Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

https://infosec.press/brunomiguel/is-mozilla-trying-hard-to-kill-itself

by pabs3 • 7 months ago

933 810 7 months ago

infosec.press

pomian• 7 months ago

Obviously, we die hard fans and users agree.

Croftengea2• 7 months ago

You don't have to be very bright to figure killing adblockers in FF is a suicide.

phito2• 7 months ago

150M seems like such a small number for something that would have so much impact

jfrifkfnfofifmk• 7 months ago

Mozilla rebranded itself as a "crew of activists". Browser is just a side business to generate revenue!

major5053• 7 months ago

They are probably a money laundy scheme this days. I used to donate every year to Mozilla. Of course, small ammounts because Im not rich. Today they would have to beat this money from my hands.

erk__• 7 months ago

Is the whole issue not that they are less of a band of activists than they used to be. Now it is suddenly no longer about free and open source software, but more of means to run the whole machine, which is why they probably have profit oriented CEO as bad as that is.

IMO they need to be more a crew of activists than they are now. Fight against stuff like intrusion of AI in every single part of our lives and such.

micromacrofoot2• 7 months ago

They're not going to be able to make a case to Google that they need $500M annually to only spend on a browser. They're barely in charge of their own company.

dom96• 7 months ago

Genuinely can someone with knowledge of the business explain why they aren't simply doubling down on making Firefox better? Is there an existential problem facing them that they are trying to solve by adding AI into the browser?

K0nserv• 7 months ago

No knowledge of the business. But I think it's because of the underlying question that plagues Mozilla: How will that make money?

4gotunameagain• 7 months ago

They don't really need money. Look at Mozilla's CEO compensation for example. It was 7 million USD in 2022. Seven. Million. For ruining a bastion of the open internet.

The problem is the MBAs.

pas3• 7 months ago

it's a completely obvious "problem" -- more users are easier to monetize, even if they "simply" go the Wikipedia donations model

many people stated that they are happy to do targeted donations (ie. money earmarked strictly for Firefox development only, and it cannot be used for bullshit outreach programs and other fluff)

and if they figure out the funding for the browser (and other "value streams") then they can put the for-profit opt-in stuff on top

lopis• 7 months ago

I'm not sure how well know this is, but besides their contract with Google to be the default search option, Firefox does earn money through revenue share with all other default search options. A normal healthy company would just rely on those. Growing the user base would therefore grow the amount of rev-share income. So improving the product by itself, and thus attracting users, does make money - and probably enough to run Firefox and Mozilla. Just not enough to pay their CEO.

tessierashpool9• 7 months ago

Google pays Mozilla, Mozilla has more money, Mozilla spends more money (especially in compensations to a bloated C-level), Mozilla needs more money, Google threatens with paying less, Mozilla will lube up and bend over.

colesantiago6• 7 months ago

What does "doubling down on making Firefox better?" mean?

What can Mozilla Firefox do to make their 500 million without Google?

philipallstar2• 7 months ago

They could just make less money and deprioritise non-engineering/engineering-leadership personnel.

rvba2• 7 months ago

They dont need to spend millions on other products and politics for start.

austhrow743• 7 months ago

Their Google dependency is their existential problem. They're limited by what they can do with "making Firefox better" while effectively being a client state. An off the books Google department. Doomed to forever being a worse funded Chrome because they can't do too much to anger their patron.

By selling browser UI real estate to AI companies[0] they reduce the power Google has over them. If they get to the point where no individual company makes up a majority of their revenue, it allows them to focus on their mission in a much broader way.

[0]These will be very expensive listings should this feature become popular: https://assets-prod.sumo.prod.webservices.mozgcp.net/media/u...

Krasnol4• 7 months ago

Is there any prove for Googles influence on their development you outline here?

bambax3• 7 months ago

Yeah but is this entirely true though? It seems Google pays FF just for existing, to protect them from antitrust litigation (or what's left of it); so Google can't really stop paying FF and can't try to kill it, as its death would be extremely counter productive. FF may be freer than it thinks.

concinds• 7 months ago

You can't monetize a browser. They have to keep trying to create new products, but they inevitably fail. Pocket, FirefoxOS, Persona, all dead. This new stuff will fail too, because Mozilla has no USP and no way to create a best-in-class product in any market. So they rely on imitating what everyone else is doing, but with more "crunchy" vibes ("values", "trust", "we're a nonprofit") because that's the only angle they can compete on. They missed mobile completely so even their browser is bleeding users and dying.

The way to interpret Mozilla is that they're a dying/zombie company, fighting heroically to delay the inevitable.

RobotToaster2• 7 months ago

They already do monetize it, every search engine included by default paid to be there. They forcefully remove those that don't pay from existing installations without the user's permission, as they did with yandex.

oneeyedpigeon• 7 months ago

You can't monetize a browser.

You very much can if all the competitors are either a) ad-ridden, ai-infested, bloated monstrosities or b) don't provide the functionality people want. In that case, there's apparently lots of demand which could easily support either a pay-once or a low-subscription-fee model.

rvba2• 7 months ago

They dont have to.

They could be lean and focus on firefox only.

Now they get 150m from google, spend just a part on firefox and rest on failures and hobby projects to get promoted.

If they were focued on core business, 1) they would have a war chest 2) they could leave off donations

https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4387539/firefox-money-invest...

NothingAboutAny• 7 months ago

I'd pay $10 a month for a browser, I pay that much for music and TV shows and I spend more time in a browser. I'm sure the market doesn't agree with me but I pay more for things that are less useful.

tjpnz2• 7 months ago

Fork Firefox, bundle uBlock Origin, Sponsor Block et el and sell it is a consumer web security product (that's not complete shit) with a monthly subscription. Use some of the proceeds to support the devs working on the underlying tech, similar to what Valve are doing for Wine, Proton and Fex.

Bonus points:

1. Multi layered approach to dealing with ads and other malware.

2. A committment to no AI or other bloat - that's not what I'm paying you for.

3. Syncable profiles.

eesmith• 7 months ago

What they could do is get funding from sovereign tech funds.

I don't think the rest of the world likes their dependencies on US companies and their love for surveillance.

Of course, to do it right means ensuring there's enough non-US organizational structure with the know-how to take over the project should things go pear-shaped, and oversight to spot of the pear is taking shape.

But that's what governments can do, assuming they don't want to be under the thumb of the US. ("Oh, you think tariffs are bad? We'll do to you like we did those ICC judges and shut off all your accounts.")

nikanj• 7 months ago

Society doesn't get improved by doing incremental work on a browser, and Mozilla's mission is to improve society

creata2• 7 months ago

Yes it does. Having a browser that truly has the user's back, without always trying to compromise the user's interests in favor of advertisers - that would be a benefit to society.

I wish Firefox would be that browser.

danaris6• 7 months ago

Possibly, but that's an absurdly overbroad mission.

Organizations with clear, focused missions are much more likely to be able to achieve them than organizations that want to be everything to everybody.

"Make and maintain Firefox as the best browser for people who care about internet freedom, privacy, and extensibility" would be a perfectly reasonable mission.

csin4• 7 months ago

Please enlighten me. How does one make a browser "better" these days?

- They were ahead of the game with extensions. Then everyone copied them.

- They were ahead of the game with tabs. Then everyone copied them.

- They were ahead of the game with containers. Then everyone copied them.

- They are still the best browser to use for an ad free internet experience.

- The only flaw I can think of, is they are not leaders in performance. Chrome loads faster. But that's because Chrome cheats by stealing your memory on startup.

How would you make FireFox better? When you say they should be making FireFox better, what should they be doing? Maybe they should hire you for ideas.

Because to me, they seem to be constantly trying to make FireFox better. It's just hit or miss.

Extensions was a hit. Tabs was a hit. Containers was a hit. They had a shit tonne of misses over the decades. We just don't remember them.

The crypto and ai stuff just happens to be a miss.

OvervCW5• 7 months ago

In my experience Chrome does not just load faster, but it also uses less memory than Firefox because of its more aggressive tab hibernation that is enabled by default.

On my laptop I had to switch from Firefox to Chrome because it kept filling up all of my RAM resulting in other applications crashing.

probably_wrong• 7 months ago

How would I make Firefox better?

First, I would stop breaking up the stuff that works. Firefox was ahead of the game with extensions, then deprecated the long tail for a rewrite that took three years [1] (during which Firefox mobile had a grand total of 9 extensions) and even then it's hard for me today to know which extensions work on mobile. They were similarly ahead of the game with containers, and yet they still don't work on private mode [2] and probably never will. That's two out of three hits where they tripped over their own two feet[3].

Second, do the one thing that users have been requesting for decades: let me donate to the browser development. Not to the Mozilla Foundation, not to internet freedom causes, to Firefox. The Mozilla foundation explicitly says that they don't want to be "the Firefox company", and yet I'd argue they should.

Third, go on the offensive. I get the impression that, with the exception of ad-blocking, Firefox is simply playing catch-up to any idea coming from Chrome regardless of whether it makes sense or not. Would Firefox had removed FTP support had Chrome not done it before?

And fourth, make all these weird experiments extensions.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2023/12/14/three-years-after-its-reva...

[2] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1330109

[3] I always associated tabs with Opera, though.

[4] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2024/a...

mr_machine• 7 months ago

Make Firefox fully and exclusively a tool in service of the user.

Eliminate - both in code and by policy - anything that compromises privacy. If a new feature or support of a new technology reduces privacy, make it optional. Give me a switch to turn it off.

Stop opting the user into things. No more experiments. No more changing of preferences or behavior during upgrade.

Give the user more control; more opportunities for easy and powerful automation and integration.

Not only would this win me back as a user, I'd pay for the privilege. I'm paying for Kagi and happy to be doing so. I'd love to pay for an open source browser I could trust and respect.

pessimizer4• 7 months ago

- They were ahead of the game with extensions. Then everyone copied them.

They were ahead of the game with extensions, then they destroyed their own extensions. They copied everyone else, not the other way around.

- They were ahead of the game with tabs. Then everyone copied them.

They were ahead of the game with tabs. Then while destroying their extensions they made vertical tabs harder, while still leaving it as a charitable contribution by the community instead of an internal project, and slow-walked it for a decade. I still have to do weird CSS to make them look right, because they decided to have an opinionated sidebar for no particular reason.

- They are still the best browser to use for an ad free internet experience.

This, again, is not their fault. It's because of a man who they don't pay, who has had to battle with them on multiple occasions. Their only contribution is not accepting a Chrome standard completely. Imagine wanting to be given credit for not exactly copying your neighbor, after an enormous amount of pressure was brought to bear. It's my belief that Google decided that Firefox wouldn't kill ad blocking in the end, because it would have looked horrible in antitrust court. Now that's over (Obama judges don't believe in antitrust), and you can expect Firefox to kill it soon enough.

Because to me, they seem to be constantly trying to make FireFox better. It's just hit or miss.

Nah. They kept telling me, while ignoring everyone's complaints about their actual experiences, that the most important thing was to reduce startup time for some unknown reason.

pier25• 7 months ago

They were ahead of the game with extensions. Then everyone copied them.

Anyone remembers when Firebug was released?

Today we have amazing dev tools in all browsers but back in the day Firebug was such a game changer.

Inityx• 7 months ago

For me:

- Enable Color Management and HDR display on non-MacOS platforms

- Play HDR video

- Support common and rising media codecs and container formats (HEVC, MKV, JXL)

- Support WebXR properly on desktop

ErroneousBosh2• 7 months ago

I feel the problem they're trying to solve with that is "EB isn't sufficiently pissed off with the gradually deteriorating user experience yet so instead of actually displaying the page we'll have a big modal popup telling him how great the AI tools are and how he should try them!"

I do not want to try your AI tools, Mozilla, yours or anyone else's.

ivanjermakov• 7 months ago

Making a better product does not make a fortune in a short run. Banning ad blockers and integrating adware/spyware does.

boobsbr• 7 months ago

The Mozilla Corporation has earned around USD ~500 million in 2023.

The Mozilla Foundation has received around USD ~26 million in 2023 in donation from the Mozilla Corporation (~70%) and other sources (~30%).

earthnail• 7 months ago

For someone not in the loop, can you explain the difference between the two orgs and maybe even explain what each org uses the money for?

swiftcoder6• 7 months ago

The Foundation owns the trademarks, and mostly does evangelism. The (subsiduary) Corporation actually develops the browser (and accepts a bunch of revenue from Google for Search placement)

cardanome2• 7 months ago

The Mozilla Foundation does lots of "spreading awareness" but does not contribute to Firefox development.

That is the most vexing part. I want to donate for Firefox development. Not marketing, not side projects, let me just fund the devs. But no, that is not possible.

Blender is a huge success story relying on sponsors and donations, Wikipedia is swimming in money but no we can't just have a free browser.

No we need to have a Mozilla Corporation that lives on Google money for being the controlled opposition i.e. technically avoiding monopoly situation thing. After all CEOs can't get rich on donations, can they?

forgotpwd162• 7 months ago

Ironically Wikimedia is also throwing money around to side projects, outreach, etc. But luckily for them their products are essentially run by volunteers.

jowea• 7 months ago

A decent chunk of the users who bothered installing an adblock would also be bothered enough to install a FF fork with adblock, so I doubt the revenue increase would be much.

As for calling it "off-mission": yes, what's even the point of FF if that's the route it goes on?

theasisa• 7 months ago

Do any of these forks have the ability to sync, either with Firefox or something self hosted? Or are they all just basically reskins with a single toggle added or such?

shantara2• 7 months ago

LibreWolf has a Firefox Sync option, though it's disabled by default

elashri• 7 months ago

Yes you can actually self-host both Firefox sync server [1] and use Firefox accounts (which also can be self-hosted [2] and someone put something simpler in docker image [3]). And those can be used even with Firefox itself not only the forks.

