10 ms·

Fully agree with this. - Mozilla SSL Certs - for corporations that don't want Let's Encrypt - Mozilla Mail - a reliable Exchange/Google Mail alternative (desp

Fully agree with this. - Mozilla SSL Certs - for corporations that don't want Let's Encrypt - Mozilla Mail - a reliable Exchange/Google Mail alternative (desperately needed imo) - Thunderbird for iOS - why is this not a thing yet? - Mozilla Search - metasearch that isn't based on Bing/DDG/Google - Mozilla HTTPS DNS - although Cloudflare will probably always do this better All seemingly low-hanging fruit with brand alignment.

binwang 10mo ago
> Mozilla Mail - a reliable Exchange/Google Mail alternative (desperately needed imo) Thunderbird Pro was announced a while back, still not GA though
SamDc73 10mo ago
> Mozilla Mail - a reliable Exchange/Google Mail alternative (desperately needed imo) I think the privacy industry is oversaturated we already have: ProtonMail, Tuta and Mailbox Mail
- gkoberger 10mo ago
  Agreed, this is why I think they should buy.
- CuriousRose 10mo ago
  I'm thinking more at an SMB level, not necessarily for secure mail, PGP and the like. IMAP + CalDev + CardDev sat on-top of cPanel is getting a bit long in the tooth for companies that want exchange-like mail solutions outside of the big two. Unfortunately MS and Google run the "spam" filters as well, so you really need an established company that they can't afford to irritate to enter the space - see Mozilla - to reliably force acceptance of enterprise mail outside the Duopoly they have. Zoho is trying their best also in this space - not sure how successful they have been on the trusted email provider and integration front.
  - veqq 10mo ago
    > IMAP + CalDev + CardDev sat on-top of cPanel is getting a bit long in the tooth Why so?
    - CuriousRose 10mo ago
      - Very irritating to setup on mobile clients (iOS profiles are not a good solution) - Usually hosted on shared VPSs where IP reputation is decimated (wonder how this will be affected by pure IPv6 hosts) - Patching is often manual and forgotten about (n = 1) - Backups are often an afterthought
amluto 10mo ago
How about: Mozilla HTTPS To My Router (or printer or any other physically present local object) in a way that does not utterly suck? Seriously, there’s a major security and usability problem, it affects individual users and corporations, and neither Google nor Apple nor Microsoft shows the slightest inclination to do anything about it, and Mozilla controls a browser that could add a nice solution. I bet one could even find a creative solution that encourages vendors, inoffensively, to pay Mozilla a bit of money to solve this problem for them. Also: > Thunderbird for iOS - why is this not a thing yet? Indeed. Apple’s mail app is so amazingly bad that there’s plenty of opportunity here.
- Affric 10mo ago
  Apple mail steadfastly refusing to permit me to see an email address so I can verify the source of an email. Truly the most cursed.
  - VanTheBrand 10mo ago
    It’s so stupid but what I do is click forward which reveals the email in the compose window.
  - vladvasiliu 10mo ago
    How so? You can tap the from / to fields and it shows the addresses.
    - nneonneo 10mo ago
      When you tap one of those fields it bounces you to a contact card. If it is an existing contact (for example, yourself), you just get the full contact card. If that contact card has multiple addresses (my contact card lists ten), you get no indication of which one it was sent to. At some point in time the actual email address used was flagged with a little “recent” badge - by itself a confusingly-worded tag - but even that doesn’t show up consistently. It’s stupid because there’s really no reason to play hide and seek with the email address - that’s an identifier that people should generally be familiar with (since you have to use it reasonably often), and lots of people have multiple addresses that they can receive mail at.
MarsIronPI 10mo ago
> - Mozilla Search - metasearch that isn't based on Bing/DDG/Google As much hate as Brave gets overall, I think Mozilla should take a page from Brave's book if they're going to make a search engine. I think they should have their own index, possibly supplemented by Bing or Google. Let people opt-in to using their browsers to help crawl for the search engine index, like Brave does. Then add in some power-user features like goggles and custom ranking, and they'd have a pretty compelling search engine. They should even be able to subsidize it somewhat with advertising: DDG and Brave Search are the only two websites I allow ads on, because they're usually relevant and they're never intrusive.
- CuriousRose 10mo ago
  > Let people opt-in to using their browsers to help crawl for the search engine index, like Brave does. This is really cool. I'd be happy with a re-branded SearX/SearXNG, with a paid cloud hosted instance from Mozilla that uses a shared base index plus your own crawled pages or optionally contribute your crawls back to the shared index.
- estimator7292 10mo ago
  They could partner with Kagi. Pretty much everyone trusts Kagi, so if Mozilla convinces them to get on board, Mozilla must be actually serious about being trustworthy.
  - veqq 10mo ago
    Kagi is just an AI company. (That was always their stated goal...)
  - input_sh 10mo ago
    > Pretty much everyone trusts Kagi ...on a forum run by its investors whose goal is to push Kagi, sure. Outside of this forum, nobody knows about a fringe little search engine that is paywalled and only has 62k users. For a brand like Mozilla, even something as dumb as Ecosia would be a better fit, as they have about 250x the number of users of Kagi.
dyauspitr 10mo ago
Agree with a lot of this except Mozilla Search. Search is already or very soon going to be an entirely LLM driven space.
- khaelenmore 10mo ago
  Precisely why we need a reliably working search engine without llm, ai and other nonsense
  - mghackerlady 10mo ago
    I predict the next gen search engines will be a return to form of the early web-directory style of known good pages and having to be vetted to appear in results
pmontra 10mo ago
> Thunderbird for iOS - why is this not a thing yet? They are building Thunderbird Android over K9 Mail, which is an Android app. They would have to start from scratch on iOS, which of course is feasible but it takes more time.
Tepix 10mo ago
As a US corporation, Mozilla cannot compete on privacy focused services. If they want to focus on privacy (which I think is great), they should ship software that improves privacy, not offer services.
