I'll be contrarian to the thread sentiment and say: Mozilla has misstepped in the past, and will continue to do so, and they're partially funded by competitors for antitrust reasons, etc.
That said, I can't really disagree with anything in this. As a developer (and socially conscious human) I want to move in the direction of openness.
I think the problem many of us have is it feels like Mozilla invests more effort into everything other than its browser, we see the things they do outside of Mozilla, I mean it was so bad Thunderbird had to become its own foundation due to lack of funding!
I would love for there to be a world where Mozilla maintains Firefox and can make for product projects that provide higher value. I also have a pipe dream of one day someone like (and if they read this, and anyone who reads this will think I'm crazy) CloudFlare just buys Firefox itself from Mozilla so it can finally be funded correctly. CloudFlare has an interesting talent pool and I'm sure there's people who work with Rust / have worked with Rust who can help fund something like Firefox. Then I would like to see them create a true open foundation whose entire bottom line goes towards Firefox, not to anything else.
Free the fox from corporate shennanigans. By my own corporate shennanigans. And CF could be swapped out with any company bold enough to free the fox.
>I think the problem many of us have is it feels like Mozilla invests more effort into everything other than its browser,
Unfortunately the side bets are disproportionately visible relative to the vast majority of what they actually do, which is ship millions of lines of code in browser improvements every quarter, keeping pace with Google despite a fraction of Google's resources.
I certainly think a better strategic partner than Google would be ideal. Yahoo had a strategically promising moment that slipped through its fingers that I think will always be a what-if. Cloudflare is interesting because they're very much a create-a-blue-ocean kind of company, and the problem with browsers has always been that the browser space simply isn't a revenue driver, it's something you subsidize from other businesses.
Firefox is, remarkably, the most successful self funded browser engine in the history of the world, but many great companies have come and gone in this space (e.g. Opera) and still fell behind. They invest more in the browser now than they ever have, they have shipped more production Rust code than anybody. But that's not louder than the noise in the modern internet.
I think you're right that someone like Cloudflare would be an interesting partner and I can't think of a better one off the top of my head. And if AI is eclipsing search, that threatens search licensing they're currently relying on. I don't know what AI in the browser is, what new norms, what new expectations, what core concepts are going to matter the most. But something is going to change and you have to get out ahead of that now, to be relevant tomorrow.
CloudFlare relies on it in key projects, which is why I feel like if I had to pick any tech company to consider taking a hold of Firefox, they'd be my top pick. I know some people are skeptical of them, but they have not goofed yet. Maybe if the CEO ever steps down I'll change my views on CF.
Yeah if you’re going to scope it to browsers alone, sure but Google is catching up. They just implemented JPEG-XL as a rust library for Firefox to use too, for example. Nothing at the scale of Stylo but it seems to be accelerating.
At the same time, Firefox last year gained tab groups, vertical tabs, a user-friendly profile switcher. Split view and tab notes are under development. It sometimes feels like it's moving faster than ever, and that's disregarding all AI features.
(Disclosure: I work at Mozilla, but not on Firefox.)
I kept up with it a lot during the Oxidation years and it felt like Firefox was getting a LOT then, while I'm sure its still getting attention (I was testing Firefox Quantum the second it come out), and I still use it daily, I'm just expressing the overall of how I and others feel, I dont feel they're ALWAYS messing up with Firefox, but it definitely feels like Mozilla does too many moonshot things that fail and it leaves anyone wondering if the money was better spent invested in Firefox itself.
different point of view: tab grouping took 20+y to develop (since opera had it in 2000s).
in 2026 firefox should have:
- fast ui
- fast js
- fast rendering
- hw acceleration for video
- same look and feel on all platforms
- faster adblocker
just the basics, no? didn't add more advanced features here.
and let's see what is actually here:
- UI rendered via HTML/xul. an abomination. a slow abomination at that. right clicking something can show you stagers of rendering of a menu.
- check any Js benchmarks, you will see how FF stands
- rendering,... there was a talk in one of the conferences explaining timing requests and time-to-picture. this may be blamed on the standards, but chrome does it better
- video hw acceleration on Linux? is this actually working? and I don't mean 3/100 relevant codecs
- same look and feel - done
- AdBlock is the only advantage you have over other platforms. it would make sense to implement this in the browser and not rely on Js and extensions
it's sad and funny that people with only a couple million are going to soon catch up to Mozilla and make it obsolete, by building a Bowser engine, not only a shell around blink/WebKit.
Look at what happened to Opera. They fell apart, abandoned their Presto engine for Chromium and sold to an outside investment group and now they serve ads based on user data.
There was, in my opinion, no better browser company past or present than Opera in the 2000s and 2010s (sorry Mozilla). But their example exposes the fallacy of assuming that building out great features guarantees market share gains.
opera had a different business model. I don't think they had millions upon miliona that Mozilla gets from Google for antitrust reasons.
opera had to earn their money.
this aside, Mozilla just now implemented tab grouping. does that mean they are going to, because of the added features, follow opera's path?
my point was that someone said how they increased development speed. and I'm saying they are breaking record in how slow it is. it's not 1y, it's since the feature appeared anywhere and it's 20y ago. what the f was Mozilla doing since then? obviously they didn't work on the features. but also they didn't work on the other list of things I mentioned since only one is fully delivered (look and feel on all platforms) and those are non-features like fore mentioned tab groupings, but core capabilities for a browser.
in everything else they are so much behind it's really a wonder they still have market share as much as they do.
What are you talking about? Opera and Mozilla are both in the business of trying to deliver a good browser, which means good features. Different financing doesn't change the mandate to deliver good browser features, and Opera most definitely did rely on search licensing as their primary income stream anyway, despite attempts to diversify (for years they relied on Google and Yandex and got more money from that than other forms of financing).
As I said, my opinionated hot take is that Opera was probably the best ever at delivering features and performance beloved by users, but that wasn't enough to move the needle on market share, which is why Opera perfectly exposes the fallacy of assuming better features = better market share. In this context appealing to "business structure" is a deflection.
Also, this tab grouping argument is mistaken both on its own terms but more broadly as a stand in for the argument that the Mozilla team has supposedly done nothing. Firefox had native tab grouping years before Chrome ever had it, had arguably the best tab grouping extension of any browser due to an intentional choice to invest in an extension ecosystem that made that functionality possible, and for the most part, Firefox has never not had tab grouping. What's new is that it's back as a baked-in default rather than merely present as a best in class extension.
The idea that Firefox has done nothing is an unfortunate impression that comes from looking at a serious of unfortunately critical tech headlines and losing sight of nuts and bolts development. I don't have the patience to recite everything here, but every year they push millions of lines of new code, thousands of patches, and deliver measurable improvements to major browser components like webGPU, javascript rendering, shipping production quality rust code, and more for a browser with 30 million lines of code.
You must be joking! The user profile switcher is NOT user friendly. It's lacking in every aspect of UX compared to Chromes profile switcher. And it has ads in it. Of all places, why the heck did they put ads into the user profile switcher.
Are you talking about the new one, or the old one? The old one was indeed horrible, but the new one is pretty nice IMO. I have no idea what you're talking about when it comes to ads though, I don't think either has that.
> I think the problem many of us have is it feels like Mozilla invests more effort into everything other than its browser, we see the things they do outside of Mozilla, I mean it was so bad Thunderbird had to become its own foundation due to lack of funding!
And then people simultaneously complain that Mozilla is reliant on Google for funding. There are not many good revenue options available for a browser other than selling search defaults - and AI may start choking off that revenue as well - but Mozilla also can't touch AI without being screamed at.
I mean, even literally this one sentence is self-contradictory. Thunderbird is not their browser. You complain that they "invest more effort into everything other than their browser" and then complain that they don't invest enough in Thunderbird.
No win situation for them in terms of public opinion.
* They can't get diversify their revenue to be less dependent on Google without doing things that people view as "distractions"
* They don't get credit when the "distractions" are for the public good, like LetsEncrypt, Rust, Opus / AV1, etc.
* They get punished for de-prioritizing "distractions" like Thunderbird and Servo and Rust because those distractions are popular.
* For years they were simultaneously being dragged for dropping the XUL extension ecosystem, and also dragged for low performance and lack of multiprocessing and a bunch of other things which were being kneecapped hard by the XUL extension ecosystem.
It's not like I love their management or anything, certainly they've made mistakes, but the narcissism of small differences hits them with full force relative to every other competitor in the space.
Mozilla has had an endowment for, I think, ~15 years now, and they have invested it and grown it from around $90 million to around $1.2 billion and counting. Which now is a firewall in case of emergency, as well as a resource that's helping to stand up a VC fund which is one of their most interesting pathways to diversifying revenue.
They already spend more on developing the browser now than at any point in the entire history of Firefox, and that's after adjusting for inflation. They ship millions of lines of new code every year and apply thousands of patches. It's probably one of the biggest and most active open source projects in the entire world.
And just so we're clear, are you suggesting they shouldn't have an endowment at all, or that they shouldn't use the endowment to create any lines of long term revenue, or that they should but spending a fraction of a percent of it on a VC fund would not be successful? Whichever one you pick, there's at least one person who's exactly as upset at Mozilla for the opposite reason.
Edit: I would go so far as to say I think the VC fund is the single best idea Mozilla has ever had for long term financial independence. It builds on the success they've had thus far (such as it is) raising money from search licensing, and then using that search licensing money to stand up the endowment. Now, the VC fund leverages the endowment in a way that's the most serious path to financial independence they've ever had.
You started this thread by falsely claiming Mozilla had no endowment. You were fully possessed by the certainty that this was simply more proof of their bad management. Can you acknowledge you were wrong about that instead of just shifting to new accusations?
500 million could net you about 50 to 70 million annually if you put it all on the S&P 500... A few years of this and you're a self-funded non-profit...
They're doing that. Their endowment is invested and it does grow by a non-trivial amount, though I don't know the exact numbers off the top of my head.
Reminder: Ladybird is being developed by a handful of people with contributions from the community. It's far from being complete, but it clearly shows that you don't need an enormous budget to build a Web browser entirely from scratch, let alone maintain one.
It is more easier to secure revenue/funding from Google once they retain existing market share and gain more. They need to improve the product for that to happen.
With all the distractions they are abandoning their primary product and they are bleeding whatever miniscule market share they have. This means Google has more leverage over them and can eventually stop the funding once their market share drops beyond a threshold say 0.5% because we all know antitrust is not a strong reason anymore to keep FF alive based on trends of recent rulings.
If we're being completely honest, improving the quality of the product would not meaningfully improve their market share. That worked in the early 2000s when the competition (internet explorer) was utterly stagnant and the internet-using population was composed predominantly of techies willing to try new things. Browsers are commodities now, and most people aren't going to try a new browser when they're already using Chrome / Safari on their mobile device with all of the integrations that are available between the two.
Chrome gained marketshare not just because it was a good product but because they paid Adobe, Oracle, and legions of freeware antivirus providers lots of $$$ to put a checked-by-default box in their installers to install Google Chrome and make it the default browser for anyone not paying enough attention to uncheck the boxes, and because they targeted Firefox users visiting google.com with popups advertising how much better Chrome was. Mozilla could never do that and they would be excoriated if they tried. And as I mentioned, many of the aspects of Chrome that were indeed superior, were met with kicking and screaming when Mozilla tried to follow, e.g. choosing performance over the XUL extension ecosystem.
Sadly I think their best hope to regain marketshare is to indirectly benefit from Linux to capturing marketshare from Windows.
>If we're being completely honest, improving the quality of the product would not meaningfully improve their market share.
Exactly right. They did the dang thing with Project Quantum, a massive rewrite of the browser, a massive leap forward in stability and performance. The thing everyone asked for. And they..... continued to lose market share. Because there are other factors, like monopoly power, and distribution lock-in.
You don't have to imagine what it looks like for a browser company to lap the field with an excellent development team, creative revenue raising ideas, being ahead of the curve on mobile, having best in class stability and performance, and building out features that their core user base loves and swears by. Because Opera was that company in the 2000s and 2010s.
But even Opera had to sell to a new ownership group and abandon their Presto engine for Chromium. Because, like Spock said, you can make every decision correctly and still lose. Which is kind of depressing, but it at least helpfully bursts the bubble of people claiming changes in market share are a one-to-one relationship to specific decisions about which features to build in a browser.
End users are easily influenced but they could have targeted developers.
I think they should have pushed for a gecko based electron alternative. End user dont really care if their favourite markdown editor or notes software is based on electron or gecko but it would have made sure that developers do not target, develop and test for only chromium based browsers.
That would probably also be considered a "distraction" by HN. Electron isn't built by the Chrome team.
It also wouldn't be directly revenue diversification. You can't beat Electron by selling an alternative.
Firefox has somewhat tried to target developers. There's Developer Edition with a "direct to the dev tools" focus. Firefox's Dev Tools still generally are somewhat ahead of Safari's and Chrome's (though not always Edge's, even in the Edgmium era one of the few teams that still exists that doesn't upstream everything immediately is Edge's Dev Tools work). Firefox was directly ahead on Flexbox and CSS Grid debugging tools, though now everyone else has copied them. (Not to mention that the history of Dev Tools in the first place all points back to Firebug and other Firefox extensions that went mainstream and then made sense to prioritize as out-of-the-box tools.)
Firefox probably can't do much more to target developers on its own, from a browser perspective. Targeting developers doesn't seem to move the needle enough in marketshare, either.
It's not just Electron that developers are stuck in "develop and test for only chromium based browsers" modes. There's also all the top-down pressure in corporate environments to standardize on only one browser to "cut down" on "testing costs". There are the board room-driven development cycles of "I only care if it looks good on the CEO's iPhone" or "the CEO is into Android this year, that's the focus, everything else is garbage". There's also the hard to avoid spiral of "Firefox marketshare is low, don't worry about it" to more sites not working as well in Firefox to Firefox marketshare getting lower to more "don't worry about it" websites and so on.
Is anyone else seeing this pattern? "Mozilla should have an endowment". They do! "Well they should have invested the endowment!" They do. "They should have done a gecko based electron alternative". They did. "They should have tab grouping". They've never not had it, between native support and extensions. "They should be spending on the browser." They literally spend more now than ever in their history.
It's vibes and drive by cheap shots, all the way down. I get that dabbling in adtech is not great, I get that they've cycled through side bets recently without committing to them (unlike Google?!), but it's an ounce of truth with every pound of nonsense. Mozilla Derangement Syndrome.
