11 ms·

Nobody wants anything from Mozilla except Firefox/Thunderbird to be high-performance alternatives to Chrome/Outlook with fewer restrictions on extensions. That

Nobody wants anything from Mozilla except Firefox/Thunderbird to be high-performance alternatives to Chrome/Outlook with fewer restrictions on extensions. That’s it. The rest is just activism and kids playing in a sandbox with non-profit money to pad out their resume with whatever topical keywords might land them their next gig.

brazukadev 11mo ago
Activism and kids playing at Mozilla was a long time ago.
aquova 11mo ago
I see this sentiment a lot, but I never agree with it. Sure, some of their projects seem very odd for them to lead, but given that they are completely reliant on their competitor for cash -- a revenue source that has been threatened several times by anti-trust cases against Google -- they should be looking to branch out. Firefox alone won't pay the bills, so they need to try and find some other revenue source. Plus, Chrome has essentially won. Not necessarily for any engineering reason, at least not these days, but from continued momentum of being the market leader. Sitting around quietly isn't going to get people to switch, they do need to find some way to distinguish themselves apart from Chrome, which again leads to these misc features being thrown out there. The AI inclusion seems like the same reason everyone else is adding AI, they don't want to be left behind if or when it's viewed as an essential feature.
- probably_wrong 11mo ago
  > Chrome has essentially won. Not necessarily for any engineering reason, at least not these days, but from continued momentum of being the market leader. Ah, how the young forget... Mozilla became popular precisely due to their willingness to challenge the market leader at the time [1], namely, Internet Explorer. Going against the market leader should be in their DNA. The fight is not lost just because there's a market leader. If anything, Mozilla is currently losing the battle because the leadership doesn't believe they can do it again. I'm fine with Mozilla diversifying their income, but I'm not fine with Mozilla sacrificing their browser (the part we desperately need the most) in the name of a "Digital Rights Foundation" that, at this rate, will lose their seat at the negotiating table. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#/media/File:BrowserUsageShare.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#/m...
  - rollcat 11mo ago
    > Mozilla is currently losing the battle because the leadership doesn't believe they can do it again. I do not believe that this is the case. Their #1 revenue source is Google. The moment they start regaining any foothold? Imagine just collecting that amount from Google as tax, and funding Mozilla publicly.
  - tempest_ 11mo ago
    They were losing because MS bundled IE with every device. Eventually they MS lost an anti trust case against it and it opened up the market, which is before that graph begins. Well 30 years later we are back where we started. Chrome is where it is because it is preloaded on most phones on the planet (the other ecosystem has a different preloaded browser). The other thing is that it was advertised on the most visited page on the internet for 20 years. Most internet users don't even use desktop/laptops, they use mobile devices and likely have no idea there is any other option than chrome.
    - glenstein 11mo ago
      Exactly, this is just about the most lucid explanation of the market share graph I've seen on HN. It's baffling to me that the rise of Chrome, distributed via Google, on phones and on Chromebooks, somehow doesn't enter people's explanations of market share change when talking about Mozilla. It probably the biggest single driver of market share change by an order of magnitude.
    - pessimizer 11mo ago
      > They were losing because MS bundled IE with every device. They weren't losing, they had 10x the market share they have now. MS lost an antitrust case, they weren't forced to do anything even after they lost, and big tech learned (correctly) that there was not ever going to be any serious antitrust enforcement on platforms. Chrome came out with a heavily marketed browser that some people liked (but was far more marketed than loved.) Firefox then intentionally destroyed its own browser to make it a wonky clone of Chrome, even down to trivial cosmetic features and version numbering. Firefox's strength was its extensions ecosystem, so it took special relish in destroying that, and joy in painting the users that were bothered by this as stochastic terrorists. They claimed that the perpetual complainers just didn't understand the "normal users" of the market while Firefox shrunk from 30% of it to 2.5% of it. Meanwhile, they took to forcing bizarre, unhideable features that should have been extensions, and doing bizarre marketing experiments. > Most internet users don't even use desktop/laptops, they use mobile devices and likely have no idea there is any other option than chrome. Firefox gets all of its margin from Google, and is 2.5% of the market. There isn't really another option, no matter what Mehta says. Firefox gets more than all of its margin from Google - Google cash allows it to blow money on goofy money-losing projects that look good on resumes. Meanwhile, Wikipedia has 100x what it needs to run in the bank, entirely from donations, still keeps dishonestly begging, and still keeps collecting. But Firefox claims that's impossible. It has to be fully dependent on Google because reasons, and those reasons are that it chooses its direction based on Google's desires. edit: the craziest part of this common argument about Google bundling is that Google doesn't have anything like the monopoly that Microsoft had, Microsoft bound its browser to everything it could figure out how to, and Microsoft was still losing a huge section of the market to Firefox. The idea that Google is some special impossible challenge when Microsoft owned every computer is insane. It's impossible to beat Google when they pay your salary.
- BearOso 11mo ago
  The amount of money they get from Google is vastly more than it takes to hire a few dozen people full-time to develop a web browser and email program. People in the organization are trying to use what's left of the name recognition and all that money to benefit their own initiatives.
