In an interview with "The Verge", the new Mozilla CEO, Enzor-DeMeo, IMHO hints that axing adblockers is something that, at the very least...
In an interview with “The Verge”, the new Mozilla CEO, Enzor-DeMeo, IMHO hints that axing adblockers is something that, at the very least, was on the table in some form and at some point. From the article:
He says he could begin to block ad blockers in Firefox and estimates that’d bring in another $150 million, but he doesn’t want to do that. It feels off-mission.
It may be just me, but I read this as “I don't want to 😜 😜 but I'll kill AdBlockers in Firefox for buckerinos 😂”. This disappoints and saddens me a lot, and I hope I'm wrong.
I've been using Firefox before it was called that. Heck, I even used the Mozilla Application Suite back in the day. It was its commitment to open standards and the open web, and its powerful add-on system, that attracted me to its software.
Honestly, that's what's been keeping me. I think that's also what's been keeping their loyal base of users with the project, the geeks and nerds that care about privacy. It's the same group of people who helped it get very popular at one point.
Killing one of its advantages over the Chromium engine, being able to have a fucking adblocker that's actually useful, and that nowadays is a fucking security feature due to malvertising, will be another nail in the coffin, IMHO. The core community will feel disenfranchised, and this may have negative consequences for the project. You know why? Because these are some of the people that the normies turn to when they want tech advice.
For fuck sake, for-profit side of Mozilla, get a damn grip!
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>> He says he could begin to block ad blockers in Firefox and estimates that’d bring in another $150 million, but he doesn’t want to do that. It feels off-mission.
> It may be just me, but I read this as “I don't want to but I'll kill AdBlockers in Firefox for buckerinos ”.
Yes, that does seem like a pretty uncharitable interpretation of that quote. I read it as "we won't do it, even though it would bring in $150M USD".
The interpretation is not the problem. Whether he will do it, is actually secondary to the fact that he thinks cutting adblock can bringing in money.
No, it will just kill the browser. The fact he thinks otherwise tells me how out of touch he is.
By JoeJonathan 2025-12-1711:3710 reply Like many others, the ability to run uBO is the main reason I use Firefox. Otherwise I'd use Chrome or Safari.
By throwaway613745 2025-12-1712:1613 reply I have used Firefox as my default browser through thick and thin for damn near two decades.
If Mozilla killed andblocking extensions I’d switch to Helium Browser in a heartbeat since they’re maintaining manifest v2 support for uBO and even ship it OOTB.
The web is unusable without a proper Adblock.
The one and only time I ever got a machine infected with malware in my 30+ years of using the internet was when I fell for Forbes.com's request to please disable my adblocker. I promptly got hit by a trojan carried in one of their unvetted ads. Browsing without an adblocker is a critical security issue, and I will drop Firefox without a second thought if they ever cripple blockers like Google did.
By 3eb7988a1663 2025-12-182:25 I am also really curious how GP was able to pinpoint the event. Or was it more, "Well this is the one weird thing I did on my machine this week."
By 9cb14c1ec0 2025-12-1712:462 reply > The web is unusable without a proper Adblock.
It's a privacy nightmare as well. Few people reason how much data they give away to a host of shady companies just by letting ads display.
Ads and page level analytics aren’t the only thing gathering data.
There is server-side now (and previously) hosted by the site owner.
It’s a lost cause to fight this. I admire you all for using FF because uBO just for the experience, but it’s only a partial data block. Serverside and thumbprinting- you can’t be anonymous even with Tor, VPN, etc.
By xedrac 2025-12-1720:16 Any privacy benefits of blocking ads are incidental compared to the usability improvements it brings. I have near zero tolerance for ads.
By cons0le 2025-12-1720:38 uBo + tamper monkey is needed just to block popups. Adblock on brave is basically non existent compared to uBO
By ekianjo 2025-12-183:41 Blocking even part of it is a win. Not sure why we should treat this as a dichotomy
By ghssds 2025-12-1722:51 > It's a privacy nightmare as well. Few people reason how much data they give away to a host of shady companies just by letting ads display.
Imagine all the data Cloudflare vacuums.
