6 ms·

The Mozilla Cycle, Part III: Mozilla Dies in Ignominy

178 points by holysoles 11mo ago

undeveloper 11mo ago
This is a very pessimistic post about mozilla, and a lot of it is warrented -- but also it's trivial to disable the AI stuff. dead simple. so until that day comes, I'll still be supporting mozilla (for now, using firefox relay). It looks like till then google will be propping up mozilla to avoid looking like a browser monopoly, and i'm not sure about a future where the community maintains the remains of the firefox source.
- nicce 11mo ago
  It is not about disabling AI; rather all the made effort for AI is away from something else.
- sir_pepe 11mo ago
  It does not count as "easy" if the features don't stay disabled.
  - undeveloper 11mo ago
    I have had no issues with this, but n=1.
  - zzo38computer 11mo ago
    Maybe it is possible to make it (and other functions) to stay disabled by the enterprise policies file.
- m000 11mo ago
  The problem with AI integrations in Firefox is not in whether they could be disabled or not. Given that Mozilla Foundation isn't swimming in cash, "investing" in AI (a well known money sink) makes very little sense and will definitely undermine the development of their core product (the freaking browser). Also, the timing of their Nov. 13 announcement is pretty bad. There is already chatter that AI may be a bubble bigger than the dotcom bubble. For a company that doesn't have deep pockets, it would be prudent to take the back seat on this.
  - tempest_ 11mo ago
    I mean maybe it needs to be said again but > Given that Mozilla Foundation isn't swimming in cash, "investing" in AI (a well known money sink) makes very little sense and will definitely undermine the development of their core product (the freaking browser). The browser doesn't make any money (the Google search bar money would not be replaced by another entity if they stopped). That is why Microsoft abandoned theirs and why Safari is turning in to IE. Every one of these threads lambasting Mozilla for the "side projects" doesnt seem to have an answer for how does mozilla make money. Often it will be people complaining they can't "donate directly to browser development" not realizing that it will be peanuts compared to the google money. Most people in the market wont pay for a web browser.
    - hamandcheese 11mo ago
      It would be one thing if the side projects made money. But they don't. If they aren't making money either way, I'd prefer they focused on the core product. Or charge for an actually useful feature like Firefox sync which is currently free.
      - deleted 11mo ago
        [deleted]
      - PunchyHamster 11mo ago
        I'm not paying company monthly fee to sync 50KB's worth of data and I think you find not many other people would
        hamandcheese 11mo ago
        You can be the customer, or you can be the product. Seems like you choose to be the product.
      - pseudalopex 11mo ago
        Mozilla's 2023 subscription and advertising revenue was $65 million. Does any browser with measurable market share not provide Firefox Sync's features without payment?
- kev009 11mo ago
  It's pretty clear opportunists displaced the software ideologues at Mozilla a long time ago, but I still find the products to be more palatable than alternatives. It would take a long time to burn off all relevance of Firefox and Thunderbird even without adequate maintenance.
- pdpi 11mo ago
  It’s also trivially easy to disable ads in the Windows start menu, but the fact that they’re even there is shocking. I use Firefox because I want to do at least something to keep the web browser market from becoming a monoculture again, but they’re making it increasingly hard to justify.
  - pjmlp 11mo ago
    Sadly Firefox has been out of our browser matrix for several years now, it is only taken into consideration by FE teams when the customers explicitly ask for it being supported. I also use because I care, but at 3% hardly any business does any longer.
    - wredcoll 11mo ago
      I had a ceo type person ask me just last week if we were testing on firefox and I kinda did a double take.
      - larrymcp 11mo ago
        I think I understand where he's at. If your web site has compatibility issues with smaller browsers like Firefox at 3%, Opera at 2% etc. then you could be losing out on 5% of your sales. If you were to approach any CEO and ask if they'd be interested in an initiative to increase sales by 5%, they would most likely express an interest.
        PunchyHamster 11mo ago
        there is good chance whoever site didn't worked for will just switch to chrome for that site. I did that few times. We have "any browser above 5% market share" in deals with our clients. So FF testing is not even required
        wredcoll 11mo ago
        I mean, I don't object in principle, I in general consider this to be "doing a good job" that we all strive for, but in this particular case it was a "line of business" app with like 500 users so I genuinely hadn't even considered it. We'll see if it comes up later!
- culi 11mo ago
  > It looks like till then google will be propping up mozilla to avoid looking like a browser monopoly This is less and less the case each year. Historically, Google's accounted for over 95% of Mozilla's revenue. But through the recent launches of a bunch of products it's gradually knocked that number down to under 70% and seems to continue decreasing rapidly. I often see two demands made of Mozilla: (1) focus on Firefox; (2) become financially independent from Google. IMO these two goals are going to be in conflict with each other. They started their own VPN, launched MDN Plus, etc in an effort to improve their financial independence. The AI gimmicks feel like they're in the same thread. I don't like it and don't ever wanna use it but I can't fault Mozilla for exploring that option. Based on independent audits they are accomplishing (2) and based on their amazing performance in interop-25, interop-24, etc they are also accomplishing (1) as best they could.
  - tyre 11mo ago
    I like the author’s suggestion of an enterprise build. At every company I’ve worked at, we told internal users to use Chrome exclusively. We could have chosen Firefox (most devs seemed to prefer it), but as the market share numbers bear out, most people are familiar with Chrome; most are not with Firefox. If Firefox had specific features that made it easier for enterprises, or even internal teams at startups, then companies would happily pay $10/user/mo for something as critical as a browser. There isn’t any such reason afaik. Edit: Some examples off the top of my head include - VPNs - user and permission management (identity) - ad- and tracker-blocking - internal auto-updating and easily managed/deployed extensions
    - hedora 11mo ago
      I can imagine manifest v2 support being a key differentiator for enterprises.
  - pseudalopex 11mo ago
    > I often see two demands made of Mozilla: (1) focus on Firefox; (2) become financially independent from Google. IMO these two goals are going to be in conflict with each other. Yes. > Historically, Google's accounted for over 95% of Mozilla's revenue. But through the recent launches of a bunch of products it's gradually knocked that number down to under 70% and seems to continue decreasing rapidly. Someone who read this might infer other products were 30% of Mozilla's revenue. But they were 10% in 2023. And this was lower than 2022. Royalties were 76%. Google could be under 70%. But interest, dividends, and investment gains contributed more than products.[1] Did you see more recent information? > They started their own VPN The servers were Mullvad's. [1] https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2024/mozilla-fdn-2023-fs-final-short-1209.pdf https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2024/mozilla-fdn-202...
- dreamcompiler 11mo ago
  > It looks like till then google will be propping up mozilla to avoid looking like a browser monopoly The US government (via the courts) has sent a very clear message to Google that they can be as monopolistic as they want without consequences. I cannot imagine Google will continue supporting Mozilla for much longer.
- _zagj 11mo ago
