I'll be contrarian to the thread sentiment and say: Mozilla has misstepped in the past, and will continue to do so, and they're partially funded by competitors for antitrust reasons, etc.
That said, I can't really disagree with anything in this. As a developer (and socially conscious human) I want to move in the direction of openness.
I think the problem many of us have is it feels like Mozilla invests more effort into everything other than its browser, we see the things they do outside of Mozilla, I mean it was so bad Thunderbird had to become its own foundation due to lack of funding!
I would love for there to be a world where Mozilla maintains Firefox and can make for product projects that provide higher value. I also have a pipe dream of one day someone like (and if they read this, and anyone who reads this will think I'm crazy) CloudFlare just buys Firefox itself from Mozilla so it can finally be funded correctly. CloudFlare has an interesting talent pool and I'm sure there's people who work with Rust / have worked with Rust who can help fund something like Firefox. Then I would like to see them create a true open foundation whose entire bottom line goes towards Firefox, not to anything else.
Free the fox from corporate shennanigans. By my own corporate shennanigans. And CF could be swapped out with any company bold enough to free the fox.
I guess replies on this thread are evident that Mozilla has lost much of the trust and goodwill it once enjoyed. Admittedly I am also very skeptical that Mozilla has the ability or genuine interest to make this work.
I feel that, at some point around the Brendan Eich-gate, the Internet decided that Mozilla was always wrong. Change the shape of tabs? We received rape threats. Change it back? Bomb threats. Bringing in new APIs for add-ons that make Firefox faster, more secure, more stable and doesn't break all the time? No, we want addon $X, we don't care about security.
I'm not going to claim that everything Mozilla has done is right, but the bad will of the tech crowd is a bit exhausting.
There is always a pile on on Firebox for not being perfect. Sometimes with valid complaints. But if you dig deeper nearly always the commenter is using a version of Chrome and justifies it over Firefox for a very shallow or outdated reason. Firefox would do well to listen to some of the criticism about the browser and ignore the noise about anything else
There's also the cohort of bad web developers that only test on Chrome
> I guess replies on this thread are evident that Mozilla has lost much of the trust and goodwill it once enjoyed. Admittedly I am also very skeptical that Mozilla has the ability or genuine interest to make this work.
That reverses cause and effect to a great degree. Many are very skeptical because they read everyone slamming it. It's a mob psychology.
The other problem is, they will eventually axe this initiative if it doesn't produce anything meaningful to them, and will have been wasted resources that could have gone to Firefox itself.
Firefox has improved significantly. It's improvement strategy is mostly focused on what developers ask them to focus on. They've had great performance on the yearly interops
Agree, I'm not the kind of guy that has 100 tabs open (10 at the time I'm typing this), but when I came back 2 years ago I noticed that it isn't as snappy and fast as it used to be 15 years ago before I switched to Chrome.
The open source community will start taking Firefox seriously again when all the AI shit is removed for good and real improvements to performance and privacy are made.
Despite all the posturing about "respecting your privacy and freedom," the stock configuration of Firefox is trivially fingerprintable. At the very least, a privacy-focused browser should adopt the Tor patches and report standardized spoofed values for hardware components and disable by default all privacy invasive anti-features like WebGL. This isn't difficult to do, but illustrates the gap between empty promises and what is actually delivered.
I'd definitely love to see them take some steps, but at the points where a minor increase in privacy leads to a much worse UX for average people (aka, "why doesn't this site work in FF, FF sucks!" because they don't know they have to enable something). If Firefox becomes a browser that is harder to use then it will only ever be used by the extremely small niche of people that care about that. That will only further lead to more "not tested on Firefox" web development. I already have to have Chrome available on my machine because of sites like Ramp.com and Mailgun that don't work on Firefox, and that would only get worse.
If you put too much in your Telemetry/crash reports, yeah, users become fingerprintable.
On the other hand, if you return spoofed values, it means that Firefox developers cannot debug platform/hardware-specific crashes. If you disable Telemetry, improving performance becomes impossible, because you're suddenly unable to determine where your users suffer. If you remove WebGL, plenty of websites suddenly stop working, and people assume that Firefox is broken.
