Nobody wants anything from Mozilla except Firefox/Thunderbird to be high-performance alternatives to Chrome/Outlook with fewer restrictions on extensions.
That’s it. The rest is just activism and kids playing in a sandbox with non-profit money to pad out their resume with whatever topical keywords might land them their next gig.
I am a regular Firefox user; it is literally the tool I use most often during my working hours. I like it more than Chrome.
Firefox is steadily losing market share, and any attempts to do something about it are met with negativity. The 2-4% of users who use it care about their privacy. But they are not being deprived of it; the AI tab is optional, and no one is removing the regular tab. (Of course, it would be better if they allowed the integration of local models or aggregators, such as Openrouter, Huggingface...)
Meanwhile, developers continue to ignore Firefox, testing only Chromium browsers. Large companies are also choosing the Chromium engine for their browsers.
Perhaps if they implement this functionality conveniently, more average users will use Firefox.
I am not a Firefox user, but I am baffled by the fact that every time I see news about it is because its developers are trying to push something that users dislike. All the comments I read always highlight how they keep wasting time and money instead of working on more important things.
My impression is that this is the reason why they keep losing market share. I never see any positive news about Firefox or Mozilla, and the browser has nothing that would make me switch.
Firefox gained market share because people recommended it and installed it on the computers of friends and family. They seem to have stopped, and its developers don't seem, from the outside, to be interested in doing anything to bring that back.
Here are some of the things that make Firefox the best browser for me:
- An extension system more powerful than Chrome's, which supports for example rich adblockers that can block ads on Youtube. Also, it works on mobile, too
- Many sophisticated productivity, privacy, and tab management features such as vertical tabs, tab groups, container tabs, split tabs, etc. And now it also has easy-to-use profiles and PWA support just like Chrome
- A sync system which is ALWAYS end-to-end encrypted, and doesn't leak your browsing data or saved credentials if you configure it wrong, like Google's does, and it of course works on mobile too
- And yes, LLM-assisted summarization, translation, tab grouping, etc, most of which works entirely offline with local LLMs and no cloud interation, although there are some cloud enabled features as well
My favourite feature is userChrome. The default chrome sucks in both Chrome and Firefox, but at least Firefox allows me to customize it to my liking without forking the entire browser.
On the flip side, changing keybinds in Firefox requires forking, but the defaults aren't too bad.
There are plenty of us that have no problem with Firefox and use it. But I notice people love to hate Firefox. You also get a lot of people complaining who've never used it.
Truth is it's a perfectly fine browser and the average person doesn't really notice the difference when you switch them over. Okay, "you" might be special and we're on a tech forum but most people don't.
But we're also on a tech forum where people don't realize that a chrome/chromium dominance means Google controls how the internet operates. People love to complain about Firefox's lack of standards as if those aren't first protocols in chrome and then Google votes for them to become standards. That's the entire problem right there
At this point that doesn't matter, does it? Mozilla has no teeth in which to bite with. They're not even close to. So is that really the priority?
In the meantime all these conversions accomplish is the sharpening of Google's teeth. Google not only has the capacity to bite but is actively demonstrating that they'll use their teeth.
So why the fuck do we complain about a dog with no teeth while another dog is eating our legs? Let's get our priorities right. Let's talk after we're not being bitten or if that dog starts eating our other leg.
they hate it because all the news about it is bad, and falls cleanly into the unignorable modern narrative that "everything is being corrupted and turning against users over time". Embedding corporate interests in a browser that was supposed to be for people (see: all the examples of them doing that) is morally disgusting and everyone hates it. The repulsiveness of it is more about the trend that it represents than the feature itself. We are soooooooo fucking tired of good things becoming bad and being unaccountable for it. To win our confidence, the right number of "betrayals of user trust" is absolutely zero, and it's not right now... and since they're ostensibly non-profit/open source the dissonance of "pretending to win trust" and then "betraying it" is especially jarring. When Google does something evil every day you're not surprised, just resigned; when Mozilla does something evil you're truly disappointed because they have no reason to; they were supposed to be good the good guys.
Mozilla does good thing: doesn't make news and everyone carries on as doing good things is expected and "normal"
Mozilla does bad thing: people get upset and this drives more attention and discussion.
