Mozilla's new strategy document confirms their position, and the end of their stewardship of the open web.
17 minute read Published: 2025-11-21
I owe Mozilla a thank-you. Really, I do. Maybe an Edible Arrangement? People like those. Some lil pineapples cut into stars on sticks and chocolate strawberries might brighten their day. For the note, I'm thinking something like:
Thank you for proving me exactly right.
XOXO MT
Eight months ago, in the fallout of Mozilla's fumbling of a Privacy Policy update, I wrote:
Mozilla is pursuing its primary objective, which is the survival of Mozilla. Its mission statement is more than broad enough to accommodate that, and Firefox is not a real priority. The community should accept that and stop waiting for Mozilla to be the hero they deserve.
Regrettably, I was unable to take my own advice on the last part. So here we are yet again, marveling at Mozilla's dedication toward eroding decades of good will in the community they purportedly serve. To quote one of my sacred texts, it's a focus and intensity normally seen only in successes.
Back in the present, we have Mozilla doubling tripling nthing down on this direction. First, with their announcement of "AI Window," a new feature (used very loosely) coming to Firefox which seems to emulate the user experience offered by AI browsers like Perplexity's Comet or OpenAI's Atlas. In other words, instead of performing search from the address bar and interacting with websites like browsers have done since they were invented, your first interaction will be with a language model prompt, which then mediates your experience of the web.
Not to gloat, but I told you so.
The response from the Firefox community has not just been overwhelmingly negative, it is universally negative as far as I can tell. At least among users willing to post on Mozilla's forums about the issue, which is absolutely a biased sample set. I have received some comments separately in support of Firefox, but they are countable and the vast, vast minority. Mozilla's core audience hates this move. At the very least, they would want all the AI components of Firefox to be opt-in, a choice that Firefox has been unwilling to make so far, instead enabling these new features by default.
What does Mozilla do? Temper the plan? Ease up on the forced features?
Nah, they do what any good corporate PR person would tell you to do when facing public backlash: post through it.
This post is a summary of Mozilla's new Strategic Plan, which is viewable in full here. I read it through a few times, and my brain nearly ripped in half from the cognitive dissonance involved. But I think it's worth examining Mozilla's claims carefully. They are:
- AI (by which they mean generative AI) is a transformative technology that will fundamentally alter how we interact with machines and the web.
- The current landscape is dangerous and controlled by big tech and "closed source" models.
- Mozilla should therefore pivot to develop and support "open source" AI implementations the same way they advocated for open web standards.
The strategy details the "what" and "how" of Mozilla's transformation in this direction. We're going to touch on some of those points, but let's begin with these big claims, affording Mozilla maximum benefit of the doubt.
Is generative AI a transformative technology? The Corpos sure seem to want it to be, although its actual usage seems mostly to be chatbot-related. All other attempts to use this trick in other realms have failed rather miserably. Microsoft, for example, wants you to talk to your computer instead of using a mouse and keyboard like a dinosaur. The results, unfortunately, are much worse than the Jurassic version of computer interaction. The pattern holds true across the board. Google's AI Overview continues to be an inferior provider of information than solid web search results. Also, as it turns out, people learn less from LLM output.
Even the AI browsers Mozilla wants to emulate have significant issues, vulnerable to old web vulnerabilities and new attacks against the models themselves.
Generative AI is transforming something, but I don't think it's the web, and I don't think it's for the better.
Which means their second claim is definitely true! The current landscape is dangerous, as I've been decrying for years.
But because Mozilla is convinced that generative AI is a force for good (with no evidence to back that claim up), they conclude that their mission must be to create "open source" alternatives to commercial ("big tech") offerings.
If you truly believe generative AI is a net good but with potential for significant harm, there are arguments to be made for ethical implementations. This same instinct is what propelled researchers from OpenAI to split and found Anthropic.
This, however, is an article of faith. It cannot be argued rationally because no empirical evidence exists to support it. The entirety of the belief is predicated on future potential—and it always will be, right up until the harms are so inescapably clear that even the most ardent of believers suffer because of them. Even then, not all of the Flock will lose faith. And as we now see, Mozilla leadership are not just the Flock, but Disciples.
Mozilla has had a conversion experience, while its core audience has not. This results in a schism of purpose.
Post by @mttaggart@infosec.exchange
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The Actual Strategy
Digging into the plan itself, Mozilla's ambitions are remarkable. Mozilla has, as the plan notes, always measured itself against a "double bottom line" of mission and market success. However, it seems these two criteria are now separately defined by: "a. AI that advances the Manifesto; and b. diversifying revenue away from search."