Yes, it's the stock configuration to be not broken. If you are ok with breakage in exchange for less fingerprinting, the config setting privacy.resistFingerprinting is right there: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/resist-fingerprinting
It is an uplift from Tor, and I believe Tor just enables it in their build, though it doesn't end up being quite the same. Tor is always going to be better for this.
But turning it on in the stock Firefox configuration would be suicide in terms of market share. When "I want maximal privacy" fights "I want this site to work", guess which one wins?
Unfortunately, the guys in charge at Mozilla are clearly enamored with AI. They like it so much (and value users so little), that they'll let it write the whole damn PR blog post about company strategy.
I'll be honest, when I see another "Hate Firefox" fest, I ask only one question "Quo bono?"
> I haven't seen anything from Mozilla in recent years that makes me trust this has a future.
As opposed to what? Chrome? What's the future there?
The various Firefox derivatives will die a quick death if Firefox dies. The strings attached to Chrome derivatives make them pointless. So, what's left? What are we discussing here? There's no alternative, it's that simple.
On the other hand, joining the hate-fest on various forums cannot and does not help Mozilla to find a better way. One is peeved by this, another by that, go figure... I'd call it childish if it wasn't so damaging.
The new CEO centered AI ("It's Time to Evolve Firefox Into an AI Browser") in his first communication to the community. Spawned at least three new forks and introduced people to LibreWolf.
His first communication reduced trust: "It is a privilege to lead an organization with a long history of standing up for people and building technology that puts them first."
Now let's put people first by making Firefox an AI first browser. Enzor-Demeo would have made an excellent Microsoft product manager. Too bad he didn't get the job.
Agreed, I subscript to random Mozilla products like VPN and Relay to pay them but I dont need those and would hate to have them waste extra development time on improving those services. I would rather fund the browser directly.
Yes, but how large is the subset of Firefox users that are willing to pay for a browser? Take that number and multiply it either by 10 o by 100 and you get the order of magnitude.
Even the most successful online annual fundraising drive that exists, Wikipedia, raises less than half of what Mozilla gets annually from search licensing. And Mozilla in a best case scenario probably can't match Wikipedia's fundraising for a number of reasons.
It would feel good and I certainly wouldn't mind it, but it's much closer to a drop in the bucket than a panacea.
In my view, this is the exact right approach. LLMs aren’t going anywhere, these tools are here to stay. The only question is how they will be developed going forward, and who controls them. Boycotting AI is a really naive idea that’s just a way for people to signal group membership.
Saying I hate AI and I’m not going to use it is really trending and makes people feel like they’re doing something meaningful, but it’s just another version of trying to vote the problem away. It doesn’t work. The real solution is to roll up the sleeves and built an a version of this technology that’s open, transparent, and community driven.
- Mozilla.ai agent platform: No link with the browser. Just a closed-source SaaS competitor to the many existing agentic platforms like LangChain / LangGraph.
- Mozilla Data Collective: It's been made clear now that sadly data licensing doesn't matter and if you use less data than your competitor, your model will be inferior.
- Real deployments: Basically getting into the public contracts and consulting grift with no priori experience. Probably banking on EU open source funding & co.
- Mozilla Ventures: Redistributing a token amount of the money they are already not making (gift from Google) to fund Open Source research.
I genuinely don't understand the "permissioned data" assumption. Presumably, all the current models that were trained on illegitimate scraping of vastly larger sources will always have the upper hand (in terms of raw power, obviously at the cost of regurgitating evil stuff too), because they just have absorbed way more diverse data in their training. So the models trained on ethical datasets only will not be able to compete, unless they too rely on a common base of "foundational sin" data and just add those datasets as an ethical layer to cover the rotten roots.
Is it really possible to start training from scratch at this stage and compete with the existing models, using only ethical datasets? Hasn't it been established that without the stolen data, those models could not exist or compete?
