6 ms·

For anyone reading this that has worked on the launch of this new product (or the many others of their ilk throughout the years) under the various Mozilla orgs,

For anyone reading this that has worked on the launch of this new product (or the many others of their ilk throughout the years) under the various Mozilla orgs, I mean no disrespect, however I feel it's important to not mince words these days.. I implore ANYONE at Mozilla org to please, please stop working on projects distracting from the complex and necessary work of browser and web standards stewardship. That alone should be the very reason for your continued existence if you have any. Focus on anything outside that purview will lead to the furthering of the, already painful and readily apparent, stagnation of your browser and our standards bodies as entities distinct from corporations. Ditching any direct financial ties to Google or any other browser vendor is both important and necessary at this point, as this clearly represents a conflict of interest in your overall mission. The web as a platform should belong to us all, not just the few corporate leaders of the day. I've watched in real time, saddened by the persistent errosion of our commons that is the web. I see it becoming nothing more than a corporate playground should trends continue, if it's not already too late. There may have been a time when your mission took precident over product launches of seemingly unrelated domains, but that is not what Ii observing today. I think I speak for many in the community in these regards (please correct me if not the case.)

ojubknobugh 6mo ago
[flagged]
- drzaiusx11 6mo ago
  Mozilla should not be a business, full stop. The fact that is being run like one, albeit poorly is exactly the problem. I don't think you realize the irony in calling my post childish here. "C'mon" I guess?
  - kgraves 6mo ago
    How would Mozilla replace the $500M a year from Google to not be a business?
    - drzaiusx11 6mo ago
      Myself and I believe many others are willing to put money where our mouths are for an organization leading by example with regards to stewardship, much as this org has done in the past prior, instead of all these continued distractions, and ESPECIALLY if they stop swallowing this poisonous "donation" from Google. The fact that they do makes me wary of sending them a single penny. They'll just keep doing shit like they have been in recent years...
      - Ethee 6mo ago
        I can understand where you're coming from, but this seems a little misguided. Are you personally trying to pledge at least 1 full devs salary to Mozilla in exchange for less AI products? At the end of the day this really comes down to the money. If you want Mozilla to do the things you say you want from them, they need more than donations. Good will doesn't build a browser, that shit's expensive. It's like you're asking for a games studio to just give you an MMO out of the goodness of their heart for a few scraps from people who support their mission. The world doesn't work that way, without products like these I imagine Mozilla wouldn't be around much longer in the way you describe considering most of their salaries are paid directly by that 'poison' you describe.
      - bloppe 6mo ago
        The foundation never gets more than 10M / year in donations. You really think their donation rate could possibly go up by more than 50x just by cutting ties with Google?
      - eipi10_hn 6mo ago
        [flagged]
  - singpolyma3 6mo ago
    Maybe they shouldn't be, but they are. As a for profit corporation with employees they are very much a business not just "run like one"
CivBase 6mo ago
I'm perfectly fine with Mozilla working on other things as long as those things are profitable or at least self-funded. As long as they are not leeching donated resources from Firefox or Thunderbird, I don't see a problem. However, I wish I had some kind of assurance that the money I donate to Mozilla would go to Firefox and not some other project like this.
- rothific 6mo ago
  Thunderbolt was funded from a grant, not donations. https://github.com/thunderbird/thunderbolt/blob/main/docs/faq.md https://github.com/thunderbird/thunderbolt/blob/main/docs/fa...
  - yjftsjthsd-h 6mo ago
    I think the rest of that line is really kind of important: > Thunderbolt is funded through a grant from Mozilla. Is there any way that that's not taking dollars out of the same organization that's funding Firefox or thunderbird?
    - drzaiusx11 6mo ago
      No
ryukoposting 6mo ago
> already painful and readily apparent, stagnation of your browser What's wrong with Firefox? There are several things Firefox does that it's annoying to live without in other browsers (video pop-outs, competent ad blocking, etc). Is there some core feature that's missing? I'm subjected to Edge at work and I couldn't tell you a single thing it does that I'd want FF to do. > and our standards bodies as entities distinct from corporations Ok, I buy that.
- Onavo 6mo ago
  It's slow. It almost always trails Safari and Chrome on most benchmarks. See e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1ljns9o/freshly_released_firefox_140_benchmarked_against/ https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1ljns9o/freshly_re...
  - braiamp 6mo ago
    How many milliseconds do you think this page took to render? I usually click and it's already done.
    - latexr 6mo ago
      HN is a fast site (comparatively; most websites are unnecessarily slow). It’s a bad measurement.
      - galangalalgol 6mo ago
        HN is a good website. Ebay is another good example where JavaScript is optional but with good functionality. Marko was mocked, but now Astro is cool because they invented ssr...
    - drzaiusx11 6mo ago
      HN is not the most complex website rendering wise by any imaginable metric. I presume HN renders equally as fast on lynx or Mosaic from 1994...
  - 6mo ago
ta8903 6mo ago
I agreed with these posts a couple years ago but for the past year there have been a lot of meaningful improvements in Firefox.
