be pushed to another (un-pinned) tab. Even if navigate to a totally different url, I do no want to be pushed to another tab.
The enforcement of the url remaining the same should be done by myself, not the browser trying to second-guess me.
As far as I can tell, it's literally the only way I use pinned tabs (other than when I accidentally do navigate away on them due to the lack of enforcement). I have several pages I always want open (e.g. my email, a couple of messaging platforms, Spotify, the web portal for texting via my Android phone), and then I have some varying number of other tabs open that I use for anything else I'm currently using my browser for. I guess this is one of those things where everyone's preference is different, because to me, having a static set of pages I always want open is pretty much the ideal use case for a pinned tab. I can't really wrap my head around wanting to use them any other way; if they can navigate away, they're just like any other tab but harder to close, and I don't really have a use case for enforcing the minimum number of tabs to be larger than zero unless it's literally to force a specific page to always be open. I find it far more annoying to have to navigate a tab back to the state it was previously than to reopen a page from a tab I accidentally closed, so having an extra layer of protection on closing a tab isn't nearly as useful as if it also had that extra layer of protection on what the tab itself was showing.
edit: I don't see it as the browser second-guessing me as much as following what I'm already trying to do in the first place. I don't pin a tab if I don't actually want to keep that specific page open, and taking an action to preserve a state that I opted into isn't going around my specified intention, but following it.
Consider these thoughts:
1. Let's imagine I have pinned a dashboard url in my bank's website. After some time, I go back to it, it sees I've lost my session, redirects me to the login page, and bam, that login page open up in a random, un-pinned tab. How is that a good experience?? You might say I should pin the login url, but no, after login I always want to get to a specific dashboard page.
2. In my view, pinned tabs are not for specific urls; that is what the toolbar is for. Pinned tabs are, for me, simply a way to have the most important tabs you are working easily available. And that makes sense, because the set of tabs that are most important changes a lot from time to time. I frequently have hundreds, probably a thousand, tabs open. If I have to pin every single url I'd like to go back to, I'll quickly run out of room in no time.
So let's say depending on what I'm working in this month, suddenly I find myself using Github a lot, or Notion. Then it is far easier for me to open some of my pinned tab and just navigate to the new urls I want, rather that have to close each of them , then create new pinned tabs, and hope that if I click on something on the page that is minor, I will not be rudely pushed into another tab.
Summary: I think you are using pinned tabs for what the toolbar was designed for.
I'm not sure I understand how the toolbar can solve this problem. Unless I'm misunderstanding, I'd have to reopen the page every time when I click on the icons in the toolbar, in addition to not being able to interact with them in the same way as other tabs (e.g. using the keyboard to jump between them rather than needing to click). It's probable that the developer intent is closer to what you're describing, but I still maintain that what I'm looking for would be more useful for than the toolbar and that I don't personally have any use for what you're describing.
Maybe the difference here is that I don't ever have more than maybe a dozen tabs open total (including the half dozen pinned ones). To me, it seems more that you're using tabs for what browser history was designed for, and that you're using pinned tabs in a way that doesn't make sense unless you are using tabs in that way.
I guess we just have different use patterns, but at least you do see that problem with the scenario in point 1, don't you?
Try Zen Browser - it's reskinned Firefox.
> Now that Google is yanking it
Can you elaborate? Are they winding down their their participation in search licensing deals?
Looks like I was a little out of date.
https://itsfoss.com/news/mozilla-lifeline-is-safe/
Google pays Mozilla, basically to make Google the default search engine for everything in Firefox. Previously, it looked like an antitrust case was going to force them to stop doing that, but it didn't turn out that way.
Mozilla is still getting most of their money from Google and they shouldn't need to kneecap themselves to pay the rent. Still, you can't help but wonder what might happen if Firefox starts eating too much of Chrome's market share. Mozilla should be trying to branch out, but in a user friendly way.
I definitely heard there was a risk of that happening, but you're right that it seems not to have materialized. I'm honestly not sure what remedy they landed on or if they are still deliberating but I think a fascinating option that follows precedent would be a pop-up browser picker in Android instead of rolling Chrome as default, as that has precedent in other antitrust cases and could potentially change the market share issue overnight.
Another interesting one would be truly spinning off Chrome, but paying a search licensing fee to them, too. Actually, that's fascinating to consider in this context, because I know that option (spinning off the browser into its own company) has been criticized on the grounds that it would be unrealistic to assume a browser can simply monetize itself. Ironic given the Mozilla criticism.
> Now that Google is yanking it, Mozilla needs to find alternative sources of filthy lucre
How do Mozilla's costs look?
Is it him or is it you? I'd think within the Mozilla organization is a data trove of telemetry which renders a fairly good picture of how many users actually are using ad blockers.
If nobody is using ad-blockers then disabling them wouldn’t bring in any additional revenue.
Yep, and that's how he arrived at the $number. If a small number of people were using ad blockers, the cited sum would approach $0 since disabling ad blockers would affect very few page views, right?
Is that true? What if Google just pays them $150m to disable ad blockers?
Not sure if that's legal or whatever but killing ad blockers is probably worth it for Google.
Google wouldn't spend $150m to block adblockers if nobody was using adblockers.
As a decades long Mozilla fan, who has stayed true to the fox even with the rise of Chrome, Mozilla breaking adblocking would make me uninstall the fox and never come back. I feel that many of the so called greybeards here feel similar. Once adblocking is gone, users will be too and Mozilla will fall faster than Nokia did
Each Firefox add-on has a counter of the number of users. It doesn't require some "data trove of telemetry".
In a purely hypothetical world people could have disabled telemetry and also shared add ons on floppies instead of installing them from the store.
I think it is him. Chrome making blocking harder is one of the issues that has been pushing some users away (and a good portion of those in the direction of FF). If FF is not better is that regard then those moving away for that reason will go elsewhere, and those who are there already at least in part for that reason will move away.
If this happened it would be the final straw for me, if I wasn't already looking to change because of them confirming the plan to further descend into the great “AI” cult.
Not sure what your point is? It doesn't matter the number of users, because the GP's point is that those users are going to immediately bail, for a browser thsy supports ad block.
So that extra money will never materialize. And usage numbers will again crater. This is the point.
(You can disagree with that assessment, but that has nothing to do with telemetry, which cannot gauge users hanging around with blocked .. adblockers)
The question is what happens if he thinks the browser will die without that money. Is it a hill to die on?
For me as a user it is, but is it for him as a CEO?
> he thinks cutting adblock can bringing in money.
It may kill the browser in a longer window, but before that, it would make them money. Most users do not donate anyway.
> The fact he thinks otherwise tells me how out of touch he is.
We don't know what he really thinks. Maybe he knows it's a risk he wouldn't want to take but presents it as a goodwill
Firefox has a market share around 3%. Even most technologists stopped using it long ago. Many banks and government websites don’t even support it anymore and loudly tell people to use Chrome instead, especially in developing countries.
Nothing can kill Firefox, because it’s already dead for all practical purposes.
I use Firefox as my daily browser. If i have a website that fails to work, I might try chrome maybe once every two months. And then it usually also doesn't work. So for all browsing I do on the internet, Firefox works like a charm
well I use it because it can handle 2000 tabs on my m1 macbook air (16gb ram)
... damn do I have adhd?????
Get the OneTab extension. It'll save and close all those tabs. That way you won't have Firefox crashing during startup once you exceed the number of tabs it can handle (a few thousand).
Tip: the crashing is caused by certain extensions such as OneTab and All Tabs Helper which for some reason seem to cause all the tabs to load, just when restoring a session. Temporarily disable these extensions before restoring, then you can reenable.
I have 117 thousand tabs, and it starts up fine. Just adjust your shm ratio.
(I'm kidding)
I've had it function just fine around 9000 tabs.
Doesn't Firefox natively unload tabs these days?
You can also just do tab groups in ffx
Amateur numbers... I've tested over 10000 (not right now)... It used to get really slow after 9000, but things seem to have improved.
Were all tabs loaded though? If one tab takes 10 Mb of RAM (very low estimate; many take 50-100 Mb, especially Youtube), then 10K tabs require 100Gb.
I’ve started seeing tabs that weigh in at multiple gbs. Cloud provider consoles are particularly egregious examples here.
I use Chrome and have 1500 tabs on my MacBook Pro. I'm a packrat.
> Many banks and government websites don’t even support it anymore and loudly tell people to use Chrome instead, especially in developing countries.
I cannot remember the last time I came across one myself.
Reading comments here about problems using Firefox is odd to me as I never run into them. I feel like people are taking about totally different browsers. I don't remember the last time I had page rendering issues or was asked to use a different browser.
Its the same kind of people that claim Linux is too unstable for them, and when you ask when they tried it they say 15 years ago.
I've been using Linux on my desktop for ten years and I definitely experience bugs and performance issues with Firefox from time to time that don't occur in Chrome. It's rare but common enough to keep Chrome around as a fallback.
A few: Developer tools are quite slow; Airline websites often break during checkout; JS games and video players sometimes stutter or use a lot of CPU
I last tried Ubuntu as a daily driver in 2009. How has Linux reliability improved for consumers since then?
My favorite anecdote on this front: someone posted a comment on Lemmy, a fediverse alternative to Reddit, claiming Arch was "broken" and Linux users were delusional for thinking it was functional for the average person.
And when people ask them what they meant, they revealed that they used some package from the arch user repository that apparently required manual compiling for every update.
And instead of thinking that this wasn't the unusual behavior of a particular package, they insisted that this was the normal Linux packaging experience, which was why Linux as a whole was a terrible operating system.
A bunch of commenters chimed in emphasizing that the whole package distribution system in Linux is designed to among other things, handle dependencies and avoid manual compiling (though it's available as an option), and they were all dismissed as just being fanboy apologists.
Same. I mean, I'm sure there have been cases where I've switched to Chrome for certain things. I just got a custom viewfinder for my partner for Christmas, is showing a bunch of photos of the cruise that we went on. And they have an online editor for it, but the editor seemed to be glitching when using Firefox. So I moved to Chrome. Later I realized I was just misunderstanding and it actually just worked fine in Firefox.
And I'm able to access my bank, my credit cards, my utility bills, in Firefox without issue. So I'm not sure what people are talking about.
One thing I am familiar with though in the aftermath of gamergate was a bunch of motivated reasoning to complain about games and insist that they had design flaws or bugs, when really? The bugs weren't real but were kind of just a different way of saying We Don't Like This Game. And so reports of perceived bugs in some cases are as much a social phenomenon as they are a sincere representation of software functionality.
I don't want to say there's no bugs but for every one person's unsubstantiated anecdote, I seem to be able to find two people able to reproduce a functional version of the experience without issue. And just to zoom in on the bank login issue in particular, I use a credit union with an old decrepit HTTP site that was recently updated to a slightly less old and decrepit HTTP site. Plaid is unable to successfully log in, but the web interface works perfectly fine on Firefox mobile.
Most of the service sites I use are fine in Firefox running on Linux. The only thing I use that is problematic is the Microsoft 365 with Teams portal an employer uses. So I have Chromium just for that one.
Teams is straight up broken on web and in its native client. Not sure it’s fair to blame firefox for that.
Yes, I wonder if the rise of the Web Platform Tests have made browser behaviour much more consistent?
It happens so rarely, I don’t keep Chrome installed and have to download a new version of Ungoogled Chromium when I need to see if something only works in Chrome, which I can only remember doing about twice in the last year!
It's not page rendering issues, usually, since Firefox and Chrome pretty much support all the same things.
What you run into the most is the website saying, hey, it looks like you are not using a browser we have tested against, so we are not going to let you log in. Please come back when you have Chrome, edge, or Safari.
Never had this problem - so far - on Linux. Maybe it has something to do with using a sucker operating systems.
That happens quite often these days. Last week I was filling in a govt form (EU country), submit button didn't work in FF, so I had to resort to using Microsoft Chrome. On my company's training platform videos aren't rendered in FF. Another shitty corporate portal which shows my salary and holidays doesn't work in FF at all, completely. What else... A few smaller payment providers weren't working in FF over past two years. Ghost of the Skype before being finally killed only worked in Chrome clones. Stadia only worked in Chrome (yes, I used it and it was fine).
Also many sites show significant degradation in FF lately. Youtube works like shit in FF, once every 10 page opens it just gets stuck half way with part of the background loaded, like black with black empty frames on top. Or just empty page. No, it never finishes loading from that state, and neither it can reload on F5. But opening a new tab works fine and YT loads normally.
And to finish off this rant, FF has now started corrupting my open tabs after opening FF with saved session. This never happened since this feature was implemented and in 2025 has happened 3 times already. And in mozilla bugtracker all tickets about this are ignored for years now. Meanwhile they are developing some crappy bells and whistles, instead of fixing fundamental bugs.
If not for Chrome monopoly, I would consider switching browsers. Ladybird can't come soon enough. Mozilla has lost touch with reality.
Having switched to Firefox about 10 months ago, one thing I notice is every site I visit works but a lot of sites load way slower than Chrome. YouTube is a big one.
How much of that is Firefox rendering being worse vs artificial slowdowns by Google owned sites kind of doesn't matter in the end. Objectively it's a slower browsing experience but I solely use it for uBlock Origin.
I've been using Orion browser (WebKit-based with support for Chrome and Firefox extensions) for quite some time and haven't had this issue with YouTube, but I've definitely experienced the same with Firefox. If it's an issue of artificial slowdowns, you'd think they'd apply it to anything not running on Chrome's engine, which makes me think it's specifically Firefox's rendering causing this issue.
User-Agent Switcher usually sorts them out
It very strongly depends on which country you live in.
In which country are you seeing that?
For me the biggest offender are usually Google products and sometimes the lazy-coded website written by incompetents and whose audience is the tech illiterate (i.e. some websites involving schools/teaching) that just tell you "use latest Chrome just to be sure, download here" to, well, just be sure. Notable mentions for government websites that are like 10 years in the past and that are still on the "Supports Firefox" side because, well, they are just always late to everything.
I live in Australia and I can't log into government services using my myGov account on Firefox. Works fine on Chromium.
Usually that's because of third party cookies the government websites love to use for authentication. FF and Safari by default blocks them but both can be disabled temporarily to use those websites. Chrome is more lax on them since ad networks love cross origin cookies as well.
I have no issues with mygov in firefox (on linux of all platforms). I don't even whitelist ublock origin on that domain. Check your other extensions.
MyGov works fine on Firefox but I do use incognito window with no extensions for them. I’d say it’s probably one of your extensions.
I live in Australia and have been using Firefox for all my myGov needs without even thinking about it
Which service do you have issues with?
Wow. Force-Supporting the same company they're battling daily, on multiple issues.
Lack of joined up thinking.
While governments battle big tech on some issues, they are very much on the same side on others. They both want more tracking for example - the governments want to regulate it, and there is a battle for control of the data, but both want the data to be collected by someone.
Just to test I just logged into myGov then through Firefox and it worked fine.
Seems really dumb to let a crappy bank site dictate what browser you use for everything else.
3% market share is 150 million active users give or take. That's no death by any count in the software world.
Gosh, I really wish Mozilla would just dig into their user-base and find a way to adequately become sustainable... or find a way to make it work better as a foundation that is NOT maintained by Google, ie like the Wiki Foundation. I do spend a LOT of time in FF, can't anyone see there's a value beyond selling ads and personal info that could make Mozilla more sustainable, dependable and resilient?
This 3% number is deceptive.
The whole desktop market is cratering.
I was talking to a reddit mod a few months ago. He was looking at the subreddit stats. 95% of his users were on mobile.
Think about that. We desktop users are dinosaurs.
So FireFox having a 3% market share might actually mean more than half of desktop users are on FireFox.
It is the desktop where Firefox has a 4% market share right now. Once you consider all traffic it drops down to 2%.
Source: https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worl...
I think you're right, but it's important to emphasize many of these attempts to tell the story of market share get major facts catastrophically wrong. The decline in Firefox market share from like 33% to below 10% is mostly because the world pivoted to mobile, and Firefox "dominance" was in a world of desktop browsers. It was defaults and distribution lock-in as the world pivoted to mobile that led to the change in market share. As well as the web as a whole effectively tripling in number of users, and Google leveraging its search monopoly and pushing out Chromebooks effectively at cost.
For some reason that part of the story always seems to get omitted, which I find bizarre. But the web pivoted to mobile and Google flexed its monopoly powers. I would argue that upwards of 95% of the change in market share is explained by those two factors.
No, the decline of Firefox market share happened in the early 2010s, on desktop, when everyone switched to Chrome because it felt way faster. I say "everyone" - this is the subset of "everyone" who were switched on enough to use a non-default browser in the first place. The rest used IE or Safari, dependent on platform.
What happened in the last 6 months or so to affect those numbers? According to them, Chrome increased in percentage quite a but recently and the others all got "compressed" towards 0.
Looking at the last 10 years gives a different perspective (not great for Firefox but maybe underscores something is different recently in general):
https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worl...
I can't imagine browsing the web on my phone and tablet without Firefox mobile. That would honestly be the biggest loss once this CEO takes this nonsense to the logical end.
I'm genuinely curious. What does FireFox mobile have over it's competition?
You can't install UBlock Origin on mobile.
Like I still use FireFox on mobile, just purely out of habit. I don't really see anything better about it (I am quite inexperienced when it comes to phones).
You can install uBlock Origin on Firefox mobile; it's the only reason I use it.
Oh wow TIL. Thanks, that is amazing.
I just looked it up. 2023 was when it started. I'm surprised Android even allows something like this.
Yeah at some point it wasn't possible. I think Mozilla did some workaround by having a bunch of wetted extensions?
Pretty sure even back then, uBO was on the list of vetted extensions. I remember using it prior to 2023 (since like 2019), on my old OnePlus 6. There may have been a period it wasn’t available, but surely it wasn’t gone for too long.
I use several extensions on Fennec mobile: AdGuard AdBlocker, Google & YouTube cookie consent popup blocking, NoScript, Privacy Badger, Translate this page, Web Archives, uBlacklist
you can even use extensions like vimium. it made using the galaxy xr much more usable than chrome
You can also install uBlock Origin on Edge for Android btw.
> Many banks and government websites don’t even support it
Because their web developers are too lazy to write anything to proper standards. They're doing some kind of lazy "Check for Chrome, because everyone must be running that, if not, redirect to an Unsupported page".
I've yet to find a website that "refuses" to work in Firefox which doesn't work just fine when I use a user agent switching extension to present a standard Chrome on MacOS or Chrome on Windows useragent.
Are you sure they're all lazy?
Another pretty common experience for developers is wanting to do things "the right way", but being overridden by management.
Yes, because in this case "the right way" is to do nothing.
When they say "don't support it anymore", does that mean they're back to the IE era of using Chrome specific technologies so it doesn't work in any browser, do they use user-agent sniffing and show a big popup, or is it just that they're not testing it in FF anymore? The latter shouldn't be an issue as long as they use standards, the only thing they would run into in this day and age is browser specific bugs - but Safari seems to have that the most.
It's exclusively UA sniffing. IMO, Firefox should take the nuclear option and just start reporting the Chrome UA.
No, they mostly just show a popup telling you to use Chrome. Websites work fine if you switch the user agent.
Have not used Chrome-based browsers 3+ years and never had problem with Firefox. Sometimes Safari was not working 100% - but nothing serious. Maybe it is because, only page from google I use is Youtube; however Firefox has best experience there, even better than Chrome - thanks to proper uBlock Origin.
Wikimedia stats from last year put it at 15% of desktop browsers, ahead of Safari and Edge.
Yeah, every website has different stats about user-agents, depends a lot on the types of users you attract. I bet HN has Firefox usage ratio above 15% for sure, while sites like Instagram probably has way below the global average.
Global browser marketshare never made much sense. You need to figure out what your users use, then aim to be compatible for most of those, and ignore any global stats.
I wouldn't be surprised if there's a correlation between people frequenting Wikimedia websites and people using Firefox. It would be nice to know.
If people are curious, all the stats for Wikimedia properties are here: https://analytics.wikimedia.org/dashboards/browsers/#desktop...
As of December 7th, Firefox is 10.3% of traffic there. This makes it the #2 browser, after Chrome (at 62.2%) -- a spot it has been dueling with Edge over for the last year or so.
I'm inclined to think that "people visiting wikipedia" is a fairly representative sample of "normal users", overall.