  > but also it's trivial to disable the AI stuff That's the problem: the number of things you have to disable to stop Firefox--a browser that sold itself on protecting user's privacy--from spying on you, or facilitating the spying of third parties, keeps growing with successive versions, to the point that you now need a running checklist of what to about:config (thanks to the "simplified" Privacy & Security window) and extensions to add. I still use it only because Chrome is worse, and even with Chromium, certain extensions either aren't available or are a bitch to use. And what's increasingly annoying is that many web sites (for example, banking and utilities) don't even bother properly testing for Firefox support, given how obscure a browser it has become. Your traffic is also much more likely to be flagged as "suspicious" as a FF user, so expect to spend much more time playing "spot the traffic light/bicycle/bus/stairs" games.
psyclobe 11mo ago
Huh, I sorta like my ai pane in Firefox..
- ZeroGravitas 11mo ago
  I also liked Pocket integration. But the naive purists seem determined to team up with the genuinely evil in every walk of life, so Chrome monoculture seems inevitable. And it's not like Google or Microsoft is going to do anything with AI that is worse than this, right?
  - Nextgrid 11mo ago
    Nobody would have an issue with those features being add-ons. In fact the Pocket integration is actually an add-on, silently downloaded on first run based on some online check. If they’re gonna be bundling add-ons, I’d rather have them bundle something universally useful like uBlock Origin, but obviously they won’t do that because publishing a browser with an actually unique and useful selling point is not in their best interests.
    - RunSet 11mo ago
      I recall the original interface of Firefox was abandoned in favor of copying Chrome's with the rationale being that "it could be implemented as a third-party add-on" or some such. "Why does the default interface get relegated to an extension when things like pocket and hello and AI chat are opt-out?" I ask, rhetorically.
- clueless 11mo ago
  Same, really don't understand what all the hoopla is about. AI integration in Firefox is inevitable, as is with all other browsers.
- lxgr 11mo ago
  Same here. I find it useful, and it doesn't feel like it took several engineering years to build, diluting Mozilla's focus from "just building a browser". Actually, whenever I hear people argue that that's all Mozilla should ever be doing, I wonder if they really mean a HTML and Javascript engine? While that's important, browsers are more than that; the chrome matters too.
espeed 11mo ago
Someone needs to convince Firefox rather than develop its own AI (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45926779 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45926779) to develop a system to pipe your html rendered browsing history in real time so external local services can process it (https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/archive-your-browser-history-and-pipe-a-stream-of-it-in-real/idi-p/103428 https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/archive-your-browser-hi...). See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45743918 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45743918 Firefox probably won't suddenly have the best AI, but they could have the only browser that does this.
- Am4TIfIsER0ppos 11mo ago
  They'd probably reject that idea under some bullshit privacy or security excuse Wayland-like reasoning. Also why we don't have XUL extensions anymore and why they'll eventually copy chrome on that manifest crap.
- cannonpalms 11mo ago
  You can already do what you're looking for by reading the browser cache as new data is cached. This would allow you to see the site as it was loaded originally, instead of simply fetching an updated view from a URL. The data layout for the cache in Firefox and Chrome is available online.
  - espeed 11mo ago
    Does the cache store the rendered DOM?
D13Fd 11mo ago
I don’t really care that much about the AI junk. But I’m on my very last straw with Firefox. Recent mobile versions just cannot seem to remember any default search engine setting other than Google. It drives me insane that they can do all these other things but the search engine bug has lingered for weeks.
- Telaneo 11mo ago
  My feelings are the same. Firefox is barely alive, and what little sustains it is goodwill and people not wanting to deal with Google more than is needed. Yet they keep on eating into their goodwill and do seemingly nothing to build it back up again (unless introducing AI features is somehow supposed to be that). Every bad feature implemented could have been a bug that got fixed instead, or effort to push back against Google. And yet they consistently opt to put their effort into features that push people away from them, and don't put that effort into things that would at least retain the people they already have. It's a lose-lose situation.
- redrix 11mo ago
  Agreed. I just don’t want to have to use a Chromium-based browser given Google’s grip on the project - but what alternatives are there if Mozilla goes under? Safari? Orion?
- glenstein 11mo ago
  I genuinely do hate this too, I have to reset it every time. But it's worth 600 million to them so I'm kind of begrudgingly bearing it.
sfink 11mo ago
This article is annoying. It's not wrong, but it also doesn't come across as terribly relevant without suggesting some vaguely plausible alternative. The closest it comes is that everyone should go back to using "regular" search engines that will return "regular" pages. and that if all the players (browser makers + search engines) did that then everything would be just fine. That'd be great, if that pristine Web still existed to search and people were happy with today's results of searching it. But in the real world, the Web is a pile of auto-generated and auto-assembled fragments of slop, SEO-optimized to death, puddled atop and all around the surviving fragments of value. (The value is still there! I suspect the total value in the Web has never stopped increasing. Just like those monkeys are always typing out more and more Shakespeare.) Also in the real world, people are decisively choosing the AI-generated summaries and fevered imaginings. Not for everything, but web search -> URL -> page visit is becoming a declining percentage that won't always be able to support everything that it does today. It's not that I particularly want AI in my browser. I would say that I emphatically don't, except that automatic translation is really nice, and Firefox's automatic names for tab groups are pretty cool, and I'm sure here and there people will come up with other pieces. I'm actually ok with AI that targets real needs, which is 0.01% of what people are pushing it for. But I also think that we're past the point where NOT having AI in the browser is a sustainable position. (In terms of number of users and therefore financially.) Should Mozilla be head over heels in love with AI, as it appears to be now? I'd definitely prefer if it weren't. But telling Mozilla "don't do bad thing, it'll make you irrelevant and have no users" is fine and dandy but ultimately pointless unless you have an alternative that doesn't require the entire world to cooperate in turning back the clock. (Disclosure: Mozilla pays me a salary to write bugs.) (And working code! I write some of that too!) (And no, I currently don't do anything that adds AI to the browser, nor can I think of anything I'd want to work on that would add any AI.)
- themafia 11mo ago
  > But in the real world, the Web is a pile of auto-generated and auto-assembled fragments of slop There are parts of the web like that but your assertion seems to rely on this being universally true. It clearly and obviously isn't. > Also in the real world, people are decisively choosing the AI-generated summaries and fevered imaginings. Are they "decisively" choosing it if it's turned on by default? If it were actually opt-in then we could measure this. As it is I don't think you have any data to rely on when making this assertion. > Not for everything, but web search -> URL -> page visit is becoming a declining percentage The same web search companies that own AI models they're trying to sell? Do you not suspect there could be a few confounding variables in this analysis? > except that automatic translation is really nice Which we already had and has nothing to do with language models masquerading as "AI". > is fine and dandy but ultimately pointless unless you have an alternative that doesn't require the entire world to cooperate in turning back the clock. An alternative to what? Tab renaming? Bad article summaries? Weak search engine algorithms?
cbondurant 11mo ago
I don't particularly care about mozilla so much as I care about Firefox, gecko, and the continued existence of at least ONE other browser. I don't want to use a blink based browser. If/When mozilla finally dies I don't have high hopes that Firefox won't just die with it.