By 1vuio0pswjnm7 2025-12-1720:297 reply "The web is unusable without a proper Adblock"
Unusable for the commenter perhaps, based on his choices, but not unusable in an absolute sense
For example, I have been using the web without an adblock for several decades.^1 I see no ads
Adblocking is only necessary when one uses a popular graphical web browser
When I use an HTTP generator and a TCP client then no "adblock" is necessary
When I use a text-only browser then no "adblock" is necessary
Websites that comprise "the web" are only one half of the ad delivery system
The other half is the client <--- user choice
Firefox is controlled and distribuited by an entity that advocates for a "healthy online advertising ecosystem" and sends search query data to an online advertising services company called Google in exchange for payment. Ex-Mozilla employees left to join Google and start another browser called "Chrome"
These browsers are designed to deliver advertising. That's why an "adblock" extension is needed
When one uses a client that is not controlled and distributed by a company that profits from advertising services, that is not designed to deliver advertising, then an "adblock" may not be needed. I also control DNS and use a local forward proxy
The web is "usable" with such clients. For example, I read all HN submissions using clients that do not deliver or display ads. I am submitting this comment without using a popular graphical web browser
1. Obviously there are some exceptions, e.g., online banking, e-commerce, etc. For me, this is a small minority of web usage
The web is usuable with a variety of clients, not only the ones designed to deliver ads
By afiori 2025-12-1722:32 For almost all purposes and users this is the same as saying "just close your eyes"/"just stay offline".
By 1vuio0pswjnm7 2025-12-1721:23 Original web clients were not designed for (today's) ads. Graphics were optional. There was no Javascript
I even still use the original line mode browser and other utilties in the 1995 w3c-libwww from time to time
The "modern" protocols are handled by the local forward proxy not the client
TLS1.3, HTTP/2, QUIC, etc.
By 1vuio0pswjnm7 2025-12-1723:10 I use a text-only browser as an offline HTML reader
I make HTTP requests with a TCP client
There are no "false positives"
I only request the resources that I want, e.g., the HTML from the primary domain, JSON from the API domain, etc.
I also use custom filters written in C to extract the information I want from the retreived HTML or JSON and transform it into SQL or "pretty print"
There is nothing to "block" because I'm not using software that automatically tries to request resources I do not want from domains I never indicated I wanted to contact
Why do people make posts like this?
You know that your long-winded and patronizing response in no way is a solution to the problem that you claim it is for the audience you're talking about.
Why do you pawn off an obviously non-solution as a solution? What does this get you?
By oska 2025-12-180:37 The GP comment was excellent and exactly the sort of unconventional but informed thinking (about tech) that I like to see on HN
By 1vuio0pswjnm7 2025-12-1723:05 In terms of majorities and minorities, HN commenters do not represent "almost all users"
There are some web users who are online 24/7
There are others who may prefer to stay offline
A wide variety of people use the web for a wide variety of purposes
HN commenters are a tiny sliver of "all users" and "all purposes"
As such, HN commenters are not qualified to opine on behalf of "almost all users" as almost all users do not comment on HN or elsewhere on the web. Almost all users prefer to express their opinions about the web, if any, offline
By wat10000 2025-12-1722:58 Using a text-only browser is equivalent to using an ad blocker that has a lot of false positives.
If you’re happy with it, carry on. But you are using the equivalent of an ad blocker.
"When I use a text-only browser then no "adblock" is necessary"
So you browser as if it were 1999? Yup, no ads back then.
By invaliduser 2025-12-1721:142 reply The first ad blocker was released in 1996 [1] and in 1999 we had a lot of shiny, blinking and very colorful ads already [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_blocking#History
[2] https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/exhibitions/web-banners-in-t...
The web was usable without JavaScript once.
(JS has few good uses, but is too excessive. Less code is always better - and an art.)
By mghackerlady 2025-12-1717:363 reply Is there an extension that limits JS to things that actually improve websites (like the bare minimum needed to render a page usable under most metrics)
By t23414321 2025-12-1717:38 That would be (progressive??) XBL. (!)