I'm inclined to think that "people visiting wikipedia" skews heavily towards "people who like facts" which is distinctly not a normal web viewer.
Given the current state of the Chrome family of browsers and the anti adblocker stance from Google, i'd think that alone would guarantee Firefox a steady user base.
Not sure how users cope with Chrome-based browsers and intrusive ads.
That's just a wishful thinking. Too many ordinary users accept ads as inevitable annoyances and don't even know about the very existence of adblockers.
Maybe because they don't know any better.
Of course, but how would you convince them to switch? Not just your friends, but as a whole.
You could suggest installing Firefox next to Chrome and install uBlock Origin on it. Open YouTube and show them that there are zero ads. They will likely see a contrast.
If only they could see ads for ad blockers.
I've tried a few times to convince people in my life who would self describe as "bad with computers" to download an adblocker, but they usually find the friction too high. Adding extensions is unfamiliar for most, and even if it seems very basic for us, the non-tech people I know don't really want to deal with the risk of unknown unknowns from that, let alone switching to a healthier browser. (Perhaps reasonable since it feels like these days half the extensions on the Chrome Web Store are spyware or adware behind the scenes.)
I also suspect that those who lived through the days of frequent Windows errors and Chrome running out of memory all the time often expect software to fail in weird and unexpected ways, and a lot of people adopt a "don't fix it if it isn't broken" mindset.
Still, uBlock Lite and Brave browser are definitely easy wins and I'm glad to see more random people in my life using them than I would have expected. :)
If it's the computer of an older family member or something, just put Firefox and ubo on their system for them and be done with it. They will use whatever software is preloaded, and being shown how to use it is a much lower barrier to entry than the cognitive load of finding, vetting, installing, and configuring new software.
I used to try to patiently explain why people should do xyz. Now I explain to people why I'm going to change xyz on their device, and if they don't slam the breaks I just do what needs to be done right then. If someone doesn't know what an adblocker is they are getting one so they can see for themselves and reflect on what companies have been putting them through for years to make some incremental amount of money.
The last time uBlock Origin caused me any pain was a on a toys r us rewards management site.
That's really funny. Yes, in case it wasn't clear for others reading this and thinking about installing these, it's almost certain that uBlock Origin and Brave browser will not cause you any problems and if you're using stock Chrome I really encourage you improve your situation dramatically for ~5 minutes worth of effort.
that 3% is of total users including mobile which chrome is king because it's basically force fed to users. this is important because there is no choice with browsers for the common mobile user, most of them don't know what is a browser even if they used it every day. also in the 2000s IE was king because guess what? that was what came preinstalled with winxp
Exactly! I keep banging this drum but I'm fascinated by the possibility of Android being required to have a pop-up where people can choose different browsers, as a potential remedy to Google's monopoly. Because engineering a path dependency on Google search, from mobile hardware, to software, to default browsers, to default search on the browser, I think is part of how they've enforced their monopoly. There's been a legal judgment that they are, in fact a monopoly, but I don't think any remedy has been decided on yet. And there's a lot of historical precedent for a pop-up to select a default as a remedy to software monopolies.
Granted in Google's case, it seems that the Monopoly judgment was with respect to ad markets, but locking people into search to serve ads might be understood as part of the structure of that monopoly.
Most of those sites are doing a little move called "lying". I occasionally (once every couple of months) run into a site claiming to not support Firefox. I can't recall a single site that wasn't a tech demo of some bleeding edge feature of Chrome that didn't magically start working when I turned on my Chrome UserAgent.
(Hey, if you work at Snapchat: fix your shit. Your desktop site is by far the most mainstream website I've come across that lies like this)
This is completely untrue in my experience. I use firfox exclusively on my personal laptop and have done exclusively for years. I don’t even have chromium installed.
I can’t remember the last time a website was unusable on firefox. It’s certainly not common.
> Even most technologists stopped using it long ago.
Funny, because chrome has always been the browser for laptops users, while Firefox has always been the browser of power users.
My software stopped working because its drawing on canvas in a way that causes firefox to glitch with hw acceleration enabled. Not one of my customers/users complained
The only reasons I've ever put effort into Firefox support in my software was A) I find it helps push me to write towards standards better if I include multiple browser engines, which makes it more likely I'll support Safari without extra effort, which is difficult for me to test on because I don't daily drive any Apple devices (works about 80% of the time), and B) to avoid the shit-fit I would receive if I ever posted it as a "Show HN." It has never come up as an actual user requirement.
This is academic discussion, where you think when X is said it means this, somebody (others here) think its that and so on. Grasping straws and all. I guess when around Christmas work churn slows down and some people spend more (too much?) time here.
> No, it will just kill the browser. The fact he thinks otherwise tells me how out of touch he is.
Believe me when I say this but 99.99999% of the human population does not give a shit what is Firefox, Chrome, Edge, Brave, whatever.
Their survival is completely detached from how "good" it is. As long as it runs, opens a page, opens picture, plays video.
We all live in the tech bubble, to them its an "app" that is "annoying me with ads". And that if they know its an ad, not just part of the page. That is if they even know its a page, not just something my son told me to click if I want to go to "Facebook".
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It's a common cognitive error called Moral Thought-Action Fusion. The idea is that thinking about an action implies a desire to perform the action. You will see these in other circumstances as well. One place it is commonly used is in describing non-religious moral systems that must form their moral bases without axioms from God. A non-religious person may form a considered position against murder, for instance, but the fact that they state the pros and cons before choosing against is considered evidence that they wanted to.
The core reasoning system here is probably moral intuitionism: if you have an explanation for why something is bad, it is not something you consider intuitively bad and consequently you must be wanting to do it.
I think I've seen it in online communities a lot more in the last couple of decades, and I suspect it's just a characteristic of the endless march of Eternal September.
Don't really agree here. The point against him is thinking in a very shallow way that stopping ad block means bringing in so much, which I guess is true in a certain basic level, but ignores how shitty that would contribute to making the internet.
And believe it or not, human behavior is such that something that is not even i in the space of possibilities is much less likely to occur that something that has been considered and rejected. It might have been rejected ow, but what the calculus changes?
> which I guess is true in a certain basic level...
Which is the level he's acknowledging it on. Short term profit that cannibalises product value and user goodwill is all-too-common in the modern corporate climate, and he's acknowledging the elephant in the room.
> ...but ignores how shitty that would contribute to making the internet
Presumably, that would be the reason "he considers it "off-mission""
While I agree that him phrasing his reason not to so weakly instead of "doing so would kill firefox" is a little concerning, a CEO probably doesn't want to be overly honest about the other, less investor-friendly elephant in the room, "the only reason anyone uses Firefox is for uBO".
But also, we don't actually know how exactly he said it, since it's not a direct quote. For all we know, it was an offhanded remark, or he said it in a tone that meant he knew what a terrible idea it was. We're trying to read tea-leaves from a single paraphrased remark.
To some extent I agree, but if someone is deep in the weeds of speculation, not just saying pros and cons of murder in general but also having drawn up lists of people with pros and cons of murdering each of them and possible ways of doing so, then that's starting to get a little suspicious. Perhaps not bad in itself, but suspicious.
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I don't think HN comments have an irrational burning pit of hate for Mozilla. If Mozilla was shaped more like the Tor foundation in their words and actions I think a lot more people would be supportive.
There is no "HN comments". Each commenter has its own sensibilities. Some of them just saw the word Adblock from new ceo and went full defense mode without trying to understand that the guy was just talking about what he feels is good, and there is no need to come with the worst possible interpretation of each sentence.
He may have a bad model of the world, but at least he is somewhat aligned with the user base.
Yeah, the article's quoting didn't help its case. It doesn't seem fair to quote someone saying [I don't think X is a good idea] as evidence they are about to do X.
That being said, in the original context [0] it does sound a lot more like an option on the table. That original article presents it as the weakest of a list of things they're about to explore - but who knows, maybe the journalist has butchered what was said. It is an ambiguous idea without more context about how close it is to Mozilla trying to make life hard for ad-blockers.
[0] https://www.theverge.com/tech/845216/mozilla-ceo-anthony-enz...
In addition "off-mission" is a pretty weak way to describe completely destroying your credibility and betraying your user base. Building the Firefox phone was off mission. Buying Pocket was off mission. Maybe it's just me, but selling your remaining faithful users down the river to make a quick buck from advertisers seems a little, I don't know... worse than that?
It might just as well have been something that was supposed to sound young and fun ("I don't want to do that") and ends up leaving too much room for interpretation.
If you have the power to do something, saying you might do it but that you don't want to makes people imagine you'd do it. If you have a knife and talk about how you "might stab people, but don't want to", that's a very different message than having a knife and saying "obviously I'm not going to stab people, violence is not an option".
The latter reassures, the former depends heavily on what the recipient of the message thinks of you, and whether they can imagine you stabbing people.
If that quote was accurate, then either he just said something and wanted to wing it, or they should reconsider their communication strategists.
The part about making money through advertising and selling data to 3rd parties (though "search and AI placement deals") is already not a good sign. Planning to make their money through ads and surveillance capitalism is already making it impossible to say "I always know my data is in my control. I can turn the thing off, and they’re not going to do anything sketchy"
Except that expressing loud doubts about something ethically dubious is often a sign that an opposite action will be taken. So many business people want this moral excuse "but I had doubts" while being totally cynical
Logically that is setting up an argument where no matter what the CEO says you're going to assume they're going to take an action. If they say yea, obviously it is a yes. If they say nay, it means they're thinking about it which is basically a yes! That is a completely reasonable position, often it makes sense to ignore what someone says and focus only on their capabilities. But if that is the situation then it doesn't make any sense to quote what someone says because it is about to be ignored.
My point is to have an evaluation of the cynicism behind that guy's words; so it's not about ignoring what he says - in fact, the opposite
"feels off mission" exposes how little conviction there is behind this position.
That is a flimsy tissue paper statement about a concept that should be a bedrock principle.
It's irrationally charitable to give it any credit at all. Especially in context where anyone who's awake should understand they need to be delivering an unquestionably clear message about unquestionably clear goals and core values, because this ain't that.
Or rather, it is a clear message, just a different message to a different audience.
yeah, it reads to me like "we probably shouldn't do it"
which is just prep talk for "if we need it, we could do it"
It's definitely testing the waters.
You wouldn't calculate the expected RoI of killing adblockers if killing adblockers was never considered.
Part of being CEO/running a business is considering all options, but it doesn't mean it will ever move beyond the ROI/risk phase. Ever read one of the risk assessments in a companies public filings? It's the same thing.
Finally, a situation besides “are we the baddies” where a Mitchell and Webb sketch is highly relevant.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_4J4uor3JE
Have you tried "Introduce AI summaries and kill the adblockers" ?
Part of being a CEO is also being the public face of the product, and knowing what to say and how.
On day one he’s put his appearance on the top of hacker news under “is Mozilla trying to kill himself?”.
All options that are in line with the organization’s mission.
The CEO of an organization like Mozilla even considering blocking adblockers for profit is like the president of Amnesty International considering to sell lists of dissidents to the secret police.
> The CEO of an organization like Mozilla even considering blocking adblockers for profit is like the president of Amnesty International considering to sell lists of dissidents to the secret police.
No, for Amnesty International it would be more like not considering somebody a political prisoner because the country that took the prisoner is a 1st world country and they don't want to expose themselves on a matter that would risk the donations from a certain population.
Yes, that happened in the aftermath of the Catalan attempt at peaceful independence in October 2017 by Amnesty International Spain.
But the secret police said they would "real good care" of those dissidents, while sliding double the money initially offered.
Yes, the problem is that it is considered an option at all. Are they running ROIs on harvesting passwords, blackmailing users and infecting all clients with malware?
It's not hard to imagine the last default search contract negotiation had Google go "we'll give you $x if you kill manifest v2, $x-$150 million if you don't."
edited to correct my misunderstanding.
Firefox supports Manifest v3, they just didn't kill Manifest v2 after implementing it.
for it to be considered, somebody must have offered to pay that 150M. Or he considered going to somebody (we all know that somebody is Google) and asking them for that money in return for killing ad blockers.
That was my read too, he's making a public offer, and setting the minimum negotiation price.
> You wouldn't calculate the expected RoI of killing adblockers if killing adblockers was never considered.
I agree, although if someone isn't the kind of person who would calculate that, they're probably not the person who will become the CEO of a company that size in the first place. I don't think organizations have the right incentives in place to push people with those values to the top.
You wouldn't calculate a figure and publish it as the first step in any reasonable price negotiation. Any pricing you mention publicly would be double or triple the number you are willing to accept. By the time you are talking publicly about realistic numbers you are well into the private negotiations.
I could see myself saying something like that despite having no intention to do it. But I'm also not a CEO.
I agree with all the people saying it would drive a lot of the remaining users away, and I hope they don't do it. But I'm not remotely surprised that they considered following what their biggest competitor (Chrome) already did.
Because Chrome was built by the world's biggest advertising company. If the World Wildlife Fund started selling ivory to pay the bills, would that not be surprising?
That analogy doesn't really work, though: Mozilla's goal is not specifically to fight against online advertising. Ad-blocking is connected to their goals, definitely, but they clearly have to make compromises, and I'm not that surprised that they'd think about that one.
> they clearly have to make compromises
Why? They have ample free cashflow. They haven't had money problems in 10 years. If they're worried about Google withdrawing support they should save money in an endowment, not do things to help Google.
“I wouldn’t sell sexual services. I’ve spent an evening checking the going market rate for someone my age in my area and it’s 2k! Can you believe that? That’s a ton of money! Totally not going to do it though”.
It’s an eyebrow raising comment at the very least.
The OP doesn't even say "Totally not going to do it", merely "it feels off-mission", so a vibe check away from doing it.
https://xkcd.com/463/
> It feels off-mission.
That's supposedly The Verge paraphrasing the CEO (Unfortunately I can't verify because the full article requires subscription.) I would like to know what the CEO actually said because "it feels off-mission" is a strange thing for the leader of the mission to say. I would hope that they know the mission inside out. No need to go by feels.
Here's that part of the article:
> In our conversation, Enzor-DeMeo returns often to two things: that Mozilla cares about and wants to preserve the open web, and that the open web needs new business models. Mozilla’s ad business is important and growing, he says, and he worries “about things going behind paywalls, becoming more closed off.” He says the internet’s content business isn’t exactly his fight, but that Mozilla believes in the value of an open and free (and thus ad-supported) web.
> At some point, though, Enzor-DeMeo will have to tend to Mozilla’s own business. “I do think we need revenue diversification away from Google,” he says, “but I don’t necessarily believe we need revenue diversification away from the browser.” It seems he thinks a combination of subscription revenue, advertising, and maybe a few search and AI placement deals can get that done. He’s also bullish that things like built-in VPN and a privacy service called Monitor can get more people to pay for their browser. He says he could begin to block ad blockers in Firefox and estimates that’d bring in another $150 million, but he doesn’t want to do that. It feels off-mission.
> One way to solve many of these problems is to get a lot more people using Firefox. And Enzor-DeMeo is convinced Mozilla can get there, that people want what the company is selling. “There is something to be said about, when I have a Mozilla product, I always know my data is in my control. I can turn the thing off, and they’re not going to do anything sketchy. I think that is needed in the market, and that’s what I hope to do.”
I don't like how he assumes that a free internet must be ad-supported. The ad-supported web is hideous, even with their ads removed. A long, convoluted, inane mess of content.
On the other hand, the clean web feels more direct, to the point, and passionate. I prefer to read content written by passion, not by money seeking purposes.
If something is free (en masse), you are probably a product. If you don't want to be a product you need to give something out instead, like ads.
That's not correct. Linux is free, almost all open source is, many projects, websites are done out of passion.
I contribute to open source projects and nobody "gave me something", as I did it because I wanted to make it better. Like me, there are many others. Nobody is "the product" there.
What the saying you are misrepresenting means is "carefully check free things as you may be the product". Not "free things cannot exist, you either are the product or you pay".
Linux development is paid for either directly or in-kind by companies including Red Hat, IBM, Canonical, Oracle, and others. It's free to use and mostly open source but if it existed only on passion it would be something far less than it actually is.
People need to eat and have a roof over their heads.
Those companies pay the improvements they want for their usage case, which is usually far removed from what normal users want. I don't really need support for thousands of CPUs and terabytes of RAM.
Do you remember what Linux was like before the big corporations started contributing/supporting it? Just getting X11 working with your video card and monitor could take hours or days. Setting up a single server could easily be a "project" taking weeks. And god forbid you ever had to update it.
That in particular was thanks to the X.Org foundation. And while it made things easier, it didn't take "days" setting up a graphics, it took hours at most. And setting up a server didn't take weeks, it was an 1-2 day task at worst.
> If something is free (en masse), you are probably a product.
If something being free ever mattered to your privacy, it hasn't for a long time. Today no matter how expensive something is you are probably a product anyway. Unethical and greedy companies don't care how much money you paid them, they'll want the additional cash they'll get from selling you out at every opportunity. Much of my favorite software is free and doesn't compromise my privacy.
Fine, but don't make my machine do work as part of the agreement between host and advertiser (the only reason I can utilize an ad blocker in the first place). And definitely don't try to make it so my machine can't object to you trying. On top of all that, most places want to take my money, AND force ads, AND make my machine part of the process.
I thought the "free" in "free web" was supposed to mean "free as in freedom," not "free as in beer." Have we really reached the point where the CEO of Mozilla no longer understands or cares about that distinction?
> a pretty uncharitable interpretation
like hoping for the best, but planning for the worst, you must interpret people's intentions using the same methodology. By quoting that axing adblock could be bringing $150mil, but also saying that he doesn't want to do it, it's advertising that a higher price would work - it's a way to deniably solicit an offer.
So then we should interpret Bruno adopting this uncharitable interpretation as evidence they are intentionally trying to ruin Mozillas reputation rather than sincerely analysing an interview, right?
And in turn my comment above is not a honest remark that your suggested interpretation strategy seems to be selectively applied, but rather an attempt to hurt your standing with your peers.
Do you really harbor so much charity towards tech CEOs that you can't see its other meaning as at least equally as likely?
It costs Mozilla literally nothing to reassure its privacy and user-controlled principles. Instead we got a jk...unless... type of response. This is cowardice and like another commenter has said, a negotiation offer disguised as a mission statement.
"Uncharitable interpretation" is putting it mildly. I don't know the context for the quote but imagine being the CEO. You might give one hour interview outlining the tradeoffs you need to do to keep things running, and a random blogger takes a 5 second clip, makes an absurd interpretation and ends up on hackernews.
Right, I was ready for the headline to be this like deep dive into the history of letting go of several engineers, or assessing the costs of purchasing pocket, or a deep dive into source code changes related to dabbling in ad tech or something.
You know, actual reporting sourcing something new. But in truth, it was just extrapolating a bunch of sweet nothings from the freezing of a quote already published in The Verge. It reminds me of Boston media market sports reporting. You're a sports writer, you have a deadline, and you have to take Curt Schilling's press conference and try and turn it into a story. So take something he said and squeeze it dry, trying to extract some implication of clubhouse drama, to drive the next new cycle and survive to your next paycheck as a reporter. That's the grift, that's the grind.
I'm not sure it's that uncharitable...
The original quote was apparently said without an understanding of the customer base as if ad blockers were not a core piece of their value proposition.
This person doesn't understand their customer if they think it's going to bring in more money to cut ad blockers... It would bring in far less money because they would lose most of their customer base. It's not off mission: it's off Target.
I would go as far to say that ad blockers are the primary value proposition of Firefox at this point. If they lose that, I have little reason to use it on my phone or my workstations.
I'm concerned about the original quote which has a very weak sentiment. "it feels off-mission". Not something strong like "I'm completely against it" or "we'll never do that".
Even better would be similar to the article sentiment: "we could get 150 million now but degrade one of our few features that distinguishes us from other browsers + break a lot user trust, which would bring greater losses in the long term".
That just seems like an ordinary case of purity test syndrome. What they said is they don't want to do it, but they're being convicted of a hypothetical belief in wanting to hypothetically do it maybe, maybe which is the last refuge of scoundrels who have no stronger sourcing for more well-grounded accusations. But in internet comment sections there's no need for accountability or charitable interpretation, and so you can accuse someone of practically anything and it's their job to bend over backwards against the most skeptical interpretations to pass the purity test. So there's a metagame not just of indicating your values but of extrapolating as to all the possible permutations of uncharitable interpretation that could lead to accusations so that you have to artfully construct your phrasing to get out ahead of that. It's never on the internet trolls making the accusation to be accountable to ordinary norms of charitable interpretation.
