In the real world, in the same line as the article suggests, there was a brief time when the "puts you back in control" browser needed you to change the following about:config settings to disable the force-pushed ai:
Look, I absolutely agree it sucks they didn't deliver the opt-out/in interface day one, it was obvious people would want it, and yes, it's not the first time they've blundered.
At the same time, they did listen to the feedback and deliver. It now has a genuinely good interface for it where you don't have to opt out of everything, but can opt-in where you want it. It's not just a big off button, it's a general out-out including new features, but that then exposes individual opt-ins if you want for each feature. Most other browsers won't respond at all. Firefox is still by far the best browser out there for people who care about their privacy.
Especially on HN, Firefox just gets so much more hate than software that is way more user hostile for much less bad behaviour. I'm not saying we shouldn't hold it to a higher standard when that is what it's selling itself on: clearly we can't allow "not as bad" to let it slip into worse and worse, but at the same time, I don't understand how the narrative seems to trend towards "they are essentially the same as google" when that is so clearly not true (to be clear, not saying you are saying that in this post, just that's the vibe of HN's commentary as a whole).
That is true - Firefox is definitely held to a higher standard here and elsewhere. They marketed those values to us. So the criticisms, in my opinion, are definitely justified. And no, they aren't listening to their users.
If they had listened to their users they would have delivered what every users wants - just a browser. Not some kind of "platform" stuffed with lot of unwanted crap that makes it bloated and introduces possibly new unnecessary attack vectors in it (both malicious and / or privacy exploits). All those additional crap that every new management wants in Firefox should have been a browser extension or a plugin, instead of being bundled into the core browser. When a user installs / updates Firefox, they could be asked if they want to install any of these new feature available as an extension / plugin. That keeps the browser lean, transfers the choice completely to the user and is genuinely respectful of the user. The current way of force bundling everything into the browser, making it bloated, and then pretending that "users can opt-out" is not just arrogance but also misleading (to be polite) as it is common knowledge among software firms that most people often never change the default settings.
Think about it ... if every of these controversial features - Pocket, ads in address bar or home page, AI etc. etc. - had been made available as user opted extension or plugin, would there ever have been any controversies? The installation data itself would provide a feedback of how much the users actually care about these features, and provide unique insights to the management into the kind of user base that it has (which the article is spot-on about).
(Note that I know that some of these features are indeed implemented as an extension. But not as user controlled ones as they cannot be completely uninstalled. All the user can do is disable it (turn "off or on"). Why? It is stuff like this that makes it harder to trust claims of caring about user Privacy.)
People are mad because Mozilla refuses to listen to users until backlash becomes a threat to the company. They keep pushing users to the limit and only pull back slightly when the screaming gets too loud.
People are mad because Mozilla is clearly and unashamedly trying to boil the frog and doesn't seem to even be interested in hiding that fact.
People are mad because Mozilla is speed-running SV software-shittifying strategies without even doing us the dignity of pretending they aren't.
People had to raise hell to get that, while being made fun of by their CMs on social media. Even the opt-out is full of silicon valley dark patterns. Whoever is calling shots about the product at Mozilla doesn't have your best interests at heart.
I think Firefox gets hated on more than the others because they advertise putting the user in control but in practice they seem to undermine it at every opportunity.
A browser that puts users in control should make features like AI and advertising opt-in because there is a sizeable group of people who are concerned about those things. It's meaningless if they only put users in control who agree 100% with Mozilla's ways of thinking.
After so many times of blundering in ways that are favorable to their corporate sponsors, it's hard to believe they're not doing it on purpose.
The only correct move would be remove the option, remove all AI code, and move it into extensions. If the extension security policies, and other restrictions, don't allow all the things they want to put in, then GOOD, they don't go in.
I think Mozilla is still mostly made up of tech-optimist people, so they were open and interested in ai from day one. I highly doubt there was any malicious intent.
You're complaning that the browser that "puts you back in control"
... put you back in control of which AI features you want to enable/disable? How horrible!
What? They didn't make these 10 distinct features one single all-or-nothing button? They let you switch them on or off individually?? How dare they?!?
What? They shipped new features to the browser...turned on?!? Instead of spending all those development hours and then...hiding them behind a setting by default?
I need "AI" in my browser, so I don't use the AI features. No data was sent anywhere. No 4 GB model was downloaded. Nothing happened, except for a popup saying "hey, by the way, if you want to do X, just press this button here". It's just UI elements. No AI-related code runs, no data is sent to AI companies unless you directly tell the browser to do that.
Imagine if Firefox shipped a brand new GPU-accelerated compositor, improved hardware video decoding and WebGL/WebGPU. You people cry about why they didn't add a big "disable GPU features" button? And that they dared to enable this by default?
Oh no! Mozilla downloaded a 50MB file onto my computer after I asked it to translate a page for me. Those batards!!!!
I'm not convinced anyone complaining even knows what they're complaining about. The AI features Mozilla has is pretty minimal and there's a good fucking reason they didn't add a nuke button in the beginning. Because most people like translate. The chat sidebar? Most people I know that use Firefox didn't even know it existed till I showed them. The only other model that existed at the time was a 20MB tab grouper. The complaints felt reactionary to AI (rightfully) but for some reason targeted Mozilla, the company that wasn't shoving AI down your throat
The irony here is that after enough negative user feedback, they did make that one button, as an actual button not a config option. You can still change those options if you want AI but not in the sidebar, for example.
You either missed the point or deliberately missed the point.
The issue was they shipped AI features built into everything and the only way to switch them off was to "about:config" a bunch of settings, they shouldn't have shipped it without the off switch and "Open about:settings and then disable things manually" isn't control for the average user.
And those are some of the better named config options. Some are pretty opaque, as are their values (and often poorly documented). You can tell there isn't an edict to make config options highly accessible
They KEEP adding utter cancerous garbage to the homepage/new tab page. I recently installed Firefox from scratch for a coworker who was having chrome-only issues(yes, they do exist!) and was blown away by how insanely gross the default settings are now. It’s straight up adware junk bullshit
Good for you. The point is that a lot of Firefox users actively didn't want these sorts of features enabled and pushed on them. That was clear and obvious to anyone paying attention to general reactions to unsolicited AI helper tools, going back decades. For Mozilla to turn this on without any respect for those users’ preferences was a huge mistake that they keep making over and over again.
Interesting to read, but ultimately it's very easy to blame "leaders" for everything and I'm not sure it has much merit. It's popular to pile on them and their decisions. But I don't think it's as obvious as people (often here on HN) make it out to be. If Mozilla didn't try out these avenues deemed wrong, if Mozilla spent all money on the browser only, if Mozilla made the best browser ever, would that really make a difference? Would more people use it, would they be a healthier organization now? Mozilla is surviving on the mercy of Google money, it's not a viable strategy.
Firefox usage has been declining for a decade. Doing nothing, or just doing the exact same as before, is popular with its fans (including me). But wouldn't it perhaps just have lead to an even more rapid decline?
> if Mozilla spent all money on the browser only, if Mozilla made the best browser ever, would that really make a difference?
It's obviously impossible to say, but when we look at things that did happen due to Mozilla's financial decisions we have some major disruptions. Besides the already-mentioned Rust and Thunderbird examples we also have the years-long rebuild of the extension system where Firefox, once known as the leader in customization, offered less than 20 extensions for its mobile version and deprecated who-knows how many. I find it hard to believe that these actions didn't affect their market share, goodwill, or both.
I am in favor of Mozilla launching initiatives to support the browser, but right now I think they are using the browser to support their initiatives.
Keep in mind that while Firefox offered 20 extensions on mobile, Chrome offered zero and continues to lack any support for extensions whatsoever. Nobody ditched Firefox for Chrome because of the extensions thing.
The move to WebExtensions was painful, but it also made it possible to easily port Chrome extensions to Firefox, which was a great boost for the extension ecosystem, as well as being the thing that actually made mobile extensions possible.
I do agree they should've made the transition period longer though. There were like two years in between where some of the big Chrome extensions hadn't been ported yet, but their original Firefox counterparts were already killed. That probably made a few users move ti Chrome, but that was already during the great Chrome migration, so I can't imagine this made a huge difference.
The leaders could, for example, have made AI opt-in. If it's popular, maybe make it the default for new installs later on. Instead we had to go a few versions from "now with AI" to "now with an AI off button" because they got enough negative user feedback.
I don't mind experiments, but if you're the "we put you back in control" browser then please build an "off" switch in from the start.
Again: Would it have made a measurable difference? Or is it just moaning from a small core? Not saying the core is not important, but I don't think Fx can survive on only us.
> if Mozilla spent all money on the browser only, if Mozilla made the best browser ever, would that really make a difference? Would more people use it, would they be a healthier organization now?
I worked at Mozilla for a bit over six years and really enjoyed my time there. There were lots of brilliant people attracted by the mission and the work was technically interesting. I left in part because I came to the conclusion that the answer to these questions was no. Google's distribution advantages with Chrome and getting boxed out of mobile by the bundled Android/iOS browsers was simply too much to overcome by making a better product. People can gripe about Mozilla's management or product decisions all they want but the fundamental problem is the structure of the web browser market.
This is a good take honestly - Firefox could be perfect and efficient and secure but if the defaults are good enough why would people make the effort to switch ?
What we really need is normalised effort to provide an alternative to the systemic issues you are starting to bring up. Not just the browser market but the entrenchment of big tech in general. An organisation that can deliver on what the idealists individually want in a big, cohesive way.
Personally in our current day an age I think that's what a labor union can provide (in addition to the obvious other resources).
That wasn't my point, really. But that they chastise Mozilla leadership without offering any other alternative direction than "keeping doing as in 2009".
Firefox is a top notch browser we all are provided with for free. And it's been great and free for longer than any other browser. Ever.
Browsers are notoriously difficult to build and maintain. I think we owe all the engineers and people behind it a lot of appreciation.
Have they made a few missteps over the years trying out the new hot thing ? Yes. And it temporarily upset a niche of technical people. And last time I checked none of these things were very hard to avoid or turn off.
if Mozilla made the best browser ever, would that really make a difference?
I really don’t think it would.
One thing “Do what you did before when you were successful!” is missing is that Firefox was sleek, fast, extendable, new, and cool.
It was cool partly because of its “sleek, fast, extendable”, but also because of its “new”, and it can’t get “new” back.
Perhaps launching a completely new piece of software, like the Netscape -> Firefox change (although that was organic, not planned) - but only if it’s actually something new and cool that comes out of it. A rebadge won’t work.
I don’t think there’s a playbook that works here. I’m struggling to think of many major pieces of tech (or non-tech!) that ever got its cool back. Netscape -> Firefox? Apple and/or the Mac? IE4? Lego? Elvis? “New Nixon”?...
Alongside all of the successes there are orders of magnitude more failures, and I don’t think they’re all on merit.
There is a pool of opportunities they largely refuse to jump into: those requiring curation. Pocket, the sole exception, ended up as yet another unforced error.
> But wouldn't it perhaps just have lead to an even more rapid decline?
A product like Firefox depends on word of mouth. There was not a *single* announcement or decision by the Mozilla leadership in the last 10 years or so which would make me recommend Firefox to others, instead every single time it pushed me away a little bit more. I have hardly ever seen such a fundamental alienation of their core audience, even for Silicon Valley standards ;)
This, in part. The swift deprecation of XUL extensions felt like a kick in the gonads and made me switch to Pale Moon for a while, after which I landed on Firefox ESR to avoid the inmediate impact of bad decisions, and accumulated a veritable landslide of user.js and userchrome.css tweaks I keep having to maintain.