- drzaiusx11 6mo ago
  It has been my daily driver off and on again across the years since the Netscape code was open sourced and Mozilla as an organization was founded. It's a fantastic browser, but Chrome now owns the lionshare of the market as Firefox plays catch-up instead of leading like it did in the past. Memory isolation, etc never got the resourcing it needed to complete until it was apparently too late. I see Firefox now as the new Opera, a technically good browser making dubious extensions that no one asked for until it dies a slow, spiraling death. My plea is simply to not go down that road any further...
karrot-kake 6mo ago
I agree that Mozilla is a breath of fresh air, and I am happy to see this extending to AI.
eipi10_hn 6mo ago
Yeah, you don't speak for me.
- drzaiusx11 6mo ago
  Fair enough.
time4tea 6mo ago
Firefox is pretty cool. Use it every day. Blocks ads Multi account containers Dev tools very good I never notice that it is in any way slow, except for those sites that need infinity cpu on any browser, like jira. What specifically is the issue? To my mind it quietly just gets on with things.
- drzaiusx11 6mo ago
  It is very cool! I'd go as far to say it's a great browser in fact. I simply want it to exist and be such in perpetuity and lead by example like it has in the past. I see it as a follower instead of a leader these days, largely to Google, but also Safari and to some degree Edge (by simply stealing the blink renderer) The Mozilla org continues to produce a very capable browser, but it's now 3rd or fourth fiddle on a stage their misteps helped orchestrate in their demotion. Edit: clarification
  - sylos 6mo ago
    What are the other competing browsers? There's chrome(and the derivatives), safari, firefox? safari exists only because of ios lockin. Aren't most other browsers an increasingly smaller share? Genuine question.
    - PaulHoule 6mo ago
      It's a problem. I use Firefox as my daily driver -- it used to be I ran into incompatible sites once a month or less except for YouTube which intermittently punishes users for browsing with Firefox. Now I have a serious problem every week like an online vendor or bank or something that doesn't work with Firefox. Firefox is a little slow for an internal application we have that loads 40,000 rows of data into a grid but otherwise all our stuff works with it because I develop Firefox first and I think a few of us are all that really stands between Firefox and oblivion and probably are doing more work than a lot of the people they have on the payroll.
      - jgraham 6mo ago
giancarlostoro 6mo ago
I'm going to sound crazy, and I've said this on HN before, but I wish CloudFlare or someone who would truly appreciate the effort and investment, would buy out Mozilla and have them oxidizing the browser again. Firefox was at its best when they were going through that effort, and since they put a pause on it, Firefox has been so "meh" for many years now, and embedding things nobody asked for. A faster fully oxidized browser on the other hand would be loved by many.
- ferfumarma 6mo ago
  I feel dumb, but what does oxidized mean in this context?
  - oceansweep 6mo ago
    migrate to rust.
righthand 6mo ago
The Mozilla employees are just Google plants. The web standards are now controlled by WHATWG who are all members of Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Mozilla and they are not interested in pushing standards forward or making browser improvements. They are only interested in ensuring entrenchment for their corporations. That’s why they created WHATWG. There is nothing any non-compromised Mozilla employee can do. The ship has sunk. Either someone hard forks Firefox or we continue down the current road.
maxloh 6mo ago
Mozilla is doing exactly what you’re describing. They need revenue to ditch their direct financial ties to Google (and I wonder if they hire those high-salary executives solely in the hope of generating that revenue). These AI products, along with all previous failed attempts, are just them trying to gain enough revenue to remove that dependency on Google.
- glenstein 6mo ago
  And you your point, AI is probably eating search and with it the prospect of search licensing revenue. Not sure yet what paradigms will be most important to the browser experience but it's critical to get in early and make the inevitable early mistakes and work through them.
- drzaiusx11 6mo ago
  I truly hope that is the case. I feel they're going about it from all the wrong angles, but I sincerely hope it works out in their favor. Their funding model and governance seem inherently broken and have for a long time...
derf_ 6mo ago
These two goals: > ... please stop working on projects distracting from the complex and necessary work of browser and web standards stewardship. > Ditching any direct financial ties to Google or any other browser vendor is both important and necessary... are inherently contradictory. If you do not want Mozilla to have revenue from search vendors that also have browsers, it has to come from somewhere else. Or are you suggesting they switch the default search engine back to Yahoo [0]? I am not trying to defend the projects they have chosen to work on, but you have to understand that reducing dependence on Google is exactly why they are working on them [1]. [0] Even when they did that, it was for the US only, and Google was still the default for most of the world. [1] Although in this case, this appears to come from the Thunderbird organization, so unrelated to the browser. Money is fungible, though.
- manfredz 6mo ago
  There are plenty ways to fund digital commons, including people volunteering their time.
  - sylos 6mo ago
    I don't think volunteering is going to cut it. Big orgs have big money and public commons are just targets to be controlled exploited.
  - tomaspiaggio12 6mo ago
    mozilla employs 750 people and has a 1/2Bn dollar deal with Google and still their browser is absolute hot garbage. i think volunteering won't cut it.