I wish the CEO of Mozilla could have stated the commitment a little more strongly than “it feels off-mission”. Privacy, user control, and security of the web browsing experience are (or should be) the CORE of Mozilla's mission. This isn’t a decision to take lightly on vibes. Allowing ad-blockers (or any content manipulation plugins users want) should be a deep commitment.
It isn't even true that it would bring $150M. This is a calculation accounting on users staying on Firefox.
If they do that, most of the remaining users would flee and goodbye to your millions if you don't have any userbase anymore to justify asking money to anyone.
CEOs are well known for turning down money, and always resisting the urge to squeeze every last drop of good will from an acquired property, right?
I think it's an apt warning, I'd have to read the literal interview transcripts to really draw a conclusion one way or the other. But the simple fact that this is on his mind, and felt like mentioning killing ad block was something Mozilla could do, and is considering doing, was a safe thing to say to a journalist... There's not a chance in hell I'd say anything remotely like that to a journalist.
When someone tells you who they are, believe them.
That's peanuts. Google would pay them a lot more to disable adblocking for good. And it sounds like this guy would do it for the right amount. That said, it is kind of a lackluster article.
"It feels off-mission" is incredibly weak opposition to something that would go against core values. It just means this guy's price is higher than 150 million dollars.
Everybody has their price. I'm ideologically opposed to advertising but if someone put 150 million dollars on my table and told me to stop making an issue out of it I think I'd take the money. Being set for life trumps being called a hypocrite.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman once boasted that the company hadn’t "put a sexbot avatar in ChatGPT yet." Two months later, they did[0].
Interpreting the Mozilla CEO the same way may not be charitable, but it is certainly familiar.
[0]: https://futurism.com/future-society/sam-altman-adult-ai-reve...
It wouldn't bring in their estimate, it'd kill the browser.
Maybe they'd still get paid $150M for that, while only having to barely keep the browser alive, with no user request, for illusion of non-monopoly.
Fewer devs, more bucks, big win for the execs on the short term.
Right? This is what all these MBAs and supply chain efficiency experts never get.
They don't care if their plans cause long term harm as long as they can cash out after the short term profits come in. As long as there are new companies/products to jump to and exploit next they're making money which is all they care about.
The estimate does sound reasonable if it's an one-off payment. I agree that no one would pay that amount of money each year to keep adblocking from Firefox.
It's not impossible that people would pay Firefox that much yearly to keep their current user-base from using ad blockers. However, what is impossible is to imagine Firefox would have anything close to their current user base if people were prevented from using ad blockers. Most likely they would shrink to almost 0 users overnight if they did this. There are very few reasons to use Firefox over Chrome or Safari (or even Edge) other than the much better ad blocking (or any ad blocking, on mobile).
That doesn't explain the apparent market share of 2--3%, which is still quite large if you think about.
I believe most non-techie users are just lingering, using Firefox just because they used to. Since Firefox doesn't have a built-in ad blocking and the knowledge about adblocking is not universal (see my other comment), it is possible that there are a large portion of Firefox users who don't use adblockers and conversely adblocking users are in a minority. If this is indeed the case, Mozilla can (technically) take such a bet as such policy will affect a smaller portion of users. But that would work only once; Mozilla doesn't have any more option like that after all. That's why I see $150M is plausible, but only once.
Of course, I don't know the actual percent of FF users that use ad block. But I think it's far more likely that it is a majority of current FF users, rather than it being a negligible minority. I think 2-3% of web users is not an implausible approximation of how many people use ad block overall on the web. It's not an obscure technology, it's quite well known, even if few people bother with it.
Edit: actually I'm way off - it seems estimates are typically around 30-40% of overall users on the web having some kind of ad blocker. So, the Firefox percentage being 60-80+% seems almost a given to me.
Ad-blockers are the most used extensions on firefox. Origin itself has 10m installs, there are others with 3m and few with 1m installs.
Can someone explain how banning ad blockers from Firefox would bring in money for Mozilla? I can see how it would bring in money for other actors such as news outlets, YouTube, etc., but Mozilla doesn't have a big website where they are showing ads.
The issue isn't the explicit "we won't do it," it's that it was framed as a concrete, priced option at all
How would it bring in $150m? Is that some tranche of funding Google is witholding from them until they disable extensions?
Mentioning it is just the first of many softening phases. Its abuse 101. At some point we'll have "made him do it".
I have seen these discussions in companies where privacy is the selling point.
These kind of questions usually come from non-engineers, people in product or sales who see privacy as a feature or marketing point, and if the ROI is higher they don't give a fuck and would pitch anything that would make a buck
I only use Firefox over Chrome because it has adblock. So where does the $150 million comes from if people won't use it without adblock? Seems comrade didn't think this through...
People are absolutely somersaulting through hoops to try to make "I don't want to do that" into "I'm going to do it" in the comments lol
No, they are accurately observing that the "I don't want to do it" and "feels off mission" statements are FAR weaker than they can be and should be.
Such weak statements are either a real mistake or show movement away from those principles which should be bedrock for Mozilla and towards some justification to abandon those principles.
It's not like the industry has no precedents on this. "Don't Be Evil" was the motto of a company that is now one of the apex predators in the surveillance capitalism ecosystem.
Unwise to try to dismiss and laugh off legitimate alarms.
Instead of criticizing an actual contract to engage with a third party or a code push or an affirmative statement, you're attempting to parse a random combination of tea leaves and chicken entrails to indict Mozilla for a hypothetical thing that they explicitly said they're not doing. If that's not scraping the bottom of the barrel, it's only because you're able to imagine an even lower bottom than that that you're willing to reach for.
>>you're attempting to parse a random combination of tea leaves and chicken entrails
It is exactly the opposite — it is reading the actual language used for its intended meaning.
Every CEO is expected to not only understand the issues he faces and is managing, but to ALSO carefully choose the words to describe the situation and the intentions of the organization he leads.
When a CEO makes a statement about what should be a core fundamental principle of an organization, we can certainly expect that CEO to choose their words carefully.
Those words are, or at least should be, the exact opposite of "tea leaves and chicken entrails".
If the CEO is sloppy and the chosen words should actually be considered "tea leaves and chicken entrails", that is a different problem of a less-than-competent CEO.
If those words were actually chosen carefully, consider these two statements:
The actual statement: "[I don't] want to do that. It feels off-mission"
A different statement: "This is a core fundamental principle of Mozilla and I will not lead the company in that direction — not on my watch".
One could technically say "they both say 'Not today'".
But that would be absurd, and stupidly throwing out significant meaning in what the CEO chose to say and how he chose to say it.
He made the first vague statement with weasel words instead of something resembling the bold and unambiguous statement resembling the second statement.
The statement he did make is "I don't want to", which type of statement has often preceded an eventual "sorry, we had to".
There is a lot to make Firefox users nervous, and his choice of statement here did not help matters.
> It's not like the industry has no precedents on this. "Don't Be Evil" was the motto of a company that is now one of the apex predators in the surveillance capitalism ecosystem.
How is this precedent? "Don't Be Evil" strikes me as extremely explicit. This seems like a counter-example to me.
Yes. The point is that it started out as a wonderfully explicit and expansive statement.
And even THAT explicit and expansive statement was abandoned to the point where the very same company is now a global leader in surveillance capitalism, which is widely considered a massive net-negative for society if not flat-out evil.
So, when a CEO won't even make anything more than wish-washy "I don't want to do it" and "feels off mission" statements, people should be concerned that those weak good intentions will hold up even less well.
This is just tone policing.
"we won't do this" But you didn't say you'd never do this. "okay we'll never do this" But you didn't say you'd never ever do this. "fine we'll never ever do this" But you didn't say that it's never entered your mind once.
They said they won't do it and your interpretation is to demand they said it with more words? Come on, let's stop this nonsense. Can Firefox users ever be happy?
It costs the CEO of Mozilla nothing to make hard, convicted statements that all their users agree with. If it was me, the quote would be something like "but then they'd need to find a new CEO, because I'd be in prison for what I'd do to anyone who even suggested it".
Literally the only people who talk about Mozilla, or read things about what Mozilla is up to, are unusually motivated power users who really, really care about ad blocking and privacy. They may still have other users, but those people are coasting on momentum from when their grandkid installed Firefox on their computer years ago. They're not reading interviews with the new CEO. Yet Mozilla seems to consistently fail utterly at messaging to their only engaged users.
It's not even that they're doing evil shit, they're just absolutely terrible at proclaiming that they are committed to not doing evil shit.
I’d happily pay $100 a year for Firefox WITH an adblocker as long as part of the money is put towards ongoing internet freedom and preventing attestation
As with all the comments about "I'd pay X dollars to not be the product", it's been shown over and over again that paying money is not going to void corporate desire to simply double dip by raising prices while also showing ads.
Or for a similar point, it's been shown over and over that attempting to crowdsource the revenue is a staggeringly unrealistic response with no real world precedent in the history either of browsers or online crowdsourced funding. You would think that would matter to people who point to that as a possible panacea.
Actual attempts to get users to pay for the browser itself, like what Opera did, simply didn't work and led to the insolvency of the browser and having to sell it off to someone harvesting its users as data.
You might want to look up Thunderbird crowd funding over the past couple of years. Spoiler: it's been very successful.
Check Firefox's annual budget compared to Thunderbird's annual budget and get back to me.
Orion browser is a thing
A closed source thing.
There are operating systems other than macOS.
https://help.kagi.com/orion/faq/faq.html#other_os_support
I'm aware. What does it change?
It directly addresses your complaint, a confusing complaint to make if you were already aware that Linux and Windows versions are coming soon.
Unless, of course, you're holding out for, I don't know, a BeOS version.
I just don't think one can seriously say "Orion browser is a thing" if it is definitely not a thing for 95% desktops out there (the exact % may be different depending on the source of data, etc.). And Windows (around 70% of the market share) version is not expected until late 2026.
> It feels off-mission.
He didn't say it is off-mission. But just that it feels. My guess is that he is looking at a higher number.
Ah, instead of AGILE, it's MAFIA nowadays
I mean, that's also exactly what you would say if you had a $150M offer on the table, had received a lot of push back and were now just checking the waters and waiting to consolidate your position.
It would bring users leaving.
Imagine you are in a marriage and your spouse say: "I can sleep with other people, doesn’t want to do that. It feels off-mission".
I don't understand context, but my honest reaction will be: "WTF, you just said? What type of relationship you think we have if we discuss such things?"
I definitely understand why people worry. This is just crazy to weight trust in money. If this is on the table and discussed internally, then what we are talking about?
'T' in Mozilla Firefox means 'Trust'.
Yeah, I've once said in a relationship "Look, sure, she maybe pretty, but I want to be with you, so no, I am not going to reach out to her, don't worry". Apparently, it was a poor way to word this idea.
"Fucking her brains out would feel off mission"
Yes, people tend to try to dig out additional information from the particular wording (talk about a hidden channel) based on how they would phrase the same message themselves. That's why communication is hard.
Oh no, we're not supposed to actually parse the words a CEO spew forth. Get out of here.
"It feels off-mission" is very different from "It's absolutely off-mission and against everything we stand for".
[dead]
Standard Firefox users looking for anything to be mad about. Even when it makes zero sense.
It's kinda frustrating that Mozilla's CEO thinks that axing ad-blockers would be financially beneficial for them. Quite the opposite is true (I believe) since a ton of users would leave Firefox for alternatives.
The whole web ecosystem was first run by VC money and everything was great until every corner was taken, the land grab was complete and the time to recoup the investment has come.
Once the users were trapped for exploitation, it doesn’t make sense to have a browser that blocks ads. How are they supposed to pay software salaries and keep the lights on? People don’t like paying for software, demand constant updates and hate subscriptions. They all end up doing one of those since the incentives are perverse, that’s why Google didn’t just ride the Firefox till the end and instead created the Chrome.
It doesn’t make sense to have trillion dollars companies and everything to be free. The free part is until monopolies are created and walled gardens are full with people. Then comes the monetization and those companies don’t have some moral compass etc, they have KPI stock values and analytics and it’s very obvious that blocking ads isn’t good financially.
> The whole web ecosystem was first run by VC money and everything was great until every corner was taken,
Categorically untrue and weird revisionism. Basically the opposite of what actually happened.
I agree with the untrue and revisionism bit, but I disagree with it being the opposite of what happened.
People were trying to figure out how to make money off of the Internet from the early days of the Internet being publicly accessible (rather than a tool used by academic and military institutions). It can be attributed to the downfall of Gopher. It can be attributed to the rise of Netscape and Internet Explorer. While the early web was nowhere near as commercial as it is today, we quickly saw the development of search engines and (ad supported) hosting services that were. By the time 2000's hit, VC money was very much starting to drive the game. In the minds of most people, the Internet was only 5 to 10 years old at that point. (The actual Internet may be much older, but few people took notice of it until the mid-1990's.)
> People were trying to figure out how to make money off of the Internet from the early days of the Internet being publicly accessible
People were doing that even in ARPANET days. The commercial aspect was seen as a strong incentive to make ARPANET accessible by the masses.
> People don’t like paying for software, demand constant updates and hate subscriptions.
Yes, No, Yes?
I don't demand constant updates. I don't want constant updates. Usually when a company updates software it becomes worse. I am happy with the initial version of 90% of the software I use, and all I want is bug fixes and security updates.
> I don't want constant updates.
> all I want is bug fixes and security updates.
GP wasn't differentiating between different types of updates in their argument, because it doesn't make sense - they're discussing the economics of it, which doesn't care if you're fixing bugs or not.
>> How are they supposed to pay software salaries and keep the lights on? People don’t like paying for software, demand constant updates and hate subscriptions.
I suspect then it doesn't matter whether Mozilla kills itself or not. You should be fine with the current release of Firefox. Maybe you'd lose the installer, so all you have to do is put it somewhere safe and you're good.
> all I want is bug fixes and security updates.
Yes yes, I don't want updates. I just want updates. haha.
> People don’t like paying for software, demand constant updates and hate subscriptions.
constant updates
"Don't give me security updates every time there's a security issue. Instead do it occasionally because I like my vulnerabilities to be a surprise"
I'm just pointing out that your proposal doesn't match their requirements.
> I don't want updates. I just want updates
It only sounds dumb if you write it like that. If you say "I don't want feature bloat, I just want security patches" it sounds reasonable.
while i may agree with the first line, rest are little skewed perspective.
> People don’t like paying for software, demand constant updates and hate subscriptions.
hate subscription?? may be. if it's anything like Adobe then yes, people will hate.
that constant update, is something planted by these corporates, and their behavior manipulation tactics. People were happily paying for perpetual software, which they can "own" in a cd//dvd.
People weren't happily paying, there was huge pirate business that was run on porn, gambling ads and spyware revenue. Then there were organizations with lots of lawyers paid by the "pay once use forever" companies to enforce the pay part because people didn't want to pay.
One time fee software ment that once your growth slows down you no longer make money and have plenty of customers to support for free. That's why this model was destroyed by the subscription and ad based "free" software.
The last example is Affinity which was the champion of pay once use forever model, very recently they end up getting acquired and their software turned into "free" + subscription.
> One time fee software ment that once your growth slows down you no longer make money and have plenty of customers to support for free.
What do you mean. Support contracts were not included by default. Consumers had some initial support to fight off instant reclamations.
It wasn’t one time fee though. The one time fee bought a copy of the software and its patches. A couple of years later a new version would come out and people had the choice between keeping using the old version or buying the new one.
To convince people to buy they had to add genuinely useful features. I would have bought a new version with new features and better performance. I wouldn’t have bought a new version same as the previous one with AI crammmed in it
If a time comes when there are zero free browser with effective ad-blocking, it will create space for a non-free browser that does it. It would create a whole ecosystem.
I currently pay zero for ad-blocking (FF + uBlock Origin) and it works perfectly; but I would pay if I had to.
I think they are trying to balance it between making as much as money possible, risking being sued for monopolistic practices and risking exodus. Microsoft once overplayed their hand and the anger and consumer dissatisfaction was so strong that people left Internet Explorer en masse.
So the best situation for google would be to have borderline monopoly where they pay for the existence of their competition and the competition(Firefox) blocks adblockers too by default but leaving Chrome and Firefox is harder than forcing installin adblockers through the unofficial way.
So basically, all the people who swear they never clicked ads manage to block ads, Firefox and Chrome print money by making sure that ads are shown and clocked by the masses.
> The whole web ecosystem was first run by VC money
Huh? Nexus was funded by CERN.
Newsgrounds was never investor funded.
Yahoo! Directory was just two guys, and you paid to be listed. There were no investors involved.
WebCrawler was a university project. Altavista was a research project.
People seem to forget the non-commercial web ever existed.
The long tail of the web, likely consisting of mostly small or noncommercial sites, are currently numerically huge but individually low traffic. Meanwhile, user attention is dominated by a relatively small set of commercial and platform sites.
That was ine inception age when very few people were online, its not the stage of mass adoption. The mass adoption starts with the dot.com era with mass infrastructure build up.
But sure, if you think that we should start counting from these years you can do that and add a "public funded" era at the beginning.
I came to the web after dotcom and most of the content (accessibke trough search) was blogs and forums. It wasn’t until SEO that fake content started to grow like weeds.
That's the time when VC's were making huge investments into the web tech, most companies were losing crazy money.
The mentality of the age was portrayed like this in SV: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo
There were companies that were making some money but those were killed or acquired by companies that give their services for free. Google killed the blogs by killing their RSS reader since they were long into making money stage and their analytics probably demonstrated that it is better people search stuff than directly going to the latest blog posts.
It's the same thing everywhere, the whole industry is like that. Uber loses money until there's no longer viable competition then lose less money by jacking up the prices. The tech is very monopolistic, Peter Thiel is right about the tech business.
The existing online mass is what attracted the VC in the first place, same as it ever was. It was mostly privately funded and very much a confederacy (AOL vs Prodigy vs BBS) at the time, much like now.
I don't think Altavista came before the bubble burst... They directly competed with Google and Yahoo.
I take your point, but I think the comment was referring to Web 2.0.
Yeah Web 2.0 was scam but internet is broader than that.
Ditto. A fully functional uBlock Origin is the only remaining reason why I'm still sticking with Firefox despite everything
Containers are also very useful indeed; I have to log into various different Google and Github accounts and can do this in a single browser window.
Yeah I see 1,000 comments about uBO but Containers was/is a game-changer for my workflow.
Indeed; I could probably get away with the minimal uBlock Chrome now offers, but it's no good for me without the containers.
It's financially beneficial for them in exactly the same way as setting yourself on fire makes you warmer
Mozilla has pressure from their sugar daddy, Google, to weaken ad-blockers.
The only reason Mozilla matters in the eyes of Google is because it gives the impression there's competition in the browser market.
But Firefox's users are the kind who choose the browser, not use whatever is there. And that choice is driven in part by having solid ad-blockers. People stick with Firefox despite the issues for the ad-blocker. Take that away and Firefox's userbase dwindles to even lower numbers to the point where nobody can pretend they are "competition". That's when they lose any value for Google.
Without the best-of-the-best ad-blocking I will drop Firefox like a rock and move to the next best thing, which will have to be a Chromium based browser. I'll even have a better overall experience on the web when it comes to the engine itself, to give me consolation for not having the best ad-blocker.
It might be financial beneficial once as an up-front payment, but long term, as others have mentioned, really not good for the project to remove the only feature that gives firefox a defensible way to fill it's niche in the market.
That wouldn’t seem so much out of the ordinary, long-term thinking CEO is an oxymoron these days.
i left chrome to avoid ads.. i'd rather use dillo than ads infested firefox
> Quite the opposite is true (I believe) since a ton of users would leave Firefox for alternatives.
Yes but keep in mind that’s not an individual problem that is solved by switching browsers. If a browser engine dies, the walls get closer and the room smaller. With only Chromium and WebKit left, we may soon have a corporate owned browsers pulling in whatever direction Google and Apple wants. I can think of many things that are good for them but bad for us. For instance, ”Web Integrity” and other DRM.
Which alternatives though? On Mac at least, I'm not aware of any viable non-Chromium alternatives.
> On Mac at least, I'm not aware of any viable non-Chromium alternatives
Surely Mac is the only place there is a viable non-Chromium alternative (Safari)?