(- it's kind of behavior extension on tag level, yet has JS - and it's orthogonal, like CSS or XSLT (BTW. see that hack: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41245159), unlike JS which is.. untamed and invasive; i.e. there is video (any) tag but you could (+)DIY not touching the document - like custom playing with MPlayer or VLC as a plugin there for all AV formats or sorting filtering editing whatever, all aside custompacks? :)
- or, what about the other way, like a firewall ??
uMatrix, from the same author of uBO. It's been officially unsupported for years but it still works and it's UI is better then the UI of NoScript and of course much better than the incomprehensible subsystem of uBO that should have replaced uMatrix.
It doesn't "still work" if you're on Firefox. uMatrix has bugs that cause it to randomly delete your cookies, or occasionally fail to block a request (race condition? Looking at logger shows an incorrect domain on some requests)
There are community-made forks which fix the cookies problem, like nuTensor.
> It doesn't "still work" if you're on Firefox.
Not my experience at all. I run uMatrix on every computer I have and it is awesome. Still annoyed it was replaced by uBo which is quite good, but nowhere as nice as uMatrix. Luckily uMatrix still works great.
I wish they'd just scrap the uBo interface and replace it with the uMatrix interface which is far superior.
By pmontra 2025-12-189:53 They do different things. I'm using both: uBO for ads and hiding UI elements, uMatrix for JS. I wish that the author could support both but time is limited and I'm OK with that.
By the way, I realized that most of the tabs where I'm logged into something run inside their own tab container, so that limits the damage that any bug on handling cookies can do.
By pmontra 2025-12-1723:15 Thanks, I'll check nuTensor. I'm using uMatrix with Firefox on both Linux and Android and I didn't notice anything strange but maybe some of those bugs were hidden under the normal hiccups of finding the right combination of rows with trial and errors.
By t23414321 2025-12-1720:07 Didn't one of those extensions had an option to regexp replace content of JS files ? (Now how to do that: with parsing - or with magical chains ??:)
Right, that could be nice use of AI to extract only the good parts - or, at least, to adjust the rules for https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/requestcontro... by function.
By kirth_gersen 2025-12-1718:511 reply +1 for NoScript. It is kind of a pain for the first few days when you have to spend 10-30 seconds reloading sites to allow the minimum needed. It is also eye opening to see how much bloat is added and how fast pages load without all the extra bs.
By mghackerlady 2025-12-1720:09 Thats my problem though, I don't want to have to allow the minimum for each site. I wish there was a noscript-like extension that used a public database of sorts to allow what's needed and block everything else, including things that are "needed" but suck so bad you shouldn't use the site
By danudey 2025-12-1723:23 I tried switching to Ungoogled Chromium lately but had to switch back because, even on 32 GB of RAM, having another chromium process running meant that all my apps were getting killed left right and centre. Do too much browsing and VS Code gets killed. Restart VS Code and do a build and Slack gets killed. Open Zoom and Chromium gets killed.
Now I'm back to Firefox again and nothing has died so far.
By LtdJorge 2025-12-1713:10 Exactly. And I’m one of those that uses Firefox sync, and prefers all the things Firefox comes with, including the developer tools. The only thing it lacks is the integrated Google Lighthouse reporting.
By samgranieri 2025-12-1718:462 reply have you tried using pi-hole or adblock plus running on a raspberry pi on your network?
whenever i'm off my home wifi network, i have wireguard configured to connect home and get me that ad blocking. it's so nice.
yes, i prefer to use brave for personal stuff and i use edge for work stuff (reasons,,, don't ask)
By timeinput 2025-12-1720:32 It's definitely better than nothing, and greatly improves things, but UBO is better. Try watching a youtube video in a browser with UBO, and the android app on a network with pi-hole, etc.
By throwaway613745 2025-12-1719:091 reply I ran AdGuard Home for a while but it was causing too many problems for everyone else at home so I stopped.
These days I’m using AdGuard on iOS and ublock origin with Firefox on everything else.
By doubled112 2025-12-1719:58 It took me a long time to get the allow lists dialed in, but I think it was still worth it. My wife may disagree since she was the most common victim.
It amazes me that every link the kid's school sends is a tracking link, and not always the same tracker.