[1] https://github.com/mozilla-services/syncstorage-rs

[2] https://mozilla.github.io/ecosystem-platform/tutorials/devel...

[3] https://github.com/jackyzy823/fxa-selfhosting

falcor84• 7 months ago

Good point. I'd actually be happy to pay a couple of bucks a month for a good syncing solution based on an open source protocol, to make it easier for me to use the same history and preferences across browsers, IDEs and other such tools. It's actually a similar need and setup to that of a password manager, so I wonder if this is something Bitwarden could take on.

master-lincoln• 7 months ago

I don't see how your 2 questions are related to each other.

Do any of these forks have the ability to sync, either with Firefox or something self hosted?

The Firefox Sync web service is provided by Mozilla but can be self hosted: https://github.com/mozilla-services/syncstorage-rs. That could also be used in forks. See e.g. https://librewolf.net/docs/faq/#can-i-use-firefox-sync-with-... . I don't understand what you mean by sync with Firefox.

Or are they all just basically reskins with a single toggle added or such?

Hard to generalize, but definitely not all of them. see e.g. https://lwn.net/Articles/1012453/

major5053• 7 months ago

Well, is no mistery that today the best versioins of Firefox are the non official versions like waterfox and zen.

NObody trusts mozilla anymore, specially after they turned into an add company and started paying their CEOs exorbitating ammounts, considering what was being invested in their core business (supposedly making a better browser).

TurboSkyline• 7 months ago

I'm not familiar with Zen, but how do you reconcile that Waterfox frequently lags behind upstream Firefox in terms of security fixes? Yes, you get a perceived gain in privacy, but is that worth potentially exposing yourself to additional vulnerabilities?

MrAlex94• 7 months ago

lags behind upstream Firefox in terms of security fixes

I’m not sure why this has become a thing - usually I either release Waterfox the week before ESR releases (the week the code freeze happens and new version gets tagged) or, if I’m actively working on features and they need to coincide with the next update I push, I will release on the same Tuesday the ESR releases.

You can check the GitHub tag history for Waterfox to see it’s been that way for a good while :)

einr• 7 months ago

Yes, you get a perceived gain in privacy, but is that worth potentially exposing yourself to additional vulnerabilities?

Speaking only for myself, and regardless of whether this is actually true (see sibling comment): yes. Absolutely. A non-privacy focused browser like Firefox has vulnerabilities/data leaks by design that are worse than hypothetical ones that I probably will not be subject to browsing my usual benign set of websites.

(Posted from Waterfox)

major5053• 7 months ago

IT dosnet lag long, since both have pretty activity communities.

There are other variations that are a little faster in issueing the updates, but they are maintained by small teams, so they have more change of being corrupted by bullshit, specially this day and age where people take politics too damn serious.

Too be honest, except for niche uses, I just abandoned firefox. Their engine is behind, lags in sites that use too much javascript is visible, when even opening 3 or 4 tabs makes they browser lag behind.

I just keep it in my system this days to access some sites in my work computer and test UI rendering in firefox. Other than that, I had to surrender to chrome and its variations.

iLoveOncall2• 7 months ago

Unfortunately Firefox is basically already dead, it has an incredibly small market share and it will never grow again because their leadership is affected by the corporate mind virus.

I know most HN users are on Firefox, but they should get used to an alternative now, not when its inevitable death happens.

phito2• 7 months ago

What's a good, non-chromium alternative?

notenlish• 7 months ago

Zen browser is quite nice. I've heard waterfox was good too.

HanClinto2• 7 months ago

I've been hearing good things about Orion browser. My wife has switched to it, but I'm still on Firefox.

Our family is already super happy with Kagi as a web search engine, and it sounds like they're doing good things on the browser side too.

Idiot211• 7 months ago

My key problem is not knowing what the real good alternatives are? I've trusted Mozilla for so long that I've fallen out of touch with a market that never really changed as much as it has in the last few years.

iLoveOncall2• 7 months ago

I simply don't think there's an alternative that will tick all the boxes between UX, privacy, support, etc.

hhh• 7 months ago

do you have a source for hn users being mostly firefox users?

nottorp• 7 months ago

i can guess that a lot of them are ublock origin users

tcfhgj• 7 months ago

Firefox may be far from perfect, but somehow it's still the best option.

array_key_first7• 7 months ago

There are zero alternatives to Firefox that aren't 99% Firefox.

Firefox is a unique browser that is, in many ways, positioned to be the best browser. It's fast, fairly privacy preserving, and not built on chromium.

some_furry2• 7 months ago

This Mozilla fiasco has convinced me that being a nonprofit isn't enough. We need a web browser that is actively hostile towards corporations and surveillance capitalism.

eviks• 7 months ago

Why hasn't the anti-corporate fiasco (not a single successful example) convinced you that it's not enough?

some_furry2• 7 months ago

Corporations, private equity, the ever encroaching monopolies and centralization of economic power, the steady march towards authoritarianism... all of these things are connected and are making our lives shittier. We should oppose them.

swiftcoder6• 7 months ago

This Mozilla fiasco has convinced me that being a nonprofit isn't enough

I'm not sure to what extent Mozilla actually functions as a nonprofit. All the bits one cares about (i.e. FireFox) are developed by the for-profit subsidiary, which is at least somewhat beholden to Google/Microsoft for revenue...

nrhrjrjrjtntbt• 7 months ago

man curl

Phelinofist• 7 months ago

hostile towards corporations and surveillance capitalism

... they said. Not against users.

cardanome2• 7 months ago

Starting with a strong copyleft license helps a lot. See Blender being GPL.

aschampion• 7 months ago

How so? Corporate and surveillance capitalism's infrastructure is built on copyleft software. The equivocation of license dogmatism with social good and sustainability that those movements were never actually aligned with is part of what's left socially minded technologies and communities so vulnerable to the predation that led the web to this current mess.

jamespo2• 7 months ago

"oh look, my browser doesn't work with Facebook, any Google sites and most of the web"

bluehex• 7 months ago

I just noticed last week that Chrome was putting multiple versions of some 4GB AI model [1] on my hard disk that I'd never asked for, so when I upgraded my laptop I took the opportunity to switch to Firefox, and now this.

My image of Mozilla as a bastion for user first software just shattered.

[1] https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/get-started

bjord2• 7 months ago

last I checked, firefox doesn't download AI models unless you try to use a (clearly-labeled) feature that requires them. you can also manage/uninstall them at about:addons

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/on-device-models

totally uncharitable interpretation of the quote linked here aside, how is providing an interface for using fully local models not user first software?

chillfox• 7 months ago

If the users don't want the feature, then pushing it on them is not user first. It's that simple.

herobird• 7 months ago

It's kinda frustrating that Mozilla's CEO thinks that axing ad-blockers would be financially beneficial for them. Quite the opposite is true (I believe) since a ton of users would leave Firefox for alternatives.

hu3• 7 months ago

Mozilla has pressure from their sugar daddy, Google, to weaken ad-blockers.

buran77• 7 months ago

The only reason Mozilla matters in the eyes of Google is because it gives the impression there's competition in the browser market.

But Firefox's users are the kind who choose the browser, not use whatever is there. And that choice is driven in part by having solid ad-blockers. People stick with Firefox despite the issues for the ad-blocker. Take that away and Firefox's userbase dwindles to even lower numbers to the point where nobody can pretend they are "competition". That's when they lose any value for Google.

Without the best-of-the-best ad-blocking I will drop Firefox like a rock and move to the next best thing, which will have to be a Chromium based browser. I'll even have a better overall experience on the web when it comes to the engine itself, to give me consolation for not having the best ad-blocker.

agumonkey5• 7 months ago

i left chrome to avoid ads.. i'd rather use dillo than ads infested firefox

mrtksn5• 7 months ago

The whole web ecosystem was first run by VC money and everything was great until every corner was taken, the land grab was complete and the time to recoup the investment has come.

Once the users were trapped for exploitation, it doesn’t make sense to have a browser that blocks ads. How are they supposed to pay software salaries and keep the lights on? People don’t like paying for software, demand constant updates and hate subscriptions. They all end up doing one of those since the incentives are perverse, that’s why Google didn’t just ride the Firefox till the end and instead created the Chrome.

It doesn’t make sense to have trillion dollars companies and everything to be free. The free part is until monopolies are created and walled gardens are full with people. Then comes the monetization and those companies don’t have some moral compass etc, they have KPI stock values and analytics and it’s very obvious that blocking ads isn’t good financially.

shakna2• 7 months ago

The whole web ecosystem was first run by VC money

Huh? Nexus was funded by CERN.

Newsgrounds was never investor funded.

Yahoo! Directory was just two guys, and you paid to be listed. There were no investors involved.

WebCrawler was a university project. Altavista was a research project.

MindDraft• 7 months ago

while i may agree with the first line, rest are little skewed perspective.

People don’t like paying for software, demand constant updates and hate subscriptions.

hate subscription?? may be. if it's anything like Adobe then yes, people will hate.

that constant update, is something planted by these corporates, and their behavior manipulation tactics. People were happily paying for perpetual software, which they can "own" in a cd//dvd.

bambax3• 7 months ago

If a time comes when there are zero free browser with effective ad-blocking, it will create space for a non-free browser that does it. It would create a whole ecosystem.

I currently pay zero for ad-blocking (FF + uBlock Origin) and it works perfectly; but I would pay if I had to.

mattacular• 7 months ago

The whole web ecosystem was first run by VC money and everything was great until every corner was taken,

Categorically untrue and weird revisionism. Basically the opposite of what actually happened.

ryandrake• 7 months ago

People don’t like paying for software, demand constant updates and hate subscriptions.

Yes, No, Yes?

I don't demand constant updates. I don't want constant updates. Usually when a company updates software it becomes worse. I am happy with the initial version of 90% of the software I use, and all I want is bug fixes and security updates.

shantara2• 7 months ago

Ditto. A fully functional uBlock Origin is the only remaining reason why I'm still sticking with Firefox despite everything

gvurrdon2• 7 months ago

Containers are also very useful indeed; I have to log into various different Google and Github accounts and can do this in a single browser window.

ghusto• 7 months ago

Which alternatives though? On Mac at least, I'm not aware of any viable non-Chromium alternatives.

braebo• 7 months ago

Use Brave the privacy is better than Firefox already.

swiftcoder6• 7 months ago

On Mac at least, I'm not aware of any viable non-Chromium alternatives

Surely Mac is the only place there is a viable non-Chromium alternative (Safari)?

actionfromafar• 7 months ago

What problems do people have? I use Firefox on Mac since a decade at least.

saubeidl6• 7 months ago

Zen is basically Firefox with Arc's UX. It's by far my favorite browser.

janv• 7 months ago

Orion is pretty viable alternative. Based on WebKit.

7bit• 7 months ago

I prefer Firefox over Chromium. But I much more prefer having a working ad blocker. Therefore I support that statement and when Firefox starts removing support for that, I'm out and there's enough alternatives I can go to, even tho they're Chromium based.

mark_l_watson• 7 months ago

I use the Duck Duck Go browser for almost everything. I is open source for iOS/Android/macOS platforms, but I think there are parts of their platform that are not. The DDG browser hits all my privacy requirements.

mcv2• 7 months ago

There are a ton of Firefox forks, especially in order to keep Firefox but without these sort of shenanigans.

The only problem is: what's the difference between the forks, and which is the best? I have no idea.

danaris6• 7 months ago

...Safari??

Apple doesn't collect your browsing data, they build in privacy controls that are pretty much as strong as they can manage given the state of the world, and while it doesn't support uBO, it supports a variety of pretty solid adblockers (I use AdGuard, which, AFAICT, Just Works™ and even blocks YouTube ads most of the time, despite their arms race).

iso16313• 7 months ago

There's only two alternatives, safari and chrome-based browsers. Safari isn't cross platform either

nephihaha6• 7 months ago

What is your opinion on Brave?

woadwarrior01• 7 months ago

Safari isn't cross platform either

WebKit is[1][2].

[1] https://webkit.org/downloads/ [2]: https://webkit.org/webkit-on-windows/

vanschelven• 7 months ago

It's financially beneficial for them in exactly the same way as setting yourself on fire makes you warmer

PurpleRamen5• 7 months ago

Knowing an option, doesn't mean it's his goal. It's probably just a regular offer from Google, they always decline.

ErroneousBosh2• 7 months ago

Quite the opposite is true (I believe) since a ton of users would leave Firefox for alternatives.

Alternatives like maybe a fork of Firefox with the adblocker-blocker removed?

mattbee• 7 months ago

And users would flee not just because they're seeing the ads but because Firefox is obviously the slowest browser again. Stripping the ads is a big performance boost, so right now Firefox feels snappier than Chrome on ad-laden pages.

klabb3• 7 months ago

Quite the opposite is true (I believe) since a ton of users would leave Firefox for alternatives.

Yes but keep in mind that’s not an individual problem that is solved by switching browsers. If a browser engine dies, the walls get closer and the room smaller. With only Chromium and WebKit left, we may soon have a corporate owned browsers pulling in whatever direction Google and Apple wants. I can think of many things that are good for them but bad for us. For instance, ”Web Integrity” and other DRM.

freddref• 7 months ago

It might be financial beneficial once as an up-front payment, but long term, as others have mentioned, really not good for the project to remove the only feature that gives firefox a defensible way to fill it's niche in the market.

ntoskrnl_exe• 7 months ago

That wouldn’t seem so much out of the ordinary, long-term thinking CEO is an oxymoron these days.