There is Orion which is built on top of WebKit so you get a lot of the battery life optimisations built into Safari
I think people like to imagine it's not viable because the most commonly known adblocker refuses to release the version for it. Negative news somehow stick better.
Fortunately it's not the only one and for example Adguard works perfectly fine.
Safari is even further behind chrome in feature set than Firefox.
… which is a positive, right?
Maybe, maybe not. It's getting dangerously close to the modern day IE, where some websites just don't work right and everyone has to do arcane shit to make their websites cross platform.
It's also a closed source browser developed by Apple. It's not competing with Firefox. Everyone contemplating switching to safari over Firefox are not being honest - they're not even on the same playing field.
> It's getting dangerously close to the modern day I.E.
This line gets thrown around a lot, but if you look at the supported features, Safari is honestly pretty up-to-date on the actual ratified web standards.
What it doesn't tend to do is implement a bunch of the (often ad-tech focused) drafts Google keeps trying to push through the standards committee
I would agree, except for CSS. You still see checks for webkit in CSS fairly regularly.
The only way you can possibly view Safari as "the modern day IE" is if you consider the authoritative source for What Features Should Be Supported to be Chrome.
You should probably think about that for a bit, in light of why IE was IE back in the day.
> The only way you can possibly view Safari as "the modern day IE" is if you consider the authoritative source for What Features Should Be Supported to be Chrome.
No. Safari is the modern IE in the sense that it's the default browser on a widely used OS, and it's update cycle is tied to the update of the OS itself by the user, and it drags the web behind by many years because you cannot not support its captive user-base.
It's even worse than IE in a sense, because Apple prevents the existence of an alternative browser on that particular OS (every non-safari OSes on iOS are just a UI on top of Safari).
> drags the web behind by many years
But this can only be by comparison to something. And Apple is very good at keeping Safari up to date on the actual standards. You know—the thing that IE was absolutely not doing, that made it a scourge of the web.
So if it's not Chrome, what is your basis for comparison??
> But this can only be by comparison to something.
The something being the other browsers. Chrome and Firefox. Safari was even behind the latest IE before the switch to Chromium by the way.
> the thing that IE was absolutely not doing, that made it a scourge of the web.
You're misremembering, IE also kept improving its support for modern standards. The two main problems were that it was always behind (like Safari) and that it people were still using old versions because it was tied to Windows, like Safari with iOS. When people don't update their iPhone because they know it will become slow as hell as soon as you use the new iOS version on an old iPhone or just because they don't want their UI to change AGAIN, they're stuck on an old version of Safari.
I'm sorry, but you're wrong. I am not remotely misremembering, and I'll thank you not to tell me what's happening in my own head.
IE 6 stood stagnant for years, while the W3C moved on without them, and there was no new version.
> The something being the other browsers. Chrome and Firefox.
And can you name a single thing Firefox does right, that Chrome didn't do first, or that came from an actual accepted web standard (not a proposal, not a de-facto standard because Chrome does it), that Safari doesn't do?
> and there was no new version.
Yes there was… IE 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11.
The reason why IE 6 kept haunting us all was because later versions were never available on Windows XP.
> actual accepted web standard
The only thing for which there is an actual standard that matters is JavaScript itself (or rather ECMAScript) and on that front Apple has pretty much always been a laggard.
Saying “Apple is compliant with all of W3C standards” is a bit ridiculous when this organization was obsolete long before Microsoft ditched IE. And Apple itself acknowledge that, themselves being one of the founding parties of the organization that effectively superseded W3C (WHATWG).
> The reason why IE 6 kept haunting us all was because later versions were never available on Windows XP.
First of all, according to the IE Wikipedia page, that's not true—7 & 8 were available for XP.
Second of all, this ignores the fact that for five years, there was only IE6. And IE6 was pretty awful.
> Saying “Apple is compliant with all of W3C standards” is a bit ridiculous when this organization was obsolete long before Microsoft ditched IE. And Apple itself acknowledge that, themselves being one of the founding parties of the organization that effectively superseded W3C (WHATWG).
And now you have identified a major component of the problem: in the 2000s, the W3C was the source of web standards. Safari, once it existed, was pretty good at following them; IE (especially IE6) was not.
Now, there effectively are no new standards except for what the big 3 (Safari, Chrome, and Firefox) all implement. And Firefox effectively never adds new web features themselves; they follow what the other two do.
So when you say "Safari is holding the web back," what you are saying is "Safari is not implementing all the things that Google puts into Chrome." Which is true! And there is some reason to be concerned about it! But it is also vital to acknowledge that Google is a competitor of Apple's, and many of the features they implement in Chrome, whether or not Google has published proposed standards for them, are being implemented unilaterally by Google, not based on any larger agreement with a standards body.
So painting it as if Apple is deliberately refusing to implement features that otherwise have the support of an impartial standards body, in order to cripple the web and push people to build native iOS apps, is, at the very best, poorly supported by evidence.
I prefer Firefox over Chromium. But I much more prefer having a working ad blocker. Therefore I support that statement and when Firefox starts removing support for that, I'm out and there's enough alternatives I can go to, even tho they're Chromium based.
There are a ton of Firefox forks, especially in order to keep Firefox but without these sort of shenanigans.
The only problem is: what's the difference between the forks, and which is the best? I have no idea.
I use the Duck Duck Go browser for almost everything. I is open source for iOS/Android/macOS platforms, but I think there are parts of their platform that are not. The DDG browser hits all my privacy requirements.
What problems do people have? I use Firefox on Mac since a decade at least.
...Safari??
Apple doesn't collect your browsing data, they build in privacy controls that are pretty much as strong as they can manage given the state of the world, and while it doesn't support uBO, it supports a variety of pretty solid adblockers (I use AdGuard, which, AFAICT, Just Works™ and even blocks YouTube ads most of the time, despite their arms race).
> Apple doesn't collect your browsing data
That's what their marketing want you to believe, at least.
Their privacy policy is very clear it's not the case though:
> we may collect a variety of information, including:
> […]
> Usage Data. Data about your activity on and use of our offerings, such as app launches within our services, including browsing history; search history;
(emphasis mine)
Zen is basically Firefox with Arc's UX. It's by far my favorite browser.
Orion is pretty viable alternative. Based on WebKit.
Use Brave the privacy is better than Firefox already.
Question was about non-Chromium browsers. Although Brave's custom ad-blocker is not bad.
And users would flee not just because they're seeing the ads but because Firefox is obviously the slowest browser again. Stripping the ads is a big performance boost, so right now Firefox feels snappier than Chrome on ad-laden pages.
The users most likely to leave are the ones who actively recommend Firefox to others and keep it installed on friends' and family's machines...
> Quite the opposite is true (I believe) since a ton of users would leave Firefox for alternatives.
Alternatives like maybe a fork of Firefox with the adblocker-blocker removed?
Knowing an option, doesn't mean it's his goal. It's probably just a regular offer from Google, they always decline.
There's only two alternatives, safari and chrome-based browsers. Safari isn't cross platform either
> Safari isn't cross platform either
WebKit is[1][2].
[1]: https://webkit.org/downloads/ [2]: https://webkit.org/webkit-on-windows/
That second link says it all about how wise it would be to try:
> This guide provides instructions for building WebKit on Windows 8.1
What is your opinion on Brave?
They already said "Chromium-based browsers."
I was meaning specifically.
I have no opinion on Chrome skins and forks as they are still chromium
[flagged]
You can't even imagine how little the rest of the world cares about this.
Do people in California care that slightly under 50% of my state's population are at or below poverty level? Do they care that most of the rest spend 55-60% of our income on food? Do they care that our life expectancy is 15 years lower than that in California, mostly because of terrible pollution caused by extraction and processing of minerals which our beloved government then sells to the US and several European countries, and pockets the money?
Do they care about conflict minerals in general, used to build electronics for their enjoyment? Have they done anything about this?
This American political bickering does not even register on our radars when choosing a web browser.
"Europe's problems are the world's problems but the world's problems are not Europe's problems.", as India's Mr. Jaishankar is fond of saying.
The same can be said about the US.
What an incredibly unfair and even fanatical take on what happened.
Amazing how they continue not to cater to their core audience. They literally have lost 90% of their market share from their peak, I guess I can see the temptation to try to regain it by reaching out to others, but doing that at the expense of your core is a terrible business strategy. It's not like those users are all that sticky, they're leaving as Mozilla pisses them off, and likely Mozilla are going to be left with what they stand for - which these days is nothing.
It's sad, I'm sure there was a better path Mozilla could have taken, but they've had a decade or more of terrible management. I wonder if the non-profit / corp structure hasn't helped, or if it's just a later-stage company with a management layer who are disconnected from the original company's mission and strategy.
> Amazing how they continue not to cater to their core audience.
Who is Mozilla's core audience? From what I remember, it's not addon-users, as most users never have used even just a single addon.
> They literally have lost 90% of their market share from their peak,
To be fair, it's not entirely their own fault. Competition is strong, especially from Google and Apple. Even with perfect decisions, they likely would still have lost big since their peak. The market for alternative Browsers isn't as big any more as it used to be.
> From what I remember, it's not addon-users, as most users never have used even just a single addon.
If most users who install Firefox do so for superior adblocking and those same users are also very likely to turn off telemetry (which I think some privacy/adblock extensions probably do by default?), then at Mozilla's end one might get the impression that "most users don't use extensions" - even though the vast majority of users do.
So to answer the questions of:
> Who is Mozilla's core audience?
It's probably the kind of user that has telemetry off. You don't know much if anything about them.
Update-checks are not included in telemetry. And I would think most people using addons still do update their addons from time to time, or even have the auto-check active. There is also the download-stats from their server-side, so I would think they do have a good enough picture of their numbers. Might be they could be 10% off, but surely are there not tens or even hundreds of millions of stealth-users around.
> It's probably the kind of user that has telemetry off. You don't know much if anything about them.
Don't think so, most people don't give a f** about this. Tech-people on that level are even in the industry a minority. And on the other side, those stealth-users are worthless for Mozilla, because they can't make money from google with them. So for a project needing to make money with usersnumbers, everyone who is out of this, isn't core audience anyway.
> Don't think so, most people don't give a f* about this.
Most people are not Firefox users.
> It's probably the kind of user that has telemetry off.
If less than 4% of users use uBO, which the kind of users you're referencing claim is the primary reason they use Firefox, I doubt many users disable telemetry either.
I believe some Linux distributions patch Firefox to change default settings including disabling telemetry. Probably not a big factor, but still something to think about.
40% of Firefox users use addons.
https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/usage-behavior
Thanks, I think this was what I was searching. Strange that it's not appearing in my search-results.
Relevant part from the site: [..]Add-on usage measured here reflects multiple facets of browser customization, including web extensions, language packs, and themes.[..]
40% is a big minority, but not really what I would call core audience, especially when language packs and themes are also counted here. And 5 of the top 10-addons in that statistic are language packs.
Though, UBlock Origin is #1 with 9.6% user-share, and it's shown to have 10.5 million users on the store-page, which means there are at best only around 100 Million users left with Firefox on desktop? Seems worse than I thought.
> Who is Mozilla's core audience?
I am thinking of it as: people who care about privacy and/or an independent web browser. That seems mostly in line with what the Mozilla Foundation's principles are stated to be.
Maybe it's not that. But if not, what is it? How do they otherwise have any positive differentiation versus their competition? It surely can't be claimed to be any sense of "users who want an AI browser" because surely those people are going to use ChatGPT's browser, not Mozilla's.
Remember when the whole reason people liked Firefox is that it was super customizable? There was a time when it was THE power user browser. Things only went sideways after Chrome came out.
Firefox literally was a mainstream browser at one point. Internet Explorer sucked. Safari didn't suck but it was nobody's favorite either except some really hard-core Apple fans.
Yes, Chrome was revolutionary when it came out. And yes, Firefox seemed to struggle with legacy architectural decisions that limited their ability to catch up. But Firefox was still differentiated and had a loyal fan base. Loyal fan base is exactly what can keep a project or product alive through a downturn. All they had to do was focus on the browser. They did some great things along the way like popularizing DoH. But it's 2025 and there's still no UI for switching profiles that any normal person might be able or want to use. Can you really blame people for giving up?
> To be fair, it's not entirely their own fault. Competition is strong, especially from Google and Apple. Even with perfect decisions, they likely would still have lost big since their peak. The market for alternative Browsers isn't as big any more as it used to be.
Their peak in share was also pre-chrome. They've basically been losing the battle slowly for over a decade.
> From what I remember, it's not addon-users, as most users never have used even just a single addon.
Source?
I looked up "firefox addon usage" and this was the second result https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/usage-behavior
> over 40% of Firefox users have at least 1 installed add-on
Before they changed their ToS to allow selling my data I had spent the last 2 decades with telemetry disabled and adblocker installed
What’s the story on the TOS change? This is the first I’m hearing about it.
A while ago they changed their TOS from something along the lines of "We will never sell your data" to "Your data is safe"
> About one-third of Firefox users have installed an add-on before
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/extensions-addons/heres-...
Ublock Origin has 10,488,339 Users listed on it's Mozilla store-page at the moment, AdBlock Plus has 3,188,401 Users. And Firefox has surely still far more than those ~14 million users.
There was an article from Mozilla, some years ago, going more into the details about this, but I'm not sure where. Though, I found another one[1] from 2021, which starts with only one third of the users having installed an addon.
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/blog/firefoxs-most-popular-innova...
> Amazing how they continue not to cater to their core audience.
I’ve seen this across several industries now.
The “core audience” is too small and too particular. There is another audience, much easier to please, much much larger, much more money can be made off them. Why stick to your niche “core audience”?
No, it's not much easier to please. You will compete with Chrome and you will lose. It is the core audience that is much easier to please, because those are loyal users that trust you and all you have to do is respect this trust by providing a stable service without nasty surprises.
Well Mozilla has completely failed at it, for starters.
When you've already lost most of your mass-market appeal, the only defensible strategy left is to double down on the people who still care
Every tech CEO loves to cosplay as "announcing the iPhone" 2007 Steve Jobs but nobody ever tries to cosplay as the "pulling Apple back from the brink by focusing on core competencies" 1997 Steve Jobs.
Conspiracy theory: Mozilla leadership is bad on purpose as a form of sabotage. Erode the fan base until it just wears away and dies on its own. Then there will be no one to challenge the Microsoft Google Apple hegemony.
CEO
> He says he could begin to block ad blockers in Firefox and estimates that’d bring in another $150 million, but he doesn’t want to do that. It feels off-mission.
LOL the day that Firefox stops me from running what I want is the day I'll get rid of it.
I still think it was a mistake for Firefox to dump its old plugin model. The customisation was a USP for Firefox and many useful tweaks and minor features have never been replaced.
Today the ability to run proper content blockers is still a selling point for Firefox but obviously wouldn't be if they started to meddle with that as well. (Has there ever been a more obvious case of anticompetitive behaviour than the biggest browser nerfing ad blocking because it's owned by one of the biggest ad companies?)
Other than customisation the only real advantage I see for Firefox today is the privacy angle. But again that would obviously be compromised if they started breaking tools like content blockers that help to provide that protection.
It made me stop using FF on android.
They readded support a while ago.
What are you using as an alternative?
They...already do that? They stopped allowing unsigned addons, even if you allow them in about:config (a power-user feature). Even Chrome allows you to toggle the option to do that -- in a more user-friendly way! -- and actually honors it, so I don't think it's the massive security hole everyone claims.
Edit: My Hitler parody of when Firefox introduced this (almost 10 years ago now!): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taGARf8K5J8
Funny.
Though, on this line:
"The whole point of Firefox is that I can customize it all I want".
You realize that with more customization comes more fingerprinting? :-)
Funny.
You realize that you can prevent that? :-)
The web without ublock origin is a hellscape. Whenever I try another browser, I immediately go back to firefox.
Do these people even know their users?
For example: Fedora Silverblue default Firefox install had an issue with some Youtube videos due to codecs. So I tried watching youtube on Chromium. Ads were so annoying I stopped watching by the second time I tried to watch a video. Stopped watching youtube until I uninstalled default firefox install and added Firefox from flathub. If the option to use a good adblocker gets taken away I 'll most likely dramatically reduce my web browsing.
P.S. Maybe someone ports Vanadium to desktop Linux? If firefox goes away that 'd be my best case desktop browser. Using it on my mobile ;)
It's amusing how much ads hurt, once you're weaned off of them.
Even with traditional TV, growing up, I didn't really mind ads. Then I setup MythTV years ago, and had commercial skip... and of course just downloaded things without commercials too.
When I'd visit my parents back then, any commercial felt like intense agony. So this isn't just about the web, it's really about useless annoying juke being fed to you, when you're used to not having it.
The closest I can compare it to, is once I rented an airb&b which was under a freeway, beside a bridge, and adjacent to another freeway. Yet after a while I just sort of got used to most of the noise.
I wonder if the CEO of Mozilla doesn't use adblock, and just doesn't, literally, understand.
> Maybe someone ports Vanadium to desktop linux
https://github.com/secureblue/Trivalent
That's not a niche power-user concern anymore, it's basic UX and safety
I prefer Brave but already have suspicions about that too.
I think people are wildly overreacting. There is a new CEO and he wants to make a splash so the throws around "AI" that's it. Of course there will be AI related features in firefox, there already are! Wait and see what the actual specifics are before reacting?
Also, a small minor detail here: We're not paying for firefox! why are so many people feeling entitled? Mozilla has to do something other than beg Google to survive. Perhaps we need a fork of firefox that is sustained by donations and is backed by a non-profit explicilty chartered to make decisions based on community feedback? I don't see a problem with that wikipedia-like approach, I don't think any of the forks today have a good/viable org structure that is fully non-profit (as in it won't seek profit at all). Mozilla has bade some bad decisions recently, but they're a far cry from the world-ended outcry they're getting.
If we don't donate to Mozilla and we don't pay them money, then we have to be the product at some point. Even if they don't it to be that way, they have to placate to some other business interests.
I hope the EU also pays attention, perhaps some of their OSS funding can help setup an alternate org.
Waiting until the thing is done to voice your opinions on the thing is a very poor strategy if you want to have any influence over what the thing turns out to even be.
>>> Also, a small minor detail here: We're not paying for firefox! why are so many people feeling entitled? Mozilla has to do something other than beg Google to survive.
Because some of us have supported, donated to, advocated for, and participated in the firefox and mozilla communities over the years, and feel betrayed by the abandonment of principles, kowtowing to adtech surveillance "features", and overall enshittification of a once beloved browser that we hoped would allow for an alternative to the chrome blob, as they once were to the atrocity that was internet explorer.
It's perfectly reasonable to call out foundations and organizations that utterly abandon and fail to live up to principles. Mozilla is just a PR wing for Alphabet and whitewashing the chromification of all browsers, at this point.
Ladybug and some other alternatives will come around. I don't see any future in which Mozilla returns to principles - the people leeching off / running the foundation won't ever be interested in returning to a principled stance, but to change the brand, or pursue profit, or some other outcome that is divergent from the expectations and consideration of the original supporters. They keep trying to commodify and branch out and waste insane amounts of money on nonsense, and hire CEOs that lose the plot before they ever start the job. Mozilla is functionally dead, for whatever vision of it a lot of us might once have had.
By the time they'd have a chance to fix anything, maybe it'll be practical to have an AI whip up a new browser engine and we'll all have bespoke, feature complete privacy respecting browsers built on the fly.
I think all of firefox's alternatives depend on firefox as an upstream. firefox itself has low adaption right now. I'm all for any approach that isn't google/chrome being the only browser standards driver. This type of knee-jerking doesn't help with that goal.. I don't care so much about mozilla's past or how terrible an "ai browser" will be, as much as having viable alternatives and not having a monopoly for browser standards. a fork and alternative browsers will do nothing to help with that. Either there is an alternative to Mozilla or there isn't.
This isn't kneejerk, it's bone deep weariness of year over year of failure and corporate schlock and weasel words and trying to rebrand firefox and sucking on the google teat while pretending they have a purpose. They're doing anything and everything but seriously putting in the time and effort to distinguish themselves and be a viable competitor. All of the good stuff happens downstream; firefox development is a continual disappointment and enshittification, and they don't even profit from it. They enshittify on behalf of google and the adtech blob.
The downstream projects constantly have to tear out features the mozilla team try to jam in, for no good reason, almost like there's an arms race and the adtech blob is just trying to slip one past all the people who want simple privacy preserving software.