By FuriouslyAdrift 2025-12-1717:32 There's also Palemoon...
By chrisweekly 2025-12-1716:49 Thanks for referencing Helium -- it looks great!
By tim333 2025-12-1713:18 Though uBlock Origin Lite in Chrome actually works quite well.
>The web is unusable without a proper Adblock.
And yet somehow most people in the world use it every day without an adblocker...
By ghssds 2025-12-1722:57 How many limit themselves to a few apps owned by the GAFAM?
By LargoLasskhyfv 2025-12-188:57 Trillions of flies eat shit...
By kevin_thibedeau 2025-12-1716:53 Except by that point you've executed all their JavaScript. The FBI recommends ad blockers as a safety measure. Bouncing on the site still exposes you to risk.
>If Mozilla killed andblocking extensions
Yeah but they haven't and they're not going to, so what's the point of fantasizing about what you would do in that situation? It's like tough guy syndrome, where a person constantly fantasizes about what they would do in the imaginary situation where one of their friends or family is disrespected, or doomsday preppers who spend their life imagining what they would do in an apocalypse that never comes.
That stuff belongs on archiveofourown.com, not news.ycombinator.com.
By matthewkayin 2025-12-1717:361 reply Relax, man. It's perfectly reasonable to say that you would stop using a browser if they killed adblock support. Saying so is not "tough guy" syndrome because switching which browser you use is not a tough thing to do.
It is tough guy syndrome, because it's projecting a hypothetical scenario to performatively declare what you would do in that hypothetical, attempting to hold a third party accountable for something they're not actually doing. Try to follow the ball instead of lecturing me to relax ;)
Yeah, otherwise it’d weird the new CEO had such a precise idea of the amount of money it could bring in. It makes it sound like Mozilla definitely had either considered offers from advertisers or done the maths themselves to work out potential revenue.
And for the record, as a Firefox user, count me in with the others who would switch and just use Safari on my Mac if they went through with it!
By kelipso 2025-12-184:33 Same. I use Safari even with the ads because it has the profiles thing. Only reason I use Firefox is the ad blocker.
By throwaway613745 2025-12-1720:201 reply Constantly Fantasizing? I was responding to a hypothetical based on interpretations of real statements made by the new CEO. It's a public forum for discussion. Firefox is something that is central and essential to my digital life.
I think the only person fantasizing here is you, about what random strangers on discussion forums do all day when not responding directly to topics at hand.
By glenstein 2025-12-1721:03 You literally just agreed that you did the thing I'm describing and then insisted I was fantasizing. And you're right, it's a public forum for discussion, hence my criticism of attempting to hold Mozilla accountable for a fictional hypothetical that they explicitly said they're not doing.
I'm all for fanfiction, but as I noted before, it seems that these days archiveofourown.com is where people publish that stuff, not Hacker News. It's easy to sign up and if your fiction is creative people will give you positive reviews. But you might need to spice it up by implying a conspiracy to cooperate with Google or something.
Firefox on Android mobile is also useful because it allows extensions - especially uBlock Origin (UBO), Ghostery, No script, etc. Some mobile browsers (e.g., Samsung Internet) used to allow extensions also, but they've become crap or dropped such support, so their usage has fallen.
I like Firefox (for safety) and Vivaldi (Chromium browser, it's easier to use) on Android mobile. On iOS, Safari is simple and sufficient, but I would prefer UBO there, however we all know Apple will never allow extensions for Safari.
Ever since Google moved to Manifest v3, Chrome is a no go.
>On iOS, Safari is simple and sufficient, but I would prefer UBO there, however we all know Apple will never allow extensions for Safari.
fwiw Safari on iOS does allow some extensions and uBlock Origin Lite is free in the iOS App Store.
ublock origin lite is the knee-capped version that is also available in chrome. I haven't tried it, but it is technically not able to block all ads.
By selectodude 2025-12-1721:59 I’ve found Wipr 2.0 has been able to block all ads (even YouTube) but it’s unable to hide itself so there are sites that block my ability to read them.
By strictnein 2025-12-1722:35 Works much better than I thought it would. It's rather rare when I see an add in Chrome.