Their specific goals include:
- All Mozilla orgs have a flagship AI product by 2028
- 10% year-over-year community growth
- 20% year-over-year growth in non-search revenue
- 3 Mozilla orgs have more than $25M in revenue (currently: 1)
- 10% year-over-year investment portfolio returns
I am dumbfounded by these goals. I can't even be snarky about them. They seem so disconnected from reality that I can't imagine how a Board arrived at them.
Let's go through them one at a time.
"Flagship" AI Products
What "orgs" are we talking about here? Historically there have been two Mozilla organizations: the Mozilla Foundation, which is the not-for-profit to which you donate to preserve the open web); and the Mozilla Corporation, which develops Firefox, makes deals with search engines, and creates other revenue-generating projects like, uh, Pocket.
There now exist three other for-profit subsidiaries of the Foundation, although these are not mentioned in the official listings. The first is MZLA Technologies Corporation, which is responsible for Thunderbird. I can't tell what else they do, if anything.
Another is Mozilla.ai, which has a much clearer purpose. This company produces AI products and services. So of these organizations, 3 of them need to have flagship AI products by 2028. What could that possibly look like?
There is also Mozilla Ventures, which is literally just a venture capital firm throwing money at AI projects that align with Mozilla's Manifesto.
Mozilla.ai has the easiest and clearest road, as their Agent Platformis already in early access and is absolutely a commercial product. MZLA has...Thunderbird? So AI-powered Thunderbird? That's what I can figure, although Thunderbird is not exactly known as an AI platform. Their new paid Thunderbird Pro service currently makes no mention of AI integration. That's a headscratcher. Mozilla VenturesAnd finally, we have the Corporation and Firefox.
Let's be as clear as we can possibly be. Mozilla is an AI company, and Firefox will be a flagship AI product according to this strategic plan. This is the focus for Mozilla, which means users of Firefox will only get more and more AI shoved down their throat, and likely fewer ways to avoid it.
Community Growth
I don't have access to Mozilla's "community" numbers, however they choose to define them. But if the reaction to recent changes is any indication, expecting growth of any kind isn't just optimistic, it's delusional. 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.
Financials
While I don't have access to community numbers, the Mozilla Foundation must disclose its financials, so that I can review—and you can too, if you're broken like me. I don't want to think about how much time I've spent reading Mozilla's 990s.
Looking at their revenue change from 2022 to 2023, we see a drop of 3% in royalties (search deals) and almost 15% in subscriptions and advertising. Let's also note that by these counts, royalties account for about 76% of Mozilla's annual revenue. That's by my own calculation on these disclosure, but Mozilla themselves cite 85% as share of revenue from search alone.
2022's numbers show a similar drop (down 3% from 2021) in royalties, but a 25% (!!) jump in subscriptions and ad revenue. My guess is ads, since I don't think the VPN service is raking it in, nor do I think a bunch of people suddenly signed up for Pocket before it died. This would certainly explain why last year, Mozilla went hard on their "privacy-honoring" advertising acquisition.
Zooming back out: the current business model is not delivering growth. So the pivot to AI is a bet that investment is out there for alternative sources of AI technology. It's also, tacitly, a bet that the AI bubble will last long enough to get competing products off the ground and attract investment before it's too late.
I...wouldn't be so sure.
As far as their investment portfolio's performance, Mozilla has changed their strategy significantly in the last 3 years, resulting in significant increases in dividend and realized gains in investments. What's the change in strategy?
At the end of 2022, Mozilla changed our strategy for managing our financial reserves. In prior years we took a purely defensive approach, investing solely in highly liquid fixed-income securities. Our revised approach is focused on delivering a total return to Mozilla after inflation, while maintaining sufficient liquid reserves to weather economic pressures and seize growth opportunities.
Translation: we invested more in stocks and less in bonds, T-notes, and CDs. What specifically they've invested in is unclear, but you can probably guess it rhymes with Blavidia. I'm sure they have a diversified portfolio, but if you believe (as I do) that the market is heading for a massive correction, this goal is unattainable and a dangerous target for a strategic plan.
Lastly, on revenue. Mozilla plainly has to diversify away from search, because search is dying. Google itself is trying to kill it, in favor of AI. If this succeeds, Firefox's primary revenue stream is drying up, and they know it. More than anything else, this is the reason for the pivot. As I've said before, the will to survive takes precedence over principle when choosing a path forward for any organization, even a not-for-profit with a stated mission.
These goals are not so much reasonable expectations as existential mandates. Either Mozilla approaches these targets in 3 years, or they may be staring death in the face.