Unfortunately, it’s impossible to donate to Firefox development. Donations to Mozilla expressly do not got to pay for Firefox since Firefox is for-profit and they’ve decided to not accept money from users. So I guess we are already “the product.”
Why do there have to be AI features in Firefox? No one wants them. They make the browser less secure. They distract from the mission.
I found the local translation feature nice on a few occasions.
I liked it the few times it worked but so many times it's chosen to do things like translate Japanese into Spanish when I speak English natively and never would've chosen Spanish as the target language. It just feels convoluted and poorly implemented, like most AI features in most software.
I don't give a shit about the specifics. I don't want AI in my browser period.
Yes, AI is already in Firefox. That does not on any way make more AI any less unacceptable.
I don't want to opt out. I don't want to dismiss nags. I don't want to fuck around with internal configs and hope that the options do what they say (they often don't).
I want a browser that renders websites. That's it. Anything else is detracting from Firefox's core value proposition: being a good web browser.
I want a web browser. I do not want, need, nor am I interested in entertaining an ""AI browser"", whatever the hell that even means. I want to browse the goddamn web, not interact with "AI". We've had AI shoved into literally every conceivable corner of every piece of software. Nobody, nobody needs more AI in more places. We have ten million ways to access AI in absolutely every other program.
Just give me a fucking web browser. This is not that complicated.
Because the AI implementations they’ve already done are shit? Buttons on by default, features that are annoying to remove for normal users (the context menu ‘search with chatbot’). It’s just garbage, get this shit out of here. Stop adding things to my window without permission and stop with the popups announcing them to me. Anyone who seriously wants this will seek it out. Leave the rest of us alone.
Yeah I dunno why they didn't just let it be an official add-on or whatever. I use AI a lot and even I don't want this shit everywhere.
> If we don't donate to Mozilla
1. Why would I donate to Mozilla? Mozilla hates me.
2. When Mozilla was 30% of the browser market rather than 3%, they could have easily cleaned up on donations. If they had made whatever extension transition that they thought they needed to do but while protecting all contemporary extension capabilities and not using it as a power grab to limit user control, they'd still have 30% of the market. If they hadn't made the business decision to permanently be a wonky Chrome, people wouldn't think of them as a wonky Chrome.
3. Mozilla has plenty of money. If you can't create a sustainable browser with a billion and a half dollars in the bank and a fully-featured browser, it's because you don't want to. You already have the browser, you can't whine about how complicated it is to create a browser. Pay developers with the interest. Stop paying these useless weirdo executives a fortune.
But enough about Mozilla. If you're some Bitcoin or startup billionaire, I'll ask you the same thing. Firefox is sitting right there and licensed correctly. You want people to respect you and remember you nicely when you're dead? Take it, fork it, put that same billion and a half into a trust, and save an open door to the Internet at a time when it's really needed. You've won in life, it will be easy to make people trust you if your ambition is just to do good. Steal Firefox, put it on the right track, and people will flock back to it. I know Ladybird is interesting, but a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.
Did you read the article? Don't answer that because I can see you didn't from your response.
Genuinely can someone with knowledge of the business explain why they aren't simply doubling down on making Firefox better? Is there an existential problem facing them that they are trying to solve by adding AI into the browser?
Their Google dependency is their existential problem. They're limited by what they can do with "making Firefox better" while effectively being a client state. An off the books Google department. Doomed to forever being a worse funded Chrome because they can't do too much to anger their patron.
By selling browser UI real estate to AI companies[0] they reduce the power Google has over them. If they get to the point where no individual company makes up a majority of their revenue, it allows them to focus on their mission in a much broader way.
[0]These will be very expensive listings should this feature become popular: https://assets-prod.sumo.prod.webservices.mozgcp.net/media/u...
Yeah but is this entirely true though? It seems Google pays FF just for existing, to protect them from antitrust litigation (or what's left of it); so Google can't really stop paying FF and can't try to kill it, as its death would be extremely counter productive. FF may be freer than it thinks.
Same as for Apple, the amount Google pays will vary. Firefox will probably still exist with 10% of Google's money, except execs Mozilla execs would be in a very different situation.
Its not impossible that someday a new non-chromium browser reaches feature parity (or close enough) with the chromium browsers. At that point, Google could stop worrying about funding Firefox's development.
Is there any prove for Googles influence on their development you outline here?
Google pay Mozilla hundreds of millions of dollars each year to place Google as the default browser. It's by far their biggest income stream. In 2023 it was reported as 75% of their revenue.
There's no world in which 75% of your revenue coming from Google doesn't influence what you do. Even if it's not the main driver of all decisions, pissing off Google is a huge risk for them.
Soooo...there isn't.
If the plaintiff pays 500 million to the judge and the defendant goes to jail, there's no proof that the judge wouldn't have made the same decision without the 500 million. If you're a fool, you'll sneer and ask "Where's the proof?"
Why would there be any proof?
Well if you bring up law how about: innocent until proven guilty?
Google is not bribing Mozilla...they probably keep them alive to avoid all kinds of monopoly lawsuits. With their market share however, you would need more prove to justify further conspiracies...
Large sums of money are typically how we measure influence in the modern day.
Too bad we're not interested in prove before we're condemning anyone in those modern days...
There's proof of financial dependence, here's a recent report https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2021/mozilla-fdn-202...
In 2021 they got $500M "royalties" (this is their payment from Google) with only $75k revenue from all other sources, including $7.5k donations.
The document you linked mentions $50M in advertising/subscription revenue.
No knowledge of the business. But I think it's because of the underlying question that plagues Mozilla: How will that make money?
I'm not sure how well know this is, but besides their contract with Google to be the default search option, Firefox does earn money through revenue share with all other default search options. A normal healthy company would just rely on those. Growing the user base would therefore grow the amount of rev-share income. So improving the product by itself, and thus attracting users, does make money - and probably enough to run Firefox and Mozilla. Just not enough to pay their CEO.
They don't really need money. Look at Mozilla's CEO compensation for example. It was 7 million USD in 2022. Seven. Million. For ruining a bastion of the open internet.
The problem is the MBAs.
It still seems obscene to me that anyone at a non-profit, that begs for donations and volunteers, makes 7 figures.
(Yes it's technically a company, but it's a company owned by a non profit.)
did people ask the supervisors of the foundation what do they think about this?
multiple things can be true at once.
is that too much money for one person? well, apparently it depends on who do you ask. and even if the board members who approved it might thought it's too much, it still could have been cheaper than to fire the CEO and find a new one and keep Mozilla on track.
CEO compensation is usually a hedge against risks that are seen as even more costly, even if the performance of the CEO is objectively bad.
https://www.ecgi.global/sites/default/files/working_papers/d...
framing Mozilla/Firefox as some kind of bastion is simply silly - especially if it's supplied by the gigantic fortress kingdom of G, and makes more money on dividends and interest than on selling any actual products or services.
it's a ship at sea with a sail that's too big and a rudder that's unfortunately insignificant.
but whatever metaphor we pick it needs to transform into a sustainable ecosystem, be that donation or sales based.
It's too much money for a non-profit that is failing by all possible metrics and is saying it is struggling for revenue.
Parallelly, it is on par for similar positions.
Just because something bad has been normalized doesn't make it appropriate, though.
You can argue that they won't find another CEO for less money. To that I would posit that they won't find another CEO from the MBA crowd for less money, but that is a feature, not a bug.
It's a git repo. They don't need employees besides a few programmers
it's a completely obvious "problem" -- more users are easier to monetize, even if they "simply" go the Wikipedia donations model
many people stated that they are happy to do targeted donations (ie. money earmarked strictly for Firefox development only, and it cannot be used for bullshit outreach programs and other fluff)
and if they figure out the funding for the browser (and other "value streams") then they can put the for-profit opt-in stuff on top
Google pays Mozilla, Mozilla has more money, Mozilla spends more money (especially in compensations to a bloated C-level), Mozilla needs more money, Google threatens with paying less, Mozilla will lube up and bend over.
You can't monetize a browser. They have to keep trying to create new products, but they inevitably fail. Pocket, FirefoxOS, Persona, all dead. This new stuff will fail too, because Mozilla has no USP and no way to create a best-in-class product in any market. So they rely on imitating what everyone else is doing, but with more "crunchy" vibes ("values", "trust", "we're a nonprofit") because that's the only angle they can compete on. They missed mobile completely so even their browser is bleeding users and dying.
The way to interpret Mozilla is that they're a dying/zombie company, fighting heroically to delay the inevitable.
I'd pay $10 a month for a browser, I pay that much for music and TV shows and I spend more time in a browser. I'm sure the market doesn't agree with me but I pay more for things that are less useful.
Let's see if you are telling the truth. I will sell you a browser for $10 a month. DM me.
Kagi and Orion have entered the chat.
> You can't monetize a browser.
You very much can if all the competitors are either a) ad-ridden, ai-infested, bloated monstrosities or b) don't provide the functionality people want. In that case, there's apparently lots of demand which could easily support either a pay-once or a low-subscription-fee model.
What they could do is get funding from sovereign tech funds.
I don't think the rest of the world likes their dependencies on US companies and their love for surveillance.
Of course, to do it right means ensuring there's enough non-US organizational structure with the know-how to take over the project should things go pear-shaped, and oversight to spot of the pear is taking shape.
But that's what governments can do, assuming they don't want to be under the thumb of the US. ("Oh, you think tariffs are bad? We'll do to you like we did those ICC judges and shut off all your accounts.")
They already do monetize it, every search engine included by default paid to be there. They forcefully remove those that don't pay from existing installations without the user's permission, as they did with yandex.
Fork Firefox, bundle uBlock Origin, Sponsor Block et el and sell it is a consumer web security product (that's not complete shit) with a monthly subscription. Use some of the proceeds to support the devs working on the underlying tech, similar to what Valve are doing for Wine, Proton and Fex.
Bonus points:
1. Multi layered approach to dealing with ads and other malware.
2. A committment to no AI or other bloat - that's not what I'm paying you for.
3. Syncable profiles.
Charging for a browser died with Netscape in 1998
But I'm not pitching a browser. This is a web security product which people do pay for - it's a billion dollar product category in fact. The only functional difference is that the malware and fraud protection it provides is demonstrably superior to all of its competitors.
I think that's false, with the current state of internet, advertising everywhere, enshitification and monetization of users private data, some people are ready to pay for services that were considered "free".
I am paying for kagi, and I would pay for a good, private browser (I know they make onion but I'm on linux, not macos or windows).
Vivaldi is a decent option if you aren't specifically looking to get off Blink as the engine. It has an integrated adblocker and many other privacy-related features.
I'm specifically avoiding chrome-based browser as form of protest against google's monopoly.
Currently using waterfox, but might go for librewolf... In any case I'm very interested in servo, even thinking of contributing to it.
They dont have to.
They could be lean and focus on firefox only.
Now they get 150m from google, spend just a part on firefox and rest on failures and hobby projects to get promoted.
If they were focued on core business, 1) they would have a war chest 2) they could leave off donations
https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4387539/firefox-money-invest...
Please enlighten me. How does one make a browser "better" these days?
- They were ahead of the game with extensions. Then everyone copied them.
- They were ahead of the game with tabs. Then everyone copied them.
- They were ahead of the game with containers. Then everyone copied them.
- They are still the best browser to use for an ad free internet experience.
- The only flaw I can think of, is they are not leaders in performance. Chrome loads faster. But that's because Chrome cheats by stealing your memory on startup.
How would you make FireFox better? When you say they should be making FireFox better, what should they be doing? Maybe they should hire you for ideas.
Because to me, they seem to be constantly trying to make FireFox better. It's just hit or miss.
Extensions was a hit. Tabs was a hit. Containers was a hit. They had a shit tonne of misses over the decades. We just don't remember them.
The crypto and ai stuff just happens to be a miss.
How would I make Firefox better?
First, I would stop breaking up the stuff that works. Firefox was ahead of the game with extensions, then deprecated the long tail for a rewrite that took three years [1] (during which Firefox mobile had a grand total of 9 extensions) and even then it's hard for me today to know which extensions work on mobile. They were similarly ahead of the game with containers, and yet they still don't work on private mode [2] and probably never will. That's two out of three hits where they tripped over their own two feet[3].
Second, do the one thing that users have been requesting for decades: let me donate to the browser development. Not to the Mozilla Foundation, not to internet freedom causes, to Firefox. The Mozilla foundation explicitly says that they don't want to be "the Firefox company", and yet I'd argue they should.
Third, go on the offensive. I get the impression that, with the exception of ad-blocking, Firefox is simply playing catch-up to any idea coming from Chrome regardless of whether it makes sense or not. Would Firefox had removed FTP support had Chrome not done it before?
And fourth, make all these weird experiments extensions.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2023/12/14/three-years-after-its-reva...
[2] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1330109
[3] I always associated tabs with Opera, though.
[4] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2024/a...
> [3] I always associated tabs with Opera, though.
Yeah as someone who picked up Firefox when it was Phoenix, it was “free Opera with a less-odd-feeling UI”. That was basically the initial (great!) sales pitch.
What got me installing it on any computer belonging to a person I would have to help support was the auto-pop-blocking and that it performed a ton better than IE/Netscape/Mozilla. Opera also performed better and I think it also blocked pop ups out of the box, but it wasn’t free (well, kinda, but the free edition… had ads).
> - They were ahead of the game with extensions. Then everyone copied them.
They were ahead of the game with extensions, then they destroyed their own extensions. They copied everyone else, not the other way around.
> - They were ahead of the game with tabs. Then everyone copied them.
They were ahead of the game with tabs. Then while destroying their extensions they made vertical tabs harder, while still leaving it as a charitable contribution by the community instead of an internal project, and slow-walked it for a decade. I still have to do weird CSS to make them look right, because they decided to have an opinionated sidebar for no particular reason.
> - They are still the best browser to use for an ad free internet experience.
This, again, is not their fault. It's because of a man who they don't pay, who has had to battle with them on multiple occasions. Their only contribution is not accepting a Chrome standard completely. Imagine wanting to be given credit for not exactly copying your neighbor, after an enormous amount of pressure was brought to bear. It's my belief that Google decided that Firefox wouldn't kill ad blocking in the end, because it would have looked horrible in antitrust court. Now that's over (Obama judges don't believe in antitrust), and you can expect Firefox to kill it soon enough.
> Because to me, they seem to be constantly trying to make FireFox better. It's just hit or miss.
Nah. They kept telling me, while ignoring everyone's complaints about their actual experiences, that the most important thing was to reduce startup time for some unknown reason.
Make Firefox fully and exclusively a tool in service of the user.
Eliminate - both in code and by policy - anything that compromises privacy. If a new feature or support of a new technology reduces privacy, make it optional. Give me a switch to turn it off.
Stop opting the user into things. No more experiments. No more changing of preferences or behavior during upgrade.
Give the user more control; more opportunities for easy and powerful automation and integration.
Not only would this win me back as a user, I'd pay for the privilege. I'm paying for Kagi and happy to be doing so. I'd love to pay for an open source browser I could trust and respect.
> They were ahead of the game with extensions. Then everyone copied them.
Anyone remembers when Firebug was released?
Today we have amazing dev tools in all browsers but back in the day Firebug was such a game changer.
In my experience Chrome does not just load faster, but it also uses less memory than Firefox because of its more aggressive tab hibernation that is enabled by default.
On my laptop I had to switch from Firefox to Chrome because it kept filling up all of my RAM resulting in other applications crashing.
For me:
- Enable Color Management and HDR display on non-MacOS platforms
- Play HDR video
- Support common and rising media codecs and container formats (HEVC, MKV, JXL)
- Support WebXR properly on desktop
What does "doubling down on making Firefox better?" mean?
What can Mozilla Firefox do to make their 500 million without Google?
They could just make less money and deprioritise non-engineering/engineering-leadership personnel.
In short, they could become a non profit again, with a single mission - build a open source browser with the interests of its users as first priority.
Others are trying that approach, so I guess we'll see if that's enough
They dont need to spend millions on other products and politics for start.
I feel the problem they're trying to solve with that is "EB isn't sufficiently pissed off with the gradually deteriorating user experience yet so instead of actually displaying the page we'll have a big modal popup telling him how great the AI tools are and how he should try them!"
I do not want to try your AI tools, Mozilla, yours or anyone else's.
Society doesn't get improved by doing incremental work on a browser, and Mozilla's mission is to improve society
Yes it does. Having a browser that truly has the user's back, without always trying to compromise the user's interests in favor of advertisers - that would be a benefit to society.
I wish Firefox would be that browser.
Possibly, but that's an absurdly overbroad mission.
Organizations with clear, focused missions are much more likely to be able to achieve them than organizations that want to be everything to everybody.
"Make and maintain Firefox as the best browser for people who care about internet freedom, privacy, and extensibility" would be a perfectly reasonable mission.
Making a better product does not make a fortune in a short run. Banning ad blockers and integrating adware/spyware does.
[flagged]
Money laundering? Is there evidence for that? That’s a pretty big thing to throw out there.
I'm going to repost/merge a few comments I made about this a while ago:
I dropped firefox 9 months so after they updated their privacy policy and removed "we don't sell your data" from their FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43213612
Mozilla has hired a lot of execs from Meta and bought an ad company, looking through a lot of their privacy policy at the time, a lot of it involves rewriting it to say that they can serve you sponsored suggestions when you're searching for things in their search bar and stuff and sharing out some of that data with third parties etc.
Firefox was bringing in half a billion a year for the last decade, if they would've just invested that money in low risk money market accounts (instead of paying their csuite executives millions of dollars in salary and putting the rest on non-Firefox related related social causes), the company would be able to easily survive off the interest alone.
I've been using Firefox since 2006 and have defended it for decades even when they've made questionable decisions that have gotten everybody upset with them. But this time it wasn't just making stupid decisions to try and fund the company, this time they actuality sold out their own customers.
In public announcement in the above link explaining why they removed "we don't sell your data" from the FAQ, the rationality was that some jurisdictions define selling data weirdly, they cited California's definition as an example but California's definition is exactly what I would consider the definition of selling my personal data.
They're justifying this by saying that they need it to stay alive since they're not going to be getting money from Google anymore, but I argue that you shouldn't sell out your customer base on the very specific reason anyone would choose you. I would rather pay a monthly fee to use Firefox to support them, but even if you gave them $500 million today they would just squander it away like they've done since forever so I really don't have any solution I can think of which frustrates me.
I switched to Orion (and use Safari if a site doesn't work in Orion), which can be a little buggy at times but I'm happy that it's not based on chrome at least.
The funny thing about removing "we don't sell your data" is that Mozilla before that was giving your data away for free. Now they just could be compensated.
> this time they actuality sold out their own customers.
The end users are not their customers. They haven't been for a long, long time.
I'm deeply disappointed in Mozilla's management as well, but as long as LibreWolf and IronFox exist, I still see it as the lesser evil.
A decent chunk of the users who bothered installing an adblock would also be bothered enough to install a FF fork with adblock, so I doubt the revenue increase would be much.
As for calling it "off-mission": yes, what's even the point of FF if that's the route it goes on?
Do any of these forks have the ability to sync, either with Firefox or something self hosted? Or are they all just basically reskins with a single toggle added or such?
Yes you can actually self-host both Firefox sync server [1] and use Firefox accounts (which also can be self-hosted [2] and someone put something simpler in docker image [3]). And those can be used even with Firefox itself not only the forks.
[1] https://github.com/mozilla-services/syncstorage-rs
[2] https://mozilla.github.io/ecosystem-platform/tutorials/devel...
[3] https://github.com/jackyzy823/fxa-selfhosting
I don't see how your 2 questions are related to each other.
> Do any of these forks have the ability to sync, either with Firefox or something self hosted?
The Firefox Sync web service is provided by Mozilla but can be self hosted: https://github.com/mozilla-services/syncstorage-rs. That could also be used in forks. See e.g. https://librewolf.net/docs/faq/#can-i-use-firefox-sync-with-... . I don't understand what you mean by sync with Firefox.
> Or are they all just basically reskins with a single toggle added or such?
Hard to generalize, but definitely not all of them. see e.g. https://lwn.net/Articles/1012453/
LibreWolf has a Firefox Sync option, though it's disabled by default
Good point. I'd actually be happy to pay a couple of bucks a month for a good syncing solution based on an open source protocol, to make it easier for me to use the same history and preferences across browsers, IDEs and other such tools. It's actually a similar need and setup to that of a password manager, so I wonder if this is something Bitwarden could take on.
