Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/leadership/mozillas-next-chapter-anthony-enzor-demeo-new-ceo/

by recvonline • 7 months ago

593 869 7 months ago

blog.mozilla.org

tensegrist• 7 months ago

i feel like there ought to be a meaningfully large market for a "trusted" company where part of the brand identity is being able to form sentences that do not include the token "ai", especially with e.g. microsoft's recent excesses in this direction, but what do i know about the alleged realities of running a tech company in $YEAR

ecshafer5• 7 months ago

It looks like they chose a Product Manager and MBA. Why can't we get a software engineer or computer scientist?

dvngnt_• 7 months ago

Wouldn't it make more sense to have them program and let a product person handle big picture ideas

lawn• 7 months ago

The track record of MBA's destroying companies says otherwise.

What Mozilla needs is a change in leadership direction, not another MBA.

abcd_f• 7 months ago

They had one. Until he made a fatal mistake of giving a tenner to the wrong people.

neom2• 7 months ago

He gave $1000 donation to support a ban on gay marriage, to be clear.

phoronixrly• 7 months ago

Translation: he had donated to ban same-sex marriage in California[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Eich#Appointment_to_CE...

jsheard• 7 months ago

But then he went on to make Yet Another Chromium Fork, so it doesn't seem like he was particularly attached to Gecko or what it stands for in the browser engine market anyway. What's to say that Mozilla wouldn't have given up the fight and pivoted to Chromium, like Opera and Edge did, if he was still in charge?

smt886• 7 months ago

Eich chose to resign due to internal and external protest in the form of petitions and resignations.

No one forced him to do anything, and Mozilla itself certainly didn't force him out.

His free speech was met with the free speech of others, and he decided it was too painful to stay in that spotlight.

How would you prefer it to have gone?

philjackson• 7 months ago

They need to build a great product as well as somehow fund the project. Seem like those credentials match the requirements.

hobofan• 7 months ago

Why do you think a software engineer or computer scientist would be more qualified?

missedthecue3• 7 months ago

This site in general has a massive hate boner for any part of a corporate structure that isn't the engineering department. Sales, admin, marketing, legal, HR, etc... all get flak from the HN community for being irredeemably idiotic wastes of space.

pndy2• 7 months ago

I'm afraid they're delegated to coding nowadays and even open source projects are run like corporations with attached "foundations" parasites where funneling out money on unrelated stuff occurs.

This piece linked is a dry marketing and nothing else, and I don't believe in a single bit this guy is saying or will ever say.

The line about AI being always a choice that user can simply turn it off: I need to go to about:config registry to turn every occurrence of it in Firefox. So there's that.

sunshine-o3• 7 months ago

Yes and he is writing like an MBA/Product Manager (or is it the AI?)

Actually he is most likely a drone. Meaning he is speaking like he believes he is the CEO of a public company talking to the shareholders, so of course he talks about how AI is changing software.

But guess what Mozilla is not a public company, there is no stock to pump and the thing it really miss is its users. Going from 30% to less than 5% market share in 15 years with a good product. Actually I am pretty sure the users who left just do not want to much AI.

But he is an MBA drone so he is just gonna play the same music as every other MBA drone.

whoisthemachine• 7 months ago

Looking at his LinkedIn profile, he seems to be the MBA type, with little to no technical experience. For the past year he's been the SVP or GM of Firefox, whatever that means. Take that as you will...

tanepiper• 7 months ago

His one technical skill is building PowerPoint decks...

Fiveplus• 7 months ago

Does anyone else feel like the "Trust" angle is the only card they have left to play? Technically, Chrome is faster on JS benchmarks. Edge has better OS integration on Windows and comes by default. Safari wins on battery life on Mac. Firefox's only unique selling point is "We aren't a massive data vampire." If they clutter the browser with AI which inherently requires data processing, often in the cloud, they dilute their only true differentiator.

alex1138• 7 months ago

It's interesting because I've heard Manifest 3 was an effort to not make extensions quite have full trust capability and isn't as odious as it sounds but it's also Google, so...

deaddodo• 7 months ago

Have you tried using Manifest V3 adblockers on Chrome? They're not nearly as capable or useful as the old ones.

transcriptase• 7 months ago

Ah Manifest 3: Will still happily allow an extension to silently transmit all of your browsing and AI chat history to data brokers to be packaged and sold to the highest bidder.

While conveniently and regrettably unavoidably nerfing ad blockers :(

For your safety of course.

perlgeek• 7 months ago

They also have the "extensions that can do real ad blocking" angle.

bamboozled3• 7 months ago

Have you tried Brave?

aleph44• 7 months ago

Yes, although they can't go all in on that because it doesn't help monetization...

WawaFin2• 7 months ago

I've been using Chrome with uBlock Origin Lite and not even once I found a case when this version of uBlock was behaving differently (as less efficient) than the "full" uBlock Origin

Maybe I'm just lucky, but even this argument is quite ... meh

freedomben• 7 months ago

Indeed, manifest v2 support alone is a killer feature that will keep me on FF as long as they support it.

It definitely helps that it's also a great (though imperfect) browser.

dig12• 7 months ago

chromium-ungoogled works perfectly fine with "extensions that can do real ad blocking" ;)

kryllic• 7 months ago

It's the only realistic alternative to a chromium-based browser if someone wants to make their own fork. I use the Zen browser, and it strips out some stuff I'm not a huge fan of in baseline Firefox. Manifest v3 not rearing its ugly head is also a huge plus, as a competent adblocker is essential these days.

CivBase2• 7 months ago

Extension (adblock) support on mobile is worth more to me than anything you just listed off.

tcauduro• 7 months ago

Looking at their strategy doc, it doesn't seem like they hear their users at all. It's riddled with AI. In fact their aspiration is "doing for AI what we did for the web." Oh boy!

https://blog.mozilla.org/wp-content/blogs.dir/278/files/2025...

4gotunameagain2• 7 months ago

I will eat my hat if Google had nothing to do with the demise of Mozilla, what an absolute disgrace.

How incompetent can they be, how out of touch with their core (and arguably only) product ?

Nobody wants AI in firefox.

fidotron• 7 months ago

As a semi Rust hater, but Firefox user, I believe Mozilla should go absolutely all-in on Rust, for a mixture of direct and indirect effects. That and/or launch an open source e-Reader development project.

No MBA type is going to be able to do anything of the sort.

nottorp3• 7 months ago

Setting aside questions like "is Rust a religion or actually useful"...

Rewrites tend to kill software projects. Even if you don't completely change the language to boot.

afavour2• 7 months ago

Mozilla (in its previous form) has long been doomed. Mobile cemented it, I think. Browsers are part of the operating system and getting users to switch from the default is an incredible uphill climb. Especially when browsers are essentially utilities, there are so few unique compelling features.

That lack of connection to tech giants is a strength in the trust angle. And I think they’re right to be thinking about AI: people are using it and there does need to be an alternative to tech giants/VC funded monsters

Will they be successful? The odds are stacked against them. But if they’re not going to even try then what purpose will they serve any more?

aleph44• 7 months ago

Exactly.

Unfortunately, we live in a time when anti-trust regulations mean nothing.

The fact that it's difficult to separate Chrome from Android dooms most competitors, which is bad for everyone.

glenstein24• 7 months ago

Right. The myth that keeps getting confidently repeated in HN comment sections is that Mozilla supposedly lost market share due to a series of strategic missteps. But it basically was about the pivot to mobile, and the monopoly lock-in of Google. Actually think one fantastic remedy for Google's search monopoly might be allowing the use of alternative browsers on Android via a pop-up rather than preloading and privileging Chrome. Because browsers and mobile are part of the strategy of creating a path dependency tied to Google search.

But to your point, I think the simple reality is that LLMs are increasingly taking the place of search and so having all your funding based on search licensing might be risky when it's at least possible that we're going to be in a new paradigm sooner than later.

I honestly think AI in the browser right now is generally very half-baked and doesn't have any well thought out applications, and raises all kinds of trust issues. I can think of good applications (eg browse the Kindle unlimited store for critically acclaimed hard sci-fi books), but there might be better ones that I'm not thinking of. It just might make sense to be involved so you went caught flat-footed by some new application that quickly progresses into something people expect. And of course because HN commenters are famously self-contradictory in response to literally everything Mozilla does, it's a damned if they do damned if they don't situation: if they load AI into the browser it's pointless feature bloat. If they don't then they were sitting on their thumbs while the world moved on when they should have been reinventing themselves and finding new paths to revenue.

SoftTalker4• 7 months ago

IDK. I tried Orion on iOS and within five minutes I knew I was never going back to Safari.

Zak3• 7 months ago

It's interesting that most people on Windows PCs switch to Chrome when Edge is the default. It was obvious why people switched from IE6 to Firefox and later from IE7 to Chrome; IE was terrible; Firefox was better; Chrome was better still. Edge is not obsolete, unstable, or a security nightmare the way IE was.

Chrome even has significant user share on Mac OS; the numbers I'm finding are around 40%.

It's hard to guess whether people are much less inclined to switch browsers on mobile than on desktop, or if they just like Chrome. Either way, the odds are against anyone who tries to compete with it.

aleph44• 7 months ago

Well, that's kind of their whole point-- can AI be done in a way that guards privacy. It's not impossible even with cloud processing.

And "Trust" should be a big deal-- unfortunately most people don't care and Chrome has a much bigger marketing budget (and monopoly on Android).

112233• 7 months ago

Confidential compute (intel, amd and nvidia) already is a thing and has nothing to do with mozilla. Without such drastic measures, no, it IS impossible with regular cloud processing.

mikkupikku2• 7 months ago

What does "faster JS" actually get me? Youtube is probably the most heavy site I and I think most people use, I'm certainly not trying to do heavy scientific computation in my browser, so what difference does it really make?

Anyway, Firefox's killer feature is still extensions, despite everything that's happened on that front. There's nothing like Tree Style Tabs for Chrome (not usably implemented anyway) and while I think maybe Brave has it, Firefox has uMatrix which is better than anything Brave uses (Brave may share lists or even code with that, but the uMatrix UI is where its at.)

mossTechnician3• 7 months ago

"Trust" is just community goodwill, and Mozilla has steadily been chipping away at that goodwill by pivoting to AI and ad businesses, and occasionally implying that it's the community that wants things like AI, and it's the community's fault for misunderstanding their poorly written license agreement.

ksec3• 7 months ago

Technically.....

Since its birth, Firefox is still the only browser that manage multiple ( hundreds or in some cases, thousands! [1] ) tabs better than any browser. And in my view in the past 12 - 24 months Firefox has managed to be as fast as chrome. While Chrome also improved on its multiple Tab browsing experience.

Safari.... I dont know why this battery life argument keeps coming up because it is not the case. It hasn't been so for at least 5 - 6 years.

Mozilla could have played the trust angle when they have the good will and money. They could have invested into SaaS that provides better revenue generations other than getting it from Google. They could also have partnered with Wikipedia before they got rotten. But now I am not even sure if they still have the "trust" card anymore. Gekco is still hard to be embedded, XULRunner could have been Electron. They will need to get into survival mode and think about what is next.

[1] https://www.tomshardware.com/software/mozilla-firefox/firefo...

dijit• 7 months ago

Safari.... I dont know why this battery life argument keeps coming up because it is not the case. It hasn't been so for at least 5 - 6 years.

I mean, observably, this is still the case.

