I wish Mozilla would explore the enterprise productivity space. There’s huge amount of money currently being made on dubious enterprise security products, and with the browser being at the forefront of threats (its literal purpose is to execute lots of untrusted code safely) I feel like an enterprise build with centralised management, in-browser DLP (removes the need for janky TLS interception middleboxes), built-in adblocking (since those also reduce productivity) would sell really well and give them independence from Google and the advertising industry.
I don’t understand Mozilla’s current strategy; their attempt to pander to the advertising industry and produce a Chrome clone has been a massive failure as demonstrated by their ever-shrinking browser market share which is now effectively a rounding error. For people that are satisfied with being part of the advertising economy, why wouldn’t you just use Chrome and the Google ecosystem? If you don’t mind your data being used for advertising purposes, Chrome is an excellent browser and their broader ecosystem gives you functionality Mozilla will never match.
Mozilla’s only way out is to go back to its roots and build a better user-agent, and provide an adversarial alternative to the current advertising-based ecosystems.
> demonstrated by their ever-shrinking browser market share
At this point I think Firefox market share stopped being in Mozilla's hand.
Just as it was during the browser war days, the critical issue went back to site compatibility: Firefox performs poorly on Google properties (Gmail is fine, YouTube, gsuite, admin consoles are pretty bad), and document based services like Notion or Figma. It kinda works, but Chrome based browser perform notably better.
The main point of course is that those sites are at fault (sometimea intentionally when it comes to Google), but that doesn't change Mozilla's position. Stop using Google services is just not a great choice, and many of us use them rely heavily on them for work.
Mozilla could make technical miracles and or bring some incredible feature from the left field, but that's a tall order for any company that size, so I'd expect most of their future effort to still end up with lower market share, whether or not they had good ideas.
> The main point of course is that those sites are at fault (sometimea intentionally when it comes to Google), but that doesn't change Mozilla's position. Stop using Google services is just not a great choice, and many of us use them rely heavily on them for work.
That's not exactly what happened. Yes, google did some shady stuff but in parallel Firefox was also slow for everything.
Only when FF Quantum launched the performance caught up, and the same launch gave power user a push to go elsewhere, coz all their plugins either stopped working or worked worse.
And it was too little too late too. IIRC the FF market share was already hovering around 10%. There were some people going back to it after Quantum release but that didn't last and were not at the level where companies like one I work for don't even test on FF because market share is so small clients don't require it
> Mozilla could make technical miracles and or bring some incredible feature from the left field, but that's a tall order for any company that size, so I'd expect most of their future effort to still end up with lower market share, whether or not they had good ideas.
Mozilla could, years ago, not focus on everything else but making a browser (Anyone remember Firefox OS ? nobody ? thought so). Firefox was on the top of the web and the management squandered it all.
It’s not about ff being slow. That was never a reason to switch (unless it was misconfigured and couldn’t use your video card or something, but that happened just as often with chrome back then).
Google actively breaks firefox compatibility at random. It seems intentional from the outside, but it could be incompetence.
For instance, copy paste didn’t work in google docs under firefox the last time I checked.
> copy paste didn’t work in google docs under firefox the last time I checked
Still doesn't. Because instead of using the standard clipboard API, google docs uses a special extension which of course is pre-installed on chrome, and AFAIK not even possible to install on Firefox.
The Web is in a weird place where, most websites are so inefficient that they require the literal cutting edge of browser rendering and JavaScript execution performance to even run acceptably.
It's natural for a browser engineer to look at a website and go "wow, this is trash. Go ask the makers of this website to, I don't know, stop re-rendering the page 100 times a second."
Whereas the Chrome team's approach for years has been "okay, this website is trash. How do we make this trash run well for the users?"
> Firefox was on the top of the web and the management squandered it all
I have not followed Mozill's internal shenanigans close enough to properly understand, and really wonder what's the biggest hurdle for some other company or org to come in and scoop/fork Firefox. I'm assuming it's sheer money.
Mozilla obviously dropped the ball. And then nothing is there to catch it.
Firefox performs poorly on Google properties
(Gmail is fine, YouTube, gsuite, admin consoles
are pretty bad)
I switch between FF and Chrome pretty frequently, and I've never felt any issues with YT or Gsuite. Haven't used the rest in multiple browsers so I can't compare.
There are some caveats to mention. One, I use AdBlock, and I'm subscribed to YT Premium so I don't see ads. Two, the documents I edit with GSuite are generally pretty trivial. Three, I've always used decently spec'd (not high end, but decent) computers so perhaps I'm not feeling performance issues that are felt on low end gear.
Still, I agree that's somewhat besides the point. Comapanies can (and do) decide to stop caring about Firefox at any point. There's no guarantee that Gmail will run well on Firefox tomorrow, or two months from now.
This is a chicken and egg problem; right now there is no compelling reason for the masses to use Firefox so developers are right to not worry about it and tell people to just use Chrome if they’re experiencing any issues.
But if Mozilla makes a killer enterprise browser and a significant chunk of the enterprise jumps on it they will have an incentive to support it.
At some point people should recognize the web browsers are an opinionated VM. Many many many languages only have one runtime. There's no true reason Mozilla NEEDs its own engine, and probably would be in better shape today if they shifted to a privacy defensive fork of chrome.
It might not be a problem in principle, but it's definitely a problem when said one runtime is controlled by a single entity that is both powerful and fundamentally adversarial towards the users.
A privacy fork can only do so much if Google keeps removing underlying things that make it possible. The more it diverges from upstream, the harder it is to maintain.
I partly agree. Firefox moving to Webkit or Blink isn't as bad as people put it, but under one critical condition: Firefox still keeps the capacity to steer away from Google's roadmap and shoulder a competitive and full implementation of the engine on its own (100% maintain a fork that can deviate from Blink as much as needed, including becomming fully incompatible).
Under that specific scenario, we would get the best of both worlds. There would be less engine variety, but it would save Firefox and offer an out of a Google owned ecosystem.
Now I think that's absolutely not trivial, and if Firefox could pull that out it could probably as well push its own engine way more forward right now.
For instance Apple played that game, ended up basically alone on Webkit, and I'm not sure Safari is more competitive to Chrome than Firefox is. Safari keeps some market share, but the reasons are elsewhere.
I would like to see the browser be the Users Agent. IE: "Cookie Banners?" That's a browser, not website issue. I really care less about the interpreter/VM than I do say, how we built a browser on it (which is why webkit is great, and I had my own webkit GTK browser that did exactly what I wanted, and why so many webkit based apps exist!)
> "Cookie Banners?" That's a browser, not website issue.
It was neither, it was a legal issue. As I understand it, EU law (or its most common interpretation) did not actually allow websites to just defer to a browser preference. Fortunately, the EU is about to fix this:
IMHO rendering engines can be ignored for restricted use cases or if it's fine to work 98% of the time. What we're expecting from a mainstream browser is a way higher bar, so having no control on the engine is a no go. Tomorrow Firefox having to wait for Google to implement a new sandboxing approach, or not able to override deeper DRM or tracking integration would be a pretty bad situation.
As I understand it that's exactly why Apple took webkit and ran with it.
> Cookie Banners?
People really viscerally hate those, do they. That anger should be pointed to the site pushing them IMHO, but aside from that, dismissing the banner is in itself a legal choice (whatever the default was) that isn't only bound to cookies despite the name. Whatever happens on the backend or service can also be bound to that choice.
I look at it the same way we have newsletter checkboxes. They're a PITA but I wouldn't trust an automated system to make the right choice on every single form, and not sign me to some super weird stuff just because it thought the checkbox was a newsletter optout (imagine a site pushing a "bill me every month for the extra feature" clearly explained option, but with an html input id close to "opt_out_of_free_plan" and it's automatically checked by your browser)
im surprised this is earning such downvotes. idk about the "opinionated" vm perspective but I think it needing its own engine oe not is at least something worth considering. firefox has been my go-to alt browser for years as my backup to chrome. it was what I would use to "test again in another browser" but as time has gone by, more and more stuff just doesn't work on firefox :(
It's already problematic to have Chromium dominating/near-monopolizing, and add salt to the wound letting Gecko die this way.
Chromium is so prevalent as an engine, that most developers don't test their code on Firefox and just tell everyone to use Chrome/Chromium when they run into issues.
This has the unintentional side-effect of strong-arming the W3C into compliance with the engine and not the other way around. Why do we bother with the W3C then? if they are powerless and Chromium can do as they please?
>> This has the unintentional side-effect of strong-arming the W3C into compliance with the engine and not the other way around.
I don't want any engine to have that much dominance, but I especially don't want that dominating engine owned by an ad company who's main goal is to spy on people.
- Rapid Release or Extended Support Release channels
- MSI deployment wrapper
- ADM and AMDX group policy templates
- MacOS plist file policy templates
- Linux target JSON file “policies.json” policy templates
- “Open in IE” extension for ActiveX
Does not have the built-in DLP you're requesting (at as far as I could find) and Firefox already has pretty aggressive adblocking that sets off lots of sites for me.
100% agree. I would happily run a dedicated enterprise browser that blocks downloads, has DLP, has watermarking (etc) if it meant I could use my own PC. Not Browser Isolation or VDI - An actual enterprise browser.
My job is pretty much 100% in browser though, so I realise this isn’t viable for everyone.
The main driver of market share loss was the rise of mobile and Chrome being the bundled default on over a billion devices. I don't think Mozilla's run has been perfect, but I am flabbergasted at so many confidently wrong retellings of the history of market share change that treat it exclusively as a story of Mozilla's strategic missteps and make no space for the fact that a trillion dollar company with the #1 or #2 most visited site in the world for the past 20 years muscled a new browser into the picture, leveraging their monopoly in search and mobile, plus laptops produced and sold practically at cost. Firefox could have made every perfect decision you could have dreamed of and still suffered a market share collapse.
In fact, I think there's a pretty clear-cut example of a natural experiment demonstrating what it looks like to execute in the browser space to nearly perfection and still lose. In my personal opinion, Opera at its peak with the Presto engine, represented the most impressive combination for it's time of elite level performance and stability, genuinely good innovation that benefited the user, and commitment to the core browser above all else. My favorite was whenever they rolled out Opera Unite (to this day a truly mind blowing idea), I think Opera 11 or 12.
And, at a time when it truly mattered, was light on resources and bandwidth and even shipped a portable executable that could be run from any Windows PC from a USB stick. Not only that, but it was consistently ahead of the competition with embedded and device adapted versions. Is business partnerships were creative and cutting edge too. They were early to mobile, struck deals with oems, and even got on the Nintendo Wii. They offered paid and subscription options. IIRC they sold "speed dial" placement for ads and got into the search licensing game. So in everything from performance to speed to stability to innovation that actually benefited users, to intelligent business partnerships and experimenting to find revenue, Opera executed at perhaps the best level anyone could, the perfect moneyball browser. And I was never originally an Opera fanboy, I preferred Firefox 1 and 2 at the start, but pivoted to Opera because, as a college kid with no money, it delivered an impressively modern experience on lightweight hardware.