- charcircuit 11mo ago
  [flagged]
  - cbondurant 11mo ago
    To me blink as a render engine is too closely coupled to Google. Even though technically chromium is disconnected and open source, the amount of leverage Google has is too high. I dread the possibility that gecko and webkit browsers truly die out, and the single biggest name in web advertising has unilateral sway over the direction of web standards. A good example of this is that through the exclusive leverage of Google, all blink based browsers are phasing out support for Manifest V2. A widely unpopular, forcing change. If I'm using a blink based browser I become vulnerable to any other profit motivated changes like that one. Mozilla might be trying their hardest to do the same with this AI shlock, but if I have to choose between the trillion dollar market cap dictator of the internet and the little kid playing pretend evil billionaire in their sandbox? Well, Mozilla is definitely the less threatening of the two in that regard.
    - bigyabai 11mo ago
      > If I'm using a blink based browser I become vulnerable to any other profit motivated changes like that one. Only if your OEM prevents you from installing competing browser engines. For most real computers it's not a concern.
      - 1718627440 11mo ago
        Yeah, what IS preventing you is the lack of competing browsers.
cyberax 11mo ago
I actually like some of the AI stuff in Mozilla. I disabled the AI summaries, but the automatic translation support is very helpful. And I'd love to have automatic subtitles and/or translation support for videos.
- lxgr 11mo ago
  > the automatic translation support is very helpful. It's great, and I love that it works fully on-device, i.e., it's as privacy-preserving as it gets.
- queenkjuul 11mo ago
  Pretty sure i read that the translation is not AI (LLM) based
  - cycomanic 11mo ago
    When I read posts like this I despair. I mean I can sort of understand that ML an AI have become largely synonymous, but that even on a technical website for nerds like HN, people now think that AI and LLMs are synonymous and that translation engines are not AI?!
    - jcranmer 11mo ago
      AIUI, the AI-based translation models are based on the same transformer-oriented neural nets that LLMs are based on, just not quite writ as large. In other words, it's not entirely inaccurate to call these models LLMs. While there's a lot of other AI technologies that aren't LLMs, automatic translation is probably the closest technology phylogenitically speaking.
  - cyberax 11mo ago
    It is AI-based, you can check the source code: https://github.com/mozilla/firefox-translations-models https://github.com/mozilla/firefox-translations-models
lxgr 11mo ago
> The response from the Firefox community has not just been overwhelmingly negative, it is universally negative as far as I can tell. Insofar as I count as part of the Firefox community as a long-time user and infrequent bug reporter: I want useful, non-creepy AI features in my main browser, or it's probably not going to remain my main browser for too long. Of course I also want them to be fully optional, but I have no reason to believe that they would be anything but.
- IshKebab 11mo ago
  Yeah I think although he acknowledges how biased the Firefox forum poster sample is, I think he is vastly underestimating just how biased. If Firefox is reduced to just nerds who post in forums it's totally dead. Maybe it's at that point already. Tbh I still use Chrome because Firefox's performance just isn't as good. I wish it weren't so but there we go.
  - lxgr 11mo ago
    When have you last tried it, and what types of sites are you struggling with? Curious since I had the same concern in the past, but it's been a long time since it's been an issue. Safari still seems better on battery life on macOS, but I can't really tell a difference between Chrome and Firefox anymore.
    - IshKebab 11mo ago
      No sites in particular; it's just noticeably less snappy than Chrome (on Android anyway - the difference on desktop isn't really noticeable).
      - lxgr 11mo ago
        Ah, I can definitely see mobile being a different story. Google is probably pouring immense resources into performance there as it directly affects battery life, just like Apple does into Safari. I'm unfortunately on the latter platform, so I'm limited to WebKit chrome wrappers for the time being.
FridayoLeary 11mo ago
I've noticed that Firefox has steadily been eating up more and more of my CPU/RAM lately. It's not been significant enough to make me use Chrome, but it is a worrying trend. The main thing i want of a browser is for it to get out of my way. Edge is a little bit worse at this then chrome which is why nobody uses it. There's very little distinguishing browsers, a large part of the reason i continue to use firefox is because i used to use it. The second i find that Chrome has 0.1% less friction, i'll switch. A comment on the article: >Google's AI Overview continues to be an inferior provider of information than solid web search results. I would love to hate that feature, but i don't. I kind of like it. It's useful sometimes and easy to ignore if i want. Honestly i would say it enhances my browsing. You can complain that it's often wrong and 2 dimensional and you would be right. But that would be missing the point. Maybe you can complain about secondary effects. I don't know what those would be though. Perhaps that it degrades the overall browser ecosystem and locks you into googles own, but that is moving the goalposts.
- dralley 11mo ago
  Half the time this is just because of Google websites having poor performance.
- cannonpalms 11mo ago
  Google's AI overview regularly hallucinates or gets the answer wrong. Obviously if you're going to run inference on every search from billions of users, it has to be a very cheap model.
  - anuramat 11mo ago
    I really like how Kagi does it - summary only appears if you finish your query with a question mark, or if you press "q" after loading the results
PKop 11mo ago
> They are betraying the principles of their core use base in favor of their new god. That behavior is usually not rewarded by users or customers. Same with Microsoft and Windows PC power users as well.
- Nextgrid 11mo ago
  Microsoft at least has the decency not to base their entire marketing on being pro-online-privacy.
Nextgrid 11mo ago
I wish Mozilla would explore the enterprise productivity space. There’s huge amount of money currently being made on dubious enterprise security products, and with the browser being at the forefront of threats (its literal purpose is to execute lots of untrusted code safely) I feel like an enterprise build with centralised management, in-browser DLP (removes the need for janky TLS interception middleboxes), built-in adblocking (since those also reduce productivity) would sell really well and give them independence from Google and the advertising industry. I don’t understand Mozilla’s current strategy; their attempt to pander to the advertising industry and produce a Chrome clone has been a massive failure as demonstrated by their ever-shrinking browser market share which is now effectively a rounding error. For people that are satisfied with being part of the advertising economy, why wouldn’t you just use Chrome and the Google ecosystem? If you don’t mind your data being used for advertising purposes, Chrome is an excellent browser and their broader ecosystem gives you functionality Mozilla will never match. Mozilla’s only way out is to go back to its roots and build a better user-agent, and provide an adversarial alternative to the current advertising-based ecosystems.
- redrix 11mo ago
  100% agree. I would happily run a dedicated enterprise browser that blocks downloads, has DLP, has watermarking (etc) if it meant I could use my own PC. Not Browser Isolation or VDI - An actual enterprise browser. My job is pretty much 100% in browser though, so I realise this isn’t viable for everyone.
- unethical_ban 11mo ago
  Palo Alto Networks is one of several companies pushing custom versions of Chrome as enterprise security browsers doing exactly what you're talking about: holistic DLP/anomaly detection, URL filtering and content inspection in-browser. Presumably because it's closer to the malicious behavior, and network MITM is harder to accomplish with newer TLS and with decentralized workforces. If Firefox had a more customizable, enterprise-feature-focused browser maybe we'd be seeing it used instead of Chrome? I don't know.