KurSix5• 7 months ago

The users most likely to leave are the ones who actively recommend Firefox to others and keep it installed on friends' and family's machines...

dhruv3006• 7 months ago

Correction : It has already killed itself.

9209561826• 7 months ago

Ok win

akimbostrawman• 7 months ago

They have been since a decade. After tripping down on unrelated political activism they do the same with AI.

Firefox is only good for getting forked into better browser like Mullvad Browser, LibreWolf and Tor Browser.

ACCount37• 7 months ago

I think AI in the browser could be useful. It just isn't that useful now.

So far, the most useful "AI feature" Firefox has ever shipped is the page translation system, which uses a local AI to work. I wouldn't mind seeing more of things like that.

Eventually, "browser use" skill in AIs is going to get better too. And I'd trust Firefox with an official vendor agnostic "AI integration" interface, one that allows an AI of user's choice to drive it, over something like OpenAI's browser - made solely by one AI company for its own product.

ThatPlayer• 7 months ago

Yeah I use a plugin for similar translation functionality, but with a local llama.cpp instance instead. Definitely useful and has increased my usage. Also works nicely on the Android version of the app.

colesantiago6• 7 months ago

How are they funded? Especially LibreWolf?

Curious if LibreWolf can survive the next 25 years or even longer than Firefox.

OvervCW5• 7 months ago

Mullvad at least is funded by their VPN subscriptions.

Grikbdl• 7 months ago

> He says he could begin to block ad blockers in Firefox and estimates that’d bring in another $150 million, but he doesn’t want to do that. It feels off-mission.
I read this as “I don't want to but I'll kill AdBlockers in Firefox for buckerinos ”.

I completely disagree. First of all the original quote is paraphrasing, so we don't know in which tone it was delivered, but calling something "off-mission" doesn't at all sound like "we'd do it for money" to me.

Krssst• 7 months ago

This is how I read it too, feels like a misinterpreted quote taken out of context. Everyone at Mozilla is probably well aware that removing adblockers would make them lose probably the majority of their users.

wtcactus2• 7 months ago

Sincerely, I'm just using Firefox ATM because of Sidebery.

If I could use something similar on Brave, I would go back in an instant.

My main issues with FF are that it is a battery hog on MacOS, doesn't have AV1 playing capabilities (or it has, but I would need to go through some configuring that I don't need to do in other browsers) and sometimes it stalls in certain pages (that's probably not FF fault, but that the web developers don't optimize for it... but still, it's not a problem on Brave, so, I don't really care for apologising for it).

aitchnyu• 7 months ago

I used Sidebery which had niggles. I switched to native vertical tabs with collapsible groups, which Brave also has.

wtcactus2• 7 months ago

But it still doesn’t have work spaces, right?

onli• 7 months ago

We are missing the context how the statement was said in the interview. The CEO is new and not used to the scrutiny that position brings, especially for Mozillas CEO given their purported ideals. It is quite possible he said this as something absurd -> "If making money was our only goal we would have some other options. We could for example disable all adblockers, to get more money from our advertising sponsor Google, at least 150 million USD. But we can not and won't do that, as it would feel completely off-mission for everyone and harm us long-term. So we always keep our mission in mind." Then the journalists shortens it to the blip in the verge article and the reaction twists it around a bit more, assuming disabling adblockers was on the table as a serious suggestion.

Or it could be it really was on the table since they just entered the advertising business and think AI is the future of Mozilla, a "fuck those freeloaders", heartfelt from the Porsche driving MBAs in Mozilla's management. Who knows. But it's a choice which interpretation one assumes.

twelvechess• 7 months ago

At least there are projects like ladybird coming up to fill their shows

tgv2• 7 months ago

Don't count on it. Have you ever seen how much time and effort has been put in making Firefox, Safari and Chrome compliant and performant? It'll take Ladybird ages to get anywhere near.

Someone could try to merge e,g, V8 and Servo, once that's in decent shape. But even then it'll be time consuming to build an acceptable UI, cookie and history management, plugin interface, etc.

potwinkle• 7 months ago

Ladybird is pretty good today. A lot of web apps, even complex ones, just work. It's reached high compliance scores for web standards in a shockingly quick period. See here: https://youtu.be/VqzbqsIlaNI?si=YPdwbApq4nVYlPMQ&t=209

kjkjadksj2• 7 months ago

Seems like its easier to crack an existing browser and take away stupid features than to build one. Against TOS but I really don’t care.

jemmyw• 7 months ago

And servo: I wish that one would get more mention as it's quite far along. Having multiple competing browsers again that are not controlled by megacorps would be great. Ladybird for browsing, Servo for embedding.

andai• 7 months ago

Oh no! There goes Google's antitrust insurance...

ekjhgkejhgk2• 7 months ago

CEO

He says he could begin to block ad blockers in Firefox and estimates that’d bring in another $150 million, but he doesn’t want to do that. It feels off-mission.

LOL the day that Firefox stops me from running what I want is the day I'll get rid of it.

Silhouette• 7 months ago

I still think it was a mistake for Firefox to dump its old plugin model. The customisation was a USP for Firefox and many useful tweaks and minor features have never been replaced.

Today the ability to run proper content blockers is still a selling point for Firefox but obviously wouldn't be if they started to meddle with that as well. (Has there ever been a more obvious case of anticompetitive behaviour than the biggest browser nerfing ad blocking because it's owned by one of the biggest ad companies?)

Other than customisation the only real advantage I see for Firefox today is the privacy angle. But again that would obviously be compromised if they started breaking tools like content blockers that help to provide that protection.

guywhocodes• 7 months ago

It made me stop using FF on android.

SilasX• 7 months ago

They...already do that? They stopped allowing unsigned addons, even if you allow them in about:config (a power-user feature). Even Chrome allows you to toggle the option to do that -- in a more user-friendly way! -- and actually honors it, so I don't think it's the massive security hole everyone claims.

Edit: My Hitler parody of when Firefox introduced this (almost 10 years ago now!): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taGARf8K5J8

ekjhgkejhgk2• 7 months ago

Funny.

Though, on this line:

"The whole point of Firefox is that I can customize it all I want".

You realize that with more customization comes more fingerprinting? :-)

colesantiago6• 7 months ago

The state of Mozilla's current 'products':

Firefox

Mozilla VPN

Mozilla Monitor

Firefox Relay

MDN Plus

Thunderbird

Some of these products are just repackaged partnerships.

Firefox - Funded by Google with the search partnership bringing in $500M in revenue. (free)

Mozilla VPN - Repackaged Mullvad VPN and using Mullvad servers.

Mozilla Monitor - Repackaged HaveIBeenPwned. (free)

Firefox Relay - No different to Simplelogin and not open source. (free)

MDN Plus - Be honest, you wouldn't pay for this since this was offered for a long time for free, MDN is already free.

Thunderbird - Most likely funded by Google (free) (using Firefox Search Revenue)

Be honest, would you pay for any of Mozilla's products when most of these can be found for free or close to free?

That is the problem.

homarp• 7 months ago

people do pay for Kagi.

the question is more "how to replace the free money from google by real clients,and still get the same margin as google free money"

tgv2• 7 months ago

Isn't Thunderbird (more or less) independent? "Thunderbird operates in a separate, for-profit subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation."

forgotpwd162• 7 months ago

Yeap. It's mentioned in their financial reports that user donations represent more than 99.9% of our annual revenue[0]. Also seems their staff is mainly engineers/developers, and all the expenses are concentrated to their product*. Thunderbird doing what Firefox should.

[0] https://blog.thunderbird.net/2023/05/thunderbird-is-thriving...

*Though Thunderbird is Gecko-based so can be said in part, perhaps a significant one, they're depending on Firefox development.

colesantiago6• 7 months ago

It doesn't matter if they are or not really.

As of right now Thunderbird doesn't make any money, it relies on 'Donations' which isn't at all sustainable.

I can see Thunderbird is planning to do a pro plan, but it is behind a waitlist so the total sum of revenue Thunderbird is making relative to Google's $500M deal is close to zero.

Ender-events• 7 months ago

Firefox relay is open source (https://github.com/mozilla/fx-private-relay) and have paid plan (1€/month)

colesantiago6• 7 months ago

Even worse?

That means people can self host (for privacy and incase the private relays are unstable) and not give money to Mozilla.

Besides 1€/month is not going to cover anything of the costs to run the service.

mrweasel2• 7 months ago

Part of the "problem" is that people don't care about any of those products, except Firefox.

Mozilla needs to figure out how much they need to maintain Firefox, nothing else. I suspect that's not the entirety of the $200 million they currently spend on "development costs". Everything else they receive in donations and partnership fees should go directly into an investment portfolio which will be used to keep Firefox development active in the future.

If they didn't care about anything else, the Google money could fund Firefox for at least two years per yearly fee.

goldsteinq2• 7 months ago

I am subscribed to recurrent donations to Thunderbird.

I would pay for Firefox if it was focused on privacy and customizabilty, not telemetry and LLMs.

colesantiago6• 7 months ago

How much do you pay to Thunderbird, just curious.

ionwake2• 7 months ago

I dont know how anyone could take mozilla seriously after they integrated google analytics into it about 10 years ago for no reason I can fathom. It immediately made me think somethings off, and I never used it again.

Instead I thought screw it and just went nuts deep into chrome, atleast it was more functional.

ps - ( apparently mozilla took it out sometime later , but to me the damage to its reputation was done)

gitaarik2• 7 months ago

And so switching to a browser created by the world's biggest advertising company is your solution? Interesting

ionwake2• 7 months ago

yes I explained the irony it’s clear you missed if you read my comment again you will understand that I decided to opt for full functionality albeit at the expense of loss of total privacy after being let down my Mozilla.

If you’re still struggling you can use an llm to try and explain my comment to you.

All the best buddy

lxgr2• 7 months ago

> He says he could begin to block ad blockers in Firefox and estimates that’d bring in another $150 million, but he doesn’t want to do that. It feels off-mission.
It may be just me, but I read this as “I don't want to but I'll kill AdBlockers in Firefox for buckerinos ”.

Yes, that does seem like a pretty uncharitable interpretation of that quote. I read it as "we won't do it, even though it would bring in $150M USD".

chii• 7 months ago

a pretty uncharitable interpretation

like hoping for the best, but planning for the worst, you must interpret people's intentions using the same methodology. By quoting that axing adblock could be bringing $150mil, but also saying that he doesn't want to do it, it's advertising that a higher price would work - it's a way to deniably solicit an offer.

SiempreViernes• 7 months ago

So then we should interpret Bruno adopting this uncharitable interpretation as evidence they are intentionally trying to ruin Mozillas reputation rather than sincerely analysing an interview, right?

And in turn my comment above is not a honest remark that your suggested interpretation strategy seems to be selectively applied, but rather an attempt to hurt your standing with your peers.

anothernewdude2• 7 months ago

It wouldn't bring in their estimate, it'd kill the browser.

cryptonym• 7 months ago

Maybe they'd still get paid $150M for that, while only having to barely keep the browser alive, with no user request, for illusion of non-monopoly.

Fewer devs, more bucks, big win for the execs on the short term.

lifthrasiir5• 7 months ago

The estimate does sound reasonable if it's an one-off payment. I agree that no one would pay that amount of money each year to keep adblocking from Firefox.

Croftengea2• 7 months ago

Right? This is what all these MBAs and supply chain efficiency experts never get.

roenxi2• 7 months ago

Yeah, the article's quoting didn't help its case. It doesn't seem fair to quote someone saying [I don't think X is a good idea] as evidence they are about to do X.

That being said, in the original context [0] it does sound a lot more like an option on the table. That original article presents it as the weakest of a list of things they're about to explore - but who knows, maybe the journalist has butchered what was said. It is an ambiguous idea without more context about how close it is to Mozilla trying to make life hard for ad-blockers.

[0] https://www.theverge.com/tech/845216/mozilla-ceo-anthony-enz...

autoexec4• 7 months ago

The part about making money through advertising and selling data to 3rd parties (though "search and AI placement deals") is already not a good sign. Planning to make their money through ads and surveillance capitalism is already making it impossible to say "I always know my data is in my control. I can turn the thing off, and they’re not going to do anything sketchy"

kunley2• 7 months ago

Except that expressing loud doubts about something ethically dubious is often a sign that an opposite action will be taken. So many business people want this moral excuse "but I had doubts" while being totally cynical

tdeck2• 7 months ago

In addition "off-mission" is a pretty weak way to describe completely destroying your credibility and betraying your user base. Building the Firefox phone was off mission. Buying Pocket was off mission. Maybe it's just me, but selling your remaining faithful users down the river to make a quick buck from advertisers seems a little, I don't know... worse than that?

luckylion• 7 months ago

It might just as well have been something that was supposed to sound young and fun ("I don't want to do that") and ends up leaving too much room for interpretation.

If you have the power to do something, saying you might do it but that you don't want to makes people imagine you'd do it. If you have a knife and talk about how you "might stab people, but don't want to", that's a very different message than having a knife and saying "obviously I'm not going to stab people, violence is not an option".

The latter reassures, the former depends heavily on what the recipient of the message thinks of you, and whether they can imagine you stabbing people.