Despite executing at the highest level both in software and business decision making, it didn't matter, because distribution power trumps product quality. Sustaining a fully independent rendering engine became financially unsustainable, and with the maturity of Android, carriers favored bundled stock browsers.
With no options left Opera then made what I consider a difficult and very unfortunate decision, but perhaps having no other choice, sold to a new ownership team, pivoted to Chromium, and lost much of its team to Vivaldi which is also based on Chromium. But at no point in the story was their loss of financial visibility or market share due the loss of vision that people think explains Firefox's loss of market share. If the world actually worked that way we'd all be using Opera 25 right now.
Edit: If someone more knowledgeable could chime in, I would be fascinated to know if choosing a browser on Android could be a potential monopoly remedy. There's already precedent for that on Windows, iOS and on Android in EU for search.
Palo Alto Networks is one of several companies pushing custom versions of Chrome as enterprise security browsers doing exactly what you're talking about: holistic DLP/anomaly detection, URL filtering and content inspection in-browser. Presumably because it's closer to the malicious behavior, and network MITM is harder to accomplish with newer TLS and with decentralized workforces.
If Firefox had a more customizable, enterprise-feature-focused browser maybe we'd be seeing it used instead of Chrome? I don't know.
I will stick with Firefox due to multi account containers. Chrome does not offer a comparable alternative, and this extension makes working with AWS significantly easier.
To me blink as a render engine is too closely coupled to Google. Even though technically chromium is disconnected and open source, the amount of leverage Google has is too high.
I dread the possibility that gecko and webkit browsers truly die out, and the single biggest name in web advertising has unilateral sway over the direction of web standards.
A good example of this is that through the exclusive leverage of Google, all blink based browsers are phasing out support for Manifest V2. A widely unpopular, forcing change. If I'm using a blink based browser I become vulnerable to any other profit motivated changes like that one.
Mozilla might be trying their hardest to do the same with this AI shlock, but if I have to choose between the trillion dollar market cap dictator of the internet and the little kid playing pretend evil billionaire in their sandbox? Well, Mozilla is definitely the less threatening of the two in that regard.
Participarion in web standards includes multiple different browsers even if they use the same browser engine. If we had only blink based browsers, it wouldn't be just Google at the table.
>phasing out support for Manifest V2. A widely unpopular, forcing change.
It was unpopular among a niche minority. Most of which didn't undersrand what actually changed with MV3, nor did most people understand the evolution of MV3 over time.
Android breaks app with every major update, but what happens is those app developers make changes to be compatible with the new version. It wouldn't have broken if uBO was updated to be MV3 like other web extentions were. Instead for a MV3 and brand new extention was made which means users can't be automatically updated with a MV3 connotation version.
Some additional information would be that MV3 allows the extention to update rules without a new extention update. This is one of the several misinformations of MV3 that have been spread.
Anecdotaly (from both mine and other HNers) it has been the opposite where people report having no issues with ads being blocked which would mean you can't notice the difference.
But notably not lack of competing browser engines as the power of these decisions come from the product and not the open source libraries the product uses.
It's not based on cryptocurrency, there are just extra features that use it. Unstoppable domains is an optional feature. You don't need to visit them, but it gives value to people by letting them actually own their domain instead of leasing it from ICANN. Viewing ads to earn BAT is an optional feature. As I mentioned ad blocking is built in so you can have it show no ads if you want.
Not OP, but personally I very much prefer Firefox font rendering on Windows. Text in Chromium based browser looks blurry to me, which causes eye strain. Firefox also has a much sharper and better looking image down-scaling algorithm that again looks blurry in Chromium based browsers.
Have you used chrome? The depth of enshittifaction is staggering. Setting it up from scratch is like watching a Cory Doctorow documentary.
The only change that’d get me to willingly use the engine would be the DOJ mandating the return of manifest v2 support and then barring google from contributing to it for the next 40 years.
This is a very pessimistic post about mozilla, and a lot of it is warrented -- but also it's trivial to disable the AI stuff. dead simple. so until that day comes, I'll still be supporting mozilla (for now, using firefox relay). It looks like till then google will be propping up mozilla to avoid looking like a browser monopoly, and i'm not sure about a future where the community maintains the remains of the firefox source.
> It looks like till then google will be propping up mozilla to avoid looking like a browser monopoly
This is less and less the case each year. Historically, Google's accounted for over 95% of Mozilla's revenue. But through the recent launches of a bunch of products it's gradually knocked that number down to under 70% and seems to continue decreasing rapidly.
I often see two demands made of Mozilla: (1) focus on Firefox; (2) become financially independent from Google. IMO these two goals are going to be in conflict with each other. They started their own VPN, launched MDN Plus, etc in an effort to improve their financial independence. The AI gimmicks feel like they're in the same thread. I don't like it and don't ever wanna use it but I can't fault Mozilla for exploring that option.
Based on independent audits they are accomplishing (2) and based on their amazing performance in interop-25, interop-24, etc they are also accomplishing (1) as best they could.
> I often see two demands made of Mozilla: (1) focus on Firefox; (2) become financially independent from Google. IMO these two goals are going to be in conflict with each other.
Yes.
> Historically, Google's accounted for over 95% of Mozilla's revenue. But through the recent launches of a bunch of products it's gradually knocked that number down to under 70% and seems to continue decreasing rapidly.
Someone who read this might infer other products were 30% of Mozilla's revenue. But they were 10% in 2023. And this was lower than 2022. Royalties were 76%. Google could be under 70%. But interest, dividends, and investment gains contributed more than products.[1] Did you see more recent information?
I like the author’s suggestion of an enterprise build. At every company I’ve worked at, we told internal users to use Chrome exclusively.
We could have chosen Firefox (most devs seemed to prefer it), but as the market share numbers bear out, most people are familiar with Chrome; most are not with Firefox.
If Firefox had specific features that made it easier for enterprises, or even internal teams at startups, then companies would happily pay $10/user/mo for something as critical as a browser.
There isn’t any such reason afaik.
Edit:
Some examples off the top of my head include
- VPNs
- user and permission management (identity)
- ad- and tracker-blocking
- internal auto-updating and easily managed/deployed extensions
It’s also trivially easy to disable ads in the Windows start menu, but the fact that they’re even there is shocking.
I use Firefox because I want to do at least something to keep the web browser market from becoming a monoculture again, but they’re making it increasingly hard to justify.
Sadly Firefox has been out of our browser matrix for several years now, it is only taken into consideration by FE teams when the customers explicitly ask for it being supported.
I also use because I care, but at 3% hardly any business does any longer.
I think I understand where he's at. If your web site has compatibility issues with smaller browsers like Firefox at 3%, Opera at 2% etc. then you could be losing out on 5% of your sales. If you were to approach any CEO and ask if they'd be interested in an initiative to increase sales by 5%, they would most likely express an interest.
IE6 was already announced dead by Microsoft when it reached so tiny market share, you are forgetting IE got several versions up to 11, before being replaced by Edge, followed by Edge Chrome, later rebranded as Edge.
It's pretty clear opportunists displaced the software ideologues at Mozilla a long time ago, but I still find the products to be more palatable than alternatives. It would take a long time to burn off all relevance of Firefox and Thunderbird even without adequate maintenance.
> It looks like till then google will be propping up mozilla to avoid looking like a browser monopoly
The US government (via the courts) has sent a very clear message to Google that they can be as monopolistic as they want without consequences. I cannot imagine Google will continue supporting Mozilla for much longer.
The problem with AI integrations in Firefox is not in whether they could be disabled or not.
Given that Mozilla Foundation isn't swimming in cash, "investing" in AI (a well known money sink) makes very little sense and will definitely undermine the development of their core product (the freaking browser).
Also, the timing of their Nov. 13 announcement is pretty bad. There is already chatter that AI may be a bubble bigger than the dotcom bubble. For a company that doesn't have deep pockets, it would be prudent to take the back seat on this.
> Also, the timing of their Nov. 13 announcement is pretty bad. There is already chatter that AI may be a bubble bigger than the dotcom bubble. For a company that doesn't have deep pockets, it would be prudent to take the back seat on this.
Unless Mozilla plans to spend millions on cloud GPUs to train their own models, there seems to be little danger of that. They're just building interfaces to existing weights somebody else developed. Their part of the work is just browser code and not in real danger from any AI bubble.
It could still be at risk as collateral damage. If the AI bubble pops, part of that would be actual costs being transmitted to users, which could lead to dramatically lower usage, which could lead to any AI integration becoming irrelevant. (Though I'd imagine the financial shocks to Mozilla would be much larger than just making some code and design irrelevant, if Mozilla is getting more financially tied to the stock price of AI-related companies?)
But yeah, Mozilla hasn't hinted at training up its own frontier model or anything ridiculous like that. I agree that it's downstream of that stuff.
If they just use 3rd party APIs/models, and AI bubble pops, the amount of users of AI in FF will not change.
The upstream might earn less, and some upstreams might fail, but once they have code switching to competition or local isn't a big deal.
That being said
"This could've been a plugin" - actual AI vendors can absolutely just outcompete FF, nobody gonna change to FF to have slightly better AI integration - and if Google decides to do same they will eat Mozilla lunch yet again
The bubble if any is an investment bubble. If somebody likes using LLMs for summaries, or generating pictures or such things, that's not going anywhere. Stable Diffusion and Llama are sticking around regardless of any economical developments.
So if somebody finds Mozilla's embedded LLM summary functionality useful, they're not going to suddenly change their mind just because some stock crashed.
The main danger I guess would be long term, if things crash at the point where they're almost useful but not quite there. Then Mozilla would be left with a functionality that's not as good as it could be and with little hope of improvement because they build on others' work and don't make their own models.
> Given that Mozilla Foundation isn't swimming in cash, "investing" in AI (a well known money sink) makes very little sense and will definitely undermine the development of their core product (the freaking browser).
The browser doesn't make any money (the Google search bar money would not be replaced by another entity if they stopped). That is why Microsoft abandoned theirs and why Safari is turning in to IE. Every one of these threads lambasting Mozilla for the "side projects" doesnt seem to have an answer for how does mozilla make money.
Often it will be people complaining they can't "donate directly to browser development" not realizing that it will be peanuts compared to the google money. Most people in the market wont pay for a web browser.
They already do that. They invest the endowment, and right now it exists as a firewall to cover operations in the event that their search licensing revenue becomes unstable. The annual growth of the endowment is not nothing, but it's also nowhere near enough to fund their browser development on a yearly basis.
And while I don't love the dabbling in ad tech, and I do think there's been confusion around the user interface, I think by far the most unfair smear Mozilla has suffered is to claim they haven't been focusing on the core browser. Every year they're producing major internal engine overhauls that deliver important gains to everything from WebGPU to spidermonkey, to their full overhaul of the mobile browser, to Fission/Site Isolation work.