- zobzu 11mo ago
  They don't wanna be Redhat - but IMO it's their biggest mistake (I worked there 10 years).
redrix 11mo ago
I was surprised (and frustrated) that OpenAI’s and Perplexity’s browsers are both Chromium-based. I would have thought that they would have gone with a Firefox (or WebKit) fork given: 1. That Google is a competitor to them in the AI space. 2. That Google has such a strong stranglehold over the web, and Chromium/Chrome is a big part of that. I mean, why ultimately help your competitor here?
- cannonpalms 11mo ago
  Time-to-market favors chromium. It's also by far the most commonly used engine for headless browsing, creating lots of useful prior art.
gwerbret 11mo ago
Some thoughts regarding Mozilla's leadership. Certain aspects of human nature, as they apply to the corporate world, can be acknowledged and understood, even if they're not excuses when they lead to the downfall of a prominent organization. When you give someone a big title, a dump truck full of cash, and a mandate to innovate, human nature dictates that most people will internalize the idea that "because I was given all this, I must be competent", even if they very obviously are not. Typically the outcome is a "bold plan forward" which is notable for lacking any actual clear solution to the company's main problems. In one example I know of, the CEO decided to pivot from an unrelated field towards launching a cryptocurrency, and cooked up a cartoonishly-dangerous marketing scheme to support the idea. One person ended up dying as a result, and the company then purged every mention of crypto from its website. (And yes, the company collapsed soon afterwards.) While it's easy to blame the CEO with their oversized salary, the blame for such disasters doesn't just lie with them. After all, arguably the most important roles of the board are to hire a good CEO, ensure the CEO is actually performing as they should, and fire them if they're not. When politics, cronyism, or again, simple incompetence, lead the board to also fail at its job, you end up with the long, slow decline into obscurity we've seen so often in the tech world. But Mozilla had a good run.
- chichis 11mo ago
  > But Mozilla had a good run. I don’t think Mozilla is over. I also don’t think people should equate their history with their current state. They lied to their users and told them they’d never sell their data, and then they did. That is much worse than never having made the promise. I don’t trust them. But, they have far too much support and are far too embedded to disappear anytime soon.
chris_armstrong 11mo ago
Non profit organisations trying to remain relevant (or just survive) behave this way because they arent much different from companies operating in a market for profit. Their leadership is often not that much different, with similar people working in similar jobs educated in the same institutions and walking in the same social circles, producing the same solutions to the existential problem of organisational survival.
- PunchyHamster 11mo ago
  Mozilla management have nobody to respond to. For-profit (public) company at least have shareholders. Mozilla have zero motivation to improve aside from being retirement home for failing managers
- trueno 11mo ago
  As the downcycle lingers on everyone’s doorsteps a lot of non profits that do incredible work are losing funding as the investors back out from commitments they confidently put forward when things were going well. It quickly shutters the non profits. It makes me sad tbh. Can’t say this is the same thing that happens at Mozilla but you are very right in that a lot of nonprofits seem to be lead by those bring the same operational decision making experience and solutions that you see in publicly traded companies. There are plenty of non-profits that are indistinguishable from public companies in how the board is composed of an inner circle of wealthy unsavory people.
  - chris_armstrong 11mo ago
    I think this because nonprofits are subject to a similar market discipline as companies: they compete for funding, relevance, market share etc. And their board composition converges similarly as those same people are relied upon for their connections to fundraise, hire, etc. They don’t want to be seen taking an unusual strategy as it would be perceived as risky and jeopardising precious donated funds, so the same groupthink emerges. Even if someone outside these circles was hired, they’d be knocked down with the smallest misstep, with the veiled criticism they weren’t suitable for the position (ie someone with better connections should have been chosen), so even they will fall into line.
cycomanic 11mo ago
Sometimes these posts feel like the old man yelling at the clouds kind of disconnected from reality. They don't seem to even be realising that what they are asking for is contradictory. "Only spend money on the browser/javascript engine", "become independent of google", "give me the best search results when I type into the address bar", but "don't give me AI recommendation". On top of that, the whole premise that AI is just being a nothing burger. Pull your head out of your arse. Is there an AI bubble? I tend to agree, likely yes. And yes it is very much overhyped etc. Does that mean that AI is useless and will disappear? No way! Just observe how Joe Doe's are interacting with the web. AI engines have taken over from where people used to use search. It's ironic how they say they just want search results when typing in their address bar, at a time when everyone is complaining that search has become increasingly useless (and yes we can blame AI tools at least partly, doesn't change the fact). Moreover, there are definitely use cases where an AI gives a much better answer than search (just try searching for how to do something a little niche with e.g. ffmpeg, you can either read 10s of block/stackoverflow posts try to understand the manual or ask an AI and typically immediately get a decent answer). I tend to agree with Mozilla org here, AI does pose an existential thread to the web as we know it and if we don't get non-profit organisations to develop "open" (and I acknowledge the discussion what that entails is important) tools we will end up with a web that is much less free than it is today.
sedatk 11mo ago
I basically have two problems with Firefox that prevent me from using it my main browser. One is this 7 year old kerning bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1445596 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1445596 The other one is Firefox Sync not storing shortcut bar favicons. Every install, I have to click on every web site one by one to bring back their favicons. It's a 17 year old ticket: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=428378 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=428378 Firefox adding crazy features that it may or may not cancel in a few years while ignoring these minor issues frustrates me, and keeps me away from it.
hedora 11mo ago
I wonder where the widely-cited 3% marketshare number comes from. Does it include dilution from mobile? China/Russia-mandated browsers? Even with that (Chrome probably is below 50% if you count that way), 3% is lower than I’ve seen. I know things vary site by site, but still. 3% is not coming from the planet I live on, even before you start filtering out bot traffic and click fraud (both are typically detected as Chrome). I haven’t done this, but if you want to be fair, you should also add a weight based on likelihood to pay or be an influencer in a western market. That probably cranks the percentage up even further.
kakwa_ 11mo ago
Sometimes, I'm wondering if Mozilla did not get too much money. With an order of magnitude less money, I think they would have been more focused on improving Firefox rather than trying to diversify with projects like Firefox OS, VPN services or AI. Even today, given their ~$1.5B in the bank, at the cost of a really painful downsizing, the interests alone could probably pay for a Firefox development focused on standard adherence, performance, quality and privacy. Mozilla is not a company trying to reinvent itself to survive. If it becomes irrelevant because the Browser becomes irrelevant in the future, that's fine in my book, the organization would have fulfill its mission. But it is sad to see it become irrelevant because of mismanagement and lack of focus.
l0b0 11mo ago
Maybe it's time for some decently funded other organisation (not a teracorp) to take over Firefox specifically, then let Mozilla go its own way into the sunset. No idea how that could be arranged, though.