Flawed Hypotheses
This strategy hinges on three stated hypotheses from Mozilla:
- A generational shift in human computer interaction is widening the gap between Mozilla’s products and trustworthy, user-centered experiences.
- A vibrant, successful and decentralized open source AI ecosystem is essential if we want independent tech players to thrive — and for innovation to come from everywhere.
- The growing need for sovereign, public interest AI which will only be met by governments and public interest tech players pooling resources and banding together.
That's...okay. We'll take it from the top.
Would you say generative AI is a "generational shift in human computer interaction?" The Corpos want it to be, but so far this hasn't taken place. Declaring it thus is the wish becoming the father of the thought. Maybe someday a functional language model will govern our interaction with computing machines, but that is nowhere near the case now, and the fundamental flaws in the technology preclude it from being so in the foreseeable future.
Would you say generative AI is "trustworthy" or "user-centered?" The people who implicitly trust generative AI are suffering from psychosis. It's a pathology. The model creators themselves tell you not to trust them! What are we doing here?
Y'know what is trustworthy? A goddamned URL bar that takes me to the website I want to go to. A search engine that shows me sources, ideally curated for quality.
Okay so hypothesis 1 doesn't pass the sniff test. On to number 2.
Can someone please explain to me what the hell "open source AI" is? Mozilla's helpful Strategy Wiki lists Mozilla's own products and investments under this category. Remember that for LLMs, you have two major "source" components: the dataset on which a model was trained, and the resulting vectors/weights file that comprises the model. Among them is HuggingFace, which is probably best understood as GitHub for AI. HuggingFace hosts both models and datasets used in ML/AI applications. It's about as close to open source AI as I can imagine.
Some of those HuggingFace datasets are really useful. Like, for example, the OCRed version of the Epstein Files. That's rad as hell, and I'm glad there's a place to share those things. It's even a goldmine for researchers like me, since datasets containing model jailbreaking prompts are available.
But let's be clear about Mozilla's value proposition of the "transformative" generative AI. These are not small models we're talking about; these are large language models that were trained on massive corpora of text. Those corpora are the "source." We know that the training data for frontier models comes from copyrighted material and material scraped without consent. We also know that code generated from scraped sources may well violate the licenses of that source code in reproduction.
In other words, there can never be an open source large language model when the sources are themselves violate of content usage agreements. For all the talk about "ethical" AI, Mozilla fails to address this original sin of the technology.
I'm sorry, I should say "nearly fails." In the "Threats" section of their SWOT analysis of their own strategy, they identify "Open models disappear" as a threat:
Big tech / China stop releasing open models. No public open source frontier models emerge. Mozilla’s strategy is obsolete / outflanked.
Okay so by "open source AI" you actually mean Qwen/Deepseek/Llama. Cool. Cool cool cool. These are open weight only, so the premise of open data goes out the window. And this threat gives away the fact that Mozilla can only succeed on the backs of frontier models. There is no real plan to "democratize" LLMs, nor can there be for the scale required.
This entire exercise is a farce. Yet again, Mozilla pursues a parasitical relationship with the corpos. It worked last time, right??
Hypothesis 3: the growing need for "sovereign" AI. We've already established that there is no large language model possible without corpo scale and investment, except perhaps with government support. So is that what Mozilla wants? State-sponsored LLMs? This hypothesis points in that direction, with Mozilla as the "public interest tech player" catching a percentage somewhere in the middle. Being a government intermediary is also probably not a safe position for anyone at this juncture, much less a tech company.
But also, what "need" are we talking about here? Why is there a need for any of this at all?
Again we encounter the fundamental schism of purpose between Mozilla trying to survive, and the mission its core audience believes in. You could imagine a Mozilla that decided, "Actually, the web was better without this dreck in it, and the experience of the web is not improved by moving users closer to it." You could imagine an organization that doubled down on true privacy, and a human-centered web. We'll never know what kind of funding streams such an organization could build, because Mozilla has chosen the machines over people. They have chosen quick revenue over long-term sustainability.
It's finally time you and I take the advice I offered before: let Mozilla die. It no longer serves its stated purpose.
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Comments
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.
By makeitdouble 2025-11-230:423 reply > 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.
By PunchyHamster 2025-11-231:153 reply > 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.
By thayne 2025-11-233:54 > 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.
By wavemode 2025-11-233:44 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?"
By makeitdouble 2025-11-233:291 reply 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.
By godelski 2025-11-235:23 Yet that still is a win for Google. A win that gives them control of the Internet.
Is that something we, the techies, want?
By Nextgrid 2025-11-231:05 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.