Since their Quantum project, which overhauled the browser practically from top to bottom in 2017 and delivered the stability and performance gains that everyone was asking for, they've done the equivalent of one "quantum unit" of work on other areas in the browser on pretty much an unbroken chain from then until now. It just doesn't get doesn't mentioned in headlines.
That's the problem: the number of things you have to disable to stop Firefox--a browser that sold itself on protecting user's privacy--from spying on you, or facilitating the spying of third parties, keeps growing with successive versions, to the point that you now need a running checklist of what to about:config (thanks to the "simplified" Privacy & Security window) and extensions to add.
I still use it only because Chrome is worse, and even with Chromium, certain extensions either aren't available or are a bitch to use.
And what's increasingly annoying is that many web sites (for example, banking and utilities) don't even bother properly testing for Firefox support, given how obscure a browser it has become. Your traffic is also much more likely to be flagged as "suspicious" as a FF user, so expect to spend much more time playing "spot the traffic light/bicycle/bus/stairs" games.
Certain aspects of human nature, as they apply to the corporate world, can be acknowledged and understood, even if they're not excuses when they lead to the downfall of a prominent organization. When you give someone a big title, a dump truck full of cash, and a mandate to innovate, human nature dictates that most people will internalize the idea that "because I was given all this, I must be competent", even if they very obviously are not. Typically the outcome is a "bold plan forward" which is notable for lacking any actual clear solution to the company's main problems. In one example I know of, the CEO decided to pivot from an unrelated field towards launching a cryptocurrency, and cooked up a cartoonishly-dangerous marketing scheme to support the idea. One person ended up dying as a result, and the company then purged every mention of crypto from its website. (And yes, the company collapsed soon afterwards.)
While it's easy to blame the CEO with their oversized salary, the blame for such disasters doesn't just lie with them. After all, arguably the most important roles of the board are to hire a good CEO, ensure the CEO is actually performing as they should, and fire them if they're not. When politics, cronyism, or again, simple incompetence, lead the board to also fail at its job, you end up with the long, slow decline into obscurity we've seen so often in the tech world.
I also don’t think people should equate their history with their current state. They lied to their users and told them they’d never sell their data, and then they did. That is much worse than never having made the promise. I don’t trust them.
But, they have far too much support and are far too embedded to disappear anytime soon.
You can already do what you're looking for by reading the browser cache as new data is cached. This would allow you to see the site as it was loaded originally, instead of simply fetching an updated view from a URL. The data layout for the cache in Firefox and Chrome is available online.
They'd probably reject that idea under some bullshit privacy or security excuse Wayland-like reasoning. Also why we don't have XUL extensions anymore and why they'll eventually copy chrome on that manifest crap.
> The response from the Firefox community has not just been overwhelmingly negative, it is universally negative as far as I can tell.
Insofar as I count as part of the Firefox community as a long-time user and infrequent bug reporter: I want useful, non-creepy AI features in my main browser, or it's probably not going to remain my main browser for too long.
Of course I also want them to be fully optional, but I have no reason to believe that they would be anything but.
Summarizing a page (or explaining a phrase on one) for non-native-speakers or fixing up text input boxes are two that immediately come to mind.
Sure, both are possible by copy-pasting to any LLM, but being able to do it without leaving the page is great.
This applies to ebook readers at least as much as it does to browsers, fwiw – I find it mind-boggling that Kindles still doesn't have an "ask $LLM about this highlighted sentence" feature.
I just did the same thing with "very famous rock live acts performing within 500 miles of my location within the next 9 months". Whether this kind of functionality needs to be delivered via the browser I'm not sure. The LLM has to be server hosted, so may we well host the rest of it server-side, perhaps?
Chat conversations are definitely not the peak LLM UI. They're universal and don't require app integration, which is why they're what people are currently primarily using, but I strongly suspect that that's temporary.
A relatively small variation for a client-side LLM would be something like: "suggest variations on this search that might produce better results"
Had this issue the other day that I wanted to try to find a remembered example of using Ground Penetrating Radar to find hidden roads in Northern Spain and Southern France, yet for everything tried I could not get Google to actually return results that would ever focus on what it was I actually wanted.
There was some GPR results, there was some about hidden structures, yet finding the actual scholarly articles discussing hidden roadways and searching under farm fields for features that reveal or point to their existence simply never returned positive. Rephrasing, changing the sentence, trying to prioritize search terms never really changed much.
Doing stuff too like, "image search, pixel tree, except filter out all the pay for an image stock photo websites." Really difficult to find anything these days cause there's so much chaff of stock image websites.
If it is about chat, do we actually need Firefox adapted when you can go to gemini.google.com or some other one and write what you want there? Optionality is ensured since you actively have to go there.
When have you last tried it, and what types of sites are you struggling with? Curious since I had the same concern in the past, but it's been a long time since it's been an issue.
Safari still seems better on battery life on macOS, but I can't really tell a difference between Chrome and Firefox anymore.
Ah, I can definitely see mobile being a different story. Google is probably pouring immense resources into performance there as it directly affects battery life, just like Apple does into Safari.
I'm unfortunately on the latter platform, so I'm limited to WebKit chrome wrappers for the time being.
I don’t really care that much about the AI junk. But I’m on my very last straw with Firefox. Recent mobile versions just cannot seem to remember any default search engine setting other than Google. It drives me insane that they can do all these other things but the search engine bug has lingered for weeks.
Agreed. I just don’t want to have to use a Chromium-based browser given Google’s grip on the project - but what alternatives are there if Mozilla goes under?
My feelings are the same. Firefox is barely alive, and what little sustains it is goodwill and people not wanting to deal with Google more than is needed. Yet they keep on eating into their goodwill and do seemingly nothing to build it back up again (unless introducing AI features is somehow supposed to be that). Every bad feature implemented could have been a bug that got fixed instead, or effort to push back against Google. And yet they consistently opt to put their effort into features that push people away from them, and don't put that effort into things that would at least retain the people they already have. It's a lose-lose situation.
Nobody would have an issue with those features being add-ons. In fact the Pocket integration is actually an add-on, silently downloaded on first run based on some online check.
If they’re gonna be bundling add-ons, I’d rather have them bundle something universally useful like uBlock Origin, but obviously they won’t do that because publishing a browser with an actually unique and useful selling point is not in their best interests.
I recall the original interface of Firefox was abandoned in favor of copying Chrome's with the rationale being that "it could be implemented as a third-party add-on" or some such.
"Why does the default interface get relegated to an extension when things like pocket and hello and AI chat are opt-out?" I ask, rhetorically.
Same here. I find it useful, and it doesn't feel like it took several engineering years to build, diluting Mozilla's focus from "just building a browser".
Actually, whenever I hear people argue that that's all Mozilla should ever be doing, I wonder if they really mean a HTML and Javascript engine? While that's important, browsers are more than that; the chrome matters too.
I think a lot of folks feel that Firefox has outstanding features and issues that prevent more widespread adoption and current user happiness, as opposed to spending effort on AI features.
The average person doesn't care about an AI pane and that won't cause them to change browsers. Mozilla adding tab group support actively got non-tech people I know to switch, in addition to uBlock Origin and generally better privacy.
> The average person doesn't care about an AI pane and that won't cause them to change browsers.
Are you sure? "Summarize this website" seems pretty useful to the average person. It's the type of thing that will probably only make very few people switch to the only browser that supports it, but quite a few more would switch away from the only one that does not supprt it.
> Mozilla adding tab group support actively got non-tech people I know to switch [...]
And tab group autosuggestions and auto-naming are powered by on-device LLMs, as far as I remember. I personally don't use tab groups, but having them automatically arranged seems pretty useful.
I was surprised (and frustrated) that OpenAI’s and Perplexity’s browsers are both Chromium-based.
I would have thought that they would have gone with a Firefox (or WebKit) fork given:
1. That Google is a competitor to them in the AI space.
2. That Google has such a strong stranglehold over the web, and Chromium/Chrome is a big part of that. I mean, why ultimately help your competitor here?
Sometimes, I'm wondering if Mozilla did not get too much money.
With an order of magnitude less money, I think they would have been more focused on improving Firefox rather than trying to diversify with projects like Firefox OS, VPN services or AI.
Even today, given their ~$1.5B in the bank, at the cost of a really painful downsizing, the interests alone could probably pay for a Firefox development focused on standard adherence, performance, quality and privacy.
Mozilla is not a company trying to reinvent itself to survive. If it becomes irrelevant because the Browser becomes irrelevant in the future, that's fine in my book, the organization would have fulfill its mission.
But it is sad to see it become irrelevant because of mismanagement and lack of focus.
The other one is Firefox Sync not storing shortcut bar favicons. Every install, I have to click on every web site one by one to bring back their favicons. It's a 17 year old ticket:
Maybe it's time for some decently funded other organisation (not a teracorp) to take over Firefox specifically, then let Mozilla go its own way into the sunset. No idea how that could be arranged, though.
This article is annoying. It's not wrong, but it also doesn't come across as terribly relevant without suggesting some vaguely plausible alternative. The closest it comes is that everyone should go back to using "regular" search engines that will return "regular" pages. and that if all the players (browser makers + search engines) did that then everything would be just fine.
That'd be great, if that pristine Web still existed to search and people were happy with today's results of searching it. But in the real world, the Web is a pile of auto-generated and auto-assembled fragments of slop, SEO-optimized to death, puddled atop and all around the surviving fragments of value. (The value is still there! I suspect the total value in the Web has never stopped increasing. Just like those monkeys are always typing out more and more Shakespeare.) Also in the real world, people are decisively choosing the AI-generated summaries and fevered imaginings. Not for everything, but web search -> URL -> page visit is becoming a declining percentage that won't always be able to support everything that it does today.
It's not that I particularly want AI in my browser. I would say that I emphatically don't, except that automatic translation is really nice, and Firefox's automatic names for tab groups are pretty cool, and I'm sure here and there people will come up with other pieces. I'm actually ok with AI that targets real needs, which is 0.01% of what people are pushing it for. But I also think that we're past the point where NOT having AI in the browser is a sustainable position. (In terms of number of users and therefore financially.)
Should Mozilla be head over heels in love with AI, as it appears to be now? I'd definitely prefer if it weren't. But telling Mozilla "don't do bad thing, it'll make you irrelevant and have no users" is fine and dandy but ultimately pointless unless you have an alternative that doesn't require the entire world to cooperate in turning back the clock.
(Disclosure: Mozilla pays me a salary to write bugs.)
(And working code! I write some of that too!)
(And no, I currently don't do anything that adds AI to the browser, nor can I think of anything I'd want to work on that would add any AI.)
I think the vast majority of attempts to shoehorn ai into the browser are deeply unimaginative and very much garnering a "who ordered that?" reaction. But I suspect we're going to converge on some specific use cases that everyone's going to want and it might just be important to be in the game now as we collectively figure out what they are.