Now, luckily the M-series laptops have such insane battery life that it barely matters compared to before... but I can still observe about an hour of battery life difference between Safari and Chrome on an M2 Macbook Air (running Sequoia). Now, my battery life is still in the region of 7.5 hours, so even if it's a large difference it's not impacting my workday yet (though the battery is at 90% max design capacity from wear).

I know this, because there are days where I only use chrome, and days where I only use Safari, and I do roughly the same work on each of those days.

exogen2• 7 months ago

No doubt the browsers are constantly leapfrogging each other, so this isn't always the case. But, anecdotally: switching from Chrome to Safari actually felt like I got a new computer. The difference was that apparent.

yardie• 7 months ago

Safari.... I dont know why this battery life argument keeps coming up because it is not the case. It hasn't been so for at least 5 - 6 years.

I can assure you, this is still true. I use Chrome when plugged in at my desk and Safari for everything else on the go. Chrome still isn't great on memory or battery life.

pca006132• 7 months ago

I remember people saying that chromium is better at sandboxing than firefox, so more secure.

NitpickLawyer• 7 months ago

Safari.... I dont know why this battery life argument keeps coming up because it is not the case. It hasn't been so for at least 5 - 6 years.

Uhh, not my experience. I default any video watching longer than a short clip to safari. It is still the best browser for video IME.

dabockster25• 7 months ago

I think Brave has the potential to be the next Firefox if they can run their company right.

17186274402• 7 months ago

They are still the only browser I know, which has actual useful chrome like changing the stylesheet, is CUA compliant and behaves and feel like a native GTK+ app (now-a-days only after restoring the OS window bar and enabling the menubar).

They also have useful keyboard behaviour and provide both a search and a URL bar, which makes it effortless to search locally and perform additional refinery searches while hunting down something, because you can change the search term without returning to the search website. Searching via the search engines portal is also often slower than via the search bar on crappy connections. Their search provider integration is also great (not sure how other browsers are in this regard) which makes opening a Wikipedia or MDN page about a specific topic a single action, without needing to look at a search result list.

There Profile Manager is also a breeze (not the new crap), it allows to open any URL in any Profile by clicking on any link in another program.

The extension system and the advanced configuration is also quite good.

eviks3• 7 months ago

They also have useful keyboard behaviour

Like not being able to change the default shortcuts?

fyrn_• 7 months ago

Fitefox has faster WASM and WebGPU at least. Kind of doesn't matter since Chrome has bloated the standard so much that many websites only work in chrome

glenstein24• 7 months ago

And, a different way of stating the same thing, they're actually way ahead of everybody in shipping production Rust code in the browser, which is a big part of the efficiency gains in recent years.

MaxBarraclough• 7 months ago

faster WASM and WebGPU

Regarding WASM at least, it seems to depend. https://arewefastyet.com/

unethical_ban• 7 months ago

Firefox's only unique selling point is "We aren't a massive data vampire."

That's a big selling point. Along with "still allows ad-blocking extensions".

Besides being able to turn off all online AI features, and the fact that forks like Librewolf will inevitably strip it out, I am stunned by how HN readers think "Translate this for me immediately and accurately" and related functions are not desirable to the average person.

hosteur3• 7 months ago

Firefox is the only browser that actually blocks all ads effectively using ublock origin. Even youtube, etc.

munificent• 7 months ago

I find that any performance benefits Chrome and Safari have are more than offset by the performance benefits Firefox gets by being massively better at blocking ads and the huge amount of JS and tracking garbage that comes with them.

Firefox always feels snappier to me, and I think most of that comes from less time downloading a bunch of ad shit I don't want anyway.

lelanthran4• 7 months ago

Technically, Chrome is faster on JS benchmarks.

I'm not browsing benchmarks :-/

When I do then chrome will have an advantage.

Meanwhile, in the real world, a JS engine can be half the speed of the Chrome one and the browser can still be faster, because blocking ads is what gives you the biggest speed up.

All the performance advantages in the world fail to matter if you're still loading ads.

g947o• 7 months ago

On my Android phone, Chrome opens web pages noticeably (and consistently) faster than Firefox. And I wasn't using a stopwatch. I am literally making a sacrifice to use Firefox.

robinhood2• 7 months ago

To me, Firefox has way better dev tools than Chrome. I don't even mention Safari here - who can stand their horrible dev tools? Firefox has a fantastic add on marketplace which competes with Chrome's. Firefox without too many addons actually do not drain battery life on MacOS. Firefox has "native" profile management with real separation of cookies. JS benchmarks provide no value to me, since I try to avoid heavy-JS web apps anyway.

I don't know. As a dev and user, Firefox wins on every single aspect for me. I understand that every user is different. But I'm glad it exists.

iberator• 7 months ago

Why do you need THAT fast js for? Firefox is amazing speed even if second in the benchmarks.

t234143212• 7 months ago

Yes, there is no more: plugins, XBL, original extensions, and XSLT is removed not from Chrome but from the web standards !

Anything left ?

dabockster25• 7 months ago

Firefox's only unique selling point is "We aren't a massive data vampire."

The fact that they haven't moved away from apparently needing 90%+ of their money to come from Google, after more than a decade of that being an issue, means that claim is a moot point. This "AI first" move was probably heavily influenced by Google behind the scenes too.

Klonoar• 7 months ago

They also still lack significant security improvements that Chrome has.

AnonC4• 7 months ago

If they clutter the browser with AI which inherently requires data processing, often in the cloud

Where are you getting the “often in the cloud” from? So far Firefox has some local models for certain features. Using a specific cloud based AI is a conscious decision by the user within the sidebar.

runiq• 7 months ago

It is the angle that is important to ME, a European user. I would happily throw moneydollars at the browser project but the Mozilla suits won't allow me to, for whatever-the-fuck reason.

nefasti• 7 months ago

What product or market mozilla still relevant? Of all the sites I manage, or companies I worked with in the last 5 years mozilla browsers were less than 1% of the userbase.

spacechild12• 7 months ago

In Germany and France Mozilla has about the same market share as Edge, in Austria it's even more. Yes, Mozilla makes some dumb decision, but I think the bigger problem is that computer literacy has declined overall. Most people don't even realize they have a choice. Things like ad-blockers and privacy should be taught in schools.

rjh29• 7 months ago

1% of all internet users is an absolutely gigantic user base.

sam_goody2• 7 months ago

Good for them.

Currently they spend millions of dollars (that mostly come from people wanting to support their browser) on huge salaries and projects that have nothing to do with their browser. At the same time they keep on taking steps to alienate those that are donating or using their products.

The bar for success is pretty low - stop wasting all them bucks, and stop alienating your users.

If you could do that, there is plenty of next steps.

Good luck

wodenokoto• 7 months ago

No, their millions of dollars dont come mostly from people wanting to support their browser.

It comes from search ads on google.com

sam_goody2• 7 months ago

I agree that most of their money comes from Google (at least for now).

But when you load their home page (https://www.mozillafoundation.org), the first thing you are greeted with is a banner that says they have raised over $6M in their last campaign alone.

So, it seems that millions are being donated by users.

The claim that most of those users want it to go to their browser is not supported or refuted by that page, but I have read a detailed breakdown of all their donations and attempts to guess what people really think they are donating for, and it matched my original statement - though I haven't got the time to search now, what do _you_ think people are donating for?

colechristensen• 7 months ago

I don't trust Mozilla. I don't trust them with my donation money. I don't trust their software any more than other browser vendors.

"Third: Firefox will grow from a browser into a broader ecosystem of trusted software. Firefox will remain our anchor. It will evolve into a modern AI browser and support a portfolio of new and trusted software additions."

Yeah, no. Just make a browser that doesn't suck. Mozilla has been wasting a ton of money, lost almost all of their market share, and have been focusing on making new products nobody wants for a VERY long time and this looks to continue.

henning• 7 months ago

Can't imagine a worse angle for regaining trust than doubling down on AI slop.

catapart2• 7 months ago

AI should always be a choice — something people can easily turn off.

Welp. Starting off on the wrong foot. "AI should always be a choice - something people can easily opt in to".

Can't teach what there's profit in not learning, etc. Oh well.

summermusic• 7 months ago

AI should always be a choice — something people can easily turn off.

Literally 5 sentences later:

[Firefox] will evolve into a modern AI browser…

catapart2• 7 months ago

Neat! I didn't make it that far. Nice thing about red flags is, there's no value in continuing after you see them. Turns out, the thing the red flag made me accuse them of was their stated goal. Case in point!

TiredOfLife3• 7 months ago

Same with tabs, sandboxing or pop-up blocking. All of the features should be opt-in.

ishtanbul• 7 months ago

What browser should I use then? I quit chrome in a futile attempt to be tracked less. They killed support for my adblocker.

neom2• 7 months ago

fwiw I've been running brave for the past 5 years and it seems fine, they put a bunch of weird shit in it you need to turn off, but otherwise it...browses the internet well?

suprjami5• 7 months ago

Librewolf

zamalek• 7 months ago

Would any of these soft forks survive without Mozilla working on Firefox?

cpburns20098• 7 months ago

Brave. It's a Chromium fork with a built-in ad blocker that's equivalent to uBlock Origin. It works great on Android too.

ares6232• 7 months ago

It is sad that the choice is either an AI browser or a Blockchain browser

alberth• 7 months ago

Dumb question: who’s Firefox target user?

Chrome is able to capture the mass consumer market, due to Google’s dark pattern to nag you to install Chrome anytime you’re on a Google property.

Edge target enterprise Fortune 500 user, who is required to use Microsoft/Office 365 at work (and its deep security permission ties to SharePoint).

Safari has Mac/iOS audience via being the default on those platform (and deep platform integration).

Brave (based on Chromium), and LibreWolf (based on Firefox) has even carved out those user who value privacy.

---

What’s Firefox target user?

Long ago, Firefox was the better IE, and it had great plugins for web developers. But that was before Chrome existed and Google capturing the mass market. And the developers needed to follow its users.

So what target user is left for a Firefox?

Note: not trolling. I loved Firefox. I just don’t genuine understand who it’s for anymore.

suprjami5• 7 months ago

Ostensibly nerds. Linux users and maybe Mac users. Technical people who understand more about the software industry than all Mozilla Corp management since Brendan.

It's difficult to monetize us when the product is a zero dollar intangible, especially when trust has been eroded such that we've all fled to Librewolf like you said.

It's difficult to monetize normies when they don't use the software due to years of continuous mismanagement.

I think giving Mozilla a new CEO is like assigning a new captain to the Titanic. I will be surprised if this company still exists by 2030.

0x3f4• 7 months ago

Yes, I would literally pay a nominal fee for Firefox if I were confident in the org's direction. As things stand though, the trust is gone as you said.

glenstein24• 7 months ago

Right and to your point, there's not a whole lot of precedent for browsers successfully funding themselves when the browser itself is the primary product.

Opera was the lightweight high performance extension rich, diversely funded, portable, adapted to niche hardware, early to mobile browser practically built from the dreams of niche users who want customization and privacy. They're a perfect natural experiment for what it looks like to get most, if not all decisions right in terms of both of features users want, as well as creative attempts to diversify revenue. But unfortunately, by the same token also the perfect refutation of the fantasy that making the right decisions means you have a path to revenue. If that was how it worked, Opera would be a trillion dollar company right now.