On the other hand, part of the struggle was my fight against the web as a """platform""", with its many privacy and security issues that accumulated as W3C APIs were added like hot cakes and websites exploded in complexity. Firefox provided the control necessary through addons, thanks to its vast community of likeminded people. Nowadays, a lot of the privacy controls have landed in firefox proper, in part thanks to the tor browser upstreaming, if you know where to look.
The problem is what "enthusiasts" want is typically opposed to what is needed at the time to improve the product, such as:
* Wanting niche features that don't benefit other people than those in the enthusiast core, thus preventing the company from gaining market share and revenue.
* Ever-increasing expectations in terms of visible feature delivery (e.g. e10s was widely seen as a failure despite being foundational to move off a single thread model and increase browser responsiveness).
* General conservativeness in terms of anything that breaks workflows (famously [1], but also see the criticism of Firefox redesigns over the years, etc.)
* Most importantly, lack of proposals for monetization from said audience (donations do not cut it and smaller and more important projects such as OpenSSL, etc. have also been underfunded from time to time, so nvm funding a browser's development), while also opposing the typical monetization mechanisms, e.g. ads.
These things end up constraining a company from spending more resources to improve a growing product, as they don't have any. While more capital-intensive industries such as phone manufacturers often just choose to appeal to mass market at the cost of giving up their enthusiasts[2], Mozilla always wanted to hedge its bets, and has failed to go in either direction.
Therefore, it is not unexpected that Mozilla is failing, and only survives through whatever meager donations come through, and revshare from Google by placing them as the default search engine.
I don't think workflow concerns can just be brushed off. Breaking changes and constant design churn is devastating for user retention.
What users want is a working browser that gets out of the way and them browse the web. That's what Chrom(e,ium) is. It's like air, it's everywhere but you can't see it.
Firefox is not. Every time you open Firefox, there's a new dialog announcing some change or shilling some product. It's cut from the same cloth as that car that Homer Simpson designed. Every time you open Firefox, it works a bit differently, so you have to unlearn some habit and learn a new one[1]. This is friction. This grates. You have some task to perform, which is why you opened the browser, but now you your blood pressure is up 20 points because firefox can't just let you browse, it's always telling you stuff in a dozen different channels, popups, toasts, notifications, there's always something it throws in your face, often multiple calls to action at once. So you say for fucks sake, and go back to chrome which just lets you browse with none of that nonsense.
These are all the calls to action I get when I open firefox. Which I opened yesterday as well, so it's not a clean install.
Why is there a dialog announcing widgets, when I can see the widgets already? It's literally telling me what I see on the screen. Why do you need this exposition to inform me of something that is plain to see in front of my eyes? It's like bad fiction writing, except in the form of annoying UX.
Like is anyone working on Firefox actually using the browser, in its vanilla configuration? How can they not see how infuriating it is to be a Firefox user?
[1] 5 years ago we changed which kitchen drawer we keep the cutlery in, and I still reach for the wrong one every time.
I didn't hear any enthusiasts complain about the new VPN integration, which helps fund the browser. A paid email service is also something many have been asking for a while. People even want to donate money for browser development, but can't due to the foundation structure.
It doesn't seem a coincidence that it started to go down hill after they removed an engineer from CEO (Brendan Eich), and replaced him with a marketing dude, then a lawyer lady, and now an MBA bro.
Firefox's market share peaked in 2009. Eich was CEO for 2 weeks in 2014. He resigned and declined Mozilla's offer to remain in another C level position. The same lawyer lady Mitchell Baker had every top job from 1999 to 2008.
Agreed. For some reasons, the powers to be (Google?) didn't want someone who was independent (not be "guided" by Google), understood the core product technically and from an actual user's perspective, who may have been able to innovate Firefox into a better product and possibly even decouple Firefox from Google with alternative revenue streams (who knows, maybe instead of Brave Search, we may have had Firefox search?).
That engineer went on to create Brave, a browser that pays you Monopoly money for watching ads, injected affiliate links, installed their commercial VPN without asking, and leaked DNS traffic when using Tor in its "privacy" mode. I'd say Mozilla dodged a bullet there.
I used Firefox and made sure everybody in my circle family and social used it. I had donated 5$ to Mozilla when I was making 360$ per month. I believed in mozilla, I was naive. Soon after I learned the money didn't go to Firefox. They soon after launched a political campaign in my country. I realized this and every other fancy they had, was where my money was going. Stopped using it and stopped caring a long while back. Can't wait for Servo/Ladybird to replace it.
Some 10 years ago I was a Mozilla volunteer. I mainly worked on MDN, to the point of becoming a so-called "topic driver" for the glossary. Some of the work I did landed in the citations of a couple of papers about web technology. They flew me a whole week to Vancouver for an event where employees and volunteers worked together in the same room and they even made me (and the other volunteers ) attend a sort-of-corporate meeting where they sort-of fought about something (can't even remember what it was).
I'm telling you this to highlight that volunteers where a huge part of Mozilla.
But on the last day they announced that they were moving the day-to-day conversations from IRC (an open protocol) to Yahoo Messenger (a closed protocol). I felt sort of betrayed in that moment: the company that was all about openness and to which I dedicated countless hours doing unpaid work for and even more years evangelizing for was imposing its volunteers and employees used a proprietary app to coordinate. That didn't sit well with me. At all. I basically lost interest.
This was in 2015. Last I heard MDN introduced ads (I wouldn't know, uBlock is pretty effective) and is not showing contributors to a page on the page itself anymore.
So yeah, the part of OP saying how Mozilla managed to piss volunteers resonated pretty hard with me.
I think “IRC (an open protocol)” served more to explain the why than the what here. It frames the whole rest of the story and why GP felt alienated.
It wasn’t because Mozilla stopped using GP’s favorite chat software. It’s because GP was a believer in the mission and the principles. Switching from an open system to a corny corporate one made the whole illusion fall apart. Mozilla was a corp all along and they took their volunteers for a ride.
Another feeling when reading "(I woudn't know, uBlock is pretty effective)" coming from a volunteer for MDN
Who else would be likely to look at what a web page is trying to get the browser to do, e.g., trigger requests for ads using Javascript. There are a variety of places to look, it is not like this is seriously hidden from those with even the slightest curiousity
That a former MDN volunteer is apparently disappointed by ads on MDN yet satisfied with MDN anyway because of a community-sourced browser add-on. An add-on that can be rendered useless at any time by the browser vendor, including the one that puts ads on MDN
It is not unimaginable that one day uBlock Origin may cease to work on Firefox when Mozilla sells search data to Google as its primary source of income and is actively working on such things as "making ads more private"
I thank the volunteer for their past work on MDN, I'm not singling him out, nor am I holding it against anyone for thinking this way, but I wonder how many uBlock Origin users believe themselves to possess some "specialised knowledge",^1 for lack of a better term, but would be all but helpless against advertising without a solution provided by someone else, e.g., a browser extension
The point I'm making is that today it seems like "knowing which app to install and how to install it" is considered specialised knowledge instead of actually knowing how to avoid ads to an extent where if the app stopped working they could devise another solution
There are definitely some HN users who can do it, and you, dear reader may be amongst them, but it seems, based on the comments I have seen over the years, there are many, many more who cannot. In that sense the situation is a bit like the IRC comment
The more one understands about online ads, the more clear it should be that so-called "ad blockers" is only a temporary solution at best, and these only work with web browsers
IMHO it is important that more people who wish to avoid ads become more curious about how they work instead of only installing a browser extension and concluding the problem is solved for the long-term
1. Many calling themselves "engineers" for example
Yes, I'd echo thanks to parent, the OA and all still in the trenches.
Since 2007 in my case which is when I started using Linux at home. The distributions I use come with Firefox as the Web browser (Ubuntu, Debian and latterly Slackware).
I do find myself turning things off more now than I used to.
Last I heard the ads were introduced to be less dependent on Google money - they actually cover the costs/salaries of the internal MDN team and thus secure the existence of MDN within the organisation.
Also apparently they are non-tracking ads, and so provide only a small fraction of income that tracking ads would bring, but that would go against the ideals of Mozilla.
So I'm seeing the ads as a net positive. (And am surprised that the people visiting MDN don't use an ad blocker anyhow).
I support MDN by disabling UBO. This is not (much) of a burden: there is no animation, and the advertised products are always technical and possibly of interest. Only complaint is the occasional large light areas, which do not play well with dark mode.
> But on the last day they announced that they were moving the day-to-day conversations from IRC (an open protocol) to Yahoo Messenger (a closed protocol).
IIRC they had a partnership with Yahoo around that time. Interesting to hear it went that deep. Notable: Yahoo Messenger was shutdown in 2018.
Yeah, the part that I was most surprised at from this sort was the 2015; when they said Yahoo Messenger I had been assuming it was like a decade earlier.
> I felt sort of betrayed in that moment: the company that was all about openness and to which I dedicated countless hours doing unpaid work for and even more years evangelizing for was imposing its volunteers and employees used a proprietary app to coordinate. That didn't sit well with me. At all. I basically lost interest.
I feel the same way after seeing what they've done with AI chatbots in the sidebar. Five cloud providers. No local AI option. I don't see a reason to use Firefox today and it's been my main browser since it was called Phoenix. I use it only because it's what I've been using for a long time. There's no relationship between Mozilla of today and the group that placed the ad in the NY Times in 2004.
The AI chatbot thing was just the latest happening, but it shows how devoid of meaning that organization has become when you have a technology like AI and nobody even looks to Mozilla to provide leadership on an issue like that. Sure, send all your data to a large cloud outfit, that's the corporate world of Mozilla in 2026. It would actually be shocking to see Mozilla promote AI data privacy. Ironically, the local model I run the most is provided by Google, and it's not the least bit surprising that they're making it possible.
As the OP says, the point is not that they needed unpaid work, if that's what you mean. The point is that volunteers shaped what Firefox, MDN, Thunderbird, Mozilla itself were.
I'm using Waterfox on desktop at the moment, but I really wish Mozilla would get their act back together and make all the forks unnecessary. I'm not saying they need to die: I only hope one day they aren't needed anymore.
Also, I'm afraid that's not sustainable in the long run. How long before Mozilla makes a change so big to introduce some nasty feature that it becomes impossible for forks to stay up to date with upstream? Do they really have the resources necessary to maintain an actual fork and not just a customized version?
"Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people:
First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers, launch technicians, and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.
Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers' union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.
The Iron Law states that, in every case, the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules and control promotions within the organization."
I want to put it in other words based on philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche -
Exploitation is the key characteristic of living beings. This is applicable not only to humans but also to single celled life forms. (There are exceptions to this). So, those who are dedicated to the org itself are the one who are exploiting. And those who are working for the goal of the org are the exploited. There is always fight between these two group. Some time, a symbiotic relationship, some times status quo. etc.
Those who recognize this will be at peace since they understand the soul of bureaucracy.
This is new to me. Not sure I totally agree but it's a useful heuristic. Despite being easy targets, orgs do in fact need coordinators, middle managers, administrators, etc. Especially as they scale. (And no AI won't render them obsolete.) Finding the balance between productivity and bureaucracy is the hard part.
It's true that large orgs need all that bureaucracy. But is it still true that productivity needs large orgs? We see a lot of massive hits coming from small teams - whether it's startups, movies, indie games, etc.
>In political jargon, a self-licking ice cream cone is a self-perpetuating system that has no purpose other than to sustain itself.