Personally I would rather use a 'bad' ai that's trained ethically and runs locally than a good ai trained on stolen data that requires me to surrender my thoughts to the cloud.
whether or not it's possible to compete I guess we'll see but I am hopeful and appreciative that Mozilla is trying, as I am getting tired of big tech trying to force everyone to hand over even more unhinged amounts of data than what they're already taking from us.
Being the agent of the user isn't particularly profitable. For example: companies want the users to be shown ads, and users generally don't want to be shown ads. But profit, which is to say money you make without having to directly work for it, comes from selling the user's interests away. Like, perhaps, choosing to take a bribe to cement Google's search monopoly, a fundamentally anticompetitive behavior which, even as it makes cash for Mozilla, costs the web far, far more.
They've lost their way completely as an independent entity, and a post like this that doesn't reaaally seem to grasp that weight of that conundrum comes no closer to convincing me that they can find their way back to the light.
I think you're right but I suspect that's the point. AI may be eating into search, and that could threaten their search licensing deal. Apple just struck a deal with Google to use Gemini, though it sounds like Apple paying Google for the privilege. Ominous if you're a browser company looking to sell a license for a preferred AI tool.
I think this is a good initiative. Having major software components be part of foundations, rather than single-vendor backed, is always a good thing. TBD if this succeeds or not, but I think they are doing a good thing here.
> Mozilla was born to change this, and Firefox succeeded beyond what most people thought possible — dropping Internet Explorer’s market share to 55% in just a few years and ushering in the Web 2.0 era.
Is this true? I can see from here[0] that its peak was 32%, as IE was really on the back burner but before Chrome had fully risen to dominance, but I wouldn't claim that it was responsible for IE's market share drop.
Web 2.0 is around 2003 or so and chrome would not even exist for another few years.
Giving Firefox/phoenix/Netscape the majority credit for the first fall of IE seems accurate.
The rise of chrome happened afterwards and by then IE also fell much deeper than 55%.
You’re right on the numbers....Firefox never had majority share. The stronger claim is causal influence, not dominance. I recently read somewhere that the Firefox (and later Chrome) forced standards compliance and broke IE’s de-facto monopoly mindset. IE’s decline was gradual and multi-factor, but Firefox clearly shifted developer and user expectations.
Firefox does offline translation and offline tts. It is quite amazing. Unfortunately half the tech crowd is like "BURN anything that has been in the same room as AI" and the other half is yoloing agentic browsers and uploading all their pron history to the datalakes
Has mozilla ever hired a CEO on the premise of "Our top priority is resolving the long standing bugs in our web and email clients"?
I'm still bitching, years later, about thunderbird failing to update IMAP folder contents (i.e. sync with server) until I click on the folder.
While it may still reign as the "capital of the industry", there's a certain kind of technical brain damage that comes from being located in the bay area.
Let's just call it "proximity to venture capital"...
Good decision for a change, now looking at execution track record and ability to stick with it..
yeah, that's where the bad news start.
They have a tendency to go from trend to trend and always a "me too, I'm here" player. Deliver first and stick with it, Mozilla's goodwill fund is long gone to be excited about "mission statements".
I don't understand how they expect offline LLM models to work in a meaningful capacity for users.. Isn't there a single multilingual person working at Mozilla?
All of the small LLM models break down as soon as you try to do something that isn't written in English, because - surprise - they're just too small.
There would need to be a hardware breakthrough, or they would have to somehow solve the heavy cost of switching the models between pages.
Instead of useful AI stuff that is a clear improvement to accessibility, they're insistent on ham-fisting LLM solutions that no one have even asked for.
Off the top of my head, they could instead:
1. Integrate something like whisper to add automatic captions to videos or transcribe audio
2. Integrate one of the many really great text to speech models to read articles or text out loud
Maybe, but I would argue that some of these features are genuinely useful and important. Take translation, for example. It's not great to have to send off a page that potentially contains identifying content to Google, but it is the easiest way to handle the matter. Firefox uses local AI to perform a decent translation relatively quickly, and I'd like them to work on improving that capability.
Well it does say that compute is a current bottleneck, but I doubt that'll stay that way forever. There's a ton of resources going into making AI run locally, quickly. It's already gotten loads better just last year.