We live in a world of social media where it's absolutely obvious what drives "engagement". Why would this be any different here? I mean we even see the inverse side where Google is expected to be evil so it's just stats quo. People then complain about how helpless they are to fight off these monopolies and yet are looking for excuses to not do something as simple as changing a browser. Is Firefox perfect? Of course not. The perfect browser does not exist. But browsers are pretty feature rich and fairly on parity these days. But let's not pretend that these complaints are more driven by our want to complain or our need to justify our current choice than it is about the actual impact of these things. I mean here we are talking about an optional feature and we're pigeonholing it into the optional AI quick tab while ignoring other useful things like translation. And let's not pretend like that quick tab is a crazy thing. We're on Hacker News and we all are quite aware at how often people are using LLMs. You think suddenly in this thread everyone is anti-LLM? Or maybe it's perception bias. I for one quite like the quick tab because I can just press <C-x> to open up Claude instead of pinning a tab or navigating to their site. I don't use it to read my websites and it doesn't have to. Everything here is 100% optional.
yes, I'm sure. The claim is not "based on the (biased) examples I've seen, Mozilla is 'actually' evil", as if evil was some logical predicate that has a truth value which we are discovering the value of. The claim is "based on the (biased) examples I've seen, Mozilla is not morally trustworthy", because nobody who's trustworthy does any of the things we've seen. In every case they've got in trouble for, they were completely free to do not do the thing. There is no excusing that.
> You think suddenly in this thread everyone is anti-LLM?
No, they're anti "putting LLMs in our software and shoving it in our faces" like literally every corporation is doing right now. You can find LLMs useful as a tool and despise the way corporations are trying to force them on you.
The right way for Mozilla to have Claude built-in is as an optional extension. That's... obvious. But anyway, the concern in the OP is not "Mozilla is adding LLM features" as much as it is the fact that despite this quote
"It’s safe to say that the people who volunteered to “shape” the initiative want it dead and buried. Of the 52 responses at the time of writing, all rejected the idea and asked Mozilla to stop shoving AI features into Firefox."
They're going to do it anyway, and pretend like that didn't happen, because they are slimy; because they consistently do the wrong thing in every moral situation in a way that is tremendously disappointing. Because their attitude is consistently that the point of soliciting feedback is to give the appearance of soliciting feedback rather than a genuine concern for doing right by users.
Presumably you saw https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45830770 about the Japanese translator quitting over being blatantly disrespected by the Mozilla bureaucracy. If your reaction to that is "I don't understand what Mozilla did wrong" then you don't understand how repulsive the "Would you be interested to hop on a call with us to talk about this further? We want to make sure we trully understand what you're struggling with." response was. The grievance already happened, there was nothing else to discuss. Either the entity is capable of feeling empathy collectively (which is to say, the leadership is) and doing the right thing, or it isn't. When their response to fucking up is vapid damage control instead of genuine guilt... yeah, they're just acting like a corporate robot instead of human beings. Nobody wants that, nobody respects it, and nobody trusts it; they deserve all the critique they get until they have leadership that can demonstrate humanity.
(Not that they are the only ones. Mozilla is just particularly frustrating because there's no reason they couldn't; they're not even a public company; they could just do better things for free. We're in a societal epidemic of entities not demonstrating humanity but pretending to; if an actual person acted the way corporations do, with all the corpospeak bullshit + distortive messaging around doing shamelessly profit-seeking things--you would find them sickening and repulsive. Maybe you think we shouldn't hold corporations to human standards? I say, fuck that, that's what benefits them, not us; why shouldn't we seek a better world?)
To add to all of this, the "perception bias" argument falls apart when we consider that if Mozilla had done the good alternative this case, the very example that we are discussing — if they had made a pledge to never force AI on Firefox users — then it absolutely would have made the news and driven discussion. It would have been a bold statement that re-inspired faith.
I'm a big fan of being critical of corporations. But we're worse off by treating this as a binary condition (moral vs immoral) rather than a continuum. No company is fundamentally moral and nobody is perfect. By creating a binary distinction we end up either placing everything into the same bucket or being disillusioned to their faults. Neither is good but the former allows for a race to the bottom and the least moral one to win. That's worse for us users.