>History
>The phrase appeared to have been first used in 1991–1992, in a book about Gulf War weapons systems by Norman Friedman, and On Self-Licking Ice Cream Cones, a paper by Pete Worden about NASA's bureaucracy, to describe the relationship between the Space Shuttle and Space Station.
That is rarely true. If an organization ceases to exist but people still have the same goal then they create a new organization or act individually without an incorporated bureaucracy.
On the contrary, the existence of a mismanaged organization nominally dedicated to a given purpose often prevents its nominal goal from being achieved, because people assume giving time or money to that organization will be the best way to further the goal. Then the organization squanders them when those resources would otherwise have gone to some other organization or people with greater effectiveness towards the goal.
I hate this. It basically takes as axiomatic that anyone in an administrative position in an organisation has zero interest in the goals of the organisation -and that those at the coal-face have no interest in the organisation and that there is little or no overlap in interest. Its reductionist, divisive and stupid.
I don’t think that it is reductionist at all. The examples provided are either qualified with “dedicated” or “many of”. It’s also not surprising at all that people who have an interest in driving the goals of the organization usually gravitate more to operational roles and people who have no interest in it at all gravitate towards organizational roles – but that’s not a rule.
I would totally be pissed as someone in an “organizational” role of someone reduced me to someone “not interested in the goals of the organization”, but magpi3 didn’t do that. They correctly stated a pattern. If you are around organizational/administrative people, ask yourself honestly if the pattern isn’t the least bit accurate…
That's not what it says though? There is no reason type 1 people can't be in an administrative position. It's merely hypothesising that since it is not their primary goal (but it is for type 2 people) that they will eventually be out-competed by type 2's for management type positions.
I don't have that reading at all. The phrasing even seems (carefully?) chosen to avoid this interpretation: it's "Examples are many of the administrators [...]", not "Examples are the administrators [...]".
I see it as a pointed observation that the people who focus on a goal will accomplish that goal. There are organizations with administrative-focused people who work in alignment with the mission-focused people, and that also follows this law as well. It's just that the same dynamic can cause organisations to spiral into an extractive, stale, ossifying, change-resistent focus instead.
I agree. It's a false binary. I'd never heard of this one before, but even if the premise is reductive there's some truth in it. If nothing else, it might be a helpful lens for evaluating an org.
It takes the view that anyone in an administrative position will put the survival of the organization as their primary goal, while lower-level employees (who are far less invested in the organization) can remain invested in the organization's ostensible goals.
I find it to be very true after almost 30 years in the working world, and I always keep it in mind wherever I work.
De-prioritizing Servo is something I will never understand. Aside from making Firefox attractive again, desktop software has migrated almost entirely to web-based stacks. They could have owned the foundation layer of almost every hardware device if they managed to make Servo faster and slimmer than the options we currently have. What a blunder.
To some degree, yeah they did, by leaving space for a lean and mean competitor like Google Chrome to come around and eat their lunch. And when it was introduced, Google Chrome truly was the lean and mean browser, less bloated than both Firefox and IE.
But I'm not sure how much they could've done. Maybe they could've invested a ton of engineering resources into a project similar to Firefox Quantum earlier, so that Firefox didn't leave as much room for a leaner browser? But half the reason people complain about Firefox today is that they broke XUL extensions, which was an absolutely necessary step in making Firefox a competitive, fast browser. I can only imagine the backlash they would've seen if they did that before Chrome ate their lunch.
And I'm not sure how much it would've really helped, since 1) Chrome would've still been a less bloated browser simply through having been around for a shorter time and having fewer features, and 2) Google would've still had immense marketing opportunities by plastering Chrome ads all over Google Search etc.
I really wish Mozilla would focus relentlessly on a privacy-first, performant browser across major platforms. Nothing else. I don’t want extensions (attack vector), vpns, fancy bookmarking services that are deprecated later on etc. I want to browse the web safely and privately and preserve battery life - nothing more.
I wouldn't want a browser without extensions. Ad blocking in particular.
To me, ad blocking belongs in extensions. The job of a web browser is to show web pages as intended according to the standards. It includes all the ads, tracking, etc... the page has put in. If you want to block stuff or deviate from the standards in any way, that's what extensions are for.
And extension like ad blocking are an arms race, websites will deploy countermeasures to make them less effective and to which extensions can respond. Again I dont want the core browser to participate in an arms race. Keeping it free of vulnerabilities is already hard enough not to fight against standard behavior.
Extensions are the primary threat to your security today. Nothing else comes close. Organizations are not basically competent if they are not restricting or blocking extensions, and you should not have more than one to three very trusted extensions in your browser. I'd argue the case for eliminating them in favor of in house code is significant.
As a reminder: Extensions execute with post-decryption access to the websites you view, and they update to new code silently and without asking for permission. HTTPS might as well not bother existing if you have extensions you do not have incredible trust in.
If I couldn't use the ublock origin extension with Firefox, I'd leave for another browser. I consider it essential for privacy reasons as well as for adblocking, and I can't imagine it hurts battery life compared to all the ads and other crap it blocks.
Firefox's VPN service also has its privacy-related uses (yes, I'm aware of the limitations), but I think it mostly serves as a possible source of non-google revenue for Mozilla.
Extensions were why Firefox was so popular among those considered 'abnormal.' Chrome just copied the idea. VPNs, Pocket, and sync services are all great features; it's their implementation and execution that is so poor.
All Mozilla (and Firefox) needs is to be run by developers, not the fucking MBAs.
> focus relentlessly on a privacy-first, performant browser across major platforms. Nothing else. [...] to browse the web safely and privately and preserve battery life - nothing more.
"Nothing more," you say.
The chief focus should be Privacy... Privacy and Performance... Our two chief focuses should be Privacy and Performance... and Cross-Platform Executables with Functional Parity... Our three chief focuses should be Privacy, Performance, Cross-Platform Executables with Functional Parity, and Safety on the Web... Our four chief focuses should be Privacy, Performance, Cross-Platform Executables with Functional Parity, Safety on the Web, and ruthless Efficiency in Preserving Battery Life... Our five... no... Amongst our chief focuses... Amongst our non-trivial chief focuses that users think are easy... are such elements as Privacy, Safety on the Web, Cross-Platform Executables with Functional Parity... I'll come in again.
How do you expect Mozilla to make enough money from just Firefox to survive if Google ever decides to stop paying them for being the default search engine?
Charge me. I’ll pay. I’m not going to donate to the org right now as I don’t use Firefox as it uses (noticeably) too much battery on my MacBook compared to safari and chrome.
- Kept Rust and sold best-in-class tooling like IDEs to enterprises.
- Polished Firefox OS and distributed apps in their store for a 1% commission.
- Kept Servo and made the most secure and fast browser that no one else had made.
- Partnered with OEMs to offer Firefox as the default browser.
Yet the best they could do was pay their CEO for nothing.
"We shouldn't try to be like the big browsers because that's not what our Community wants."
This is just a path to irrelevance. Firefox had the ambition to be the default browser, what Chrome is now! It's a shame if they're going to spiral off into their niche.
> To this day, I am still kind of confused with that move.
I do not think that this was that confusing. People [1] looked around at the beginning of the 2010's and saw
1) Mobile usage was growing exponentially and desktop was... not [2].
2) Every mobile OS shipped their own browser by default, or even went so far as to prevent other browsers from being used at all (iOS) [3].
3) Because Android and iOS both had non-trivial marketshare, neither could be called a "monopoly" so there was no way to use anti-trust law to get Firefox on devices as was done with Windows (not that this would have been a compelling strategy even if it were possible).
People took that set of facts and concluded Mozilla needed its own mobile OS in order to stay relevant.
What they underestimated was the amount of investment needed to make such an OS and get it on devices and the amount of time it would have to exist in a state of not being very good before it could compete with the established players (who were not standing still... people forget how bad Android was in the beginning). But if you look at the actual world we ended up in, with no mobile OS from Mozilla and a total Firefox marketshare that is less than desktop Safari's, it is hard to say that initial conclusion was incorrect.
[1] Full disclosure: I was a Mozilla employee at the time, though not involved in any of these decisions.
[2] I would say "desktop was shrinking", but to everyone's surprise it actually remained fairly steady in absolute numbers, although it did become a smaller slice of a much larger pie. In 2010 everyone expected it to shrink, though.
[3] Mozilla did ship a re-skin around mobile Safari to try to get some brand presence, but was still at the mercy of what web standards Safari chose to implement, and you could hardly call it a first-class experience. Eventually iOS loosened their rules, but no one could have predicted that back then.
Thanks for the explanation, and thank you for your work at Mozilla. I guess what I'm saying is that I wish Mozilla could have just focused on the browser.
I think Firefox OS was great, and too early for its time, combined with the mistake of "let's run on extremely terrible hardware" (rather than designing for the flagships of the time, which wouldn't be flagships by the time it shipped).
I mean the fact that a fork of FirefoxOS KaiOS is still around and being used shows that there was some merit to the idea but yeah it was executed as a start-up without a long-term plan but thanks to the open nature of the code its still in use.
It would be great if Mozilla as an organization tool the opposite approach of Google and if they started a project you knew it would be supported for the long run and if not internally it was handed over to the community of users and stewarded along, sort of how Apache seems to adopt projects but mostly for corporate/enterprise users.
Firefox OS was amazing and, sadly, would STILL be amazing today.
Boot-to-Gecko is brilliant because honestly most apps today... are Web pages packaged in an "app". Most PWA with desktop shortcuts (and ideally offline responsive mode) show that. Very few "apps" genuinely need to be apps.
Consequently being "just" a phone with basic connectivity and delegating the rest to the browser made perfect sense.
I didn't work because it didn't make sense or wasn't technically feasible. It didn't work because anybody who made a mobile OS wanted THEIR own walled gardens. The fact that today we are stuck with Android an iOS shows how needed it was and still is.
Firefox OS was a brilliant idea. Imagine cross platform and open apps based on HTML/JavaScript that feel native and polished. 2026 would have been amazing if Mozilla executed it right.
I like that take. There is a tendency in the software world to dream about becoming the BigTech we all hate.
I believe that the people who want Firefox want it because it's different, just like the people who want Linux want it because it is different. And similarly in Linux, many people keep explaining how Linux should look more like Windows if it wants the year of the Linux Desktop.
But I wouldn't be on Linux if I wanted Windows. I am not on Linux because I want everybody to be on Linux, on the contrary. Same applies for Firefox.
just today i came back to firefox from brave. firefox at one point in time was not able to work with the onshape web cad system and i needed a chrome based browser but was not ready to leave adblockers behind. brave war the only one suporting manifest 2 addons. but today i tried onshape in firefox and now it works. glad to be back
Mozilla continues to exist because Google funds them, and Google funds them so they can claim that their Chrome browser isn't a monopoly.
That's why Firefox continues to be a niche browser. Its actual goal, never outright stated by Mozilla leadership, is to occupy just enough market share to prop up their behemoth benefactor.
> That doesn't mean we can't become big. We did this before. When we listened to our Community, gave them what they wanted, let them work with us to build something amazing, they told their friends
Exactly this. Mozilla/Firefox lost their way when they stopped listening to the community.
Which is not to say you shouldn't try to build new cool things that the community hasn't thought of yet - but you should listen to them when they tell you it is terrible garbage that they do not want and there is no way to opt out.
First of all thanks for posting what's on your mind and everything you did at Mozilla. Sorry to hear you are burnt out, hope you get better with time.