Recently some Ycombinator funded project got highly upvoted on HN, a Chrome based extension that used LLM capabilities to effectively do grease monkey style scripting live in response to human requests. Now that is interesting, and it's a specific application that's actually meaningful and it's not just another AI chat sidebar.
I think it's a matter of workshopping but I bet we're going to be discovering things users actually want that are not yet obvious to us. The example I keep thinking of is non-stupid agent tasking. I wouldn't mind an agent that browsed Amazon for Kindle unlimited hard sci-fi books with critical acclaim. I would be willing to be there's going to be numerous "whybdidn't I think of that" uses cooked up in the next few years.
It's certainly wrong on some things. For example, claiming that there are no examples of positive uses of LLMs is flat out wrong. I'm generally on the very conservative side when it comes to AI hype but even I'll admit it will be transformative in some ways.
Certainly not the insane fantasies most of the gen-AI CEOs are pushing, but, for example, it's clear beyond any shadow of a doubt that traditional search is dead. AI supported search is far superior in every way. For clarity, I'm talking about "deep research" style search where you get verifiable links to source materials along with your answers.
It's absolutely not crazy for Mozilla to get into this space, though I think if I were them I'd make an adjacent "AI search and agnentic AI first" web application adjacent to Firefox and keep Firefox as a legacy style browser. This would both give Mozilla a clean slate to do it right, while also keeping happy those who are not early adopters.
> But in the real world, the Web is a pile of auto-generated and auto-assembled fragments of slop
There are parts of the web like that but your assertion seems to rely on this being universally true. It clearly and obviously isn't.
> Also in the real world, people are decisively choosing the AI-generated summaries and fevered imaginings.
Are they "decisively" choosing it if it's turned on by default? If it were actually opt-in then we could measure this. As it is I don't think you have any data to rely on when making this assertion.
> Not for everything, but web search -> URL -> page visit is becoming a declining percentage
The same web search companies that own AI models they're trying to sell? Do you not suspect there could be a few confounding variables in this analysis?
> except that automatic translation is really nice
Which we already had and has nothing to do with language models masquerading as "AI".
> is fine and dandy but ultimately pointless unless you have an alternative that doesn't require the entire world to cooperate in turning back the clock.
An alternative to what? Tab renaming? Bad article summaries? Weak search engine algorithms?
I wonder where the widely-cited 3% marketshare number comes from.
Does it include dilution from mobile? China/Russia-mandated browsers?
Even with that (Chrome probably is below 50% if you count that way), 3% is lower than I’ve seen.
I know things vary site by site, but still. 3% is not coming from the planet I live on, even before you start filtering out bot traffic and click fraud (both are typically detected as Chrome).
I haven’t done this, but if you want to be fair, you should also add a weight based on likelihood to pay or be an influencer in a western market. That probably cranks the percentage up even further.
Non profit organisations trying to remain relevant (or just survive) behave this way because they arent much different from companies operating in a market for profit.
Their leadership is often not that much different, with similar people working in similar jobs educated in the same institutions and walking in the same social circles, producing the same solutions to the existential problem of organisational survival.
As the downcycle lingers on everyone’s doorsteps a lot of non profits that do incredible work are losing funding as the investors back out from commitments they confidently put forward when things were going well. It quickly shutters the non profits. It makes me sad tbh.
Can’t say this is the same thing that happens at Mozilla but you are very right in that a lot of nonprofits seem to be lead by those bring the same operational decision making experience and solutions that you see in publicly traded companies. There are plenty of non-profits that are indistinguishable from public companies in how the board is composed of an inner circle of wealthy unsavory people.
I think this because nonprofits are subject to a similar market discipline as companies: they compete for funding, relevance, market share etc.
And their board composition converges similarly as those same people are relied upon for their connections to fundraise, hire, etc. They don’t want to be seen taking an unusual strategy as it would be perceived as risky and jeopardising precious donated funds, so the same groupthink emerges.
Even if someone outside these circles was hired, they’d be knocked down with the smallest misstep, with the veiled criticism they weren’t suitable for the position (ie someone with better connections should have been chosen), so even they will fall into line.
Genuine independence is almost impossible at this size, because you need a strong internal discipline to only rely on small donors, and not bend your organisation’s mission to keep larger donors
I disabled the AI summaries, but the automatic translation support is very helpful. And I'd love to have automatic subtitles and/or translation support for videos.
When I read posts like this I despair. I mean I can sort of understand that ML an AI have become largely synonymous, but that even on a technical website for nerds like HN, people now think that AI and LLMs are synonymous and that translation engines are not AI?!
AIUI, the AI-based translation models are based on the same transformer-oriented neural nets that LLMs are based on, just not quite writ as large. In other words, it's not entirely inaccurate to call these models LLMs.
While there's a lot of other AI technologies that aren't LLMs, automatic translation is probably the closest technology phylogenitically speaking.
Sometimes these posts feel like the old man yelling at the clouds kind of disconnected from reality. They don't seem to even be realising that what they are asking for is contradictory. "Only spend money on the browser/javascript engine", "become independent of google", "give me the best search results when I type into the address bar", but "don't give me AI recommendation".
On top of that, the whole premise that AI is just being a nothing burger. Pull your head out of your arse.
Is there an AI bubble? I tend to agree, likely yes. And yes it is very much overhyped etc.
Does that mean that AI is useless and will disappear? No way! Just observe how Joe Doe's are interacting with the web. AI engines have taken over from where people used to use search. It's ironic how they say they just want search results when typing in their address bar, at a time when everyone is complaining that search has become increasingly useless (and yes we can blame AI tools at least partly, doesn't change the fact). Moreover, there are definitely use cases where an AI gives a much better answer than search (just try searching for how to do something a little niche with e.g. ffmpeg, you can either read 10s of block/stackoverflow posts try to understand the manual or ask an AI and typically immediately get a decent answer).
I tend to agree with Mozilla org here, AI does pose an existential thread to the web as we know it and if we don't get non-profit organisations to develop "open" (and I acknowledge the discussion what that entails is important) tools we will end up with a web that is much less free than it is today.
I've noticed that Firefox has steadily been eating up more and more of my CPU/RAM lately. It's not been significant enough to make me use Chrome, but it is a worrying trend. The main thing i want of a browser is for it to get out of my way. Edge is a little bit worse at this then chrome which is why nobody uses it. There's very little distinguishing browsers, a large part of the reason i continue to use firefox is because i used to use it. The second i find that Chrome has 0.1% less friction, i'll switch.
A comment on the article:
>Google's
AI Overview continues to be an inferior provider of information than
solid web search results.
I would love to hate that feature, but i don't. I kind of like it. It's useful sometimes and easy to ignore if i want. Honestly i would say it enhances my browsing. You can complain that it's often wrong and 2 dimensional and you would be right. But that would be missing the point. Maybe you can complain about secondary effects. I don't know what those would be though. Perhaps that it degrades the overall browser ecosystem and locks you into googles own, but that is moving the goalposts.
Google's AI overview regularly hallucinates or gets the answer wrong. Obviously if you're going to run inference on every search from billions of users, it has to be a very cheap model.
I wish Mozilla would explore the enterprise productivity space. There’s huge amount of money currently being made on dubious enterprise security products, and with the browser being at the forefront of threats (its literal purpose is to execute lots of untrusted code safely) I feel like an enterprise build with centralised management, in-browser DLP (removes the need for janky TLS interception middleboxes), built-in adblocking (since those also reduce productivity) would sell really well and give them independence from Google and the advertising industry.
I don’t understand Mozilla’s current strategy; their attempt to pander to the advertising industry and produce a Chrome clone has been a massive failure as demonstrated by their ever-shrinking browser market share which is now effectively a rounding error. For people that are satisfied with being part of the advertising economy, why wouldn’t you just use Chrome and the Google ecosystem? If you don’t mind your data being used for advertising purposes, Chrome is an excellent browser and their broader ecosystem gives you functionality Mozilla will never match.
Mozilla’s only way out is to go back to its roots and build a better user-agent, and provide an adversarial alternative to the current advertising-based ecosystems.
> demonstrated by their ever-shrinking browser market share
At this point I think Firefox market share stopped being in Mozilla's hand.
Just as it was during the browser war days, the critical issue went back to site compatibility: Firefox performs poorly on Google properties (Gmail is fine, YouTube, gsuite, admin consoles are pretty bad), and document based services like Notion or Figma. It kinda works, but Chrome based browser perform notably better.
The main point of course is that those sites are at fault (sometimea intentionally when it comes to Google), but that doesn't change Mozilla's position. Stop using Google services is just not a great choice, and many of us use them rely heavily on them for work.
Mozilla could make technical miracles and or bring some incredible feature from the left field, but that's a tall order for any company that size, so I'd expect most of their future effort to still end up with lower market share, whether or not they had good ideas.
> The main point of course is that those sites are at fault (sometimea intentionally when it comes to Google), but that doesn't change Mozilla's position. Stop using Google services is just not a great choice, and many of us use them rely heavily on them for work.
That's not exactly what happened. Yes, google did some shady stuff but in parallel Firefox was also slow for everything.
Only when FF Quantum launched the performance caught up, and the same launch gave power user a push to go elsewhere, coz all their plugins either stopped working or worked worse.
And it was too little too late too. IIRC the FF market share was already hovering around 10%. There were some people going back to it after Quantum release but that didn't last and were not at the level where companies like one I work for don't even test on FF because market share is so small clients don't require it
> Mozilla could make technical miracles and or bring some incredible feature from the left field, but that's a tall order for any company that size, so I'd expect most of their future effort to still end up with lower market share, whether or not they had good ideas.
Mozilla could, years ago, not focus on everything else but making a browser (Anyone remember Firefox OS ? nobody ? thought so). Firefox was on the top of the web and the management squandered it all.
It’s not about ff being slow. That was never a reason to switch (unless it was misconfigured and couldn’t use your video card or something, but that happened just as often with chrome back then).
Google actively breaks firefox compatibility at random. It seems intentional from the outside, but it could be incompetence.
For instance, copy paste didn’t work in google docs under firefox the last time I checked.
> copy paste didn’t work in google docs under firefox the last time I checked
Still doesn't. Because instead of using the standard clipboard API, google docs uses a special extension which of course is pre-installed on chrome, and AFAIK not even possible to install on Firefox.
The Web is in a weird place where, most websites are so inefficient that they require the literal cutting edge of browser rendering and JavaScript execution performance to even run acceptably.
It's natural for a browser engineer to look at a website and go "wow, this is trash. Go ask the makers of this website to, I don't know, stop re-rendering the page 100 times a second."
Whereas the Chrome team's approach for years has been "okay, this website is trash. How do we make this trash run well for the users?"
I was thinking about incidents like this one (around 2023, way after Quantum)
https://www.zdnet.com/article/youtube-is-slowing-video-loads...