  - glenstein 11mo ago
    What would you say is the most costly initiative that's siphoning money away from core browser development right now?
    - BearOso 11mo ago
      Good question. Looking at their expenses, though, it seems to be just a plethora of piddly donations. $1M here and there, and it adds up. That does fit with the lack of focus narrative.
  - pseudalopex 11mo ago
    > The amount of money they get from Google is vastly more than it takes to hire a few dozen people full-time to develop a web browser and email program. You under estimated the work to develop a web browser. Vivaldi are 60 people.[1] They produce an unstable Chromium fork and email program. They couldn't commit to keep uBlock Origin working. [1] https://vivaldi.com/team/ https://vivaldi.com/team/
    - BearOso 11mo ago
      That's a good example. I'm probably significantly underestimating the amount of people needed. $500M can hire a lot of $250k salaried engineers, though.
      - pseudalopex 11mo ago
        > $500M can hire a lot of $250k salaried engineers, though. $250,000 is conservative for the total cost to employ a software engineer in the US. And their expenses are not limited to software engineer salaries of course. A fair question would be what Google or Apple spend to produce their web browsers. The answers are secrets. $1 billion is a common Chrome development cost estimate in my experience.
- pfortuny 11mo ago
  > Plus, Chrome has essentially won. Not necessarily for any engineering reason, at least not these days, but from continued momentum of being the market leader. s/Chrome/Internet Explorer/g Nobody has won until the match is over, and history has a very long tail.
- CamouflagedKiwi 11mo ago
  I see the point, but them following the leader on this does not seem like a recipe for success. They aren't going to be as good at AI as OpenAI's browser, and their users are going to be less bought into it. I would have hoped they'd have learned their lesson from things like FirefoxOS but I guess not...
- gr4vityWall 11mo ago
  > they should be looking to branch out. Firefox alone won't pay the bills, so they need to try and find some other revenue source They probably would've achieved enough to sustain Firefox development in perpetuity if they invested most of Google's money in a fund.
  - glenstein 11mo ago
    They do exactly that! Their endowment is now $1.2 billion and its year to year growth is one of their strongest non-Google revenue streams.
- abdullahkhalids 11mo ago
  There is no possible way to compete against a competent trillion dollar organization that knows how to build a good browser, and exploits its global monopoly position in search to advertise their browser. It doesn't matter if Firefox became better. There is simply not enough differentiation potential in the core browser product to win by being better. Its all marketing. I just wish Mozilla sold some stickers/themes as proxy donations and became largely independent.
- Seattle3503 11mo ago
  > Chrome has essentially won. ... Sitting around quietly isn't going to get people to switch You hit the nail on the head with this one
genter 11mo ago
I'm not opposed to activism, I'm just opposed to their activism which goes against what the Mozilla Foundation stands for. Obviously what I think the foundation stands for (a freely accessible web) and what it actually stands for are two different things, but I like my rose tinted glasses.
debugnik 11mo ago
> kids playing in a sandbox with non-profit money Nitpick: Firefox is developed by Mozilla Corp., not the non-profit.
- perch56 11mo ago
  Mozilla Corp is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation. Tomayto, tomahto.
  - debugnik 11mo ago
    And part of the Corp's profits fund the Foundation, not the other way around. We get a discussion about this every few months in the HN comments, in case anyone wants to look it up.
    - glenstein 11mo ago
      Right, and my understanding is that structuring lets them do the search licensing deals that have been the lifeline of the whole org.
- paradox460 11mo ago
  A distinction without substance
  - debugnik 11mo ago
    And yours redundant, I made that clear already. > nitpick > to find faults in details that are not important
phantasmish 11mo ago
I would have loved to see them leverage their browser to make a distributed social network, back when they had enough market share to attempt such a thing. An open slack-alike also seems like a good fit for them. Alas, they have tons of cash but little capacity to do anything useful.
- rollcat 11mo ago
  Mozilla has started so many incredibly ambitious projects: Firefox OS, Rust, Servo/Stylo, Quantum... A slack-alike would at best give them a +1 against killedbygoogle.com. Yep, a federated social network is indeed an ambitious problem, perhaps Mozilla would've been well-suited to tackle it. The problem is not the tech or scope, but timing. 15 years ago everyone was happy to be on FB / Twitter. 10 years ago, Microsoft just bought LinkedIn; Google tried, then killed off a network with 500k DAU; all of that time, there was little space for a new contender. Mastodon only took off because Twitter went to shit real fast; still most people flocked to mastodon.social, because they heard Mastodon was good, but had no idea what federation is, or why it's important. MAYBE that would've been the perfect timing for Mozilla to launch their own ActivityPub platform.
  - lukan 11mo ago
    "but had no idea what federation is, or why it's important" Maybe the ideal technical solution would not require them to know?
    - mbonnet 11mo ago
      The average user is a moron. This is key to all tech and key to why complex shit like Mastodon will never see wide adoption.
    - rollcat 11mo ago
      Yep. Everyone understands email, not everyone understands that email is federated, and yet everyone benefits from federation.
  - glenstein 11mo ago
benrutter 11mo ago
Agreed! I think it should be a huge red flag to folks at mozilla, that there are several forks of Firefox that mostly just take out tracking and AI features from the browser.
- swed420 11mo ago