Developers are no longer a significant fraction of the pie, and a significant fraction of those are web developers or do web development, and those users will in all likelihood primarily use what their users are using, which isn't Firefox.
> And then people simultaneously complain that Mozilla is reliant on Google for funding. There are not many good revenue options available for a browser other than selling search defaults - and AI may start choking off that revenue as well - but Mozilla also can't touch AI without being screamed at.
Proton Mail, Google Workspace, iCloud, Dropbox are all viable money-making products that line up well with Mozilla's core mission if they made their own alternatives. Persona could've been really good, if one of these products existed and had enough traction to build a user base that made third parties want to depend on Persona.
There is a world where Mozilla built services people actually want instead of focusing on trust-eroding gimmicks like Pocket, and they'd be thriving right now.
>And then people simultaneously complain that Mozilla is reliant on Google for funding. There are not many good revenue options available for a browser other than selling search defaults - and AI may start choking off that revenue as well - but Mozilla also can't touch AI without being screamed at.
Wish I read this before posting my comment, I wholeheartedly agree at every level. The criticisms are a mile wide, an inch deep, and sometimes legitimate, but often deeply contradictory, and there's no attitude of accountability or self awareness when someone jumps in for the millionth time saying "don't get distracted" but also "offer something new to generate revenue".
And the factual literacy of the drive-by critics is, unfortunately, sometimes brutally off the mark and even veering into conspiratorial. Some unfortunate threads appear to be young adults reading a Mozilla 990 filing for the first time and misreading a conspiracy into every single line, very casual attitudes about accusing them of falsifying financial statements or accusations of controlled opposition, or ridiculous suggestions that they spend down their endowment on "engineering" to no particular end, and sometimes completely misrepresenting how much of a time suck and energy suck certain projects were (e.g. blockchain is sometimes on the Rap Sheet of Bad Things, but they basically wrote a white paper or two).
Which, as you note, isn't to say there's no legitimate concerns: "privacy preserving ads" is a contradiction in terms, the strategic reliance on Google is precarious, and side bets like Pocket were left to languish. In normal times I might consider myself a critic. But unfortunately too often the comment section is an out of control orgy of completely uninformed cheap shots, with an ounce of truth to every pound of confidently incorrect accusation. And that phenomenon, to my mind, is as big as any misstep Mozilla is or isn't making.
Sure, it's not like CloudFare centralizes enough of the internet infrastructure, let's also give them one of the few (more or less) independent browsers.
I think it is an interesting fit that makes sense. CloudFlare works on the web, and they aren't out here bubbling up how you view the web or altering it in any way, unlike Google or Bing which curate what results you get.
I guess replies on this thread are evident that Mozilla has lost much of the trust and goodwill it once enjoyed. Admittedly I am also very skeptical that Mozilla has the ability or genuine interest to make this work.
I feel that, at some point around the Brendan Eich-gate, the Internet decided that Mozilla was always wrong. Change the shape of tabs? We received rape threats. Change it back? Bomb threats. Bringing in new APIs for add-ons that make Firefox faster, more secure, more stable and doesn't break all the time? No, we want addon $X, we don't care about security.
I'm not going to claim that everything Mozilla has done is right, but the bad will of the tech crowd is a bit exhausting.
I never worked on Firefox, and am often critical of Mozilla, but I can second this sentiment. It's seemed like everything Mozilla does makes everyone mad, all the time. It's frustrating.
Also, compared to the scale of harm that Google does and the risk of it de facto controlling the web with the chromium engine, all the things that Mozilla does to piss people off should be small potatoes.
It's the "vocal minority", right? Sure it's not fun to receive threats but it's a known fact that communicating over the Internet makes people unhinged. Maybe there's stuff to complain about but I am a happy Firefox user for .. what? over two decades! :) so, thanks for that.
As a former Firefox user, I got fed up with the constant change for the sake of change. Why change the tabs? They were fine the way they were. People got mad about the addon situation since it broke their workflows because of vague technical reasons. And Mozilla usually ignored user protests while pointing at telemetry, and did whatever they wanted to, users be damned.
At least that's how it looked from this side. I switched to Vivaldi some 4-5 years ago, and it looks and works pretty much the same since I started using it. New features and changes have happened, but they've been able to be ignored/disabled/hidden without doing CSS brain surgery.
If/when the Google Adblockerblocker changes trickles down to Vivaldi I may have to crawl back to Firefox, but I dread the prospect.
> And Mozilla usually ignored user protests while pointing at telemetry, and did whatever they wanted to, users be damned.
When I worked on Firefox, most of the changes happened exactly because user research determined that users wanted them and/or that not having them hurt the product. We changed the tabs at least once because users thought that the old shape of tabs made the browser feel slow (true story, sadly). We changed the add-on API (after having warned add-on developers for at least 6 years) because the old API was incompatible with multi-threading, multi-process, sandboxing, which in turn was really bad for both performance and security.
I'll absolutely grant you that Mozilla hasn't been very good at communicating these choices, but again, the sheer hostility of tech crowds is exhausting.
Anyone can hip fire an accusation from the philosopher's chair (potty), and it's like that thing about a falsehood circling the world five times before the truth even gets out of bed.
Against the avalanche of claims that they've "done nothing", it can be tedious to pull out examples of, say, major projects achieving huge performance improvements in WebGPU, but meanwhile it costs nothing to claim Firefox has "done nothing since Quantum" which I've heard claimed in these parts in full sincerity.
> broke their workflows because of vague technical reasons
> I switched to Vivaldi
You refer to important security improvements as "vague technical reasons" and you switched to Vivaldi, a browser that is based[1] on extended stable Chromium, which is not "recommended for any team where security is a primary concern"[2].
I don't know but I've been using Firefox since forever and I can't even recall the tabs changing at all. Of course they have changed many times over the course of years, but that happens in every browser. I don't know what happened to tabs that affected you so badly? I feel like it's an excuse for some people sometime that if some little thing in the UI changes that they claim their whole flow is now compromised so that is the reason they are now using this other software, where the same stuff happens as far as I can see.
I'm obviously not just talking about the tabs. And "some little UI thing" can absolutely break your workflow - UI isn't just how things look. Mozilla purged lots of minor features over the years, and the goto excuse was usually "parity with Chrome" or "telemetry".
In the latest version they changed something AGAIN, when you drag a tab too far to the left it's pinned automatically. Literally nobody asked for it and it makes me so angry, god I hate Mozilla. I only use Fiefox because it's the last browser with Manifest V2 (I have a lot of these add-ons) and as an add-on dev they made me even more angry with having double standards regarding their shitty add-on review system.
There is always a pile on on Firebox for not being perfect. Sometimes with valid complaints. But if you dig deeper nearly always the commenter is using a version of Chrome and justifies it over Firefox for a very shallow or outdated reason. Firefox would do well to listen to some of the criticism about the browser and ignore the noise about anything else
There's also the cohort of bad web developers that only test on Chrome
Supporting a proper ad blocker makes it automatically superior than any of the more popular browsers. The fact most people don't mind being fuel for the machine is another issue.
There was a long period of time during which firefox users weren't sure whether they were going to follow chrome (like they did on every single other thing.) They're still user-hostile and their values are inscrutable; I have no trust that they won't kill ad blocking next year, or the year after. Requiring add-ons to be signed was a more radically hostile leap than moving to ManifestV3 would be.
The people still complaining about firefox are its most faithful users. The reason some are vicious is because they are trapped - they'll consider cutting their use of the internet before using an non-FOSS browser. 90% of firefox's users left. People who could stand a closed browser have already decided to use one. You're in an extreme minority if you even know anything about firefox to complain about. This year the Linux desktop, of all impossible things, has become more popular than firefox.
Yet there's still this confidence and attitude about even the remaining users that comes from being spoon-fed cash by your direct competitor in return for nothing.
The Firefox market share was eaten largely by the enormous and legally dubious marketing campaigns by Google and Microsoft. Hard to see how Mozilla could compete with constant forced nags and defaults in the most widely used websites and operating systems.
It was a big factor, but so were things like the way they treated their mobile browser for years and years, which is the platform 2/3 of browser traffic now originates.
According to statcounter's stats, Firefox never cracked 1% of monthly mobile traffic any month from when stats started in 2009. Even Opera and UC have more than double Firefox's average for the last year and they are just Chromium forks users are downloading off the stores.
For context, I recall that for years and years, Firefox was the highest ranked mobile browser. Mozilla invested a lot in mobile, Firefox devs had to rewrite the Android linker, invent new ways of starting binaries on Android, etc. just to make Firefox work (all of which were later used by Chrome for Android).
It still didn't make a dent in mobile browser shares.
Sure, Mozilla could have invested even more in Firefox mobile, but at some point, this would have come at the expense of Firefox desktop, which was the source of ~100% of the funding.
What Firefox was doing 4 months after Android 1.0 GA'd would indeed been unlikely to have made a dent in mobile share compared to what effort was going on once Android had a billion users. Why put all of that effort in before something is even used to just then let it rot for years anyways? In the end, they ended up spending the resources to refresh it in 2019 anyways - by which time billions had already decided Firefox was just a battery hog and slow on mobile.
It's a sad story because Firefox was so good on mobile when nobody had a chance to use it then it was crap when they did. On desktop Firefox is still the #1 non-bundled browser, things went so poorly on mobile they can't even come close to that today. In a parallel universe timings were inverted and Firefox may have even had more users on mobile than it does desktop today.
It was eaten by Google flexing their search and mobile monopolies, to advertise it on one of the most visited websites in the world, and coming pre-installed on over a billion devices. Distribution lock in leading to market share dominance is a tale as old as computing to the point that we now have decades old case law specifically on the issue of software monopolies being the cause of browser market share dominance.
Interestingly the most recent anti-trust case against Google, one proposed remedy was spinning off the Chrome browser into its own company, but that option was judged to be unrealistic, because how would a browser survive on it's own without distribution advantages and all its costs subsidized by other revenue drivers? A great question.
There's a lot of opinions and anecdata in that. Firefox was almost never as bad as it was marketed to be (by its competition), and Chrome was certainly never as good as it was marketed to be (by an evil ad company pretending to be a good, well adjusted internet benefit company).
Firefox used to be the first browser with decent developer tools thanks to the Firebug extension.
Then Chrome pushed heavily the development of its own development tools and crushed Firefox in the process. Chrome has now been the best browser for developers for the last +10 years.
The consequence is also that when the new generation of headless browsers were developed (Puppeteer) they were based on Chromium because it is so hackable and developer friendly.
This means that Firefox lost a big chunk of the developer community which constituted also a non trivial amount of their user base and advocates.
I don't know why people left Firefox, but I know why *I* did. And it was three or four years ago (after using it for 15 years) because I got annoyed at them for removing many features that I used over the years, and because I tried a Crommium based browser and it just had better performance and better ad-blocking. That's just one anecdote, but feel free to correlate it with other anecdotes to find some patterns and reach your own conclusion.
My father, who is very non-technical has never left Firefox and stuck with it for decades, even against Microsoft and Chrome's tactics to try to claim default browser and constantly install them into his face. My father particularly hates Chrome because he never understands how it keeps reinstalling itself despite his best efforts. His taskbar is often a mess of all three browsers because he can't figure out how to keep Edge and Chrome unpinned. My father sees Chrome installing itself and auto-pinning to his taskbar and Start Menu as the exact same IE-level adware/spyware shenanigans that led to him fleeing to Firefox in the first place.
I returned to Firefox again after years of IE8+ and Spartan Edge. I've never liked the "mouthfeel" of Chrome, have generally felt it to be bloated and slow and ad-heavy adware (though not as strongly as my father and I often do know how Chrome gets backdoor installed through shameful adware deals like with Adobe), and when Edge switched to being just another Chromium I still felt the same in my dislike of Chromium and I went back to Firefox. (Spartan Edge had so much better performance and battery usage than Chromium. It's death was not mourned by enough people.)
Feel free to correlate these two counter-anecdotes with more and see if you find some patterns to reach your own conclusion. That's the fun of anecdata and marketing, there are patterns on every side, you can interpret it how you want. "Popularity" isn't facts, pattern matching based on popularity of certain anecdotes can lead to incorrect conclusions. Especially when Marketing is involved. Marketing is about making popular things that aren't necessarily facts, especially when an advertiser is unscrupulous and no one is busy enforcing truth in advertising laws.
These anecdotes say the people still using Firefox don't like Chrome/Edge and that few cared when Edge switched from Spartan to Chromium. I don't think anyone disagrees with any of that. It's the anecdotes about the different reasons people actually stopped using Firefox for under debate, not the reasons a few have still stayed anyways.
I.e. IE (couldn't resist :)) can be said to have used the exact same shenanigans, as mentioned above, but there were other reasons droves of people still decided to install and use Firefox back then anyways. People no longer make the same decision to install and use Firefox, so if the shenanigans haven't changed... then what did? This is where the common refrains that Chrome managed to be a better browser (particular on mobile) for that decade or that Firefox managed to regress in certain ways come from. Sure, Chrome absolutely got its growth blasted forward by marketing and bundling, but people decided to stick with it and stop using Firefox for reasons unrelated to that. Sometimes niche reasons, sometimes general reasons, but the story was never something like "Chrome invented marketing and bundling, which resulted in Firefox losing its easily gained massive market share of the time".
No, Chrome was genuinely better than Firefox back then. Firefox didn't have multiprocess until many years later and Flash constantly crashed the browser.
I’d argue they aren’t, but the number one threat actor in the privacy space is Google.
I occasionally have to use Chrome to test with it. Can someone explain concisely how it manages Google logins? They clearly bolted it in at some low level to help violate privacy, and or shove dark patterns.
Also, the out of the box spam and dark patterns are over the top. It reminds me of Win 95 bundled software bullshit.
That’s to say nothing of their B-tier properties, like Google TV or YouTube client:
When the kids use this garbage it’s all “Bruh, what is this screen?”, or “I swear I’m not touching the remote!”
(The official YouTube client loses monitor sync(!!) as it rapid cycles through ads on its own now. I guess this is part of an apparent google-run ad fraud campaign, since it routinely seems to think it ran > 5-10 ads to completion in ~15 seconds. We can’t even see all the ads start because each bumps the monitor settings around, which has the effect of auto-mute.)
My primary complaint is that they have a bunch of ad placements on the product out of the box when it's opened for the first time and any time I set up a new system I have to go configure Firefox to not be annoying by default. It makes the Firefox experience feel subversive and untrustworthy because this freshly installed application is obviously bedfellows with advertisers. I know I can't trust advertisers with my data or browser behavior, so why should I trust Firefox with it? If I stop using Firefox for a little while, they _so helpfully_ offer to reset my configuration back to default so those ads will get shown again. It's a hostile experience.