178 points by holysoles 11mo ago

This is a very pessimistic post about mozilla, and a lot of it is warrented -- but also it's trivial to disable the AI stuff. dead simple. so until that day comes, I'll still be supporting mozilla (for now, using firefox relay). It looks like till then google will be propping up mozilla to avoid looking like a browser monopoly, and i'm not sure about a future where the community maintains the remains of the firefox source.

nicce 11mo ago
It is not about disabling AI; rather all the made effort for AI is away from something else.
sir_pepe 11mo ago
It does not count as "easy" if the features don't stay disabled.
- undeveloper 11mo ago
  I have had no issues with this, but n=1.
- zzo38computer 11mo ago
  Maybe it is possible to make it (and other functions) to stay disabled by the enterprise policies file.
m000 11mo ago
The problem with AI integrations in Firefox is not in whether they could be disabled or not. Given that Mozilla Foundation isn't swimming in cash, "investing" in AI (a well known money sink) makes very little sense and will definitely undermine the development of their core product (the freaking browser). Also, the timing of their Nov. 13 announcement is pretty bad. There is already chatter that AI may be a bubble bigger than the dotcom bubble. For a company that doesn't have deep pockets, it would be prudent to take the back seat on this.
- tempest_ 11mo ago
  I mean maybe it needs to be said again but > Given that Mozilla Foundation isn't swimming in cash, "investing" in AI (a well known money sink) makes very little sense and will definitely undermine the development of their core product (the freaking browser). The browser doesn't make any money (the Google search bar money would not be replaced by another entity if they stopped). That is why Microsoft abandoned theirs and why Safari is turning in to IE. Every one of these threads lambasting Mozilla for the "side projects" doesnt seem to have an answer for how does mozilla make money. Often it will be people complaining they can't "donate directly to browser development" not realizing that it will be peanuts compared to the google money. Most people in the market wont pay for a web browser.
  - hamandcheese 11mo ago
    It would be one thing if the side projects made money. But they don't. If they aren't making money either way, I'd prefer they focused on the core product. Or charge for an actually useful feature like Firefox sync which is currently free.
    - deleted 11mo ago
      [deleted]
    - PunchyHamster 11mo ago
      I'm not paying company monthly fee to sync 50KB's worth of data and I think you find not many other people would
      - hamandcheese 11mo ago
        You can be the customer, or you can be the product. Seems like you choose to be the product.
    - pseudalopex 11mo ago
      Mozilla's 2023 subscription and advertising revenue was $65 million. Does any browser with measurable market share not provide Firefox Sync's features without payment?
kev009 11mo ago
It's pretty clear opportunists displaced the software ideologues at Mozilla a long time ago, but I still find the products to be more palatable than alternatives. It would take a long time to burn off all relevance of Firefox and Thunderbird even without adequate maintenance.
pdpi 11mo ago
It’s also trivially easy to disable ads in the Windows start menu, but the fact that they’re even there is shocking. I use Firefox because I want to do at least something to keep the web browser market from becoming a monoculture again, but they’re making it increasingly hard to justify.
- pjmlp 11mo ago
  Sadly Firefox has been out of our browser matrix for several years now, it is only taken into consideration by FE teams when the customers explicitly ask for it being supported. I also use because I care, but at 3% hardly any business does any longer.
  - wredcoll 11mo ago
    I had a ceo type person ask me just last week if we were testing on firefox and I kinda did a double take.
    - larrymcp 11mo ago
      I think I understand where he's at. If your web site has compatibility issues with smaller browsers like Firefox at 3%, Opera at 2% etc. then you could be losing out on 5% of your sales. If you were to approach any CEO and ask if they'd be interested in an initiative to increase sales by 5%, they would most likely express an interest.
      - PunchyHamster 11mo ago
        there is good chance whoever site didn't worked for will just switch to chrome for that site. I did that few times. We have "any browser above 5% market share" in deals with our clients. So FF testing is not even required
      - wredcoll 11mo ago
        I mean, I don't object in principle, I in general consider this to be "doing a good job" that we all strive for, but in this particular case it was a "line of business" app with like 500 users so I genuinely hadn't even considered it. We'll see if it comes up later!
culi 11mo ago
> It looks like till then google will be propping up mozilla to avoid looking like a browser monopoly This is less and less the case each year. Historically, Google's accounted for over 95% of Mozilla's revenue. But through the recent launches of a bunch of products it's gradually knocked that number down to under 70% and seems to continue decreasing rapidly. I often see two demands made of Mozilla: (1) focus on Firefox; (2) become financially independent from Google. IMO these two goals are going to be in conflict with each other. They started their own VPN, launched MDN Plus, etc in an effort to improve their financial independence. The AI gimmicks feel like they're in the same thread. I don't like it and don't ever wanna use it but I can't fault Mozilla for exploring that option. Based on independent audits they are accomplishing (2) and based on their amazing performance in interop-25, interop-24, etc they are also accomplishing (1) as best they could.
- tyre 11mo ago
  I like the author’s suggestion of an enterprise build. At every company I’ve worked at, we told internal users to use Chrome exclusively. We could have chosen Firefox (most devs seemed to prefer it), but as the market share numbers bear out, most people are familiar with Chrome; most are not with Firefox. If Firefox had specific features that made it easier for enterprises, or even internal teams at startups, then companies would happily pay $10/user/mo for something as critical as a browser. There isn’t any such reason afaik. Edit: Some examples off the top of my head include - VPNs - user and permission management (identity) - ad- and tracker-blocking - internal auto-updating and easily managed/deployed extensions
  - hedora 11mo ago
    I can imagine manifest v2 support being a key differentiator for enterprises.
- pseudalopex 11mo ago
  > I often see two demands made of Mozilla: (1) focus on Firefox; (2) become financially independent from Google. IMO these two goals are going to be in conflict with each other. Yes. > Historically, Google's accounted for over 95% of Mozilla's revenue. But through the recent launches of a bunch of products it's gradually knocked that number down to under 70% and seems to continue decreasing rapidly. Someone who read this might infer other products were 30% of Mozilla's revenue. But they were 10% in 2023. And this was lower than 2022. Royalties were 76%. Google could be under 70%. But interest, dividends, and investment gains contributed more than products.[1] Did you see more recent information? > They started their own VPN The servers were Mullvad's. [1] https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2024/mozilla-fdn-2023-fs-final-short-1209.pdf https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2024/mozilla-fdn-202...
dreamcompiler 11mo ago
> It looks like till then google will be propping up mozilla to avoid looking like a browser monopoly The US government (via the courts) has sent a very clear message to Google that they can be as monopolistic as they want without consequences. I cannot imagine Google will continue supporting Mozilla for much longer.
_zagj 11mo ago
> but also it's trivial to disable the AI stuff That's the problem: the number of things you have to disable to stop Firefox--a browser that sold itself on protecting user's privacy--from spying on you, or facilitating the spying of third parties, keeps growing with successive versions, to the point that you now need a running checklist of what to about:config (thanks to the "simplified" Privacy & Security window) and extensions to add. I still use it only because Chrome is worse, and even with Chromium, certain extensions either aren't available or are a bitch to use. And what's increasingly annoying is that many web sites (for example, banking and utilities) don't even bother properly testing for Firefox support, given how obscure a browser it has become. Your traffic is also much more likely to be flagged as "suspicious" as a FF user, so expect to spend much more time playing "spot the traffic light/bicycle/bus/stairs" games.

psyclobe 11mo ago

Huh, I sorta like my ai pane in Firefox..