I've been a loyal Firefox user since forever - reading, writing, web dev I do is always in Firefox. It's a first app I always install. I'm grateful Firefox exists, and the world (at least mine) would be much worse if it wasn't around.
I don't like Mozilla is taking money from Google - I'd prefer if it was all community driven, to the point of a community owned co-operative, but I'm probably delusional.
That would be JR Conlin, national treasure. Worked with him on YDN in 2007 and Netflix in 2009; veterans of the Netflix API team will never forget his hack day entry, which was "Mac and Me" playing on a toaster oven.
They still have not fixed their build system. Meson/ninja or cmake would be alternatives. Nothing to have them abandon mozconfig ... this is legacy code. The rest of the world moved on. Mozilla lives in the past.
I noticed too; I managed to ignore it at first but it eventually became so grating I stopped reading shortly before I reached the end of the article.
I'm not exactly sure of the reason for the overuse but the sheer amount of times it is used feels artificial. Not "artificial" in an "artificial intelligence" sense but perhaps a corporate, "inclusive" thing[1] that may have rubbed off on the author during his time at Mozilla, or a political convention (which is possible considering the large "Fump Truck" text on his Mastodon page).
It was an eleven day war and the casualty was their future. Eich was the last time that Mozilla hired a CEO from the ranks of its own engineers. Eich would not have prevented the economic external challenges faced, but Eich and other such engineer-leaders would have prevented the unforced errors Mozilla is known for today. Every CEO after that was business, not engineer. This placed the company onto the same runway of mediocrity and collapse that we see Boeing crashing planes into with some regularity.
If Mozilla believed in the values it espoused, Librewolf wouldn’t exist. It would just be called Firefox.
One of the first betrayals was putting ads in their new tab page, the forced AI comes as a Mozilla tradition now of user respect as marketing only.
At the same time it simply may not be a viable business. Firefox was popular originally because Chrome didn’t exist and Internet Explorer especially 6 back was awful.
The browser is now an OS on top of an OS, it requires massive resources to maintain.
So Mozilla has a cursed mission now and related or unrelated in any case they’re full of it and have lost my respect. Open source and user respect still means something to me even if it doesn’t to Mozilla.
another thing is that the weirdos who were using firefox didn't switch to chrome either, mainly just to other firefox forks or brave, vivaldi.. casual users just use whatever but use firefox less and less
> Another delusion comes about because of self-reinforcement. Say you're going to release some, controversial feature. Maybe it's browser based DRM, maybe it's AI, maybe it's Push Notifications. Listening to your users can be a bit challenging[2], because while some might tell you, most probably won't. They'll just leave. That means that your source of information will be the people that stick around, so you wind up getting artificially high approval rates for things.
This is a bit ironic, because... there's a bunch of low hanging fruit that are lacking and that keeps driving the nerds off of Firefox. Take Meshcore/Meshtastic or, frankly, the entire ESP32 world for example - in the Chromium ecosystem, you can use WebUSB and WebSerial to flash and communicate with these things from the browser. It does not get more convenient. Meanwhile, WebUSB still isn't supported in Firefox at all and only two weeks ago Firefox at least gained WebSerial [1].
He's right. The nerds who want WebUSB are leaving or using Chromium on the side. Firefox has just been collecting the nerds who want absolute safety and privacy at the cost of any functionality (which apparently includes removing extensions according to one).
I was floored when I discovered that Firefox rejected Web NFC because they were afraid of it being used on specific outdated Yubikeys. I could understand if they were concerned about it being used to steal credit cards, but the Yubikey scenario is just so out of touch. I can only hope that Web Serial represents a pivot away from that.
> We're a niche browser that is lucky enough to get well funded.
Now - we really need a viable alternative to the Evil Google Empire. For a while I had hope that ladybird would be that competitor, but that died after I was banned from github, as well as Kling making some really strange decisions in the last year or so, with weird explanations; most recent one the "we don't need external contributors so we close that down" (in part also due to the rise of AI slop spam, which is indeed annoying, but Kling is a strange guy really). I gave up on Mozilla many years ago already, though. The key insight I had was when one mozilla dev explaind that all linux guys use systemd + pulseaudio. So, using youtube (which annoys me because the evil Google empire controls it as well), I had no audio on firefox. Chrome on the other hand played fine (I only used alsa). So, the same machine, almost the same software stack (excluding pulseaudio; I did use system back then though), means that one browser plays audio fine, the other does not. Now, I could recompile firefox and enable non-pulseaudio audio ... but look at this:
There is allegedly a python-only alternative. I tried it. It did not compile.
This is not the only issue I had. Many more problems existed with Mozilla and I also think that becoming addicted to Google money killed Mozilla. It is a dying shadow and has been for a long time. Yes, we need alternatives, but Mozilla failed us many years ago already.
I don't have a real solution against the evil Google empire. It's not even only Google; many companies are part of the evilness. I am almost beginning to sound like Richard Stallman, though I don't feed off of my feet - but the main point here is more to have real alternatives. Firefox is useable, no doubt, but it's not going to change the control Google has over the world wide web. We need something much more fundamental - control by the people. Everyone sees what Google and co are doing. Something has to change fundamentally, to stop Google parasitizing on the rest of the world. But for this you also need to have software alternatives that work.
The only thing I can come up with is to make all components of the browser/www stack as modular as possible and to also come up with alternatives. W3C also betrayed us when they demanded DRM into everything. I don't want that. Next in line will be mandatory age sniffing. This is currently ongoing. It will be extended. Systemd already added support for it; Poettering tried to do damage control but clearly failed: and reddit censoring like crazy - https://old.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/1rzykul/the_system... as is typical.
Hey, we have the evil Microsoft empire :) Or the Apple alternative.
Maintaining a browser engine including patching the latest vulnerabilities when someone points Mythos at your code is a really hard problem, my feeling is you need a certain size of organization and funding as your table stakes.
Someone should convince the EU to look into funding a new browser, maybe.
What if the EU bought some big chunk of Mozilla, something like Mozilla EU, and then ran it? Would the US then cry out against EU buying US companies and start to fund Mozilla?
Literal who has left the company that provides Google's antitrust insurance policy. That Mozilla still manages to swing "non-profit" status as they do this is outrageous.
I would like to see Mozilla's entire board leave Mozilla... in a PERP WALK.
Mozilla Corporation, owner and operator of the Firefox brand and recipient of Google’s payments, is not a non-profit. U.S. law permits non-profits to have for-profit subsidiaries if one accepts severe limitations, such as the corporation’s profits being largely severed from the non-profit’s use. Severance isn’t just a science fiction show, it’s a compulsory auditable requirement.
Corporations get up to so many rotten things, most of which are entirely legal, but shouldn't be. Mozilla Corporation thanks you for the free ball-washing & PR work. If you reach out to their non-profit parent, you may even be able to deduct this on your taxes.
It's easy to leave a place. Harder to stay and fix the things you don't like. How many people regret leaving the place they invested 12+ years, rather than fighting back while in a position to do so?
If you're burned out, no longer fun, we all get it. But don't leave your investment into a product just because some new direction took over unless you plan to kick their backside.
I don't know, but maybe spending 15 years working on something that you felt was not only a job but also in part a mission shapes a lot of you as a person and you want to express your feelings about that huge part of your life.
I would say about 99% of the population views software corporations as these monolithic inhuman cubes of pure shitanium. What these posts are important for is
1: reminding the average population that corporations are just abstract human pyramids and made up of normal people.
And
2: doing that through a very human, biased, and filtered perspective that can provide some genuine insight into the function of these opaque systems.
Now, does the average consumer of hacker news get all that? Probably not, but I do think insider perspective is still valuable.
Respect. This is what Firefox could have been.
In the real world, in the same line as the article suggests, there was a brief time when the "puts you back in control" browser needed you to change the following about:config settings to disable the force-pushed ai:
browser.ml.enable, browser.ml.chat.enabled, browser.ml.chat.sidebar, browser.ml.chat.menu, browser.ml.chat.page, extensions.ml.enabled, browser.ml.linkPreview.enabled, browser.ml.pageAssist.enabled, browser.ml.smartAssist.enabled, browser.tabs.groups.smart.enabled, browser.tabs.groups.smart.userEnabled, pdfjs.enableAltTextModelDownload, pdfjs.enableGuessAltText
A bit of community feedback later, and we've got one big "off" button, and me wondering which footgun the executives will shoot themselves with next.
Look, I absolutely agree it sucks they didn't deliver the opt-out/in interface day one, it was obvious people would want it, and yes, it's not the first time they've blundered.
At the same time, they did listen to the feedback and deliver. It now has a genuinely good interface for it where you don't have to opt out of everything, but can opt-in where you want it. It's not just a big off button, it's a general out-out including new features, but that then exposes individual opt-ins if you want for each feature. Most other browsers won't respond at all. Firefox is still by far the best browser out there for people who care about their privacy.
Especially on HN, Firefox just gets so much more hate than software that is way more user hostile for much less bad behaviour. I'm not saying we shouldn't hold it to a higher standard when that is what it's selling itself on: clearly we can't allow "not as bad" to let it slip into worse and worse, but at the same time, I don't understand how the narrative seems to trend towards "they are essentially the same as google" when that is so clearly not true (to be clear, not saying you are saying that in this post, just that's the vibe of HN's commentary as a whole).
That is true - Firefox is definitely held to a higher standard here and elsewhere. They marketed those values to us. So the criticisms, in my opinion, are definitely justified. And no, they aren't listening to their users.
If they had listened to their users they would have delivered what every users wants - just a browser. Not some kind of "platform" stuffed with lot of unwanted crap that makes it bloated and introduces possibly new unnecessary attack vectors in it (both malicious and / or privacy exploits). All those additional crap that every new management wants in Firefox should have been a browser extension or a plugin, instead of being bundled into the core browser. When a user installs / updates Firefox, they could be asked if they want to install any of these new feature available as an extension / plugin. That keeps the browser lean, transfers the choice completely to the user and is genuinely respectful of the user. The current way of force bundling everything into the browser, making it bloated, and then pretending that "users can opt-out" is not just arrogance but also misleading (to be polite) as it is common knowledge among software firms that most people often never change the default settings.
Think about it ... if every of these controversial features - Pocket, ads in address bar or home page, AI etc. etc. - had been made available as user opted extension or plugin, would there ever have been any controversies? The installation data itself would provide a feedback of how much the users actually care about these features, and provide unique insights to the management into the kind of user base that it has (which the article is spot-on about).
(Note that I know that some of these features are indeed implemented as an extension. But not as user controlled ones as they cannot be completely uninstalled. All the user can do is disable it (turn "off or on"). Why? It is stuff like this that makes it harder to trust claims of caring about user Privacy.)
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People are mad because Mozilla refuses to listen to users until backlash becomes a threat to the company. They keep pushing users to the limit and only pull back slightly when the screaming gets too loud.
People are mad because Mozilla is clearly and unashamedly trying to boil the frog and doesn't seem to even be interested in hiding that fact.
People are mad because Mozilla is speed-running SV software-shittifying strategies without even doing us the dignity of pretending they aren't.
> it's not the first time they've blundered
It's a recurring pattern of not reading the room
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People had to raise hell to get that, while being made fun of by their CMs on social media. Even the opt-out is full of silicon valley dark patterns. Whoever is calling shots about the product at Mozilla doesn't have your best interests at heart.
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I think Firefox gets hated on more than the others because they advertise putting the user in control but in practice they seem to undermine it at every opportunity.