Additionally, my perception (from posts and discussions like these, I'm not a financial analyst and I have no meaningful insights into their business) is also that they probably receive enough funding through non-advertising means that they don't actually need to do this if they were to pare back the nonsense spending they're so greatly known for.
> Additionally, my perception (from posts and discussions like these, I'm not a financial analyst and I have no meaningful insights into their business) is also that they probably receive enough funding through non-advertising means that they don't actually need to do this if they were to pare back the nonsense spending they're so greatly known for.
Last time I checked, Mozilla received 90%+ of its funding from Google. This is a situation that nobody likes (except Google, of course). These ads are an attempt to diversify income streams.
People are really unhappy that Mozilla gets money from Google, but also extremely vocally unhappy whenever Mozilla attempts to find other sources.
I haven't seen anyone suggest alternate solutions yet.
- full uBlock support
- the ability to still be themed
- first-party isolation
...Okay, okay, I’m being too cheeky.
The common wisdom is that overall Firefox can feel bottlenecked at render and draw times (“less snappy”). That could be a result of a slower JavaScript engine (takes longer to get to drawing), or a result of poorer hardware acceleration (slower drawing), or a less optimized multiprocessing/multithreading model (more resource contention when drawing).
I honestly can't see it in the real world, but synthetic benchmark are pretty clear on that front.
> Near all editors have a VS code plugin compatible layer
Huh, never heard about this before, and took a look at emacs and vim/neovim as those are the two most popular editors I know of, neither can run VS code plugins, that'd be crazy if true.
If you count LSP (Language Server Protocol) as a VSCode plugin-compatible layer as LSP was built and standardized by the VSCode team (so many do), then Emacs and Neovim are full of VSCode-compatible plugins today. One of Neovim's selling points right now over bare Vim is better/more direct LSP support.
Ah, if LSP is what parent meant with "VS code plugin compatible layer" then what you say makes sense, I personally also moved from vim to neovim mainly because of better LSP support.
But I understood "VS code plugin compatible layer" to mean there is something that lets you run VSCode plugins with other editors, which is what I haven't seen anywhere (yet?).
Except Emacs doesn't have "plugins". They are called "packages" and not plugins for specific reasons - they are more like libraries than plugins. In Emacs, one can change/override the behavior of any function (built-in or third party) with some enormous flexibility not easily achievable in other editors.
Very long time vim/neovim user here. I can't remember names atm and can't check, but I have definitely seen plugins that run a headless or subset of VScode in the background to pull info from it. It may not be super common, but it is being done
It really seems like all the complaints about firefox are mostly ego-deflection.
People know it is wrong to stay on Chrome and empower Google to the extent that it is, but they're stuck on that workflow and don't want to change, so they find nits to pick about firefox and get very LOUD about that. Then it becomes Mozill's fault that they're still using Chrome, and you can't blame them for anything.
> There is always a pile on on Firebox for not being perfect.
I don't have a problem w/ Firefox not being perfect. I have a problem with the Mozilla Foundation spending money on seemingly random other stuff and not on Firefox.
> There is always a pile on on Firebox for not being perfect.
Nobody has ever complained about anything not being perfect. That's just something dishonest people say when they want to avoid mentioning specific criticisms.
> I guess replies on this thread are evident that Mozilla has lost much of the trust and goodwill it once enjoyed. Admittedly I am also very skeptical that Mozilla has the ability or genuine interest to make this work.
That reverses cause and effect to a great degree. Many are very skeptical because they read everyone slamming it. It's a mob psychology.
The other problem is, they will eventually axe this initiative if it doesn't produce anything meaningful to them, and will have been wasted resources that could have gone to Firefox itself.
Firefox has improved significantly. It's improvement strategy is mostly focused on what developers ask them to focus on. They've had great performance on the yearly interops
I'm surprised to hear that. I was under the assumption that it was generally acknowledged that the Firefox dev tools were far and away the best of the major browsers. I always find myself missing them when having to use Chrome devtools at least.
I feel like nowadays they both have basically the same featureset so maybe it's more about how well you know how to use them
Agree, I'm not the kind of guy that has 100 tabs open (10 at the time I'm typing this), but when I came back 2 years ago I noticed that it isn't as snappy and fast as it used to be 15 years ago before I switched to Chrome.
The open source community will start taking Firefox seriously again when all the AI shit is removed for good and real improvements to performance and privacy are made.
Despite all the posturing about "respecting your privacy and freedom," the stock configuration of Firefox is trivially fingerprintable. At the very least, a privacy-focused browser should adopt the Tor patches and report standardized spoofed values for hardware components and disable by default all privacy invasive anti-features like WebGL. This isn't difficult to do, but illustrates the gap between empty promises and what is actually delivered.
I'd definitely love to see them take some steps, but at the points where a minor increase in privacy leads to a much worse UX for average people (aka, "why doesn't this site work in FF, FF sucks!" because they don't know they have to enable something). If Firefox becomes a browser that is harder to use then it will only ever be used by the extremely small niche of people that care about that. That will only further lead to more "not tested on Firefox" web development. I already have to have Chrome available on my machine because of sites like Ramp.com and Mailgun that don't work on Firefox, and that would only get worse.
> I'd definitely love to see them take some steps, but at the points where a minor increase in privacy leads to a much worse UX for average people
Disabling Javascript or even just third party scripts does lead to major breakage, but reporting spoofed values for identifiers like Tor does not. The Arkenfox user.js does all of this and more, but these options are not enabled by default. This shows that Firefox does not care much about privacy in practice.
The only "breakage" that I have encountered with such a hardened configuration is related to the spoofing of the time zone. But the fundamental issue is that Javascript/browsers should have not been designed to allow websites to extract this kind of personal information in the first place. But even that is not enough and users are still fingerprintable. In an ideal world, the only thing a website should see is the originating IP and nothing else.
If anything, Brave has done more to harden Chromium than Mozilla has with Firefox, even though Brave comes with its own set of problems (scammy crypto integrations, AI, VPN and other stuff).
> Disabling Javascript or even just third party scripts does lead to major breakage, but reporting spoofed values for identifiers like Tor does not. The Arkenfox user.js does all of this and more, but these options are not enabled by default. This shows that Firefox does not care much about privacy in practice.
I suspect that it shows that Firefox developers do a good job at making Firefox work, and this good job enables forks to work.
If you put too much in your Telemetry/crash reports, yeah, users become fingerprintable.
On the other hand, if you return spoofed values, it means that Firefox developers cannot debug platform/hardware-specific crashes. If you disable Telemetry, improving performance becomes impossible, because you're suddenly unable to determine where your users suffer. If you remove WebGL, plenty of websites suddenly stop working, and people assume that Firefox is broken.
> If you put too much in your Telemetry/crash reports, yeah, users become fingerprintable.
It's not only what gets send to Mozilla as telemetry or crash reports that is a problem. That can be turned off (many Linux distros do), or firewalled.
The main issue is that websites can more or less accurately identify users uniquely by extracting information that they should not have access to if the browser was designed with privacy in mind.
This includes, but is not limited to, fonts installed, system language, time zone, window size, browser version, hardware information (number of cores, device memory), canvas fingerprint, and many others attributes. When you combine all of that with the originating IP address, you can reliably determine who visited a website, because that information is shared and correlated with services where people identify themselves (Google accounts, Facebook, Amazon, etc.) Even masking your IP may not be enough because typically there is enough information in the other data points to track you already.
All of this is true, but it's a problem of the entire web platform and specs, so if you want to favor untraceability above compatibility, you'll need a dedicated privacy-hardened browser. Firefox aims to be better at privacy, but still respect the web specs.
Sure, but then don't go grandstanding about privacy. You can't have both.
And saying that improving performance is impossible without it is hyperbolic. Developers did that before every major application turned into actual spyware. Profilers still work without it.
Yes, it's the stock configuration to be not broken. If you are ok with breakage in exchange for less fingerprinting, the config setting privacy.resistFingerprinting is right there: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/resist-fingerprinting
It is an uplift from Tor, and I believe Tor just enables it in their build, though it doesn't end up being quite the same. Tor is always going to be better for this.
But turning it on in the stock Firefox configuration would be suicide in terms of market share. When "I want maximal privacy" fights "I want this site to work", guess which one wins?
Unfortunately, the guys in charge at Mozilla are clearly enamored with AI. They like it so much (and value users so little), that they'll let it write the whole damn PR blog post about company strategy.
I'll be honest, when I see another "Hate Firefox" fest, I ask only one question "Quo bono?"
> I haven't seen anything from Mozilla in recent years that makes me trust this has a future.
As opposed to what? Chrome? What's the future there?
The various Firefox derivatives will die a quick death if Firefox dies. The strings attached to Chrome derivatives make them pointless. So, what's left? What are we discussing here? There's no alternative, it's that simple.
On the other hand, joining the hate-fest on various forums cannot and does not help Mozilla to find a better way. One is peeved by this, another by that, go figure... I'd call it childish if it wasn't so damaging.
The new CEO centered AI ("It's Time to Evolve Firefox Into an AI Browser") in his first communication to the community. Spawned at least three new forks and introduced people to LibreWolf.
His first communication reduced trust: "It is a privilege to lead an organization with a long history of standing up for people and building technology that puts them first."
Now let's put people first by making Firefox an AI first browser. Enzor-Demeo would have made an excellent Microsoft product manager. Too bad he didn't get the job.
Agreed, I subscript to random Mozilla products like VPN and Relay to pay them but I dont need those and would hate to have them waste extra development time on improving those services. I would rather fund the browser directly.
Yes, but how large is the subset of Firefox users that are willing to pay for a browser? Take that number and multiply it either by 10 o by 100 and you get the order of magnitude.
a) It’s insane how little we pay for browsers given their utility.
b) Many people would be happy to pay extra for a browser to support free access for others (The Guardian was a decent example of that IIRC).
Going by the 2023 financial report (getting the 2024 report requires to submit a mail address?!), Mozilla spent over 500mil in that year, 328m on salaries (page 5).
Even the most successful online annual fundraising drive that exists, Wikipedia, raises less than half of what Mozilla gets annually from search licensing. And Mozilla in a best case scenario probably can't match Wikipedia's fundraising for a number of reasons.
It would feel good and I certainly wouldn't mind it, but it's much closer to a drop in the bucket than a panacea.
In my view, this is the exact right approach. LLMs aren’t going anywhere, these tools are here to stay. The only question is how they will be developed going forward, and who controls them. Boycotting AI is a really naive idea that’s just a way for people to signal group membership.
Saying I hate AI and I’m not going to use it is really trending and makes people feel like they’re doing something meaningful, but it’s just another version of trying to vote the problem away. It doesn’t work. The real solution is to roll up the sleeves and built an a version of this technology that’s open, transparent, and community driven.
- Mozilla.ai agent platform: No link with the browser. Just a closed-source SaaS competitor to the many existing agentic platforms like LangChain / LangGraph.
- Mozilla Data Collective: It's been made clear now that sadly data licensing doesn't matter and if you use less data than your competitor, your model will be inferior.
- Real deployments: Basically getting into the public contracts and consulting grift with no priori experience. Probably banking on EU open source funding & co.
- Mozilla Ventures: Redistributing a token amount of the money they are already not making (gift from Google) to fund Open Source research.
Indeed, but LangChain / LangGraph tools are also Open Source so its not really Mozilla bringing their Open Source culture as a differentiating factor from their competitors.
Mozilla is indeed developing some Open Source AI tools which will then be used in their proprietary and paying SaaS AI agent platform.
What I meant to say is that existing competing solutions like LangGraph and LangChain are already Open Source themselves. So releasing Open Source AI libraries is not a new twist that Mozilla is bringing.
I genuinely don't understand the "permissioned data" assumption. Presumably, all the current models that were trained on illegitimate scraping of vastly larger sources will always have the upper hand (in terms of raw power, obviously at the cost of regurgitating evil stuff too), because they just have absorbed way more diverse data in their training. So the models trained on ethical datasets only will not be able to compete, unless they too rely on a common base of "foundational sin" data and just add those datasets as an ethical layer to cover the rotten roots.
Is it really possible to start training from scratch at this stage and compete with the existing models, using only ethical datasets? Hasn't it been established that without the stolen data, those models could not exist or compete?
Personally I would rather use a 'bad' ai that's trained ethically and runs locally than a good ai trained on stolen data that requires me to surrender my thoughts to the cloud.
whether or not it's possible to compete I guess we'll see but I am hopeful and appreciative that Mozilla is trying, as I am getting tired of big tech trying to force everyone to hand over even more unhinged amounts of data than what they're already taking from us.
I strongly suspect that it is absolutely impossible to have an even remotely usable/useful "AI" trained on tiny datasets, and that instead of training only on ethical data, companies that want to sound ethical will use an extra post-training step for dirty foundation models to behave more ethically as if they'd only learned from ethical sources. I'd hate for this to become the norm, but I fear this is logically what annoucements like this one really mean. The difference in scale is so vast -- taking whatever you want from the entire internet -- vs hand-curated datasets with explicit authorisation and free to use. It's like trying to make a grain of sand gravitate around a marble in the playground, to mimic the moon around the Earth – won't work.
Being the agent of the user isn't particularly profitable. For example: companies want the users to be shown ads, and users generally don't want to be shown ads. But profit, which is to say money you make without having to directly work for it, comes from selling the user's interests away. Like, perhaps, choosing to take a bribe to cement Google's search monopoly, a fundamentally anticompetitive behavior which, even as it makes cash for Mozilla, costs the web far, far more.
They've lost their way completely as an independent entity, and a post like this that doesn't reaaally seem to grasp that weight of that conundrum comes no closer to convincing me that they can find their way back to the light.
I think you're right but I suspect that's the point. AI may be eating into search, and that could threaten their search licensing deal. Apple just struck a deal with Google to use Gemini, though it sounds like Apple paying Google for the privilege. Ominous if you're a browser company looking to sell a license for a preferred AI tool.
I think this is a good initiative. Having major software components be part of foundations, rather than single-vendor backed, is always a good thing. TBD if this succeeds or not, but I think they are doing a good thing here.
> Mozilla was born to change this, and Firefox succeeded beyond what most people thought possible — dropping Internet Explorer’s market share to 55% in just a few years and ushering in the Web 2.0 era.