I'm not saying don't criticize Mozilla. I'm saying don't act like their problems are even in the same ballpark as Google. Even if Mozilla was "equally evil" it's better to support them simply to distribute that power as I'd rather two evils fight than one evil reign. This is the problem we have and why I'm not addressing your points or why most people aren't. Because we too have the same problems with Mozilla but we recognize what we've been doing has just been giving Google more power. So let's not?
It's not about being dismissive, it's about prioritization.
Let's be honest here, Firefox is only alive because Google needs them to avoid monopoly regulation. I'm not surprised they're trying to do anything they can to survive and that that also involved many bad ideas. Like you said, they're free. But do you donate? How do they fund themselves? They don't have an ad empire to back them up. You might say the CEO is paid too much and I'll agree but this is also a silly conversation when we look at other CEOs pay. The complaint is more a manifestation of being frustrated with Mozilla and a justification. If it was really about the money we'd be prioritizing our conversations about the companies giving magnitudes more. You don't complain about wasting pennies while dollars are flying out the window. So let's make sure we're on the same page.
All this comes down to: if not Firefox, who?
Picking chrome/chromium creates a monopolization of the infrastructure of the Internet. By a mega corp who's primary goal is to destroy privacy. A corporation who is already demonstrating that they will dictate the specifications of internet protocols and in their own interest.
Picking Safari gives undue power to a different mega corp who is less interested in destroying privacy (more ambivalent) but interested in walled gardens.
Picking Firefox gives power to a non profit (giving transparency into their financials) who's primary funding comes through donations and publicly takes a stance on privacy. It's the backbone of privacy browsers like Tor and Mullvad.
Picking Ladybird is currently not viable as it's still in alpha.
I'd say we're going "most to least evil" through that list. I won't call any of them saints or perfectly moral. That's not the bar!
I don't actually want to replace Google's dominance with Mozilla dominance and I don't think most pro Firefox people do either. We want competition in the space. I don't want any one entity controlling the internet. I don't want any 2 or 3! I want healthy competition with more actors than we have today because any dominating player risks jeopardizing the entire internet. So at this point it doesn't matter how good or bad Mozilla is, it really only matters that someone is fighting Google. Its priorities. We're so far gone that we don't have the liberty to have that discussion because frankly Mozilla has no teeth. Let's talk when they can bite or when they're close to having that capacity. Until then, stop sharpening Google's teeth!
the point of taking a big moral stance against Mozilla -- in fact, against anyone is
> if not Firefox, who?
Firefox! But run well!
The point of complaining about someone fucking up, or shaming them, is to get them to stop. They're the ones who should be doing good; they're in the position to do so; they know how; their hubris/capture by money/interests/class/ignorance/something is preventing it. They need only listen to solve this problem. And maybe wholesale replace leadership, I dunno. But replacing bad leadership is way easier than writing a new browser for scratch.
(a secondary purpose of complaining is to promulgate good norms to everybody else so that everybody's on the same page about what respectable behavior would look like)
> Let's be honest here, Firefox is only alive because Google needs them to avoid monopoly regulation.
The problem is that others listen and use those words to justify choosing "not Firefox." It is the way we complain about Firefox, not that we do. It's a fine line to walk, but be careful to not arm your enemy
I don't understand why anyone would choose Chrome over Firefox. I get that it's performant, but it's developed by a dominant advertising company. Why would you trust Chrome if you care about your privacy?
Firefox is excellent, despite the grumbling of people who want it to have a narrower focus (which I'm not disagreeing with).
Then explain Brave then. They market as privacy but it has similar issues being chromium. The most critical being that by being chromium Google still gets to dictate how the internet works
> I don't understand why anyone would choose Chrome over Firefox. I get that it's performant, but it's developed by a dominant advertising company. Why would you trust Chrome if you care about your privacy?
I believe the vast majorty of people do not care about their privacy, answering GP's question.
I tend to use Chrome over Firefox although I have both. Plus points - better translate, google lens, slick and consistent. Minus points - Firefox containers are good.
Re privacy it comes across to me as a bit tin foil hat worrying about the evil doers tracking my thoughts. I mean sure I don't want criminals to know my home address and bank account details but re Google knowing say I use mac and advertising some Apple stuff to me - what's the problem?
> re Google knowing say I use mac and advertising some Apple stuff to me - what's the problem?