  Not only several Firefox forks, but also an entirely new browser effort ought to be a wakeup call to Mozilla: Ladybird
- charcircuit 11mo ago
  >that mostly just take out tracking and AI features Do you have any evidence they have a significant adoption by the market and aren't a vocal minority.
- rincebrain 11mo ago
  Mozilla's fundamental problem to square is they have no way to fund themselves. So they keep trying to find ways to try to extract even a tiny drip of income from their userbase, who recognize and resent it when they feel Mozilla is already in arrears in their relationship, and it just spirals because every less invasive option Mozilla tries and has to walk back means the next option was one they considered and decided was worse the last time. I don't really have a great idea how to do this better, but it's not _just_ that Mozilla execs have poor ideas, it's that they're desperately trying to find a funding source and all the options are going to burn the already-negative goodwill remaining. It's kind of the startup story - you give people the first hit for free (which Mozilla did for many years, effectively), then once enough people are using it, you slowly attempt to boil the frog to cover the massive debt you sank giving something away below the actual cost of providing it. In a nicer world, I could imagine a nation-state providing funding to Mozilla to underwrite not having a browser monoculture. But I don't see anyone having the appetite for doing that now.
railka 11mo ago
I am a regular Firefox user; it is literally the tool I use most often during my working hours. I like it more than Chrome. Firefox is steadily losing market share, and any attempts to do something about it are met with negativity. The 2-4% of users who use it care about their privacy. But they are not being deprived of it; the AI tab is optional, and no one is removing the regular tab. (Of course, it would be better if they allowed the integration of local models or aggregators, such as Openrouter, Huggingface...) Meanwhile, developers continue to ignore Firefox, testing only Chromium browsers. Large companies are also choosing the Chromium engine for their browsers. Perhaps if they implement this functionality conveniently, more average users will use Firefox.
- tcoff91 11mo ago
  It’s losing market share because it doesn’t keep up with supporting the latest web standards.
  - ryandrake 11mo ago
    And because they are wasting their time on these side quests that could have been spent improving the actual browser.
  - dymk 11mo ago
    They’re losing market share because they’re not bundled with {OS of choice} / not heavily pushed on you when you visit a Google property
  - wpm 11mo ago
    Which standards and are they actually standards or just some “draft” slop from Google?
    - charcircuit 11mo ago
      For example since firefox doesn't support WebNFC I can't do online shopping because during 3D secure my phone can't recognize my credit card being tapped. I have to use Chrome instead. Frankly, I don't care if WebNFC is "slop" or not. It's solving real world problems.
dbg31415 11mo ago
I want Mozilla Observatory. They did a good job with that. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/observatory https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/observatory
Xss3 11mo ago
I dont care if Firefox is faster than chrome or edge. I care about privacy, security, and the web as a whole.
xnx 11mo ago
> Nobody wants anything from Mozilla except Firefox/Thunderbird to be high-performance alternatives to Chrome/Outlook with fewer restrictions on extensions. Amen. I'd be happy if Firefox was a Chromium patched with better extension support and a mobile version.
- Lapel2742 11mo ago
  > I'd be happy if Firefox was a Chromium patched with better extension support and a mobile version. The main reason I still use Firefox is that it is the only serious engine beside chromium and I do not want Google to get a monopoly in this area (although practically they already have). Firefox is not bad. It does its job and I'm not needing more. It's even fast enough. I dislike the management and its decisions. I'm constantly looking at Ladybird. I even subscribed to their YouTube channel and if one day it is a usable Browser on Linux and on phone there is a high chance that I will ditch Firefox.
renewiltord 11mo ago
> Nobody wants anything from Mozilla Sufficiently accurate. That’s the reason they’re trying all these things. It’s because the original objective was met and now they’re trying to find something else to put all their money to.
mrandish 11mo ago
I agree with your point and have long disliked when Firefox squanders their limited resources on side quests - which is too often. But, to 'steelman' their motivation to 'do something' on AI, this analysis article sums up why major AI and browser vendors are pushing : https://entropytown.com/articles/2025-10-31-openai-atlas-ai-browser/ https://entropytown.com/articles/2025-10-31-openai-atlas-ai-.... I just think Firefox is taking the wrong approach. Trying to run with the pack of large commercial entities supporting their multi-prong corporate agendas does nothing for Firefox long-term (while annoying their users and looking like a buzzword-chasing 'me too'). This is a perfect example of when Firefox should zig instead of zag. Per the article I linked: > “the hard part of an AI browser is not chat, it’s process and trust isolation.” Instead of feature parity on AI, Firefox should race to technically position with APIs as the friendliest 'host browser' for AI companies outside the big five (eg "everyone else"). That gets some AI vendors actually recommending Firefox as the "works best with..." option instead of ignoring FF. Plus AI projects, researchers and LocalLLama-type hobbyists will be attracted. Sure, that's currently a small segment but they have high-potential for growth. It's very early days and today's AI leaders may not be tomorrow's AI giants.
bakugo 11mo ago
> with fewer restrictions on extensions I recently switched to Firefox to continue using uBlock, and was honestly shocked to find out that it actually has more restrictions in terms of where you're allowed to install extensions from. You literally cannot install extensions that are not signed by Mozilla at all unless you use a different beta version of Firefox.