  - patmorgan23 6mo ago
    A leading web browser can not be built and maintained by volunteers.
    - glenstein 6mo ago
      Right. Firefox stands alone as the most successful self financed full stack browser that's ever been made without being subsidized by outside revenue streams. I like to use the example of Opera. If "make a better browser" won market share and business creativity won stable revenue, we'd all be using Opera right now because (sorry Mozilla), no browser company was ever better than Opera in my opinion. In 2026 the rules to making a good browser are (1) already be a trillion dollar company, (2) use Chromium, (3) have some form of distribution lock-in over billions of devices. Otherwise you're cooked. Mozilla swims against the stream better than anyone.
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
jamespo 6mo ago
Have you donated to the Mozilla Foundation so they can ditch financial ties with Google?
- drzaiusx11 6mo ago
  I'd gladly setup a recurring donation if I knew it was going to the areas in question and NOT to separate grants to the likes of this product just announced
  - jamespo 6mo ago
    Yes a lot of people _say_ this.
pipeline_peak 6mo ago
Where exactly do you expect Mozilla to gain revenue from other than non browser projects? Do you want people to pay to use Firefox?
- drzaiusx11 6mo ago
  If by "people" I mean everyone and not just direct users of their products. Something more akin to the Linux or Apache Foundations, including both private sector donations and government grants etc. A DIVERSE set of funding sources, not sharing ad revenue from a direct competitor. Having "people" directly pay to play as it were would never work, as we've seen before in other industries like news, etc.
  - pipeline_peak 6mo ago
    The private sector has no need for Firefox. Government grants are better spent elsewhere.
    - drzaiusx11 6mo ago
      Many companies and governments have a vested interest in the web continuing to exist as an open platform and not just a corporate playground controlled by 3 corporations. Without Firefox or something like it, the web becomes a defacto standard at best, largely controlled by Google (and to a lesser extent Apple and even lesser extent Microsoft)
glenstein 6mo ago
This "Mozilla is distracted" narrative is a category 5 hurricane of unsubstantiated vibes from people who have no idea what they're talking about. Some quick hits just from reading recent release announcements from December '25 through April 26: - Hardware acceleration for faster performance with PDFs - Expanded WebGPU support - Faster page loading with compression dictionaries - Deeper hardware integration for faster video playback on AMD hardware - Better GPU stability and performance on MacOS - Faster local translation And I'm only picking out bits and pieces. "Web platform" improvements are so abundant that reproducing them from any single release would be a massive wall of text, but for a few examples just from one recent release: >Service worker support for WebGPU has been added, making it available in all worker contexts. Service workers allow WebGPU to run in the background, which is particularly useful for extensions and other pages that can meaningfully share resources across multiple tabs and time periods. >Firefox now supports the Iterator.zip() and Iterator.zipKeyed() methods from the joint iteration proposal. This allows zipping together underlying iterators into an iterator over values grouped by position, similar to zip in many other languages. >Firefox now supports the Trusted Types API, which is primarily aimed at preventing cross-site scripting attacks. >Firefox now supports the Sanitizer API, which provides new methods for HTML manipulation. The element.setHTML() method enables developers to insert HTML content similarly to element.innerHTML, but without the security vulnerabilities such as cross-site scripting (XSS). A complementary method, document.parseHTML(), is also available for parsing HTML safely. And on and on it goes with APIs, CSS and so on, and that's every release, and that's still not covering feature requests and cosmetic updates, or the constant security updates. Guys, this is millions of lines of code and thousands of patches every quarter. While you were reading about AI features or poorly worded terms of service, they studied the blade..er.. they worked on real performance improvements. It should be a scandal that anyone in the comment section gets away with claiming they're not working on anything.
- drzaiusx11 6mo ago
  Firefox is still very much a technically excellent browser. My plea is simply to stop taking poison pills from the very companies they should be fighting against in standards body discussions. I'd argue Firefox is "behind" in both _marketshare_ and _features_ largely _because_ said features are steamrolled through community governance bodies by the likes of Google, etc. Mozilla is at the table for these discussions but their hands are tied. Mozilla's continued existence in recent history has relied on money from their primary competitor to stay in operation. Some have argued that doing seemingly unrelated projects like the one announced today is an effort to buy their freedom as it were. I'm arguing that's a distraction and that something closer to Linux or wiki foundation model would allow them to concentrate their efforts where it makes the most sense, as their current governance model is inherently based on a conflict of interest. Opera was also a technically excellent browser, and we've seen that that alone is not enough to justify its existence in the long term.
nine_k 6mo ago
They (like many) are afraid to become svn as the world is apparently taken over by git. Well-maintained but irrelevant.
camgunz 6mo ago
> I implore ANYONE I implore ANYONE about to write a similar post to avail themselves of the search bar to not Groundhog Day us. Someone should do a "History of HNers railing ignorantly about Mozilla and Firefox" coffee table book; would link the buy page in my group chats.