The issue is that the data isn't limited to device type and Google uses this data to sell to marketers. The more data they have on you, the more money they make which is why they're incentivized to break the rules and vacuum up as much data as possible even if it breaks the law. Hence, less than 6 months ago they paid over a billion dollars for "unlawfully tracking users’ geolocation, incognito searches, and collecting biometric data without proper consent"[1]
They're incentivized to abuse your data and owning the browser allows them for unchecked access to your internet browsing and information about you.
Well, we'll see. Google have all my info really, including emails and photos and in ~25 years of using them I haven't heard of anything particularly bad happening. They used to have my full location data but offloaded it to my device slightly to my annoyance so they don't get hassled by law enforcement asking where people are. I think people sometimes people worry about the wrong stuff.
The same reason people used to choose Internet Explorer over Firefox, because it was already installed on their device. The device of the masses has changed from desktop computers to Android phones, and those have Chrome.
> All the comments I read always highlight how they keep wasting time and money instead of working on more important things.
Nail on the head. Longtime Firefox user. All the way back to when it was called Netscape in fact, though I did roll chrome for a few years before coming back.
It was sometime around Mozilla's acquisition/integration of Pocket that shit started going sideways. Though, aside from the ad/privacy bullshit recently, their decisions haven't necessarily been "bad" ones so much as strange ones, and are all too often opt-out by default instead of opt-in. I just constantly find myself asking "Why?" more than actively being against what they're doing.
These days I use waterfox as it's Firefox without all the weird decisions (and telemetry), but truth be told the only reason I recommend Water/Firefox to anyone these days is by-and-large when they're bitching about ads and why their adblock doesn't work as well as it used to because of chrome and their MV3 chicanery. There are other reasons to use firefox, but for the average/casual user that's the main differentiator between it and chrome.
Every time I try Firefox it’s slower than Chrome or Safari. Every time. And since that never seems to improve, I suspect that’s why its market share keeps dropping because all the fluff doesn’t matter if the core feature is just worse.
I don't know what you mean; uBlock Origin Lite blocks every ad on any page I visit in Safari and Chrome, even YouTube ads. Safari also blocks tracker cookies by default, and is significantly faster than Firefox in my use.
I hear this complaint all the time, but I just don't see it as having any basis in reality. I use Firefox, Chrome, and Edge side by side all the time, and I never experience any difference in page load times except on YouTube, where we all know that Google purposefully delivers a slower experience for Firefox users.
The performance is fine and has always been fine for me, across multiple OS, since it was called Phoenix onward. No issue. Never had a very top-of-the-line machine, either.
Slower than Chrome? That's like looking over at the sports car next to you when you're driving and being jealous, IMO
Amen. Friends don't let friends use Firefox in the manner prescribed by Mozilla in its current state. It's horrid.
I have LibreWolf and Chrome installed, but not Firefox, and I like part of Firefox in spite of, not because of, the rest of Mozilla. I'd be interested in Ladybird except they threaten to use Swift.
Exactly. I've never stopped using Firefox, I've stopped recommending it because I can't support it (literally, meaning guide the people I recommend it to through annoyances and problems.) I only use it myself through Debian, I cram it with extensions to get old functionality back and give me some measure of privacy, and make tons of userChrome changes to get everything to look halfway sane (i.e. like it looked out of the box in 2010.)
I'm not helping somebody non-technical with that, and without that, I can't really recommend it over Chrome; they're both controlled by Google. I can tell them that Firefox is better for adblocking, for now, until they gaslight everyone and revert to following Chrome's tail on absolutely everything again.
But if Firefox were a real public service browser, they would have brought uBlock in-house a long time ago by employing gorhill (along with a bunch of other extensions, especially Tree Style Tabs.) Instead, they danced around shutting down its APIs just like Chrome until they decided not to (or until Google decided for them, because Firefox doing that would have annihilated Google in antitrust hearings.) There is absolutely no reason to be confident that Firefox won't be "regretfully" or "unfortunately" right in on "Manifest V4."
Excellent point. Google can point to this browser with sub 5% market penetration as an alternative in anti-trust hearings, so keeping it on life support is beneficial.
What's horrid? I have been using stock Firefox for half my lifetime and it's fine. One is already being esoteric enough using a 2% market share browser; do I have to be even more esoteric and use a 2% of the 2%?