> Firefox was on the top of the web and the management squandered it all
I have not followed Mozill's internal shenanigans close enough to properly understand, and really wonder what's the biggest hurdle for some other company or org to come in and scoop/fork Firefox. I'm assuming it's sheer money.
Mozilla obviously dropped the ball. And then nothing is there to catch it.
The hurdle is that, if you're going to fork a browser, you can just fork Chromium. Might as well start off ahead rather than behind.
That's why most new browsers are Chromium-based.
Yet that still is a win for Google. A win that gives them control of the Internet.
Is that something we, the techies, want?
There are some caveats to mention. One, I use AdBlock, and I'm subscribed to YT Premium so I don't see ads. Two, the documents I edit with GSuite are generally pretty trivial. Three, I've always used decently spec'd (not high end, but decent) computers so perhaps I'm not feeling performance issues that are felt on low end gear.
Still, I agree that's somewhat besides the point. Comapanies can (and do) decide to stop caring about Firefox at any point. There's no guarantee that Gmail will run well on Firefox tomorrow, or two months from now.
This is a chicken and egg problem; right now there is no compelling reason for the masses to use Firefox so developers are right to not worry about it and tell people to just use Chrome if they’re experiencing any issues.
But if Mozilla makes a killer enterprise browser and a significant chunk of the enterprise jumps on it they will have an incentive to support it.
At some point people should recognize the web browsers are an opinionated VM. Many many many languages only have one runtime. There's no true reason Mozilla NEEDs its own engine, and probably would be in better shape today if they shifted to a privacy defensive fork of chrome.
It might not be a problem in principle, but it's definitely a problem when said one runtime is controlled by a single entity that is both powerful and fundamentally adversarial towards the users.
A privacy fork can only do so much if Google keeps removing underlying things that make it possible. The more it diverges from upstream, the harder it is to maintain.
I partly agree. Firefox moving to Webkit or Blink isn't as bad as people put it, but under one critical condition: Firefox still keeps the capacity to steer away from Google's roadmap and shoulder a competitive and full implementation of the engine on its own (100% maintain a fork that can deviate from Blink as much as needed, including becomming fully incompatible).
Under that specific scenario, we would get the best of both worlds. There would be less engine variety, but it would save Firefox and offer an out of a Google owned ecosystem.
Now I think that's absolutely not trivial, and if Firefox could pull that out it could probably as well push its own engine way more forward right now.
For instance Apple played that game, ended up basically alone on Webkit, and I'm not sure Safari is more competitive to Chrome than Firefox is. Safari keeps some market share, but the reasons are elsewhere.
A fully incompatible Blink fork sounds like Gecko with more steps.
I would like to see the browser be the Users Agent. IE: "Cookie Banners?" That's a browser, not website issue. I really care less about the interpreter/VM than I do say, how we built a browser on it (which is why webkit is great, and I had my own webkit GTK browser that did exactly what I wanted, and why so many webkit based apps exist!)
> "Cookie Banners?" That's a browser, not website issue.
It was neither, it was a legal issue. As I understand it, EU law (or its most common interpretation) did not actually allow websites to just defer to a browser preference. Fortunately, the EU is about to fix this:
> The amendments will reduce the number of times cookie banners pop up and allow users to [...] save their cookie preferences [...] in browsers and operating system. (https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_25_...)
IMHO rendering engines can be ignored for restricted use cases or if it's fine to work 98% of the time. What we're expecting from a mainstream browser is a way higher bar, so having no control on the engine is a no go. Tomorrow Firefox having to wait for Google to implement a new sandboxing approach, or not able to override deeper DRM or tracking integration would be a pretty bad situation.
As I understand it that's exactly why Apple took webkit and ran with it.
> Cookie Banners?
People really viscerally hate those, do they. That anger should be pointed to the site pushing them IMHO, but aside from that, dismissing the banner is in itself a legal choice (whatever the default was) that isn't only bound to cookies despite the name. Whatever happens on the backend or service can also be bound to that choice.
I look at it the same way we have newsletter checkboxes. They're a PITA but I wouldn't trust an automated system to make the right choice on every single form, and not sign me to some super weird stuff just because it thought the checkbox was a newsletter optout (imagine a site pushing a "bill me every month for the extra feature" clearly explained option, but with an html input id close to "opt_out_of_free_plan" and it's automatically checked by your browser)
How would that work practically?
If they fork it sufficiently to not be tied to Google's decisions, they're once again maintaining their own engine (see also: WebKit vs. Blink).
If they don't, they'll be at the mercy of whatever Google decides (see also: Manifest V3 in Chrome).
Mozilla might be in better shape, but the web wouldn't be.
Do you think Chrome gives a shit about firefox's engine? No.
don't forget the decade of -my-shitty-browser-extension: somethingdumb;
im surprised this is earning such downvotes. idk about the "opinionated" vm perspective but I think it needing its own engine oe not is at least something worth considering. firefox has been my go-to alt browser for years as my backup to chrome. it was what I would use to "test again in another browser" but as time has gone by, more and more stuff just doesn't work on firefox :(
It's already problematic to have Chromium dominating/near-monopolizing, and add salt to the wound letting Gecko die this way.
Chromium is so prevalent as an engine, that most developers don't test their code on Firefox and just tell everyone to use Chrome/Chromium when they run into issues.
This has the unintentional side-effect of strong-arming the W3C into compliance with the engine and not the other way around. Why do we bother with the W3C then? if they are powerless and Chromium can do as they please?
But if firefox ran chrome, it wouldn't be a problem. Vivaldi, Opera, and others are doing just fine.
The problem is
I don't want any engine to have that much dominance, but I especially don't want that dominating engine owned by an ad company who's main goal is to spy on people.Did you read the comment your replied to?
> idk about the "opinionated" vm perspective
What I mean is, it's basically a VM. It's got a screen, inputs, storage, networking.
They actually have an Enterprise Edition [1]
[1] https://www.firefox.com/en-US/browsers/enterprise/
Features: [2]
Does not have the built-in DLP you're requesting (at as far as I could find) and Firefox already has pretty aggressive adblocking that sets off lots of sites for me.[2] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-enterprise-vs-n...
100% agree. I would happily run a dedicated enterprise browser that blocks downloads, has DLP, has watermarking (etc) if it meant I could use my own PC. Not Browser Isolation or VDI - An actual enterprise browser.
My job is pretty much 100% in browser though, so I realise this isn’t viable for everyone.
As others have mentioned but not yet shared links, enterprise support is coming in January: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-support-organiz...
But they already do?[0]
--
[0]: https://cyberwarzone.com/2025/11/07/mozilla-unveils-enterpri...
>I wish Mozilla would explore the enterprise productivity space.
They're rolling one out in January 2026
They don't wanna be Redhat - but IMO it's their biggest mistake (I worked there 10 years).
The main driver of market share loss was the rise of mobile and Chrome being the bundled default on over a billion devices. I don't think Mozilla's run has been perfect, but I am flabbergasted at so many confidently wrong retellings of the history of market share change that treat it exclusively as a story of Mozilla's strategic missteps and make no space for the fact that a trillion dollar company with the #1 or #2 most visited site in the world for the past 20 years muscled a new browser into the picture, leveraging their monopoly in search and mobile, plus laptops produced and sold practically at cost. Firefox could have made every perfect decision you could have dreamed of and still suffered a market share collapse.
In fact, I think there's a pretty clear-cut example of a natural experiment demonstrating what it looks like to execute in the browser space to nearly perfection and still lose. In my personal opinion, Opera at its peak with the Presto engine, represented the most impressive combination for it's time of elite level performance and stability, genuinely good innovation that benefited the user, and commitment to the core browser above all else. My favorite was whenever they rolled out Opera Unite (to this day a truly mind blowing idea), I think Opera 11 or 12.
And, at a time when it truly mattered, was light on resources and bandwidth and even shipped a portable executable that could be run from any Windows PC from a USB stick. Not only that, but it was consistently ahead of the competition with embedded and device adapted versions. Is business partnerships were creative and cutting edge too. They were early to mobile, struck deals with oems, and even got on the Nintendo Wii. They offered paid and subscription options. IIRC they sold "speed dial" placement for ads and got into the search licensing game. So in everything from performance to speed to stability to innovation that actually benefited users, to intelligent business partnerships and experimenting to find revenue, Opera executed at perhaps the best level anyone could, the perfect moneyball browser. And I was never originally an Opera fanboy, I preferred Firefox 1 and 2 at the start, but pivoted to Opera because, as a college kid with no money, it delivered an impressively modern experience on lightweight hardware.
Despite executing at the highest level both in software and business decision making, it didn't matter, because distribution power trumps product quality. Sustaining a fully independent rendering engine became financially unsustainable, and with the maturity of Android, carriers favored bundled stock browsers.
With no options left Opera then made what I consider a difficult and very unfortunate decision, but perhaps having no other choice, sold to a new ownership team, pivoted to Chromium, and lost much of its team to Vivaldi which is also based on Chromium. But at no point in the story was their loss of financial visibility or market share due the loss of vision that people think explains Firefox's loss of market share. If the world actually worked that way we'd all be using Opera 25 right now.
Edit: If someone more knowledgeable could chime in, I would be fascinated to know if choosing a browser on Android could be a potential monopoly remedy. There's already precedent for that on Windows, iOS and on Android in EU for search.
Palo Alto Networks is one of several companies pushing custom versions of Chrome as enterprise security browsers doing exactly what you're talking about: holistic DLP/anomaly detection, URL filtering and content inspection in-browser. Presumably because it's closer to the malicious behavior, and network MITM is harder to accomplish with newer TLS and with decentralized workforces.
If Firefox had a more customizable, enterprise-feature-focused browser maybe we'd be seeing it used instead of Chrome? I don't know.
I don't particularly care about mozilla so much as I care about Firefox, gecko, and the continued existence of at least ONE other browser.
I don't want to use a blink based browser. If/When mozilla finally dies I don't have high hopes that Firefox won't just die with it.
I will stick with Firefox due to multi account containers. Chrome does not offer a comparable alternative, and this extension makes working with AWS significantly easier.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/aws-sso-conta...
> the continued existence of at least ONE other browser.
thankfully next generation of browsers are here - ladybug and servo, so at least something will survive even in the worst of the worst cases
Ladybug?
Probably meant Ladybird
Why do you want to not use a blink based browser? Are there any changes to the engine you are looking for that a competing browser could help develop.
Not OP but I've never used anything but Firefox. I simply want to keep using my favourite browser, the one I have most control over.
To me blink as a render engine is too closely coupled to Google. Even though technically chromium is disconnected and open source, the amount of leverage Google has is too high.
I dread the possibility that gecko and webkit browsers truly die out, and the single biggest name in web advertising has unilateral sway over the direction of web standards.
A good example of this is that through the exclusive leverage of Google, all blink based browsers are phasing out support for Manifest V2. A widely unpopular, forcing change. If I'm using a blink based browser I become vulnerable to any other profit motivated changes like that one.