By jrflowers 2025-12-1722:17 Yep. It’s not great but it’s not terrible. Hopefully Apple expands Safari extension support in the future
By matheusmoreira 2025-12-1717:381 reply Same. Without uBlock Origin I'll drop Firefox. There are very few reasons to put up with its "niche browser that nobody tests" status if they won't even allow me to block ads. They should just give up and end Firefox development already if they're going down that route.
I'm doing as much to keep Firefox alive as anybody.
Wherever I've worked as a dev in a decade I've always developed Firefox-first and let the testers turn up Chrome issues. So the products that I am involved with just work with Firefox all the time.
I know there are a lot of people like me, people who are passionate and engaged with technology but have problems with "big tech" and if they turn people like me away than it really will be a "niche browser that nobody tests"
By matheusmoreira 2025-12-1718:012 reply I developed and tested my personal site on Firefox. If I were a professional web developer, I'd work just like you do.
But let's not kid ourselves. We're an absolute minority. For every one of us, there are hundreds, thousands of developers who literally do not give a shit so long as their paychecks hit their accounts. Actually they're likely to write Firefox off as some irrelevant niche market the company can afford to lose because it's less work for them if they do.
By PaulHoule 2025-12-1718:32 (1) I like to think that professional web developers are foxier than average
(2) It just takes one on the team to make the difference
(3) Practically compatibility with Firefox is pretty good. Maybe once a month I use an e-commerce site or other e-business site where I have to drop down to Chrome, Edge or Safari.
By BeFlatXIII 2025-12-1719:55 > For every one of us, there are hundreds, thousands of developers who literally do not give a shit so long as their paychecks hit their accounts
May our new AI co-workers put those thousands into the poorhouse for shoddy worksmanship.
By csdreamer7 2025-12-1716:531 reply There are a few reasons:
I haven't compared it in years, but Firefox's bookmark sync is better than Google's, it is a reason why I have stuck with it.
I think Firefox manages hundreds of tabs better than Chrome does as far as memory usage goes. I haven't used Chrome seriously in years, but people continue to complain about how RAM hungry Chrome is so I assume it is still an issue.
But Mozilla has been doing odd things that makes me question them. I would move to some Chromium based browser if ublock origin was... blocked... pun intended... because the web does prefer Chrome over Firefox. If this 3rd party browser is able to integrate some of the functionality of ublock origin that Firefox chose to remove; I would use it over the reasons I listed above in a heartbeat.
It's only Firefox that is never satiated with however much memory I throw at it. Any time my machine slows, the solution is to kill Firefox. Not sure what exactly they are doing wrong.
By heavyset_go 2025-12-1722:36 Set `browser.low_commit_space_threshold_mb` and/or `browser.low_commit_space_threshold_percent` to something you'd prefer, and confirm that `browser.tabs.unloadOnLowMemory` is set (I think it is by default).
The default settings are to allow it to acquire memory until memory pressure on the system reaches 5% free, at which point it will begin freeing memory. You can set a custom percentage or a specific amount of memory.
That or just run it in a cgroup with a memory limit.
By csdreamer7 2025-12-183:27 Are you sure it is not malware? When was the last time you changed the profile?
Also, I have a ton of bookmarks and as I been slowly deleting them Firefox's performance has improved. This same giant size of bookmarks Chrome seems to sync out of order causing their placement to change.
Ublock origin also does slow down the browser a bit on websites that.. don't.. have ads.
By subsection1h 2025-12-1718:12 Do you use Auto Tab Discard?
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-disc...
By immibis 2025-12-1718:26 Go to about:processes and kill whichever website's subprocess is using the most memory. Sometimes it's the main process but more commonly it's a specific site. Looking at You, Tube.
and funnily enough uBO author didn't want any money even though he's making our lives a lot better
By matheusmoreira 2025-12-1717:451 reply I want to take this opportunity to thank Raymond Hill for his enormous gift to humanity. I've done this many times over the years, and it's always worth the time to do it again.
Thank you, gorhill! And thanks to all the people maintaining it and all the filter lists!