A browser that puts users in control should make features like AI and advertising opt-in because there is a sizeable group of people who are concerned about those things. It's meaningless if they only put users in control who agree 100% with Mozilla's ways of thinking.
After so many times of blundering in ways that are favorable to their corporate sponsors, it's hard to believe they're not doing it on purpose.
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The only correct move would be remove the option, remove all AI code, and move it into extensions. If the extension security policies, and other restrictions, don't allow all the things they want to put in, then GOOD, they don't go in.
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I think Mozilla is still mostly made up of tech-optimist people, so they were open and interested in ai from day one. I highly doubt there was any malicious intent.
You're complaning that the browser that "puts you back in control" ... put you back in control of which AI features you want to enable/disable? How horrible!
What? They didn't make these 10 distinct features one single all-or-nothing button? They let you switch them on or off individually?? How dare they?!?
What? They shipped new features to the browser...turned on?!? Instead of spending all those development hours and then...hiding them behind a setting by default?
I need "AI" in my browser, so I don't use the AI features. No data was sent anywhere. No 4 GB model was downloaded. Nothing happened, except for a popup saying "hey, by the way, if you want to do X, just press this button here". It's just UI elements. No AI-related code runs, no data is sent to AI companies unless you directly tell the browser to do that.
Imagine if Firefox shipped a brand new GPU-accelerated compositor, improved hardware video decoding and WebGL/WebGPU. You people cry about why they didn't add a big "disable GPU features" button? And that they dared to enable this by default?
Oh no! Mozilla downloaded a 50MB file onto my computer after I asked it to translate a page for me. Those batards!!!!
I'm not convinced anyone complaining even knows what they're complaining about. The AI features Mozilla has is pretty minimal and there's a good fucking reason they didn't add a nuke button in the beginning. Because most people like translate. The chat sidebar? Most people I know that use Firefox didn't even know it existed till I showed them. The only other model that existed at the time was a 20MB tab grouper. The complaints felt reactionary to AI (rightfully) but for some reason targeted Mozilla, the company that wasn't shoving AI down your throat
The irony here is that after enough negative user feedback, they did make that one button, as an actual button not a config option. You can still change those options if you want AI but not in the sidebar, for example.
You either missed the point or deliberately missed the point.
The issue was they shipped AI features built into everything and the only way to switch them off was to "about:config" a bunch of settings, they shouldn't have shipped it without the off switch and "Open about:settings and then disable things manually" isn't control for the average user.
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And those are some of the better named config options. Some are pretty opaque, as are their values (and often poorly documented). You can tell there isn't an edict to make config options highly accessible
They KEEP adding utter cancerous garbage to the homepage/new tab page. I recently installed Firefox from scratch for a coworker who was having chrome-only issues(yes, they do exist!) and was blown away by how insanely gross the default settings are now. It’s straight up adware junk bullshit
Maybe I just love downvotes, but the Firefox AI sidebar is incredibly useful and I make use of it nearly every day.
Good for you. The point is that a lot of Firefox users actively didn't want these sorts of features enabled and pushed on them. That was clear and obvious to anyone paying attention to general reactions to unsolicited AI helper tools, going back decades. For Mozilla to turn this on without any respect for those users’ preferences was a huge mistake that they keep making over and over again.
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Interesting to read, but ultimately it's very easy to blame "leaders" for everything and I'm not sure it has much merit. It's popular to pile on them and their decisions. But I don't think it's as obvious as people (often here on HN) make it out to be. If Mozilla didn't try out these avenues deemed wrong, if Mozilla spent all money on the browser only, if Mozilla made the best browser ever, would that really make a difference? Would more people use it, would they be a healthier organization now? Mozilla is surviving on the mercy of Google money, it's not a viable strategy.
Firefox usage has been declining for a decade. Doing nothing, or just doing the exact same as before, is popular with its fans (including me). But wouldn't it perhaps just have lead to an even more rapid decline?
> if Mozilla spent all money on the browser only, if Mozilla made the best browser ever, would that really make a difference?
It's obviously impossible to say, but when we look at things that did happen due to Mozilla's financial decisions we have some major disruptions. Besides the already-mentioned Rust and Thunderbird examples we also have the years-long rebuild of the extension system where Firefox, once known as the leader in customization, offered less than 20 extensions for its mobile version and deprecated who-knows how many. I find it hard to believe that these actions didn't affect their market share, goodwill, or both.
I am in favor of Mozilla launching initiatives to support the browser, but right now I think they are using the browser to support their initiatives.
Keep in mind that while Firefox offered 20 extensions on mobile, Chrome offered zero and continues to lack any support for extensions whatsoever. Nobody ditched Firefox for Chrome because of the extensions thing.
The move to WebExtensions was painful, but it also made it possible to easily port Chrome extensions to Firefox, which was a great boost for the extension ecosystem, as well as being the thing that actually made mobile extensions possible.
I do agree they should've made the transition period longer though. There were like two years in between where some of the big Chrome extensions hadn't been ported yet, but their original Firefox counterparts were already killed. That probably made a few users move ti Chrome, but that was already during the great Chrome migration, so I can't imagine this made a huge difference.
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The leaders could, for example, have made AI opt-in. If it's popular, maybe make it the default for new installs later on. Instead we had to go a few versions from "now with AI" to "now with an AI off button" because they got enough negative user feedback.
I don't mind experiments, but if you're the "we put you back in control" browser then please build an "off" switch in from the start.
Again: Would it have made a measurable difference? Or is it just moaning from a small core? Not saying the core is not important, but I don't think Fx can survive on only us.
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AI is not, and was not the reason why the average user moved away from Firefox.
AI is however a potential avenue for raising money.
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> if Mozilla spent all money on the browser only, if Mozilla made the best browser ever, would that really make a difference? Would more people use it, would they be a healthier organization now?
I worked at Mozilla for a bit over six years and really enjoyed my time there. There were lots of brilliant people attracted by the mission and the work was technically interesting. I left in part because I came to the conclusion that the answer to these questions was no. Google's distribution advantages with Chrome and getting boxed out of mobile by the bundled Android/iOS browsers was simply too much to overcome by making a better product. People can gripe about Mozilla's management or product decisions all they want but the fundamental problem is the structure of the web browser market.
This is a good take honestly - Firefox could be perfect and efficient and secure but if the defaults are good enough why would people make the effort to switch ?
What we really need is normalised effort to provide an alternative to the systemic issues you are starting to bring up. Not just the browser market but the entrenchment of big tech in general. An organisation that can deliver on what the idealists individually want in a big, cohesive way.
Personally in our current day an age I think that's what a labor union can provide (in addition to the obvious other resources).
> it's very easy to blame "leaders" for everything and I'm not sure it has much merit.
Leaders are accountable for their decisions, their statements, their strategies, and their care for the organisation(s) that they lead.
That wasn't my point, really. But that they chastise Mozilla leadership without offering any other alternative direction than "keeping doing as in 2009".
Its weird how quickly people are to excuse the class literally paid to be responsible.
Agreed
Firefox is a top notch browser we all are provided with for free. And it's been great and free for longer than any other browser. Ever.
Browsers are notoriously difficult to build and maintain. I think we owe all the engineers and people behind it a lot of appreciation.
Have they made a few missteps over the years trying out the new hot thing ? Yes. And it temporarily upset a niche of technical people. And last time I checked none of these things were very hard to avoid or turn off.
if Mozilla made the best browser ever, would that really make a difference?
I really don’t think it would.
One thing “Do what you did before when you were successful!” is missing is that Firefox was sleek, fast, extendable, new, and cool.
It was cool partly because of its “sleek, fast, extendable”, but also because of its “new”, and it can’t get “new” back.
Perhaps launching a completely new piece of software, like the Netscape -> Firefox change (although that was organic, not planned) - but only if it’s actually something new and cool that comes out of it. A rebadge won’t work.
I don’t think there’s a playbook that works here. I’m struggling to think of many major pieces of tech (or non-tech!) that ever got its cool back. Netscape -> Firefox? Apple and/or the Mac? IE4? Lego? Elvis? “New Nixon”?...
Alongside all of the successes there are orders of magnitude more failures, and I don’t think they’re all on merit.
There is a pool of opportunities they largely refuse to jump into: those requiring curation. Pocket, the sole exception, ended up as yet another unforced error.
> But wouldn't it perhaps just have lead to an even more rapid decline?
A product like Firefox depends on word of mouth. There was not a *single* announcement or decision by the Mozilla leadership in the last 10 years or so which would make me recommend Firefox to others, instead every single time it pushed me away a little bit more. I have hardly ever seen such a fundamental alienation of their core audience, even for Silicon Valley standards ;)
This, in part. The swift deprecation of XUL extensions felt like a kick in the gonads and made me switch to Pale Moon for a while, after which I landed on Firefox ESR to avoid the inmediate impact of bad decisions, and accumulated a veritable landslide of user.js and userchrome.css tweaks I keep having to maintain.
On the other hand, part of the struggle was my fight against the web as a """platform""", with its many privacy and security issues that accumulated as W3C APIs were added like hot cakes and websites exploded in complexity. Firefox provided the control necessary through addons, thanks to its vast community of likeminded people. Nowadays, a lot of the privacy controls have landed in firefox proper, in part thanks to the tor browser upstreaming, if you know where to look.
The problem is what "enthusiasts" want is typically opposed to what is needed at the time to improve the product, such as:
* Wanting niche features that don't benefit other people than those in the enthusiast core, thus preventing the company from gaining market share and revenue.
* Ever-increasing expectations in terms of visible feature delivery (e.g. e10s was widely seen as a failure despite being foundational to move off a single thread model and increase browser responsiveness).
* General conservativeness in terms of anything that breaks workflows (famously [1], but also see the criticism of Firefox redesigns over the years, etc.)
* Most importantly, lack of proposals for monetization from said audience (donations do not cut it and smaller and more important projects such as OpenSSL, etc. have also been underfunded from time to time, so nvm funding a browser's development), while also opposing the typical monetization mechanisms, e.g. ads.
These things end up constraining a company from spending more resources to improve a growing product, as they don't have any. While more capital-intensive industries such as phone manufacturers often just choose to appeal to mass market at the cost of giving up their enthusiasts[2], Mozilla always wanted to hedge its bets, and has failed to go in either direction.
Therefore, it is not unexpected that Mozilla is failing, and only survives through whatever meager donations come through, and revshare from Google by placing them as the default search engine.
[1] https://xkcd.com/1172/
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJgTKx-rg18
I don't think workflow concerns can just be brushed off. Breaking changes and constant design churn is devastating for user retention.
What users want is a working browser that gets out of the way and them browse the web. That's what Chrom(e,ium) is. It's like air, it's everywhere but you can't see it.
Firefox is not. Every time you open Firefox, there's a new dialog announcing some change or shilling some product. It's cut from the same cloth as that car that Homer Simpson designed. Every time you open Firefox, it works a bit differently, so you have to unlearn some habit and learn a new one[1]. This is friction. This grates. You have some task to perform, which is why you opened the browser, but now you your blood pressure is up 20 points because firefox can't just let you browse, it's always telling you stuff in a dozen different channels, popups, toasts, notifications, there's always something it throws in your face, often multiple calls to action at once. So you say for fucks sake, and go back to chrome which just lets you browse with none of that nonsense.