brazukadev 11mo ago

Activism and kids playing at Mozilla was a long time ago.

aquova 11mo ago

I see this sentiment a lot, but I never agree with it. Sure, some of their projects seem very odd for them to lead, but given that they are completely reliant on their competitor for cash -- a revenue source that has been threatened several times by anti-trust cases against Google -- they should be looking to branch out. Firefox alone won't pay the bills, so they need to try and find some other revenue source. Plus, Chrome has essentially won. Not necessarily for any engineering reason, at least not these days, but from continued momentum of being the market leader. Sitting around quietly isn't going to get people to switch, they do need to find some way to distinguish themselves apart from Chrome, which again leads to these misc features being thrown out there. The AI inclusion seems like the same reason everyone else is adding AI, they don't want to be left behind if or when it's viewed as an essential feature.

probably_wrong 11mo ago
> Chrome has essentially won. Not necessarily for any engineering reason, at least not these days, but from continued momentum of being the market leader. Ah, how the young forget... Mozilla became popular precisely due to their willingness to challenge the market leader at the time [1], namely, Internet Explorer. Going against the market leader should be in their DNA. The fight is not lost just because there's a market leader. If anything, Mozilla is currently losing the battle because the leadership doesn't believe they can do it again. I'm fine with Mozilla diversifying their income, but I'm not fine with Mozilla sacrificing their browser (the part we desperately need the most) in the name of a "Digital Rights Foundation" that, at this rate, will lose their seat at the negotiating table. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#/media/File:BrowserUsageShare.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#/m...
- rollcat 11mo ago
  > Mozilla is currently losing the battle because the leadership doesn't believe they can do it again. I do not believe that this is the case. Their #1 revenue source is Google. The moment they start regaining any foothold? Imagine just collecting that amount from Google as tax, and funding Mozilla publicly.
- tempest_ 11mo ago
  They were losing because MS bundled IE with every device. Eventually they MS lost an anti trust case against it and it opened up the market, which is before that graph begins. Well 30 years later we are back where we started. Chrome is where it is because it is preloaded on most phones on the planet (the other ecosystem has a different preloaded browser). The other thing is that it was advertised on the most visited page on the internet for 20 years. Most internet users don't even use desktop/laptops, they use mobile devices and likely have no idea there is any other option than chrome.
  - glenstein 11mo ago
    Exactly, this is just about the most lucid explanation of the market share graph I've seen on HN. It's baffling to me that the rise of Chrome, distributed via Google, on phones and on Chromebooks, somehow doesn't enter people's explanations of market share change when talking about Mozilla. It probably the biggest single driver of market share change by an order of magnitude.
  - pessimizer 11mo ago
    > They were losing because MS bundled IE with every device. They weren't losing, they had 10x the market share they have now. MS lost an antitrust case, they weren't forced to do anything even after they lost, and big tech learned (correctly) that there was not ever going to be any serious antitrust enforcement on platforms. Chrome came out with a heavily marketed browser that some people liked (but was far more marketed than loved.) Firefox then intentionally destroyed its own browser to make it a wonky clone of Chrome, even down to trivial cosmetic features and version numbering. Firefox's strength was its extensions ecosystem, so it took special relish in destroying that, and joy in painting the users that were bothered by this as stochastic terrorists. They claimed that the perpetual complainers just didn't understand the "normal users" of the market while Firefox shrunk from 30% of it to 2.5% of it. Meanwhile, they took to forcing bizarre, unhideable features that should have been extensions, and doing bizarre marketing experiments. > Most internet users don't even use desktop/laptops, they use mobile devices and likely