ZeroGravitas 11mo ago
I also liked Pocket integration. But the naive purists seem determined to team up with the genuinely evil in every walk of life, so Chrome monoculture seems inevitable. And it's not like Google or Microsoft is going to do anything with AI that is worse than this, right?
- Nextgrid 11mo ago
  Nobody would have an issue with those features being add-ons. In fact the Pocket integration is actually an add-on, silently downloaded on first run based on some online check. If they’re gonna be bundling add-ons, I’d rather have them bundle something universally useful like uBlock Origin, but obviously they won’t do that because publishing a browser with an actually unique and useful selling point is not in their best interests.
  - RunSet 11mo ago
    I recall the original interface of Firefox was abandoned in favor of copying Chrome's with the rationale being that "it could be implemented as a third-party add-on" or some such. "Why does the default interface get relegated to an extension when things like pocket and hello and AI chat are opt-out?" I ask, rhetorically.
clueless 11mo ago
Same, really don't understand what all the hoopla is about. AI integration in Firefox is inevitable, as is with all other browsers.
lxgr 11mo ago
Same here. I find it useful, and it doesn't feel like it took several engineering years to build, diluting Mozilla's focus from "just building a browser". Actually, whenever I hear people argue that that's all Mozilla should ever be doing, I wonder if they really mean a HTML and Javascript engine? While that's important, browsers are more than that; the chrome matters too.

espeed 11mo ago

Someone needs to convince Firefox rather than develop its own AI (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45926779 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45926779) to develop a system to pipe your html rendered browsing history in real time so external local services can process it (https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/archive-your-browser-history-and-pipe-a-stream-of-it-in-real/idi-p/103428 https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/archive-your-browser-hi...). See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45743918 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45743918 Firefox probably won't suddenly have the best AI, but they could have the only browser that does this.

Am4TIfIsER0ppos 11mo ago
They'd probably reject that idea under some bullshit privacy or security excuse Wayland-like reasoning. Also why we don't have XUL extensions anymore and why they'll eventually copy chrome on that manifest crap.
cannonpalms 11mo ago
You can already do what you're looking for by reading the browser cache as new data is cached. This would allow you to see the site as it was loaded originally, instead of simply fetching an updated view from a URL. The data layout for the cache in Firefox and Chrome is available online.
- espeed 11mo ago
  Does the cache store the rendered DOM?

D13Fd 11mo ago

I don’t really care that much about the AI junk. But I’m on my very last straw with Firefox. Recent mobile versions just cannot seem to remember any default search engine setting other than Google. It drives me insane that they can do all these other things but the search engine bug has lingered for weeks.

Telaneo 11mo ago
My feelings are the same. Firefox is barely alive, and what little sustains it is goodwill and people not wanting to deal with Google more than is needed. Yet they keep on eating into their goodwill and do seemingly nothing to build it back up again (unless introducing AI features is somehow supposed to be that). Every bad feature implemented could have been a bug that got fixed instead, or effort to push back against Google. And yet they consistently opt to put their effort into features that push people away from them, and don't put that effort into things that would at least retain the people they already have. It's a lose-lose situation.
redrix 11mo ago
Agreed. I just don’t want to have to use a Chromium-based browser given Google’s grip on the project - but what alternatives are there if Mozilla goes under? Safari? Orion?
glenstein 11mo ago
I genuinely do hate this too, I have to reset it every time. But it's worth 600 million to them so I'm kind of begrudgingly bearing it.

sfink 11mo ago

This article is annoying. It's not wrong, but it also doesn't come across as terribly relevant without suggesting some vaguely plausible alternative. The closest it comes is that everyone should go back to using "regular" search engines that will return "regular" pages. and that if all the players (browser makers + search engines) did that then everything would be just fine. That'd be great, if that pristine Web still existed to search and people were happy with today's results of searching it. But in the real world, the Web is a pile of auto-generated and auto-assembled fragments of slop, SEO-optimized to death, puddled atop and all around the surviving fragments of value. (The value is still there! I suspect the total value in the Web has never stopped increasing. Just like those monkeys are always typing out more and more Shakespeare.) Also in the real world, people are decisively choosing the AI-generated summaries and fevered imaginings. Not for everything, but web search -> URL -> page visit is becoming a declining percentage that won't always be able to support everything that it does today. It's not that I particularly want AI in my browser. I would say that I emphatically don't, except that automatic translation is really nice, and Firefox's automatic names for tab groups are pretty cool, and I'm sure here and there people will come up with other pieces. I'm actually ok with AI that targets real needs, which is 0.01% of what people are pushing it for. But I also think that we're past the point where NOT having AI in the browser is a sustainable position. (In terms of number of users and therefore financially.) Should Mozilla be head over heels in love with AI, as it appears to be now? I'd definitely prefer if it weren't. But telling Mozilla "don't do bad thing, it'll make you irrelevant and have no users" is fine and dandy but ultimately pointless unless you have an alternative that doesn't require the entire world to cooperate in turning back the clock. (Disclosure: Mozilla pays me a salary to write bugs.) (And working code! I write some of that too!) (And no, I currently don't do anything that adds AI to the browser, nor can I think of anything I'd want to work on that would add any AI.)

themafia 11mo ago
> But in the real world, the Web is a pile of auto-generated and auto-assembled fragments of slop There are parts of the web like that but your assertion seems to rely on this being universally true. It clearly and obviously isn't. > Also in the real world, people are decisively choosing the AI-generated summaries and fevered imaginings. Are they "decisively" choosing it if it's turned on by default? If it were actually opt-in then we could measure this. As it is I don't think you have any data to rely on when making this assertion. > Not for everything, but web search -> URL -> page visit is becoming a declining percentage The same web search companies that own AI models they're trying to sell? Do you not suspect there could be a few confounding variables in this analysis? > except that automatic translation is really nice Which we already had and has nothing to do with language models masquerading as "AI". > is fine and dandy but ultimately pointless unless you have an alternative that doesn't require the entire world to cooperate in turning back the clock. An alternative to what? Tab renaming? Bad article summaries? Weak search engine algorithms?

cbondurant 11mo ago

I don't particularly care about mozilla so much as I care about Firefox, gecko, and the continued existence of at least ONE other browser. I don't want to use a blink based browser. If/When mozilla finally dies I don't have high hopes that Firefox won't just die with it.