Is this true? I can see from here[0] that its peak was 32%, as IE was really on the back burner but before Chrome had fully risen to dominance, but I wouldn't claim that it was responsible for IE's market share drop.
Web 2.0 is around 2003 or so and chrome would not even exist for another few years.
Giving Firefox/phoenix/Netscape the majority credit for the first fall of IE seems accurate.
The rise of chrome happened afterwards and by then IE also fell much deeper than 55%.
Opera was also essential at this point, not in terms of market share, but of innovation in the browser space with features that would eventually spread to everything else.
That shouldn't be forgotten. There was a time when the 1% or so of users that ran Opera were getting a much better experience than any other browser. It was far superior for several years, until all of its innovations were copied by other vendors.
Yeah, my anecdotal memories aren't worth much, but in that era it was all IE or Firefox. Even once Chrome came along it still took quite some time before I noticed it popping up on normie people's systems.
You’re right on the numbers....Firefox never had majority share. The stronger claim is causal influence, not dominance. I recently read somewhere that the Firefox (and later Chrome) forced standards compliance and broke IE’s de-facto monopoly mindset. IE’s decline was gradual and multi-factor, but Firefox clearly shifted developer and user expectations.
No one is claiming, here or in the article, that Firefox ever had a majority share.
I don’t know if the 55% number for IE is 100% correct but it sounds like the right ballpark to me. The browser market was a lot more fragmented 15+ years ago, so saying that IE had 55% market share and Firefox had 32%, leaving 13% for other browsers, sounds completely right to me.
Firefox does offline translation and offline tts. It is quite amazing. Unfortunately half the tech crowd is like "BURN anything that has been in the same room as AI" and the other half is yoloing agentic browsers and uploading all their pron history to the datalakes
Has mozilla ever hired a CEO on the premise of "Our top priority is resolving the long standing bugs in our web and email clients"?
I'm still bitching, years later, about thunderbird failing to update IMAP folder contents (i.e. sync with server) until I click on the folder.
While it may still reign as the "capital of the industry", there's a certain kind of technical brain damage that comes from being located in the bay area.
Let's just call it "proximity to venture capital"...
Good decision for a change, now looking at execution track record and ability to stick with it..
yeah, that's where the bad news start.
They have a tendency to go from trend to trend and always a "me too, I'm here" player. Deliver first and stick with it, Mozilla's goodwill fund is long gone to be excited about "mission statements".
I don't understand how they expect offline LLM models to work in a meaningful capacity for users.. Isn't there a single multilingual person working at Mozilla?
All of the small LLM models break down as soon as you try to do something that isn't written in English, because - surprise - they're just too small.
There would need to be a hardware breakthrough, or they would have to somehow solve the heavy cost of switching the models between pages.
Instead of useful AI stuff that is a clear improvement to accessibility, they're insistent on ham-fisting LLM solutions that no one have even asked for.
Off the top of my head, they could instead:
1. Integrate something like whisper to add automatic captions to videos or transcribe audio
2. Integrate one of the many really great text to speech models to read articles or text out loud
Click Reader mode on a web page, then the read aloud option in the sidebar.
Note that how well it works on Linux will depend on your distro and default settings, as is common for Linux world. They do try to provide setup instructions if your linux distro has issues.
... now whether that model is integrated by default, no idea. I imagine that depends on size.
Oh, and mozilla's off-line translate for private translation of web pages... that's another neat AI thing they added that I've found super helpful. Chrome still requires sending the content to their servers.
Ah cool, thanks, didn't know this existed. I just get a dummy message when playing audio, so I'll play around with some speech dispatcher[1] solutions later!
> Oh, and mozilla's off-line translate for private translation of web pages... that's another neat AI thing they added that I've found super helpful.
Yes, it's awesome! And one of my favorite additions to Firefox in many years, it's stuff like that they should focus on if they want AI, imo.
I tried it, and I'm sure it's not a based on any language model. Sounds like espeak-ng or its ilk, so it probably uses whatever's available?
The TTS repo was updated 5 years ago and links to installation instructions for Ubuntu are broken :/. Also the docker repo is archived, but only recently, so maybe it works.
All in all, doesn't look like the project is alive at all.
It definitely uses whatever is available, but on review of the models (and there are quite a few) the ones I checked included instructions for integrating into linux speech engines.
What your distro uses by default might be espeak-ng, but you could use mozilla TTS or festival or piper or anything else. It makes sense to not bundle an entire system that repeats things that are available on all desktop environments and mobile these days, but instead call out to those from the browser functionality - especially given the enormous size of high quality speech models - not to mention the localisation issue. I think the TTS project was just to increase availability of high quality FOSS alternatives. Getting those into your distro is more of a distro packager thing.
Maybe, but I would argue that some of these features are genuinely useful and important. Take translation, for example. It's not great to have to send off a page that potentially contains identifying content to Google, but it is the easiest way to handle the matter. Firefox uses local AI to perform a decent translation relatively quickly, and I'd like them to work on improving that capability.
Agreed on all counts. Right now there's not even a keyboard shortcut implemented (fiddly context menu only), and the translations are sometimes dodgy too, but I still use it. It's such peace of mind to know that the translation is happening entirely locally.
Well it does say that compute is a current bottleneck, but I doubt that'll stay that way forever. There's a ton of resources going into making AI run locally, quickly. It's already gotten loads better just last year.
I detest AI on the grounds that it causes an overuse of our planet's resources as well as stealing IP and exploiting underpaid data workers.
However, if Mozilla can launch something capable that steals the thunder from all the closed source AI alternatives that might make the bubble pop finally.
Stock markets shook when Deepseek came on the scene and proved that clever coding might make up for using older hardware. The market leaders' moat suddenly didn't seem so impenetrable. In that same vein Mozilla might make a real dent by truly commodifying AI. AI stocks are highly valued currently because there's an idea that the leaders have something no one can copy.
This has the feeling of corporate feel-good PR release: its essentially
content-less AI-generated rehashing "our models are freer/more open-source"
which seems silly since they don't develop anything unlike DeepSeek/GLM/Qwen
the real open-source giants. Mozilla is a middle-man that could use open-source
agents, but it pretending to be the "gatekeeper" of "open AI".
Their key motivation is exposed in the middle of text:
"The Mozilla Data Collective is building a marketplace for data that is properly licensed, clearly sourced, and aligned with the values of the communities it comes from."
This is far away from Firefox roots, whatever corporate stewards are at helm of
mozilla now think exclusively in terms of marketplaces and "economics of data"..
Futher reading "so we’re deepening our engagement with governments and enterprises adopting sovereign, auditable AI systems. These engagements are the feedback loops that tell us where the stack breaks and where openness needs reinforcement."
Hard pass.
They've fully disowned Servo.
On the plus side that means you can donate to Servo directly, and the project actually has a decent amount of contributors now
>Now AI is becoming the new intermediary. It’s what I’ve started calling “Layer 8” — the agentic layer that mediates between you and everything else on the internet. These systems will negotiate on our behalf, filter our information, shape our recommendations, and increasingly determine how we interact with the entire digital world.
This is a sad statement. It reminds me of Wall-E. Big tech created the environmental ruins of today’s internet through perverse incentives. Now we need robots to go sift through the garbage and think for us so we don’t have to be exposed to the toxic internet.
Mozilla is not and never has been a browser company. They have always been a charity with a for profit arm that does a browser. However never has a browser been more than an after thought to any of the leadership.
Of course what the world really needs is a browser company and so we try to pretend Mozilla is that, but they are not. Support an alternative browser (I'm not aware of any though. There are browser skin companies but nobody making the hard parts of a browser)
I’m aware of at least two honest-to-goodness new browser projects:
There’s Servo, which used to be from Mozilla, but then they abandoned it. Now I believe it’s independent after a long period of dormancy.
There is also Ladybird, whose founder is a prolific and technically brilliant person but who is also, at minimum, a fascist sympathizer, in addition to being a supporter of white replacement theory and other racist ideas.
Neither project, last I checked, is really close to being a “daily driver.” But they’re both in active development, so maybe in the future they’ll become legit alternatives to the Google/Apple duopoly.
> There is also Ladybird, whose founder is a prolific and technically brilliant person but who is also, at minimum, a fascist sympathizer, in addition to being a supporter of white replacement theory and other racist ideas.
I know nothing about Ladybird or their founder, so I'm taking your word for it that they are "at minimum, a fascist sympathizer, in addition to being a supporter of white replacement theory and other racist ideas."
Accepting the premise, this leads to an interesting philosophical discussion. I'm utterly repulsed by all those things, but I'm also repulsed by viewpoints and even personalities of some actors and musicians and such. In my younger days I couldn't even enjoy their art. There would be songs or shows I loved but couldn't listen to or watch once I knew about the musicians/actors views. However as I've gotten older, I've gotten more to a place where I'm able to separate the art from the artist and appreciate it more (still not perfectly, but I hope to get there someday).
I'm now asking myself if I could use and/or support a browser like Ladybird (assuming it's a good product, again I know nothing about it) even despite the founder's reprehensible views. I'm not sure, but I feel like I want to be able to.
You will never find somebody you 100% agree with. The question is when does something become so bad you will boycott them in other areas. Still a hard question, but the framing can help.
Indeed, thanks that is very helpful framing, thanks! Doesn't eliminate the subjectivity, but definitely helps limit it's scope by giving a more specific point to focus on
The art-vs-artist hand-wringing seems to be a particular affliction for Americans and particularly US progressives. I suspect it's something to do with America's protestant puritan heritage. There's a metaphysics of contamination at work that's hard to explain without religion. As a liberal European atheist I have no problem using software written by edgy young fascists (assuming it's good software). Just as I have no problem admiring art by (to take one of a million examples) the sexual predator and borderline sadist Pablo Picasso.
As a someone from the US who is atheist and probably would be lumped in the "progressive" bucket, I can provide my own perspective which might be helpful:
I bristle at taking an action which would support (morally, financially, etc) currently living fascists and/or Nazis, whose ideologies and in certain cases the people themselves (e.g. Musk) are actively working to dismantle and destabilize the government of my country.
In that respect, using software written by someone like Andreas Kling (Ladybird creator) or Musk, DHH, etc is much more reprehensible to me than admiring the art of Picasso, who was a horrible person but who is dead and cannot hurt anyone else.
You probably like watching ads because Firefox is only browser you will have a true ad free experience. Unfortunately Firefox is slower than chrome has less support for audio, copy pasting is broken etc. So I use both depending what I am doing.
I'll be contrarian to the thread sentiment and say: Mozilla has misstepped in the past, and will continue to do so, and they're partially funded by competitors for antitrust reasons, etc.
That said, I can't really disagree with anything in this. As a developer (and socially conscious human) I want to move in the direction of openness.
I think the problem many of us have is it feels like Mozilla invests more effort into everything other than its browser, we see the things they do outside of Mozilla, I mean it was so bad Thunderbird had to become its own foundation due to lack of funding!
I would love for there to be a world where Mozilla maintains Firefox and can make for product projects that provide higher value. I also have a pipe dream of one day someone like (and if they read this, and anyone who reads this will think I'm crazy) CloudFlare just buys Firefox itself from Mozilla so it can finally be funded correctly. CloudFlare has an interesting talent pool and I'm sure there's people who work with Rust / have worked with Rust who can help fund something like Firefox. Then I would like to see them create a true open foundation whose entire bottom line goes towards Firefox, not to anything else.
Free the fox from corporate shennanigans. By my own corporate shennanigans. And CF could be swapped out with any company bold enough to free the fox.
>I think the problem many of us have is it feels like Mozilla invests more effort into everything other than its browser,
Unfortunately the side bets are disproportionately visible relative to the vast majority of what they actually do, which is ship millions of lines of code in browser improvements every quarter, keeping pace with Google despite a fraction of Google's resources.
I certainly think a better strategic partner than Google would be ideal. Yahoo had a strategically promising moment that slipped through its fingers that I think will always be a what-if. Cloudflare is interesting because they're very much a create-a-blue-ocean kind of company, and the problem with browsers has always been that the browser space simply isn't a revenue driver, it's something you subsidize from other businesses.
Firefox is, remarkably, the most successful self funded browser engine in the history of the world, but many great companies have come and gone in this space (e.g. Opera) and still fell behind. They invest more in the browser now than they ever have, they have shipped more production Rust code than anybody. But that's not louder than the noise in the modern internet.
I think you're right that someone like Cloudflare would be an interesting partner and I can't think of a better one off the top of my head. And if AI is eclipsing search, that threatens search licensing they're currently relying on. I don't know what AI in the browser is, what new norms, what new expectations, what core concepts are going to matter the most. But something is going to change and you have to get out ahead of that now, to be relevant tomorrow.
I’m not sure Mozilla has shipped more Rust code than anybody, FWIW. The obviously have a lot, but so have other companies as well.
CloudFlare relies on it in key projects, which is why I feel like if I had to pick any tech company to consider taking a hold of Firefox, they'd be my top pick. I know some people are skeptical of them, but they have not goofed yet. Maybe if the CEO ever steps down I'll change my views on CF.
Cloudflare hates Firefox though. I get a lot more captchas on Cloudflare sites with Firefox.
Yeah, but if they controlled firefox, there'd probably be less captchas to complete
I like the way you think ;)
In the browser space they have. Google has been a lot more tentative about working it into their various toolkits.
Yeah if you’re going to scope it to browsers alone, sure but Google is catching up. They just implemented JPEG-XL as a rust library for Firefox to use too, for example. Nothing at the scale of Stylo but it seems to be accelerating.
At the same time, Firefox last year gained tab groups, vertical tabs, a user-friendly profile switcher. Split view and tab notes are under development. It sometimes feels like it's moving faster than ever, and that's disregarding all AI features.
(Disclosure: I work at Mozilla, but not on Firefox.)
I kept up with it a lot during the Oxidation years and it felt like Firefox was getting a LOT then, while I'm sure its still getting attention (I was testing Firefox Quantum the second it come out), and I still use it daily, I'm just expressing the overall of how I and others feel, I dont feel they're ALWAYS messing up with Firefox, but it definitely feels like Mozilla does too many moonshot things that fail and it leaves anyone wondering if the money was better spent invested in Firefox itself.
all this should have been developed in 2000s
different point of view: tab grouping took 20+y to develop (since opera had it in 2000s).
in 2026 firefox should have: - fast ui - fast js - fast rendering - hw acceleration for video - same look and feel on all platforms - faster adblocker
just the basics, no? didn't add more advanced features here.
and let's see what is actually here: - UI rendered via HTML/xul. an abomination. a slow abomination at that. right clicking something can show you stagers of rendering of a menu. - check any Js benchmarks, you will see how FF stands - rendering,... there was a talk in one of the conferences explaining timing requests and time-to-picture. this may be blamed on the standards, but chrome does it better - video hw acceleration on Linux? is this actually working? and I don't mean 3/100 relevant codecs - same look and feel - done - AdBlock is the only advantage you have over other platforms. it would make sense to implement this in the browser and not rely on Js and extensions
it's sad and funny that people with only a couple million are going to soon catch up to Mozilla and make it obsolete, by building a Bowser engine, not only a shell around blink/WebKit.