Mozilla might be trying their hardest to do the same with this AI shlock, but if I have to choose between the trillion dollar market cap dictator of the internet and the little kid playing pretend evil billionaire in their sandbox? Well, Mozilla is definitely the less threatening of the two in that regard.
Participarion in web standards includes multiple different browsers even if they use the same browser engine. If we had only blink based browsers, it wouldn't be just Google at the table.
>phasing out support for Manifest V2. A widely unpopular, forcing change.
It was unpopular among a niche minority. Most of which didn't undersrand what actually changed with MV3, nor did most people understand the evolution of MV3 over time.
I don't know the details, but breaking uBO was the obvious negative impact for users.
Is there some additional information that you think would change the opinion of the users who want strong adblocking capabilities?
Android breaks app with every major update, but what happens is those app developers make changes to be compatible with the new version. It wouldn't have broken if uBO was updated to be MV3 like other web extentions were. Instead for a MV3 and brand new extention was made which means users can't be automatically updated with a MV3 connotation version.
Some additional information would be that MV3 allows the extention to update rules without a new extention update. This is one of the several misinformations of MV3 that have been spread.
There's the not-so-small problem that the replacement for UBO is noticeably worse in many ways, which is entirely the fault of MV3.
>is noticeably worse
Anecdotaly (from both mine and other HNers) it has been the opposite where people report having no issues with ads being blocked which would mean you can't notice the difference.
It's not necessarily about that performance, but importing lists, blacklisting sections, etc.
> If I'm using a blink based browser I become vulnerable to any other profit motivated changes like that one.
Only if your OEM prevents you from installing competing browser engines. For most real computers it's not a concern.
Yeah, what IS preventing you is the lack of competing browsers.
But notably not lack of competing browser engines as the power of these decisions come from the product and not the open source libraries the product uses.
Oof, maybe read his comment again...
Is there any Blink browser that allows you to install uBlock origin?
Brave has adblocking built into blink itself, so you no longer need to trust a 3rd party browser extention.
I think gorhill is far more trustworthy than a whole new browser based on crypto.
It's not based on cryptocurrency, there are just extra features that use it. Unstoppable domains is an optional feature. You don't need to visit them, but it gives value to people by letting them actually own their domain instead of leasing it from ICANN. Viewing ads to earn BAT is an optional feature. As I mentioned ad blocking is built in so you can have it show no ads if you want.
Not OP, but personally I very much prefer Firefox font rendering on Windows. Text in Chromium based browser looks blurry to me, which causes eye strain. Firefox also has a much sharper and better looking image down-scaling algorithm that again looks blurry in Chromium based browsers.
Have you used chrome? The depth of enshittifaction is staggering. Setting it up from scratch is like watching a Cory Doctorow documentary.
The only change that’d get me to willingly use the engine would be the DOJ mandating the return of manifest v2 support and then barring google from contributing to it for the next 40 years.
This is a very pessimistic post about mozilla, and a lot of it is warrented -- but also it's trivial to disable the AI stuff. dead simple. so until that day comes, I'll still be supporting mozilla (for now, using firefox relay). It looks like till then google will be propping up mozilla to avoid looking like a browser monopoly, and i'm not sure about a future where the community maintains the remains of the firefox source.
> It looks like till then google will be propping up mozilla to avoid looking like a browser monopoly
This is less and less the case each year. Historically, Google's accounted for over 95% of Mozilla's revenue. But through the recent launches of a bunch of products it's gradually knocked that number down to under 70% and seems to continue decreasing rapidly.
I often see two demands made of Mozilla: (1) focus on Firefox; (2) become financially independent from Google. IMO these two goals are going to be in conflict with each other. They started their own VPN, launched MDN Plus, etc in an effort to improve their financial independence. The AI gimmicks feel like they're in the same thread. I don't like it and don't ever wanna use it but I can't fault Mozilla for exploring that option.
Based on independent audits they are accomplishing (2) and based on their amazing performance in interop-25, interop-24, etc they are also accomplishing (1) as best they could.
> I often see two demands made of Mozilla: (1) focus on Firefox; (2) become financially independent from Google. IMO these two goals are going to be in conflict with each other.
Yes.
> Historically, Google's accounted for over 95% of Mozilla's revenue. But through the recent launches of a bunch of products it's gradually knocked that number down to under 70% and seems to continue decreasing rapidly.
Someone who read this might infer other products were 30% of Mozilla's revenue. But they were 10% in 2023. And this was lower than 2022. Royalties were 76%. Google could be under 70%. But interest, dividends, and investment gains contributed more than products.[1] Did you see more recent information?
> They started their own VPN
The servers were Mullvad's.
[1] https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2024/mozilla-fdn-202...
I like the author’s suggestion of an enterprise build. At every company I’ve worked at, we told internal users to use Chrome exclusively.
We could have chosen Firefox (most devs seemed to prefer it), but as the market share numbers bear out, most people are familiar with Chrome; most are not with Firefox.
If Firefox had specific features that made it easier for enterprises, or even internal teams at startups, then companies would happily pay $10/user/mo for something as critical as a browser.
There isn’t any such reason afaik.
Edit:
Some examples off the top of my head include
- VPNs
- user and permission management (identity)
- ad- and tracker-blocking
- internal auto-updating and easily managed/deployed extensions
I can imagine manifest v2 support being a key differentiator for enterprises.
It’s also trivially easy to disable ads in the Windows start menu, but the fact that they’re even there is shocking.
I use Firefox because I want to do at least something to keep the web browser market from becoming a monoculture again, but they’re making it increasingly hard to justify.
Sadly Firefox has been out of our browser matrix for several years now, it is only taken into consideration by FE teams when the customers explicitly ask for it being supported.
I also use because I care, but at 3% hardly any business does any longer.
I had a ceo type person ask me just last week if we were testing on firefox and I kinda did a double take.
I think I understand where he's at. If your web site has compatibility issues with smaller browsers like Firefox at 3%, Opera at 2% etc. then you could be losing out on 5% of your sales. If you were to approach any CEO and ask if they'd be interested in an initiative to increase sales by 5%, they would most likely express an interest.
there is good chance whoever site didn't worked for will just switch to chrome for that site. I did that few times.
We have "any browser above 5% market share" in deals with our clients. So FF testing is not even required
That entirely depends on who those 3% are and how much revenue they bring. Back when IE6 had 3% that was reason enough to keep supporting it
IE6 was already announced dead by Microsoft when it reached so tiny market share, you are forgetting IE got several versions up to 11, before being replaced by Edge, followed by Edge Chrome, later rebranded as Edge.
It is not about disabling AI; rather all the made effort for AI is away from something else.
It's pretty clear opportunists displaced the software ideologues at Mozilla a long time ago, but I still find the products to be more palatable than alternatives. It would take a long time to burn off all relevance of Firefox and Thunderbird even without adequate maintenance.
It does not count as "easy" if the features don't stay disabled.
I have had no issues with this, but n=1.
Maybe it is possible to make it (and other functions) to stay disabled by the enterprise policies file.
> It looks like till then google will be propping up mozilla to avoid looking like a browser monopoly
The US government (via the courts) has sent a very clear message to Google that they can be as monopolistic as they want without consequences. I cannot imagine Google will continue supporting Mozilla for much longer.
The problem with AI integrations in Firefox is not in whether they could be disabled or not.
Given that Mozilla Foundation isn't swimming in cash, "investing" in AI (a well known money sink) makes very little sense and will definitely undermine the development of their core product (the freaking browser).
Also, the timing of their Nov. 13 announcement is pretty bad. There is already chatter that AI may be a bubble bigger than the dotcom bubble. For a company that doesn't have deep pockets, it would be prudent to take the back seat on this.
> Also, the timing of their Nov. 13 announcement is pretty bad. There is already chatter that AI may be a bubble bigger than the dotcom bubble. For a company that doesn't have deep pockets, it would be prudent to take the back seat on this.
Unless Mozilla plans to spend millions on cloud GPUs to train their own models, there seems to be little danger of that. They're just building interfaces to existing weights somebody else developed. Their part of the work is just browser code and not in real danger from any AI bubble.
It could still be at risk as collateral damage. If the AI bubble pops, part of that would be actual costs being transmitted to users, which could lead to dramatically lower usage, which could lead to any AI integration becoming irrelevant. (Though I'd imagine the financial shocks to Mozilla would be much larger than just making some code and design irrelevant, if Mozilla is getting more financially tied to the stock price of AI-related companies?)
But yeah, Mozilla hasn't hinted at training up its own frontier model or anything ridiculous like that. I agree that it's downstream of that stuff.
If they just use 3rd party APIs/models, and AI bubble pops, the amount of users of AI in FF will not change.
The upstream might earn less, and some upstreams might fail, but once they have code switching to competition or local isn't a big deal.
That being said
"This could've been a plugin" - actual AI vendors can absolutely just outcompete FF, nobody gonna change to FF to have slightly better AI integration - and if Google decides to do same they will eat Mozilla lunch yet again
The bubble if any is an investment bubble. If somebody likes using LLMs for summaries, or generating pictures or such things, that's not going anywhere. Stable Diffusion and Llama are sticking around regardless of any economical developments.
So if somebody finds Mozilla's embedded LLM summary functionality useful, they're not going to suddenly change their mind just because some stock crashed.
The main danger I guess would be long term, if things crash at the point where they're almost useful but not quite there. Then Mozilla would be left with a functionality that's not as good as it could be and with little hope of improvement because they build on others' work and don't make their own models.
I mean maybe it needs to be said again but
> Given that Mozilla Foundation isn't swimming in cash, "investing" in AI (a well known money sink) makes very little sense and will definitely undermine the development of their core product (the freaking browser).
The browser doesn't make any money (the Google search bar money would not be replaced by another entity if they stopped). That is why Microsoft abandoned theirs and why Safari is turning in to IE. Every one of these threads lambasting Mozilla for the "side projects" doesnt seem to have an answer for how does mozilla make money.
Often it will be people complaining they can't "donate directly to browser development" not realizing that it will be peanuts compared to the google money. Most people in the market wont pay for a web browser.
It would be one thing if the side projects made money. But they don't.
If they aren't making money either way, I'd prefer they focused on the core product.
Or charge for an actually useful feature like Firefox sync which is currently free.
Mozilla's 2023 subscription and advertising revenue was $65 million.
Does any browser with measurable market share not provide Firefox Sync's features without payment?
I'm not paying company monthly fee to sync 50KB's worth of data and I think you find not many other people would
They have an endowment of $1.2 billion. They set aside more for it every year as a firewall in case the licensing revenue goes away.
Mozilla Corp. has > $1B in the bank. Their pockets are not empty.
I have an idea:
Take that $1B, invest it sensibly, and use the income to fund the development of an open, free browser in perpetuity.
Nah, that’ll never happen.
They already do that. They invest the endowment, and right now it exists as a firewall to cover operations in the event that their search licensing revenue becomes unstable. The annual growth of the endowment is not nothing, but it's also nowhere near enough to fund their browser development on a yearly basis.