These are all the calls to action I get when I open firefox. Which I opened yesterday as well, so it's not a clean install.
https://www.marginalia.nu/junk/firefox.png
Why is there a dialog announcing widgets, when I can see the widgets already? It's literally telling me what I see on the screen. Why do you need this exposition to inform me of something that is plain to see in front of my eyes? It's like bad fiction writing, except in the form of annoying UX.
Like is anyone working on Firefox actually using the browser, in its vanilla configuration? How can they not see how infuriating it is to be a Firefox user?
[1] 5 years ago we changed which kitchen drawer we keep the cutlery in, and I still reach for the wrong one every time.
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I didn't hear any enthusiasts complain about the new VPN integration, which helps fund the browser. A paid email service is also something many have been asking for a while. People even want to donate money for browser development, but can't due to the foundation structure.
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It has merit. I left for similar reasons after a similar tour. I largely agree with their reasons. No further notes.
>if Mozilla made the best browser ever, would that really make a difference?
Yes.
It doesn't seem a coincidence that it started to go down hill after they removed an engineer from CEO (Brendan Eich), and replaced him with a marketing dude, then a lawyer lady, and now an MBA bro.
Firefox's market share peaked in 2009. Eich was CEO for 2 weeks in 2014. He resigned and declined Mozilla's offer to remain in another C level position. The same lawyer lady Mitchell Baker had every top job from 1999 to 2008.
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Agreed. For some reasons, the powers to be (Google?) didn't want someone who was independent (not be "guided" by Google), understood the core product technically and from an actual user's perspective, who may have been able to innovate Firefox into a better product and possibly even decouple Firefox from Google with alternative revenue streams (who knows, maybe instead of Brave Search, we may have had Firefox search?).
It’s not.
That engineer went on to create Brave, a browser that pays you Monopoly money for watching ads, injected affiliate links, installed their commercial VPN without asking, and leaked DNS traffic when using Tor in its "privacy" mode. I'd say Mozilla dodged a bullet there.
I used Firefox and made sure everybody in my circle family and social used it. I had donated 5$ to Mozilla when I was making 360$ per month. I believed in mozilla, I was naive. Soon after I learned the money didn't go to Firefox. They soon after launched a political campaign in my country. I realized this and every other fancy they had, was where my money was going. Stopped using it and stopped caring a long while back. Can't wait for Servo/Ladybird to replace it.
What was the campaign?
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Some 10 years ago I was a Mozilla volunteer. I mainly worked on MDN, to the point of becoming a so-called "topic driver" for the glossary. Some of the work I did landed in the citations of a couple of papers about web technology. They flew me a whole week to Vancouver for an event where employees and volunteers worked together in the same room and they even made me (and the other volunteers ) attend a sort-of-corporate meeting where they sort-of fought about something (can't even remember what it was).
I'm telling you this to highlight that volunteers where a huge part of Mozilla.
But on the last day they announced that they were moving the day-to-day conversations from IRC (an open protocol) to Yahoo Messenger (a closed protocol). I felt sort of betrayed in that moment: the company that was all about openness and to which I dedicated countless hours doing unpaid work for and even more years evangelizing for was imposing its volunteers and employees used a proprietary app to coordinate. That didn't sit well with me. At all. I basically lost interest.
This was in 2015. Last I heard MDN introduced ads (I wouldn't know, uBlock is pretty effective) and is not showing contributors to a page on the page itself anymore.
So yeah, the part of OP saying how Mozilla managed to piss volunteers resonated pretty hard with me.
Dat feeling when reading "IRC (an open protocol)" on HN—the parenthesis being necessary to explain IRC.
Makes me think in 10 years time the web will all be discord-like data silos behind infernal subscriptions and/or dark patterns with ads.
What a wonderful thing we've created.
I think “IRC (an open protocol)” served more to explain the why than the what here. It frames the whole rest of the story and why GP felt alienated.
It wasn’t because Mozilla stopped using GP’s favorite chat software. It’s because GP was a believer in the mission and the principles. Switching from an open system to a corny corporate one made the whole illusion fall apart. Mozilla was a corp all along and they took their volunteers for a ride.
Is there a widely-used open modern chat network? Specifically, I'm fine with the feature set of IRC, but I want durable messages and a mobile client.
Speaking as someone who hasn't run their own bouncer in 10+ years.
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Sounds like some decision-maker couldn't figure out how to connect to the IRC channel. That's not the right type of management for Mozilla.
Another feeling when reading "(I woudn't know, uBlock is pretty effective)" coming from a volunteer for MDN
Who else would be likely to look at what a web page is trying to get the browser to do, e.g., trigger requests for ads using Javascript. There are a variety of places to look, it is not like this is seriously hidden from those with even the slightest curiousity
That a former MDN volunteer is apparently disappointed by ads on MDN yet satisfied with MDN anyway because of a community-sourced browser add-on. An add-on that can be rendered useless at any time by the browser vendor, including the one that puts ads on MDN
It is not unimaginable that one day uBlock Origin may cease to work on Firefox when Mozilla sells search data to Google as its primary source of income and is actively working on such things as "making ads more private"
I thank the volunteer for their past work on MDN, I'm not singling him out, nor am I holding it against anyone for thinking this way, but I wonder how many uBlock Origin users believe themselves to possess some "specialised knowledge",^1 for lack of a better term, but would be all but helpless against advertising without a solution provided by someone else, e.g., a browser extension
The point I'm making is that today it seems like "knowing which app to install and how to install it" is considered specialised knowledge instead of actually knowing how to avoid ads to an extent where if the app stopped working they could devise another solution
There are definitely some HN users who can do it, and you, dear reader may be amongst them, but it seems, based on the comments I have seen over the years, there are many, many more who cannot. In that sense the situation is a bit like the IRC comment
The more one understands about online ads, the more clear it should be that so-called "ad blockers" is only a temporary solution at best, and these only work with web browsers
IMHO it is important that more people who wish to avoid ads become more curious about how they work instead of only installing a browser extension and concluding the problem is solved for the long-term
1. Many calling themselves "engineers" for example
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IRC's UI is horrible. (Like email.)
No wonder people don't want to join it.
(Saying that as someome who has his own bouncer.)
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I've been using Firefox for almost 20 years as my default browser. Thank you for your work!
Yes, I'd echo thanks to parent, the OA and all still in the trenches.
Since 2007 in my case which is when I started using Linux at home. The distributions I use come with Firefox as the Web browser (Ubuntu, Debian and latterly Slackware).
I do find myself turning things off more now than I used to.
There were a few years where it was hard to justify using Firefox, it was just so slow compared to Chrome at the time. Nowadays it's fine again.
Last I heard the ads were introduced to be less dependent on Google money - they actually cover the costs/salaries of the internal MDN team and thus secure the existence of MDN within the organisation.
Also apparently they are non-tracking ads, and so provide only a small fraction of income that tracking ads would bring, but that would go against the ideals of Mozilla.
So I'm seeing the ads as a net positive. (And am surprised that the people visiting MDN don't use an ad blocker anyhow).
I support MDN by disabling UBO. This is not (much) of a burden: there is no animation, and the advertised products are always technical and possibly of interest. Only complaint is the occasional large light areas, which do not play well with dark mode.
> But on the last day they announced that they were moving the day-to-day conversations from IRC (an open protocol) to Yahoo Messenger (a closed protocol).
IIRC they had a partnership with Yahoo around that time. Interesting to hear it went that deep. Notable: Yahoo Messenger was shutdown in 2018.
Yeah, the part that I was most surprised at from this sort was the 2015; when they said Yahoo Messenger I had been assuming it was like a decade earlier.
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> I felt sort of betrayed in that moment: the company that was all about openness and to which I dedicated countless hours doing unpaid work for and even more years evangelizing for was imposing its volunteers and employees used a proprietary app to coordinate. That didn't sit well with me. At all. I basically lost interest.
I feel the same way after seeing what they've done with AI chatbots in the sidebar. Five cloud providers. No local AI option. I don't see a reason to use Firefox today and it's been my main browser since it was called Phoenix. I use it only because it's what I've been using for a long time. There's no relationship between Mozilla of today and the group that placed the ad in the NY Times in 2004.
The AI chatbot thing was just the latest happening, but it shows how devoid of meaning that organization has become when you have a technology like AI and nobody even looks to Mozilla to provide leadership on an issue like that. Sure, send all your data to a large cloud outfit, that's the corporate world of Mozilla in 2026. It would actually be shocking to see Mozilla promote AI data privacy. Ironically, the local model I run the most is provided by Google, and it's not the least bit surprising that they're making it possible.
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Do Mozilla really still need volunteers in this day and age? Tbh even in 2015. They are established enough to not need to exploit goodwill.
As the OP says, the point is not that they needed unpaid work, if that's what you mean. The point is that volunteers shaped what Firefox, MDN, Thunderbird, Mozilla itself were.
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Libtewolf is hopefully there. Ublock origin is pre-installed
Librewolf, like all the forks, free-rides on the upstream work of paid Mozilla staff in order to be secure. It's a band-aid, not a solution.
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I'm using Waterfox on desktop at the moment, but I really wish Mozilla would get their act back together and make all the forks unnecessary. I'm not saying they need to die: I only hope one day they aren't needed anymore.
Also, I'm afraid that's not sustainable in the long run. How long before Mozilla makes a change so big to introduce some nasty feature that it becomes impossible for forks to stay up to date with upstream? Do they really have the resources necessary to maintain an actual fork and not just a customized version?
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Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy absolutely applies here:
https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html
"Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people:
First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers, launch technicians, and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.
Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers' union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.
The Iron Law states that, in every case, the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules and control promotions within the organization."
I want to put it in other words based on philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche - Exploitation is the key characteristic of living beings. This is applicable not only to humans but also to single celled life forms. (There are exceptions to this). So, those who are dedicated to the org itself are the one who are exploiting. And those who are working for the goal of the org are the exploited. There is always fight between these two group. Some time, a symbiotic relationship, some times status quo. etc.
Those who recognize this will be at peace since they understand the soul of bureaucracy.
This is new to me. Not sure I totally agree but it's a useful heuristic. Despite being easy targets, orgs do in fact need coordinators, middle managers, administrators, etc. Especially as they scale. (And no AI won't render them obsolete.) Finding the balance between productivity and bureaucracy is the hard part.
It's true that large orgs need all that bureaucracy. But is it still true that productivity needs large orgs? We see a lot of massive hits coming from small teams - whether it's startups, movies, indie games, etc.
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The issue is that most dedicated to caring for the bureaucracy tend to overvalue the organization and undervalue the mission.
"The bureaucracy will expand to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy." -- paraphrase of C. Northcote Parkinson [0]
[0] _ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law
Self-Licking Ice Cream Cone
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-licking_ice_cream_cone
>In political jargon, a self-licking ice cream cone is a self-perpetuating system that has no purpose other than to sustain itself.
>History
>The phrase appeared to have been first used in 1991–1992, in a book about Gulf War weapons systems by Norman Friedman, and On Self-Licking Ice Cream Cones, a paper by Pete Worden about NASA's bureaucracy, to describe the relationship between the Space Shuttle and Space Station.
[...]
> in any bureaucratic organization
So are there any exceptions?
There are also:
* People who understand that the existence of the organization is necessary for the goals of the organization
That is rarely true. If an organization ceases to exist but people still have the same goal then they create a new organization or act individually without an incorporated bureaucracy.
On the contrary, the existence of a mismanaged organization nominally dedicated to a given purpose often prevents its nominal goal from being achieved, because people assume giving time or money to that organization will be the best way to further the goal. Then the organization squanders them when those resources would otherwise have gone to some other organization or people with greater effectiveness towards the goal.