- fsflover 10mo ago
  Are you saying that a warrant canary isn't useful?
  - hermanzegerman 10mo ago
    He is saying that no one outside of the US will trust them with their data, because of the US Cloud Act and similar legislation. There is a reason Proton & Co are based in Switzerland and not in the US
    - aydyn 10mo ago
      lots of people seem to trust apple
      - philipallstar 10mo ago
        Apple has actually proven itself over a long period of time on this issue. Maybe Mozilla has as well (do they encrypt telemetry logs etc for people with a Mozilla login?) but I haven't heard so much about that.
        rurban 10mo ago
        Did you really forgot about Snowden's Apple slide? Also their phones are routinely mirrored at the border. Just to support the unconstitutional government agenda of policing thoughts and speech.
        JumpCrisscross 10mo ago
        > Did you really forgot about Snowden's Apple slide? Was Apple coöperating or were they hacked? (I remember the smiley face for Gmail. Google, in that case, was hacked.)
MYEUHD 10mo ago
> Thunderbird for iOS - why is this not a thing yet? There's no release yet, but it's being worked on. https://github.com/thunderbird/thunderbird-ios https://github.com/thunderbird/thunderbird-ios
GuestFAUniverse 10mo ago
Quant and Ecosia are already building their own (European) index in a joint venture. Mozilla Search is totally uninteresting (to me).
- palata 10mo ago
  Nitpick: "Qwant"
rvba 10mo ago
Nobody wants this. People want firefox.
- gwd 10mo ago
  That's like saying, "Nobody wants Adwords; people want Chrome." True but besides the point. Salaries have to be paid somehow. Some options I can think of for paying salaries: - Go the Wikipedia route, stay entirely free, and beg for donations on a regular basis - Start charging for Firefox; or for Firefox Premium - Use Firefox as a loss-leader to build a brand, and use that brand to sell other products (which is essentially what GP is suggesting). How would you pay for developers' salaries while satisfying "people [who] want firefox"?
  - palata 10mo ago
    > That's like saying, "Nobody wants Adwords; people want Chrome." Bad comparison, but I understand your point. > Salaries have to be paid somehow. I would be interested in knowing how much of what Mozilla does brings money. Isn't it almost exclusively the Google contract with Firefox? As a non-profit, Mozilla does not seem to be succeeding with Firefox. Mozilla does a lot of other things (I think?) but I can't name one off the top of my head. Is Google paying for all of that, or are the non-Firefox projects succeeding? Like would they survive if Firefox was branched off of Mozilla? And then would enough people ever contribute to Firefox if it stopped getting life support from Google? Not clear either. It's a difficult situation: I use Firefox but I regularly have to visit a website on Chrom(ium) because it only works there. It doesn't sound right that Google owns the web and Firefox runs behind, but if Chrome was split from Google, would it be profitable?
    - gwd 10mo ago
      > Bad comparison, but I understand your point. I'm not sure why you think so; it seems pretty close to me. Chrome and Firefox are exact competitors; both require a large amount of development investment. Neither one are being charged for, which means their development needs to be supported some other way. The people using Chrome don't want Adwords, but it's Adwords that is paying for Chrome's development. People using Firefox don't want email or Mozilla certificates or what-not, but something needs to fund Firefox's development. > ...if Chrome was split from Google, would it be profitable? They'd have to figure out a different business model, wouldn't they?
palata 10mo ago
> All seemingly low-hanging fruit with brand alignment. Genuinely interested: are you a developer? Doesn't sound like low-hanging fruit to me. There are already many alternatives to Gmail, I don't think Mozilla would make a lot of money there. And I don't know if they are making a lot of money with their Mozilla VPN (which I understand is a wrapper around Mullvad): why would I pay Mozilla instead of Mullvad? There are alternative search engines, like Kagi in the US and Qwant/Ecosia in Europe (though only Qwant seems to keep the servers in Europe). What I want from Mozilla, really, is a browser. And I would love to donate to that specifically, but I don't think I can.
- kakacik 10mo ago
  A reliable, corporate-friendly, with advanced support model alternative of Exchange + AD is something that could sink a titan like Microsoft in 2 decades, at least its non-cloud business (but then for cloud alone they are just one of many, nothing special there). Literally everybody is fu*king fed up with M$ arrogance. But you can't get rid of Active Directory and Exchange. Make comparable alternative (with say 80% of most used use cases, no need to die on some corner case hill) and many many corporations will come. This won't come from some startup, it has to be a company like Mozilla.
  - palata 10mo ago
    Are you sure of that? There have been alternatives to Microsoft Office for decades. Yet most businesses use and pay for Microsoft Office, even though their employees most likely don't need anything that doesn't exist in those alternatives. Why would it be different with email?
    - mghackerlady 10mo ago
      Nobody got fired for buying ~~IBM~~ Microsoft. People trust Mozilla though, they've built their brand on not sucking as bad as M$ and Google
    - kakacik 10mo ago
      I don't think you understand what I was writing about - none of that is MS Office. Thats another topic, but without this (and say some sort of domain propagation rules) bigger corporations will never move out of MS.
e2le 10mo ago
> Mozilla Mail Aren't they already moving towards this? The Thunderbird team recently announced ThunderMail which will have an optional $9/year plan. https://www.tb.pro/en-US/thundermail/ https://www.tb.pro/en-US/thundermail/ > Thunderbird for iOS https://blog.thunderbird.net/2025/10/state-of-the-bird-2024-25/ https://blog.thunderbird.net/2025/10/state-of-the-bird-2024-... > We’ve also seen the overwhelming demand to build a version of Thunderbird for the iOS community. Unlike the Android app, the iOS app is being built from the ground up.
endemic 10mo ago
Re-launch FirefoxOS -- not for smartphones, but as a privacy-focused ChromeOS competitor. Give students Mozilla/Firefox brand awareness while prying them out of Google's clutches.