I detest AI on the grounds that it causes an overuse of our planet's resources as well as stealing IP and exploiting underpaid data workers.
However, if Mozilla can launch something capable that steals the thunder from all the closed source AI alternatives that might make the bubble pop finally.
Stock markets shook when Deepseek came on the scene and proved that clever coding might make up for using older hardware. The market leaders' moat suddenly didn't seem so impenetrable. In that same vein Mozilla might make a real dent by truly commodifying AI. AI stocks are highly valued currently because there's an idea that the leaders have something no one can copy.
This has the feeling of corporate feel-good PR release: its essentially
content-less AI-generated rehashing "our models are freer/more open-source"
which seems silly since they don't develop anything unlike DeepSeek/GLM/Qwen
the real open-source giants. Mozilla is a middle-man that could use open-source
agents, but it pretending to be the "gatekeeper" of "open AI".
Their key motivation is exposed in the middle of text:
"The Mozilla Data Collective is building a marketplace for data that is properly licensed, clearly sourced, and aligned with the values of the communities it comes from."
This is far away from Firefox roots, whatever corporate stewards are at helm of
mozilla now think exclusively in terms of marketplaces and "economics of data"..
Futher reading "so we’re deepening our engagement with governments and enterprises adopting sovereign, auditable AI systems. These engagements are the feedback loops that tell us where the stack breaks and where openness needs reinforcement."
Hard pass.
They've fully disowned Servo.
On the plus side that means you can donate to Servo directly, and the project actually has a decent amount of contributors now
>Now AI is becoming the new intermediary. It’s what I’ve started calling “Layer 8” — the agentic layer that mediates between you and everything else on the internet. These systems will negotiate on our behalf, filter our information, shape our recommendations, and increasingly determine how we interact with the entire digital world.
This is a sad statement. It reminds me of Wall-E. Big tech created the environmental ruins of today’s internet through perverse incentives. Now we need robots to go sift through the garbage and think for us so we don’t have to be exposed to the toxic internet.
Mozilla is not and never has been a browser company. They have always been a charity with a for profit arm that does a browser. However never has a browser been more than an after thought to any of the leadership.
Of course what the world really needs is a browser company and so we try to pretend Mozilla is that, but they are not. Support an alternative browser (I'm not aware of any though. There are browser skin companies but nobody making the hard parts of a browser)
You probably like watching ads because Firefox is only browser you will have a true ad free experience. Unfortunately Firefox is slower than chrome has less support for audio, copy pasting is broken etc. So I use both depending what I am doing.
rafterydj|1 month ago
That said, I can't really disagree with anything in this. As a developer (and socially conscious human) I want to move in the direction of openness.
giancarlostoro|1 month ago
I would love for there to be a world where Mozilla maintains Firefox and can make for product projects that provide higher value. I also have a pipe dream of one day someone like (and if they read this, and anyone who reads this will think I'm crazy) CloudFlare just buys Firefox itself from Mozilla so it can finally be funded correctly. CloudFlare has an interesting talent pool and I'm sure there's people who work with Rust / have worked with Rust who can help fund something like Firefox. Then I would like to see them create a true open foundation whose entire bottom line goes towards Firefox, not to anything else.
Free the fox from corporate shennanigans. By my own corporate shennanigans. And CF could be swapped out with any company bold enough to free the fox.
nusl|1 month ago
Yoric|1 month ago
I'm not going to claim that everything Mozilla has done is right, but the bad will of the tech crowd is a bit exhausting.
Writing this as a former Firefox contributor.
Larrikin|1 month ago
There's also the cohort of bad web developers that only test on Chrome
mmooss|1 month ago
That reverses cause and effect to a great degree. Many are very skeptical because they read everyone slamming it. It's a mob psychology.
giancarlostoro|1 month ago
rzmmm|1 month ago
TomMasz|1 month ago
culi|1 month ago
https://wpt.fyi/interop-2021
https://wpt.fyi/interop-2022
https://wpt.fyi/interop-2023
https://wpt.fyi/interop-2024
https://wpt.fyi/interop-2025
unknown|1 month ago
[deleted]
luisgvv|1 month ago
drnick1|1 month ago
Despite all the posturing about "respecting your privacy and freedom," the stock configuration of Firefox is trivially fingerprintable. At the very least, a privacy-focused browser should adopt the Tor patches and report standardized spoofed values for hardware components and disable by default all privacy invasive anti-features like WebGL. This isn't difficult to do, but illustrates the gap between empty promises and what is actually delivered.
freedomben|1 month ago
Yoric|1 month ago
If you put too much in your Telemetry/crash reports, yeah, users become fingerprintable.