have no idea there is any other option than chrome. Firefox gets all of its margin from Google, and is 2.5% of the market. There isn't really another option, no matter what Mehta says. Firefox gets more than all of its margin from Google - Google cash allows it to blow money on goofy money-losing projects that look good on resumes. Meanwhile, Wikipedia has 100x what it needs to run in the bank, entirely from donations, still keeps dishonestly begging, and still keeps collecting. But Firefox claims that's impossible. It has to be fully dependent on Google because reasons, and those reasons are that it chooses its direction based on Google's desires. edit: the craziest part of this common argument about Google bundling is that Google doesn't have anything like the monopoly that Microsoft had, Microsoft bound its browser to everything it could figure out how to, and Microsoft was still losing a huge section of the market to Firefox. The idea that Google is some special impossible challenge when Microsoft owned every computer is insane. It's impossible to beat Google when they pay your salary.
BearOso 11mo ago
The amount of money they get from Google is vastly more than it takes to hire a few dozen people full-time to develop a web browser and email program. People in the organization are trying to use what's left of the name recognition and all that money to benefit their own initiatives.
- glenstein 11mo ago
  What would you say is the most costly initiative that's siphoning money away from core browser development right now?
  - BearOso 11mo ago
    Good question. Looking at their expenses, though, it seems to be just a plethora of piddly donations. $1M here and there, and it adds up. That does fit with the lack of focus narrative.
- pseudalopex 11mo ago
  > The amount of money they get from Google is vastly more than it takes to hire a few dozen people full-time to develop a web browser and email program. You under estimated the work to develop a web browser. Vivaldi are 60 people.[1] They produce an unstable Chromium fork and email program. They couldn't commit to keep uBlock Origin working. [1] https://vivaldi.com/team/ https://vivaldi.com/team/
  - BearOso 11mo ago
    That's a good example. I'm probably significantly underestimating the amount of people needed. $500M can hire a lot of $250k salaried engineers, though.
    - pseudalopex 11mo ago
      > $500M can hire a lot of $250k salaried engineers, though. $250,000 is conservative for the total cost to employ a software engineer in the US. And their expenses are not limited to software engineer salaries of course. A fair question would be what Google or Apple spend to produce their web browsers. The answers are secrets. $1 billion is a common Chrome development cost estimate in my experience.
pfortuny 11mo ago
> Plus, Chrome has essentially won. Not necessarily for any engineering reason, at least not these days, but from continued momentum of being the market leader. s/Chrome/Internet Explorer/g Nobody has won until the match is over, and history has a very long tail.
CamouflagedKiwi 11mo ago
I see the point, but them following the leader on this does not seem like a recipe for success. They aren't going to be as good at AI as OpenAI's browser, and their users are going to be less bought into it. I would have hoped they'd have learned their lesson from things like FirefoxOS but I guess not...
gr4vityWall 11mo ago
> they should be looking to branch out. Firefox alone won't pay the bills, so they need to try and find some other revenue source They probably would've achieved enough to sustain Firefox development in perpetuity if they invested most of Google's money in a fund.
- glenstein 11mo ago
  They do exactly that! Their endowment is now $1.2 billion and its year to year growth is one of their strongest non-Google revenue streams.
abdullahkhalids 11mo ago
There is no possible way to compete against a competent trillion dollar organization that knows how to build a good browser, and exploits its global monopoly position in search to advertise their browser. It doesn't matter if Firefox became better. There is simply not enough differentiation potential in the core browser product to win by being better. Its all marketing. I just wish Mozilla sold some stickers/themes as proxy donations and became largely independent.
Seattle3503 11mo ago
> Chrome has essentially won. ... Sitting around quietly isn't going to get people to switch You hit the nail on the head with this one