But it didn't work because the economics of web browsers basically doesn't exist. You have to be a trillion dollar company already, and dominate distribution of a given platform and force preload your browser.

Browsers are practically full scale operating systems these days with tens of millions of lines of code, distribued for free. Donations don't work, paying for the browser doesn't work. If it did, Opera (the og Opera, not the new ownership they got sold to) would still be here.

account4225• 7 months ago

Mozilla is (or at least started as) a nonprofit. Even corporation is only there to fulfill the nonprofit goals. They shouldn't even be thinking about monetization they should be thinking about getting donations and securing grants.

DamnInteresting• 7 months ago

Dumb question: who’s Firefox target user?

These days, it seems to be people who:

* Don't want to be using a browser owned by an ethically dubious corporation

* Want a fully functional ad blocker

* Prefer vertical tabs

Bolwin• 7 months ago

Mind you, you can get all that and more in a browser like vivaldi. And that market is.. small. Vivaldi doesn't have to develop a browser engine

whynotmaybe• 7 months ago

Want a fully functional ad blocker

My main reason but also

* want to ensure competition because I'm sure that once it's chromium all the way, we're gonna have a bad time.

charcircuit4• 7 months ago

Brave already has an adblocker built into the browser itself and supports vertical tabs.

akagusu• 7 months ago

The problem is the list keeps shrinking since now Mozilla Corp is an ethically dubious corporation.

someNameIG3• 7 months ago

Want a fully functional ad blocker

Is this even the case? UBO has ~10 million users going by the extension store, Firefox has over 150 million users.

So less than 10% of Firefox installs also have UBO.

account4225• 7 months ago

* But don't really care about privacy that much

TiredOfLife3• 7 months ago

Dumb question: who’s Firefox target user?

Partly me. It's the only browser where I can disable AV1 support to work around broken HW acceleration on Steam Deck.

Also tab hoarders. (I migrated to Chrome 3 years ago to try and get rid of my tab hoarding)

sfink9• 7 months ago

I've been using Firefox for a long time, longer than it's had that name, and it used to be excellent for my tab hoarding habits. Specifically, it could handle a large number of tabs, and every couple of months it would crash and lose all of them. I would have to start over from scratch, with an amazing sense of catharsis and freedom, and I never had to make the decision on my own that I would never be able to make.

Now, it's no better than the others. I'm at 1919 tabs right now, and it hasn't lost any for many years. It's rock solid, it's good at unloading the tabs so I don't even need to rely on non-tab-losing crash/restarts to speed things up, and it doesn't even burn enough memory on them to force me to reconsider my ways.

This is a perfect example of how Mozilla's mismanagement has driven Firefox into the ground. Bring back involuntary tab bankruptcy and spacebar heating!

lionkor4• 7 months ago

Firefox users are people who would use LibreWolf, but installed it, tried it, saw it doesn't have dark mode, and figured that Firefox was good enough after all.

protoster3• 7 months ago

I use Firefox because I don't want to use a browser provided by an advertising company e.g. Chrome.

__alexs4• 7 months ago

Just one that is entirely funded by an advertising company?

283042834092342• 7 months ago

Yet ... with firefox that is exactly what you are using. Except there's a proxy in the middle (Mozilla).

glenstein24• 7 months ago

Me! I want the best thing that's not Google or Chromium. Right now that's Firefox. Maybe someday it will be Ladybird.

thesuitonym9• 7 months ago

What’s Firefox target user?

It seems as if you ask Mozilla, the answer would be "Not current Firefox users."

I really don't know the answer to this question, and I don't know if Mozilla has defined it internally, which probably leads to a lot of the problems that the browser is facing. Is it the privacy focused individual? They seem to be working very hard against that. Is it the ad-sensitive user? Maybe, but they're not doing a lot to win that crowd over.

It kind of feels like Firefox is not targeted at anyone in particular. But long gone are the days when you can just be an alternative browser.

Maybe the target user is someone who wants to use Firefox, regardless of what that means.

Zak3• 7 months ago

It seems to me Android users who want to block ads are a strong target market. Desktop Chrome has extensions and despite the nerf, it has adblockers that mostly work; Android Chrome doesn't have extensions.

A built in adblocker would probably help Firefox attract those users, but might destroy their Google revenue stream.

cyberrock• 7 months ago

I think the problem with that is that Firefox Android with uBO still feels like it has worse First Contentful Paint than Chrome Android. Even on a high-end phone the difference can feel ridiculous; sites render after 1-2s on Chrome but sometimes I can count up to 5 with FF.

The benefits of having uBO might matter more to you and me, but let's not forget that faster rendering was arguably the main reason Chrome Desktop got popular 20 years ago, which caused Firefox to rewrite its engine 2 (3?) times since then to catch up. 20 years later this company still hasn't learned with Android.

mmooss12• 7 months ago

It's an island of trust in an ocean of predatory capitalism.

account4225• 7 months ago

It was that once.

lukewrites• 7 months ago

Somehow its target user group includes my father, who is 90 years old. As far as I can recall, we got him using Firefox years ago and he became a committed user.

I wish more browsers would target seniors. Accessibility and usability is universally a nightmare.

dabockster25• 7 months ago

I just don’t genuine understand who it’s for anymore.

It still gets bundled a TON on Linux. So if you use Linux a lot, Firefox gets into your muscle memory.

But honestly, that bundling is likely just momentum from the 2010s. Better tech exists now.

J_Shelby_J• 7 months ago

Non-laptop users.

throw7• 7 months ago

"Trust" and "AI" are mutually exclusive. Not really impressed with this guy. My guess is the board vetted this guy to be more politically correct than anything else.

pluc• 7 months ago

AI should always be a choice — something people can easily turn off.

One sentence later:

It will evolve into a modern AI browser

One more sentence later:

In the next three years, that means investing in AI that reflects the Mozilla Manifesto

I mean if you wanted to concretely see how much ignoring their users is in their DNA.

What a daring approach. Truly worth the millions he's gonna earn.

suprjami5• 7 months ago

You really only need to make $2M before you can live off the interest forever. That's the goal of these people imo.

whywhywhywhy2• 7 months ago

The mozilla exec salaries are way higher than that.

1970-01-01• 7 months ago

The only answer is for them to go back to "plan A" and do their own things. Stop copying Chrome. Stop looking at Safari and Edge. Stop the rapid release nonsense. Go back to the fundamentals of speed, security, and stability on desktops and leave the rest to plugins. Once desktop is back on track, they should begin fixing mobile. When both are great, do nothing else except bugfix and performance fixes. We want this and nothing more.

miki_oomiri2• 7 months ago

If I were the CEO, I would:

- focus 100% on Firefox Desktop & Mobile - just a fast solid minimalist browser (no AI, no BS) - other features should be addons - privacy centric - builtin, first-class, adblocker - run on donations - partner with Kagi - layoff 80% of the non-tech employees

I worked for them for many years, I guarantee you that Mozilla will be fine without all the non-sense people, just put engineers in charge.

quchen• 7 months ago

To expand on Firefox mobile: if you haven’t tried it, give it a shot. uBlock Origin works just like on desktop. I have seen maybe five ads on my phone browser (including Youtube!) since buying it in 2019.

spacechild12• 7 months ago

Yes! I can confirm it works just like on desktop. I'm shocked when I have to use other people's phones. How do they put up with all these ads?

lionkor4• 7 months ago

The only issue is that Firefox on mobile is visibly breaking a couple of sites every now and then; if you can put up with that for no ads (I can), then its great.

josefresco• 7 months ago

Can I get details on ad blocking in Firefox on iOS? I have an ad blocker which works well in Safari but not Firefox. What am I missing?

BoredPositron3• 7 months ago

...on android.

cpburns20098• 7 months ago

My only complaint about Firefox on Android is it's slow even with ad blocking. Chrome is noticeably faster. Brave gives you the best of both worlds: speed and ad blocking.

mgbmtl2• 7 months ago

Donations only get you so far. Take a mid-sized project, that needs $500k per year (a few devs, very modestly paid, zero expenses). It's a lot of money. It requires a huge user base. Say you have 500k users, and 5% donate $25 per year (I'm optimistic). And that's just $500k US, a few devs, zero expenses. A project that size probably has audit requirements, hosting costs, accounting, legal, trademarks, etc.

I see finances for a few free software projects, and many of them really struggle to get donations year after year, in a way that helps make the project predictable and sustainable.

For the US, people want you to be a 501c3, and then you need a EU equivalent. Canadians are unlikely to give to a US org (especially these days), but the market is too small to setup a local charity. So you need partners. All that has many compliance requirements and paperwork, so you need non-tech employees for the fundraising and accounting.

Eventually your big donors start blackmailing the project if you don't do what they want, and often their interests are not aligned with most users. You need various income sources.

zihotki• 7 months ago

With 1.3b in reserves, it's enough for funding development for many years to come if they fire most of management and close irrelevant to the browser things.

account4225• 7 months ago

Oh no a nonprofit has to do nonprofit things. Can't be done, I tell you. Impossible.

hamdingers6• 7 months ago

Kagi already has their own WebKit based browser, not sure they'd be interested in that partnership.

thesuitonym9• 7 months ago

I don't know that a partnership with Kagi is the move, as great as the two work for me. The last thing you want users to see when starting up a new browser is a paywall. It would be rad to see Firefox treat Kagi as a first-class citizen, but I think a true partnership would be detrimental to both.

Agree with you on everything else, though.

pndy2• 7 months ago

Frankly, looking at the shape of Firefox I don't think that Mozilla cares for it at all - they just hold the brand because it's really well-established.

What would be the best solution today is to convince all these Firefox spinoff projects into combining forces and fully forking Firefox away from Mozilla, and don't look back. But seeing what happens around, how various projects - even the smallest ones are being lead, the moods in communities, I highly doubt that's actually possible.

robinhood2• 7 months ago

No. Kagi uses Google results behind the scenes. Partner with Duckduckgo, yes. Or others. But please stop fueling Google, even indirectly.

account4225• 7 months ago

DDG uses Bing instead, that's not really any better. Ideally a Browser should not partner with any websites. It's always been a deal with the devil even when Google was not as evil.

broadsidepicnic• 7 months ago

Good, agreed. Let's just hope Anthony will read this.

Also, speaking of trust, return the "never sell your data" to the FAQ.

mmooss12• 7 months ago

Mozilla will be fine without all the non-sense people, just put engineers in charge.

That's always said by the engineers and never seems more than the obvious egocentric bias: What I do is important, everyone and everythying else is pointless.

miki_oomiri2• 7 months ago

Yep. I’ll die on the hill. Engineer and designers. That’s all we really need.

We started with a very very small team and did all the heavy lifting. Then they started adding PM, marketing, market people, HR, …

We were striving when we were not drowning in meetings, KPIs, management, emails, …

matheusmoreira• 7 months ago

I guarantee you that Mozilla will be fine without all the non-sense people
just put engineers in charge

I would like that but is that even possible? Look at Wikipedia. Look at schools. Once an organization develops a bad case of fat "administrator" class, can it be cured or is it terminal?

I don't want to get my hopes up for nothing.

mgbmtl2• 7 months ago

I for one, am grateful to Mozilla for still being around, pushing for an open web.

Their documentation is excellent, the improvements and roadmap for Thunderbird made me finally adopt it, and I appreciate their privacy-friendlier translation services. uBO works great in Firefox, and I can't stand using a browser without its full features.