On the other hand, if you return spoofed values, it means that Firefox developers cannot debug platform/hardware-specific crashes. If you disable Telemetry, improving performance becomes impossible, because you're suddenly unable to determine where your users suffer. If you remove WebGL, plenty of websites suddenly stop working, and people assume that Firefox is broken.
sfink|1 month ago
It is an uplift from Tor, and I believe Tor just enables it in their build, though it doesn't end up being quite the same. Tor is always going to be better for this.
But turning it on in the stock Firefox configuration would be suicide in terms of market share. When "I want maximal privacy" fights "I want this site to work", guess which one wins?
plagiarist|1 month ago
fwip|1 month ago
whinvik|1 month ago
However, I haven't seen anything from Mozilla in recent years that makes me trust this has a future.
bigbadfeline|1 month ago
> I haven't seen anything from Mozilla in recent years that makes me trust this has a future.
As opposed to what? Chrome? What's the future there?
The various Firefox derivatives will die a quick death if Firefox dies. The strings attached to Chrome derivatives make them pointless. So, what's left? What are we discussing here? There's no alternative, it's that simple.
On the other hand, joining the hate-fest on various forums cannot and does not help Mozilla to find a better way. One is peeved by this, another by that, go figure... I'd call it childish if it wasn't so damaging.
kwanbix|1 month ago
[deleted]
mentalgear|1 month ago
So I think what we can do is give them the benefit of the doubt and approach this with cautious optimism for now instead of just negativity.
vuggamie|1 month ago
His first communication reduced trust: "It is a privilege to lead an organization with a long history of standing up for people and building technology that puts them first."
Now let's put people first by making Firefox an AI first browser. Enzor-Demeo would have made an excellent Microsoft product manager. Too bad he didn't get the job.
NelsonMinar|1 month ago
28304283409234|1 month ago
AuthAuth|1 month ago
pmontra|1 month ago
I googled this https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1mhks3h/firefoxs_w...
Let's say we are at 100 million users. If only 1 out of 100 pay, it's 10 to 100 million dollars per year. A lot of money or a puny amount, it depends.
glenstein|1 month ago
It would feel good and I certainly wouldn't mind it, but it's much closer to a drop in the bucket than a panacea.
yogthos|1 month ago
Saying I hate AI and I’m not going to use it is really trending and makes people feel like they’re doing something meaningful, but it’s just another version of trying to vote the problem away. It doesn’t work. The real solution is to roll up the sleeves and built an a version of this technology that’s open, transparent, and community driven.
LunaSea|1 month ago
- Mozilla.ai agent platform: No link with the browser. Just a closed-source SaaS competitor to the many existing agentic platforms like LangChain / LangGraph.
- Mozilla Data Collective: It's been made clear now that sadly data licensing doesn't matter and if you use less data than your competitor, your model will be inferior.
- Real deployments: Basically getting into the public contracts and consulting grift with no priori experience. Probably banking on EU open source funding & co.
- Mozilla Ventures: Redistributing a token amount of the money they are already not making (gift from Google) to fund Open Source research.