If that quote was accurate, then either he just said something and wanted to wing it, or they should reconsider their communication strategists.

kuschku• 7 months ago

You wouldn't calculate the expected RoI of killing adblockers if killing adblockers was never considered.

boomboomsubban• 7 months ago

It's not hard to imagine the last default search contract negotiation had Google go "we'll give you $x if you kill manifest v2, $x-$150 million if you don't."

edited to correct my misunderstanding.

gr4vityWall3• 7 months ago

You wouldn't calculate the expected RoI of killing adblockers if killing adblockers was never considered.

I agree, although if someone isn't the kind of person who would calculate that, they're probably not the person who will become the CEO of a company that size in the first place. I don't think organizations have the right incentives in place to push people with those values to the top.

littlecranky672• 7 months ago

for it to be considered, somebody must have offered to pay that 150M. Or he considered going to somebody (we all know that somebody is Google) and asking them for that money in return for killing ad blockers.

takluyver4• 7 months ago

I agree with all the people saying it would drive a lot of the remaining users away, and I hope they don't do it. But I'm not remotely surprised that they considered following what their biggest competitor (Chrome) already did.

matwood• 7 months ago

Part of being CEO/running a business is considering all options, but it doesn't mean it will ever move beyond the ROI/risk phase. Ever read one of the risk assessments in a companies public filings? It's the same thing.

duskdozer• 7 months ago

I could see myself saying something like that despite having no intention to do it. But I'm also not a CEO.

freeopinion2• 7 months ago

You wouldn't calculate a figure and publish it as the first step in any reasonable price negotiation. Any pricing you mention publicly would be double or triple the number you are willing to accept. By the time you are talking publicly about realistic numbers you are well into the private negotiations.

xenator• 7 months ago

Imagine you are in a marriage and your spouse say: "I can sleep with other people, doesn’t want to do that. It feels off-mission".

I don't understand context, but my honest reaction will be: "WTF, you just said? What type of relationship you think we have if we discuss such things?"

I definitely understand why people worry. This is just crazy to weight trust in money. If this is on the table and discussed internally, then what we are talking about?

'T' in Mozilla Firefox means 'Trust'.

Joker_vD2• 7 months ago

Yeah, I've once said in a relationship "Look, sure, she maybe pretty, but I want to be with you, so no, I am not going to reach out to her, don't worry". Apparently, it was a poor way to word this idea.

nialv7• 7 months ago

The interpretation is not the problem. Whether he will do it, is actually secondary to the fact that he thinks cutting adblock can bringing in money.

No, it will just kill the browser. The fact he thinks otherwise tells me how out of touch he is.

p-e-w4• 7 months ago

Firefox has a market share around 3%. Even most technologists stopped using it long ago. Many banks and government websites don’t even support it anymore and loudly tell people to use Chrome instead, especially in developing countries.

Nothing can kill Firefox, because it’s already dead for all practical purposes.

guenthert• 7 months ago

Is it him or is it you? I'd think within the Mozilla organization is a data trove of telemetry which renders a fairly good picture of how many users actually are using ad blockers.

JoeJonathan• 7 months ago

Like many others, the ability to run uBO is the main reason I use Firefox. Otherwise I'd use Chrome or Safari.

kakacik• 7 months ago

This is academic discussion, where you think when X is said it means this, somebody (others here) think its that and so on. Grasping straws and all. I guess when around Christmas work churn slows down and some people spend more (too much?) time here.

yxhuvud• 7 months ago

The question is what happens if he thinks the browser will die without that money. Is it a hill to die on?

For me as a user it is, but is it for him as a CEO?

alex77456• 7 months ago

The fact he thinks otherwise tells me how out of touch he is.

We don't know what he really thinks. Maybe he knows it's a risk he wouldn't want to take but presents it as a goodwill

beloch2• 7 months ago

The current pattern in software is, sadly:

1. Innovate

2. Dominate

3. Enshitify to cash in.

You can't skip step #2.

Right now, Firefox's market share is a rounding error compared to Chrome. Users are starting to switch away from Chrome because it's currently in step 3 (in spades). That trend will not continue if Firefox beats Chrome to the bottom of the pig-pen. Firefox's current focus on AI is concerning enough, but mirroring Chrome's shift to Manifest v3 (i.e. What killed full-blooded ad blocking in Chrome) would be outright suicide.

Mozilla needs to listen to their users. Most don't particularly want "let me run that through an AI for you" popups everywhere. Practically nobody running Firefox wants to be cut off from effective ad blocking.

Monetization is hard, for Mozilla in particular. It was always weird that most of their funding came from Google. Now that Google is yanking it, Mozilla needs to find alternative sources of filthy lucre. However, if they destroy their product's only competitive advantages, there will be nothing left to monetize. If Firefox remains a browser that can provide decent privacy and ad-blocking then Mozilla has a chance to find alternative revenue streams. If, instead, Mozilla throws those advantages away to make a quick buck, that's the last buck they'll ever make.

marcosdumay• 7 months ago

He may have a bad model of the world, but at least he is somewhat aligned with the user base.

unglaublich• 7 months ago

Who selects these CEOs? It almost seems like a caste system at this point. You can be a complete clown, but it's the best we have in our small caste so you're the one.

anon-3988• 7 months ago

No, it will just kill the browser. The fact he thinks otherwise tells me how out of touch he is.

Believe me when I say this but 99.99999% of the human population does not give a shit what is Firefox, Chrome, Edge, Brave, whatever.

Their survival is completely detached from how "good" it is. As long as it runs, opens a page, opens picture, plays video.

We all live in the tech bubble, to them its an "app" that is "annoying me with ads". And that if they know its an ad, not just part of the page. That is if they even know its a page, not just something my son told me to click if I want to go to "Facebook".

jklinger410• 7 months ago

he thinks cutting adblock can bringing in money.

It may kill the browser in a longer window, but before that, it would make them money. Most users do not donate anyway.

torben-friis2• 7 months ago

“I wouldn’t sell sexual services. I’ve spent an evening checking the going market rate for someone my age in my area and it’s 2k! Can you believe that? That’s a ton of money! Totally not going to do it though”.

It’s an eyebrow raising comment at the very least.

rblank• 7 months ago

https://xkcd.com/463/

animuchan2• 7 months ago

The OP doesn't even say "Totally not going to do it", merely "it feels off-mission", so a vibe check away from doing it.

hsbauauvhabzb• 7 months ago

I’d happily pay $100 a year for Firefox WITH an adblocker as long as part of the money is put towards ongoing internet freedom and preventing attestation

arealaccount• 7 months ago

Orion browser is a thing

rchaud4• 7 months ago

As with all the comments about "I'd pay X dollars to not be the product", it's been shown over and over again that paying money is not going to void corporate desire to simply double dip by raising prices while also showing ads.

RossBencina• 7 months ago

It feels off-mission.

That's supposedly The Verge paraphrasing the CEO (Unfortunately I can't verify because the full article requires subscription.) I would like to know what the CEO actually said because "it feels off-mission" is a strange thing for the leader of the mission to say. I would hope that they know the mission inside out. No need to go by feels.

autoexec4• 7 months ago

Here's that part of the article:

In our conversation, Enzor-DeMeo returns often to two things: that Mozilla cares about and wants to preserve the open web, and that the open web needs new business models. Mozilla’s ad business is important and growing, he says, and he worries “about things going behind paywalls, becoming more closed off.” He says the internet’s content business isn’t exactly his fight, but that Mozilla believes in the value of an open and free (and thus ad-supported) web.
At some point, though, Enzor-DeMeo will have to tend to Mozilla’s own business. “I do think we need revenue diversification away from Google,” he says, “but I don’t necessarily believe we need revenue diversification away from the browser.” It seems he thinks a combination of subscription revenue, advertising, and maybe a few search and AI placement deals can get that done. He’s also bullish that things like built-in VPN and a privacy service called Monitor can get more people to pay for their browser. He says he could begin to block ad blockers in Firefox and estimates that’d bring in another $150 million, but he doesn’t want to do that. It feels off-mission.
One way to solve many of these problems is to get a lot more people using Firefox. And Enzor-DeMeo is convinced Mozilla can get there, that people want what the company is selling. “There is something to be said about, when I have a Mozilla product, I always know my data is in my control. I can turn the thing off, and they’re not going to do anything sketchy. I think that is needed in the market, and that’s what I hope to do.”

csomar• 7 months ago

It feels off-mission.

He didn't say it is off-mission. But just that it feels. My guess is that he is looking at a higher number.

dizhn2• 7 months ago

That's peanuts. Google would pay them a lot more to disable adblocking for good. And it sounds like this guy would do it for the right amount. That said, it is kind of a lackluster article.

tokai3• 7 months ago

Oh no, we're not supposed to actually parse the words a CEO spew forth. Get out of here.

kristjank• 7 months ago

Do you really harbor so much charity towards tech CEOs that you can't see its other meaning as at least equally as likely?

It costs Mozilla literally nothing to reassure its privacy and user-controlled principles. Instead we got a jk...unless... type of response. This is cowardice and like another commenter has said, a negotiation offer disguised as a mission statement.

Brian_K_White• 7 months ago

"feels off mission" exposes how little conviction there is behind this position.

That is a flimsy tissue paper statement about a concept that should be a bedrock principle.

It's irrationally charitable to give it any credit at all. Especially in context where anyone who's awake should understand they need to be delivering an unquestionably clear message about unquestionably clear goals and core values, because this ain't that.

Or rather, it is a clear message, just a different message to a different audience.

asddubs• 7 months ago

yeah, it reads to me like "we probably shouldn't do it"

bagacrap• 7 months ago

It's definitely testing the waters.

kgwxd4• 7 months ago

Mentioning it is just the first of many softening phases. Its abuse 101. At some point we'll have "made him do it".

prmoustache• 7 months ago

It isn't even true that it would bring $150M. This is a calculation accounting on users staying on Firefox.

If they do that, most of the remaining users would flee and goodbye to your millions if you don't have any userbase anymore to justify asking money to anyone.

baxtr• 7 months ago

"It feels off-mission" is very different from "It's absolutely off-mission and against everything we stand for".

Ensorceled• 7 months ago

I mean, that's also exactly what you would say if you had a $150M offer on the table, had received a lot of push back and were now just checking the waters and waiting to consolidate your position.

Raed667• 7 months ago

I have seen these discussions in companies where privacy is the selling point.

These kind of questions usually come from non-engineers, people in product or sales who see privacy as a feature or marketing point, and if the ROI is higher they don't give a fuck and would pitch anything that would make a buck

tziki2• 7 months ago

"Uncharitable interpretation" is putting it mildly. I don't know the context for the quote but imagine being the CEO. You might give one hour interview outlining the tradeoffs you need to do to keep things running, and a random blogger takes a 5 second clip, makes an absurd interpretation and ends up on hackernews.

glenstein14• 7 months ago

Right, I was ready for the headline to be this like deep dive into the history of letting go of several engineers, or assessing the costs of purchasing pocket, or a deep dive into source code changes related to dabbling in ad tech or something.

You know, actual reporting sourcing something new. But in truth, it was just extrapolating a bunch of sweet nothings from the freezing of a quote already published in The Verge. It reminds me of Boston media market sports reporting. You're a sports writer, you have a deadline, and you have to take Curt Schilling's press conference and try and turn it into a story. So take something he said and squeeze it dry, trying to extract some implication of clubhouse drama, to drive the next new cycle and survive to your next paycheck as a reporter. That's the grift, that's the grind.

tschumacher• 7 months ago

Can someone explain how banning ad blockers from Firefox would bring in money for Mozilla? I can see how it would bring in money for other actors such as news outlets, YouTube, etc., but Mozilla doesn't have a big website where they are showing ads.

mossTechnician• 7 months ago

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman once boasted that the company hadn’t "put a sexbot avatar in ChatGPT yet." Two months later, they did[0].

Interpreting the Mozilla CEO the same way may not be charitable, but it is certainly familiar.

[0] https://futurism.com/future-society/sam-altman-adult-ai-reve...

grayhatter2• 7 months ago

CEOs are well known for turning down money, and always resisting the urge to squeeze every last drop of good will from an acquired property, right?

I think it's an apt warning, I'd have to read the literal interview transcripts to really draw a conclusion one way or the other. But the simple fact that this is on his mind, and felt like mentioning killing ad block was something Mozilla could do, and is considering doing, was a safe thing to say to a journalist... There's not a chance in hell I'd say anything remotely like that to a journalist.

When someone tells you who they are, believe them.

staticassertion2• 7 months ago

People are absolutely somersaulting through hoops to try to make "I don't want to do that" into "I'm going to do it" in the comments lol

toss13• 7 months ago

No, they are accurately observing that the "I don't want to do it" and "feels off mission" statements are FAR weaker than they can be and should be.

Such weak statements are either a real mistake or show movement away from those principles which should be bedrock for Mozilla and towards some justification to abandon those principles.

It's not like the industry has no precedents on this. "Don't Be Evil" was the motto of a company that is now one of the apex predators in the surveillance capitalism ecosystem.

Unwise to try to dismiss and laugh off legitimate alarms.

pnt12• 7 months ago

I'm concerned about the original quote which has a very weak sentiment. "it feels off-mission". Not something strong like "I'm completely against it" or "we'll never do that".