ojubknobugh 6mo ago

[flagged]

drzaiusx11 6mo ago
Mozilla should not be a business, full stop. The fact that is being run like one, albeit poorly is exactly the problem. I don't think you realize the irony in calling my post childish here. "C'mon" I guess?
- kgraves 6mo ago
  How would Mozilla replace the $500M a year from Google to not be a business?
  - drzaiusx11 6mo ago
    Myself and I believe many others are willing to put money where our mouths are for an organization leading by example with regards to stewardship, much as this org has done in the past prior, instead of all these continued distractions, and ESPECIALLY if they stop swallowing this poisonous "donation" from Google. The fact that they do makes me wary of sending them a single penny. They'll just keep doing shit like they have been in recent years...
    - Ethee 6mo ago
      I can understand where you're coming from, but this seems a little misguided. Are you personally trying to pledge at least 1 full devs salary to Mozilla in exchange for less AI products? At the end of the day this really comes down to the money. If you want Mozilla to do the things you say you want from them, they need more than donations. Good will doesn't build a browser, that shit's expensive. It's like you're asking for a games studio to just give you an MMO out of the goodness of their heart for a few scraps from people who support their mission. The world doesn't work that way, without products like these I imagine Mozilla wouldn't be around much longer in the way you describe considering most of their salaries are paid directly by that 'poison' you describe.
    - bloppe 6mo ago
      The foundation never gets more than 10M / year in donations. You really think their donation rate could possibly go up by more than 50x just by cutting ties with Google?
    - eipi10_hn 6mo ago
      [flagged]
- singpolyma3 6mo ago
  Maybe they shouldn't be, but they are. As a for profit corporation with employees they are very much a business not just "run like one"