- Newsletter
everyday7732|1 month ago
b1085436|1 month ago
Is it really possible to start training from scratch at this stage and compete with the existing models, using only ethical datasets? Hasn't it been established that without the stolen data, those models could not exist or compete?
jd172|1 month ago
whether or not it's possible to compete I guess we'll see but I am hopeful and appreciative that Mozilla is trying, as I am getting tired of big tech trying to force everyone to hand over even more unhinged amounts of data than what they're already taking from us.
brainless|1 month ago
conartist6|1 month ago
They've lost their way completely as an independent entity, and a post like this that doesn't reaaally seem to grasp that weight of that conundrum comes no closer to convincing me that they can find their way back to the light.
glenstein|1 month ago
josh-sematic|1 month ago
linuxftw|1 month ago
philipallstar|1 month ago
Is this true? I can see from here[0] that its peak was 32%, as IE was really on the back burner but before Chrome had fully risen to dominance, but I wouldn't claim that it was responsible for IE's market share drop.
[0] https://mspoweruser.com/firefox-statistics
diffeomorphism|1 month ago
Web 2.0 is around 2003 or so and chrome would not even exist for another few years. Giving Firefox/phoenix/Netscape the majority credit for the first fall of IE seems accurate.
The rise of chrome happened afterwards and by then IE also fell much deeper than 55%.
codebyaditya|1 month ago
bingemaker|1 month ago
What models is Mozilla talking about?
internet_points|1 month ago
johnea|1 month ago
I'm still bitching, years later, about thunderbird failing to update IMAP folder contents (i.e. sync with server) until I click on the folder.
While it may still reign as the "capital of the industry", there's a certain kind of technical brain damage that comes from being located in the bay area.
Let's just call it "proximity to venture capital"...
PedroBatista|1 month ago
yeah, that's where the bad news start.
They have a tendency to go from trend to trend and always a "me too, I'm here" player. Deliver first and stick with it, Mozilla's goodwill fund is long gone to be excited about "mission statements".
pcmaffey|1 month ago
marczellm|1 month ago
realberkeaslan|1 month ago
mkroman|1 month ago
All of the small LLM models break down as soon as you try to do something that isn't written in English, because - surprise - they're just too small.
There would need to be a hardware breakthrough, or they would have to somehow solve the heavy cost of switching the models between pages.
Instead of useful AI stuff that is a clear improvement to accessibility, they're insistent on ham-fisting LLM solutions that no one have even asked for.
Off the top of my head, they could instead:
1. Integrate something like whisper to add automatic captions to videos or transcribe audio
2. Integrate one of the many really great text to speech models to read articles or text out loud
capitainenemo|1 month ago
oidar|1 month ago
striking|1 month ago
fooqux|1 month ago
everyday7732|1 month ago
pjmlp|1 month ago
nilshauk|1 month ago
However, if Mozilla can launch something capable that steals the thunder from all the closed source AI alternatives that might make the bubble pop finally.
Stock markets shook when Deepseek came on the scene and proved that clever coding might make up for using older hardware. The market leaders' moat suddenly didn't seem so impenetrable. In that same vein Mozilla might make a real dent by truly commodifying AI. AI stocks are highly valued currently because there's an idea that the leaders have something no one can copy.
dieselgate|1 month ago
countWSS|1 month ago
This is far away from Firefox roots, whatever corporate stewards are at helm of mozilla now think exclusively in terms of marketplaces and "economics of data".. Futher reading "so we’re deepening our engagement with governments and enterprises adopting sovereign, auditable AI systems. These engagements are the feedback loops that tell us where the stack breaks and where openness needs reinforcement." Hard pass.
zb3|1 month ago
No, I just want Mozilla to focus on Firefox, the browser.
tomcam|1 month ago
fyrn_|1 month ago
rubyfan|1 month ago
This is a sad statement. It reminds me of Wall-E. Big tech created the environmental ruins of today’s internet through perverse incentives. Now we need robots to go sift through the garbage and think for us so we don’t have to be exposed to the toxic internet.
It feels like we have lost so much.
unknown|1 month ago
[deleted]
Lariscus|1 month ago
[deleted]
bluGill|1 month ago
Of course what the world really needs is a browser company and so we try to pretend Mozilla is that, but they are not. Support an alternative browser (I'm not aware of any though. There are browser skin companies but nobody making the hard parts of a browser)
catapart|1 month ago
Nope! Very happy to be entirely out, thanks.
maxdo|1 month ago
drnick1|1 month ago
pacman1337|1 month ago
cubefox|1 month ago