Even better would be similar to the article sentiment: "we could get 150 million now but degrade one of our few features that distinguishes us from other browsers + break a lot user trust, which would bring greater losses in the long term".

glenstein14• 7 months ago

That just seems like an ordinary case of purity test syndrome. What they said is they don't want to do it, but they're being convicted of a hypothetical belief in wanting to hypothetically do it maybe, maybe which is the last refuge of scoundrels who have no stronger sourcing for more well-grounded accusations. But in internet comment sections there's no need for accountability or charitable interpretation, and so you can accuse someone of practically anything and it's their job to bend over backwards against the most skeptical interpretations to pass the purity test. So there's a metagame not just of indicating your values but of extrapolating as to all the possible permutations of uncharitable interpretation that could lead to accusations so that you have to artfully construct your phrasing to get out ahead of that. It's never on the internet trolls making the accusation to be accountable to ordinary norms of charitable interpretation.

skywhopper• 7 months ago

I wish the CEO of Mozilla could have stated the commitment a little more strongly than “it feels off-mission”. Privacy, user control, and security of the web browsing experience are (or should be) the CORE of Mozilla's mission. This isn’t a decision to take lightly on vibes. Allowing ad-blockers (or any content manipulation plugins users want) should be a deep commitment.

jajuuka3• 7 months ago

Standard Firefox users looking for anything to be mad about. Even when it makes zero sense.

KurSix5• 7 months ago

The issue isn't the explicit "we won't do it," it's that it was framed as a concrete, priced option at all

rchaud4• 7 months ago

How would it bring in $150m? Is that some tranche of funding Google is witholding from them until they disable extensions?

OkayPhysicist4• 7 months ago

It costs the CEO of Mozilla nothing to make hard, convicted statements that all their users agree with. If it was me, the quote would be something like "but then they'd need to find a new CEO, because I'd be in prison for what I'd do to anyone who even suggested it".

Literally the only people who talk about Mozilla, or read things about what Mozilla is up to, are unusually motivated power users who really, really care about ad blocking and privacy. They may still have other users, but those people are coasting on momentum from when their grandkid installed Firefox on their computer years ago. They're not reading interviews with the new CEO. Yet Mozilla seems to consistently fail utterly at messaging to their only engaged users.

It's not even that they're doing evil shit, they're just absolutely terrible at proclaiming that they are committed to not doing evil shit.

matheusmoreira4• 7 months ago

"It feels off-mission" is incredibly weak opposition to something that would go against core values. It just means this guy's price is higher than 150 million dollars.

Everybody has their price. I'm ideologically opposed to advertising but if someone put 150 million dollars on my table and told me to stop making an issue out of it I think I'd take the money. Being set for life trumps being called a hypocrite.

ikrenji• 7 months ago

I only use Firefox over Chrome because it has adblock. So where does the $150 million comes from if people won't use it without adblock? Seems comrade didn't think this through...

LtWorf2• 7 months ago

It would bring users leaving.

adverbly• 7 months ago

I'm not sure it's that uncharitable...

The original quote was apparently said without an understanding of the customer base as if ad blockers were not a core piece of their value proposition.

This person doesn't understand their customer if they think it's going to bring in more money to cut ad blockers... It would bring in far less money because they would lose most of their customer base. It's not off mission: it's off Target.

xedrac2• 7 months ago

I would go as far to say that ad blockers are the primary value proposition of Firefox at this point. If they lose that, I have little reason to use it on my phone or my workstations.

caycep2• 7 months ago

Ah, instead of AGILE, it's MAFIA nowadays

CamouflagedKiwi2• 7 months ago

Amazing how they continue not to cater to their core audience. They literally have lost 90% of their market share from their peak, I guess I can see the temptation to try to regain it by reaching out to others, but doing that at the expense of your core is a terrible business strategy. It's not like those users are all that sticky, they're leaving as Mozilla pisses them off, and likely Mozilla are going to be left with what they stand for - which these days is nothing.

It's sad, I'm sure there was a better path Mozilla could have taken, but they've had a decade or more of terrible management. I wonder if the non-profit / corp structure hasn't helped, or if it's just a later-stage company with a management layer who are disconnected from the original company's mission and strategy.

PurpleRamen5• 7 months ago

Amazing how they continue not to cater to their core audience.

Who is Mozilla's core audience? From what I remember, it's not addon-users, as most users never have used even just a single addon.

They literally have lost 90% of their market share from their peak,

To be fair, it's not entirely their own fault. Competition is strong, especially from Google and Apple. Even with perfect decisions, they likely would still have lost big since their peak. The market for alternative Browsers isn't as big any more as it used to be.

g947o• 7 months ago

From what I remember, it's not addon-users, as most users never have used even just a single addon.

Source?

chmod7752• 7 months ago

From what I remember, it's not addon-users, as most users never have used even just a single addon.

If most users who install Firefox do so for superior adblocking and those same users are also very likely to turn off telemetry (which I think some privacy/adblock extensions probably do by default?), then at Mozilla's end one might get the impression that "most users don't use extensions" - even though the vast majority of users do.

So to answer the questions of:

Who is Mozilla's core audience?

It's probably the kind of user that has telemetry off. You don't know much if anything about them.

esperent• 7 months ago

40% of Firefox users use addons.

https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/usage-behavior

CamouflagedKiwi2• 7 months ago

Who is Mozilla's core audience?

I am thinking of it as: people who care about privacy and/or an independent web browser. That seems mostly in line with what the Mozilla Foundation's principles are stated to be.

Maybe it's not that. But if not, what is it? How do they otherwise have any positive differentiation versus their competition? It surely can't be claimed to be any sense of "users who want an AI browser" because surely those people are going to use ChatGPT's browser, not Mozilla's.

nateglims2• 7 months ago

To be fair, it's not entirely their own fault. Competition is strong, especially from Google and Apple. Even with perfect decisions, they likely would still have lost big since their peak. The market for alternative Browsers isn't as big any more as it used to be.

Their peak in share was also pre-chrome. They've basically been losing the battle slowly for over a decade.

nerdponx3• 7 months ago

Remember when the whole reason people liked Firefox is that it was super customizable? There was a time when it was THE power user browser. Things only went sideways after Chrome came out.

Firefox literally was a mainstream browser at one point. Internet Explorer sucked. Safari didn't suck but it was nobody's favorite either except some really hard-core Apple fans.

Yes, Chrome was revolutionary when it came out. And yes, Firefox seemed to struggle with legacy architectural decisions that limited their ability to catch up. But Firefox was still differentiated and had a loyal fan base. Loyal fan base is exactly what can keep a project or product alive through a downturn. All they had to do was focus on the browser. They did some great things along the way like popularizing DoH. But it's 2025 and there's still no UI for switching profiles that any normal person might be able or want to use. Can you really blame people for giving up?

KurSix5• 7 months ago

When you've already lost most of your mass-market appeal, the only defensible strategy left is to double down on the people who still care

Ezhik• 7 months ago

Every tech CEO loves to cosplay as "announcing the iPhone" 2007 Steve Jobs but nobody ever tries to cosplay as the "pulling Apple back from the brink by focusing on core competencies" 1997 Steve Jobs.

pepperball• 7 months ago

Amazing how they continue not to cater to their core audience.

I’ve seen this across several industries now.

The “core audience” is too small and too particular. There is another audience, much easier to please, much much larger, much more money can be made off them. Why stick to your niche “core audience”?

Etherlord87• 7 months ago

No, it's not much easier to please. You will compete with Chrome and you will lose. It is the core audience that is much easier to please, because those are loyal users that trust you and all you have to do is respect this trust by providing a stable service without nasty surprises.

sb057• 7 months ago

Well Mozilla has completely failed at it, for starters.

nerdponx3• 7 months ago

Conspiracy theory: Mozilla leadership is bad on purpose as a form of sabotage. Erode the fan base until it just wears away and dies on its own. Then there will be no one to challenge the Microsoft Google Apple hegemony.

tigranbs• 7 months ago

Firefox has been lagging in Web features for a long time. I have been a Zen browser user for about a year, and recently moved back to Arc just because almost all interactive websites look bad on the Firefox engine; somehow, they don't have the same level of JS API support as Chrome does, especially for WebRTC, Audio, or Video. And this is frustrating that they think the problem is the AdBlockers!

bjord2• 7 months ago

I didn't read it that way. I read it as him acknowledging that would be a poor choice and therefore that mozilla won't do it.

gitaarik2• 7 months ago

Right, saying that something which is completely against the company's fundamental principles "feels off mission" gives us a very secure feeling of this CEO.

nextlevelwizard2• 7 months ago

Literally only reason to use Firefox is that it still blocks ads properly.

If Mozzilla brings AI or removes ad blocks then they are every way just worse Chrome and there is zero reason to use them over Chrome.

I guess I should already start porting my Firefox extensions over to Chrome since this ship is sinking stupid fast.

jwrallie• 7 months ago

Firefox may say they will not block anything and still end up adopting something like Manifest v3.

Android blocking side loading is more or less in the same ballpark.

nextlevelwizard2• 7 months ago

And the result will be the same i.e. no reason to use Firefox.

I don't know why bring up Android when it is already Google product.

WhereIsTheTruth• 7 months ago

Mozilla received $555 million from Google in 2023

Half a billion, they are both milking and lying to you

nephihaha6• 7 months ago

I suspected it would be something like this.

on_the_train2• 7 months ago

The fact that they even have a CEO is mind boggling to me

nephihaha6• 7 months ago

A lot of things are not what they pretend to be. Wikipedia is another example.

elAhmo• 7 months ago

Has anything positive came out from or about Mozilla in the past few months or years?

TavsiE9s• 7 months ago

I'd say Rust.

swiftcoder6• 7 months ago

Rust is already a teenager...

globular-toast• 7 months ago

Wait, how could "blocking ad blockers" bring in money at all?

swiftcoder6• 7 months ago

Certain advertising firms are likely to pay a nice big sum to make sure ads are being delivered

1GZ0• 7 months ago

Yes, and they've been at it for a while. its honestly hard to watch.

throwaway81523• 7 months ago

"I think no one wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45926779

exceptione• 7 months ago

What Firefox needs is a new steward and move out, literally. The unruly business practices aren't just normalized, they are an expectation. The blathering ceo wasn't even aware his job is to hide that. The fox will die in this toxic ecosystem.

rado• 7 months ago

Just when I re-started using it because of the vertical tabs.

fijuv• 7 months ago

I think it's too late for Mozilla, since it seems they already squandered most of their good will, userbase and money.

At any rate, I think their only good path of to get rid of Gecko.

The best would be to replace it with a finished version of Servo, which would give them a technically superior browser, assuming Google doesn't also drop Blink for Servo. It may be too late for this, but AI agents may perhaps make finishing Servo realistic.

The other path would be to switch to Chromium, which would free all the Gecko developers to work on differentiating a Chromium-based Firefox from Chrome, and guarantee that Firefox is always better than Chrome.

takluyver4• 7 months ago

I doubt AI agents are going to greatly accelerate the development of something as big and complex as Servo. It seems more realistic that Firefox would be built around either Blink (from Chromium) or Webkit to lean on Google/Apple.

saubeidl6• 7 months ago

If they switch to Chromium, they'll just become yet another Chrome rebrand. It'll kill what makes their browser special.

theandrewbailey• 7 months ago

They keep redesigning their UI to be more like Chrome, might as well go deeper.

0dayz• 7 months ago

The other path would be to switch to Chromium, which would free all the Gecko developers to work on differentiating a Chromium-based Firefox from Chrome, and guarantee that Firefox is always better than Chrome

No they would get fired, unless Firefox found a new big project to earn money from, which at the moment is not very likely.

skrebbel• 7 months ago

I don't think it's too late at all. I mean, there's recurring outrage whenever Mozilla does something silly again but all through that Firefox is still a fantastic browser. Don't under-value the many quieter parts of Mozilla who just keep kicking ass day in day out.

mcv2• 7 months ago

What's wrong with Gecko?

takluyver4• 7 months ago

There's nothing particularly wrong with it, but developing a browser engine and keeping up with new web standards is quite a bit of work. And web developers won't all test on a browser with 2-3% market share, so there's more risk of sites not rendering quite right because the engine is different.

Iolaum• 7 months ago

The web without ublock origin is a hellscape. Whenever I try another browser, I immediately go back to firefox.

Do these people even know their users?

For example: Fedora Silverblue default Firefox install had an issue with some Youtube videos due to codecs. So I tried watching youtube on Chromium. Ads were so annoying I stopped watching by the second time I tried to watch a video. Stopped watching youtube until I uninstalled default firefox install and added Firefox from flathub. If the option to use a good adblocker gets taken away I 'll most likely dramatically reduce my web browsing.

P.S. Maybe someone ports Vanadium to desktop Linux? If firefox goes away that 'd be my best case desktop browser. Using it on my mobile ;)

nephihaha6• 7 months ago

I prefer Brave but already have suspicions about that too.

KurSix5• 7 months ago

That's not a niche power-user concern anymore, it's basic UX and safety

nbf_1995• 7 months ago

Maybe someone ports Vanadium to desktop linux

https://github.com/secureblue/Trivalent

b1124• 7 months ago

It's amusing how much ads hurt, once you're weaned off of them.

Even with traditional TV, growing up, I didn't really mind ads. Then I setup MythTV years ago, and had commercial skip... and of course just downloaded things without commercials too.

When I'd visit my parents back then, any commercial felt like intense agony. So this isn't just about the web, it's really about useless annoying juke being fed to you, when you're used to not having it.

The closest I can compare it to, is once I rented an airb&b which was under a freeway, beside a bridge, and adjacent to another freeway. Yet after a while I just sort of got used to most of the noise.

I wonder if the CEO of Mozilla doesn't use adblock, and just doesn't, literally, understand.

littlecranky672• 7 months ago

You can't kill ad-blockers in a browser, unless you don't allow running AI models in browsers (which will become very soon an integral part of your browsing usage - for some of us it already is, mostly through extension).