CivBase 6mo ago

I'm perfectly fine with Mozilla working on other things as long as those things are profitable or at least self-funded. As long as they are not leeching donated resources from Firefox or Thunderbird, I don't see a problem. However, I wish I had some kind of assurance that the money I donate to Mozilla would go to Firefox and not some other project like this.

rothific 6mo ago
Thunderbolt was funded from a grant, not donations. https://github.com/thunderbird/thunderbolt/blob/main/docs/faq.md https://github.com/thunderbird/thunderbolt/blob/main/docs/fa...
- yjftsjthsd-h 6mo ago
  I think the rest of that line is really kind of important: > Thunderbolt is funded through a grant from Mozilla. Is there any way that that's not taking dollars out of the same organization that's funding Firefox or thunderbird?
  - drzaiusx11 6mo ago
    No

ryukoposting 6mo ago

> already painful and readily apparent, stagnation of your browser What's wrong with Firefox? There are several things Firefox does that it's annoying to live without in other browsers (video pop-outs, competent ad blocking, etc). Is there some core feature that's missing? I'm subjected to Edge at work and I couldn't tell you a single thing it does that I'd want FF to do. > and our standards bodies as entities distinct from corporations Ok, I buy that.

Onavo 6mo ago
It's slow. It almost always trails Safari and Chrome on most benchmarks. See e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1ljns9o/freshly_released_firefox_140_benchmarked_against/ https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1ljns9o/freshly_re...
- braiamp 6mo ago
  How many milliseconds do you think this page took to render? I usually click and it's already done.
  - latexr 6mo ago
    HN is a fast site (comparatively; most websites are unnecessarily slow). It’s a bad measurement.
    - galangalalgol 6mo ago
      HN is a good website. Ebay is another good example where JavaScript is optional but with good functionality. Marko was mocked, but now Astro is cool because they invented ssr...
  - drzaiusx11 6mo ago
    HN is not the most complex website rendering wise by any imaginable metric. I presume HN renders equally as fast on lynx or Mosaic from 1994...
- 6mo ago

ta8903 6mo ago

I agreed with these posts a couple years ago but for the past year there have been a lot of meaningful improvements in Firefox.

drzaiusx11 6mo ago
It has been my daily driver off and on again across the years since the Netscape code was open sourced and Mozilla as an organization was founded. It's a fantastic browser, but Chrome now owns the lionshare of the market as Firefox plays catch-up instead of leading like it did in the past. Memory isolation, etc never got the resourcing it needed to complete until it was apparently too late. I see Firefox now as the new Opera, a technically good browser making dubious extensions that no one asked for until it dies a slow, spiraling death. My plea is simply to not go down that road any further...

karrot-kake 6mo ago

I agree that Mozilla is a breath of fresh air, and I am happy to see this extending to AI.

eipi10_hn 6mo ago

Yeah, you don't speak for me.

drzaiusx11 6mo ago
Fair enough.

time4tea 6mo ago

Firefox is pretty cool. Use it every day. Blocks ads Multi account containers Dev tools very good I never notice that it is in any way slow, except for those sites that need infinity cpu on any browser, like jira. What specifically is the issue? To my mind it quietly just gets on with things.

drzaiusx11 6mo ago
It is very cool! I'd go as far to say it's a great browser in fact. I simply want it to exist and be such in perpetuity and lead by example like it has in the past. I see it as a follower instead of a leader these days, largely to Google, but also Safari and to some degree Edge (by simply stealing the blink renderer) The Mozilla org continues to produce a very capable browser, but it's now 3rd or fourth fiddle on a stage their misteps helped orchestrate in their demotion. Edit: clarification
- sylos 6mo ago
  What are the other competing browsers? There's chrome(and the derivatives), safari, firefox? safari exists only because of ios lockin. Aren't most other browsers an increasingly smaller share? Genuine question.
  - PaulHoule 6mo ago
    It's a problem. I use Firefox as my daily driver -- it used to be I ran into incompatible sites once a month or less except for YouTube which intermittently punishes users for browsing with Firefox. Now I have a serious problem every week like an online vendor or bank or something that doesn't work with Firefox. Firefox is a little slow for an internal application we have that loads 40,000 rows of data into a grid but otherwise all our stuff works with it because I develop Firefox first and I think a few of us are all that really stands between Firefox and oblivion and probably are doing more work than a lot of the people they have on the payroll.
    - jgraham 6mo ago