And while I don't love the dabbling in ad tech, and I do think there's been confusion around the user interface, I think by far the most unfair smear Mozilla has suffered is to claim they haven't been focusing on the core browser. Every year they're producing major internal engine overhauls that deliver important gains to everything from WebGPU to spidermonkey, to their full overhaul of the mobile browser, to Fission/Site Isolation work.
Since their Quantum project, which overhauled the browser practically from top to bottom in 2017 and delivered the stability and performance gains that everyone was asking for, they've done the equivalent of one "quantum unit" of work on other areas in the browser on pretty much an unbroken chain from then until now. It just doesn't get doesn't mentioned in headlines.
How are they using that money to stay alive though
> but also it's trivial to disable the AI stuff
That's the problem: the number of things you have to disable to stop Firefox--a browser that sold itself on protecting user's privacy--from spying on you, or facilitating the spying of third parties, keeps growing with successive versions, to the point that you now need a running checklist of what to about:config (thanks to the "simplified" Privacy & Security window) and extensions to add.
I still use it only because Chrome is worse, and even with Chromium, certain extensions either aren't available or are a bitch to use.
And what's increasingly annoying is that many web sites (for example, banking and utilities) don't even bother properly testing for Firefox support, given how obscure a browser it has become. Your traffic is also much more likely to be flagged as "suspicious" as a FF user, so expect to spend much more time playing "spot the traffic light/bicycle/bus/stairs" games.
Some thoughts regarding Mozilla's leadership.
Certain aspects of human nature, as they apply to the corporate world, can be acknowledged and understood, even if they're not excuses when they lead to the downfall of a prominent organization. When you give someone a big title, a dump truck full of cash, and a mandate to innovate, human nature dictates that most people will internalize the idea that "because I was given all this, I must be competent", even if they very obviously are not. Typically the outcome is a "bold plan forward" which is notable for lacking any actual clear solution to the company's main problems. In one example I know of, the CEO decided to pivot from an unrelated field towards launching a cryptocurrency, and cooked up a cartoonishly-dangerous marketing scheme to support the idea. One person ended up dying as a result, and the company then purged every mention of crypto from its website. (And yes, the company collapsed soon afterwards.)
While it's easy to blame the CEO with their oversized salary, the blame for such disasters doesn't just lie with them. After all, arguably the most important roles of the board are to hire a good CEO, ensure the CEO is actually performing as they should, and fire them if they're not. When politics, cronyism, or again, simple incompetence, lead the board to also fail at its job, you end up with the long, slow decline into obscurity we've seen so often in the tech world.
But Mozilla had a good run.
> But Mozilla had a good run.
I don’t think Mozilla is over.
I also don’t think people should equate their history with their current state. They lied to their users and told them they’d never sell their data, and then they did. That is much worse than never having made the promise. I don’t trust them.
But, they have far too much support and are far too embedded to disappear anytime soon.
Someone needs to convince Firefox rather than develop its own AI (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45926779) to develop a system to pipe your html rendered browsing history in real time so external local services can process it (https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/archive-your-browser-hi...). See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45743918
Firefox probably won't suddenly have the best AI, but they could have the only browser that does this.
You can already do what you're looking for by reading the browser cache as new data is cached. This would allow you to see the site as it was loaded originally, instead of simply fetching an updated view from a URL. The data layout for the cache in Firefox and Chrome is available online.
Does the cache store the rendered DOM?
They'd probably reject that idea under some bullshit privacy or security excuse Wayland-like reasoning. Also why we don't have XUL extensions anymore and why they'll eventually copy chrome on that manifest crap.
> The response from the Firefox community has not just been overwhelmingly negative, it is universally negative as far as I can tell.
Insofar as I count as part of the Firefox community as a long-time user and infrequent bug reporter: I want useful, non-creepy AI features in my main browser, or it's probably not going to remain my main browser for too long.
Of course I also want them to be fully optional, but I have no reason to believe that they would be anything but.
What useful, non-creepy AI features are there?
I cannot imagine why one would want AI in a browser at all, but I am open to the possibility that there are applications I have not considered.
Summarizing a page (or explaining a phrase on one) for non-native-speakers or fixing up text input boxes are two that immediately come to mind.
Sure, both are possible by copy-pasting to any LLM, but being able to do it without leaving the page is great.
This applies to ebook readers at least as much as it does to browsers, fwiw – I find it mind-boggling that Kindles still doesn't have an "ask $LLM about this highlighted sentence" feature.
Let's say I want a 5000mAh power bank supporting 12v USB PD output and trickle charging. And it's got to be available in my country.
To find such a thing I basically have to open loads of product pages cross-reference retailers' websites with manufacturers' product pages.
If I could automate that process, it'd be pretty neat.
Thanks.
I don't think I understand why that would be implemented in the browser and not as its own service, but it does sound useful.
I just did the same thing with "very famous rock live acts performing within 500 miles of my location within the next 9 months". Whether this kind of functionality needs to be delivered via the browser I'm not sure. The LLM has to be server hosted, so may we well host the rest of it server-side, perhaps?
Chat conversations are definitely not the peak LLM UI. They're universal and don't require app integration, which is why they're what people are currently primarily using, but I strongly suspect that that's temporary.
"Hey AI rewrite this comment to sound smarter" :)
A relatively small variation for a client-side LLM would be something like: "suggest variations on this search that might produce better results"
Had this issue the other day that I wanted to try to find a remembered example of using Ground Penetrating Radar to find hidden roads in Northern Spain and Southern France, yet for everything tried I could not get Google to actually return results that would ever focus on what it was I actually wanted.
There was some GPR results, there was some about hidden structures, yet finding the actual scholarly articles discussing hidden roadways and searching under farm fields for features that reveal or point to their existence simply never returned positive. Rephrasing, changing the sentence, trying to prioritize search terms never really changed much.
Doing stuff too like, "image search, pixel tree, except filter out all the pay for an image stock photo websites." Really difficult to find anything these days cause there's so much chaff of stock image websites.
What features? Voice control?
If it is about chat, do we actually need Firefox adapted when you can go to gemini.google.com or some other one and write what you want there? Optionality is ensured since you actively have to go there.
Yeah I think although he acknowledges how biased the Firefox forum poster sample is, I think he is vastly underestimating just how biased.
If Firefox is reduced to just nerds who post in forums it's totally dead. Maybe it's at that point already.
Tbh I still use Chrome because Firefox's performance just isn't as good. I wish it weren't so but there we go.
When have you last tried it, and what types of sites are you struggling with? Curious since I had the same concern in the past, but it's been a long time since it's been an issue.
Safari still seems better on battery life on macOS, but I can't really tell a difference between Chrome and Firefox anymore.
No sites in particular; it's just noticeably less snappy than Chrome (on Android anyway - the difference on desktop isn't really noticeable).
Ah, I can definitely see mobile being a different story. Google is probably pouring immense resources into performance there as it directly affects battery life, just like Apple does into Safari.
I'm unfortunately on the latter platform, so I'm limited to WebKit chrome wrappers for the time being.
I don’t really care that much about the AI junk. But I’m on my very last straw with Firefox. Recent mobile versions just cannot seem to remember any default search engine setting other than Google. It drives me insane that they can do all these other things but the search engine bug has lingered for weeks.
Agreed. I just don’t want to have to use a Chromium-based browser given Google’s grip on the project - but what alternatives are there if Mozilla goes under?
Safari? Orion?
I genuinely do hate this too, I have to reset it every time. But it's worth 600 million to them so I'm kind of begrudgingly bearing it.
My feelings are the same. Firefox is barely alive, and what little sustains it is goodwill and people not wanting to deal with Google more than is needed. Yet they keep on eating into their goodwill and do seemingly nothing to build it back up again (unless introducing AI features is somehow supposed to be that). Every bad feature implemented could have been a bug that got fixed instead, or effort to push back against Google. And yet they consistently opt to put their effort into features that push people away from them, and don't put that effort into things that would at least retain the people they already have. It's a lose-lose situation.
Huh, I sorta like my ai pane in Firefox..
I also liked Pocket integration.
But the naive purists seem determined to team up with the genuinely evil in every walk of life, so Chrome monoculture seems inevitable.
And it's not like Google or Microsoft is going to do anything with AI that is worse than this, right?
Nobody would have an issue with those features being add-ons. In fact the Pocket integration is actually an add-on, silently downloaded on first run based on some online check.
If they’re gonna be bundling add-ons, I’d rather have them bundle something universally useful like uBlock Origin, but obviously they won’t do that because publishing a browser with an actually unique and useful selling point is not in their best interests.
I recall the original interface of Firefox was abandoned in favor of copying Chrome's with the rationale being that "it could be implemented as a third-party add-on" or some such.
"Why does the default interface get relegated to an extension when things like pocket and hello and AI chat are opt-out?" I ask, rhetorically.
Same here. I find it useful, and it doesn't feel like it took several engineering years to build, diluting Mozilla's focus from "just building a browser".
Actually, whenever I hear people argue that that's all Mozilla should ever be doing, I wonder if they really mean a HTML and Javascript engine? While that's important, browsers are more than that; the chrome matters too.
I think a lot of folks feel that Firefox has outstanding features and issues that prevent more widespread adoption and current user happiness, as opposed to spending effort on AI features.
The average person doesn't care about an AI pane and that won't cause them to change browsers. Mozilla adding tab group support actively got non-tech people I know to switch, in addition to uBlock Origin and generally better privacy.
> The average person doesn't care about an AI pane and that won't cause them to change browsers.
Are you sure? "Summarize this website" seems pretty useful to the average person. It's the type of thing that will probably only make very few people switch to the only browser that supports it, but quite a few more would switch away from the only one that does not supprt it.
> Mozilla adding tab group support actively got non-tech people I know to switch [...]
And tab group autosuggestions and auto-naming are powered by on-device LLMs, as far as I remember. I personally don't use tab groups, but having them automatically arranged seems pretty useful.
> I wonder if they really mean a HTML and Javascript engine?
When I say that I mean investment into features in the browsers chrome, directly working on the website.
Same, really don't understand what all the hoopla is about. AI integration in Firefox is inevitable, as is with all other browsers.
I was surprised (and frustrated) that OpenAI’s and Perplexity’s browsers are both Chromium-based. I would have thought that they would have gone with a Firefox (or WebKit) fork given:
1. That Google is a competitor to them in the AI space.
2. That Google has such a strong stranglehold over the web, and Chromium/Chrome is a big part of that. I mean, why ultimately help your competitor here?
Time-to-market favors chromium. It's also by far the most commonly used engine for headless browsing, creating lots of useful prior art.
Sometimes, I'm wondering if Mozilla did not get too much money.
With an order of magnitude less money, I think they would have been more focused on improving Firefox rather than trying to diversify with projects like Firefox OS, VPN services or AI.