I will one day just add "Remove all ads on the page I am browsing" into my BROWSER_AI.md file.

fooker• 7 months ago

What could possibly go wrong?

gr4vityWall3• 7 months ago

Mozilla believes in the value of an open and free (and thus ad-supported) web.
and thus ad-supported

What a sad view of the web. Advertisement is a net-negative for society.

saubeidl6• 7 months ago

It's a business wankers view of the web.

Only what makes money has any value in their view. That's also why MBA types are the wrong type of person to run something like Mozilla.

wafflemaker• 7 months ago

Nothing wrong with an unobtrusive, not tracking, banner on a side of a page. Related to what the page is about.

simiones4• 7 months ago

While that would be miles better, there's still plenty wrong with it. Most advertising is designed to trick people into either buying something that they don't need at all (e.g. consuming more soda instead of drinking water, or getting some gadget, or more clothes than they need), or into buying the an objectively worse option (e.g. buying a more expensive fridge that will actually last less time). This is the goal of B2C advertising: tricking people to behave less rationally in their consumption behavior.

The only way to avoid this is to just block ads - even unobtrusive content-relevant ads. You may think ads can't trick you, but that has been shown time and time again to be false.

rjdj377dhabsn2• 7 months ago

That's an even more evil ad than the obnoxious and irrelevant variety because something related to my interests has a higher chance of successfully manipulating me.

treyd2• 7 months ago

It's a distraction from the content that I actually want to see and I should not have to spend the bandwidth on loading it or the battery on rendering it.

phantasmish2• 7 months ago

Yeah I think that might be a worse statement than the one daydreaming about eliminating their remaining market share by abandoning the only thing keeping anyone around. It’s a gross premise to operate from. And bullshit.

Zardoz84• 7 months ago

Time to migrate to a Firefox fork

wzrr• 7 months ago

going to die anyway

dizhn2• 7 months ago

I've been using Firefox before it was called that.

Call me petty but I still can't let this one go. At the time they basically stole the Firebird name from the database project and did not hesitate to use AOL's lawyers to bully the established owners of the name. So they didn't actually become shady over night. It's in their DNA.

tonyedgecombe• 7 months ago

He says he could begin to block ad blockers in Firefox and estimates that’d bring in another $150 million, but he doesn’t want to do that. It feels off-mission.

It would be amusing if the only browser left that could run ad-blockers was Safari.

andyjohnson0• 7 months ago

Long-time Firefox user* here. If Mozilla weakens the ability to block ads or control content, and/or introduces intrusive AI features that I can't easily disable, then I'm done. I'll go to Waterfox or whatever. Tired of Mozilla's attitude.

* Windows and Android. I even pay for their vpn because there is apparently no way to pay for the browser, which is what I actually use.

jb19912• 7 months ago

So what browsers will be left if Firefox kills ad blockers. This seems to be happening to all the major browsers.

letmetweakit2• 7 months ago

Brave has decent ad-blocking but has a shady history ...

jb19912• 7 months ago

What is shady about it?

egorfine• 7 months ago

They're between a rock and a hard place. Introduce AI and alienate whatever users you have left. Do not introduce AI and alienate whatever investors you have left.

shit_game• 7 months ago

It's so tiring how everything around us is being engineered to make us miserable for the sake of profit. That in itself creates misery, almost seemingly for the sake of misery. A just world would punish this behavior.

nephihaha6• 7 months ago

It's about control, not profit. Many of these projects are unprofitable. Mozilla will lose business off this.

saubeidl6• 7 months ago

It feels like the only reasonable path forward would be for the EU to buy Mozilla and fund it as a public resource.

Capital extraction is fundamentally opposed to user freedom. If we want an open web, we, the people need to be maintaining it and not rely on MBA types to do it for us.

breve• 7 months ago

It feels like the only reasonable path forward would be for the EU to buy Mozilla

Why would they need to buy Mozilla? Just fork Firefox and go from there.

saubeidl6• 7 months ago

I suppose they could, but I'm assuming Mozilla has quite a few experts on the code base that could come in handy.

Maybe just try to poach them?

EbNar3• 7 months ago

No, thanks. I don't want my taxes to fund a(nother) failed Corp. If they aren't able to stay afloat (after 20 years of miliking billons from the evil Google), just let them sink.

fedeb95• 7 months ago

It will bring 150 millions the first year, but the next one?

vintermann• 7 months ago

Sorry to get on one of my political hobby horses but...

We actually need to consider the possibility that yes, it is. More precisely, that the new CEO is trying to do that.

It doesn't take a grand conspiracy to join an organisation on false premises. It's totally easy. You can, today, go join a political party without agreeing with them at all, with the intent to sabotage them. Or another organization, including a workplace.

And just like some people just lie for amazingly little reason, I'm increasingly convinced some people do this. Maybe for a sense of control, maybe because they think they'll get rewarded. For every person who holds a crazy belief in public, there's probably one who holds the same belief but doesn't feel the need to let others in on it. As the world gets more paranoid, it'll get worse, open fears are the top of the iceberg.

If Enzor-Demeo ends up tanking Mozilla, there are plenty of people who will be happy with that. It's not as if his career will be over, far from it. Ask Nick Clegg or Stephen Elop. We all need to wake up to the idea that maybe the people who are supposed to be on our side aren't actually guaranteed to be unless we have solid mechanisms in place to ensure it.

slig• 7 months ago

ends up tanking Mozilla

No, Mozilla has been tanking for a decade already. Less than 5% of market share, and zero mobile.

pessimizer4• 7 months ago

I see you're familiar with Stephen Elop. Also, remember that the people who hired Elop probably hired him with the intention of making a fortune off of that destruction.

It's not that he's some secret agent or some mentally ill person who wants to destroy the company while twirling his mustache, it's that he's a person carefully chosen by people who have made large fortunes from Firefox through indirect means. He would be chosen to destroy it in a way optimized for their gain, like Elop was chosen by the board to turn Nokia into a cheap, obvious Microsoft buy, Clegg was chosen to enable the Tory government, or Sturgeon to make sure that indyref2 never happened.

Google is under no antitrust threat at all anymore. Obama judges don't believe in antitrust. Google wants to get out of paying that 500M/yr, and shitting up Firefox is a great way to do it. They'd be more than happy to throw a couple dozen of those Ms to Enzor-DeMeo or whoever will help them get that done.

How much you willing to bet that he becomes Mozilla's highest paid CEO in history, ruins the product completely, then leaves and ends up an exec at Google or some 80% owned by Google offshoot founded by a Google alum?

zrn900• 7 months ago

Maybe for a sense of control, maybe because they think they'll get rewarded.

Maybe they are rewarded. Industrial sabotage by competitors is not new.

adornKey2• 7 months ago

I think the writing for Mozilla was on the wall for a solid decade now. The time to look for alternatives and to switch to other (pretty unknown) niche browsers was at least 5 years ago. I don't even remember the time when I downloaded and used Firefox anymore.

jillesvangurp• 7 months ago

I think blocking ad blockers (the whole FFing point of using Firefox is freedom to do use those) would be the shortest path for him out of the door as a CEO.

It's so tone deaf that it is likely to probe the community into drastic action if he were to attempt to push that through. Including probably much of the developer community. I'm talking the kind of action that boils down to forking and taking a large part of the user base along. Which is why that would be very inadvisable.

The problem with being a CEO of a for profit corporation, which is what he is, is that his loyalty is to shareholders, not to users. The Mozilla Foundation and the corporation are hopelessly inter dependent at this point. The foundation looks increasingly like a paper tiger given the decision making and apparent disconnect with its user base which it is supposed to serve.

All the bloated budgets, mis-spending on offices, failed projects, fancy offices, juicy executive salaries at a time where revenue from Google continued to be substantial all while downsizing developer teams and actually laying some off isn't a great look. Stuff like this just adds to the impression that they are increasingly self serving hacks that don't care about the core product: Firefox. This new CEO isn't off to a great start here.

jwnin• 7 months ago

who are the shareholders?

globalnode3• 7 months ago

yeah pretty sure its a private corp under the ownership of the parent foundation. no shareholders so not sure why they new guy said what he said.. theres no one to impress

cr3cr3• 7 months ago

It's insane that this is right now on top of HN. Random and really childish interpretation is now worthy of top post?

lcnmrn• 7 months ago

I use AdGuard DNS. AdBlockers are too CPU and memory intensive anyway.

adornKey2• 7 months ago

With DNS over https Firefox has the answer against you already built in. And back then they were very keen on implementing it as soon as possible. They even sold it as helping against censorship. It's maybe just a question of time how long good old Firefox will allow you to censor ads...

throwfaraway1353• 7 months ago

Mozilla needs some of that Brave and Opera energy. They have their issues too, but at least they try not to be just a worse chrome.

tokai3• 7 months ago

that Brave and Opera energy

Closed source adware and crypto scams?!

throwfaraway1353• 7 months ago

“Absorb what is useful, discard what is useless, and add what is specifically your own,” Bruce Lee

EbNar3• 7 months ago

Can you please tell me how a purely opt-in feature is a scam? I'm all ears.

PunchyHamster• 7 months ago

They are but as with everything else in last 10 years they are insanely incompetent at it so it will take a while

qwertox• 7 months ago

I would stop using Firefox if Enzor-DeMeo would block or cripple ad blockers.

While it is not my main browser (Vivaldi is), I have 5 installs of Firefox Portable for different things, like one for YouTube, one for testing pages against Firefox and so on.

bruce511• 7 months ago

Mozilla/ Firefox is irrelevant and ultimately doomed to ever smaller numbers.

That's because their users are driven by opinions and principles, and those are the worst, most disloyal kind of users. They're always threatening to leave, and will take the slightest offense to do so.

Chrome wins because its user base doesn't care. The browser is just a tool, not a religion. It's installed, they use it, they're barely aware it exists and most of Joe Public doesn't even know Google makes it.

So sure. For you it's ad blockers. For someone else it's their donation plan. Or Google funding. Or their corporate structure. Or their management.

When your marketing is about something else, other than the product itself, you always end up with edge-case-customers.

People use Chrome because it's the best browser. Less than 3% use Firefox. And all I read from Firefox users is how bad everything is (or will be).

No, Firefox's market share isn't a foil to monopoly (Safari has 5 times more users. Crumbs Edge has twice the users.)

I care about Firefox, but I really just wish all the whiners would just do what they threaten and use something else. But they won't because everything else is worse (for some or other principles reason.)

Now I fully expect to be downvoted because the only people reading this article in the first place are Firefox whiners. Which is kinda my point.

It's pretty hard to recommend Firefox to others when everything written by existing users is so negative.

globalnode3• 7 months ago

i respect that you ate those downvotes standing up for what you believe

creata2• 7 months ago

The browser is just a tool, not a religion.

An ad blocker is a very useful tool. Being able to block ads effectively makes the browser much better. I'm not sure how you can call that "religion".

People use Chrome because it's the best browser.

No they don't. They use Chrome because every Google service nags the shit out of them to use Chrome. People aren't as rational as you make them out to be.

throwfaraway1353• 7 months ago

Mozilla CEO compensations

2018: $2,458,350

2020: Over $3 million

2021: $5,591,406.

2022: $6,903,089.

2023: ~$7m

Mozilla declined to detail the CEO's salaries for 2024+

DesiLurker• 7 months ago

they are open source company, how can they decline to state? this is absurd, even regular companies do it.

vanviegen3• 7 months ago

But that includes bonuses for outstanding performance! /s

gorjusborg• 7 months ago

... and most of that money comes in the form of sponsored browser/search integration w/ their competitors.

In that set of circumstances, the main qualification for CEO is likely 'plays nice with Google'. Given that, I'm not surprised that Mozilla underperforms.

Beating Google in the browser market might be considered hostile to their sponsors.

ajdude• 7 months ago

I'm going to repost/merge a few comments I made about this a while ago:

I dropped firefox 9 months so after they updated their privacy policy and removed "we don't sell your data" from their FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43213612

Mozilla has hired a lot of execs from Meta and bought an ad company, looking through a lot of their privacy policy at the time, a lot of it involves rewriting it to say that they can serve you sponsored suggestions when you're searching for things in their search bar and stuff and sharing out some of that data with third parties etc.

Firefox was bringing in half a billion a year for the last decade, if they would've just invested that money in low risk money market accounts (instead of paying their csuite executives millions of dollars in salary and putting the rest on non-Firefox related related social causes), the company would be able to easily survive off the interest alone.

I've been using Firefox since 2006 and have defended it for decades even when they've made questionable decisions that have gotten everybody upset with them. But this time it wasn't just making stupid decisions to try and fund the company, this time they actuality sold out their own customers.

In public announcement in the above link explaining why they removed "we don't sell your data" from the FAQ, the rationality was that some jurisdictions define selling data weirdly, they cited California's definition as an example but California's definition is exactly what I would consider the definition of selling my personal data.

They're justifying this by saying that they need it to stay alive since they're not going to be getting money from Google anymore, but I argue that you shouldn't sell out your customer base on the very specific reason anyone would choose you. I would rather pay a monthly fee to use Firefox to support them, but even if you gave them $500 million today they would just squander it away like they've done since forever so I really don't have any solution I can think of which frustrates me.

I switched to Orion (and use Safari if a site doesn't work in Orion), which can be a little buggy at times but I'm happy that it's not based on chrome at least.

rjdj377dhabsn2• 7 months ago

I'm deeply disappointed in Mozilla's management as well, but as long as LibreWolf and IronFox exist, I still see it as the lesser evil.