giancarlostoro 6mo ago

I'm going to sound crazy, and I've said this on HN before, but I wish CloudFlare or someone who would truly appreciate the effort and investment, would buy out Mozilla and have them oxidizing the browser again. Firefox was at its best when they were going through that effort, and since they put a pause on it, Firefox has been so "meh" for many years now, and embedding things nobody asked for. A faster fully oxidized browser on the other hand would be loved by many.

ferfumarma 6mo ago
I feel dumb, but what does oxidized mean in this context?
- oceansweep 6mo ago
  migrate to rust.

righthand 6mo ago

The Mozilla employees are just Google plants. The web standards are now controlled by WHATWG who are all members of Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Mozilla and they are not interested in pushing standards forward or making browser improvements. They are only interested in ensuring entrenchment for their corporations. That’s why they created WHATWG. There is nothing any non-compromised Mozilla employee can do. The ship has sunk. Either someone hard forks Firefox or we continue down the current road.

maxloh 6mo ago

Mozilla is doing exactly what you’re describing. They need revenue to ditch their direct financial ties to Google (and I wonder if they hire those high-salary executives solely in the hope of generating that revenue). These AI products, along with all previous failed attempts, are just them trying to gain enough revenue to remove that dependency on Google.

glenstein 6mo ago
And you your point, AI is probably eating search and with it the prospect of search licensing revenue. Not sure yet what paradigms will be most important to the browser experience but it's critical to get in early and make the inevitable early mistakes and work through them.
drzaiusx11 6mo ago
I truly hope that is the case. I feel they're going about it from all the wrong angles, but I sincerely hope it works out in their favor. Their funding model and governance seem inherently broken and have for a long time...

derf_ 6mo ago

These two goals: > ... please stop working on projects distracting from the complex and necessary work of browser and web standards stewardship. > Ditching any direct financial ties to Google or any other browser vendor is both important and necessary... are inherently contradictory. If you do not want Mozilla to have revenue from search vendors that also have browsers, it has to come from somewhere else. Or are you suggesting they switch the default search engine back to Yahoo [0]? I am not trying to defend the projects they have chosen to work on, but you have to understand that reducing dependence on Google is exactly why they are working on them [1]. [0] Even when they did that, it was for the US only, and Google was still the default for most of the world. [1] Although in this case, this appears to come from the Thunderbird organization, so unrelated to the browser. Money is fungible, though.

manfredz 6mo ago
There are plenty ways to fund digital commons, including people volunteering their time.
- sylos 6mo ago
  I don't think volunteering is going to cut it. Big orgs have big money and public commons are just targets to be controlled exploited.
- tomaspiaggio12 6mo ago
  mozilla employs 750 people and has a 1/2Bn dollar deal with Google and still their browser is absolute hot garbage. i think volunteering won't cut it.
- patmorgan23 6mo ago
  A leading web browser can not be built and maintained by volunteers.
  - glenstein 6mo ago
    Right. Firefox stands alone as the most successful self financed full stack browser that's ever been made without being subsidized by outside revenue streams. I like to use the example of Opera. If "make a better browser" won market share and business creativity won stable revenue, we'd all be using Opera right now because (sorry Mozilla), no browser company was ever better than Opera in my opinion. In 2026 the rules to making a good browser are (1) already be a trillion dollar company, (2) use Chromium, (3) have some form of distribution lock-in over billions of devices. Otherwise you're cooked. Mozilla swims against the stream better than anyone.