binwang 10mo ago

> Mozilla Mail - a reliable Exchange/Google Mail alternative (desperately needed imo) Thunderbird Pro was announced a while back, still not GA though

SamDc73 10mo ago

> Mozilla Mail - a reliable Exchange/Google Mail alternative (desperately needed imo) I think the privacy industry is oversaturated we already have: ProtonMail, Tuta and Mailbox Mail

gkoberger 10mo ago
Agreed, this is why I think they should buy.
CuriousRose 10mo ago
I'm thinking more at an SMB level, not necessarily for secure mail, PGP and the like. IMAP + CalDev + CardDev sat on-top of cPanel is getting a bit long in the tooth for companies that want exchange-like mail solutions outside of the big two. Unfortunately MS and Google run the "spam" filters as well, so you really need an established company that they can't afford to irritate to enter the space - see Mozilla - to reliably force acceptance of enterprise mail outside the Duopoly they have. Zoho is trying their best also in this space - not sure how successful they have been on the trusted email provider and integration front.
- veqq 10mo ago
  > IMAP + CalDev + CardDev sat on-top of cPanel is getting a bit long in the tooth Why so?
  - CuriousRose 10mo ago
    - Very irritating to setup on mobile clients (iOS profiles are not a good solution) - Usually hosted on shared VPSs where IP reputation is decimated (wonder how this will be affected by pure IPv6 hosts) - Patching is often manual and forgotten about (n = 1) - Backups are often an afterthought

amluto 10mo ago

How about: Mozilla HTTPS To My Router (or printer or any other physically present local object) in a way that does not utterly suck? Seriously, there’s a major security and usability problem, it affects individual users and corporations, and neither Google nor Apple nor Microsoft shows the slightest inclination to do anything about it, and Mozilla controls a browser that could add a nice solution. I bet one could even find a creative solution that encourages vendors, inoffensively, to pay Mozilla a bit of money to solve this problem for them. Also: > Thunderbird for iOS - why is this not a thing yet? Indeed. Apple’s mail app is so amazingly bad that there’s plenty of opportunity here.