By calvinmorrison 2025-11-230:575 reply 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.
By int_19h 2025-11-231:41 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.
By lxgr 2025-11-2310:08 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).
By makeitdouble 2025-11-233:022 reply 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.
By pseudalopex 2025-11-233:30 A fully incompatible Blink fork sounds like Gecko with more steps.
By calvinmorrison 2025-11-233:042 reply 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!)
By lxgr 2025-11-2310:11 > "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_...)
By makeitdouble 2025-11-233:53 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)
By calvinmorrison 2025-11-231:131 reply Do you think Chrome gives a shit about firefox's engine? No.
don't forget the decade of -my-shitty-browser-extension: somethingdumb;
By godelski 2025-11-235:30
FTFY> Do you think Chrome gives a shit about the Internet? No.
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 :(
By ivanmontillam 2025-11-231:291 reply 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?
By calvinmorrison 2025-11-233:052 reply But if firefox ran chrome, it wouldn't be a problem. Vivaldi, Opera, and others are doing just fine.
By godelski 2025-11-235:33 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.>> This has the unintentional side-effect of strong-arming the W3C into compliance with the engine and not the other way around.By wobfan 2025-11-2311:44 Did you read the comment your replied to?
By calvinmorrison 2025-11-233:09 > idk about the "opinionated" vm perspective
What I mean is, it's basically a VM. It's got a screen, inputs, storage, networking.
By araes 2025-11-232:31 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.- 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[2] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-enterprise-vs-n...
By redrix 2025-11-230:14 100% 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.
By drewda 2025-11-232:35 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...
By ivanmontillam 2025-11-231:21 By glenstein 2025-11-231:48 >I wish Mozilla would explore the enterprise productivity space.
They're rolling one out in January 2026
By zobzu 2025-11-230:33 They don't wanna be Redhat - but IMO it's their biggest mistake (I worked there 10 years).
By glenstein 2025-11-231:44 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.
By unethical_ban 2025-11-230:16 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.
By cbondurant 2025-11-2222:513 reply 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.
By SamuelAdams 2025-11-230:50 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...
By NooneAtAll3 2025-11-2223:531 reply > 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
By charcircuit 2025-11-2223:215 reply 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.
By ifh-hn 2025-11-2223:37 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.
By cbondurant 2025-11-2223:362 reply 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.
By charcircuit 2025-11-230:301 reply 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.
By rjdj377dhabsn 2025-11-231:541 reply 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?
By charcircuit 2025-11-232:361 reply 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.
By Blackthorn 2025-11-233:251 reply 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.
By charcircuit 2025-11-235:09 >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.
> 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.
By 1718627440 2025-11-230:151 reply Yeah, what IS preventing you is the lack of competing browsers.
By charcircuit 2025-11-230:27 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.
By 7bit 2025-11-230:19 Oof, maybe read his comment again...
Is there any Blink browser that allows you to install uBlock origin?
By charcircuit 2025-11-230:241 reply Brave has adblocking built into blink itself, so you no longer need to trust a 3rd party browser extention.
By do_not_redeem 2025-11-231:121 reply I think gorhill is far more trustworthy than a whole new browser based on crypto.
By charcircuit 2025-11-231:41 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.
By debazel 2025-11-232:27 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.
By hedora 2025-11-233:36 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.
By undeveloper 2025-11-2221:448 reply 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.
By pseudalopex 2025-11-233:50 > 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
By hedora 2025-11-233:43 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.
By PunchyHamster 2025-11-231:18 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
By pjmlp 2025-11-236:44 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.
By nicce 2025-11-2221:54 It is not about disabling AI; rather all the made effort for AI is away from something else.
By kev009 2025-11-2222:09 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.
By undeveloper 2025-11-2222:06 I have had no issues with this, but n=1.
By zzo38computer 2025-11-2222:11 Maybe it is possible to make it (and other functions) to stay disabled by the enterprise policies file.
By dreamcompiler 2025-11-235:43 > 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.
By dale_glass 2025-11-2222:311 reply > 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.
By PunchyHamster 2025-11-231:21 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
By dale_glass 2025-11-2223:15 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.
By hamandcheese 2025-11-2223:003 reply 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.
By pseudalopex 2025-11-233:47 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?
By PunchyHamster 2025-11-231:22 I'm not paying company monthly fee to sync 50KB's worth of data and I think you find not many other people would
By glenstein 2025-11-232:07 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.
By glenstein 2025-11-232:21 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.
By alfiedotwtf 2025-11-230:20 How are they using that money to stay alive though
By anonnon 2025-11-2311:10 > 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.