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

jamespo 6mo ago

Have you donated to the Mozilla Foundation so they can ditch financial ties with Google?

drzaiusx11 6mo ago
I'd gladly setup a recurring donation if I knew it was going to the areas in question and NOT to separate grants to the likes of this product just announced
- jamespo 6mo ago
  Yes a lot of people _say_ this.

pipeline_peak 6mo ago

Where exactly do you expect Mozilla to gain revenue from other than non browser projects? Do you want people to pay to use Firefox?

drzaiusx11 6mo ago
If by "people" I mean everyone and not just direct users of their products. Something more akin to the Linux or Apache Foundations, including both private sector donations and government grants etc. A DIVERSE set of funding sources, not sharing ad revenue from a direct competitor. Having "people" directly pay to play as it were would never work, as we've seen before in other industries like news, etc.
- pipeline_peak 6mo ago
  The private sector has no need for Firefox. Government grants are better spent elsewhere.
  - drzaiusx11 6mo ago
    Many companies and governments have a vested interest in the web continuing to exist as an open platform and not just a corporate playground controlled by 3 corporations. Without Firefox or something like it, the web becomes a defacto standard at best, largely controlled by Google (and to a lesser extent Apple and even lesser extent Microsoft)

glenstein 6mo ago

This "Mozilla is distracted" narrative is a category 5 hurricane of unsubstantiated vibes from people who have no idea what they're talking about. Some quick hits just from reading recent release announcements from December '25 through April 26: - Hardware acceleration for faster performance with PDFs - Expanded WebGPU support - Faster page loading with compression dictionaries - Deeper hardware integration for faster video playback on AMD hardware - Better GPU stability and performance on MacOS - Faster local translation And I'm only picking out bits and pieces. "Web platform" improvements are so abundant that reproducing them from any single release would be a massive wall of text, but for a few examples just from one recent release: >Service worker support for WebGPU has been added, making it available in all worker contexts. Service workers allow WebGPU to run in the background, which is particularly useful for extensions and other pages that can meaningfully share resources across multiple tabs and time periods. >Firefox now supports the Iterator.zip() and Iterator.zipKeyed() methods from the joint iteration proposal. This allows zipping together underlying iterators into an iterator over values grouped by position, similar to zip in many other languages. >Firefox now supports the Trusted Types API, which is primarily aimed at preventing cross-site scripting attacks. >Firefox now supports the Sanitizer API, which provides new methods for HTML manipulation. The element.setHTML() method enables developers to insert HTML content similarly to element.innerHTML, but without the security vulnerabilities such as cross-site scripting (XSS). A complementary method, document.parseHTML(), is also available for parsing HTML safely. And on and on it goes with APIs, CSS and so on, and that's every release, and that's still not covering feature requests and cosmetic updates, or the constant security updates. Guys, this is millions of lines of code and thousands of patches every quarter. While you were reading about AI features or poorly worded terms of service, they studied the blade..er.. they worked on real performance improvements. It should be a scandal that anyone in the comment section gets away with claiming they're not working on anything.

drzaiusx11 6mo ago
Firefox is still very much a technically excellent browser. My plea is simply to stop taking poison pills from the very companies they should be fighting against in standards body discussions. I'd argue Firefox is "behind" in both _marketshare_ and _features_ largely _because_ said features are steamrolled through community governance bodies by the likes of Google, etc. Mozilla is at the table for these discussions but their hands are tied. Mozilla's continued existence in recent history has relied on money from their primary competitor to stay in operation. Some have argued that doing seemingly unrelated projects like the one announced today is an effort to buy their freedom as it were. I'm arguing that's a distraction and that something closer to Linux or wiki foundation model would allow them to concentrate their efforts where it makes the most sense, as their current governance model is inherently based on a conflict of interest. Opera was also a technically excellent browser, and we've seen that that alone is not enough to justify its existence in the long term.

nine_k 6mo ago

They (like many) are afraid to become svn as the world is apparently taken over by git. Well-maintained but irrelevant.

camgunz 6mo ago

> I implore ANYONE I implore ANYONE about to write a similar post to avail themselves of the search bar to not Groundhog Day us. Someone should do a "History of HNers railing ignorantly about Mozilla and Firefox" coffee table book; would link the buy page in my group chats.