By agumonkey 2025-12-1718:07 seconded
Most adblocker developers throughout history have routinely taken millions of dollars to weaken their adblockers, though. That's why we're all using uBO instead of uB.
Must be hard to resist letting some ads through for life changing money...
They say everyone has a price. Wouldn't you for ten million? A hundred million? A billion dollars? It would be extremely irrational not to. You could always donate 70% of it to Ladybird, and still come out ahead.
You could always secretly continue helping the adblocking mission under a different name. Even if you signed a contract not to.
By agumonkey 2025-12-1718:36 lots of possible paths indeed
By soulofmischief 2025-12-1718:212 reply Incorrect, Raymond Hill authored both extensions, both being forks of HTTP Switchboard.
Raymond got overwhelmed with managing an open source project of uBlock's size and let Chris Aljoudi take over. Adblock later purchased it from Chris.
Meanwhile, Raymond had forked uBlock, creating uBO, and continued to improve it on his own terms. After seeing what happened with Adblock, he has no intention of selling either uMatrix or uBO.
By neltnerb 2025-12-1719:45 I love uMatrix, but all evidence is that they stopped developing it in 2021.
https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix
I don't know the implications of that, it's the only tool I've ever found that lets me feel in control of what programs my browser is executing.
By the_af 2025-12-1719:55 > Incorrect, Raymond Hill authored both extensions, both being forks of HTTP Switchboard.
You're right, let me try to amend my statement: at the point uBlock Origin was forked, Raymond disowned the earlier uBlock, and it had become unrelated to him, hence "not the same author" (even if it was started by him). My point was that Raymond didn't want to become involved in the pay-per-ads-let-through scheme the commenter I was replying to mentioned.
I use both uBO and NoScript and wondered if I really needed uBO if I blocked YouTube as I've planned.
However, it leads to Mozilla's earlier weird design choice where you have to install addon if you only want to disable JavaScript on sites - or allow it from only the selected domains.
Years later I haven't found a sensible explanation why they ditched that choice.
I've understood that you can still do it in Chrom(e/ium) and combined with a good updated blocklist in /etc/hosts or like it would provide most of the functionality of an adblock.
By zajio1am 2025-12-1718:01 On my desktop i use just NoScript and i do not need uBO, as almost no ad is shown without JS.
By bryanrasmussen 2025-12-1720:33 do you have stats on how many others that is? Because I run FF and I don't run uBO, so.. I mean I understand the feeling based on one's own situation that it would kill the browser but just like Pauline Kael thinking nobody voted for Nixon so how could he win the fact that you think it would kill the browser does not mean that they are out of touch for saying they won't do it despite it bringing in money.
By mancerayder 2025-12-1718:143 reply Is Brave so persona-non-grata? I find that it's a 'don't ask don't tell' because of some ancient politics. If Firefox is becoming suspect, WHAT is left?
I found Chrome+adblockers NOT good enough. I like (and hate) Brave's shield, as I never figured out how to use wildcards to whitelist a whole domain / subdomain, it seems per-host. But that Brave shield WORKS.
Now people are going back to Chrome? Really?
By AstroNutt 2025-12-183:17 Too bad arnaud42 over on XDA Developers quit supporting Kiwi, even though was Chromium. It was my favorite browser ever for Android. Hopefully, someone will pick up the torch and keep it going soon.
Brave is just one of the dozen Chromium-based browsers. It's still Chromium.
By broken-kebab 2025-12-1719:53 It's Chromium-based, sure. But it blocks ads and does it well
The crypto bullshit Brave was (and somehow still is) pulling is way worse than Firefox's enshittificAItion.
By broken-kebab 2025-12-1719:511 reply Not really. You can use Brave completely ignoring crypto side, and it won't complain.
By EbNar 2025-12-1720:38 the crypto stuff is completely opt-in.
By DonHopkins 2025-12-1719:061 reply [flagged]
By eudamoniac 2025-12-1719:23 Oh? I'm installing it now, thank you!
By hirvi74 2025-12-186:09 There is a variant of uBO working in Safari again, if that is of any interest to you. Created by the same dev and all. I've had great results with it.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ublock-origin-lite/id674534269...
By parliament32 2025-12-1721:29 uBO works fine in Edge too.