I use librewolf, but for non-tech savvy, relatives where that would not be an option, I'm not exactly gonna recommend barebones vanilla Firefox either.
I've had to stop using FF as my development browser because it chokes on large source maps. I used to find lots of issues in our web app that were only ever tested on chromium browsers. I don't anymore because the devtools are unusable past a certain point.
Can you please file a bug on Mozilla's bug tracker? They are usually quite responsive on well-documented dev related bugs - especially ones around edge-cases related to fundamentals like resource allocation.
You'd be doing a good thing that would help others.
I am a frontend dev and use Firefox as much as I can. But I can't use it for development. Firefox's dev tools need to be better. I use Chrome for development because Chrome has great dev tools.
I've used Firefox as my daily driver for years on a high end gaming laptop and have the same gripe. The dev tools are truly bad. Even outside of dev work, there's sites where I want to hide paywall or login banners by simply setting a container to "display: none;", but opening up the inspector (slow) and doing so causes the browser to freeze.
The name is in keeping with a lineage of animal tools for ad hoc page manipulation in Firefox. First was Aardvark, then Platypus. https://github.com/dvogel/AardvarkDuex
I was an original early user of Aardvark. These tools have remained obscure, but with a cult following because they’re such a quick and easy way to rip up a page to your liking. They were the direct inspiration for modern browser dom selector tools.
For hairy edge cases, uBlock Origin’s element picker is the gold standard for manipulating pages.
Firefox should commit more to correctly implement web standards - not even gradients render correctly. A lot of the users are oddballs with strange configurations that break everything. No wonder devs optimize for chrome.
> Firefox is steadily losing market share, and any attempts to do something about it are met with negativity.
Why don't they spend the time innovating to make the browser engine faster and more stable? IIRC, they canceled that project. Instead they focus on stuff like yet another VPN and now this AI assistant.
Maybe Firefox would have a higher market share if they worked on features their users actually want instead of things that get widely criticized. I personally would use it a lot more if it had an --app flag like Chromium, which would probably also be a lot less work than AI integration.
>Perhaps if they implement this functionality conveniently, more average users will use Firefox.
I've tried Firefox before. I prefer Vivaldi, because it provides more convenience.
I can't actually tell you what Firefox does or where all that money is going to. It looks exactly like Chrome with negligible changes.
The critical problem, it seems, is that Firefox thinks people care about "privacy" only to the extent of being shown personalized ads. Literally nothing else matters. This feels to me like a recurring issue in technology, where an issue that users may have doesn't exist in the way they interact with the world, but only as a specific definition that can be measured or that be analyzed from a compliance perspective.
I have multiple profiles in Chrome and Vivaldi that let me switch between professional accounts and private accounts. That sounds like privacy to me, and I'd wager that for most people on the planet this is far more useful than the ability to avoid being shown ads for a thing you have already bought just because of tracking cookies. Why Firefox doesn't have this feature?
Vivaldi lets me subscribe to websites via RSS so I don't need to create an account to subscribe to things. That sounds like privacy to me. And I even have notes built into the browser. I don't use these today, but I used to use them when Vivaldi was called Opera. Firefox seems to have neither of these features. Again, I feel the need to ask, what features does Firefox actually have?
Maybe this is a "hot take" for Firefox developers, but if you want people to use your web browser maybe you should try offering functionality that other browsers don't offer? Yes, you can run some extensions that don't work on Chrome anymore, but that's not even a functionality of the browser. That is third-party. It quite literally depends on third-party developers bothering to develop extensions for a web browser that has a 2% market when they could instead use that time to develop extensions for Chrome or even Vivaldi.
If the only reason you want me to use Firefox is so that I don't use Chrome, that just doesn't feel very compelling.
I 100% agree. It's funny to me that for a website that's focused on people and companies creating new things, people here can be extremely hostile and jaded to the idea.
I don’t know. I‘m always a bit appalled that getting privacy in firefox requires you to disable so many flags in the user.js or use something like arkenfox.
It feels kind of dishonest of them that they don‘t surface those settings when they‘re enabled by default.
Of course there is librefox, but still I feel like there shouldn’t even have to be reason for an extra fork like that.
> any attempts to do something about it are met with negativity
because these attempts have all been poorly thought out, and in fact are following the corporate playbook that only works if the product is producing revenue.