charcircuit 11mo ago
[flagged]
- cbondurant 11mo ago
  To me blink as a render engine is too closely coupled to Google. Even though technically chromium is disconnected and open source, the amount of leverage Google has is too high. I dread the possibility that gecko and webkit browsers truly die out, and the single biggest name in web advertising has unilateral sway over the direction of web standards. A good example of this is that through the exclusive leverage of Google, all blink based browsers are phasing out support for Manifest V2. A widely unpopular, forcing change. If I'm using a blink based browser I become vulnerable to any other profit motivated changes like that one. Mozilla might be trying their hardest to do the same with this AI shlock, but if I have to choose between the trillion dollar market cap dictator of the internet and the little kid playing pretend evil billionaire in their sandbox? Well, Mozilla is definitely the less threatening of the two in that regard.
  - bigyabai 11mo ago
    > If I'm using a blink based browser I become vulnerable to any other profit motivated changes like that one. Only if your OEM prevents you from installing competing browser engines. For most real computers it's not a concern.
    - 1718627440 11mo ago
      Yeah, what IS preventing you is the lack of competing browsers.

cyberax 11mo ago

I actually like some of the AI stuff in Mozilla. I disabled the AI summaries, but the automatic translation support is very helpful. And I'd love to have automatic subtitles and/or translation support for videos.

lxgr 11mo ago
> the automatic translation support is very helpful. It's great, and I love that it works fully on-device, i.e., it's as privacy-preserving as it gets.
queenkjuul 11mo ago
Pretty sure i read that the translation is not AI (LLM) based
- cycomanic 11mo ago
  When I read posts like this I despair. I mean I can sort of understand that ML an AI have become largely synonymous, but that even on a technical website for nerds like HN, people now think that AI and LLMs are synonymous and that translation engines are not AI?!
  - jcranmer 11mo ago
    AIUI, the AI-based translation models are based on the same transformer-oriented neural nets that LLMs are based on, just not quite writ as large. In other words, it's not entirely inaccurate to call these models LLMs. While there's a lot of other AI technologies that aren't LLMs, automatic translation is probably the closest technology phylogenitically speaking.
- cyberax 11mo ago
  It is AI-based, you can check the source code: https://github.com/mozilla/firefox-translations-models https://github.com/mozilla/firefox-translations-models

lxgr 11mo ago

> The response from the Firefox community has not just been overwhelmingly negative, it is universally negative as far as I can tell. Insofar as I count as part of the Firefox community as a long-time user and infrequent bug reporter: I want useful, non-creepy AI features in my main browser, or it's probably not going to remain my main browser for too long. Of course I also want them to be fully optional, but I have no reason to believe that they would be anything but.

IshKebab 11mo ago
Yeah I think although he acknowledges how biased the Firefox forum poster sample is, I think he is vastly underestimating just how biased. If Firefox is reduced to just nerds who post in forums it's totally dead. Maybe it's at that point already. Tbh I still use Chrome because Firefox's performance just isn't as good. I wish it weren't so but there we go.
- lxgr 11mo ago
  When have you last tried it, and what types of sites are you struggling with? Curious since I had the same concern in the past, but it's been a long time since it's been an issue. Safari still seems better on battery life on macOS, but I can't really tell a difference between Chrome and Firefox anymore.
  - IshKebab 11mo ago
    No sites in particular; it's just noticeably less snappy than Chrome (on Android anyway - the difference on desktop isn't really noticeable).
    - lxgr 11mo ago
      Ah, I can definitely see mobile being a different story. Google is probably pouring immense resources into performance there as it directly affects battery life, just like Apple does into Safari. I'm unfortunately on the latter platform, so I'm limited to WebKit chrome wrappers for the time being.

FridayoLeary 11mo ago

I've noticed that Firefox has steadily been eating up more and more of my CPU/RAM lately. It's not been significant enough to make me use Chrome, but it is a worrying trend. The main thing i want of a browser is for it to get out of my way. Edge is a little bit worse at this then chrome which is why nobody uses it. There's very little distinguishing browsers, a large part of the reason i continue to use firefox is because i used to use it. The second i find that Chrome has 0.1% less friction, i'll switch. A comment on the article: >Google's AI Overview continues to be an inferior provider of information than solid web search results. I would love to hate that feature, but i don't. I kind of like it. It's useful sometimes and easy to ignore if i want. Honestly i would say it enhances my browsing. You can complain that it's often wrong and 2 dimensional and you would be right. But that would be missing the point. Maybe you can complain about secondary effects. I don't know what those would be though. Perhaps that it degrades the overall browser ecosystem and locks you into googles own, but that is moving the goalposts.

dralley 11mo ago
Half the time this is just because of Google websites having poor performance.
cannonpalms 11mo ago
Google's AI overview regularly hallucinates or gets the answer wrong. Obviously if you're going to run inference on every search from billions of users, it has to be a very cheap model.
- anuramat 11mo ago
  I really like how Kagi does it - summary only appears if you finish your query with a question mark, or if you press "q" after loading the results

PKop 11mo ago

> They are betraying the principles of their core use base in favor of their new god. That behavior is usually not rewarded by users or customers. Same with Microsoft and Windows PC power users as well.

Nextgrid 11mo ago
Microsoft at least has the decency not to base their entire marketing on being pro-online-privacy.

Nextgrid 11mo ago

I wish Mozilla would explore the enterprise productivity space. There’s huge amount of money currently being made on dubious enterprise security products, and with the browser being at the forefront of threats (its literal purpose is to execute lots of untrusted code safely) I feel like an enterprise build with centralised management, in-browser DLP (removes the need for janky TLS interception middleboxes), built-in adblocking (since those also reduce productivity) would sell really well and give them independence from Google and the advertising industry. I don’t understand Mozilla’s current strategy; their attempt to pander to the advertising industry and produce a Chrome clone has been a massive failure as demonstrated by their ever-shrinking browser market share which is now effectively a rounding error. For people that are satisfied with being part of the advertising economy, why wouldn’t you just use Chrome and the Google ecosystem? If you don’t mind your data being used for advertising purposes, Chrome is an excellent browser and their broader ecosystem gives you functionality Mozilla will never match. Mozilla’s only way out is to go back to its roots and build a better user-agent, and provide an adversarial alternative to the current advertising-based ecosystems.

redrix 11mo ago
100% agree. I would happily run a dedicated enterprise browser that blocks downloads, has DLP, has watermarking (etc) if it meant I could use my own PC. Not Browser Isolation or VDI - An actual enterprise browser. My job is pretty much 100% in browser though, so I realise this isn’t viable for everyone.
unethical_ban 11mo ago
Palo Alto Networks is one of several companies pushing custom versions of Chrome as enterprise security browsers doing exactly what you're talking about: holistic DLP/anomaly detection, URL filtering and content inspection in-browser. Presumably because it's closer to the malicious behavior, and network MITM is harder to accomplish with newer TLS and with decentralized workforces. If Firefox had a more customizable, enterprise-feature-focused browser maybe we'd be seeing it used instead of Chrome? I don't know.
zobzu 11mo ago
They don't wanna be Redhat - but IMO it's their biggest mistake (I worked there 10 years).