By unglaublich 2025-12-1717:421 reply Who selects these CEOs? It almost seems like a caste system at this point. You can be a complete clown, but it's the best we have in our small caste so you're the one.
By yxhuvud 2025-12-1712:26 The question is what happens if he thinks the browser will die without that money. Is it a hill to die on?
For me as a user it is, but is it for him as a CEO?
Is it him or is it you? I'd think within the Mozilla organization is a data trove of telemetry which renders a fairly good picture of how many users actually are using ad blockers.
By nkrisc 2025-12-1712:24 If nobody is using ad-blockers then disabling them wouldn’t bring in any additional revenue.
Yep, and that's how he arrived at the $number. If a small number of people were using ad blockers, the cited sum would approach $0 since disabling ad blockers would affect very few page views, right?
Is that true? What if Google just pays them $150m to disable ad blockers?
Not sure if that's legal or whatever but killing ad blockers is probably worth it for Google.
By immibis 2025-12-1711:59 Google wouldn't spend $150m to block adblockers if nobody was using adblockers.
Each Firefox add-on has a counter of the number of users. It doesn't require some "data trove of telemetry".
By im3w1l 2025-12-1718:29 In a purely hypothetical world people could have disabled telemetry and also shared add ons on floppies instead of installing them from the store.
By dspillett 2025-12-1711:29 I think it is him. Chrome making blocking harder is one of the issues that has been pushing some users away (and a good portion of those in the direction of FF). If FF is not better is that regard then those moving away for that reason will go elsewhere, and those who are there already at least in part for that reason will move away.
If this happened it would be the final straw for me, if I wasn't already looking to change because of them confirming the plan to further descend into the great “AI” cult.
By b112 2025-12-1711:29 Not sure what your point is? It doesn't matter the number of users, because the GP's point is that those users are going to immediately bail, for a browser thsy supports ad block.
So that extra money will never materialize. And usage numbers will again crater. This is the point.
(You can disagree with that assessment, but that has nothing to do with telemetry, which cannot gauge users hanging around with blocked .. adblockers)
By bossyTeacher 2025-12-1719:17 As a decades long Mozilla fan, who has stayed true to the fox even with the rise of Chrome, Mozilla breaking adblocking would make me uninstall the fox and never come back. I feel that many of the so called greybeards here feel similar. Once adblocking is gone, users will be too and Mozilla will fall faster than Nokia did
The current pattern in software is, sadly:
1. Innovate
2. Dominate
3. Enshitify to cash in.
You can't skip step #2.
Right now, Firefox's market share is a rounding error compared to Chrome. Users are starting to switch away from Chrome because it's currently in step 3 (in spades). That trend will not continue if Firefox beats Chrome to the bottom of the pig-pen. Firefox's current focus on AI is concerning enough, but mirroring Chrome's shift to Manifest v3 (i.e. What killed full-blooded ad blocking in Chrome) would be outright suicide.
Mozilla needs to listen to their users. Most don't particularly want "let me run that through an AI for you" popups everywhere. Practically nobody running Firefox wants to be cut off from effective ad blocking.
Monetization is hard, for Mozilla in particular. It was always weird that most of their funding came from Google. Now that Google is yanking it, Mozilla needs to find alternative sources of filthy lucre. However, if they destroy their product's only competitive advantages, there will be nothing left to monetize. If Firefox remains a browser that can provide decent privacy and ad-blocking then Mozilla has a chance to find alternative revenue streams. If, instead, Mozilla throws those advantages away to make a quick buck, that's the last buck they'll ever make.
Indeed, Mozilla has a particular bad habit of not listening to customers.
It shows even in the UI design. Features like tab pinning and tab groups work in ways that are sub-optimal to how users want to use them. A pinned tab should not be tied to a specific URL. If you go their forums you see a lot complaints, and weird thing is all the nonsensical arguments that their reps advance as to how these features should work the way they currently are. I as a longtime Firefox user can immediately see what is wrong with these features as implemented, but the devs won't listen. I wonder if they use FF themselves.