It's an attempt to make firefox like chrome, in the hopes of getting some of chrome's marketshare.
Stop it - firefox should be it's own identity, and serve the user's needs. It should depend in large part on donations from users, and not from corporations except as no-string attached donations.
It should not have such a large team of non-contributors drawing funds and working on initiatives unrelated to improving the browsing experience.
For example Firefox could fix it's issues with VSS crashing on GPU's so that Linux distros like Nobara don't have to ditch Firefox as the standard browser in favour of Brave. Granted, that would only get them back a couple of hundred users but hey: marketshare?
For example since firefox doesn't support WebNFC I can't do online shopping because during 3D secure my phone can't recognize my credit card being tapped. I have to use Chrome instead. Frankly, I don't care if WebNFC is "slop" or not. It's solving real world problems.
I see this sentiment a lot, but I never agree with it. Sure, some of their projects seem very odd for them to lead, but given that they are completely reliant on their competitor for cash -- a revenue source that has been threatened several times by anti-trust cases against Google -- they should be looking to branch out. Firefox alone won't pay the bills, so they need to try and find some other revenue source. Plus, Chrome has essentially won. Not necessarily for any engineering reason, at least not these days, but from continued momentum of being the market leader. Sitting around quietly isn't going to get people to switch, they do need to find some way to distinguish themselves apart from Chrome, which again leads to these misc features being thrown out there.
The AI inclusion seems like the same reason everyone else is adding AI, they don't want to be left behind if or when it's viewed as an essential feature.
> Chrome has essentially won. Not necessarily for any engineering reason, at least not these days, but from continued momentum of being the market leader.
Ah, how the young forget... Mozilla became popular precisely due to their willingness to challenge the market leader at the time [1], namely, Internet Explorer. Going against the market leader should be in their DNA. The fight is not lost just because there's a market leader. If anything, Mozilla is currently losing the battle because the leadership doesn't believe they can do it again.
I'm fine with Mozilla diversifying their income, but I'm not fine with Mozilla sacrificing their browser (the part we desperately need the most) in the name of a "Digital Rights Foundation" that, at this rate, will lose their seat at the negotiating table.
They were losing because MS bundled IE with every device. Eventually they MS lost an anti trust case against it and it opened up the market, which is before that graph begins.
Well 30 years later we are back where we started.
Chrome is where it is because it is preloaded on most phones on the planet (the other ecosystem has a different preloaded browser). The other thing is that it was advertised on the most visited page on the internet for 20 years.
Most internet users don't even use desktop/laptops, they use mobile devices and likely have no idea there is any other option than chrome.
Exactly, this is just about the most lucid explanation of the market share graph I've seen on HN. It's baffling to me that the rise of Chrome, distributed via Google, on phones and on Chromebooks, somehow doesn't enter people's explanations of market share change when talking about Mozilla. It probably the biggest single driver of market share change by an order of magnitude.
> They were losing because MS bundled IE with every device.
They weren't losing, they had 10x the market share they have now. MS lost an antitrust case, they weren't forced to do anything even after they lost, and big tech learned (correctly) that there was not ever going to be any serious antitrust enforcement on platforms.
Chrome came out with a heavily marketed browser that some people liked (but was far more marketed than loved.) Firefox then intentionally destroyed its own browser to make it a wonky clone of Chrome, even down to trivial cosmetic features and version numbering. Firefox's strength was its extensions ecosystem, so it took special relish in destroying that, and joy in painting the users that were bothered by this as stochastic terrorists. They claimed that the perpetual complainers just didn't understand the "normal users" of the market while Firefox shrunk from 30% of it to 2.5% of it. Meanwhile, they took to forcing bizarre, unhideable features that should have been extensions, and doing bizarre marketing experiments.
> Most internet users don't even use desktop/laptops, they use mobile devices and likely have no idea there is any other option than chrome.
Firefox gets all of its margin from Google, and is 2.5% of the market. There isn't really another option, no matter what Mehta says. Firefox gets more than all of its margin from Google - Google cash allows it to blow money on goofy money-losing projects that look good on resumes. Meanwhile, Wikipedia has 100x what it needs to run in the bank, entirely from donations, still keeps dishonestly begging, and still keeps collecting.