About MBA types: the free software project I work for has an MBA type, which I initially resented as being an outsider. However, they manage the finances, think about team and project growth long-term (with heavy financial consequences), and ignore the daily technical debates (which are left to the lead devs), and listen to users, big and small. Some loud users like to complain that we don't listen to them, and sometimes we kick them out, because we do listen to users.

I don't know much about Mozilla internals, if I am to judge from the results: Mozilla is still here, despite everyone saying for 10+ years that they are going to die. They are still competitive. They are still holding big tech accountable, despite having a fraction of their power. I can imagine that they make a lot of people here very uncomfortable.

ByThyGrace• 7 months ago

despite everyone saying for 10+ years that they are going to die.

What many people have been saying in my experience is pretty much the opposite: that Mozilla isn't going anywhere because Google wants them (needs them) to be around. That it's their antitrust Trojan horse.

AuthAuth• 7 months ago

They dont need an anti trust trojan horse the US gov has 0 intention of enforcing anti trust.

zetanor• 7 months ago

Aspiration: doing for AI what we did for the web.
Strength: $1.3B in reserves + diverse operating models (product, deep tech, venture, philanthropy) make Mozilla unusually free to bet long-term.
Strategy: Pillar 1: AI. Pillar 2: AI. Pillar 3: AI.

Oh yes.

suprjami5• 7 months ago

You want "Trust"?

Cut executive pay 75% back to what Brendan was getting paid, and invest that money in the company instead of lining your own pockets.

Ditch the AI crap that nobody wants or needs and focus on making a good browser and email application, and advertising them to increase user count.

Anything less than this is not trustworthy, it's just another lecherous MBA who is hastening the death of Mozilla.

pjmlp2• 7 months ago

Well good luck with those 3%, assuming that incrementing market share is actually the main goal for the new CEO.

bachmeier• 7 months ago

Oh, let's see who's going to be the leader of the organization that's going to save privacy on the internet. Bet he has a track record of valuing free information and user privacy.

Wait, just like the last CEO, the only way to find out anything about him is a LinkedIn page. I'd have to create an account, log in, and consent to letting them collect and do anything they want with my information.

Apparently Mozilla doesn't have the technical capability of displaying an html web page that doesn't require a login and surrendering to data collection in order to view. Now try to find information about Satya Nadella without giving up your privacy.

ekr____• 7 months ago

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/leadership/#anthony-enzo...

account4225• 7 months ago

Is he even real? Probably just bad filters but that picture looks almost AI generated.

mnls• 7 months ago

Firefox exists as long as uBlock exists. It’s a niche product and the only (thin) argument about using it is “don’t let Google become a monopoly" (the very same company that keeps Mozilla alive). Its terrible management decisions, its questionable telemetry and at the end of the day, its performance are the reasons why it will never catch up and it will never get new users.

ChrisArchitect• 7 months ago

Verge interview with some comments about AI:

https://www.theverge.com/tech/845216/mozilla-ceo-anthony-enz... (https://archive.ph/li0ig)

netdevphoenix3• 7 months ago

I love Mozilla but this feels like marketing imo.

From the article: "AI should always be a choice — something people can easily turn off" and "Firefox will remain our anchor. It will evolve into a modern AI browser". I highly doubt you will be able to turn of the transformer tech features in an AI browser imo. And they won't make a separate browser for this.

This really feels like the beginning of the end for Mozilla, sadly.

Are there any true alternatives (not dependent on financing or any engines from third parties) to Google, if you wish to use the web in 2025?

idiotsecant2• 7 months ago

I'm excited about what Kagi is doing:

https://orionbrowser.com/

I have no illusions that they will turn into google the first chance they get, all companies do. But for now they seem pretty good.

rrradical2• 7 months ago

I tried Orion about a year ago. I tried using the profile sandboxing. Logging into my google account in one profile also logged me in in another profile.

I can definitely excuse some bugs (there were crashes for example that I didn’t overly mind; I understand I was using prerelease software). But something like account containers should be built fundamentally to disallow any data sharing. If data sharing is a bug, and not fundamentally disallowed by the architecture, then it’s going to happen again later.

So for that reason I’m not bullish on orion.

baggachipz2• 7 months ago

Not sure why you're getting downvoted. Orion has matured as a browser and just hit 1.0. It's mac- and ios-only for now, but linux and windows ports are in the works. It has ad-blocking out of the box and has zero telemetry. I use it every day.

wyre2• 7 months ago

Google is what it is because of advertising. Kagi's whole raison d'etre is to have a search engine without advertising.

this_user• 7 months ago

What even is an "AI browser"? It's a browser, it's mainly supposed to render web pages / web apps. There is no obvious reason why it would need any AI features.

TheBigSalad• 7 months ago

This is the equivalent of Blockbuster rejecting Netflix.

christkv• 7 months ago

A bored LLM that will constantly hit reload on hackernews hoping to see something new.

high_na_euv3• 7 months ago

Translation?

Image search?

Live captions?

Dubbing?

Summary?

Rewrite text better?

jmiskovic6• 7 months ago

A browser with current definition obviously doesn't "need" AI. And we also know all too well how it's going to turn out - they will both use the AI to push ads onto us and also collect and sell our personal data.

However, a strong locally-executed AI would have potential to vastly improve our experience of web! So much work is done in browsers could be enhanced or automated with custom agents. You'd no longer need any browser extensions (which are privacy nightmare when the ownership secretly changes hands). Your agents could browse local shops for personalized gifts or discounts, you could set up very complex watches on classified ads. You could work around any lacking features of any website or a combination of several websites, to get exactly what you seek and to filter out anything that is noise to you. You would be able to seamlessly communicate with the Polish internet subculture, or with Gen Alpha, all without feeling the physical pain. With an AGI-level AI maybe even the Reddit could be made usable again.

Of course this is all assuming that the web doesn't adapt to become even more closed and hostile.

CamperBob22• 7 months ago

It is really incredibly nice to be able to highlight a passage, right click on it, and select "Summarize" or "Explain this." That's all FireFox does at the moment. It's an option on the right-click menu. You can ignore it. If nobody told you the evil AI thingy was there, you would probably never notice it.

stronglikedan• 7 months ago

Comet, for one

AnonC4• 7 months ago

Technically, a browser is a “user agent”, and it could be argued that some AI features (with privacy) can help in being a better user agent.

estimator72922• 7 months ago

If someone tries to sell you an AI browser, tell them I've got some pictures of apes to sell

rvz3• 7 months ago

This really feels like the beginning of the end for Mozilla, sadly.

The moment Mozilla failed to stop being dependent on Google's money whilst being true to their own mission in being a 'privacy first browser' it already was the end and the damage in trust was done.

In 2007, the CEO at the time said they could live without Google's money - Now, their entire survival was tied to Google funding them [0] and got rewarded for failure whilst laying off hundreds of engineers working on Firefox.

Other than the change in leadership after 17 years of mis-direction, the financial situation has still not changed.

Do you still trust them now?

Are there any true alternatives (not dependent on financing or any engines from third parties) to Google, if you wish to use the web in 2025?

After thinking about it, the only viable browser that is not funded by Google (Firefox 75%, Safari (>20%) and Chrome) is Ladybird. [1]

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20120105090543/https://www.compu...

[1] https://ladybird.org/

rdm_blackhole5• 7 months ago

The moment Mozilla failed to stop being dependent on Google's money whilst being true to their own mission in being a 'privacy first browser' it already was the end and the damage in trust was done.

I understand your position but what is the alternative funding source that could keep a company making a free browser running?

Apple funds Safari's development but it's basically a side project for them, Google funds Chrome's development as side project to their ad business, Edge is the same for Microsoft.

Obviously we don't want Firefox to become ad-supported so that leaves either donations which to be honest does not work (see all the OS projects that ask for donations when you install NPM packages for reference) or they need to start charging money (we know how well that worked out for Netscape) or finally find another corporate sponsor willing to shove billions of dollars each year into a product that will not improve their bottom line.

I am all for alternatives and I agree with you that something needs to change but the real question is how?

Maybe I am presumptuous in this assumption but I am pretty sure that if Mozilla had another palatable solution on the table, they would have probably implemented it by now.

After thinking about it, the only viable browser that is not funded by Google (Firefox 75%, Safari (>20%) and Chrome) is Ladybird.

Ladybird is sponsored by many big companies as well. What makes you think that somehow their fate will be any different than Firefox? Do you believe that Shopify for example is more altruistic than Google and therefore should be trusted more?

I personally don't.

In my opinion the problem is the expectation that things should be free always on the internet and we can thank Google and Facebook for that. Most people these days who are not in the tech world simply have no idea how many hours and how much money it takes to create something, having it used by people and iterating on it day in day out until it is in a good shape and can be used by the general public.

Therefore besides a small cohort of users in tech (like Kagi's customers for example who understand that a good search engine is not free), the vast majority of people will not accept to have to pay for a browser. Which brings us back to the question I asked above.

Who will fund this supposedly free for all browser that does not track you, that does not show you any ads, that does not incorporate AI features, that does not try to up-sell you or scam you? From my vantage point it's not like there are 100s of solutions to get out of this conundrum.

glenstein24• 7 months ago

In 2007, the CEO at the time said they could live without Google's money

Can you say more about where that quote came from? I'm seeing it as being from 2015.

https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/firefox-make...

JoshTriplett• 7 months ago

Are there any true alternatives (not dependent on financing or any engines from third parties)

Servo is still a work in progress, but their current positions give a great deal of hope.

TehCorwiz• 7 months ago

This is why I'm hopeful that at least one of Ladybird, Flow, and Servo emerge as a viable alternative to the current crop.

atlintots• 7 months ago

I recently learned of Flow, and I don't understand why people group it together with Ladybird and Servo, which are both developing the browser engine from scratch mostly, while Flow seems to be based on Chromium. Is Flow doing anything different compared to the numerous other Chromium-based browsers? Genuinely curious.

nticompass• 7 months ago

This is why I've been using Firefox forks like Zen or LibreWolf. These forks will disable/strip out the AI stuff, so I never have to see it.

FuriouslyAdrift• 7 months ago

Palemoon still exists...

vpShane2• 7 months ago

LibreWolf ftw, I switched to it, installed my extensions and am not looking back. Would be nice to have a mobile Firefox(LibreWolf) with all extensions, I should go look around F Droid again.

in ff if you're reading this go to about:config and type privacy - why these aren't immediately obvious in the Settings is beyond me

trentnix• 7 months ago

The beginning of the end was getting rid Brendan Eich for wrongthink. This is the middle of the end.

bigyabai2• 7 months ago

Having seen what Brave became, I'm extremely happy that Eich wasn't allowed to bring his "vision" to my favorite browser.

coryrc• 7 months ago

He resigned April 3, 2014 after two weeks in the role.

According to https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/137ephs/firefoxs_d...

Google Chrome exceeded Firefox market share in early 2012 after a steady rise starting in 2009 afaict.

If his resignation was involved, it was a symptom and not a cause. The end was already forecasted at least two years earlier.

shadowgovt• 7 months ago

"Anchor" is interesting. Because it could mean cornerstone or it could mean the thing weighing the company down.

pjmlp2• 7 months ago

I still use Firefox, however it has been away from our browser matrix since 2019, very few customers worry with browsers under 5% market share.

smaudet7• 7 months ago

This really feels like the beginning of the end for Mozilla, sadly.