The day Mozilla fired Brendan Eich for political reasons, Firefox died. It just took a while for everyone to realise that. That was when they collectively decided that other things are more important to them than the quality and usability of Firefox.
The new CEO is just the final nail in their coffin.
I don't know, if the CEO of some software I used suddenly came out as anti-miscegenation, and started donating money to the cause, I'd stop using the software until the CEO was fired too.
Where this analogy breaks is that at the time (2008), Eich's position had majority support in the US. The proposition he wad funding passed with majority support. Mixed marriages by contrast had overwhelming support in 2008.
Eich didn't suddenly come out against anything in 2014. People dug up his prior funding.
Demanding permanent ostracization for supporting a majority position is fairly anti-democratic. You can beat someone in a process (Eich's side lost) without demanding total victory forever or declaring more than half of a whole society as permanent villains. In 2008 55% of the US opposed gay marriage, 36% supported it.
https://poll.qu.edu/Poll-Release-Legacy?releaseid=1194
This is a non-sequitur. He didn't donate because it was the popular thing to do, he donated because it was consistent with his religious beliefs.
Christianity has never been a popularity contest. It has steadfastness in the face of rejection and martyrdom in the face of oppression baked into its fundamental fabric, borne from its oppression as a minority religion in the first centuries of its existence.
Appealing to the majority is lame.
There's three options on every stance: support, oppose, and neutral. When in doubt, you should be neutral - not opposed.
Just because everyone else is opposing gay marriage, or integration, or emancipation, doesn't mean you should.
Maybe you don't have the time or energy to try to find out what path you should take. Okay, fair. You can always do nothing. You can literally say "I don't know enough about this to have an opinion".
But following the majority IS NOT that. You ARE taking a hard stance if you do that! You're making a choice, and that means you better understand that choice. You are responsible for it, accountable to it!
> Demanding permanent ostracization for supporting a majority position is fairly anti-democratic.
This was an utterly unreasonable description of being judged unqualified for 1 job.
> Where this analogy breaks is that at the time (2008), Eich's position had majority support in the US.
And where your analogy breaks down is that Eich had that same position at the time he was appointed CEO in 2014 and has that same position today.
> Demanding permanent ostracization for supporting a majority position is fairly anti-democratic.
It depends a lot on what that position is. Donating your personal wealth to discriminate against a marginalized group, which includes many of your employees is worth calling out.
Segregation was once a "majority position" in this country. Shaming segregationists was a really effective way to change that. For example, George Wallace, who eventually redeemed himself.
So you agree: for you, it's more important that the Mozilla CEO shares your political views, than that Mozilla makes a quality product.
That's exactly what the parent post is talking about. When Mozilla started prioritizing political correctness over software quality, software quality predictably declined. That's why they are struggling now: they reduced their user base to the tiny group of political extremists that will put up with an inferior product for the sake of political signaling.
By the way, Eich didn't “come out” as anything. His private donation (a mere $1000) was exposed by people who wanted to cancel him for his political views. It wasn't Eich who forced the issue, it was his political opponents, who do not tolerate any viewpoint diversity. Eich's views weren't even fringe or extreme at the time: Proposition 8 passed with support from the majority of Californian voters.
I think the correct formulation is: "There are political views that the CEO of Mozilla could hold which would be sufficient for me to abandon the use of products that Mozilla makes". And I think that would be non-controversial for most people.
The problem with that formulation is that it denies the importance of the quantative aspect of the difference of opinion.
Of course there are views so extreme almost nobody would put up with them. But at the same time, being tolerant of differences of opinion is an important aspect of a free society and a functioning democracy. There is a word for people who cannot tolerate even the smallest difference of opinion: bigots.
But differences of opinion aren't binary; they lie on a spectrum. Similarly, bigotry lies on a spectrum. The person who doesn't brook the smallest disagreement is a greater bigot that only considers the most odious points of view beyond the pale.
For an extreme example, consider these cases: 1) A CEO is fired for arguing that the US government should round up all Jews and put them in extermination camps Nazi Germany style. 2) A CEO is fired for arguing that the local sales tax should be raised by 0.25 percentage points.
Are these cases exactly the same? You could argue in both cases the CEO gets fired for expressing sufficiently unorthodox political views, but that doesn't cut at the heart of the matter. Clearly it's necessary to quantify how extreme those views are. The extent to which the board that fires their CEO is bigoted depends on how unreasonable the CEO's views are; they are inversely proportional.
So now back to Eich. What was his sin? He donated $1000 to support Proposition 8, which restricted the legal definition of marriage to couples consisting of a man and a woman. This view was shared at the time by Barack Obama and a majority of California voters. It didn't strip gay couples of any formal rights: all the same rights could be obtained through a domestic partnership or an out-of-state marriage. It was just a nominal dispute about what the word “marriage” means.
Clearly this is a relatively unimportant issue; closer to a tax dispute than a genocide. You can disagree with Eich and the Californian public on this one, but being unable to tolerate their point of view doesn't make them monsters; it makes you a bigot.
The fact that Mozilla didn't allow their CEO to deviate from the majority point of view on this issue (again, a minority viewpoint in California at the time!) revealed Mozilla to be a heavily politicized, extremely bigoted corporation, that puts ideological conformity first.
No, fighting for equality does not make you a bigot. Being a bigot makes you a bigot.
I feel like we've awakened from a dream. I look around, and I see that the hyper-transphobe's book series has become a best-selling videogame. I wish I were asleep like you...
> the Mozilla CEO shares your political views
I think treating every human with equal dignity goes beyond politics. While the specific context here was political, but that is only the context, not the principle.
> So you agree: for you, it's more important that the Mozilla CEO shares your political views, than that Mozilla makes a quality product.
He doesn't have to share all of them, but we have to have enough overlap for him to consider me & my friends enough of a human being to share the same rights that he does.
As another commenter pointed out, there are beliefs heinous enough that will override the quality of optional software that I might choose to use.
Marriage is a right?
The freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men.[1]
[1] https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/388/1/
If it's a right for some, it should be a right for all.
> If it's a right for some, it should be a right for all.
Why is a woman not allowed to marry an animal? Or a tree? Or more than one person. Minors? Or parents, grandparents?
What? You don't like some of these ideas?
If it's a right for some, it should be a right for all. Or it's only for those you chose.
In 2008. You know, the year the majority of Americans didn't approve of gay marriage? [1] The year Obama said that marriage is between a man and a woman? [2]
Applying modern sensibilities to history is stupid.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20111017161259/http://www.quinni...
[2] https://www.politico.com/blogs/ben-smith/2008/08/obama-says-...
I am not particularly interested in what the majority of people thought at the time, especially not when the year you're citing is 2008, and not 1886.
And also in 2014 when he was appointed CEO and also today. Eich has the same position today.
Are you referring to his donation to prop 8? Im a younger dev and a bit out of the loop but how would that be anti-miscegenation? Wasn’t that more related to gay marriage?
I used anti-miscegenation as a stand-in, as an example of a ludicrous, indefensible position to hold today, while there are still holdouts who apparently think that gay marriage is some sort of affront to the moral fabric of society.
Oh okay, I see. It is wild to see how much things change because amongst my generation your analogy makes sense, but at the time prop 8 was passed by a majority of Californians.
Eich was appointed Mozilla CEO in 2014. Not 2008. 2014 polls said 60% to 70% of Californians supported same sex marriage. Most California voters would not qualify for most jobs in any case. And Eich's 2008 discrimination support mattered less than his 2014 inability to say he wouldn't do it again.
That's how these things go, sadly.
As an example, Loving v Virginia, the Supreme Court case that struck down all anti-miscegenation laws, was in 1967. In 1968, a Gallup poll indicated that less that 20% of white Americans "approved of marriage between whites and non-whites."
Three decades later, in 2000, Alabama finally voted to repeal its (inactive) law, and a full 40% of voters voted to keep the racist, useless law in their state constitution.
State-declared marriage is an tax saving scheme, that the state does in expect for future tax payers. Not granting it to people who won't "produce" tax payers seems entirely reasonable to me.
Exactly. It's one thing to be an idiot on Twitter, it's another for you to donate money to a cause specifically designed to deny rights to people - a cause that was actually successful for a time. That's something that speaks to a fundamental lack of empathy that I'm not sure he's ever directly addressed.
But in any case, I've heard this argument before, and the timeline doesn't make sense. At the time he resigned, Chrome was very firmly ahead of Firefox, and given his track record with Brave, the idea that Eich would have single-handedly saved Mozilla is also pretty dubious to me.
It seems like a disingenuous and lazy talking point tailor made to blame the demise of Firefox on a culture war politics, when in reality it's the fact that Google was willing to throw much more time and resources at the browser market than a non-profit, unimpeded by the same sort of anti-trust and lack of development that brought Internet Explorer low.
A) Firing a CEO because there is an immediate, massive public shaming of them is entirely rational from a business perspective B) This is the hill you want to die on? That being a bigot should be a protected status for CEOs?
In the US, bigots instinctively recognize and protect each other like impostors in Among Us.
> This is the hill you want to die on? That being a bigot should be a protected status for CEOs?
That is a wildly uncharitable take. I'm not OP, but I believe that nobody, CEOs or otherwise, should be fired for their activities outside of work. That can be political beliefs, but doesn't have to be either. And yes, that means that sometimes someone whose beliefs you find repugnant is going to have a good job. That is the price of a free society, and I think it's worth it.
It's a business decision.
Imagine, instead, the opinion he expressed outside of work is that Firefox sucks and nobody should use it. Should he be fired then?
As a CEO, your opinion and perspective is MARKETING. You determine if customers stay or leave. And causing customers to leave is obviously a fireable offense.
So Subway should bring back Jared and Jello should bring back Cosby? Freedom is not a one-way street that guarantees the right to be awful without social consequences.
> That is the price of a free society, and I think it's worth it.
A society free enough to fund hatred, but not one free enough for employers to make decisions based on that?
The words "bigot" and "racist" have been so overused that they've lost all meaning. "Fascist" is not all that far behind. In a recent interview, Nick Fuentes (much more deserving of the bigot label than Eich) openly said he's a racist. I suspect he lost 0 supporters by doing this. Abusing the language like this has consequences - not good ones.
Definition of bigot from Oxford Languages: a person who is obstinately or unreasonably attached to a belief, opinion, or faction, especially one who is prejudiced against or antagonistic toward a person or people on the basis of their membership of a particular group.
Explain how the word isn't being used according to its definition.
> Nick Fuentes openly said he's a racist.
Do you doubt him? In March 2025, he said, "Jews are running society, women need to shut the fuck up, Blacks need to be imprisoned for the most part, and we would live in paradise ... White men need to run the household, they need to run the country, they need to run the companies. They just need to run everything, it's that simple. It's literally that simple."
> I suspect he lost 0 supporters by doing this.
You seem to believe that his supporters think he isn't actually racist.
I think GP's point isn't that Fuentes isn't racist, it's that the term "racist" lost a lot of its bite precisely because it was thrown around so recklessly and applied to people who obviously weren't "bad guys". So now you can actually go and openly say things like "I'm racist" and mean it, and there's still plenty of people who don't see a problem with that.
> So now you can actually go and openly say things like "I'm racist" and mean it, and there's still plenty of people who don't see a problem with that.
My point is that the people (Fuentes supporters) that he said see no problem with that are racists themselves, or why would they be Fuentes supporters? That's his whole schtick. They don't see a problem with him saying racist things, so why would they see a problem with him directly admitting he is a racist? https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/conservative-writer-says...
Firefox improved in quality significantly between 2014 and the recent decline. And it's not like Brave has shown incredibly good judgement in these areas.
Firing someone for being opposed to same-sex marriage is political in the same way firing someone for robbing a bank is.
This is dangerous, faulty thinking.
Equivocating speech and crime as both being "violence" (of similar class, deserving similar response) is a fallacy that lets people justify murder in response to disagreement as long as it's deemed serious enough.
Yes it's not violence, but it's not speech either. Donating money is performing material harm. That might be an unfortunate reality, but it's undeniable. It's a different thing from just saying something.
Also, you can absolutely be fired for just saying something and that's been the case forever. As a CEO, you are essentially marketing your company. Marketing it poorly and losing customers can, and will, get you fired - in every company, ever.
Really? Having an opinion endorsed by the mainstream doctrine of several world religions with billions of adherents is the same as robbing a bank?
That being said, I disagree with Eich and it probably made sense for the org to let him go given how his views might impact public perception of Mozilla.
Does it feel good to be on the side of millions of like-minded bigots?
Not sure where I said I was on their side.
wat
I'd say it's complicated. If you are running a company in San Francisco I think you want to be sensitive to the culture there. That cause of gay marriage that he opposed was not one of these radicalism for the sake of radicalism queer positions you see on Twitter-dervied platforms but something mainstream at the root. I think of how on The Bulwark podcasts you hear gay people with a conservative but never-Trump viewpoint describing their cozy family life and it just sounds so sweet... and mainstream making the opposition to it not seem so mainstream.
On the other hand I think San Francisco is part of the Mozilla problem because it is less than an hour on the 101 to go see people at Facebook and Google yet they are distant from the 99% of of web developers and web users that live somewhere else whose use Firefox because they don't like what Chrome stands for.
I wish Mozilla was in Boulder or Minneapolis or Cleveland or Dublin or some other second-tier but vibrant city where they might have the capacity to listen to us rather than be in the same monoculture that brings us Chrome and Instagram.
I wish there was anyone in Minneapolis or MN anymore. IBM left, crays been gone forever, and what's left is basically just medtech
Yeah, I can't say I feel comfortable in the medtech culture around Boston. I worked remote at a clinical notes startup based in research triangle park -- our mission was "CRUSH EPIC!" and do that through user-centric thinking and I think medtech culture would be a buzzkill for that.
The guy who runs an affiliate link farming crypto browser built on Chromium now and put money toward denying equal rights to the queer community?
"political reasons" like espousing the level of hatred that makes your queer, Bay Area employees distrust you? OK.
Yeah no, (1) Mozilla was going to be in for a tough go no matter what; I don't think Eich would have fared any better. But (2) you can't donate to stop your own employees and users from having civil rights without repercussions.
People with an axe to grind always hide what Brendan Eich did behind "politics" which is a dishonest slight of hand.
> Yeah no, (1) Mozilla was going to be in for a tough go no matter what; I don't think Eich would have fared any better.
Nobody knows this for sure. We do know that Eich was fired for political reasons, and not because of his technological direction.
This betrays a decision making process that prioritizes political correctness above leadership qualities and technical contributions.
> you can't donate to stop your own employees and users from having civil rights without repercussions.
Why not? Why can't the CEO of Mozilla have his own private political views just like anyone else, and donate his own private money to whatever democratic causes he likes?
This really isn't obvious to anyone except the people, like you, who view Mozilla as a political project first, and as a software project a distant second.
Firing your CEO for not being sufficiently aligned with the American Democratic Party only makes sense if you assume the purpose of Mozilla is to push American Democratic politics, rather than make good software that anyone in the world may use (spoiler alert: many users of open-source software are not American Democrats!)
> Eich was fired
Eich resigned.
> private political views
Donations are public material support. Not private views.
We both know that CEOs are never fired, but there is a difference between resigning on their own accord and “resigning” because they had no organizational support. What happened to Eich was the CEO-equivalent of getting fired.
> Donations are public material support. Not private views.
Not really? Nobody would know what causes Eich donates to if they didn't make an effort to look it up and broadcast that information.
Even if you take that view, are you saying that nobody who works for Mozilla is allowed to make any political donations ever? Or are you simply saying that you Mozillians aren't allowed to donate money to conservative causes? Because it sounds a lot like the second one, and then we're back to the original allegation: that Mozilla today is a political project first, and a technological project second. Otherwise, how do you explain Mozilla caring so much about which political campaigns its employees donate to?
> We both know that CEOs are never fired, but there is a difference between resigning on their own accord and “resigning” because they had no organizational support.
CEOs are never fired is false objectively. CEOs must earn support. And there was no reason to state false information if you believed everyone would understand the context of the facts.
> Not really?
Really. Public records are public.
> Nobody would know what causes Eich donates to if they didn't make an effort to look it up and broadcast that information.
No one would know most news stories if someone didn't research and publish them. No one would know what Mozilla's CEO was paid if no one looked it up and published it.
> Even if you take that view, are you saying that nobody who works for Mozilla is allowed to make any political donations ever?
People are allowed to make donations. People are allowed to choose who they follow or support or not.
And jobs have different standards. Eich remained CTO years after his donation was published with little controversy.
> Otherwise, how do you explain Mozilla caring so much about which political campaigns its employees donate to?
Who are Mozilla to you? The board appointed Eich CEO years after his donation was published
[flagged]
>It's your own fault you lost this argument because you decided to attempt such a pathetically transparent lie, and you can't back-pedal enough to make up for that. Face it, you're just a dishonest bigot on the wrong side of history, still salty that gay marriage is finally legal, impotent to do anything about it besides being a lying keyboard warrior troll.
>I hope for your own family's sake that your own straight marriage isn't so fragile that it was undermined by gay marriage being legal, as Brendan's and other homophobic bigot's tired arguments claim is the insidious threat of gay marriage.
>Maybe you made bad life choices and want to punish people who didn't, but that's on you, so don't take it out on gay people, even if you're one of the jealous hateful closeted self loathing ones yourself.
This is a particularly egregious post that I think warrants more intervention than just a flag @dang. This user has been doing this quite a lot, over a period of many months, if you search his posts for the word "Eich" or "bigot".
Send it to hn@ycombinator.com.[1]
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[dead]
> Firing your CEO for not being sufficiently aligned with the American Democratic Party
This is not what happened. He gave money to a cause with the explicit goal of using that money to prevent his coworkers and users from having equal civil rights based on an inalienable trait they were born with.
That's not an "American Democratic Party" alignment issue, and if you genuinely believe it is, your dog whistle may be broken. It's sounding an awful lot like a normal whistle.
He has a right to do that without fear of government retaliation. But Mozilla has a right to fire him for being a bad person because of it.
That's just factually wrong. Proposition 8 deprived nobody of any rights. Gay couples could get exactly the same rights as straight couples through a domestic partnership, or get married out of state, as even Wikipedia admits:
> A same-sex marriage lawfully performed in another state or foreign jurisdiction on or after November 5, 2008 was fully recognized in California, but Proposition 8 precluded California from designating these relationships with the word "marriage." These couples were afforded every single one of the legal rights, benefits, and obligations of marriage.
Note the last sentence!
Additionally, proposition 8 was not extreme. It was carried by a majority of California voters, and Barack Obama said at the time: “I personally believe that marriage is between a man and a woman” which is essentially what the proposition established too, though Obama opposed using a ballot proposition to settle the issue.
> He has a right to do that without fear of government retaliation. But Mozilla has a right to fire him for being a bad person because of it.
I never argued that Mozilla doesn't have the right to fire people for their political views. We're just establishing that Eich _was_ fired for his political views, and that that shows Mozilla had become a political organization first, and a technological company second.
In a politically neutral technology company there should be room for people who side with Barack Obama and the majority of Californian voters. The fact that that is not true of Mozilla proves it's not a politically neutral company; it's a political project that inherited a software project they are not particularly interested in maintaining except as a vehicle for further promoting their politics.
> That's just factually wrong. Proposition 8 deprived nobody of any rights. Gay couples could get exactly the same rights as straight couples through a domestic partnership, or get married out of state, as even Wikipedia admits:
The US rejected separate but equal since decades.
California domestic partnerships provided most of the same rights as marriage. Not all. The California legislature had to pass bills after to address this.[1]
The bill which afforded same sex couples married out of state the same rights as heterosexual couples married in state passed over 11 months after Proposition 8 took effect. The citation of the last sentence revealed this. You did not read it?
Heterosexual couples were not required to marry out of state.
> Additionally, proposition 8 was not extreme. It was carried by a majority of California voters
Most jobs have requirements which most California voters would not meet.
> Barack Obama said at the time: “I personally believe that marriage is between a man and a woman” which is essentially what the proposition established too, though Obama opposed using a ballot proposition to settle the issue.
Obama opposed stripping rights by vote is a significant difference.
And Obama changed his public position by 2014. Eich was unable to say he would not repeat his harmful action.
And many people suspected Obama's opposition to same sex marriage was a lie in 2008 even. 1 of his advisers claimed this later.