But Firefox claims that's impossible. It has to be fully dependent on Google because reasons, and those reasons are that it chooses its direction based on Google's desires.
edit: the craziest part of this common argument about Google bundling is that Google doesn't have anything like the monopoly that Microsoft had, Microsoft bound its browser to everything it could figure out how to, and Microsoft was still losing a huge section of the market to Firefox. The idea that Google is some special impossible challenge when Microsoft owned every computer is insane. It's impossible to beat Google when they pay your salary.
It's worth noting that Chrome was just legitimately a good product in a space where the competition wasn't blowing any minds. The people that switched over saw how much better a browser can be and spread the word.
Allowing the user to pull tabs into its own windows and merge them back was magic back then, as was including search and url in a minimalistic bar, when other browsers had 3-row bars at times. Such a simple and elegant product.
For a couple years Chrome was noticeably faster than IE/FF which is what caused tech oriented people to switch.
FF and even IE closed the gap for a little bit but once Chromes dominance took old I imagine the fact that no one tests things on FF any more has probably caused it to slip performance wise.
It wasn’t challenging the market leader that made them successful. It’s because Firefox was precisely a better browser at the time, and their marketing/activism around open web standards was great. There were lots of “challenging” going back then.
But simply challenging isn’t enough. People like to tell this tale where just being an underdog gets you some benefit. But it doesn’t. Firefox was way leaner, opened faster, had extensions, so on.
There is no possible way to compete against a competent trillion dollar organization that knows how to build a good browser, and exploits its global monopoly position in search to advertise their browser.
It doesn't matter if Firefox became better. There is simply not enough differentiation potential in the core browser product to win by being better. Its all marketing.
I just wish Mozilla sold some stickers/themes as proxy donations and became largely independent.
> Plus, Chrome has essentially won. Not necessarily for any engineering reason, at least not these days, but from continued momentum of being the market leader.
s/Chrome/Internet Explorer/g
Nobody has won until the match is over, and history has a very long tail.
I see the point, but them following the leader on this does not seem like a recipe for success. They aren't going to be as good at AI as OpenAI's browser, and their users are going to be less bought into it. I would have hoped they'd have learned their lesson from things like FirefoxOS but I guess not...
> The amount of money they get from Google is vastly more than it takes to hire a few dozen people full-time to develop a web browser and email program.
You under estimated the work to develop a web browser. Vivaldi are 60 people.[1] They produce an unstable Chromium fork and email program. They couldn't commit to keep uBlock Origin working.
That's a good example. I'm probably significantly underestimating the amount of people needed. $500M can hire a lot of $250k salaried engineers, though.
> $500M can hire a lot of $250k salaried engineers, though.
$250,000 is conservative for the total cost to employ a software engineer in the US. And their expenses are not limited to software engineer salaries of course.
A fair question would be what Google or Apple spend to produce their web browsers. The answers are secrets. $1 billion is a common Chrome development cost estimate in my experience.
Good question. Looking at their expenses, though, it seems to be just a plethora of piddly donations. $1M here and there, and it adds up. That does fit with the lack of focus narrative.
I'm not opposed to activism, I'm just opposed to their activism which goes against what the Mozilla Foundation stands for. Obviously what I think the foundation stands for (a freely accessible web) and what it actually stands for are two different things, but I like my rose tinted glasses.
Agreed! I think it should be a huge red flag to folks at mozilla, that there are several forks of Firefox that mostly just take out tracking and AI features from the browser.
Mozilla's fundamental problem to square is they have no way to fund themselves.
So they keep trying to find ways to try to extract even a tiny drip of income from their userbase, who recognize and resent it when they feel Mozilla is already in arrears in their relationship, and it just spirals because every less invasive option Mozilla tries and has to walk back means the next option was one they considered and decided was worse the last time.
I don't really have a great idea how to do this better, but it's not _just_ that Mozilla execs have poor ideas, it's that they're desperately trying to find a funding source and all the options are going to burn the already-negative goodwill remaining.
It's kind of the startup story - you give people the first hit for free (which Mozilla did for many years, effectively), then once enough people are using it, you slowly attempt to boil the frog to cover the massive debt you sank giving something away below the actual cost of providing it.
In a nicer world, I could imagine a nation-state providing funding to Mozilla to underwrite not having a browser monoculture. But I don't see anyone having the appetite for doing that now.