Affric 10mo ago
Apple mail steadfastly refusing to permit me to see an email address so I can verify the source of an email. Truly the most cursed.
- VanTheBrand 10mo ago
  It’s so stupid but what I do is click forward which reveals the email in the compose window.
- vladvasiliu 10mo ago
  How so? You can tap the from / to fields and it shows the addresses.
  - nneonneo 10mo ago
    When you tap one of those fields it bounces you to a contact card. If it is an existing contact (for example, yourself), you just get the full contact card. If that contact card has multiple addresses (my contact card lists ten), you get no indication of which one it was sent to. At some point in time the actual email address used was flagged with a little “recent” badge - by itself a confusingly-worded tag - but even that doesn’t show up consistently. It’s stupid because there’s really no reason to play hide and seek with the email address - that’s an identifier that people should generally be familiar with (since you have to use it reasonably often), and lots of people have multiple addresses that they can receive mail at.

MarsIronPI 10mo ago

> - Mozilla Search - metasearch that isn't based on Bing/DDG/Google As much hate as Brave gets overall, I think Mozilla should take a page from Brave's book if they're going to make a search engine. I think they should have their own index, possibly supplemented by Bing or Google. Let people opt-in to using their browsers to help crawl for the search engine index, like Brave does. Then add in some power-user features like goggles and custom ranking, and they'd have a pretty compelling search engine. They should even be able to subsidize it somewhat with advertising: DDG and Brave Search are the only two websites I allow ads on, because they're usually relevant and they're never intrusive.

CuriousRose 10mo ago
> Let people opt-in to using their browsers to help crawl for the search engine index, like Brave does. This is really cool. I'd be happy with a re-branded SearX/SearXNG, with a paid cloud hosted instance from Mozilla that uses a shared base index plus your own crawled pages or optionally contribute your crawls back to the shared index.
estimator7292 10mo ago
They could partner with Kagi. Pretty much everyone trusts Kagi, so if Mozilla convinces them to get on board, Mozilla must be actually serious about being trustworthy.
- veqq 10mo ago
  Kagi is just an AI company. (That was always their stated goal...)
- input_sh 10mo ago
  > Pretty much everyone trusts Kagi ...on a forum run by its investors whose goal is to push Kagi, sure. Outside of this forum, nobody knows about a fringe little search engine that is paywalled and only has 62k users. For a brand like Mozilla, even something as dumb as Ecosia would be a better fit, as they have about 250x the number of users of Kagi.

dyauspitr 10mo ago

Agree with a lot of this except Mozilla Search. Search is already or very soon going to be an entirely LLM driven space.

khaelenmore 10mo ago
Precisely why we need a reliably working search engine without llm, ai and other nonsense
- mghackerlady 10mo ago
  I predict the next gen search engines will be a return to form of the early web-directory style of known good pages and having to be vetted to appear in results

pmontra 10mo ago

> Thunderbird for iOS - why is this not a thing yet? They are building Thunderbird Android over K9 Mail, which is an Android app. They would have to start from scratch on iOS, which of course is feasible but it takes more time.

Tepix 10mo ago

As a US corporation, Mozilla cannot compete on privacy focused services. If they want to focus on privacy (which I think is great), they should ship software that improves privacy, not offer services.

fsflover 10mo ago
Are you saying that a warrant canary isn't useful?
- hermanzegerman 10mo ago
  He is saying that no one outside of the US will trust them with their data, because of the US Cloud Act and similar legislation. There is a reason Proton & Co are based in Switzerland and not in the US
  - aydyn 10mo ago
    lots of people seem to trust apple
    - philipallstar 10mo ago
      Apple has actually proven itself over a long period of time on this issue. Maybe Mozilla has as well (do they encrypt telemetry logs etc for people with a Mozilla login?) but I haven't heard so much about that.
      - rurban 10mo ago
        Did you really forgot about Snowden's Apple slide? Also their phones are routinely mirrored at the border. Just to support the unconstitutional government agenda of policing thoughts and speech.
        JumpCrisscross 10mo ago
        > Did you really forgot about Snowden's Apple slide? Was Apple coöperating or were they hacked? (I remember the smiley face for Gmail. Google, in that case, was hacked.)