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I hate this. It basically takes as axiomatic that anyone in an administrative position in an organisation has zero interest in the goals of the organisation -and that those at the coal-face have no interest in the organisation and that there is little or no overlap in interest. Its reductionist, divisive and stupid.
I don’t think that it is reductionist at all. The examples provided are either qualified with “dedicated” or “many of”. It’s also not surprising at all that people who have an interest in driving the goals of the organization usually gravitate more to operational roles and people who have no interest in it at all gravitate towards organizational roles – but that’s not a rule.
I would totally be pissed as someone in an “organizational” role of someone reduced me to someone “not interested in the goals of the organization”, but magpi3 didn’t do that. They correctly stated a pattern. If you are around organizational/administrative people, ask yourself honestly if the pattern isn’t the least bit accurate…
That's not what it says though? There is no reason type 1 people can't be in an administrative position. It's merely hypothesising that since it is not their primary goal (but it is for type 2 people) that they will eventually be out-competed by type 2's for management type positions.
I don't have that reading at all. The phrasing even seems (carefully?) chosen to avoid this interpretation: it's "Examples are many of the administrators [...]", not "Examples are the administrators [...]".
I see it as a pointed observation that the people who focus on a goal will accomplish that goal. There are organizations with administrative-focused people who work in alignment with the mission-focused people, and that also follows this law as well. It's just that the same dynamic can cause organisations to spiral into an extractive, stale, ossifying, change-resistent focus instead.
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I agree. It's a false binary. I'd never heard of this one before, but even if the premise is reductive there's some truth in it. If nothing else, it might be a helpful lens for evaluating an org.
It takes the view that anyone in an administrative position will put the survival of the organization as their primary goal, while lower-level employees (who are far less invested in the organization) can remain invested in the organization's ostensible goals.
I find it to be very true after almost 30 years in the working world, and I always keep it in mind wherever I work.
damn! then what's happens at the EU where the "goals of the organization" are themselves to increase and champion bureaucracy?
De-prioritizing Servo is something I will never understand. Aside from making Firefox attractive again, desktop software has migrated almost entirely to web-based stacks. They could have owned the foundation layer of almost every hardware device if they managed to make Servo faster and slimmer than the options we currently have. What a blunder.
> I'm not kidding when I said that Firefox is a niche browser. Folk have to actively look to use it.
There was once a time where IE was only ever used to download Firefox... Mozilla squandered that.
To some degree, yeah they did, by leaving space for a lean and mean competitor like Google Chrome to come around and eat their lunch. And when it was introduced, Google Chrome truly was the lean and mean browser, less bloated than both Firefox and IE.
But I'm not sure how much they could've done. Maybe they could've invested a ton of engineering resources into a project similar to Firefox Quantum earlier, so that Firefox didn't leave as much room for a leaner browser? But half the reason people complain about Firefox today is that they broke XUL extensions, which was an absolutely necessary step in making Firefox a competitive, fast browser. I can only imagine the backlash they would've seen if they did that before Chrome ate their lunch.
And I'm not sure how much it would've really helped, since 1) Chrome would've still been a less bloated browser simply through having been around for a shorter time and having fewer features, and 2) Google would've still had immense marketing opportunities by plastering Chrome ads all over Google Search etc.
Firefox was indeed blowing past all the other browsers and set to become the standard.
That's when Google realized they had to do something. The market could not be allowed to be dominated by a pro-freedom, pro-privacy product.
I really wish Mozilla would focus relentlessly on a privacy-first, performant browser across major platforms. Nothing else. I don’t want extensions (attack vector), vpns, fancy bookmarking services that are deprecated later on etc. I want to browse the web safely and privately and preserve battery life - nothing more.
I wouldn't want a browser without extensions. Ad blocking in particular.
To me, ad blocking belongs in extensions. The job of a web browser is to show web pages as intended according to the standards. It includes all the ads, tracking, etc... the page has put in. If you want to block stuff or deviate from the standards in any way, that's what extensions are for.
And extension like ad blocking are an arms race, websites will deploy countermeasures to make them less effective and to which extensions can respond. Again I dont want the core browser to participate in an arms race. Keeping it free of vulnerabilities is already hard enough not to fight against standard behavior.
Extensions are the primary threat to your security today. Nothing else comes close. Organizations are not basically competent if they are not restricting or blocking extensions, and you should not have more than one to three very trusted extensions in your browser. I'd argue the case for eliminating them in favor of in house code is significant.
As a reminder: Extensions execute with post-decryption access to the websites you view, and they update to new code silently and without asking for permission. HTTPS might as well not bother existing if you have extensions you do not have incredible trust in.
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If I couldn't use the ublock origin extension with Firefox, I'd leave for another browser. I consider it essential for privacy reasons as well as for adblocking, and I can't imagine it hurts battery life compared to all the ads and other crap it blocks.
Firefox's VPN service also has its privacy-related uses (yes, I'm aware of the limitations), but I think it mostly serves as a possible source of non-google revenue for Mozilla.
Extensions were why Firefox was so popular among those considered 'abnormal.' Chrome just copied the idea. VPNs, Pocket, and sync services are all great features; it's their implementation and execution that is so poor.
All Mozilla (and Firefox) needs is to be run by developers, not the fucking MBAs.
> focus relentlessly on a privacy-first, performant browser across major platforms. Nothing else. [...] to browse the web safely and privately and preserve battery life - nothing more.
"Nothing more," you say.
The chief focus should be Privacy... Privacy and Performance... Our two chief focuses should be Privacy and Performance... and Cross-Platform Executables with Functional Parity... Our three chief focuses should be Privacy, Performance, Cross-Platform Executables with Functional Parity, and Safety on the Web... Our four chief focuses should be Privacy, Performance, Cross-Platform Executables with Functional Parity, Safety on the Web, and ruthless Efficiency in Preserving Battery Life... Our five... no... Amongst our chief focuses... Amongst our non-trivial chief focuses that users think are easy... are such elements as Privacy, Safety on the Web, Cross-Platform Executables with Functional Parity... I'll come in again.
Software Engineering Apologies to...
[0] _ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spanish_Inquisition_(Monty...
How do you expect Mozilla to make enough money from just Firefox to survive if Google ever decides to stop paying them for being the default search engine?
> make enough money from just Firefox
According to 2025 filings, 86%+ of revenue came from the Google deal.
Google pays Mozilla because of the browser. How would shifting focus to the browser make that worse?
Charge me. I’ll pay. I’m not going to donate to the org right now as I don’t use Firefox as it uses (noticeably) too much battery on my MacBook compared to safari and chrome.
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100%. Browsers are considered a commodity but I'd happily pay for a browser that:
1. Could do all the stuff chrome does as well as chrome. (Eg, canvas rendering speed etc). So I can actually use web apps.
2. Just doesn't ever have anti privacy code, pro ad code, etc in it.
I use brave and a self managed lan which is just an ad hoc half assed attempt to reach the above goals. Because there is no other option.
Sounds like Orion from kagi
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> I don’t want extensions (attack vector)
How do you block ads and invasive trackers? DNS only?
Firefox is little more than a uBlock Origin runtime for me, so extensions are pretty critical for me.
Some things Mozilla could have done correctly:
Yet the best they could do was pay their CEO for nothing.
"We shouldn't try to be like the big browsers because that's not what our Community wants."
This is just a path to irrelevance. Firefox had the ambition to be the default browser, what Chrome is now! It's a shame if they're going to spiral off into their niche.
I think Mozilla started getting nuts the day they ventured with Firefox OS. To this day, I am still kind of confused with that move.
> To this day, I am still kind of confused with that move.
I do not think that this was that confusing. People [1] looked around at the beginning of the 2010's and saw
1) Mobile usage was growing exponentially and desktop was... not [2].
2) Every mobile OS shipped their own browser by default, or even went so far as to prevent other browsers from being used at all (iOS) [3].
3) Because Android and iOS both had non-trivial marketshare, neither could be called a "monopoly" so there was no way to use anti-trust law to get Firefox on devices as was done with Windows (not that this would have been a compelling strategy even if it were possible).
People took that set of facts and concluded Mozilla needed its own mobile OS in order to stay relevant.
What they underestimated was the amount of investment needed to make such an OS and get it on devices and the amount of time it would have to exist in a state of not being very good before it could compete with the established players (who were not standing still... people forget how bad Android was in the beginning). But if you look at the actual world we ended up in, with no mobile OS from Mozilla and a total Firefox marketshare that is less than desktop Safari's, it is hard to say that initial conclusion was incorrect.
[1] Full disclosure: I was a Mozilla employee at the time, though not involved in any of these decisions.
[2] I would say "desktop was shrinking", but to everyone's surprise it actually remained fairly steady in absolute numbers, although it did become a smaller slice of a much larger pie. In 2010 everyone expected it to shrink, though.
[3] Mozilla did ship a re-skin around mobile Safari to try to get some brand presence, but was still at the mercy of what web standards Safari chose to implement, and you could hardly call it a first-class experience. Eventually iOS loosened their rules, but no one could have predicted that back then.
Thanks for the explanation, and thank you for your work at Mozilla. I guess what I'm saying is that I wish Mozilla could have just focused on the browser.
I think Firefox OS was great, and too early for its time, combined with the mistake of "let's run on extremely terrible hardware" (rather than designing for the flagships of the time, which wouldn't be flagships by the time it shipped).
I mean the fact that a fork of FirefoxOS KaiOS is still around and being used shows that there was some merit to the idea but yeah it was executed as a start-up without a long-term plan but thanks to the open nature of the code its still in use.
It would be great if Mozilla as an organization tool the opposite approach of Google and if they started a project you knew it would be supported for the long run and if not internally it was handed over to the community of users and stewarded along, sort of how Apache seems to adopt projects but mostly for corporate/enterprise users.
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Firefox OS was amazing and, sadly, would STILL be amazing today.
Boot-to-Gecko is brilliant because honestly most apps today... are Web pages packaged in an "app". Most PWA with desktop shortcuts (and ideally offline responsive mode) show that. Very few "apps" genuinely need to be apps.
Consequently being "just" a phone with basic connectivity and delegating the rest to the browser made perfect sense.
I didn't work because it didn't make sense or wasn't technically feasible. It didn't work because anybody who made a mobile OS wanted THEIR own walled gardens. The fact that today we are stuck with Android an iOS shows how needed it was and still is.
Firefox OS was a brilliant idea. Imagine cross platform and open apps based on HTML/JavaScript that feel native and polished. 2026 would have been amazing if Mozilla executed it right.
WebOS did it too
Remember, the best product doesn't necessarily win
It was a brilliant idea and some day someone will repeat it to make a fuckton of money.
They are already doing that with a literal fork of Firefox OS. Look up KaiOS.
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I like that take. There is a tendency in the software world to dream about becoming the BigTech we all hate.
I believe that the people who want Firefox want it because it's different, just like the people who want Linux want it because it is different. And similarly in Linux, many people keep explaining how Linux should look more like Windows if it wants the year of the Linux Desktop.
But I wouldn't be on Linux if I wanted Windows. I am not on Linux because I want everybody to be on Linux, on the contrary. Same applies for Firefox.
One example of the move towards being more closed is that addons on the catalog used to be reviewed by volunteers: https://wiki.mozilla.org/index.php?title=Add-ons%2FReviewers...