redrix 11mo ago

I was surprised (and frustrated) that OpenAI’s and Perplexity’s browsers are both Chromium-based. I would have thought that they would have gone with a Firefox (or WebKit) fork given: 1. That Google is a competitor to them in the AI space. 2. That Google has such a strong stranglehold over the web, and Chromium/Chrome is a big part of that. I mean, why ultimately help your competitor here?

cannonpalms 11mo ago
Time-to-market favors chromium. It's also by far the most commonly used engine for headless browsing, creating lots of useful prior art.

gwerbret 11mo ago

Some thoughts regarding Mozilla's leadership. Certain aspects of human nature, as they apply to the corporate world, can be acknowledged and understood, even if they're not excuses when they lead to the downfall of a prominent organization. When you give someone a big title, a dump truck full of cash, and a mandate to innovate, human nature dictates that most people will internalize the idea that "because I was given all this, I must be competent", even if they very obviously are not. Typically the outcome is a "bold plan forward" which is notable for lacking any actual clear solution to the company's main problems. In one example I know of, the CEO decided to pivot from an unrelated field towards launching a cryptocurrency, and cooked up a cartoonishly-dangerous marketing scheme to support the idea. One person ended up dying as a result, and the company then purged every mention of crypto from its website. (And yes, the company collapsed soon afterwards.) While it's easy to blame the CEO with their oversized salary, the blame for such disasters doesn't just lie with them. After all, arguably the most important roles of the board are to hire a good CEO, ensure the CEO is actually performing as they should, and fire them if they're not. When politics, cronyism, or again, simple incompetence, lead the board to also fail at its job, you end up with the long, slow decline into obscurity we've seen so often in the tech world. But Mozilla had a good run.

chichis 11mo ago
> But Mozilla had a good run. I don’t think Mozilla is over. I also don’t think people should equate their history with their current state. They lied to their users and told them they’d never sell their data, and then they did. That is much worse than never having made the promise. I don’t trust them. But, they have far too much support and are far too embedded to disappear anytime soon.

chris_armstrong 11mo ago

Non profit organisations trying to remain relevant (or just survive) behave this way because they arent much different from companies operating in a market for profit. Their leadership is often not that much different, with similar people working in similar jobs educated in the same institutions and walking in the same social circles, producing the same solutions to the existential problem of organisational survival.

PunchyHamster 11mo ago
Mozilla management have nobody to respond to. For-profit (public) company at least have shareholders. Mozilla have zero motivation to improve aside from being retirement home for failing managers
trueno 11mo ago
As the downcycle lingers on everyone’s doorsteps a lot of non profits that do incredible work are losing funding as the investors back out from commitments they confidently put forward when things were going well. It quickly shutters the non profits. It makes me sad tbh. Can’t say this is the same thing that happens at Mozilla but you are very right in that a lot of nonprofits seem to be lead by those bring the same operational decision making experience and solutions that you see in publicly traded companies. There are plenty of non-profits that are indistinguishable from public companies in how the board is composed of an inner circle of wealthy unsavory people.
- chris_armstrong 11mo ago
  I think this because nonprofits are subject to a similar market discipline as companies: they compete for funding, relevance, market share etc. And their board composition converges similarly as those same people are relied upon for their connections to fundraise, hire, etc. They don’t want to be seen taking an unusual strategy as it would be perceived as risky and jeopardising precious donated funds, so the same groupthink emerges. Even if someone outside these circles was hired, they’d be knocked down with the smallest misstep, with the veiled criticism they weren’t suitable for the position (ie someone with better connections should have been chosen), so even they will fall into line.

cycomanic 11mo ago

Sometimes these posts feel like the old man yelling at the clouds kind of disconnected from reality. They don't seem to even be realising that what they are asking for is contradictory. "Only spend money on the browser/javascript engine", "become independent of google", "give me the best search results when I type into the address bar", but "don't give me AI recommendation". On top of that, the whole premise that AI is just being a nothing burger. Pull your head out of your arse. Is there an AI bubble? I tend to agree, likely yes. And yes it is very much overhyped etc. Does that mean that AI is useless and will disappear? No way! Just observe how Joe Doe's are interacting with the web. AI engines have taken over from where people used to use search. It's ironic how they say they just want search results when typing in their address bar, at a time when everyone is complaining that search has become increasingly useless (and yes we can blame AI tools at least partly, doesn't change the fact). Moreover, there are definitely use cases where an AI gives a much better answer than search (just try searching for how to do something a little niche with e.g. ffmpeg, you can either read 10s of block/stackoverflow posts try to understand the manual or ask an AI and typically immediately get a decent answer). I tend to agree with Mozilla org here, AI does pose an existential thread to the web as we know it and if we don't get non-profit organisations to develop "open" (and I acknowledge the discussion what that entails is important) tools we will end up with a web that is much less free than it is today.

sedatk 11mo ago

I basically have two problems with Firefox that prevent me from using it my main browser. One is this 7 year old kerning bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1445596 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1445596 The other one is Firefox Sync not storing shortcut bar favicons. Every install, I have to click on every web site one by one to bring back their favicons. It's a 17 year old ticket: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=428378 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=428378 Firefox adding crazy features that it may or may not cancel in a few years while ignoring these minor issues frustrates me, and keeps me away from it.

hedora 11mo ago

I wonder where the widely-cited 3% marketshare number comes from. Does it include dilution from mobile? China/Russia-mandated browsers? Even with that (Chrome probably is below 50% if you count that way), 3% is lower than I’ve seen. I know things vary site by site, but still. 3% is not coming from the planet I live on, even before you start filtering out bot traffic and click fraud (both are typically detected as Chrome). I haven’t done this, but if you want to be fair, you should also add a weight based on likelihood to pay or be an influencer in a western market. That probably cranks the percentage up even further.

kakwa_ 11mo ago

Sometimes, I'm wondering if Mozilla did not get too much money. With an order of magnitude less money, I think they would have been more focused on improving Firefox rather than trying to diversify with projects like Firefox OS, VPN services or AI. Even today, given their ~$1.5B in the bank, at the cost of a really painful downsizing, the interests alone could probably pay for a Firefox development focused on standard adherence, performance, quality and privacy. Mozilla is not a company trying to reinvent itself to survive. If it becomes irrelevant because the Browser becomes irrelevant in the future, that's fine in my book, the organization would have fulfill its mission. But it is sad to see it become irrelevant because of mismanagement and lack of focus.

l0b0 11mo ago

Maybe it's time for some decently funded other organisation (not a teracorp) to take over Firefox specifically, then let Mozilla go its own way into the sunset. No idea how that could be arranged, though.