Look at what happened to Opera. They fell apart, abandoned their Presto engine for Chromium and sold to an outside investment group and now they serve ads based on user data.
There was, in my opinion, no better browser company past or present than Opera in the 2000s and 2010s (sorry Mozilla). But their example exposes the fallacy of assuming that building out great features guarantees market share gains.
opera had a different business model. I don't think they had millions upon miliona that Mozilla gets from Google for antitrust reasons.
opera had to earn their money.
this aside, Mozilla just now implemented tab grouping. does that mean they are going to, because of the added features, follow opera's path?
my point was that someone said how they increased development speed. and I'm saying they are breaking record in how slow it is. it's not 1y, it's since the feature appeared anywhere and it's 20y ago. what the f was Mozilla doing since then? obviously they didn't work on the features. but also they didn't work on the other list of things I mentioned since only one is fully delivered (look and feel on all platforms) and those are non-features like fore mentioned tab groupings, but core capabilities for a browser.
in everything else they are so much behind it's really a wonder they still have market share as much as they do.
What are you talking about? Opera and Mozilla are both in the business of trying to deliver a good browser, which means good features. Different financing doesn't change the mandate to deliver good browser features, and Opera most definitely did rely on search licensing as their primary income stream anyway, despite attempts to diversify (for years they relied on Google and Yandex and got more money from that than other forms of financing).
As I said, my opinionated hot take is that Opera was probably the best ever at delivering features and performance beloved by users, but that wasn't enough to move the needle on market share, which is why Opera perfectly exposes the fallacy of assuming better features = better market share. In this context appealing to "business structure" is a deflection.
Also, this tab grouping argument is mistaken both on its own terms but more broadly as a stand in for the argument that the Mozilla team has supposedly done nothing. Firefox had native tab grouping years before Chrome ever had it, had arguably the best tab grouping extension of any browser due to an intentional choice to invest in an extension ecosystem that made that functionality possible, and for the most part, Firefox has never not had tab grouping. What's new is that it's back as a baked-in default rather than merely present as a best in class extension.
The idea that Firefox has done nothing is an unfortunate impression that comes from looking at a serious of unfortunately critical tech headlines and losing sight of nuts and bolts development. I don't have the patience to recite everything here, but every year they push millions of lines of new code, thousands of patches, and deliver measurable improvements to major browser components like webGPU, javascript rendering, shipping production quality rust code, and more for a browser with 30 million lines of code.
You must be joking! The user profile switcher is NOT user friendly. It's lacking in every aspect of UX compared to Chromes profile switcher. And it has ads in it. Of all places, why the heck did they put ads into the user profile switcher.
Are you talking about the new one, or the old one? The old one was indeed horrible, but the new one is pretty nice IMO. I have no idea what you're talking about when it comes to ads though, I don't think either has that.
> I think the problem many of us have is it feels like Mozilla invests more effort into everything other than its browser, we see the things they do outside of Mozilla, I mean it was so bad Thunderbird had to become its own foundation due to lack of funding!
And then people simultaneously complain that Mozilla is reliant on Google for funding. There are not many good revenue options available for a browser other than selling search defaults - and AI may start choking off that revenue as well - but Mozilla also can't touch AI without being screamed at.
I mean, even literally this one sentence is self-contradictory. Thunderbird is not their browser. You complain that they "invest more effort into everything other than their browser" and then complain that they don't invest enough in Thunderbird.
No win situation for them in terms of public opinion.
* They can't get diversify their revenue to be less dependent on Google without doing things that people view as "distractions"
* They don't get credit when the "distractions" are for the public good, like LetsEncrypt, Rust, Opus / AV1, etc.
* They get punished for de-prioritizing "distractions" like Thunderbird and Servo and Rust because those distractions are popular.
* For years they were simultaneously being dragged for dropping the XUL extension ecosystem, and also dragged for low performance and lack of multiprocessing and a bunch of other things which were being kneecapped hard by the XUL extension ecosystem.
It's not like I love their management or anything, certainly they've made mistakes, but the narcissism of small differences hits them with full force relative to every other competitor in the space.
> There are not many good revenue options available for a browser other than selling search defaults
if they had set up an endowment instead of blowing it on unrelated pointless crap for decades they would have been self-funded indefinitely
they were pulling in over $500 MILLION a year
>if they had set up an endowment
Mozilla has had an endowment for, I think, ~15 years now, and they have invested it and grown it from around $90 million to around $1.2 billion and counting. Which now is a firewall in case of emergency, as well as a resource that's helping to stand up a VC fund which is one of their most interesting pathways to diversifying revenue.
> that's helping to stand up a VC fund which is one of their most interesting pathways to diversifying revenue
oh for fucks sake, that's even worse than blowing it on stupid ideas
JUST USE THE MONEY FOR THE BROWSER
They already spend more on developing the browser now than at any point in the entire history of Firefox, and that's after adjusting for inflation. They ship millions of lines of new code every year and apply thousands of patches. It's probably one of the biggest and most active open source projects in the entire world.
And just so we're clear, are you suggesting they shouldn't have an endowment at all, or that they shouldn't use the endowment to create any lines of long term revenue, or that they should but spending a fraction of a percent of it on a VC fund would not be successful? Whichever one you pick, there's at least one person who's exactly as upset at Mozilla for the opposite reason.
Edit: I would go so far as to say I think the VC fund is the single best idea Mozilla has ever had for long term financial independence. It builds on the success they've had thus far (such as it is) raising money from search licensing, and then using that search licensing money to stand up the endowment. Now, the VC fund leverages the endowment in a way that's the most serious path to financial independence they've ever had.
> And just so we're clear, are you suggesting they shouldn't have an endowment at all
did you read my comments in this chain?
> I would go so far as to say I think the VC fund is the single best idea Mozilla has ever had for long term financial independence.
do you look at Mozilla and see it as an example of an organisation that selected good investments over its existence?
would have it done better putting that money into treasuries? almost certainly
the point of an endowment for a foundation is to ensure the organisation continues to exist forever
not to gamble its future on 1 in 100 bets
and for a fund to have the possibility to have selected that 1 in 100: it has to be of significant size
You started this thread by falsely claiming Mozilla had no endowment. You were fully possessed by the certainty that this was simply more proof of their bad management. Can you acknowledge you were wrong about that instead of just shifting to new accusations?
500 million could net you about 50 to 70 million annually if you put it all on the S&P 500... A few years of this and you're a self-funded non-profit...
They're doing that. Their endowment is invested and it does grow by a non-trivial amount, though I don't know the exact numbers off the top of my head.
Reminder: Ladybird is being developed by a handful of people with contributions from the community. It's far from being complete, but it clearly shows that you don't need an enormous budget to build a Web browser entirely from scratch, let alone maintain one.
Ladybird should not be in the conversation. Its nowhere near FF or even usable as a browser.
I posted this reply from Ladybird, its pre-alpha but works better than you might think.
I won't be touching it until it has adblock and darkmode.
It is more easier to secure revenue/funding from Google once they retain existing market share and gain more. They need to improve the product for that to happen.
With all the distractions they are abandoning their primary product and they are bleeding whatever miniscule market share they have. This means Google has more leverage over them and can eventually stop the funding once their market share drops beyond a threshold say 0.5% because we all know antitrust is not a strong reason anymore to keep FF alive based on trends of recent rulings.
If we're being completely honest, improving the quality of the product would not meaningfully improve their market share. That worked in the early 2000s when the competition (internet explorer) was utterly stagnant and the internet-using population was composed predominantly of techies willing to try new things. Browsers are commodities now, and most people aren't going to try a new browser when they're already using Chrome / Safari on their mobile device with all of the integrations that are available between the two.
Chrome gained marketshare not just because it was a good product but because they paid Adobe, Oracle, and legions of freeware antivirus providers lots of $$$ to put a checked-by-default box in their installers to install Google Chrome and make it the default browser for anyone not paying enough attention to uncheck the boxes, and because they targeted Firefox users visiting google.com with popups advertising how much better Chrome was. Mozilla could never do that and they would be excoriated if they tried. And as I mentioned, many of the aspects of Chrome that were indeed superior, were met with kicking and screaming when Mozilla tried to follow, e.g. choosing performance over the XUL extension ecosystem.
Sadly I think their best hope to regain marketshare is to indirectly benefit from Linux to capturing marketshare from Windows.
>If we're being completely honest, improving the quality of the product would not meaningfully improve their market share.
Exactly right. They did the dang thing with Project Quantum, a massive rewrite of the browser, a massive leap forward in stability and performance. The thing everyone asked for. And they..... continued to lose market share. Because there are other factors, like monopoly power, and distribution lock-in.
You don't have to imagine what it looks like for a browser company to lap the field with an excellent development team, creative revenue raising ideas, being ahead of the curve on mobile, having best in class stability and performance, and building out features that their core user base loves and swears by. Because Opera was that company in the 2000s and 2010s.
But even Opera had to sell to a new ownership group and abandon their Presto engine for Chromium. Because, like Spock said, you can make every decision correctly and still lose. Which is kind of depressing, but it at least helpfully bursts the bubble of people claiming changes in market share are a one-to-one relationship to specific decisions about which features to build in a browser.
End users are easily influenced but they could have targeted developers.
I think they should have pushed for a gecko based electron alternative. End user dont really care if their favourite markdown editor or notes software is based on electron or gecko but it would have made sure that developers do not target, develop and test for only chromium based browsers.
That would probably also be considered a "distraction" by HN. Electron isn't built by the Chrome team.
It also wouldn't be directly revenue diversification. You can't beat Electron by selling an alternative.
Firefox has somewhat tried to target developers. There's Developer Edition with a "direct to the dev tools" focus. Firefox's Dev Tools still generally are somewhat ahead of Safari's and Chrome's (though not always Edge's, even in the Edgmium era one of the few teams that still exists that doesn't upstream everything immediately is Edge's Dev Tools work). Firefox was directly ahead on Flexbox and CSS Grid debugging tools, though now everyone else has copied them. (Not to mention that the history of Dev Tools in the first place all points back to Firebug and other Firefox extensions that went mainstream and then made sense to prioritize as out-of-the-box tools.)
Firefox probably can't do much more to target developers on its own, from a browser perspective. Targeting developers doesn't seem to move the needle enough in marketshare, either.
It's not just Electron that developers are stuck in "develop and test for only chromium based browsers" modes. There's also all the top-down pressure in corporate environments to standardize on only one browser to "cut down" on "testing costs". There are the board room-driven development cycles of "I only care if it looks good on the CEO's iPhone" or "the CEO is into Android this year, that's the focus, everything else is garbage". There's also the hard to avoid spiral of "Firefox marketshare is low, don't worry about it" to more sites not working as well in Firefox to Firefox marketshare getting lower to more "don't worry about it" websites and so on.
> I think they should have pushed for a gecko based electron alternative.
They did! At least three different versions of it!
Is anyone else seeing this pattern? "Mozilla should have an endowment". They do! "Well they should have invested the endowment!" They do. "They should have done a gecko based electron alternative". They did. "They should have tab grouping". They've never not had it, between native support and extensions. "They should be spending on the browser." They literally spend more now than ever in their history.
It's vibes and drive by cheap shots, all the way down. I get that dabbling in adtech is not great, I get that they've cycled through side bets recently without committing to them (unlike Google?!), but it's an ounce of truth with every pound of nonsense. Mozilla Derangement Syndrome.
Developers are no longer a significant fraction of the pie, and a significant fraction of those are web developers or do web development, and those users will in all likelihood primarily use what their users are using, which isn't Firefox.
> And then people simultaneously complain that Mozilla is reliant on Google for funding. There are not many good revenue options available for a browser other than selling search defaults - and AI may start choking off that revenue as well - but Mozilla also can't touch AI without being screamed at.
Proton Mail, Google Workspace, iCloud, Dropbox are all viable money-making products that line up well with Mozilla's core mission if they made their own alternatives. Persona could've been really good, if one of these products existed and had enough traction to build a user base that made third parties want to depend on Persona.
There is a world where Mozilla built services people actually want instead of focusing on trust-eroding gimmicks like Pocket, and they'd be thriving right now.
>And then people simultaneously complain that Mozilla is reliant on Google for funding. There are not many good revenue options available for a browser other than selling search defaults - and AI may start choking off that revenue as well - but Mozilla also can't touch AI without being screamed at.
Wish I read this before posting my comment, I wholeheartedly agree at every level. The criticisms are a mile wide, an inch deep, and sometimes legitimate, but often deeply contradictory, and there's no attitude of accountability or self awareness when someone jumps in for the millionth time saying "don't get distracted" but also "offer something new to generate revenue".
And the factual literacy of the drive-by critics is, unfortunately, sometimes brutally off the mark and even veering into conspiratorial. Some unfortunate threads appear to be young adults reading a Mozilla 990 filing for the first time and misreading a conspiracy into every single line, very casual attitudes about accusing them of falsifying financial statements or accusations of controlled opposition, or ridiculous suggestions that they spend down their endowment on "engineering" to no particular end, and sometimes completely misrepresenting how much of a time suck and energy suck certain projects were (e.g. blockchain is sometimes on the Rap Sheet of Bad Things, but they basically wrote a white paper or two).
Which, as you note, isn't to say there's no legitimate concerns: "privacy preserving ads" is a contradiction in terms, the strategic reliance on Google is precarious, and side bets like Pocket were left to languish. In normal times I might consider myself a critic. But unfortunately too often the comment section is an out of control orgy of completely uninformed cheap shots, with an ounce of truth to every pound of confidently incorrect accusation. And that phenomenon, to my mind, is as big as any misstep Mozilla is or isn't making.
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Sure, it's not like CloudFare centralizes enough of the internet infrastructure, let's also give them one of the few (more or less) independent browsers.
I think it is an interesting fit that makes sense. CloudFlare works on the web, and they aren't out here bubbling up how you view the web or altering it in any way, unlike Google or Bing which curate what results you get.