> Eich _was_ fired for his political views
Eich said he resigned because he could not be an effective leader under the circumstances.[2] Did he lie?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestic_partnership_in_Califo...
[2] https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/mozilla-ceo-eich-res...
Let's say everything you said is right: Just because a heterosexual, Christian majority say they don't support "blacks" in their bathrooms and claim the black community should be happy with their "equal" bathrooms, does NOT mean that it is morally acceptable to financially support legal requirements for segregated bathrooms.
> Barack Obama said at the time: “I personally believe that marriage is between a man and a woman”
And yet he didn't force the country to only recognize marriages between men and women. Instead, he did the opposite. He voted against DOMA in 1996. He repealed Don't Ask Don't Tell in 2010. He appointed judges who looked favorably on gay marriage and then told the justice department not to defend DOMA against constitutional attacks. Then he celebrated the Supreme Court's ruling against DOMA.
> In a politically neutral technology company there should be room for people who side with Barack Obama and the majority of Californian voters.
Barack Obama and California voters (64% of likely voters in 2013 according to PPIC) were on the other side in 2014 when Eich was appointed CEO. Eich remained (and remains to this day) on the wrong side.
Civil rights are more important than the quality and usability of _any software_.
Long-time Firefox user* here. If Mozilla weakens the ability to block ads or control content, and/or introduces intrusive AI features that I can't easily disable, then I'm done. I'll go to Waterfox or whatever. Tired of Mozilla's attitude.
* Windows and Android. I even pay for their vpn because there is apparently no way to pay for the browser, which is what I actually use.
I think it's too late for Mozilla, since it seems they already squandered most of their good will, userbase and money.
At any rate, I think their only good path of to get rid of Gecko.
The best would be to replace it with a finished version of Servo, which would give them a technically superior browser, assuming Google doesn't also drop Blink for Servo. It may be too late for this, but AI agents may perhaps make finishing Servo realistic.
The other path would be to switch to Chromium, which would free all the Gecko developers to work on differentiating a Chromium-based Firefox from Chrome, and guarantee that Firefox is always better than Chrome.
>The other path would be to switch to Chromium, which would free all the Gecko developers to work on differentiating a Chromium-based Firefox from Chrome, and guarantee that Firefox is always better than Chrome
No they would get fired, unless Firefox found a new big project to earn money from, which at the moment is not very likely.
I doubt AI agents are going to greatly accelerate the development of something as big and complex as Servo. It seems more realistic that Firefox would be built around either Blink (from Chromium) or Webkit to lean on Google/Apple.
I don't think it's too late at all. I mean, there's recurring outrage whenever Mozilla does something silly again but all through that Firefox is still a fantastic browser. Don't under-value the many quieter parts of Mozilla who just keep kicking ass day in day out.
If they switch to Chromium, they'll just become yet another Chrome rebrand. It'll kill what makes their browser special.
They keep redesigning their UI to be more like Chrome, might as well go deeper.
What makes their browser special really? Just chasing profits and google handout and not caring about their user base
What's wrong with Gecko?
There's nothing particularly wrong with it, but developing a browser engine and keeping up with new web standards is quite a bit of work. And web developers won't all test on a browser with 2-3% market share, so there's more risk of sites not rendering quite right because the engine is different.
Literally only reason to use Firefox is that it still blocks ads properly.
If Mozzilla brings AI or removes ad blocks then they are every way just worse Chrome and there is zero reason to use them over Chrome.
I guess I should already start porting my Firefox extensions over to Chrome since this ship is sinking stupid fast.
Firefox may say they will not block anything and still end up adopting something like Manifest v3.
Android blocking side loading is more or less in the same ballpark.
And the result will be the same i.e. no reason to use Firefox.
I don't know why bring up Android when it is already Google product.
> Mozilla believes in the value of an open and free (and thus ad-supported) web.
> and thus ad-supported
What a sad view of the web. Advertisement is a net-negative for society.
It's a business wankers view of the web.
Only what makes money has any value in their view. That's also why MBA types are the wrong type of person to run something like Mozilla.
Nothing wrong with an unobtrusive, not tracking, banner on a side of a page. Related to what the page is about.
While that would be miles better, there's still plenty wrong with it. Most advertising is designed to trick people into either buying something that they don't need at all (e.g. consuming more soda instead of drinking water, or getting some gadget, or more clothes than they need), or into buying the an objectively worse option (e.g. buying a more expensive fridge that will actually last less time). This is the goal of B2C advertising: tricking people to behave less rationally in their consumption behavior.
The only way to avoid this is to just block ads - even unobtrusive content-relevant ads. You may think ads can't trick you, but that has been shown time and time again to be false.
That's an even more evil ad than the obnoxious and irrelevant variety because something related to my interests has a higher chance of successfully manipulating me.
It's a distraction from the content that I actually want to see and I should not have to spend the bandwidth on loading it or the battery on rendering it.
Yeah I think that might be a worse statement than the one daydreaming about eliminating their remaining market share by abandoning the only thing keeping anyone around. It’s a gross premise to operate from. And bullshit.
The Mozilla Corporation has earned around USD ~500 million in 2023.
The Mozilla Foundation has received around USD ~26 million in 2023 in donation from the Mozilla Corporation (~70%) and other sources (~30%).
The Mozilla Foundation does lots of "spreading awareness" but does not contribute to Firefox development.
That is the most vexing part. I want to donate for Firefox development. Not marketing, not side projects, let me just fund the devs. But no, that is not possible.
Blender is a huge success story relying on sponsors and donations, Wikipedia is swimming in money but no we can't just have a free browser.
No we need to have a Mozilla Corporation that lives on Google money for being the controlled opposition i.e. technically avoiding monopoly situation thing. After all CEOs can't get rich on donations, can they?
Ironically Wikimedia is also throwing money around to side projects, outreach, etc. But luckily for them their products are essentially run by volunteers.
For someone not in the loop, can you explain the difference between the two orgs and maybe even explain what each org uses the money for?
The Foundation owns the trademarks, and mostly does evangelism. The (subsiduary) Corporation actually develops the browser (and accepts a bunch of revenue from Google for Search placement)
Mozilla CEO compensations
2018: $2,458,350
2020: Over $3 million
2021: $5,591,406.
2022: $6,903,089.
2023: ~$7m
Mozilla declined to detail the CEO's salaries for 2024+
... and most of that money comes in the form of sponsored browser/search integration w/ their competitors.
In that set of circumstances, the main qualification for CEO is likely 'plays nice with Google'. Given that, I'm not surprised that Mozilla underperforms.
Beating Google in the browser market might be considered hostile to their sponsors.
they are open source company, how can they decline to state? this is absurd, even regular companies do it.
But that includes bonuses for outstanding performance! /s
You don't have to be very bright to figure killing adblockers in FF is a suicide.
Well, is no mistery that today the best versioins of Firefox are the non official versions like waterfox and zen.
NObody trusts mozilla anymore, specially after they turned into an add company and started paying their CEOs exorbitating ammounts, considering what was being invested in their core business (supposedly making a better browser).
I'm not familiar with Zen, but how do you reconcile that Waterfox frequently lags behind upstream Firefox in terms of security fixes? Yes, you get a perceived gain in privacy, but is that worth potentially exposing yourself to additional vulnerabilities?
> lags behind upstream Firefox in terms of security fixes
I’m not sure why this has become a thing - usually I either release Waterfox the week before ESR releases (the week the code freeze happens and new version gets tagged) or, if I’m actively working on features and they need to coincide with the next update I push, I will release on the same Tuesday the ESR releases.
You can check the GitHub tag history for Waterfox to see it’s been that way for a good while :)
Yes, you get a perceived gain in privacy, but is that worth potentially exposing yourself to additional vulnerabilities?
Speaking only for myself, and regardless of whether this is actually true (see sibling comment): yes. Absolutely. A non-privacy focused browser like Firefox has vulnerabilities/data leaks by design that are worse than hypothetical ones that I probably will not be subject to browsing my usual benign set of websites.
(Posted from Waterfox)
IT dosnet lag long, since both have pretty activity communities.
There are other variations that are a little faster in issueing the updates, but they are maintained by small teams, so they have more change of being corrupted by bullshit, specially this day and age where people take politics too damn serious.
Too be honest, except for niche uses, I just abandoned firefox. Their engine is behind, lags in sites that use too much javascript is visible, when even opening 3 or 4 tabs makes they browser lag behind.
I just keep it in my system this days to access some sites in my work computer and test UI rendering in firefox. Other than that, I had to surrender to chrome and its variations.
I just noticed last week that Chrome was putting multiple versions of some 4GB AI model [1] on my hard disk that I'd never asked for, so when I upgraded my laptop I took the opportunity to switch to Firefox, and now this.
My image of Mozilla as a bastion for user first software just shattered.
[1]: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/get-started
last I checked, firefox doesn't download AI models unless you try to use a (clearly-labeled) feature that requires them. you can also manage/uninstall them at about:addons
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/on-device-models
totally uncharitable interpretation of the quote linked here aside, how is providing an interface for using fully local models not user first software?
If the users don't want the feature, then pushing it on them is not user first. It's that simple.
That's an impossible bar to clear though. Because there are ALWAYS features that some users doesn't want.
They have been since a decade. After tripping down on unrelated political activism they do the same with AI.
Firefox is only good for getting forked into better browser like Mullvad Browser, LibreWolf and Tor Browser.
I think AI in the browser could be useful. It just isn't that useful now.
So far, the most useful "AI feature" Firefox has ever shipped is the page translation system, which uses a local AI to work. I wouldn't mind seeing more of things like that.
Eventually, "browser use" skill in AIs is going to get better too. And I'd trust Firefox with an official vendor agnostic "AI integration" interface, one that allows an AI of user's choice to drive it, over something like OpenAI's browser - made solely by one AI company for its own product.
Yeah I use a plugin for similar translation functionality, but with a local llama.cpp instance instead. Definitely useful and has increased my usage. Also works nicely on the Android version of the app.
How are they funded? Especially LibreWolf?
Curious if LibreWolf can survive the next 25 years or even longer than Firefox.
Mullvad at least is funded by their VPN subscriptions.
There's an elephant in the room: why is maintaining a web browser costing $400M/y?
The web standards are growing faster than non-profit engines can implement them. Google & Apple are bloating the web specs in what looks like regulatory capture.
If Blink/Webkit dominate for long enough, they will lock everything down with DRMs & WEI. Maybe it's time to work on lighter protocols like Gopher & Gemini that don't need 20GB of RAM to open 20 tabs ?
Having a "lighter standard" simply means people will have to write native apps, one per platform. I understand Apple wants this, but for Mozilla that should be the antithesis of what they're trying to achieve.
The standard can be forward compatible. A light website is always great, you're using one right now.
> There's an elephant in the room: why is maintaining a web browser costing $400M/y?
Is that actually the case though? I find it hard to believe that Mozilla has anywhere close to 1500 senior developers working on just Firefox. My guess is that the bulk of that money is spent on unrelated adventures and overhead.
Google Chrome is likely around $400M, while Mozilla's core browser team is around $200M but are technologically far behind. Hard to find precise numbers, it's just an order of magnitude estimate
In what sense is Mozilla behind? Chrome is an advertising delivery platform, they have fundamentally different goals and that $400M they spend on Chrome is not mostly going to technology that I want in my browser, that's the point. Just because Chrome builds telemetry features doesn't mean Mozilla needs them too.
Mozilla rebranded itself as a "crew of activists". Browser is just a side business to generate revenue!
They are probably a money laundy scheme this days. I used to donate every year to Mozilla. Of course, small ammounts because Im not rich. Today they would have to beat this money from my hands.
Is the whole issue not that they are less of a band of activists than they used to be. Now it is suddenly no longer about free and open source software, but more of means to run the whole machine, which is why they probably have profit oriented CEO as bad as that is.
IMO they need to be more a crew of activists than they are now. Fight against stuff like intrusion of AI in every single part of our lives and such.
They're not going to be able to make a case to Google that they need $500M annually to only spend on a browser. They're barely in charge of their own company.
It's so tiring how everything around us is being engineered to make us miserable for the sake of profit. That in itself creates misery, almost seemingly for the sake of misery. A just world would punish this behavior.
It's about control, not profit. Many of these projects are unprofitable. Mozilla will lose business off this.
> He says he could begin to block ad blockers in Firefox and estimates that’d bring in another $150 million, but he doesn’t want to do that. It feels off-mission.
That's just miss interpretation. The way he told that was probably badly reported by the journalist and now it's getting miss understood.
Let's be honest and give this guy an honnest chance instead of witch hunting.
I really didn't like his interview and his blog post but even then, judge on the facts and not the talk !
What Firefox needs is a new steward and move out, literally. The unruly business practices aren't just normalized, they are an expectation. The blathering ceo wasn't even aware his job is to hide that. The fox will die in this toxic ecosystem.
At least there are projects like ladybird coming up to fill their shows
Don't count on it. Have you ever seen how much time and effort has been put in making Firefox, Safari and Chrome compliant and performant? It'll take Ladybird ages to get anywhere near.
Someone could try to merge e,g, V8 and Servo, once that's in decent shape. But even then it'll be time consuming to build an acceptable UI, cookie and history management, plugin interface, etc.
Ladybird is pretty good today. A lot of web apps, even complex ones, just work. It's reached high compliance scores for web standards in a shockingly quick period. See here: https://youtu.be/VqzbqsIlaNI?si=YPdwbApq4nVYlPMQ&t=209
Seems like its easier to crack an existing browser and take away stupid features than to build one. Against TOS but I really don’t care.
And servo: I wish that one would get more mention as it's quite far along. Having multiple competing browsers again that are not controlled by megacorps would be great. Ladybird for browsing, Servo for embedding.
Unfortunately Firefox is basically already dead, it has an incredibly small market share and it will never grow again because their leadership is affected by the corporate mind virus.
I know most HN users are on Firefox, but they should get used to an alternative now, not when its inevitable death happens.
What's a good, non-chromium alternative?
I've been hearing good things about Orion browser. My wife has switched to it, but I'm still on Firefox.
Our family is already super happy with Kagi as a web search engine, and it sounds like they're doing good things on the browser side too.
Zen browser is quite nice. I've heard waterfox was good too.
Zen is Chromium based, Waterfox is dead without Mozilla working on Firefox.
Zen is a Firefox fork, not Chromium based
Firefox may be far from perfect, but somehow it's still the best option.
My key problem is not knowing what the real good alternatives are? I've trusted Mozilla for so long that I've fallen out of touch with a market that never really changed as much as it has in the last few years.
I simply don't think there's an alternative that will tick all the boxes between UX, privacy, support, etc.
There are zero alternatives to Firefox that aren't 99% Firefox.
Firefox is a unique browser that is, in many ways, positioned to be the best browser. It's fast, fairly privacy preserving, and not built on chromium.
do you have a source for hn users being mostly firefox users?
i can guess that a lot of them are ublock origin users
Disabling ad blocking goes hand in hand with an "AI Browser" strategy.
Ad blocking relies on the ability to use filters to block network requests at the browser level, and visual elements at the DOM level. "AI Browsers" are designed to add bloat to the browsing experience, by offering to summarize something, or providing contextual information like say, a product recommendation that pulls data from a third party site. Network request and DOM element blocking would instantly negate that.
I've moved to Librewolf myself.
On the contrary, ad blockers and 'AI browsers' goes hand in hand. On one side is naive browser that displays pages as-is, on the other is user agent that shows what is relevant to the user. Ad blockers are just more static / more deterministic variants of that.
Bold of you to assume ai browser will allow for subverting commercial monetization
What centralized organization with a budget and a CEO is ever going to do that? They are all under pressure to not piss off the giant advertising octopus that has its tentacles in every part of the tech industry.
I think the sentiment of the headline statement is off. What you expect a CEO to say is "OBVIOUSLY the one thing which is completely off the table, because of it's lack of alignment with our mission and vision..."
Instead of which he inverts it "we'd get like $150m if we did this thing we won't do because well.. we haven't decided to." with the implicit "... yet"
And I agree with comments below: he discounts risk side loss of income because of people walking away.
The state of Mozilla's current 'products':
Firefox
Mozilla VPN
Mozilla Monitor
Firefox Relay
MDN Plus
Thunderbird
-
Some of these products are just repackaged partnerships.
-
Firefox - Funded by Google with the search partnership bringing in $500M in revenue. (free)
Mozilla VPN - Repackaged Mullvad VPN and using Mullvad servers.
Mozilla Monitor - Repackaged HaveIBeenPwned. (free)
Firefox Relay - No different to Simplelogin and not open source. (free)
MDN Plus - Be honest, you wouldn't pay for this since this was offered for a long time for free, MDN is already free.
Thunderbird - Most likely funded by Google (free) (using Firefox Search Revenue)
-
Be honest, would you pay for any of Mozilla's products when most of these can be found for free or close to free?
That is the problem.
Part of the "problem" is that people don't care about any of those products, except Firefox.
Mozilla needs to figure out how much they need to maintain Firefox, nothing else. I suspect that's not the entirety of the $200 million they currently spend on "development costs". Everything else they receive in donations and partnership fees should go directly into an investment portfolio which will be used to keep Firefox development active in the future.
If they didn't care about anything else, the Google money could fund Firefox for at least two years per yearly fee.
Isn't Thunderbird (more or less) independent? "Thunderbird operates in a separate, for-profit subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation."
Yeap. It's mentioned in their financial reports that user donations represent more than 99.9% of our annual revenue[0]. Also seems their staff is mainly engineers/developers, and all the expenses are concentrated to their product*. Thunderbird doing what Firefox should.
[0]: https://blog.thunderbird.net/2023/05/thunderbird-is-thriving...
*Though Thunderbird is Gecko-based so can be said in part, perhaps a significant one, they're depending on Firefox development.
It doesn't matter if they are or not really.
As of right now Thunderbird doesn't make any money, it relies on 'Donations' which isn't at all sustainable.
I can see Thunderbird is planning to do a pro plan, but it is behind a waitlist so the total sum of revenue Thunderbird is making relative to Google's $500M deal is close to zero.
Firefox relay is open source (https://github.com/mozilla/fx-private-relay) and have paid plan (1€/month)
Even worse?
That means people can self host (for privacy and incase the private relays are unstable) and not give money to Mozilla.
Besides 1€/month is not going to cover anything of the costs to run the service.
people do pay for Kagi.
the question is more "how to replace the free money from google by real clients,and still get the same margin as google free money"
I am subscribed to recurrent donations to Thunderbird.
I would pay for Firefox if it was focused on privacy and customizabilty, not telemetry and LLMs.
How much do you pay to Thunderbird, just curious.
Equivalent of $5-6 monthly
Mozilla's problem has never been a lack of monetization ideas, it's been a lack of ideas that don't undermine why Firefox exists in the first place
When someone working for A is doing something that would clearly harm A to the benefit of B, I usually start wondering if that someone really works for A or there's something fishy going on. Mozilla is wasting a huge load of money coming from the Google agreement (another conflict of interests) to pay huge salaries to their CEO over the years. If there's something they lack it's openness about goals, not money.
Firefox has been lagging in Web features for a long time. I have been a Zen browser user for about a year, and recently moved back to Arc just because almost all interactive websites look bad on the Firefox engine; somehow, they don't have the same level of JS API support as Chrome does, especially for WebRTC, Audio, or Video. And this is frustrating that they think the problem is the AdBlockers!
150M seems like such a small number for something that would have so much impact
Mozilla gets what, a billion dollars a year from Google to be the default search engine for Firefox? What do they need more money for?
[flagged]
I didn't read it that way. I read it as him acknowledging that would be a poor choice and therefore that mozilla won't do it.
Right, saying that something which is completely against the company's fundamental principles "feels off mission" gives us a very secure feeling of this CEO.
Mozilla needs some of that Brave and Opera energy. They have their issues too, but at least they try not to be just a worse chrome.
>that Brave and Opera energy
Closed source adware and crypto scams?!
“Absorb what is useful, discard what is useless, and add what is specifically your own,” Bruce Lee
Can you please tell me how a purely opt-in feature is a scam? I'm all ears.
> I've been using Firefox before it was called that.
Call me petty but I still can't let this one go. At the time they basically stole the Firebird name from the database project and did not hesitate to use AOL's lawyers to bully the established owners of the name. So they didn't actually become shady over night. It's in their DNA.