MYEUHD 10mo ago

> Thunderbird for iOS - why is this not a thing yet? There's no release yet, but it's being worked on. https://github.com/thunderbird/thunderbird-ios https://github.com/thunderbird/thunderbird-ios

GuestFAUniverse 10mo ago

Quant and Ecosia are already building their own (European) index in a joint venture. Mozilla Search is totally uninteresting (to me).

palata 10mo ago
Nitpick: "Qwant"

rvba 10mo ago

Nobody wants this. People want firefox.

gwd 10mo ago
That's like saying, "Nobody wants Adwords; people want Chrome." True but besides the point. Salaries have to be paid somehow. Some options I can think of for paying salaries: - Go the Wikipedia route, stay entirely free, and beg for donations on a regular basis - Start charging for Firefox; or for Firefox Premium - Use Firefox as a loss-leader to build a brand, and use that brand to sell other products (which is essentially what GP is suggesting). How would you pay for developers' salaries while satisfying "people [who] want firefox"?
- palata 10mo ago
  > That's like saying, "Nobody wants Adwords; people want Chrome." Bad comparison, but I understand your point. > Salaries have to be paid somehow. I would be interested in knowing how much of what Mozilla does brings money. Isn't it almost exclusively the Google contract with Firefox? As a non-profit, Mozilla does not seem to be succeeding with Firefox. Mozilla does a lot of other things (I think?) but I can't name one off the top of my head. Is Google paying for all of that, or are the non-Firefox projects succeeding? Like would they survive if Firefox was branched off of Mozilla? And then would enough people ever contribute to Firefox if it stopped getting life support from Google? Not clear either. It's a difficult situation: I use Firefox but I regularly have to visit a website on Chrom(ium) because it only works there. It doesn't sound right that Google owns the web and Firefox runs behind, but if Chrome was split from Google, would it be profitable?
  - gwd 10mo ago
    > Bad comparison, but I understand your point. I'm not sure why you think so; it seems pretty close to me. Chrome and Firefox are exact competitors; both require a large amount of development investment. Neither one are being charged for, which means their development needs to be supported some other way. The people using Chrome don't want Adwords, but it's Adwords that is paying for Chrome's development. People using Firefox don't want email or Mozilla certificates or what-not, but something needs to fund Firefox's development. > ...if Chrome was split from Google, would it be profitable? They'd have to figure out a different business model, wouldn't they?

palata 10mo ago

> All seemingly low-hanging fruit with brand alignment. Genuinely interested: are you a developer? Doesn't sound like low-hanging fruit to me. There are already many alternatives to Gmail, I don't think Mozilla would make a lot of money there. And I don't know if they are making a lot of money with their Mozilla VPN (which I understand is a wrapper around Mullvad): why would I pay Mozilla instead of Mullvad? There are alternative search engines, like Kagi in the US and Qwant/Ecosia in Europe (though only Qwant seems to keep the servers in Europe). What I want from Mozilla, really, is a browser. And I would love to donate to that specifically, but I don't think I can.

kakacik 10mo ago
A reliable, corporate-friendly, with advanced support model alternative of Exchange + AD is something that could sink a titan like Microsoft in 2 decades, at least its non-cloud business (but then for cloud alone they are just one of many, nothing special there). Literally everybody is fu*king fed up with M$ arrogance. But you can't get rid of Active Directory and Exchange. Make comparable alternative (with say 80% of most used use cases, no need to die on some corner case hill) and many many corporations will come. This won't come from some startup, it has to be a company like Mozilla.
- palata 10mo ago
  Are you sure of that? There have been alternatives to Microsoft Office for decades. Yet most businesses use and pay for Microsoft Office, even though their employees most likely don't need anything that doesn't exist in those alternatives. Why would it be different with email?
  - mghackerlady 10mo ago
    Nobody got fired for buying ~~IBM~~ Microsoft. People trust Mozilla though, they've built their brand on not sucking as bad as M$ and Google
  - kakacik 10mo ago
    I don't think you understand what I was writing about - none of that is MS Office. Thats another topic, but without this (and say some sort of domain propagation rules) bigger corporations will never move out of MS.

e2le 10mo ago

> Mozilla Mail Aren't they already moving towards this? The Thunderbird team recently announced ThunderMail which will have an optional $9/year plan. https://www.tb.pro/en-US/thundermail/ https://www.tb.pro/en-US/thundermail/ > Thunderbird for iOS https://blog.thunderbird.net/2025/10/state-of-the-bird-2024-25/ https://blog.thunderbird.net/2025/10/state-of-the-bird-2024-... > We’ve also seen the overwhelming demand to build a version of Thunderbird for the iOS community. Unlike the Android app, the iOS app is being built from the ground up.

endemic 10mo ago

Re-launch FirefoxOS -- not for smartphones, but as a privacy-focused ChromeOS competitor. Give students Mozilla/Firefox brand awareness while prying them out of Google's clutches.