genter 11mo ago

I'm not opposed to activism, I'm just opposed to their activism which goes against what the Mozilla Foundation stands for. Obviously what I think the foundation stands for (a freely accessible web) and what it actually stands for are two different things, but I like my rose tinted glasses.

debugnik 11mo ago

> kids playing in a sandbox with non-profit money Nitpick: Firefox is developed by Mozilla Corp., not the non-profit.

perch56 11mo ago
Mozilla Corp is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation. Tomayto, tomahto.
- debugnik 11mo ago
  And part of the Corp's profits fund the Foundation, not the other way around. We get a discussion about this every few months in the HN comments, in case anyone wants to look it up.
  - glenstein 11mo ago
    Right, and my understanding is that structuring lets them do the search licensing deals that have been the lifeline of the whole org.
paradox460 11mo ago
A distinction without substance
- debugnik 11mo ago
  And yours redundant, I made that clear already. > nitpick > to find faults in details that are not important

phantasmish 11mo ago

I would have loved to see them leverage their browser to make a distributed social network, back when they had enough market share to attempt such a thing. An open slack-alike also seems like a good fit for them. Alas, they have tons of cash but little capacity to do anything useful.

rollcat 11mo ago
Mozilla has started so many incredibly ambitious projects: Firefox OS, Rust, Servo/Stylo, Quantum... A slack-alike would at best give them a +1 against killedbygoogle.com. Yep, a federated social network is indeed an ambitious problem, perhaps Mozilla would've been well-suited to tackle it. The problem is not the tech or scope, but timing. 15 years ago everyone was happy to be on FB / Twitter. 10 years ago, Microsoft just bought LinkedIn; Google tried, then killed off a network with 500k DAU; all of that time, there was little space for a new contender. Mastodon only took off because Twitter went to shit real fast; still most people flocked to mastodon.social, because they heard Mastodon was good, but had no idea what federation is, or why it's important. MAYBE that would've been the perfect timing for Mozilla to launch their own ActivityPub platform.
- lukan 11mo ago
  "but had no idea what federation is, or why it's important" Maybe the ideal technical solution would not require them to know?
  - mbonnet 11mo ago
    The average user is a moron. This is key to all tech and key to why complex shit like Mastodon will never see wide adoption.
  - rollcat 11mo ago
    Yep. Everyone understands email, not everyone understands that email is federated, and yet everyone benefits from federation.
- glenstein 11mo ago

benrutter 11mo ago

Agreed! I think it should be a huge red flag to folks at mozilla, that there are several forks of Firefox that mostly just take out tracking and AI features from the browser.

swed420 11mo ago
Not only several Firefox forks, but also an entirely new browser effort ought to be a wakeup call to Mozilla: Ladybird
charcircuit 11mo ago
>that mostly just take out tracking and AI features Do you have any evidence they have a significant adoption by the market and aren't a vocal minority.
rincebrain 11mo ago
Mozilla's fundamental problem to square is they have no way to fund themselves. So they keep trying to find ways to try to extract even a tiny drip of income from their userbase, who recognize and resent it when they feel Mozilla is already in arrears in their relationship, and it just spirals because every less invasive option Mozilla tries and has to walk back means the next option was one they considered and decided was worse the last time. I don't really have a great idea how to do this better, but it's not _just_ that Mozilla execs have poor ideas, it's that they're desperately trying to find a funding source and all the options are going to burn the already-negative goodwill remaining. It's kind of the startup story - you give people the first hit for free (which Mozilla did for many years, effectively), then once enough people are using it, you slowly attempt to boil the frog to cover the massive debt you sank giving something away below the actual cost of providing it. In a nicer world, I could imagine a nation-state providing funding to Mozilla to underwrite not having a browser monoculture. But I don't see anyone having the appetite for doing that now.