I really feel like every time Mozilla announces something, someone gets paid to leave comments like this around. I've seen many "beginning of the end" comments like this, and so far, it hasn't happened.

What I do see is a lot of bashing, and hypocrisy, and excuses for why its OK that you don't personally try to do better...

mcpar-land2• 7 months ago

Personally try to do what better? Run Mozilla? Make a browser?

stephen_g2• 7 months ago

Even as someone who is still a Firefox user - the browser now has about half the browser market share as Edge... Absolutely nobody needs to be paid to write these kind of comments!

Honestly the last 5-10 years has been a disaster for Firefox...

skrtskrt• 7 months ago

Kagi's Orion browser is 1.0 on Mac and working on the first full Linux release - it's built on WebKit. That WebKit is a "third party" dependency but it's still a break from the browser monoculture and it doesn't seem like Mozilla has as much interest in pushing the browser engine space forward after pulling back from Servo.

bambax• 7 months ago

It will evolve into a modern AI browser

OMG, please, no! What are they thinking and who wants an "AI browser"?

Are there any true alternatives

Firefox with blocked updates works pretty well.

mminer237• 7 months ago

Not updating works until an exploit fixed years ago exfiltrates your bank info

20after4• 7 months ago

The beginning of the end was a long time ago. We are well past the middle of the end of Mozilla.

__loam• 7 months ago

Safari lol

dabockster25• 7 months ago

Safari has like 20% market share right now. The only thing holding it back is that it's Mac only. If Apple got a Windows version going again, it'd eat Chrome for lunch.

dabockster25• 7 months ago

I switched to Brave. Even with its cryptocurrency stuff bundled, it's easily disabled and not in your face at all. And their adblock tech is an amazing uBlock successor.

baobabKoodaa• 7 months ago

I stopped using Brave after they began to shove ads into the splash screen.

AnonC4• 7 months ago

This really feels like the beginning of the end for Mozilla, sadly.

This has been said numerous times over the decades anytime Mozilla has done something. Thankfully (at least for me), it hasn’t come true so far.

colesantiago• 7 months ago

"The World’s Most Trusted Software Company"

I'm sure the new leader of the trojan horse (fox?) is not going to pivot to AI...

"...Third: Firefox will grow from a browser into a broader ecosystem of trusted software. Firefox will remain our anchor. It will evolve into a modern AI browser and support a portfolio of new and trusted software additions..."

"It will evolve into a modern AI browser"

and there it is, the most "trusted" software company pivoting to AI.

BoredPositron3• 7 months ago

Now they put a LinkedIn cowboy in charge. Great.

lionkor4• 7 months ago

Well Ladybird [0] it is

[0] https://ladybird.org/

rvz3• 7 months ago

And we can at least donate directly to Ladybird's development [0]

Unlike Mozilla which Firefox is completely funded with Google's money.

[0] https://donorbox.org/ladybird

smt886• 7 months ago

You can donate to any nonprofit and stipulate that your money be used only for a certain purpose, and they're legally bound by it.

hamdingers6• 7 months ago

Is this usable day to day yet? I built it a few months ago and there were showstopper bugs on any nontrivial website.

Exciting project nonetheless.

nine_k2• 7 months ago

it is

You must be meaning "will be". Because the first alpha release is promised some time in 2026. So hopefully by 2028 it will be solid enough.

GalaxyNova• 7 months ago

You can use it right now if you build it from source, in fact I am writing this HN comment from it.

shayway• 7 months ago

I'm reading HN on my laptop outside, and a ladybug landed on my screen right as I was reading this comment. It's sitting there as I write this. I know this doesn't contribute to the discussion in any way but it's so neat I just needed to share.

ares6232• 7 months ago

I know it's very shallow but the marketing page gives me the ick. I have been Pavlov'd that websites with such designs are scams/vaporware.

lionkor4• 7 months ago

Fair, but I've been following Andreas Kling since he started (publically) with SerenityOS back a couple years ago, and he's a real hacker -- as real as they come.

I've watched hours of how he works on YouTube, it's fantastic, if anyone can lead a browser team, its him.

eviks3• 7 months ago

Firefox will remain our anchor. It will evolve into a modern AI browser

Aligning yourself with garbage generators is how you lose trust. Meanwhile, the top user requested features still point to basic deficiencies of browser UI

desireco422• 7 months ago

From my perspective, Firefox, a while back, just stopped working on issues that matter. They got into politics, they tried to do everything, but not as good.

If they just focused to produce a good browser, they would be way ahead. And time when you could get $100Ms from Google are slowly coming to an end. Money attracts grifters and this is what brought them down from my perspective.

Now, just to be honest, I wish they find a way. We always could use alternatives. Just don't expect this alternative to come from Mozilla.

smileson2• 7 months ago

I've never understood their massive activism arm, it's always seemed bloated and ineffective compared to organizations I donate money to like the EFF

desireco422• 7 months ago

just grifters siphooning money

tiahura• 7 months ago

Why does firefox need a CEO? Is the Linux model not feasible?

Barrin92• 7 months ago

Because Mozilla is an explicitly mission driven non-profit. Linux doesn't really have a model, the closest equivalent is basically Chromium which is to say it's an open source project to which extremely large companies donate the vast majority of developer hours.

hollerith• 7 months ago

The Linux Foundation has an executive director, which is the usual title (not CEO) for the head of a non-profit.

behringer• 7 months ago

If the next update fails to remove ads on by default we can assume these are empty promises.

https://www.quora.com/How-do-I-disable-sponsored-suggestions...

oytmeal• 7 months ago

I swear I've heard this trust angle used by so many CEOs throughout the years. When I hear this I know nothing good is on the way.

monegator• 7 months ago

AI should always be a choice — something people can easily turn off

and a couple of lines below

It will evolve into a modern AI browser

Besides the obvious "what the fuck is an AI browser?" aren't the two mutually exclusive?

TrevorFSmith• 7 months ago

If AI feature are on by default then no thanks!

This is how to burn what little trust remains: "AI should always be a choice — something people can easily turn off."

It has to be opt-in or you're not worthy of trust.

sfink9• 7 months ago

I find this whole "I gotta be able to turn off AI!" thing to be silly, personally. Do you also want to be able to turn off anything that uses binary search? Perhaps anything written in C++? Ooh, maybe it's nested for loops! Those kinda suck, give me an option to turn those off!

My indelicately expressed point is that the algorithm or processing model is not something anyone should care about. What matters? Things like: is my data sent off my device? Is there any way someone else can see what I'm doing or the data I'm generating? Am I burning large amounts of electricity? But none of those are "is it AI or not?"

Firefox already has a good story about what is processed locally vs being sent to a server, and gives you visibility and control over that. Why aren't the complaints about "cloud AI", at least? Why is it always "don't force-feed me AI in any form!"?

(To be clear, I'm no cheerleader for AI in the browser, and it bothers me when AI is injected as a solution without bothering to find a problem worth solving. But I'm not going to argue against on-device AI that does serve a useful purpose; I think that's great and we should find as many such opportunities as possible.)

throwaway613745• 7 months ago

Mozilla for the love of God I do not want “AI features” in the tool I use to do my online banking. Stop this madness.

Nobody is switching away from Firefox because it’s not agentic.

But there might be a small amount of people willing to switch away from Chromium slop browsers BECAUSE IT ISNT.

Why do you think Waterfox and Librewolf leave this crap out?

cpburns20098• 7 months ago

It continues to amaze me how a company racking in over 500 million a year in revenue can continue to fail so spectacularly. With that income there's no reason they shouldn't be the leading browser. Doubling down on AI is only going to burn more money while they continue to lose market share.

sfink9• 7 months ago

Are you implying that the direct competitor, Chrome, is taking in the same or less? Chrome has a much larger staff (excluding the rest of Google), so I guess they must all be earning a small fraction of Mozilla staff salaries. Such dedicated people!

cpburns20098• 7 months ago

My point is Mozilla achieves practically nothing despite making half a billion ad dollars for free from Google. If Wikipedia's numbers are right, that's $730,000 per employee.

muragekibicho• 7 months ago

I have a laptop with 4 GB of ram and firefox keeps crashing. I wish they'd fix this instead of saddling me with AI features I don't need.

lenerdenator2• 7 months ago

Mozilla needs to get back to just being a browser project with foundation-based corporate governance.

I don't get why everything has to include the latest trend. Do what the Linux kernel project does: be a bazaar. If someone wants to create deeper AI integration into Firefox, they'll pick up that task, put it in a branch, and the community will discuss whether it merits inclusion in the main. If it does, it'll be there; if not, it won't be.

Operate on donations of time and money with a clear goal of what the project should be.

account4225• 7 months ago

Yes but then how do you justify a multi-million dollar CEO salary.

cmcaleer• 7 months ago

The only thing that gives some slight semblance of hope is that he at least acknowledges that Mozilla is vulnerable and he very very briefly mentions needing new sources of revenue.

No mention of an endowment (like Wikipedia has) or concrete plans to spend money efficiently or in a worthwhile way, and I sure hope ‘invest in AI’ doesn’t mean ‘piss away 9 figures that could have set up an endowment to give Mozilla some actual resilience’.

I hope is that he’s at least paranoid enough about Mozilla’s revenue sources to do anything about their current position that gives them resiliency. Mozilla has for well over a decade now been in a pathetic state where if Google turns off the taps it is quite simply over. He talks a lot about peoples’ trust in Mozilla. I don’t really remember what he’s talking about to be honest, but if Mozilla get to a point where they seem like they can exist without them simply being Google’s monopoly defence insurance, perhaps I’ll remember the feeling of trusting Mozilla. I miss it.

aucisson_masque3• 7 months ago

people agency in how it works. Privacy, data use, and AI must be clear and understandable. Controls must be simple. AI should always be a choice — something people can easily turn off. People should know why a feature works the way it does and what value they get from it.
Second: our business model must align with trust. We will grow through transparent monetization that people recognize and value.
Third: Firefox will grow from a browser into a broader ecosystem of trusted software. Firefox will remain our anchor. It will evolve into a modern AI browser and support a portfolio of new and trusted software additions.

I like what the interim CEO was doing, focusing more on the browser and forgetting these side projects that leads to nowhere, but it seems it's back to business with this one.

wackget• 7 months ago

"a modern AI browser"

No thanks. Absolutely not.

50208• 7 months ago

I hope like hell Mozilla leadership can just go back to focusing on what is actually important: making a free, fast, secure, private web browser.

knodi• 7 months ago

Bring back Mozilla OS - Android based! Privacy focused.

greatgib• 7 months ago

What would be nice is something like the Python foundation, people can be a reasonable membership to become "members" of the organisation with a right proposal and vote for decisions.

gkoberger6• 7 months ago

Having worked at Mozilla a while ago, the CEO role is one I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy. Success is oddly defined: it's a non-profit (well, a for-profit owned by a non-profit) that needs to make a big profit in a short amount of time. And anything done to make that profit will annoy the community.

I hope Anthony leans into what makes Mozilla special. The past few years, Mozilla's business model has been to just meekly "us-too!" trends... IoT, Firefox OS, and more recently AI.

What Mozilla is good at, though, is taking complex things the average user doesn't really understand, and making it palpable and safe. They did this with web standards... nobody cared about web standards, but Mozilla focused on usability.

(Slide aside, it's not a coincidence the best CEO Mozilla ever had was a designer.)