Give it time.
I guess replies on this thread are evident that Mozilla has lost much of the trust and goodwill it once enjoyed. Admittedly I am also very skeptical that Mozilla has the ability or genuine interest to make this work.
I feel that, at some point around the Brendan Eich-gate, the Internet decided that Mozilla was always wrong. Change the shape of tabs? We received rape threats. Change it back? Bomb threats. Bringing in new APIs for add-ons that make Firefox faster, more secure, more stable and doesn't break all the time? No, we want addon $X, we don't care about security.
I'm not going to claim that everything Mozilla has done is right, but the bad will of the tech crowd is a bit exhausting.
Writing this as a former Firefox contributor.
I never worked on Firefox, and am often critical of Mozilla, but I can second this sentiment. It's seemed like everything Mozilla does makes everyone mad, all the time. It's frustrating.
Also, compared to the scale of harm that Google does and the risk of it de facto controlling the web with the chromium engine, all the things that Mozilla does to piss people off should be small potatoes.
I'm still happy with mozilla. Keep it up!
It's the "vocal minority", right? Sure it's not fun to receive threats but it's a known fact that communicating over the Internet makes people unhinged. Maybe there's stuff to complain about but I am a happy Firefox user for .. what? over two decades! :) so, thanks for that.
If no one is sending you stupid threats online, are you even alive?
As a former Firefox user, I got fed up with the constant change for the sake of change. Why change the tabs? They were fine the way they were. People got mad about the addon situation since it broke their workflows because of vague technical reasons. And Mozilla usually ignored user protests while pointing at telemetry, and did whatever they wanted to, users be damned.
At least that's how it looked from this side. I switched to Vivaldi some 4-5 years ago, and it looks and works pretty much the same since I started using it. New features and changes have happened, but they've been able to be ignored/disabled/hidden without doing CSS brain surgery.
If/when the Google Adblockerblocker changes trickles down to Vivaldi I may have to crawl back to Firefox, but I dread the prospect.
> And Mozilla usually ignored user protests while pointing at telemetry, and did whatever they wanted to, users be damned.
When I worked on Firefox, most of the changes happened exactly because user research determined that users wanted them and/or that not having them hurt the product. We changed the tabs at least once because users thought that the old shape of tabs made the browser feel slow (true story, sadly). We changed the add-on API (after having warned add-on developers for at least 6 years) because the old API was incompatible with multi-threading, multi-process, sandboxing, which in turn was really bad for both performance and security.
I'll absolutely grant you that Mozilla hasn't been very good at communicating these choices, but again, the sheer hostility of tech crowds is exhausting.
Anyone can hip fire an accusation from the philosopher's chair (potty), and it's like that thing about a falsehood circling the world five times before the truth even gets out of bed.
Against the avalanche of claims that they've "done nothing", it can be tedious to pull out examples of, say, major projects achieving huge performance improvements in WebGPU, but meanwhile it costs nothing to claim Firefox has "done nothing since Quantum" which I've heard claimed in these parts in full sincerity.
> broke their workflows because of vague technical reasons
> I switched to Vivaldi
You refer to important security improvements as "vague technical reasons" and you switched to Vivaldi, a browser that is based[1] on extended stable Chromium, which is not "recommended for any team where security is a primary concern"[2].
It seems you don't care about security.
[1] https://help.vivaldi.com/android/android-privacy/security-fa...
[2] https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/HEAD/docs/p...
You're right - security is not my primary concern.
>security fixes that are relevant to any Chrome Browser platforms will be landed on the extended stable branch
>complex and risky changes [...] may not be viable to backport
Big deal.
I don't know but I've been using Firefox since forever and I can't even recall the tabs changing at all. Of course they have changed many times over the course of years, but that happens in every browser. I don't know what happened to tabs that affected you so badly? I feel like it's an excuse for some people sometime that if some little thing in the UI changes that they claim their whole flow is now compromised so that is the reason they are now using this other software, where the same stuff happens as far as I can see.
I'm obviously not just talking about the tabs. And "some little UI thing" can absolutely break your workflow - UI isn't just how things look. Mozilla purged lots of minor features over the years, and the goto excuse was usually "parity with Chrome" or "telemetry".
In the latest version they changed something AGAIN, when you drag a tab too far to the left it's pinned automatically. Literally nobody asked for it and it makes me so angry, god I hate Mozilla. I only use Fiefox because it's the last browser with Manifest V2 (I have a lot of these add-ons) and as an add-on dev they made me even more angry with having double standards regarding their shitty add-on review system.
There is always a pile on on Firebox for not being perfect. Sometimes with valid complaints. But if you dig deeper nearly always the commenter is using a version of Chrome and justifies it over Firefox for a very shallow or outdated reason. Firefox would do well to listen to some of the criticism about the browser and ignore the noise about anything else
There's also the cohort of bad web developers that only test on Chrome
As someone that uses Firefox as my main browser on desktop and mobile, I am curious here - what exactly are the complaints with Firefox?
I'm using 3+ year old hardware that was mid-range even when it was new and it seems to do everything I would want with reasonable performance.
> what exactly are the complaints with Firefox?
If you are a (the) leading browser like Firefox once was, the "what are the complaints?" is the right question.
If you are a minor browser like Firefox currently is (~2.5% market share), the "what is it doing better?" is the correct question.
Supporting a proper ad blocker makes it automatically superior than any of the more popular browsers. The fact most people don't mind being fuel for the machine is another issue.
There was a long period of time during which firefox users weren't sure whether they were going to follow chrome (like they did on every single other thing.) They're still user-hostile and their values are inscrutable; I have no trust that they won't kill ad blocking next year, or the year after. Requiring add-ons to be signed was a more radically hostile leap than moving to ManifestV3 would be.
The people still complaining about firefox are its most faithful users. The reason some are vicious is because they are trapped - they'll consider cutting their use of the internet before using an non-FOSS browser. 90% of firefox's users left. People who could stand a closed browser have already decided to use one. You're in an extreme minority if you even know anything about firefox to complain about. This year the Linux desktop, of all impossible things, has become more popular than firefox.
Yet there's still this confidence and attitude about even the remaining users that comes from being spoon-fed cash by your direct competitor in return for nothing.
The Firefox market share was eaten largely by the enormous and legally dubious marketing campaigns by Google and Microsoft. Hard to see how Mozilla could compete with constant forced nags and defaults in the most widely used websites and operating systems.
It was a big factor, but so were things like the way they treated their mobile browser for years and years, which is the platform 2/3 of browser traffic now originates.
According to statcounter's stats, Firefox never cracked 1% of monthly mobile traffic any month from when stats started in 2009. Even Opera and UC have more than double Firefox's average for the last year and they are just Chromium forks users are downloading off the stores.
For context, I recall that for years and years, Firefox was the highest ranked mobile browser. Mozilla invested a lot in mobile, Firefox devs had to rewrite the Android linker, invent new ways of starting binaries on Android, etc. just to make Firefox work (all of which were later used by Chrome for Android).
It still didn't make a dent in mobile browser shares.
Sure, Mozilla could have invested even more in Firefox mobile, but at some point, this would have come at the expense of Firefox desktop, which was the source of ~100% of the funding.
What Firefox was doing 4 months after Android 1.0 GA'd would indeed been unlikely to have made a dent in mobile share compared to what effort was going on once Android had a billion users. Why put all of that effort in before something is even used to just then let it rot for years anyways? In the end, they ended up spending the resources to refresh it in 2019 anyways - by which time billions had already decided Firefox was just a battery hog and slow on mobile.
It's a sad story because Firefox was so good on mobile when nobody had a chance to use it then it was crap when they did. On desktop Firefox is still the #1 non-bundled browser, things went so poorly on mobile they can't even come close to that today. In a parallel universe timings were inverted and Firefox may have even had more users on mobile than it does desktop today.
The Firefox market share was eaten by being worse than Chrome, especially around the developer tools and extensions market places at the time.
It was eaten by Google flexing their search and mobile monopolies, to advertise it on one of the most visited websites in the world, and coming pre-installed on over a billion devices. Distribution lock in leading to market share dominance is a tale as old as computing to the point that we now have decades old case law specifically on the issue of software monopolies being the cause of browser market share dominance.
Interestingly the most recent anti-trust case against Google, one proposed remedy was spinning off the Chrome browser into its own company, but that option was judged to be unrealistic, because how would a browser survive on it's own without distribution advantages and all its costs subsidized by other revenue drivers? A great question.
There's a lot of opinions and anecdata in that. Firefox was almost never as bad as it was marketed to be (by its competition), and Chrome was certainly never as good as it was marketed to be (by an evil ad company pretending to be a good, well adjusted internet benefit company).
Firefox used to be the first browser with decent developer tools thanks to the Firebug extension.
Then Chrome pushed heavily the development of its own development tools and crushed Firefox in the process. Chrome has now been the best browser for developers for the last +10 years.
The consequence is also that when the new generation of headless browsers were developed (Puppeteer) they were based on Chromium because it is so hackable and developer friendly.
This means that Firefox lost a big chunk of the developer community which constituted also a non trivial amount of their user base and advocates.
I don't know why people left Firefox, but I know why *I* did. And it was three or four years ago (after using it for 15 years) because I got annoyed at them for removing many features that I used over the years, and because I tried a Crommium based browser and it just had better performance and better ad-blocking. That's just one anecdote, but feel free to correlate it with other anecdotes to find some patterns and reach your own conclusion.
My father, who is very non-technical has never left Firefox and stuck with it for decades, even against Microsoft and Chrome's tactics to try to claim default browser and constantly install them into his face. My father particularly hates Chrome because he never understands how it keeps reinstalling itself despite his best efforts. His taskbar is often a mess of all three browsers because he can't figure out how to keep Edge and Chrome unpinned. My father sees Chrome installing itself and auto-pinning to his taskbar and Start Menu as the exact same IE-level adware/spyware shenanigans that led to him fleeing to Firefox in the first place.
I returned to Firefox again after years of IE8+ and Spartan Edge. I've never liked the "mouthfeel" of Chrome, have generally felt it to be bloated and slow and ad-heavy adware (though not as strongly as my father and I often do know how Chrome gets backdoor installed through shameful adware deals like with Adobe), and when Edge switched to being just another Chromium I still felt the same in my dislike of Chromium and I went back to Firefox. (Spartan Edge had so much better performance and battery usage than Chromium. It's death was not mourned by enough people.)
Feel free to correlate these two counter-anecdotes with more and see if you find some patterns to reach your own conclusion. That's the fun of anecdata and marketing, there are patterns on every side, you can interpret it how you want. "Popularity" isn't facts, pattern matching based on popularity of certain anecdotes can lead to incorrect conclusions. Especially when Marketing is involved. Marketing is about making popular things that aren't necessarily facts, especially when an advertiser is unscrupulous and no one is busy enforcing truth in advertising laws.
These anecdotes say the people still using Firefox don't like Chrome/Edge and that few cared when Edge switched from Spartan to Chromium. I don't think anyone disagrees with any of that. It's the anecdotes about the different reasons people actually stopped using Firefox for under debate, not the reasons a few have still stayed anyways.
I.e. IE (couldn't resist :)) can be said to have used the exact same shenanigans, as mentioned above, but there were other reasons droves of people still decided to install and use Firefox back then anyways. People no longer make the same decision to install and use Firefox, so if the shenanigans haven't changed... then what did? This is where the common refrains that Chrome managed to be a better browser (particular on mobile) for that decade or that Firefox managed to regress in certain ways come from. Sure, Chrome absolutely got its growth blasted forward by marketing and bundling, but people decided to stick with it and stop using Firefox for reasons unrelated to that. Sometimes niche reasons, sometimes general reasons, but the story was never something like "Chrome invented marketing and bundling, which resulted in Firefox losing its easily gained massive market share of the time".
No, Chrome was genuinely better than Firefox back then. Firefox didn't have multiprocess until many years later and Flash constantly crashed the browser.
> what is it doing better
adblock is the single most important feature of a web browser to me. Firefox has the best adblock support.
I agree, although Chrome has extensions like uBlock Origin Lite and Privacy Badger which are decent enough for most people and uses.
> decent enough for most people and uses.
Except for the very big use case of mobile browsing, where only Firefox allows extensions.
I’d argue they aren’t, but the number one threat actor in the privacy space is Google.
I occasionally have to use Chrome to test with it. Can someone explain concisely how it manages Google logins? They clearly bolted it in at some low level to help violate privacy, and or shove dark patterns.
Also, the out of the box spam and dark patterns are over the top. It reminds me of Win 95 bundled software bullshit.
That’s to say nothing of their B-tier properties, like Google TV or YouTube client:
When the kids use this garbage it’s all “Bruh, what is this screen?”, or “I swear I’m not touching the remote!”
(The official YouTube client loses monitor sync(!!) as it rapid cycles through ads on its own now. I guess this is part of an apparent google-run ad fraud campaign, since it routinely seems to think it ran > 5-10 ads to completion in ~15 seconds. We can’t even see all the ads start because each bumps the monitor settings around, which has the effect of auto-mute.)
My primary complaint is that they have a bunch of ad placements on the product out of the box when it's opened for the first time and any time I set up a new system I have to go configure Firefox to not be annoying by default. It makes the Firefox experience feel subversive and untrustworthy because this freshly installed application is obviously bedfellows with advertisers. I know I can't trust advertisers with my data or browser behavior, so why should I trust Firefox with it? If I stop using Firefox for a little while, they _so helpfully_ offer to reset my configuration back to default so those ads will get shown again. It's a hostile experience.
Additionally, my perception (from posts and discussions like these, I'm not a financial analyst and I have no meaningful insights into their business) is also that they probably receive enough funding through non-advertising means that they don't actually need to do this if they were to pare back the nonsense spending they're so greatly known for.
> Additionally, my perception (from posts and discussions like these, I'm not a financial analyst and I have no meaningful insights into their business) is also that they probably receive enough funding through non-advertising means that they don't actually need to do this if they were to pare back the nonsense spending they're so greatly known for.
Last time I checked, Mozilla received 90%+ of its funding from Google. This is a situation that nobody likes (except Google, of course). These ads are an attempt to diversify income streams.
People are really unhappy that Mozilla gets money from Google, but also extremely vocally unhappy whenever Mozilla attempts to find other sources.
I haven't seen anyone suggest alternate solutions yet.
I don’t actually mind their money from Google but why is charging money for a quality product an unfathomable business model? Ads or bust it seems.
Because pretty much nobody is willing to pay for it.