railka 11mo ago

I am a regular Firefox user; it is literally the tool I use most often during my working hours. I like it more than Chrome. Firefox is steadily losing market share, and any attempts to do something about it are met with negativity. The 2-4% of users who use it care about their privacy. But they are not being deprived of it; the AI tab is optional, and no one is removing the regular tab. (Of course, it would be better if they allowed the integration of local models or aggregators, such as Openrouter, Huggingface...) Meanwhile, developers continue to ignore Firefox, testing only Chromium browsers. Large companies are also choosing the Chromium engine for their browsers. Perhaps if they implement this functionality conveniently, more average users will use Firefox.

tcoff91 11mo ago
It’s losing market share because it doesn’t keep up with supporting the latest web standards.
- ryandrake 11mo ago
  And because they are wasting their time on these side quests that could have been spent improving the actual browser.
- dymk 11mo ago
  They’re losing market share because they’re not bundled with {OS of choice} / not heavily pushed on you when you visit a Google property
- wpm 11mo ago
  Which standards and are they actually standards or just some “draft” slop from Google?
  - charcircuit 11mo ago
    For example since firefox doesn't support WebNFC I can't do online shopping because during 3D secure my phone can't recognize my credit card being tapped. I have to use Chrome instead. Frankly, I don't care if WebNFC is "slop" or not. It's solving real world problems.

dbg31415 11mo ago

I want Mozilla Observatory. They did a good job with that. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/observatory https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/observatory

Xss3 11mo ago

I dont care if Firefox is faster than chrome or edge. I care about privacy, security, and the web as a whole.

xnx 11mo ago

> Nobody wants anything from Mozilla except Firefox/Thunderbird to be high-performance alternatives to Chrome/Outlook with fewer restrictions on extensions. Amen. I'd be happy if Firefox was a Chromium patched with better extension support and a mobile version.

Lapel2742 11mo ago
> I'd be happy if Firefox was a Chromium patched with better extension support and a mobile version. The main reason I still use Firefox is that it is the only serious engine beside chromium and I do not want Google to get a monopoly in this area (although practically they already have). Firefox is not bad. It does its job and I'm not needing more. It's even fast enough. I dislike the management and its decisions. I'm constantly looking at Ladybird. I even subscribed to their YouTube channel and if one day it is a usable Browser on Linux and on phone there is a high chance that I will ditch Firefox.

renewiltord 11mo ago

> Nobody wants anything from Mozilla Sufficiently accurate. That’s the reason they’re trying all these things. It’s because the original objective was met and now they’re trying to find something else to put all their money to.

mrandish 11mo ago

I agree with your point and have long disliked when Firefox squanders their limited resources on side quests - which is too often. But, to 'steelman' their motivation to 'do something' on AI, this analysis article sums up why major AI and browser vendors are pushing : https://entropytown.com/articles/2025-10-31-openai-atlas-ai-browser/ https://entropytown.com/articles/2025-10-31-openai-atlas-ai-.... I just think Firefox is taking the wrong approach. Trying to run with the pack of large commercial entities supporting their multi-prong corporate agendas does nothing for Firefox long-term (while annoying their users and looking like a buzzword-chasing 'me too'). This is a perfect example of when Firefox should zig instead of zag. Per the article I linked: > “the hard part of an AI browser is not chat, it’s process and trust isolation.” Instead of feature parity on AI, Firefox should race to technically position with APIs as the friendliest 'host browser' for AI companies outside the big five (eg "everyone else"). That gets some AI vendors actually recommending Firefox as the "works best with..." option instead of ignoring FF. Plus AI projects, researchers and LocalLLama-type hobbyists will be attracted. Sure, that's currently a small segment but they have high-potential for growth. It's very early days and today's AI leaders may not be tomorrow's AI giants.

bakugo 11mo ago

> with fewer restrictions on extensions I recently switched to Firefox to continue using uBlock, and was honestly shocked to find out that it actually has more restrictions in terms of where you're allowed to install extensions from. You literally cannot install extensions that are not signed by Mozilla at all unless you use a different beta version of Firefox.