I'm not an AI hater, but I don't think Mozilla can compete here. There's just too much good stuff already, and it's not the type of thing Mozilla will shine with.

Instead, if I were CEO, I'd go the opposite way: I'd focus on privacy. Not AI privacy, but privacy in general. Buy a really great email provider, and start to own "identity on the internet". As there's more bots and less privacy, identity is going to be incredibly important over the years.. and right now, Google defacto owns identity. Make it free, but also give people a way to pay.

Would this work? I don't know. But like I said, it's not a job I envy.

wvh• 7 months ago

I'm still sad they shelved Mozilla Persona due to low adoption. There is a hole in the market around privacy and identity, and Mozilla would be a natural choice to fill it, but it's going to be an uphill battle to get major sites and end users on board. Not a job to be envious about indeed.

glenstein24• 7 months ago

And just to add, I kind of mourn FirefoxOS. We couldn't have guessed it at the time, but as of 2025, Google is pushing developer verification and stepping closer and closer to ecosystem lockdown. It would have been a great time for an alternative mobile OS 10+ years in the making, to welcome all the energy that has gone into beautiful projects like F-Droid.

If I could time travel into the past, in addition to preventing all the bad things (e.g. Young Sheldon), I might have told Yahoo they should flex some financial muscle while they still had relevance and worked to mobilize (no pun intended) developer time, energy, etc and perhaps even provide a baseline ecosystem of stock apps to support FirefoxOS.

ethbr15• 7 months ago

1000%

The two places it's mind boggling that Mozilla doesn't have a product are (1) identity (especially as a provider to 3rd parties) and (2) instant messaging (especially on mobile).

They were important 10 years ago, they're more important today, and the existing providers all have huge privacy concerns.

nightski• 7 months ago

Why is so much profit needed?

gkoberger6• 7 months ago

Depends on how you look at it. They made $653 million in 2023, most coming from their biggest competitor, Google.

They don't need this much money, but it means more layoffs and cutting scope drastically. It's expensive to run a modern browser.

mixmastamyk4• 7 months ago

The job was always very easy, fire all of the pure managers and sock the google money into an endowment before it runs out. Then focus on privacy as you mentioned.

They’ve taken in several billion dollars by now. Let that sink in. They're supposedly a non-profit, so this plan is the well-trodden playbook.

But of course no Manager instance could imagine such a thing. Cue Upton Sinclair quote.

tectec• 7 months ago

What's the quote?

YetAnotherNick• 7 months ago

Care to explain how would they get the money in the process you described? Selling privacy to Google or someone is the only money maker they have.

There is no reason to believe manager pay is even 10% of the total expense.

shevy-java3• 7 months ago

Indeed - Google successfully undermined Mozilla here. It was a huge mistake to get addicted to the Google money; now it is too late to change it.

glenstein24• 7 months ago

sock the google money into an endowment before it runs out.

They did that! Why are people proposing that like it's a new idea?

dabockster25• 7 months ago

Yep. Mozilla is effectively just a tax dodge for Google anymore.

Heck, this AI first announcement was probably strongly influenced behind the scenes by Google to create an appearance of competition similar to Microsoft's and Apple's relationship in the 1990s.

Also, ironically, I just switched full time to Brave only yesterday.

the_biot3• 7 months ago

You're assuming Mozilla would be successful at a privacy play because they are a trusted organization. I can't stress this enough: they are not.

zero0529• 7 months ago

Trust is relative and it is subjective meaning that I trust Mozilla more than I trust google but I also trust them in general, enough at least that they support most of my internet browsing. Unless you mean something else ?

mmooss12• 7 months ago

What is that based on?

You can trust your doctor much more about your knee and much less about their billing. Trust isn't binary and isn't per person/organization/object, but varies by person and (activity?).

And anything will be trusted more or less by different people. Is there evidence of who trusts Mozilla with what, and how much? The the fact that you don't trust them or that some on HN don't trust them isn't evidence.

Also, each of us is both commentator and agent. When we say 'I trust X' or 'I don't trust X', we both communicate our thoughts and change others' thoughts.

flerchin• 7 months ago

A privacy play would be more successful from Mozilla if I were paying them for it. The incentives would be aligned. I cannot pay google for privacy, because they are incentivized against that.

whatever12• 7 months ago

This. I want a password/passkey/auth and bookmark manager that work across platforms and devices.

mattmaroon2• 7 months ago

Don't you have this already? Chrome and Firefox both have these. Devices have solid password manager integration, I use mine across 3 OSes and who knows how many devices.

DANmode3• 7 months ago

Well, then I’ve gotta bust your balls here and tell you to step away from the Win98 machine, because that’s been around for some time.

Even secure, privacy-respecting versions!

e584• 7 months ago

The best that Mozilla can do for AI is to make Firefox more headless and scriptable.

CarbonJ• 7 months ago

What would you like to see from Firefox to make it more headless and scriptable? Are there specific usecases you're interested in supporting?

rapind• 7 months ago

that needs to make a big profit in a short amount of time

Why? might be I'm just missing something, but I don't understand why this needs to be a goal of theirs?

macspoofing• 7 months ago

What Mozilla is good at ...

Firefox - the one thing they do not want to work on is the only thing that makes them special.

gkoberger6• 7 months ago

They do work on it. A lot.

But the issue is browsers don't make money. You can't charge for it, you can't add ads to it, etc. You're competing with the biggest companies in the world (Google, Apple), all of whom are happy to subsidize a browser for other reasons.

glenstein24• 7 months ago

Firefox - the one thing they do not want to work on

I'm sorry but this is complete nonsense. Just this year they pushed 12 major releases, with thousands of patches, including WebGPU efficiency improvements, updated PDF engine, numerous security fixes, amounting to millions of lines of new code. They maintain a codebase that rivals that of Chrome and of the Linux Kernel and push the equivalent of Rust's entire codebase on a monthly basis.

mmooss12• 7 months ago

I assume they work on Firefox 10x more than anything else. Is there data?

autoexec4• 7 months ago

I might be in the minority here, but I actually like Thunderbird.

tsoukase• 7 months ago

Firemail should be the name of a free and privacy oriented email client wholly owned by Mozilla with a web and mobile app. I would sign up instantly and gradually migrate from gmail, while being assured for its sustainability.

Sailemi• 7 months ago

Maybe not exactly what you’re looking for but Thunderbird is working on a paid email service: https://www.tb.pro/en-US/

dpark3• 7 months ago

“Free”. Therein lies the Mozilla problem. Everyone wants everything free.

It’s real hard to compete with Google who happily gives out free email and browser because they can monetize attention.

coder543• 7 months ago

A free and privacy-oriented hosted service that people have to pay to maintain? That is a confusing concept. How would the incentives be aligned?

m463• 7 months ago

I'd focus on privacy.

I would love that. that said, right now firefox unstoppably and constantly phones home

autoexec4• 7 months ago

Does this not work anymore? https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-stop-firefox-making...

I've been perfectly willing to spend an hour making countless changes using about:config to beat Firefox (or its forks) into submission on every install, but that only works while they continue to give us the ability.

rapnie• 7 months ago

Instead, if I were CEO, I'd go the opposite way: I'd focus on privacy.

Where it comes to AI in that regard, I would also focus on direct human connection. Where AI encapsulates people in bubbles of tech isolation and social indirection.

FarhadG• 7 months ago

Super well stated and interesting point regarding (general) privacy.

I miss the days where Mozilla (Firefox) was known to be the "fastest browser." It worked and such an easy transition for users (including myself) who were tired of the bloated browser experience.

skeeter2020• 7 months ago

Anil Dash wrote something relevant recently: https://www.anildash.com/2025/11/14/wanting-not-to-want-ai/

His point (which I agree with - softly) is that Mozilla could approach this from a more nuanced perspective that others cannot, like not anti-AI but anti "Big AI". Facilitate what people are already doing (and outside of the HN bubble everyone is using AI all the time, even if it's just what we think is "dumb" stuff) throught the FF lens. Like a local LLM that runs entirely in an extension or similar. THere's no shortage of hard, valuable things that big tech won't do because of $$$.

trinsic2• 7 months ago

Why cant Mozilla go the same route with Firefox as Thunderbird where its community supported, I wonder?

bpye• 7 months ago

Web standards move very quickly, the only other two parties that keep up today are Google with Blink and Apple with WebKit.

wcchandler• 7 months ago

Privacy, identity, and more importantly, anonymity are one of those things I keep thinking about. A few months back I had this idea of comparing the need to that of credit reporting agencies. You have the big 3 - Equifax, Experian, TransUnion. They provide credit information to companies that want it. You request the info, they provide it. There's a fee for retrieving it. I think our personal identities should be treated similarly. We sign up for various online services and provide some PII, but not much. Why should the website be able to store that information? Maybe they shouldn't be able to. Instead, lets permit these identity brokers to control our private information. Name, address, email, etc. Then whenever a companies needs that info, for whatever reason, they query the identity broker, get select info they need and be done. Token based access could permit the site to certain data, for certain periods of time. You can review the tokens at a later date and make sure only the ones you care about get the info. Large companies that already participate in this space (Google, Microsoft, etc.) can separate out this business function and have it be isolated from their core products. I was thinking it'd require an act of congress to get implemented, and that may be possible. But instead of having that as a hard requirement, maybe just a branding/badge/logo on services. Say your product respects your privacy and uses data brokers for your privacy.

Going a step further, how do we encourage use? Aside from personal privacy, what if social media sites allowed us to use our identities to validate comments or attachments? Similar to the idea of a token, we upload a photo of our cat. We permit FB access to that cat pic, generate the token, say it's good until we revoke it. We revoke it, and now that picture will fail to load. We can also restrict access to our cat picture. By requesting access to the cat pic, another user provides their identity as well. If their identity is allowed to view it, then it can render. Similar to comments. It's just a string, but we can invalidate a token and make access to it no longer possible.

What about digital hoarding? Can't we screenshot everything or scrape the website and store it for later? Yes. But that's no longer a trusted source. Everything can be faked, especially as AI tools advance. Instead, by using the identity broker, you can verify if a statement was actually said. This will be a mindshift. Similar to how wikipedia isn't a credible source in a term paper, a screenshot is not proof of anything.

Identity brokers can also facilitate anonymous streams. Similar to a crypto wallet, separate personas can be generated by an identity. An anonymous comment can be produced and associated with that randomized persona. The identity broker can store the private key for the persona, possibly encrypted by the identity in some manner, or it can be stored elsewhere, free for the identity to resume using should they want to.

It's an interesting problem to think about.

wirrbel• 7 months ago

i work for a for-profit owned by a non-profit. This is a weird take. You can shape a product, sure you need to bring in a profit, but there are options of working with your owner (the non-profit) that you just don't have in a publicly traded company.

I am sure people would queue up for the job, fully aware of what it entails.

Yoric• 7 months ago

FWIW, I remember when Mozilla started experimenting with AI, and that was way ahead of the curve (around 2015, iirc?)

But yeah, I agree that buying a great email provider would be a very interesting step. And perhaps partnering with Matrix.

Arathorn• 7 months ago

On the Matrix side we would love for Mozilla (or MZLA) to become a paid Matrix hosting provider. Element has ended up focusing on digitally-sovereign govtech (https://element.io/en/sectors) in order to prevail, and it's left a hole in the market.

dabockster25• 7 months ago

They need to give Thunderbird more resources first.

chiefalchemist• 7 months ago

Merge Mozilla (including Firefox Relay, Mozilla VPN, etc ) with FastMail or Proton, price it reasonably and I’d be on board. If it worked well I’d recommend it to anyone I could.