Major problems with Firefox include:
...Okay, okay, I’m being too cheeky.The common wisdom is that overall Firefox can feel bottlenecked at render and draw times (“less snappy”). That could be a result of a slower JavaScript engine (takes longer to get to drawing), or a result of poorer hardware acceleration (slower drawing), or a less optimized multiprocessing/multithreading model (more resource contention when drawing).
I honestly can't see it in the real world, but synthetic benchmark are pretty clear on that front.
Hum.
I have at home 13 year old hardware running Firefox and no performance complaints.
Including everyone that ships Chrome with their application as "native" app.
VSCode gets a pass, because apparently it is the only programmer's editor that many only care about providing plugins nowadays.
The ubiquity of their plugin model is why. Near all editors have a VS code plugin compatible layer
Yeah, and with it Eclipse wins a second time, especially on embedded where Eclipse CDT forks were replaced by VSCode forks.
"Project Ticino: Microsoft's Erich Gamma on Visual Studio Code past, present, and future"
https://www.theregister.com/2021/01/28/erich_gamma_on_vs_cod...
> Near all editors have a VS code plugin compatible layer
Huh, never heard about this before, and took a look at emacs and vim/neovim as those are the two most popular editors I know of, neither can run VS code plugins, that'd be crazy if true.
If you count LSP (Language Server Protocol) as a VSCode plugin-compatible layer as LSP was built and standardized by the VSCode team (so many do), then Emacs and Neovim are full of VSCode-compatible plugins today. One of Neovim's selling points right now over bare Vim is better/more direct LSP support.
Ah, if LSP is what parent meant with "VS code plugin compatible layer" then what you say makes sense, I personally also moved from vim to neovim mainly because of better LSP support.
But I understood "VS code plugin compatible layer" to mean there is something that lets you run VSCode plugins with other editors, which is what I haven't seen anywhere (yet?).
Except Emacs doesn't have "plugins". They are called "packages" and not plugins for specific reasons - they are more like libraries than plugins. In Emacs, one can change/override the behavior of any function (built-in or third party) with some enormous flexibility not easily achievable in other editors.
Very long time vim/neovim user here. I can't remember names atm and can't check, but I have definitely seen plugins that run a headless or subset of VScode in the background to pull info from it. It may not be super common, but it is being done
You are probably referring to language support plug-ins.
IIRC, debugger support for java needed a component from one of the official plug-ins.
It really seems like all the complaints about firefox are mostly ego-deflection.
People know it is wrong to stay on Chrome and empower Google to the extent that it is, but they're stuck on that workflow and don't want to change, so they find nits to pick about firefox and get very LOUD about that. Then it becomes Mozill's fault that they're still using Chrome, and you can't blame them for anything.
> all the complaints about firefox are mostly ego-deflection.
Sorry this is too handwavy for me.
According to this logic, Mozilla is likely going to die believing it did nothing wrong.
I use Firefox almost exclusively on desktop and android and I'm still pretty critical of it.
Especially because I know I'm one of very few people that uses it that much.
> There is always a pile on on Firebox for not being perfect.
I don't have a problem w/ Firefox not being perfect. I have a problem with the Mozilla Foundation spending money on seemingly random other stuff and not on Firefox.
> There is always a pile on on Firebox for not being perfect.
Nobody has ever complained about anything not being perfect. That's just something dishonest people say when they want to avoid mentioning specific criticisms.
> But if you dig deeper nearly always the commenter is using a version of Chrome
Pure cope
> I guess replies on this thread are evident that Mozilla has lost much of the trust and goodwill it once enjoyed. Admittedly I am also very skeptical that Mozilla has the ability or genuine interest to make this work.
That reverses cause and effect to a great degree. Many are very skeptical because they read everyone slamming it. It's a mob psychology.
The other problem is, they will eventually axe this initiative if it doesn't produce anything meaningful to them, and will have been wasted resources that could have gone to Firefox itself.
I'm hopeful. The open source AI ecosystem could benefit from large players like Mozilla making moves.
In what world is Mozilla large?
Maybe influential would be a better word choice. Firefox has 100M+ users.
As a long-time Firefox user, I don't want them to have an "AI strategy", I want them to have a browser improvement strategy.
Firefox has improved significantly. It's improvement strategy is mostly focused on what developers ask them to focus on. They've had great performance on the yearly interops
https://wpt.fyi/interop-2021
https://wpt.fyi/interop-2022
https://wpt.fyi/interop-2023
https://wpt.fyi/interop-2024
https://wpt.fyi/interop-2025
what developers do they still have. their dev console is so bad compared to Chrome. Mozilla abandoned their user base and the users have moved on.
I'm surprised to hear that. I was under the assumption that it was generally acknowledged that the Firefox dev tools were far and away the best of the major browsers. I always find myself missing them when having to use Chrome devtools at least.
I feel like nowadays they both have basically the same featureset so maybe it's more about how well you know how to use them
Agree, I'm not the kind of guy that has 100 tabs open (10 at the time I'm typing this), but when I came back 2 years ago I noticed that it isn't as snappy and fast as it used to be 15 years ago before I switched to Chrome.
The open source community will start taking Firefox seriously again when all the AI shit is removed for good and real improvements to performance and privacy are made.
Despite all the posturing about "respecting your privacy and freedom," the stock configuration of Firefox is trivially fingerprintable. At the very least, a privacy-focused browser should adopt the Tor patches and report standardized spoofed values for hardware components and disable by default all privacy invasive anti-features like WebGL. This isn't difficult to do, but illustrates the gap between empty promises and what is actually delivered.
I'd definitely love to see them take some steps, but at the points where a minor increase in privacy leads to a much worse UX for average people (aka, "why doesn't this site work in FF, FF sucks!" because they don't know they have to enable something). If Firefox becomes a browser that is harder to use then it will only ever be used by the extremely small niche of people that care about that. That will only further lead to more "not tested on Firefox" web development. I already have to have Chrome available on my machine because of sites like Ramp.com and Mailgun that don't work on Firefox, and that would only get worse.
> I'd definitely love to see them take some steps, but at the points where a minor increase in privacy leads to a much worse UX for average people
Disabling Javascript or even just third party scripts does lead to major breakage, but reporting spoofed values for identifiers like Tor does not. The Arkenfox user.js does all of this and more, but these options are not enabled by default. This shows that Firefox does not care much about privacy in practice.
The only "breakage" that I have encountered with such a hardened configuration is related to the spoofing of the time zone. But the fundamental issue is that Javascript/browsers should have not been designed to allow websites to extract this kind of personal information in the first place. But even that is not enough and users are still fingerprintable. In an ideal world, the only thing a website should see is the originating IP and nothing else.
If anything, Brave has done more to harden Chromium than Mozilla has with Firefox, even though Brave comes with its own set of problems (scammy crypto integrations, AI, VPN and other stuff).
> Disabling Javascript or even just third party scripts does lead to major breakage, but reporting spoofed values for identifiers like Tor does not. The Arkenfox user.js does all of this and more, but these options are not enabled by default. This shows that Firefox does not care much about privacy in practice.
I suspect that it shows that Firefox developers do a good job at making Firefox work, and this good job enables forks to work.
> Disabling Javascript or even just third party scripts does lead to major breakage
Maybe that's true for the websites you visit, like HN.
Very many, very popular sites don't run without JavaScript, including most shopping, social media, mapping, etc etc.
>only ever be used by the extremely small niche[...]
Isn't that pretty much the current situation?
It's a really hard line to walk.
If you put too much in your Telemetry/crash reports, yeah, users become fingerprintable.
On the other hand, if you return spoofed values, it means that Firefox developers cannot debug platform/hardware-specific crashes. If you disable Telemetry, improving performance becomes impossible, because you're suddenly unable to determine where your users suffer. If you remove WebGL, plenty of websites suddenly stop working, and people assume that Firefox is broken.
> If you put too much in your Telemetry/crash reports, yeah, users become fingerprintable.
It's not only what gets send to Mozilla as telemetry or crash reports that is a problem. That can be turned off (many Linux distros do), or firewalled.
The main issue is that websites can more or less accurately identify users uniquely by extracting information that they should not have access to if the browser was designed with privacy in mind.
This includes, but is not limited to, fonts installed, system language, time zone, window size, browser version, hardware information (number of cores, device memory), canvas fingerprint, and many others attributes. When you combine all of that with the originating IP address, you can reliably determine who visited a website, because that information is shared and correlated with services where people identify themselves (Google accounts, Facebook, Amazon, etc.) Even masking your IP may not be enough because typically there is enough information in the other data points to track you already.
All of this is true, but it's a problem of the entire web platform and specs, so if you want to favor untraceability above compatibility, you'll need a dedicated privacy-hardened browser. Firefox aims to be better at privacy, but still respect the web specs.
Sure, but then don't go grandstanding about privacy. You can't have both.
And saying that improving performance is impossible without it is hyperbolic. Developers did that before every major application turned into actual spyware. Profilers still work without it.
Profilers only work once you have identified the problem. Telemetry lets you find out about it in the first place.
Yes, it's the stock configuration to be not broken. If you are ok with breakage in exchange for less fingerprinting, the config setting privacy.resistFingerprinting is right there: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/resist-fingerprinting
It is an uplift from Tor, and I believe Tor just enables it in their build, though it doesn't end up being quite the same. Tor is always going to be better for this.
But turning it on in the stock Firefox configuration would be suicide in terms of market share. When "I want maximal privacy" fights "I want this site to work", guess which one wins?
I am going with the Waterfox / Librewolf forks
Unfortunately, the guys in charge at Mozilla are clearly enamored with AI. They like it so much (and value users so little), that they'll let it write the whole damn PR blog post about company strategy.
I will be honest. I love that post, makes me want to go see what they are doing.
However, I haven't seen anything from Mozilla in recent years that makes me trust this has a future.
I'll be honest, when I see another "Hate Firefox" fest, I ask only one question "Quo bono?"
> I haven't seen anything from Mozilla in recent years that makes me trust this has a future.
As opposed to what? Chrome? What's the future there?
The various Firefox derivatives will die a quick death if Firefox dies. The strings attached to Chrome derivatives make them pointless. So, what's left? What are we discussing here? There's no alternative, it's that simple.
On the other hand, joining the hate-fest on various forums cannot and does not help Mozilla to find a better way. One is peeved by this, another by that, go figure... I'd call it childish if it wasn't so damaging.
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Like many here on HN, I’m skeptical, also about Mozilla, but the blog post is compelling in its plan plus there’s a new CEO in town.
So I think what we can do is give them the benefit of the doubt and approach this with cautious optimism for now instead of just negativity.
The new CEO centered AI ("It's Time to Evolve Firefox Into an AI Browser") in his first communication to the community. Spawned at least three new forks and introduced people to LibreWolf.
His first communication reduced trust: "It is a privilege to lead an organization with a long history of standing up for people and building technology that puts them first."
Now let's put people first by making Firefox an AI first browser. Enzor-Demeo would have made an excellent Microsoft product manager. Too bad he didn't get the job.
New CTO too. This post is written by Raffi Krikorian who joined in September. https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/leadership/mozilla-welco...
Please let me pay for Firefox and have the proceed fund Firefox directly. This is not 1999 anymore. We are all wealthy grown ups now.
Agreed, I subscript to random Mozilla products like VPN and Relay to pay them but I dont need those and would hate to have them waste extra development time on improving those services. I would rather fund the browser directly.
Yes, but how large is the subset of Firefox users that are willing to pay for a browser? Take that number and multiply it either by 10 o by 100 and you get the order of magnitude.
I googled this https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1mhks3h/firefoxs_w...
Let's say we are at 100 million users. If only 1 out of 100 pay, it's 10 to 100 million dollars per year. A lot of money or a puny amount, it depends.
a) It’s insane how little we pay for browsers given their utility. b) Many people would be happy to pay extra for a browser to support free access for others (The Guardian was a decent example of that IIRC).
And they claim to have at least 200 million users. If 1% pays a yearly fee of 10 dollars, surely that's enough to fund development.
Going by the 2023 financial report (getting the 2024 report requires to submit a mail address?!), Mozilla spent over 500mil in that year, 328m on salaries (page 5).
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2024/
I'm in favor of it, but that would raise about 4% of what Mozilla needs.
Even the most successful online annual fundraising drive that exists, Wikipedia, raises less than half of what Mozilla gets annually from search licensing. And Mozilla in a best case scenario probably can't match Wikipedia's fundraising for a number of reasons.
It would feel good and I certainly wouldn't mind it, but it's much closer to a drop in the bucket than a panacea.
In my view, this is the exact right approach. LLMs aren’t going anywhere, these tools are here to stay. The only question is how they will be developed going forward, and who controls them. Boycotting AI is a really naive idea that’s just a way for people to signal group membership.
Saying I hate AI and I’m not going to use it is really trending and makes people feel like they’re doing something meaningful, but it’s just another version of trying to vote the problem away. It doesn’t work. The real solution is to roll up the sleeves and built an a version of this technology that’s open, transparent, and community driven.
I'm really not optimistic about this initiative.
- Mozilla.ai agent platform: No link with the browser. Just a closed-source SaaS competitor to the many existing agentic platforms like LangChain / LangGraph.
- Mozilla Data Collective: It's been made clear now that sadly data licensing doesn't matter and if you use less data than your competitor, your model will be inferior.
- Real deployments: Basically getting into the public contracts and consulting grift with no priori experience. Probably banking on EU open source funding & co.
- Mozilla Ventures: Redistributing a token amount of the money they are already not making (gift from Google) to fund Open Source research.
- Newsletter
Looks like the Mozilla.ai platform is Saas but the tools themselves are open source, so you could just use them elsewhere.
Indeed, but LangChain / LangGraph tools are also Open Source so its not really Mozilla bringing their Open Source culture as a differentiating factor from their competitors.
Ah. I had assumed that these were tools built or contributed to by Mozilla.
Mozilla is indeed developing some Open Source AI tools which will then be used in their proprietary and paying SaaS AI agent platform.
What I meant to say is that existing competing solutions like LangGraph and LangChain are already Open Source themselves. So releasing Open Source AI libraries is not a new twist that Mozilla is bringing.
I genuinely don't understand the "permissioned data" assumption. Presumably, all the current models that were trained on illegitimate scraping of vastly larger sources will always have the upper hand (in terms of raw power, obviously at the cost of regurgitating evil stuff too), because they just have absorbed way more diverse data in their training. So the models trained on ethical datasets only will not be able to compete, unless they too rely on a common base of "foundational sin" data and just add those datasets as an ethical layer to cover the rotten roots.