I don't know how well it worked in practice but it sounded like it was a cool way to engage the community.
just today i came back to firefox from brave. firefox at one point in time was not able to work with the onshape web cad system and i needed a chrome based browser but was not ready to leave adblockers behind. brave war the only one suporting manifest 2 addons. but today i tried onshape in firefox and now it works. glad to be back
Mozilla continues to exist because Google funds them, and Google funds them so they can claim that their Chrome browser isn't a monopoly.
That's why Firefox continues to be a niche browser. Its actual goal, never outright stated by Mozilla leadership, is to occupy just enough market share to prop up their behemoth benefactor.
> That doesn't mean we can't become big. We did this before. When we listened to our Community, gave them what they wanted, let them work with us to build something amazing, they told their friends
Exactly this. Mozilla/Firefox lost their way when they stopped listening to the community.
Which is not to say you shouldn't try to build new cool things that the community hasn't thought of yet - but you should listen to them when they tell you it is terrible garbage that they do not want and there is no way to opt out.
First of all thanks for posting what's on your mind and everything you did at Mozilla. Sorry to hear you are burnt out, hope you get better with time.
I've been a loyal Firefox user since forever - reading, writing, web dev I do is always in Firefox. It's a first app I always install. I'm grateful Firefox exists, and the world (at least mine) would be much worse if it wasn't around.
I don't like Mozilla is taking money from Google - I'd prefer if it was all community driven, to the point of a community owned co-operative, but I'm probably delusional.
Yet, I'm hopeful for the future.
Sad to see so much vacation time go unused.
Is it normal to give vacation time in hours? It's about 25 days.
Who is this person?
That would be JR Conlin, national treasure. Worked with him on YDN in 2007 and Netflix in 2009; veterans of the Netflix API team will never forget his hack day entry, which was "Mac and Me" playing on a toaster oven.
What is he notable for in the context of Mozilla?
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Some mozilla software developer I guess.
They still have not fixed their build system. Meson/ninja or cmake would be alternatives. Nothing to have them abandon mozconfig ... this is legacy code. The rest of the world moved on. Mozilla lives in the past.
> They still have not fixed their build system.
FWIW the Firefox build instructions [1] look a lot saner to me than the Chromium build instructions [2].
[1] https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/setup/linux_build.ht...
[2] https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/main/docs/l...
Mozilla lives in the past.
And one would hope they stay there, because all the newer stuff is far more user-hostile.
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34 occurrences of "folk". Remarkably grating affectation. Is something wrong with other nouns for groups of individuals?
I noticed too; I managed to ignore it at first but it eventually became so grating I stopped reading shortly before I reached the end of the article.
I'm not exactly sure of the reason for the overuse but the sheer amount of times it is used feels artificial. Not "artificial" in an "artificial intelligence" sense but perhaps a corporate, "inclusive" thing[1] that may have rubbed off on the author during his time at Mozilla, or a political convention (which is possible considering the large "Fump Truck" text on his Mastodon page).
[1] https://acorn.firefox.com/latest/content/inclusive-writing/o...
Firefox leadership had a recovery the time when Brendan Eich was CEO, then he was kicked out.
since then it has been downhill since.
Eich was CEO for 11 days. You’re wildly misremembering how much of an impact he had in that post.
It was an eleven day war and the casualty was their future. Eich was the last time that Mozilla hired a CEO from the ranks of its own engineers. Eich would not have prevented the economic external challenges faced, but Eich and other such engineer-leaders would have prevented the unforced errors Mozilla is known for today. Every CEO after that was business, not engineer. This placed the company onto the same runway of mediocrity and collapse that we see Boeing crashing planes into with some regularity.
What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane (2 years ago, 532 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39856413
If Mozilla believed in the values it espoused, Librewolf wouldn’t exist. It would just be called Firefox.
One of the first betrayals was putting ads in their new tab page, the forced AI comes as a Mozilla tradition now of user respect as marketing only.
At the same time it simply may not be a viable business. Firefox was popular originally because Chrome didn’t exist and Internet Explorer especially 6 back was awful.
The browser is now an OS on top of an OS, it requires massive resources to maintain. So Mozilla has a cursed mission now and related or unrelated in any case they’re full of it and have lost my respect. Open source and user respect still means something to me even if it doesn’t to Mozilla.
Rust was an own goal foot gun.
Interesting language with a passionate community / cult, but the value to Mozilla was vanishingly close to zero.
They did rewrite a lof of important parts of Firefox in Rust so the value is a lot higher to Mozilla.
This. They learned nothing from Netscape.
another thing is that the weirdos who were using firefox didn't switch to chrome either, mainly just to other firefox forks or brave, vivaldi.. casual users just use whatever but use firefox less and less
Last time I did exchange thoughts about somebody who actually worked at mozilla in my country: "some kind of cult".
> Another delusion comes about because of self-reinforcement. Say you're going to release some, controversial feature. Maybe it's browser based DRM, maybe it's AI, maybe it's Push Notifications. Listening to your users can be a bit challenging[2], because while some might tell you, most probably won't. They'll just leave. That means that your source of information will be the people that stick around, so you wind up getting artificially high approval rates for things.
This is a bit ironic, because... there's a bunch of low hanging fruit that are lacking and that keeps driving the nerds off of Firefox. Take Meshcore/Meshtastic or, frankly, the entire ESP32 world for example - in the Chromium ecosystem, you can use WebUSB and WebSerial to flash and communicate with these things from the browser. It does not get more convenient. Meanwhile, WebUSB still isn't supported in Firefox at all and only two weeks ago Firefox at least gained WebSerial [1].
[1] https://www.heise.de/news/Firefox-151-Endlich-Web-Serial-fue...
He's right. The nerds who want WebUSB are leaving or using Chromium on the side. Firefox has just been collecting the nerds who want absolute safety and privacy at the cost of any functionality (which apparently includes removing extensions according to one).
I was floored when I discovered that Firefox rejected Web NFC because they were afraid of it being used on specific outdated Yubikeys. I could understand if they were concerned about it being used to steal credit cards, but the Yubikey scenario is just so out of touch. I can only hope that Web Serial represents a pivot away from that.
I've been bitching about it for like a decade but I still won't use Firefox until it supports window based profiles. Safari has them now, ffs.
Why not use container tabs instead?
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> We're a niche browser that is lucky enough to get well funded.
Now - we really need a viable alternative to the Evil Google Empire. For a while I had hope that ladybird would be that competitor, but that died after I was banned from github, as well as Kling making some really strange decisions in the last year or so, with weird explanations; most recent one the "we don't need external contributors so we close that down" (in part also due to the rise of AI slop spam, which is indeed annoying, but Kling is a strange guy really). I gave up on Mozilla many years ago already, though. The key insight I had was when one mozilla dev explaind that all linux guys use systemd + pulseaudio. So, using youtube (which annoys me because the evil Google empire controls it as well), I had no audio on firefox. Chrome on the other hand played fine (I only used alsa). So, the same machine, almost the same software stack (excluding pulseaudio; I did use system back then though), means that one browser plays audio fine, the other does not. Now, I could recompile firefox and enable non-pulseaudio audio ... but look at this:
https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/view/svn/xsoft/firefox...
mozconfig? In 2026? Seriously?
There is allegedly a python-only alternative. I tried it. It did not compile.
This is not the only issue I had. Many more problems existed with Mozilla and I also think that becoming addicted to Google money killed Mozilla. It is a dying shadow and has been for a long time. Yes, we need alternatives, but Mozilla failed us many years ago already.
I don't have a real solution against the evil Google empire. It's not even only Google; many companies are part of the evilness. I am almost beginning to sound like Richard Stallman, though I don't feed off of my feet - but the main point here is more to have real alternatives. Firefox is useable, no doubt, but it's not going to change the control Google has over the world wide web. We need something much more fundamental - control by the people. Everyone sees what Google and co are doing. Something has to change fundamentally, to stop Google parasitizing on the rest of the world. But for this you also need to have software alternatives that work.
The only thing I can come up with is to make all components of the browser/www stack as modular as possible and to also come up with alternatives. W3C also betrayed us when they demanded DRM into everything. I don't want that. Next in line will be mandatory age sniffing. This is currently ongoing. It will be extended. Systemd already added support for it; Poettering tried to do damage control but clearly failed: and reddit censoring like crazy - https://old.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/1rzykul/the_system... as is typical.
Options have a maintenance cost. Pulseaudio is the current Linux audio stack, like plain ALSA was before when it replaced OSS.
The current one is PipeWire (it's much better)
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Hey, we have the evil Microsoft empire :) Or the Apple alternative.
Maintaining a browser engine including patching the latest vulnerabilities when someone points Mythos at your code is a really hard problem, my feeling is you need a certain size of organization and funding as your table stakes.
Someone should convince the EU to look into funding a new browser, maybe.
What if the EU bought some big chunk of Mozilla, something like Mozilla EU, and then ran it? Would the US then cry out against EU buying US companies and start to fund Mozilla?
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Servo [0] is EU funded via NLnet. You can build a browser from that.
[0] https://servo.org/
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You might be able to get Firefox to work with apulse (pa emulation for alsa), i dont know if it still works.
https://askubuntu.com/questions/1387154/using-alsa-on-firefo...
https://github.com/i-rinat/apulse
SeaMonkey may be an alternative. It's closer to what I want than Firefox.
https://www.seamonkey-project.org/
beautifully sad well put prose mentor encouraged
But at least they are not homophobic like Eich.
Literal who has left the company that provides Google's antitrust insurance policy. That Mozilla still manages to swing "non-profit" status as they do this is outrageous.
I would like to see Mozilla's entire board leave Mozilla... in a PERP WALK.
Mozilla Corporation, owner and operator of the Firefox brand and recipient of Google’s payments, is not a non-profit. U.S. law permits non-profits to have for-profit subsidiaries if one accepts severe limitations, such as the corporation’s profits being largely severed from the non-profit’s use. Severance isn’t just a science fiction show, it’s a compulsory auditable requirement.
Corporations get up to so many rotten things, most of which are entirely legal, but shouldn't be. Mozilla Corporation thanks you for the free ball-washing & PR work. If you reach out to their non-profit parent, you may even be able to deduct this on your taxes.
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> Remember who you're working for.
Whom you're working for.
It's easy to leave a place. Harder to stay and fix the things you don't like. How many people regret leaving the place they invested 12+ years, rather than fighting back while in a position to do so?
If you're burned out, no longer fun, we all get it. But don't leave your investment into a product just because some new direction took over unless you plan to kick their backside.
Why can't people just leave? What compels them to write these lengthy self grandiosing posts "zomg I'm leaving company X".
I don't know, but maybe spending 15 years working on something that you felt was not only a job but also in part a mission shapes a lot of you as a person and you want to express your feelings about that huge part of your life.
I can't speak for the author but I can say that I left companies or institutions on my own despite loving both the (idealized) mission and the team.
I wanted to stay but the strategy was wrong, to my own moral compass.
Consequently leaving in silence, without being able to express why, and maybe even what could possibly be fixed, feels like giving up.
Leaving while telling whomever might want to hear what problems were, and possibly how to fix them, helps to move on while being truthful.
Oh, the irony...
I would say about 99% of the population views software corporations as these monolithic inhuman cubes of pure shitanium. What these posts are important for is
1: reminding the average population that corporations are just abstract human pyramids and made up of normal people.
And
2: doing that through a very human, biased, and filtered perspective that can provide some genuine insight into the function of these opaque systems.
Now, does the average consumer of hacker news get all that? Probably not, but I do think insider perspective is still valuable.
"Why do people want to share their thoughts and feelings with others"
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