I understand email isn’t easy but it difficult to imagine why Mozilla didn’t seize the opportunity.

CuriousRose5• 7 months ago

Fully agree with this.

- Mozilla SSL Certs - for corporations that don't want Let's Encrypt

- Mozilla Mail - a reliable Exchange/Google Mail alternative (desperately needed imo)

- Thunderbird for iOS - why is this not a thing yet?

- Mozilla Search - metasearch that isn't based on Bing/DDG/Google

- Mozilla HTTPS DNS - although Cloudflare will probably always do this better

All seemingly low-hanging fruit with brand alignment.

binwang• 7 months ago

Mozilla Mail - a reliable Exchange/Google Mail alternative (desperately needed imo)

Thunderbird Pro was announced a while back, still not GA though

SamDc73• 7 months ago

Mozilla Mail - a reliable Exchange/Google Mail alternative (desperately needed imo)

I think the privacy industry is oversaturated we already have: ProtonMail, Tuta and Mailbox Mail

amluto• 7 months ago

How about: Mozilla HTTPS To My Router (or printer or any other physically present local object) in a way that does not utterly suck?

Seriously, there’s a major security and usability problem, it affects individual users and corporations, and neither Google nor Apple nor Microsoft shows the slightest inclination to do anything about it, and Mozilla controls a browser that could add a nice solution. I bet one could even find a creative solution that encourages vendors, inoffensively, to pay Mozilla a bit of money to solve this problem for them.

Also:

Thunderbird for iOS - why is this not a thing yet?

Indeed. Apple’s mail app is so amazingly bad that there’s plenty of opportunity here.

MarsIronPI5• 7 months ago

- Mozilla Search - metasearch that isn't based on Bing/DDG/Google

As much hate as Brave gets overall, I think Mozilla should take a page from Brave's book if they're going to make a search engine. I think they should have their own index, possibly supplemented by Bing or Google. Let people opt-in to using their browsers to help crawl for the search engine index, like Brave does. Then add in some power-user features like goggles and custom ranking, and they'd have a pretty compelling search engine. They should even be able to subsidize it somewhat with advertising: DDG and Brave Search are the only two websites I allow ads on, because they're usually relevant and they're never intrusive.

dyauspitr• 7 months ago

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

pmontra• 7 months ago

Thunderbird for iOS - why is this not a thing yet?

They are building Thunderbird Android over K9 Mail, which is an Android app. They would have to start from scratch on iOS, which of course is feasible but it takes more time.

Tepix2• 7 months ago

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

MYEUHD• 7 months ago

Thunderbird for iOS - why is this not a thing yet?

There's no release yet, but it's being worked on. https://github.com/thunderbird/thunderbird-ios

GuestFAUniverse• 7 months ago

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

rvba2• 7 months ago

Nobody wants this.

People want firefox.

palata11• 7 months ago

All seemingly low-hanging fruit with brand alignment.

Genuinely interested: are you a developer? Doesn't sound like low-hanging fruit to me.

There are already many alternatives to Gmail, I don't think Mozilla would make a lot of money there. And I don't know if they are making a lot of money with their Mozilla VPN (which I understand is a wrapper around Mullvad): why would I pay Mozilla instead of Mullvad?

There are alternative search engines, like Kagi in the US and Qwant/Ecosia in Europe (though only Qwant seems to keep the servers in Europe).

What I want from Mozilla, really, is a browser. And I would love to donate to that specifically, but I don't think I can.

e2le2• 7 months ago

Mozilla Mail

Aren't they already moving towards this? The Thunderbird team recently announced ThunderMail which will have an optional $9/year plan.

https://www.tb.pro/en-US/thundermail/

Thunderbird for iOS

https://blog.thunderbird.net/2025/10/state-of-the-bird-2024-...

We’ve also seen the overwhelming demand to build a version of Thunderbird for the iOS community. Unlike the Android app, the iOS app is being built from the ground up.

endemic2• 7 months ago

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

Izkata• 7 months ago

And anything done to make that profit will annoy the community.

I don't keep close track of this, but as far as I remember they haven't tried donations that go only to Firefox/Thunderbird/etc of the person's choice, instead of Mozilla as a whole. That's what people always claim they want in these threads. I doubt donations would be enough, but I think doing it like that would at least be a step in a direction people like instead of are annoyed by, as long as they don't go nagging like Wikipedia.

dblohm7• 7 months ago

They do that for Thunderbird now.

e2le2• 7 months ago

Thunderbird is entirely funded by donations for some years now and is more than enough. In 2024, Thunderbird received $10.3M (19% increase over the previous year) in donations which was used to employ 43 people.

https://blog.thunderbird.net/2025/10/state-of-the-bird-2024-...

arijun• 7 months ago

I wouldn’t mind privacy-focused AI tools, either (as long as they don’t cram it in our faces). On its AI search assist, DDG has a button to open up a private session with GPT, which I use on occasion.

chironjit• 7 months ago

Adding my 2 cents worth to this: why is there not a Mozilla family internet suite of privacy browser, VPN, relay, tracker blocker, etc for one price? I already pay for family plans for other services, so this is a no brainer if it exists.

Right now, all of Mozilla's products are not even available in a standardised form in key countries. For example, I pay for Mozilla relay and VPN, and these are not available in the same countries!

Mind you, I'm lucky to have actual access to several countries, and so I can work around this. But really, why can't this team just put everything in one place for me?

Besides relay and Mozilla VPN, I am also paying for Bit warden password manager.

I'm also willing to pay for a privacy-first email(though I haven't done so yet), and please have a family plan that bundles all of this together!

If Norton can have an Internet Suite, why can't Mozilla?

nailer• 7 months ago

Just ask for money. 10 USD a year in the app store. I’d pay it.

rvba2• 7 months ago

Every time Mozilla CEO changes HN gets a set of "its so difficult" propaganda

Those CEOs get 6M per year and cannot figure out to focus on core product: Mozilla, keep a war chest, dont spend on politics.

Also cut all bullshit projects that are made for self promotion and dont help Mozilla as a browser.

When will real extensions return? Never?

Now they want to kill adblocks too

283042834092342• 7 months ago

I would pay 20 euros per month forever if I could just have firefox, as a product, without all the tracking and tracing and dark patterns.

Let me be the customer.

reactordev2• 7 months ago

I’m sorry but Mozilla is out of their league now.

Firefox is all they have. They know the web, but that’s where it ends. They haven’t been relevant outside of web standards for more than a decade.

aaron_m04• 7 months ago

it's a non-profit (well, a for-profit owned by a non-profit) that needs to make a big profit in a short amount of time.

Can you please elaborate on this need to make a big profit? Where does the need come from?

pentagrama• 7 months ago

At least he seems focused on Firefox.

Hopefully this translates into clearer direction for Firefox and better execution across the company, instead of pushing multiple micro products that are likely destined to fail, as Mozilla has done over the past 5+ years.

From his LinkedIn profile [1], his recent roles have been consistently centered on Firefox:

Chief Executive Officer

Dec 2025 - Present · 1 mo

-------

General Manager of Firefox

Jul 2025 - Dec 2025 · 6 mos

-------

SVP of Firefox

Dec 2024 - Jul 2025 · 8 mos

-------

He appears to have a solid background in product thinking, feature development, and UX. If his main focus remains on Firefox, that could be a positive sign for the product and its long term direction.

[1] https://www.linkedin.com/in/anthonyed/

BoredPositron3• 7 months ago

He rarely held a job for more than a year and a half throughout his entire career...

fuddle• 7 months ago

"Mozilla's former CEO, Mitchell Baker, earned nearly $7 million in 2022, with compensation rising from around $3 million in 2020 to over $5.5 million in 2021 and $6.9 million in 2022"

I wonder how much the new CEO is making now.

star-glider• 7 months ago

Just to clarify how outrageous the Mozilla CEO compensation is, consider that Tim Cook makes 0.019% of Apple's revenue in compensation ($75M on $391BN of revenue). For Sundar Pichai (Google), it's 0.003%; Samsung is 0.0001%; Nadella at Microsoft is 0.032%.

For Mozilla? 1.18%! That's almost FORTY TIMES these other companies. Apple revolutionized mobile computing; Google revolutionized search, Microsoft owns enterprise software, and Samsung is one of the largest hardware manufacturers in the world. Mozilla makes a second-rate web browser whose sole distinguishing feature is supporting a community-built addon that does a great job blocking Youtube ads.

I could give $100k per year to Mozilla for the rest of my life, and my lifetime donation would cover less than half of the CEO's salary.

locallost• 7 months ago

Yeah, considering how poorly it went and how much market share they lost I also always thought it was outrageous... Also so many people laid off and projects shut down. I don't have any insight, and I could be way off, but it always felt like the company was captured by bureaucracy and drained as long as it was possible. Again I could be way off, as I don't have any personal connections to it. I was a regular user until around 10 years ago, but Chrome just leapfrogged them and that was it. There was at one point nothing left other than nostalgia.

edit: I still remember using Mozilla which was this "good thing" but somehow clunky, and then getting so excited when trying Phoenix for the first time, which was then renamed to Firebird, and lastly Firefox. It was so "obviously" the right thing to use.

missedthecue3• 7 months ago

Compensation for employees is not based solely on revenue. CEOs of major global organizations cost a lot of money.

LunaSea7• 7 months ago

I wonder what the percentage would be if you were to remove the $500M yearly check by Google.

mcpar-land2• 7 months ago

Firefox will grow from a browser into a broader ecosystem of trusted software. Firefox will remain our anchor. It will evolve into a modern AI browser and support a portfolio of new and trusted software additions.

Please don't.

etempleton• 7 months ago

I was on board with this until he said, Firefox would become a “modern AI browser.” I am not sure what that looks like or means, and I am not sure anyone really does. It feels like some kind of obligatory statement to appease someone somewhere.

stack_framer• 7 months ago

As Mozilla moves forward, we will focus on becoming the trusted software company.

Does this sentence feel incomplete to anyone else? Is it supposed to say "the most trusted software company" or is it supposed to be an emphasis (i.e. the trusted software company)?

teknopaul2• 7 months ago

Fire fix usage went from I forget what but really significant down to the level people don't build site for it anymore.

Pretty sure it's because they made security changes that broke the Intranet.

What you want una browser is that it t works. Not some security pop-up telling it doesn't work. Especially if you wrote the website.

Still annoying evert time https://127.0.0.1 is flagged as insecure

teknopaul2• 7 months ago

#6 in hacker news ChatGPT images announcement doesn't work in Firefox Android as a perfect example.

https://openai.com/index/new-chatgpt-images-is-here/

stodor89• 7 months ago

Well it surely cannot get any wor-

...investing in AI...

Ugh, nevermind.

shmerl• 7 months ago

What I want to see instead of all this AI nonsense is replacing Gecko with Servo and implementing Vulkan rendering.

neilv• 7 months ago

As Mozilla moves forward, we will focus on becoming the trusted software company.

That's what I'd do.

The question is whether they really mean it.