I would have loved to see them leverage their browser to make a distributed social network, back when they had enough market share to attempt such a thing.
An open slack-alike also seems like a good fit for them.
Alas, they have tons of cash but little capacity to do anything useful.
Mozilla has started so many incredibly ambitious projects: Firefox OS, Rust, Servo/Stylo, Quantum... A slack-alike would at best give them a +1 against killedbygoogle.com.
Yep, a federated social network is indeed an ambitious problem, perhaps Mozilla would've been well-suited to tackle it. The problem is not the tech or scope, but timing. 15 years ago everyone was happy to be on FB / Twitter. 10 years ago, Microsoft just bought LinkedIn; Google tried, then killed off a network with 500k DAU; all of that time, there was little space for a new contender.
Mastodon only took off because Twitter went to shit real fast; still most people flocked to mastodon.social, because they heard Mastodon was good, but had no idea what federation is, or why it's important. MAYBE that would've been the perfect timing for Mozilla to launch their own ActivityPub platform.
Rust/Servo/Quantum culminated in tangible benefits that reflect successfully played out projects from which Firefox reaped major rewards. And FireFox OS, perhaps more than any other, is something I wish we had right now, because if they never gave up on it and we had a 10+ year old alternative mobile OS waiting for its moment, it could have been well positioned in a moment like this one where Android is increasingly betraying the trust of its developers. I think the Yahoo/Mozilla partnership, quickly forgotten, could have been meaningful if there was good vision.
Yahoo had a major collection of properties that still had relevance, and core services like email, search and maps that I remember Matt Yglesias (of all people) insisting would have been the keys to the success of a FirefoxOS. Yahoo had the infrastructure, but no vision and a bad brand, and Mozilla was the inverse. An interesting what-if that unfortunately amounted to nothing.
I agree with your point and have long disliked when Firefox squanders their limited resources on side quests - which is too often. But, to 'steelman' their motivation to 'do something' on AI, this analysis article sums up why major AI and browser vendors are pushing : https://entropytown.com/articles/2025-10-31-openai-atlas-ai-....
I just think Firefox is taking the wrong approach. Trying to run with the pack of large commercial entities supporting their multi-prong corporate agendas does nothing for Firefox long-term (while annoying their users and looking like a buzzword-chasing 'me too'). This is a perfect example of when Firefox should zig instead of zag. Per the article I linked:
> “the hard part of an AI browser is not chat, it’s process and trust isolation.”
Instead of feature parity on AI, Firefox should race to technically position with APIs as the friendliest 'host browser' for AI companies outside the big five (eg "everyone else"). That gets some AI vendors actually recommending Firefox as the "works best with..." option instead of ignoring FF. Plus AI projects, researchers and LocalLLama-type hobbyists will be attracted. Sure, that's currently a small segment but they have high-potential for growth. It's very early days and today's AI leaders may not be tomorrow's AI giants.
Sufficiently accurate. That’s the reason they’re trying all these things. It’s because the original objective was met and now they’re trying to find something else to put all their money to.
I recently switched to Firefox to continue using uBlock, and was honestly shocked to find out that it actually has more restrictions in terms of where you're allowed to install extensions from.
You literally cannot install extensions that are not signed by Mozilla at all unless you use a different beta version of Firefox.
> Nobody wants anything from Mozilla except Firefox/Thunderbird to be high-performance alternatives to Chrome/Outlook with fewer restrictions on extensions.
Amen. I'd be happy if Firefox was a Chromium patched with better extension support and a mobile version.
> I'd be happy if Firefox was a Chromium patched with better extension support and a mobile version.
The main reason I still use Firefox is that it is the only serious engine beside chromium and I do not want Google to get a monopoly in this area (although practically they already have).
Firefox is not bad. It does its job and I'm not needing more. It's even fast enough. I dislike the management and its decisions. I'm constantly looking at Ladybird. I even subscribed to their YouTube channel and if one day it is a usable Browser on Linux and on phone there is a high chance that I will ditch Firefox.
And part of the Corp's profits fund the Foundation, not the other way around. We get a discussion about this every few months in the HN comments, in case anyone wants to look it up.
That’s it. The rest is just activism and kids playing in a sandbox with non-profit money to pad out their resume with whatever topical keywords might land them their next gig.