Even today, given their ~$1.5B in the bank, at the cost of a really painful downsizing, the interests alone could probably pay for a Firefox development focused on standard adherence, performance, quality and privacy.
Mozilla is not a company trying to reinvent itself to survive. If it becomes irrelevant because the Browser becomes irrelevant in the future, that's fine in my book, the organization would have fulfill its mission.
But it is sad to see it become irrelevant because of mismanagement and lack of focus.
I basically have two problems with Firefox that prevent me from using it my main browser. One is this 7 year old kerning bug:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1445596
The other one is Firefox Sync not storing shortcut bar favicons. Every install, I have to click on every web site one by one to bring back their favicons. It's a 17 year old ticket:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=428378
Firefox adding crazy features that it may or may not cancel in a few years while ignoring these minor issues frustrates me, and keeps me away from it.
Maybe it's time for some decently funded other organisation (not a teracorp) to take over Firefox specifically, then let Mozilla go its own way into the sunset. No idea how that could be arranged, though.
This article is annoying. It's not wrong, but it also doesn't come across as terribly relevant without suggesting some vaguely plausible alternative. The closest it comes is that everyone should go back to using "regular" search engines that will return "regular" pages. and that if all the players (browser makers + search engines) did that then everything would be just fine.
That'd be great, if that pristine Web still existed to search and people were happy with today's results of searching it. But in the real world, the Web is a pile of auto-generated and auto-assembled fragments of slop, SEO-optimized to death, puddled atop and all around the surviving fragments of value. (The value is still there! I suspect the total value in the Web has never stopped increasing. Just like those monkeys are always typing out more and more Shakespeare.) Also in the real world, people are decisively choosing the AI-generated summaries and fevered imaginings. Not for everything, but web search -> URL -> page visit is becoming a declining percentage that won't always be able to support everything that it does today.
It's not that I particularly want AI in my browser. I would say that I emphatically don't, except that automatic translation is really nice, and Firefox's automatic names for tab groups are pretty cool, and I'm sure here and there people will come up with other pieces. I'm actually ok with AI that targets real needs, which is 0.01% of what people are pushing it for. But I also think that we're past the point where NOT having AI in the browser is a sustainable position. (In terms of number of users and therefore financially.)
Should Mozilla be head over heels in love with AI, as it appears to be now? I'd definitely prefer if it weren't. But telling Mozilla "don't do bad thing, it'll make you irrelevant and have no users" is fine and dandy but ultimately pointless unless you have an alternative that doesn't require the entire world to cooperate in turning back the clock.
(Disclosure: Mozilla pays me a salary to write bugs.)
(And working code! I write some of that too!)
(And no, I currently don't do anything that adds AI to the browser, nor can I think of anything I'd want to work on that would add any AI.)
I think the vast majority of attempts to shoehorn ai into the browser are deeply unimaginative and very much garnering a "who ordered that?" reaction. But I suspect we're going to converge on some specific use cases that everyone's going to want and it might just be important to be in the game now as we collectively figure out what they are.
Recently some Ycombinator funded project got highly upvoted on HN, a Chrome based extension that used LLM capabilities to effectively do grease monkey style scripting live in response to human requests. Now that is interesting, and it's a specific application that's actually meaningful and it's not just another AI chat sidebar.
I think it's a matter of workshopping but I bet we're going to be discovering things users actually want that are not yet obvious to us. The example I keep thinking of is non-stupid agent tasking. I wouldn't mind an agent that browsed Amazon for Kindle unlimited hard sci-fi books with critical acclaim. I would be willing to be there's going to be numerous "whybdidn't I think of that" uses cooked up in the next few years.
It's certainly wrong on some things. For example, claiming that there are no examples of positive uses of LLMs is flat out wrong. I'm generally on the very conservative side when it comes to AI hype but even I'll admit it will be transformative in some ways.
Certainly not the insane fantasies most of the gen-AI CEOs are pushing, but, for example, it's clear beyond any shadow of a doubt that traditional search is dead. AI supported search is far superior in every way. For clarity, I'm talking about "deep research" style search where you get verifiable links to source materials along with your answers.
It's absolutely not crazy for Mozilla to get into this space, though I think if I were them I'd make an adjacent "AI search and agnentic AI first" web application adjacent to Firefox and keep Firefox as a legacy style browser. This would both give Mozilla a clean slate to do it right, while also keeping happy those who are not early adopters.
> But in the real world, the Web is a pile of auto-generated and auto-assembled fragments of slop
There are parts of the web like that but your assertion seems to rely on this being universally true. It clearly and obviously isn't.
> Also in the real world, people are decisively choosing the AI-generated summaries and fevered imaginings.
Are they "decisively" choosing it if it's turned on by default? If it were actually opt-in then we could measure this. As it is I don't think you have any data to rely on when making this assertion.
> Not for everything, but web search -> URL -> page visit is becoming a declining percentage
The same web search companies that own AI models they're trying to sell? Do you not suspect there could be a few confounding variables in this analysis?
> except that automatic translation is really nice
Which we already had and has nothing to do with language models masquerading as "AI".
> is fine and dandy but ultimately pointless unless you have an alternative that doesn't require the entire world to cooperate in turning back the clock.
An alternative to what? Tab renaming? Bad article summaries? Weak search engine algorithms?
> Are they "decisively" choosing it
I'm pretty sure chatgpt and perplexity are "opt-in" in this sense
> nothing to do with language models
how do you think translation works?
I wonder where the widely-cited 3% marketshare number comes from.
Does it include dilution from mobile? China/Russia-mandated browsers?
Even with that (Chrome probably is below 50% if you count that way), 3% is lower than I’ve seen.
I know things vary site by site, but still. 3% is not coming from the planet I live on, even before you start filtering out bot traffic and click fraud (both are typically detected as Chrome).
I haven’t done this, but if you want to be fair, you should also add a weight based on likelihood to pay or be an influencer in a western market. That probably cranks the percentage up even further.
Non profit organisations trying to remain relevant (or just survive) behave this way because they arent much different from companies operating in a market for profit.
Their leadership is often not that much different, with similar people working in similar jobs educated in the same institutions and walking in the same social circles, producing the same solutions to the existential problem of organisational survival.
As the downcycle lingers on everyone’s doorsteps a lot of non profits that do incredible work are losing funding as the investors back out from commitments they confidently put forward when things were going well. It quickly shutters the non profits. It makes me sad tbh.
Can’t say this is the same thing that happens at Mozilla but you are very right in that a lot of nonprofits seem to be lead by those bring the same operational decision making experience and solutions that you see in publicly traded companies. There are plenty of non-profits that are indistinguishable from public companies in how the board is composed of an inner circle of wealthy unsavory people.
I think this because nonprofits are subject to a similar market discipline as companies: they compete for funding, relevance, market share etc.
And their board composition converges similarly as those same people are relied upon for their connections to fundraise, hire, etc. They don’t want to be seen taking an unusual strategy as it would be perceived as risky and jeopardising precious donated funds, so the same groupthink emerges.
Even if someone outside these circles was hired, they’d be knocked down with the smallest misstep, with the veiled criticism they weren’t suitable for the position (ie someone with better connections should have been chosen), so even they will fall into line.
Genuine independence is almost impossible at this size, because you need a strong internal discipline to only rely on small donors, and not bend your organisation’s mission to keep larger donors
Mozilla management have nobody to respond to.
For-profit (public) company at least have shareholders. Mozilla have zero motivation to improve aside from being retirement home for failing managers
I actually like some of the AI stuff in Mozilla.
I disabled the AI summaries, but the automatic translation support is very helpful. And I'd love to have automatic subtitles and/or translation support for videos.
> the automatic translation support is very helpful.
It's great, and I love that it works fully on-device, i.e., it's as privacy-preserving as it gets.
Pretty sure i read that the translation is not AI (LLM) based
When I read posts like this I despair. I mean I can sort of understand that ML an AI have become largely synonymous, but that even on a technical website for nerds like HN, people now think that AI and LLMs are synonymous and that translation engines are not AI?!
AIUI, the AI-based translation models are based on the same transformer-oriented neural nets that LLMs are based on, just not quite writ as large. In other words, it's not entirely inaccurate to call these models LLMs.
While there's a lot of other AI technologies that aren't LLMs, automatic translation is probably the closest technology phylogenitically speaking.
It is AI-based, you can check the source code: https://github.com/mozilla/firefox-translations-models
Sometimes these posts feel like the old man yelling at the clouds kind of disconnected from reality. They don't seem to even be realising that what they are asking for is contradictory. "Only spend money on the browser/javascript engine", "become independent of google", "give me the best search results when I type into the address bar", but "don't give me AI recommendation".
On top of that, the whole premise that AI is just being a nothing burger. Pull your head out of your arse.
Is there an AI bubble? I tend to agree, likely yes. And yes it is very much overhyped etc. Does that mean that AI is useless and will disappear? No way! Just observe how Joe Doe's are interacting with the web. AI engines have taken over from where people used to use search. It's ironic how they say they just want search results when typing in their address bar, at a time when everyone is complaining that search has become increasingly useless (and yes we can blame AI tools at least partly, doesn't change the fact). Moreover, there are definitely use cases where an AI gives a much better answer than search (just try searching for how to do something a little niche with e.g. ffmpeg, you can either read 10s of block/stackoverflow posts try to understand the manual or ask an AI and typically immediately get a decent answer).
I tend to agree with Mozilla org here, AI does pose an existential thread to the web as we know it and if we don't get non-profit organisations to develop "open" (and I acknowledge the discussion what that entails is important) tools we will end up with a web that is much less free than it is today.
> They are betraying the principles of their core use base in favor of their new god. That behavior is usually not rewarded by users or customers.
Same with Microsoft and Windows PC power users as well.
Microsoft at least has the decency not to base their entire marketing on being pro-online-privacy.
I've noticed that Firefox has steadily been eating up more and more of my CPU/RAM lately. It's not been significant enough to make me use Chrome, but it is a worrying trend. The main thing i want of a browser is for it to get out of my way. Edge is a little bit worse at this then chrome which is why nobody uses it. There's very little distinguishing browsers, a large part of the reason i continue to use firefox is because i used to use it. The second i find that Chrome has 0.1% less friction, i'll switch.
A comment on the article:
>Google's AI Overview continues to be an inferior provider of information than solid web search results.
I would love to hate that feature, but i don't. I kind of like it. It's useful sometimes and easy to ignore if i want. Honestly i would say it enhances my browsing. You can complain that it's often wrong and 2 dimensional and you would be right. But that would be missing the point. Maybe you can complain about secondary effects. I don't know what those would be though. Perhaps that it degrades the overall browser ecosystem and locks you into googles own, but that is moving the goalposts.
Google's AI overview regularly hallucinates or gets the answer wrong. Obviously if you're going to run inference on every search from billions of users, it has to be a very cheap model.
I really like how Kagi does it - summary only appears if you finish your query with a question mark, or if you press "q" after loading the results
Half the time this is just because of Google websites having poor performance.