Mozilla will have to recover from some history of disingenuous and incompetent leadership.

shevy-java3• 7 months ago

Now Mozilla only needs to find a CEO that understands tech.

peppersghost93• 7 months ago

"Firefox will remain our anchor. It will evolve into a modern AI browser and support a portfolio of new and trusted software additions."

reading this genuinely disgusts me. I am so tired of this nonsense being shoved where it doesn't belong. I just want a fast browser that stays out of the way.

espeed• 7 months ago

Rather than develop its own AI (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45926779), Firefox should develop a system to pipe your html rendered browsing history in real time so external local services can process it (https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/archive-your-browser-hi...). See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45743918

Firefox probably won't suddenly have the best AI, but it could be the only browser that does this. Previous: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46018789

RickyLahey• 7 months ago

i wouldn't touch anything from Mozilla with a twenty-foot pole

keeda3• 7 months ago

Everyone is reacting negatively to the focus on AI, but does Mozilla really have a choice? This is going to be a rehash of the same dynamic that has happened in all the browser wars: Leading browser introduces new feature, websites and extensions start using that feature, runner-up browsers have no choice but to introduce that feature or further lose marketshare.

Chrome and Edge have already integrated LLM capabilities natively, and webpages and extensions will soon start using them widely:

- https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/built-in

- https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2025/05/19/introducing-t...

Soon you will have pages that are "Best viewed in Chrome / Edge" and eventually these APIs will be standardized. Only a small but passionate minority of users will run a non-AI browser. I don't think that's the niche Firefox wants to be in.

I agree that Mozilla should take the charge on being THE privacy-focused browser, but they can also do so in the AI age. As an example, provide a sandbox and security features that prevent your prompts and any conversations with the AI from being exfiltrated for "analytics." Because you know that is coming.

afarah1• 7 months ago

Of course they have a choice. Just don't do it. All you said are predictions of what may or may not happen in the future. The opposite could be true - the audience at large may get sick of AI tools being pushed on them and prefer the browser that doesn't. No one knows. But even if you are right, supporting an hypothetical API that extensions and websites may or may not use and pushing opt-out AI tooling in the browser itself are very different things.

keeda3• 7 months ago

Sure, these features may never catch on... but if they do, consider the risk to Firefox: an underdog with dwindling market share that is now years behind capabilities taken for granted in other browsers. On the other hand, if these features don't pan out, they could always be deprecated with little hit to marketshare.

Strategically I think Mozilla cannot take that risk, especially as it can get feature parity for relatively low cost by embracing open-source / open-weights models.

As an aside, a local on-device AI is greatly preferable from a privacy perspective, even though some harder tasks may need to be sent to hosted frontier models. I expect the industry to converge on a hybrid local/remote model, largely because it lets them offload inference to the users' device.

There's not much I could do about a hosted LLM, but at least for the local model it would be nice to have one from a company not reliant on monetizing my data.

dagurp• 7 months ago

Of course they have a choice. Firefox started going downhill IMO because they kept copying Chrome. Vivaldi decided not to include AI until a good use case was found for it. This announcement was met with a lot of positivity.

MerrimanInd2• 7 months ago

I think you're right but there's also an opportunity to sell picks when everyone is digging for gold. Like AI-driven VS Code forks, you have AI companies releasing their own browsers left and right. I wonder if Mozilla could offer a sort of white-labeling and contracting service where they offer the engine and some customization services to whatever AI companies want their own in-house browsers. But continue to offer Firefox itself as the "dumb" (from an AI perspective) reference version. I'm not sure exactly what they could offer over just forking Chromium/Firefox without support but it would be a great way to have their cake and eat it too.

wnevets• 7 months ago

Everyone is reacting negatively to the focus on AI, but does Mozilla really have a choice?

Do these type of also-ran strategies actually work for a competitor the size of Mozilla? Is AI integration required for them to grow or at least maintain?

My hunch is this will hurt Firefox more than help it. Even if I were to believe their was a meaningful demand for these kind of features in the browser I doubt Mozilla is capable of competing with the likes of Google & Microsoft in meaningful matter in the AI arena.

keeda3• 7 months ago

I think Mozilla can get pretty far with one of the smaller open source models. Alternatively, they could even just use the models that will inevitably come bundled with the underlying OS, although their challenge then would be in providing a homogenous experience across platforms.

I don't think Mozilla should get into the game of training their own models. If they did I'd bet it's just because they want to capitalize on the hype and try to get those crazy high AI valuations.

But the rate at which even the smaller models are getting better, I think the only competitive advantage for the big AI players would be left in the hosted frontier models that will be extremely jealously guarded and too big to run on-device anyway. The local, on-device models will likely converge to the same level of capabilities, and would be comparable for any of the browsers.

cheesecompiler• 7 months ago

What is the use case with these? Even larger models skip details. Small models are terrible at summarizing and writing.

fergie• 7 months ago

I think youre mixing up two seperate concerns: functionality and standards. It seems to me that there could absolutely be a "dumb browser" that sticks to (and develops) web standards and is also relatively popular

doublextremevil• 7 months ago

Mozilla should restructure its governance such that leadership is elected by their employees - preferably their software developers.

MerrimanInd2• 7 months ago

IMO Zen Browser fixed a lot of the Firefox UI painpoints while keeping what I like about it. It would be a smart move to make the Zen UI the canonical version of Firefox. Especially since features like vertical tabs, folders, pins, split screen, and new tab previews are more in the power user use case and Chrome has entirely dominated the casual user demographic.

mmooss12• 7 months ago

I think this is a great insight and great leadership.

While the for-profit world, and many others, have embraced extremes of predatory capitalism, contempt for users, and disinformation, Mozilla has a fantastic opportunity to compete on its unique capabilities:

It's not under pressure to adapt that business culture - no private equity, Wall Street, etc. pushing it; its culture is antithetical to those things; and its culture has always been geared toward service to the community and trust.

The insight and leadership is to find this word, which hasn't been used much (I think many in business or politics would laugh at it), is incredibly powerful and a fundamental social need, and is clear guidance for everyone and every activity at Mozilla and for customers.

Imagine using a company's products and not having to think about them trying to cheat you.

orblivion• 7 months ago

It will evolve into a modern AI browser

Next time I run into Richard Stallman I should ask him for tips on browsing the web

ggm• 7 months ago

I know quite a few non-tech firefox users. None of them want the AI integration. I am wary of confirmation bias, but I feel this is one of those simpsons headmaster meme moments: Am I wrong? No, I am right! the users are wrong! the users want me to spend millions developing AI for firefox instead of all the other things.

motbus3• 7 months ago

"It will evolve into a modern AI browser and support a portfolio of new and trusted software additions." I stopped reading there. I just want a browser. Nothing else

jmyeet• 7 months ago

Mozilla has been in a dire place for years. Notably someone years ago posted a chart showing how exec salary keeps going up while marketshare keeps going down [1].

In the Microsoft antitrust trial in the 1990s, the court established that having a browser monopoly was anticompetitive. Sadly, we've allowed this situation to repeat on mobile so Chrome and Safari now dominate. Windows has a lot of default Edge installs (and set as the default browser, particularly in corporate settings) but it's really just a Webkit skin at this point.

Now iOS does technically allow third-party browsers but they're just Safari skins and they're not as good (eg at different times they have more limited features like not havintg the latest Javascript engine).

I really think we need to end the bundled exclusive apps on mobile for certain things.

Until then I'm really not sure what Mozilla's path forward is. They've tried to pivot on things like privacy but I don't think any of these make sense or at least won't produce a revenue source to justify the investment. How do you fund something like Mozilla? And how do you create value for users?

[1] https://itdm.com/mozilla-firefox-usage-down-85-but-why-are-e...

NegativeK• 7 months ago

One of the secondary awful things about AI is that I have to hear news sources I like listening to complain about it constantly.

This AI hype is frustrating, but it's also frustrating that it dominates conversations with valid points that are identical to the last five times it was talked about.

ipdashc• 7 months ago

At this point it's almost more annoying than the AI hype in the first place.

The hype by now at least seems pretty much self aware. It's mind-boggling to me that people don't realize all the Mozilla stuff is completely empty/PR fluff. You have to say you're an "AI first company" because that's the only thing investors want to hear in 2025. Everyone knows it's all fluff, they say it anyways. I will wait and see if it actually meaningfully affects their product or not.

The complaints meanwhile are spammed everywhere, and like you said, it's the same exact content every time. We get it, new features that you aren't going to use are annoying. Disable them or just don't use them, is is really that big a deal? The CEO literally says they will all be able to be disabled.

koolala2• 7 months ago

Got my first change in Firefox today that says "Nightly uses AI to read your Open Tabs". Says its local but I really have zero trust for telemetry on this kind of stuff.

unsungNovelty2• 7 months ago

Copying portion of the comment I said under another comment:

I and many stuck with Firefox despite being it being horrible until quantum release because Mozilla was aligned with community. But their tech is better now but they aren't aligned with community.

It was the community that made Firefox overtake IE. They seem to forget that.

Unless its gonna come pre-installed like chrome, they need community make the user base grow. They are absolutely dumb for going after a crowd who are happy with Chrome while shitting on the crowd which want to be with them.

CivBase2• 7 months ago

I switched back to Firefox around the quantum release and have been very happy with it since. I certainly have some complaints, but it's night and day compared to what Google wants me to deal with.

unsungNovelty2• 7 months ago

Ofcourse it is. But that also doesn't make my above comment wrong though. Not to mention, many were silent for so long against their actions. Now it looks like the entire community has started voicing against it. The ball is now on Mozilla's court.

Not to mention there is more than just technical aspect with Firefox and community. A lot of people have invested a ton of time in it.

Mozilla warrants all the flack they are getting. I am just saying they can't virtue signal their way through this. It wont work.

urig• 7 months ago

Lost me right about in the middle when he started chirping AI AI AI like a parrot. AI and trust do not go hand in hand. Focus on privacy, transparency and simplicity because instead. Good luck.

tchbnl• 7 months ago

Mozilla went to shit after Brendan Eich was ousted.

betamint• 7 months ago

I think the fundamental problem with Firefox and Mozilla is, that people want an organization to maximize Firefox, but Mozilla is an organization maximizing something else while preserving Firefox.

The fundamental problem is expectation and reality mismatch, and is being 'solved' from two directions: new ideal browsers, or criticism of Mozilla in the hope that it improves.

qwertox• 7 months ago

People want software that is fast, modern, but also honest about what it does.

I want my browser to be able to run uBlock Origin, so therefore people want more than just what is specified above. I did quit using Google Chrome because they banned uBO (I know the command-line-flags hack still works, but for how long?).

If Firefox also bans uBO through removal of Manifest v2 without offering a proper alternative, then it's just as big of a piece of crap as Chrome is. Due to lack of real choices, I could as well move back to Chrome. I'm currently using Vivaldi.

webreac• 7 months ago

My wish list: - A secure email (with optional encryption/signature, with whitelists) - IM (with point to point encryption). - identity management (I would love delegating the login/password ceremonial to Mozilla instead of reinventing the well for each site). It seems I have trust in Mozilla.

stainablesteel• 7 months ago

DEI and ESG don't work anymore, now people are latching onto AI wherever they can

they're all just marketing scams. if these people actually implement AI in ways that isn't needed it just kills the product

the built-in language translation feature of firefox is great, because it's locally ran

i don't want my browser fetching commands from random servers just to implement AI in a browser that was working fine without it

ponker• 7 months ago

What does Mozilla do these days?

okokwhatever• 7 months ago

Money calls

Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

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