Is it really possible to start training from scratch at this stage and compete with the existing models, using only ethical datasets? Hasn't it been established that without the stolen data, those models could not exist or compete?
Personally I would rather use a 'bad' ai that's trained ethically and runs locally than a good ai trained on stolen data that requires me to surrender my thoughts to the cloud.
whether or not it's possible to compete I guess we'll see but I am hopeful and appreciative that Mozilla is trying, as I am getting tired of big tech trying to force everyone to hand over even more unhinged amounts of data than what they're already taking from us.
I strongly suspect that it is absolutely impossible to have an even remotely usable/useful "AI" trained on tiny datasets, and that instead of training only on ethical data, companies that want to sound ethical will use an extra post-training step for dirty foundation models to behave more ethically as if they'd only learned from ethical sources. I'd hate for this to become the norm, but I fear this is logically what annoucements like this one really mean. The difference in scale is so vast -- taking whatever you want from the entire internet -- vs hand-curated datasets with explicit authorisation and free to use. It's like trying to make a grain of sand gravitate around a marble in the playground, to mimic the moon around the Earth – won't work.
Strange to me that they don’t mention HuggingFace, which I think of as a pretty leading player in open{source|weight|data} AI.
I like the high level points but unless Mozilla finds revenue from this, are they not doing too much with mostly donation based revenue?
Being the agent of the user isn't particularly profitable. For example: companies want the users to be shown ads, and users generally don't want to be shown ads. But profit, which is to say money you make without having to directly work for it, comes from selling the user's interests away. Like, perhaps, choosing to take a bribe to cement Google's search monopoly, a fundamentally anticompetitive behavior which, even as it makes cash for Mozilla, costs the web far, far more.
They've lost their way completely as an independent entity, and a post like this that doesn't reaaally seem to grasp that weight of that conundrum comes no closer to convincing me that they can find their way back to the light.
I think you're right but I suspect that's the point. AI may be eating into search, and that could threaten their search licensing deal. Apple just struck a deal with Google to use Gemini, though it sounds like Apple paying Google for the privilege. Ominous if you're a browser company looking to sell a license for a preferred AI tool.
I think this is a good initiative. Having major software components be part of foundations, rather than single-vendor backed, is always a good thing. TBD if this succeeds or not, but I think they are doing a good thing here.
> Mozilla was born to change this, and Firefox succeeded beyond what most people thought possible — dropping Internet Explorer’s market share to 55% in just a few years and ushering in the Web 2.0 era.
Is this true? I can see from here[0] that its peak was 32%, as IE was really on the back burner but before Chrome had fully risen to dominance, but I wouldn't claim that it was responsible for IE's market share drop.
[0] https://mspoweruser.com/firefox-statistics
When do you think the "web 2.0 era" was?
Web 2.0 is around 2003 or so and chrome would not even exist for another few years. Giving Firefox/phoenix/Netscape the majority credit for the first fall of IE seems accurate.
The rise of chrome happened afterwards and by then IE also fell much deeper than 55%.
Opera was also essential at this point, not in terms of market share, but of innovation in the browser space with features that would eventually spread to everything else.
That shouldn't be forgotten. There was a time when the 1% or so of users that ran Opera were getting a much better experience than any other browser. It was far superior for several years, until all of its innovations were copied by other vendors.
Yeah, my anecdotal memories aren't worth much, but in that era it was all IE or Firefox. Even once Chrome came along it still took quite some time before I noticed it popping up on normie people's systems.
You’re right on the numbers....Firefox never had majority share. The stronger claim is causal influence, not dominance. I recently read somewhere that the Firefox (and later Chrome) forced standards compliance and broke IE’s de-facto monopoly mindset. IE’s decline was gradual and multi-factor, but Firefox clearly shifted developer and user expectations.
No one is claiming, here or in the article, that Firefox ever had a majority share.
I don’t know if the 55% number for IE is 100% correct but it sounds like the right ballpark to me. The browser market was a lot more fragmented 15+ years ago, so saying that IE had 55% market share and Firefox had 32%, leaving 13% for other browsers, sounds completely right to me.
> Small models have gotten remarkably good. 1 to 8 billion parameters, tuned for specific tasks
What models is Mozilla talking about?
Firefox does offline translation and offline tts. It is quite amazing. Unfortunately half the tech crowd is like "BURN anything that has been in the same room as AI" and the other half is yoloing agentic browsers and uploading all their pron history to the datalakes
Has mozilla ever hired a CEO on the premise of "Our top priority is resolving the long standing bugs in our web and email clients"?
I'm still bitching, years later, about thunderbird failing to update IMAP folder contents (i.e. sync with server) until I click on the folder.
While it may still reign as the "capital of the industry", there's a certain kind of technical brain damage that comes from being located in the bay area.
Let's just call it "proximity to venture capital"...
Good decision for a change, now looking at execution track record and ability to stick with it..
yeah, that's where the bad news start.
They have a tendency to go from trend to trend and always a "me too, I'm here" player. Deliver first and stick with it, Mozilla's goodwill fund is long gone to be excited about "mission statements".
It’s an interesting choice to frame this initiative around “open AI”. That’s quite a battle to pick right out of the gate.
What's a hyperscn/laller?
Hyperscalers (e.g., Azure, Google Cloud, AWS)
I don't understand how they expect offline LLM models to work in a meaningful capacity for users.. Isn't there a single multilingual person working at Mozilla?
All of the small LLM models break down as soon as you try to do something that isn't written in English, because - surprise - they're just too small.
There would need to be a hardware breakthrough, or they would have to somehow solve the heavy cost of switching the models between pages.
Instead of useful AI stuff that is a clear improvement to accessibility, they're insistent on ham-fisting LLM solutions that no one have even asked for.
Off the top of my head, they could instead:
1. Integrate something like whisper to add automatic captions to videos or transcribe audio
2. Integrate one of the many really great text to speech models to read articles or text out loud
Mozilla did integrate TTS into Firefox - in fact, one of the better FOSS TTS AI models out their was their initiative. https://github.com/mozilla/TTS
Ah yeah, there's this: https://github.com/mozilla/TTS
I can't seem to find anything that mentions a Firefox integration though?
Click Reader mode on a web page, then the read aloud option in the sidebar.
Note that how well it works on Linux will depend on your distro and default settings, as is common for Linux world. They do try to provide setup instructions if your linux distro has issues.
... now whether that model is integrated by default, no idea. I imagine that depends on size.
Oh, and mozilla's off-line translate for private translation of web pages... that's another neat AI thing they added that I've found super helpful. Chrome still requires sending the content to their servers.
Ah cool, thanks, didn't know this existed. I just get a dummy message when playing audio, so I'll play around with some speech dispatcher[1] solutions later!
> Oh, and mozilla's off-line translate for private translation of web pages... that's another neat AI thing they added that I've found super helpful.
Yes, it's awesome! And one of my favorite additions to Firefox in many years, it's stuff like that they should focus on if they want AI, imo.
[1]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Speech_dispatcher
I tried it, and I'm sure it's not a based on any language model. Sounds like espeak-ng or its ilk, so it probably uses whatever's available?
The TTS repo was updated 5 years ago and links to installation instructions for Ubuntu are broken :/. Also the docker repo is archived, but only recently, so maybe it works.
All in all, doesn't look like the project is alive at all.
It definitely uses whatever is available, but on review of the models (and there are quite a few) the ones I checked included instructions for integrating into linux speech engines.
What your distro uses by default might be espeak-ng, but you could use mozilla TTS or festival or piper or anything else. It makes sense to not bundle an entire system that repeats things that are available on all desktop environments and mobile these days, but instead call out to those from the browser functionality - especially given the enormous size of high quality speech models - not to mention the localisation issue. I think the TTS project was just to increase availability of high quality FOSS alternatives. Getting those into your distro is more of a distro packager thing.
That sounds admirable. But it doesn't sound like a fast browser.
Maybe, but I would argue that some of these features are genuinely useful and important. Take translation, for example. It's not great to have to send off a page that potentially contains identifying content to Google, but it is the easiest way to handle the matter. Firefox uses local AI to perform a decent translation relatively quickly, and I'd like them to work on improving that capability.
Agreed on all counts. Right now there's not even a keyboard shortcut implemented (fiddly context menu only), and the translations are sometimes dodgy too, but I still use it. It's such peace of mind to know that the translation is happening entirely locally.
Many things that are not browsers are genuinely useful and important, this alone doesn't mean Mozilla should be doing them.
Translation is a necessary part of the web browsing experience for many people.
Well it does say that compute is a current bottleneck, but I doubt that'll stay that way forever. There's a ton of resources going into making AI run locally, quickly. It's already gotten loads better just last year.
That's because the article isn't about a browser - it's a tech stack for running ai.
I detest AI on the grounds that it causes an overuse of our planet's resources as well as stealing IP and exploiting underpaid data workers.
However, if Mozilla can launch something capable that steals the thunder from all the closed source AI alternatives that might make the bubble pop finally.
Stock markets shook when Deepseek came on the scene and proved that clever coding might make up for using older hardware. The market leaders' moat suddenly didn't seem so impenetrable. In that same vein Mozilla might make a real dent by truly commodifying AI. AI stocks are highly valued currently because there's an idea that the leaders have something no one can copy.
What I care about is the non-existent Firefox strategy, but Mozilla is making me not care to fully embrace ChromeOS Platform.
This has the feeling of corporate feel-good PR release: its essentially content-less AI-generated rehashing "our models are freer/more open-source" which seems silly since they don't develop anything unlike DeepSeek/GLM/Qwen the real open-source giants. Mozilla is a middle-man that could use open-source agents, but it pretending to be the "gatekeeper" of "open AI". Their key motivation is exposed in the middle of text: "The Mozilla Data Collective is building a marketplace for data that is properly licensed, clearly sourced, and aligned with the values of the communities it comes from."
This is far away from Firefox roots, whatever corporate stewards are at helm of mozilla now think exclusively in terms of marketplaces and "economics of data".. Futher reading "so we’re deepening our engagement with governments and enterprises adopting sovereign, auditable AI systems. These engagements are the feedback loops that tell us where the stack breaks and where openness needs reinforcement." Hard pass.
I've been using Waterfox the past month or two and it's great.
> So: Are you in?
No, I just want Mozilla to focus on Firefox, the browser.
How about finishing Servo?
They've fully disowned Servo. On the plus side that means you can donate to Servo directly, and the project actually has a decent amount of contributors now
Duly donated $100. Thanks.
>Now AI is becoming the new intermediary. It’s what I’ve started calling “Layer 8” — the agentic layer that mediates between you and everything else on the internet. These systems will negotiate on our behalf, filter our information, shape our recommendations, and increasingly determine how we interact with the entire digital world.
This is a sad statement. It reminds me of Wall-E. Big tech created the environmental ruins of today’s internet through perverse incentives. Now we need robots to go sift through the garbage and think for us so we don’t have to be exposed to the toxic internet.
It feels like we have lost so much.
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Mozilla is not and never has been a browser company. They have always been a charity with a for profit arm that does a browser. However never has a browser been more than an after thought to any of the leadership.
Of course what the world really needs is a browser company and so we try to pretend Mozilla is that, but they are not. Support an alternative browser (I'm not aware of any though. There are browser skin companies but nobody making the hard parts of a browser)
I’m aware of at least two honest-to-goodness new browser projects:
There’s Servo, which used to be from Mozilla, but then they abandoned it. Now I believe it’s independent after a long period of dormancy.
There is also Ladybird, whose founder is a prolific and technically brilliant person but who is also, at minimum, a fascist sympathizer, in addition to being a supporter of white replacement theory and other racist ideas.
Neither project, last I checked, is really close to being a “daily driver.” But they’re both in active development, so maybe in the future they’ll become legit alternatives to the Google/Apple duopoly.
> There is also Ladybird, whose founder is a prolific and technically brilliant person but who is also, at minimum, a fascist sympathizer, in addition to being a supporter of white replacement theory and other racist ideas.
I know nothing about Ladybird or their founder, so I'm taking your word for it that they are "at minimum, a fascist sympathizer, in addition to being a supporter of white replacement theory and other racist ideas."
Accepting the premise, this leads to an interesting philosophical discussion. I'm utterly repulsed by all those things, but I'm also repulsed by viewpoints and even personalities of some actors and musicians and such. In my younger days I couldn't even enjoy their art. There would be songs or shows I loved but couldn't listen to or watch once I knew about the musicians/actors views. However as I've gotten older, I've gotten more to a place where I'm able to separate the art from the artist and appreciate it more (still not perfectly, but I hope to get there someday).
I'm now asking myself if I could use and/or support a browser like Ladybird (assuming it's a good product, again I know nothing about it) even despite the founder's reprehensible views. I'm not sure, but I feel like I want to be able to.
You will never find somebody you 100% agree with. The question is when does something become so bad you will boycott them in other areas. Still a hard question, but the framing can help.
Indeed, thanks that is very helpful framing, thanks! Doesn't eliminate the subjectivity, but definitely helps limit it's scope by giving a more specific point to focus on
The art-vs-artist hand-wringing seems to be a particular affliction for Americans and particularly US progressives. I suspect it's something to do with America's protestant puritan heritage. There's a metaphysics of contamination at work that's hard to explain without religion. As a liberal European atheist I have no problem using software written by edgy young fascists (assuming it's good software). Just as I have no problem admiring art by (to take one of a million examples) the sexual predator and borderline sadist Pablo Picasso.
As a someone from the US who is atheist and probably would be lumped in the "progressive" bucket, I can provide my own perspective which might be helpful:
I bristle at taking an action which would support (morally, financially, etc) currently living fascists and/or Nazis, whose ideologies and in certain cases the people themselves (e.g. Musk) are actively working to dismantle and destabilize the government of my country.
In that respect, using software written by someone like Andreas Kling (Ladybird creator) or Musk, DHH, etc is much more reprehensible to me than admiring the art of Picasso, who was a horrible person but who is dead and cannot hurt anyone else.
That's a fair argument and an interesting distinction.
> So: Are you in?
Nope! Very happy to be entirely out, thanks.
A render css company will try to change the future of ai
Mozilla has stopped being relevant to open source long ago. It's are every bit as corporate as Google these days.
You probably like watching ads because Firefox is only browser you will have a true ad free experience. Unfortunately Firefox is slower than chrome has less support for audio, copy pasting is broken etc. So I use both depending what I am doing.
That's completely false!