Let's assume that Mozilla is not doing super hot and that's why their CEO is contemplating this topic.
Obviously we are not happy about ads, but we all understand that having money is pretty neat (if only to pay ones salary). Help the CEO fella: What great, unused options is Mozilla missing to generate revenue through their browser?
Adblocker.
It's insane that this is right now on top of HN. Random and really childish interpretation is now worthy of top post?
I feel like some day, YouTube and all video streaming are likely to move to apps and just drop browser support (replace with redirect to app). It feels like the logical conclusion of the ad blocking arms race. This is just one step forward down that road.
If Mozilla were to kill adblockers, there's basically no reason to not use Chromium. It's pretty much the only relevant difference between Chromium and Firefox these days.
It's truly impressive how they've managed to do every user-hostile trick Google Chrome also did over the years, except for no real clear reason besides contempt for their users autonomy I suppose. Right now the sole hill Mozilla really has left is adblockers, and they've talked about wanting to sacrifice that?
It truly boggles the mind to even consider this. That's not 150 million, that's the sound of losing all your users.
Has anything positive came out from or about Mozilla in the past few months or years?
I'd say Rust.
Rust is already a teenager...
There's very little money in running a browser for users who want ad blocking, performance, and features but don't want to let the browser company make money the same way most of the internet does - advertising. Most people don't care about seeing ads.
If killing ad blocker support is what keeps Firefox alive, I understand the move and would probably make the same call.
I understand where people are coming from with these takes... but look at the details, Mozilla is practically dead already. They are almost solely funded by Google.
Look at browser stats, what they're doing is not working and asking them to continue doing it will kill them. They have to change or they will die.
Their core audience (people on this site) is shrinking constantly. You can not save them.
I feel like this is a case where a bunch of smart people like something so much, or the idea of something, that they've completely blinded themselves to the facts.
I'm a daily Firefox user, but its to the point where I'm waiting for someone to make a serious hard fork that only has a non-profit that funds the project and nothing else.
Sincerely, I'm just using Firefox ATM because of Sidebery.
If I could use something similar on Brave, I would go back in an instant.
My main issues with FF are that it is a battery hog on MacOS, doesn't have AV1 playing capabilities (or it has, but I would need to go through some configuring that I don't need to do in other browsers) and sometimes it stalls in certain pages (that's probably not FF fault, but that the web developers don't optimize for it... but still, it's not a problem on Brave, so, I don't really care for apologising for it).
I used Sidebery which had niggles. I switched to native vertical tabs with collapsible groups, which Brave also has.
But it still doesn’t have work spaces, right?
"I think no one wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45926779
Isn't it kind of telling how incredibly complicated modern web browsing is, that a web browser is seen as one of the most difficult general purpose projects a developer could imagine building, aside from an entire desktop environment or a kernel?
You know what would be neat? If the Gemini protocol were slightly expanded for video/image embeds, and then having Firefox/Ladybird support it out of the box.
Every now and then we talk here about Mozilla needing more money to keep Firefox alive, meanwhile they spend money with other priorities in mind.
This is an old article but has some good examples:
https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4387539/firefox-money-invest...
Clearly Google have an iron hand over Mozilla. They want it to remain semi-alive for competitiveness purposes but also ad-block free in order to keep the last user's attention to ads. There might be an under the table agreement between G and the CEO that we will never find. After a while Firefox might become abandoned because nobody in power wants it any more.
Oh no! There goes Google's antitrust insurance...
What are some good alternatives to Firefox? I have loved the browser for years, but the future isn’t looking bright. Waterfox is on my radar. Any others I should be aware/you guys are using?
I've been using Firefox since it was called Phoenix. Going against the users like that would make me drop it like a hot potato.
So what browsers will be left if Firefox kills ad blockers. This seems to be happening to all the major browsers.
Brave has decent ad-blocking but has a shady history ...
What is shady about it?
When you try to visit https://lobste.rs using Brave on Linux (on macOS it somehow works) you are blocked and given the following links:
https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters/issues/761 https://web.archive.org/web/20250109000904/https://lobste.rs...
edit: in the past you would always get blocked, now I don't get blocked anymore when visiting lobste.rs with Brave. Anyway, do with this information as you please.
Correction : It has already killed itself.
> Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?
I feel like this question has been valid for almost as long as I can remember (e.g. the Mr. Robot extension incident). I find myself struggling to tell if Mozilla is an inherently flawed company or if it's just inherent to trying to survive in such a space.
It really seems like all large tech corporations are trying their hardest to kill themselves, and failing because the market is so rigged.
Remember when Kodak ignored digital cameras and became irrelevant? That was bad because it decreased shareholder value. That will not be allowed to happen again.
It feels like the only reasonable path forward would be for the EU to buy Mozilla and fund it as a public resource.
Capital extraction is fundamentally opposed to user freedom. If we want an open web, we, the people need to be maintaining it and not rely on MBA types to do it for us.
No, thanks. I don't want my taxes to fund a(nother) failed Corp. If they aren't able to stay afloat (after 20 years of miliking billons from the evil Google), just let them sink.
> It feels like the only reasonable path forward would be for the EU to buy Mozilla
Why would they need to buy Mozilla? Just fork Firefox and go from there.
I suppose they could, but I'm assuming Mozilla has quite a few experts on the code base that could come in handy.
Maybe just try to poach them?
I think the writing for Mozilla was on the wall for a solid decade now. The time to look for alternatives and to switch to other (pretty unknown) niche browsers was at least 5 years ago. I don't even remember the time when I downloaded and used Firefox anymore.
I would stop using Firefox if Enzor-DeMeo would block or cripple ad blockers.
While it is not my main browser (Vivaldi is), I have 5 installs of Firefox Portable for different things, like one for YouTube, one for testing pages against Firefox and so on.
Mozilla/ Firefox is irrelevant and ultimately doomed to ever smaller numbers.
That's because their users are driven by opinions and principles, and those are the worst, most disloyal kind of users. They're always threatening to leave, and will take the slightest offense to do so.
Chrome wins because its user base doesn't care. The browser is just a tool, not a religion. It's installed, they use it, they're barely aware it exists and most of Joe Public doesn't even know Google makes it.
So sure. For you it's ad blockers. For someone else it's their donation plan. Or Google funding. Or their corporate structure. Or their management.
When your marketing is about something else, other than the product itself, you always end up with edge-case-customers.
People use Chrome because it's the best browser. Less than 3% use Firefox. And all I read from Firefox users is how bad everything is (or will be).
No, Firefox's market share isn't a foil to monopoly (Safari has 5 times more users. Crumbs Edge has twice the users.)
I care about Firefox, but I really just wish all the whiners would just do what they threaten and use something else. But they won't because everything else is worse (for some or other principles reason.)
Now I fully expect to be downvoted because the only people reading this article in the first place are Firefox whiners. Which is kinda my point.
It's pretty hard to recommend Firefox to others when everything written by existing users is so negative.
> The browser is just a tool, not a religion.
An ad blocker is a very useful tool. Being able to block ads effectively makes the browser much better. I'm not sure how you can call that "religion".
> People use Chrome because it's the best browser.
No they don't. They use Chrome because every Google service nags the shit out of them to use Chrome. People aren't as rational as you make them out to be.
i respect that you ate those downvotes standing up for what you believe
> He says he could begin to block ad blockers in Firefox and estimates that’d bring in another $150 million, but he doesn’t want to do that. It feels off-mission.
It would be amusing if the only browser left that could run ad-blockers was Safari.
>> He says he could begin to block ad blockers in Firefox and estimates that’d bring in another $150 million, but he doesn’t want to do that. It feels off-mission.
> I read this as “I don't want to but I'll kill AdBlockers in Firefox for buckerinos ”.
I completely disagree. First of all the original quote is paraphrasing, so we don't know in which tone it was delivered, but calling something "off-mission" doesn't at all sound like "we'd do it for money" to me.
This is how I read it too, feels like a misinterpreted quote taken out of context. Everyone at Mozilla is probably well aware that removing adblockers would make them lose probably the majority of their users.
You can block adverts on the network level at the gateway in your routers web app. You can also use libre wolf which also uses the gecko rendering engine if you run Linux.
You can also block ads on the network level at the gateway on your router. If you run Linux you can run libre wolf instead of Firefox both still use gecko for rendering.
I exclusively used Firefox for 20 years. I moved over to Edge and haven't looked back. Mozilla and the people still using it seem to think maintaining your own rendering engine with Gecko is somehow keeping the internet free. Wrong abstraction layer of freedom to worry about. It's the most bizarre thing I've ever seen. It should have moved to Webkit or Blink many years ago, and focused on user experience. Such as extensions to keep MV2 addons working, and even expanding on the capabilities, like the old XUL/XPCOM Firefox extensions. Those things are why people like me used Firefox, not because of all the money and work put into Gecko. Which is just redundant in the end.
Moving to Blink or Webkit, keeping MV2 and XUL, was where the effort should have been placed. Also, I never understood Pocket or any of their other decisions. Now it's being floated to ban adblockers. Poorly run organization that given its direction and decisions, deserves to die.
I use firefox for three things.
1. The ad blocker. 2. The sense of superiority over the normies (because of the ad blocker) 3. Theming
If adblockers are killed, that removed points 1 and 2. I am pretty sure I can do the same theming in Chrome (I have simple tastes) so that makes 3 a non-factor. And combined with the companies that refuse to make their sites work with firefox, there is no reason not to use chrome. Privacy is a non-factor since my identity is already wholly linked to my google account. I would have to first switch off off there and I am not putting in the effort for that.
They're between a rock and a hard place. Introduce AI and alienate whatever users you have left. Do not introduce AI and alienate whatever investors you have left.
Story as old as free software, non-profit gets put in charge, original creators ousted, non-profit extracts max value while software rots.
You mean, Mozilla, the AI company? Where, "Our mission is to make it easy for people to build with, and collaborate on, open-source, trustworthy AI."?
Would a Mozilla-like browser be sustainable via the "old" nonprofit model through government or academic grants/philanthropy?
It will bring 150 millions the first year, but the next one?
Entire base is free s/w - every bit including both phones. Grow a pair - stop felating epstien trump and gang (including RMS).
Be the gang all f'n ready
[dead]
The fact that they even have a CEO is mind boggling to me
A lot of things are not what they pretend to be. Wikipedia is another example.
How is blocking ad blockers going to make them $150m?
User since Phoenix 0.6, now moved to Brave and haven't seen an ad in years, and it comes with a handy AI response on every search
You can donate to ladybird on donorbox
https://donorbox.org/ladybird
Mozilla wasted probably hundreds of million dollars trying all those "features", but all we want is a stable browser.
Firefox feels like an organization where the leadership is more focused on enriching themselves than the mission.
What are good Firefox alternatives these days that will run a proper uBlock origin (not chrome’s watered down manifest v3 version)?
I just run Brave and I don't even remember what ads look like.
Obviously, we die hard fans and users agree.
They are but as with everything else in last 10 years they are insanely incompetent at it so it will take a while
The profit model is being payed (as CEO) to dismantle Firefox into oblivion and no more.
I would pay for Firefox if it meant it could still block ads and well... survive.
Sadly we are way beyond that point, the moment it went below 5% that was it.
I think blocking ad blockers (the whole FFing point of using Firefox is freedom to do use those) would be the shortest path for him out of the door as a CEO.
It's so tone deaf that it is likely to probe the community into drastic action if he were to attempt to push that through. Including probably much of the developer community. I'm talking the kind of action that boils down to forking and taking a large part of the user base along. Which is why that would be very inadvisable.
The problem with being a CEO of a for profit corporation, which is what he is, is that his loyalty is to shareholders, not to users. The Mozilla Foundation and the corporation are hopelessly inter dependent at this point. The foundation looks increasingly like a paper tiger given the decision making and apparent disconnect with its user base which it is supposed to serve.
All the bloated budgets, mis-spending on offices, failed projects, fancy offices, juicy executive salaries at a time where revenue from Google continued to be substantial all while downsizing developer teams and actually laying some off isn't a great look. Stuff like this just adds to the impression that they are increasingly self serving hacks that don't care about the core product: Firefox. This new CEO isn't off to a great start here.
who are the shareholders?
yeah pretty sure its a private corp under the ownership of the parent foundation. no shareholders so not sure why they new guy said what he said.. theres no one to impress
I wonder where killing adblockers on Firefox will leave LibreWolf...
Sorry to get on one of my political hobby horses but...
We actually need to consider the possibility that yes, it is. More precisely, that the new CEO is trying to do that.
It doesn't take a grand conspiracy to join an organisation on false premises. It's totally easy. You can, today, go join a political party without agreeing with them at all, with the intent to sabotage them. Or another organization, including a workplace.
And just like some people just lie for amazingly little reason, I'm increasingly convinced some people do this. Maybe for a sense of control, maybe because they think they'll get rewarded. For every person who holds a crazy belief in public, there's probably one who holds the same belief but doesn't feel the need to let others in on it. As the world gets more paranoid, it'll get worse, open fears are the top of the iceberg.
If Enzor-Demeo ends up tanking Mozilla, there are plenty of people who will be happy with that. It's not as if his career will be over, far from it. Ask Nick Clegg or Stephen Elop. We all need to wake up to the idea that maybe the people who are supposed to be on our side aren't actually guaranteed to be unless we have solid mechanisms in place to ensure it.
> Maybe for a sense of control, maybe because they think they'll get rewarded.
Maybe they are rewarded. Industrial sabotage by competitors is not new.
>ends up tanking Mozilla
No, Mozilla has been tanking for a decade already. Less than 5% of market share, and zero mobile.
I see you're familiar with Stephen Elop. Also, remember that the people who hired Elop probably hired him with the intention of making a fortune off of that destruction.
It's not that he's some secret agent or some mentally ill person who wants to destroy the company while twirling his mustache, it's that he's a person carefully chosen by people who have made large fortunes from Firefox through indirect means. He would be chosen to destroy it in a way optimized for their gain, like Elop was chosen by the board to turn Nokia into a cheap, obvious Microsoft buy, Clegg was chosen to enable the Tory government, or Sturgeon to make sure that indyref2 never happened.
Google is under no antitrust threat at all anymore. Obama judges don't believe in antitrust. Google wants to get out of paying that 500M/yr, and shitting up Firefox is a great way to do it. They'd be more than happy to throw a couple dozen of those Ms to Enzor-DeMeo or whoever will help them get that done.
How much you willing to bet that he becomes Mozilla's highest paid CEO in history, ruins the product completely, then leaves and ends up an exec at Google or some 80% owned by Google offshoot founded by a Google alum?
Yes, and they've been at it for a while. its honestly hard to watch.
Wait, how could "blocking ad blockers" bring in money at all?
Certain advertising firms are likely to pay a nice big sum to make sure ads are being delivered
I use AdGuard DNS. AdBlockers are too CPU and memory intensive anyway.
With DNS over https Firefox has the answer against you already built in. And back then they were very keen on implementing it as soon as possible. They even sold it as helping against censorship. It's maybe just a question of time how long good old Firefox will allow you to censor ads...
We are missing the context how the statement was said in the interview. The CEO is new and not used to the scrutiny that position brings, especially for Mozillas CEO given their purported ideals. It is quite possible he said this as something absurd -> "If making money was our only goal we would have some other options. We could for example disable all adblockers, to get more money from our advertising sponsor Google, at least 150 million USD. But we can not and won't do that, as it would feel completely off-mission for everyone and harm us long-term. So we always keep our mission in mind." Then the journalists shortens it to the blip in the verge article and the reaction twists it around a bit more, assuming disabling adblockers was on the table as a serious suggestion.
Or it could be it really was on the table since they just entered the advertising business and think AI is the future of Mozilla, a "fuck those freeloaders", heartfelt from the Porsche driving MBAs in Mozilla's management. Who knows. But it's a choice which interpretation one assumes.
"it feels off-mission" is a very chatgpt thing to say
Anyone in a position to short sell from the inside?
your spelling it wrong its not Mozilla, its MozillAI.
Just when I re-started using it because of the vertical tabs.
I will gladly pay for services that help me defeat ads.
as soon as ublock goes, firefox goes.. more anonymity that way anyway since being a firefox user already makes me stand out from the crowd.
For fuck sake, for-profit side of Mozilla, get a damn grip!
Update, since this is getting traction on Reddit
I'm not against Mozilla making money. Like a regular citizen needs to make money, companies and even nonprofits need it too.
Don't second guess yourself OP. Firefox is not a product. It's an open-source project countless people have contributed their time and dime to over the years. The Mozilla corporation didn't create Firefox, the open-source community did. Mozilla was entrusted to be the stewards of the project and have repeatedly violated that trust. Mozilla is commoditizing other people's hard work while enriching themselves in the process at the expense of the community and abused the trust we placed in them to get away with it.
Yes. They're paid to do so by Google.
Mozilla received $555 million from Google in 2023
Half a billion, they are both milking and lying to you
I suspected it would be something like this.
Time to migrate to a Firefox fork
I realize that a FOSS browser is an absolutely enormous monstrosity of a project. An undertaking akin to a whole FOSS OS. But it's also comparably important, especially when no FOSS alternatives exist in the browser space. We (I mean that very loosely, not having contributed anything myself) have managed to produce _several_ FOSS OS-es. Why are we seemingly completely fucked if Mozilla does in fact kill itself/Firefox? I don't doubt that we are, I just don't understand.
> Killing one of its advantages over the Chromium engine, being able to have a fucking adblocker that's actually useful, and that nowadays is a fucking security feature due to malvertising, will be another nail in the coffin, IMHO.
Well, it would be a shot in the head. What would be the point of using Firefox if it can't block ads better than Chrome, and on mobile as well???
Doing so would not "bring in an additional 150 millions, or 50 millions, or 1 million! It would kill the product instantly.
malvertising - liking the term
This Mozilla fiasco has convinced me that being a nonprofit isn't enough. We need a web browser that is actively hostile towards corporations and surveillance capitalism.
Why hasn't the anti-corporate fiasco (not a single successful example) convinced you that it's not enough?
Corporations, private equity, the ever encroaching monopolies and centralization of economic power, the steady march towards authoritarianism... all of these things are connected and are making our lives shittier. We should oppose them.
> This Mozilla fiasco has convinced me that being a nonprofit isn't enough
I'm not sure to what extent Mozilla actually functions as a nonprofit. All the bits one cares about (i.e. FireFox) are developed by the for-profit subsidiary, which is at least somewhat beholden to Google/Microsoft for revenue...
Starting with a strong copyleft license helps a lot. See Blender being GPL.
How so? Corporate and surveillance capitalism's infrastructure is built on copyleft software. The equivocation of license dogmatism with social good and sustainability that those movements were never actually aligned with is part of what's left socially minded technologies and communities so vulnerable to the predation that led the web to this current mess.
man curl
> hostile towards corporations and surveillance capitalism
... they said. Not against users.
"oh look, my browser doesn't work with Facebook, any Google sites and most of the web"
I dont know how anyone could take mozilla seriously after they integrated google analytics into it about 10 years ago for no reason I can fathom. It immediately made me think somethings off, and I never used it again.
Instead I thought screw it and just went nuts deep into chrome, atleast it was more functional.
ps - ( apparently mozilla took it out sometime later , but to me the damage to its reputation was done)
And so switching to a browser created by the world's biggest advertising company is your solution? Interesting
yes I explained the irony it’s clear you missed if you read my comment again you will understand that I decided to opt for full functionality albeit at the expense of loss of total privacy after being let down my Mozilla.
If you’re still struggling you can use an llm to try and explain my comment to you.
All the best buddy
going to die anyway
Mozilla FireSlop.
It was already dying and with no chances of making up share, most online usage comes from mobile, nobody cares about installing Firefox there but us nerds.
So they need some kind of pivot.
I might get heavily downvoted, but since official "extension stores" are handicapped, people should re-invent dll inject ad blockers.
Does anyone have a link to the source of the statement without a paywall in front? I could not see any reference to this 150M$ anywhere.
Every bit of the base is free s/w including both phones. Stop felating trump epstein and gang incoudingbrms.
Grow a pair already. And stop calling normal average "typical"
[dead]
Ok win
You can't kill ad-blockers in a browser, unless you don't allow running AI models in browsers (which will become very soon an integral part of your browsing usage - for some of us it already is, mostly through extension).
I will one day just add "Remove all ads on the page I am browsing" into my BROWSER_AI.md file.
What could possibly go wrong?