TiredOfLife• 7 months ago

The funny thing about removing "we don't sell your data" is that Mozilla before that was giving your data away for free. Now they just could be compensated.

redundantly• 7 months ago

this time they actuality sold out their own customers.

The end users are not their customers. They haven't been for a long, long time.

immibis8• 7 months ago

It really seems like all large tech corporations are trying their hardest to kill themselves, and failing because the market is so rigged.

Remember when Kodak ignored digital cameras and became irrelevant? That was bad because it decreased shareholder value. That will not be allowed to happen again.

mlmonkey2• 7 months ago

Mozilla gets what, a billion dollars a year from Google to be the default search engine for Firefox? What do they need more money for?

arcade79• 7 months ago

I've been using Firefox since it was called Phoenix. Going against the users like that would make me drop it like a hot potato.

tempay• 7 months ago

Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

I feel like this question has been valid for almost as long as I can remember (e.g. the Mr. Robot extension incident). I find myself struggling to tell if Mozilla is an inherently flawed company or if it's just inherent to trying to survive in such a space.

Lapsa• 7 months ago

malvertising - liking the term

jstummbillig• 7 months ago

Let's assume that Mozilla is not doing super hot and that's why their CEO is contemplating this topic.

Obviously we are not happy about ads, but we all understand that having money is pretty neat (if only to pay ones salary). Help the CEO fella: What great, unused options is Mozilla missing to generate revenue through their browser?

Ylpertnodi• 7 months ago

Adblocker.

squarefoot• 7 months ago

When someone working for A is doing something that would clearly harm A to the benefit of B, I usually start wondering if that someone really works for A or there's something fishy going on. Mozilla is wasting a huge load of money coming from the Google agreement (another conflict of interests) to pay huge salaries to their CEO over the years. If there's something they lack it's openness about goals, not money.

arnaudsm3• 7 months ago

There's an elephant in the room: why is maintaining a web browser costing $400M/y?

The web standards are growing faster than non-profit engines can implement them. Google & Apple are bloating the web specs in what looks like regulatory capture.

If Blink/Webkit dominate for long enough, they will lock everything down with DRMs & WEI. Maybe it's time to work on lighter protocols like Gopher & Gemini that don't need 20GB of RAM to open 20 tabs ?

tziki2• 7 months ago

Having a "lighter standard" simply means people will have to write native apps, one per platform. I understand Apple wants this, but for Mozilla that should be the antithesis of what they're trying to achieve.

arnaudsm3• 7 months ago

The standard can be forward compatible. A light website is always great, you're using one right now.

vanviegen3• 7 months ago

There's an elephant in the room: why is maintaining a web browser costing $400M/y?

Is that actually the case though? I find it hard to believe that Mozilla has anywhere close to 1500 senior developers working on just Firefox. My guess is that the bulk of that money is spent on unrelated adventures and overhead.

arnaudsm3• 7 months ago

Google Chrome is likely around $400M, while Mozilla's core browser team is around $200M but are technologically far behind. Hard to find precise numbers, it's just an order of magnitude estimate

htk• 7 months ago

Every now and then we talk here about Mozilla needing more money to keep Firefox alive, meanwhile they spend money with other priorities in mind.

This is an old article but has some good examples:

https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4387539/firefox-money-invest...

freeopinion2• 7 months ago

You mean, Mozilla, the AI company? Where, "Our mission is to make it easy for people to build with, and collaborate on, open-source, trustworthy AI."?

skizm• 7 months ago

What are good Firefox alternatives these days that will run a proper uBlock origin (not chrome’s watered down manifest v3 version)?

vanviegen3• 7 months ago

I just run Brave and I don't even remember what ads look like.

bambax3• 7 months ago

Killing one of its advantages over the Chromium engine, being able to have a fucking adblocker that's actually useful, and that nowadays is a fucking security feature due to malvertising, will be another nail in the coffin, IMHO.

Well, it would be a shot in the head. What would be the point of using Firefox if it can't block ads better than Chrome, and on mobile as well???

Doing so would not "bring in an additional 150 millions, or 50 millions, or 1 million! It would kill the product instantly.

ozgrakkurt• 7 months ago

You can donate to ladybird on donorbox

https://donorbox.org/ladybird

Cort3z• 7 months ago

Does anyone have a link to the source of the statement without a paywall in front? I could not see any reference to this 150M$ anywhere.

globalnode3• 7 months ago

as soon as ublock goes, firefox goes.. more anonymity that way anyway since being a firefox user already makes me stand out from the crowd.

gspr• 7 months ago

I realize that a FOSS browser is an absolutely enormous monstrosity of a project. An undertaking akin to a whole FOSS OS. But it's also comparably important, especially when no FOSS alternatives exist in the browser space. We (I mean that very loosely, not having contributed anything myself) have managed to produce _several_ FOSS OS-es. Why are we seemingly completely fucked if Mozilla does in fact kill itself/Firefox? I don't doubt that we are, I just don't understand.

jmpeax• 7 months ago

How is blocking ad blockers going to make them $150m?

cullumsmith• 7 months ago

Mozilla FireSlop.

nathias• 7 months ago

"it feels off-mission" is a very chatgpt thing to say

KurSix5• 7 months ago

Mozilla's problem has never been a lack of monetization ideas, it's been a lack of ideas that don't undermine why Firefox exists in the first place

JohnBlakesDad2• 7 months ago

Entire base is free s/w - every bit including both phones. Grow a pair - stop felating epstien trump and gang (including RMS).

Be the gang all f'n ready

Kuyawa• 7 months ago

User since Phoenix 0.6, now moved to Brave and haven't seen an ad in years, and it comes with a handy AI response on every search

JohnBlakesDad2• 7 months ago

Every bit of the base is free s/w including both phones. Stop felating trump epstein and gang incoudingbrms.

Grow a pair already. And stop calling normal average "typical"

micromacrofoot2• 7 months ago

I understand where people are coming from with these takes... but look at the details, Mozilla is practically dead already. They are almost solely funded by Google.

Look at browser stats, what they're doing is not working and asking them to continue doing it will kill them. They have to change or they will die.

Their core audience (people on this site) is shrinking constantly. You can not save them.

I feel like this is a case where a bunch of smart people like something so much, or the idea of something, that they've completely blinded themselves to the facts.

vvpan• 7 months ago

I will gladly pay for services that help me defeat ads.

noirscape• 7 months ago

If Mozilla were to kill adblockers, there's basically no reason to not use Chromium. It's pretty much the only relevant difference between Chromium and Firefox these days.

It's truly impressive how they've managed to do every user-hostile trick Google Chrome also did over the years, except for no real clear reason besides contempt for their users autonomy I suppose. Right now the sole hill Mozilla really has left is adblockers, and they've talked about wanting to sacrifice that?

It truly boggles the mind to even consider this. That's not 150 million, that's the sound of losing all your users.

miroljub2• 7 months ago

The day Mozilla fired Brendan Eich for political reasons, Firefox died. It just took a while for everyone to realise that. That was when they collectively decided that other things are more important to them than the quality and usability of Firefox.

The new CEO is just the final nail in their coffin.

izzylan• 7 months ago

Firing someone for being opposed to same-sex marriage is political in the same way firing someone for robbing a bank is.

snovymgodym2• 7 months ago

Really? Having an opinion endorsed by the mainstream doctrine of several world religions with billions of adherents is the same as robbing a bank?

That being said, I disagree with Eich and it probably made sense for the org to let him go given how his views might impact public perception of Mozilla.

diggyhole• 7 months ago

wat

HanClinto2• 7 months ago

This is dangerous, faulty thinking.

Equivocating speech and crime as both being "violence" (of similar class, deserving similar response) is a fallacy that lets people justify murder in response to disagreement as long as it's deemed serious enough.

pavel_lishin6• 7 months ago

I don't know, if the CEO of some software I used suddenly came out as anti-miscegenation, and started donating money to the cause, I'd stop using the software until the CEO was fired too.

LexiMax2• 7 months ago

Exactly. It's one thing to be an idiot on Twitter, it's another for you to donate money to a cause specifically designed to deny rights to people - a cause that was actually successful for a time. That's something that speaks to a fundamental lack of empathy that I'm not sure he's ever directly addressed.

But in any case, I've heard this argument before, and the timeline doesn't make sense. At the time he resigned, Chrome was very firmly ahead of Firefox, and given his track record with Brave, the idea that Eich would have single-handedly saved Mozilla is also pretty dubious to me.

It seems like a disingenuous and lazy talking point tailor made to blame the demise of Firefox on a culture war politics, when in reality it's the fact that Google was willing to throw much more time and resources at the browser market than a non-profit, unimpeded by the same sort of anti-trust and lack of development that brought Internet Explorer low.

sltkr5• 7 months ago

So you agree: for you, it's more important that the Mozilla CEO shares your political views, than that Mozilla makes a quality product.

That's exactly what the parent post is talking about. When Mozilla started prioritizing political correctness over software quality, software quality predictably declined. That's why they are struggling now: they reduced their user base to the tiny group of political extremists that will put up with an inferior product for the sake of political signaling.

By the way, Eich didn't “come out” as anything. His private donation (a mere $1000) was exposed by people who wanted to cancel him for his political views. It wasn't Eich who forced the issue, it was his political opponents, who do not tolerate any viewpoint diversity. Eich's views weren't even fringe or extreme at the time: Proposition 8 passed with support from the majority of Californian voters.

broof2• 7 months ago

Are you referring to his donation to prop 8? Im a younger dev and a bit out of the loop but how would that be anti-miscegenation? Wasn’t that more related to gay marriage?

Foriney2• 7 months ago

In 2008. You know, the year the majority of Americans didn't approve of gay marriage? [1] The year Obama said that marriage is between a man and a woman? [2]

Applying modern sensibilities to history is stupid.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20111017161259/http://www.quinni...

[2] https://www.politico.com/blogs/ben-smith/2008/08/obama-says-...

graeme• 7 months ago

Where this analogy breaks is that at the time (2008), Eich's position had majority support in the US. The proposition he wad funding passed with majority support. Mixed marriages by contrast had overwhelming support in 2008.

Eich didn't suddenly come out against anything in 2014. People dug up his prior funding.

Demanding permanent ostracization for supporting a majority position is fairly anti-democratic. You can beat someone in a process (Eich's side lost) without demanding total victory forever or declaring more than half of a whole society as permanent villains. In 2008 55% of the US opposed gay marriage, 36% supported it.

https://poll.qu.edu/Poll-Release-Legacy?releaseid=1194

duped2• 7 months ago

Civil rights are more important than the quality and usability of _any software_.

dweinus2• 7 months ago

A) Firing a CEO because there is an immediate, massive public shaming of them is entirely rational from a business perspective B) This is the hill you want to die on? That being a bigot should be a protected status for CEOs?

bigstrat2003• 7 months ago

This is the hill you want to die on? That being a bigot should be a protected status for CEOs?

That is a wildly uncharitable take. I'm not OP, but I believe that nobody, CEOs or otherwise, should be fired for their activities outside of work. That can be political beliefs, but doesn't have to be either. And yes, that means that sometimes someone whose beliefs you find repugnant is going to have a good job. That is the price of a free society, and I think it's worth it.

Herring• 7 months ago

In the US, bigots instinctively recognize and protect each other like impostors in Among Us.

AlexandrB2• 7 months ago

The words "bigot" and "racist" have been so overused that they've lost all meaning. "Fascist" is not all that far behind. In a recent interview, Nick Fuentes (much more deserving of the bigot label than Eich) openly said he's a racist. I suspect he lost 0 supporters by doing this. Abusing the language like this has consequences - not good ones.

i80and• 7 months ago

Yeah no, (1) Mozilla was going to be in for a tough go no matter what; I don't think Eich would have fared any better. But (2) you can't donate to stop your own employees and users from having civil rights without repercussions.

People with an axe to grind always hide what Brendan Eich did behind "politics" which is a dishonest slight of hand.

sltkr5• 7 months ago

Yeah no, (1) Mozilla was going to be in for a tough go no matter what; I don't think Eich would have fared any better.

Nobody knows this for sure. We do know that Eich was fired for political reasons, and not because of his technological direction.

This betrays a decision making process that prioritizes political correctness above leadership qualities and technical contributions.

you can't donate to stop your own employees and users from having civil rights without repercussions.

Why not? Why can't the CEO of Mozilla have his own private political views just like anyone else, and donate his own private money to whatever democratic causes he likes?

This really isn't obvious to anyone except the people, like you, who view Mozilla as a political project first, and as a software project a distant second.

Firing your CEO for not being sufficiently aligned with the American Democratic Party only makes sense if you assume the purpose of Mozilla is to push American Democratic politics, rather than make good software that anyone in the world may use (spoiler alert: many users of open-source software are not American Democrats!)

PaulHoule4• 7 months ago

I'd say it's complicated. If you are running a company in San Francisco I think you want to be sensitive to the culture there. That cause of gay marriage that he opposed was not one of these radicalism for the sake of radicalism queer positions you see on Twitter-dervied platforms but something mainstream at the root. I think of how on The Bulwark podcasts you hear gay people with a conservative but never-Trump viewpoint describing their cozy family life and it just sounds so sweet... and mainstream making the opposition to it not seem so mainstream.

On the other hand I think San Francisco is part of the Mozilla problem because it is less than an hour on the 101 to go see people at Facebook and Google yet they are distant from the 99% of of web developers and web users that live somewhere else whose use Firefox because they don't like what Chrome stands for.

I wish Mozilla was in Boulder or Minneapolis or Cleveland or Dublin or some other second-tier but vibrant city where they might have the capacity to listen to us rather than be in the same monoculture that brings us Chrome and Instagram.

mghackerlady3• 7 months ago

I wish there was anyone in Minneapolis or MN anymore. IBM left, crays been gone forever, and what's left is basically just medtech

mplewis3• 7 months ago

"political reasons" like espousing the level of hatred that makes your queer, Bay Area employees distrust you? OK.

nateglims2• 7 months ago

Firefox improved in quality significantly between 2014 and the recent decline. And it's not like Brave has shown incredibly good judgement in these areas.

Tadpole91813• 7 months ago

The guy who runs an affiliate link farming crypto browser built on Chromium now and put money toward denying equal rights to the queer community?

pjmlp• 7 months ago

Sadly we are way beyond that point, the moment it went below 5% that was it.

notepad0x902• 7 months ago

I think people are wildly overreacting. There is a new CEO and he wants to make a splash so the throws around "AI" that's it. Of course there will be AI related features in firefox, there already are! Wait and see what the actual specifics are before reacting?

Also, a small minor detail here: We're not paying for firefox! why are so many people feeling entitled? Mozilla has to do something other than beg Google to survive. Perhaps we need a fork of firefox that is sustained by donations and is backed by a non-profit explicilty chartered to make decisions based on community feedback? I don't see a problem with that wikipedia-like approach, I don't think any of the forks today have a good/viable org structure that is fully non-profit (as in it won't seek profit at all). Mozilla has bade some bad decisions recently, but they're a far cry from the world-ended outcry they're getting.

If we don't donate to Mozilla and we don't pay them money, then we have to be the product at some point. Even if they don't it to be that way, they have to placate to some other business interests.

I hope the EU also pays attention, perhaps some of their OSS funding can help setup an alternate org.

Lord-Jobo• 7 months ago

Because the AI implementations they’ve already done are shit? Buttons on by default, features that are annoying to remove for normal users (the context menu ‘search with chatbot’). It’s just garbage, get this shit out of here. Stop adding things to my window without permission and stop with the popups announcing them to me. Anyone who seriously wants this will seek it out. Leave the rest of us alone.

abustamam• 7 months ago

Yeah I dunno why they didn't just let it be an official add-on or whatever. I use AI a lot and even I don't want this shit everywhere.

mplewis3• 7 months ago

Why do there have to be AI features in Firefox? No one wants them. They make the browser less secure. They distract from the mission.

lolc• 7 months ago

I found the local translation feature nice on a few occasions.

mikkupikku• 7 months ago

Waiting until the thing is done to voice your opinions on the thing is a very poor strategy if you want to have any influence over what the thing turns out to even be.

mvdtnz• 7 months ago

Did you read the article? Don't answer that because I can see you didn't from your response.

observationist2• 7 months ago

>> Also, a small minor detail here: We're not paying for firefox! why are so many people feeling entitled? Mozilla has to do something other than beg Google to survive.

Because some of us have supported, donated to, advocated for, and participated in the firefox and mozilla communities over the years, and feel betrayed by the abandonment of principles, kowtowing to adtech surveillance "features", and overall enshittification of a once beloved browser that we hoped would allow for an alternative to the chrome blob, as they once were to the atrocity that was internet explorer.

It's perfectly reasonable to call out foundations and organizations that utterly abandon and fail to live up to principles. Mozilla is just a PR wing for Alphabet and whitewashing the chromification of all browsers, at this point.

Ladybug and some other alternatives will come around. I don't see any future in which Mozilla returns to principles - the people leeching off / running the foundation won't ever be interested in returning to a principled stance, but to change the brand, or pursue profit, or some other outcome that is divergent from the expectations and consideration of the original supporters. They keep trying to commodify and branch out and waste insane amounts of money on nonsense, and hire CEOs that lose the plot before they ever start the job. Mozilla is functionally dead, for whatever vision of it a lot of us might once have had.

By the time they'd have a chance to fix anything, maybe it'll be practical to have an AI whip up a new browser engine and we'll all have bespoke, feature complete privacy respecting browsers built on the fly.

notepad0x902• 7 months ago

I think all of firefox's alternatives depend on firefox as an upstream. firefox itself has low adaption right now. I'm all for any approach that isn't google/chrome being the only browser standards driver. This type of knee-jerking doesn't help with that goal.. I don't care so much about mozilla's past or how terrible an "ai browser" will be, as much as having viable alternatives and not having a monopoly for browser standards. a fork and alternative browsers will do nothing to help with that. Either there is an alternative to Mozilla or there isn't.

pessimizer4• 7 months ago

If we don't donate to Mozilla

1. Why would I donate to Mozilla? Mozilla hates me.

2. When Mozilla was 30% of the browser market rather than 3%, they could have easily cleaned up on donations. If they had made whatever extension transition that they thought they needed to do but while protecting all contemporary extension capabilities and not using it as a power grab to limit user control, they'd still have 30% of the market. If they hadn't made the business decision to permanently be a wonky Chrome, people wouldn't think of them as a wonky Chrome.

3. Mozilla has plenty of money. If you can't create a sustainable browser with a billion and a half dollars in the bank and a fully-featured browser, it's because you don't want to. You already have the browser, you can't whine about how complicated it is to create a browser. Pay developers with the interest. Stop paying these useless weirdo executives a fortune.

But enough about Mozilla. If you're some Bitcoin or startup billionaire, I'll ask you the same thing. Firefox is sitting right there and licensed correctly. You want people to respect you and remember you nicely when you're dead? Take it, fork it, put that same billion and a half into a trust, and save an open door to the Internet at a time when it's really needed. You've won in life, it will be easy to make people trust you if your ambition is just to do good. Steal Firefox, put it on the right track, and people will flock back to it. I know Ladybird is interesting, but a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.

freeAgent• 7 months ago

Unfortunately, it’s impossible to donate to Firefox development. Donations to Mozilla expressly do not got to pay for Firefox since Firefox is for-profit and they’ve decided to not accept money from users. So I guess we are already “the product.”

estimator72922• 7 months ago

I don't give a shit about the specifics. I don't want AI in my browser period.

Yes, AI is already in Firefox. That does not on any way make more AI any less unacceptable.

I don't want to opt out. I don't want to dismiss nags. I don't want to fuck around with internal configs and hope that the options do what they say (they often don't).

I want a browser that renders websites. That's it. Anything else is detracting from Firefox's core value proposition: being a good web browser.

I want a web browser. I do not want, need, nor am I interested in entertaining an ""AI browser"", whatever the hell that even means. I want to browse the goddamn web, not interact with "AI". We've had AI shoved into literally every conceivable corner of every piece of software. Nobody, nobody needs more AI in more places. We have ten million ways to access AI in absolutely every other program.

Just give me a fucking web browser. This is not that complicated.

rchaud4• 7 months ago

Disabling ad blocking goes hand in hand with an "AI Browser" strategy.

Ad blocking relies on the ability to use filters to block network requests at the browser level, and visual elements at the DOM level. "AI Browsers" are designed to add bloat to the browsing experience, by offering to summarize something, or providing contextual information like say, a product recommendation that pulls data from a third party site. Network request and DOM element blocking would instantly negate that.

I've moved to Librewolf myself.

zajio1am2• 7 months ago

On the contrary, ad blockers and 'AI browsers' goes hand in hand. On one side is naive browser that displays pages as-is, on the other is user agent that shows what is relevant to the user. Ad blockers are just more static / more deterministic variants of that.

rchaud4• 7 months ago

What centralized organization with a budget and a CEO is ever going to do that? They are all under pressure to not piss off the giant advertising octopus that has its tentacles in every part of the tech industry.

kjkjadksj2• 7 months ago

Bold of you to assume ai browser will allow for subverting commercial monetization

t234143214• 7 months ago

The profit model is being payed (as CEO) to dismantle Firefox into oblivion and no more.

tsoukase• 7 months ago

Clearly Google have an iron hand over Mozilla. They want it to remain semi-alive for competitiveness purposes but also ad-block free in order to keep the last user's attention to ads. There might be an under the table agreement between G and the CEO that we will never find. After a while Firefox might become abandoned because nobody in power wants it any more.

docmars• 7 months ago

I would pay for Firefox if it meant it could still block ads and well... survive.

epolanski• 7 months ago

It was already dying and with no chances of making up share, most online usage comes from mobile, nobody cares about installing Firefox there but us nerds.

So they need some kind of pivot.

thibran• 7 months ago

Mozilla wasted probably hundreds of million dollars trying all those "features", but all we want is a stable browser.

otabdeveloper4• 7 months ago

Yes. They're paid to do so by Google.

giancarlostoro• 7 months ago

I'm a daily Firefox user, but its to the point where I'm waiting for someone to make a serious hard fork that only has a non-profit that funds the project and nothing else.

BuckRogers• 7 months ago

I exclusively used Firefox for 20 years. I moved over to Edge and haven't looked back. Mozilla and the people still using it seem to think maintaining your own rendering engine with Gecko is somehow keeping the internet free. Wrong abstraction layer of freedom to worry about. It's the most bizarre thing I've ever seen. It should have moved to Webkit or Blink many years ago, and focused on user experience. Such as extensions to keep MV2 addons working, and even expanding on the capabilities, like the old XUL/XPCOM Firefox extensions. Those things are why people like me used Firefox, not because of all the money and work put into Gecko. Which is just redundant in the end.

Moving to Blink or Webkit, keeping MV2 and XUL, was where the effort should have been placed. Also, I never understood Pocket or any of their other decisions. Now it's being floated to ban adblockers. Poorly run organization that given its direction and decisions, deserves to die.

president_zippy• 7 months ago

I wonder where killing adblockers on Firefox will leave LibreWolf...

unethical_ban• 7 months ago

Isn't it kind of telling how incredibly complicated modern web browsing is, that a web browser is seen as one of the most difficult general purpose projects a developer could imagine building, aside from an entire desktop environment or a kernel?

You know what would be neat? If the Gemini protocol were slightly expanded for video/image embeds, and then having Firefox/Ladybird support it out of the box.

QuiEgo• 7 months ago

I feel like some day, YouTube and all video streaming are likely to move to apps and just drop browser support (replace with redirect to app). It feels like the logical conclusion of the ad blocking arms race. This is just one step forward down that road.

ggm• 7 months ago

I think the sentiment of the headline statement is off. What you expect a CEO to say is "OBVIOUSLY the one thing which is completely off the table, because of it's lack of alignment with our mission and vision..."

Instead of which he inverts it "we'd get like $150m if we did this thing we won't do because well.. we haven't decided to." with the implicit "... yet"

And I agree with comments below: he discounts risk side loss of income because of people walking away.

rolph• 7 months ago

your spelling it wrong its not Mozilla, its MozillAI.

caycep2• 7 months ago

Would a Mozilla-like browser be sustainable via the "old" nonprofit model through government or academic grants/philanthropy?

weare138• 7 months ago

For fuck sake, for-profit side of Mozilla, get a damn grip!

Update, since this is getting traction on Reddit

I'm not against Mozilla making money. Like a regular citizen needs to make money, companies and even nonprofits need it too.

Don't second guess yourself OP. Firefox is not a product. It's an open-source project countless people have contributed their time and dime to over the years. The Mozilla corporation didn't create Firefox, the open-source community did. Mozilla was entrusted to be the stewards of the project and have repeatedly violated that trust. Mozilla is commoditizing other people's hard work while enriching themselves in the process at the expense of the community and abused the trust we placed in them to get away with it.

aucisson_masque• 7 months ago

He says he could begin to block ad blockers in Firefox and estimates that’d bring in another $150 million, but he doesn’t want to do that. It feels off-mission.

That's just miss interpretation. The way he told that was probably badly reported by the journalist and now it's getting miss understood.

Let's be honest and give this guy an honnest chance instead of witch hunting.

I really didn't like his interview and his blog post but even then, judge on the facts and not the talk !

Lvl999Noob• 7 months ago

I use firefox for three things.

1. The ad blocker. 2. The sense of superiority over the normies (because of the ad blocker) 3. Theming

If adblockers are killed, that removed points 1 and 2. I am pretty sure I can do the same theming in Chrome (I have simple tastes) so that makes 3 a non-factor. And combined with the companies that refuse to make their sites work with firefox, there is no reason not to use chrome. Privacy is a non-factor since my identity is already wholly linked to my google account. I would have to first switch off off there and I am not putting in the effort for that.

christkv• 7 months ago

Firefox feels like an organization where the leadership is more focused on enriching themselves than the mission.

whywhywhywhy• 7 months ago

Story as old as free software, non-profit gets put in charge, original creators ousted, non-profit extracts max value while software rots.

normalaccess• 7 months ago

Anyone in a position to short sell from the inside?

est• 7 months ago

I might get heavily downvoted, but since official "extension stores" are handicapped, people should re-invent dll inject ad blockers.

petrie-5947532• 7 months ago

You can also block ads on the network level at the gateway on your router. If you run Linux you can run libre wolf instead of Firefox both still use gecko for rendering.

petrie-5947532• 7 months ago

You can block adverts on the network level at the gateway in your routers web app. You can also use libre wolf which also uses the gecko rendering engine if you run Linux.

mmonaghan• 7 months ago

There's very little money in running a browser for users who want ad blocking, performance, and features but don't want to let the browser company make money the same way most of the internet does - advertising. Most people don't care about seeing ads.

If killing ad blocker support is what keeps Firefox alive, I understand the move and would probably make the same call.

huey77• 7 months ago

What are some good alternatives to Firefox? I have loved the browser for years, but the future isn’t looking bright. Waterfox is on my radar. Any others I should be aware/you guys are using?

Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

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