Firefox is also the only app on my MacBook that consistently brings the system to a crawl. Almost every single time my machines slows down, the solution is to kill Firefox. It's got to the point I don't even need to use Activity Monitor, I just kill Firefox and and system recovers.
It's gotten to the point I'm seriously looking at alternatives, trying out Orion and Helium browsers.
I'm confused, because I desperately want pinned tabs to stay on their URL, but that's not what happens, and I end up with random URLs in these tabs because I click links. Is there a config flag I flipped without thinking?
Yeah, I don't get why I'd want to pin a tab and then change the url (which I do accidentally for a pinned tab every couple of weeks or so). When it's not the site I pinned, it's just...a tab?
By prmph 2025-12-189:39 Do you actually use the feature much?
From my experience I want to pin tabs because I simply want a set of tab available for use that remain visible when I scroll through a lot of tab headers to the right.
It's very annoying to be on a pinned tab, navigate to even just another server on the same root domain, and suddenly be pushed to another (un-pinned) tab. Even if navigate to a totally different url, I do no want to be pushed to another tab.
The enforcement of the url remaining the same should be done by myself, not the browser trying to second-guess me.
By prmph 2025-12-1723:12 It seems they have listened to users and allow pinned tabs to navigate to any url.
Initially this is how pinning worked, and along the way they changed it so that if you navigated to a different domain from the one you pinned, it opened in a new (unpinned) tab, which was jarring.
Now it seems they have reverted that change. So they seem to vacillate on the implementation.
By immibis 2025-12-1718:28 Try Zen Browser - it's reskinned Firefox.
> Now that Google is yanking it
Can you elaborate? Are they winding down their their participation in search licensing deals?
By beloch 2025-12-1721:36 Looks like I was a little out of date.
https://itsfoss.com/news/mozilla-lifeline-is-safe/
Google pays Mozilla, basically to make Google the default search engine for everything in Firefox. Previously, it looked like an antitrust case was going to force them to stop doing that, but it didn't turn out that way.
Mozilla is still getting most of their money from Google and they shouldn't need to kneecap themselves to pay the rent. Still, you can't help but wonder what might happen if Firefox starts eating too much of Chrome's market share. Mozilla should be trying to branch out, but in a user friendly way.
By logifail 2025-12-1716:59 > Now that Google is yanking it, Mozilla needs to find alternative sources of filthy lucre
How do Mozilla's costs look?
By alex77456 2025-12-1712:58 > The fact he thinks otherwise tells me how out of touch he is.
We don't know what he really thinks. Maybe he knows it's a risk he wouldn't want to take but presents it as a goodwill
By anon-3988 2025-12-181:07 > No, it will just kill the browser. The fact he thinks otherwise tells me how out of touch he is.
Believe me when I say this but 99.99999% of the human population does not give a shit what is Firefox, Chrome, Edge, Brave, whatever.
Their survival is completely detached from how "good" it is. As long as it runs, opens a page, opens picture, plays video.
We all live in the tech bubble, to them its an "app" that is "annoying me with ads". And that if they know its an ad, not just part of the page. That is if they even know its a page, not just something my son told me to click if I want to go to "Facebook".
By marcosdumay 2025-12-1716:57 He may have a bad model of the world, but at least he is somewhat aligned with the user base.
By kakacik 2025-12-1711:49 This is academic discussion, where you think when X is said it means this, somebody (others here) think its that and so on. Grasping straws and all. I guess when around Christmas work churn slows down and some people spend more (too much?) time here.
Firefox has a market share around 3%. Even most technologists stopped using it long ago. Many banks and government websites don’t even support it anymore and loudly tell people to use Chrome instead, especially in developing countries.
Nothing can kill Firefox, because it’s already dead for all practical purposes.
I use Firefox as my daily browser. If i have a website that fails to work, I might try chrome maybe once every two months. And then it usually also doesn't work. So for all browsing I do on the internet, Firefox works like a charm
well I use it because it can handle 2000 tabs on my m1 macbook air (16gb ram)
... damn do I have adhd?????
By CodesInChaos 2025-12-1711:205 reply Get the OneTab extension. It'll save and close all those tabs. That way you won't have Firefox crashing during startup once you exceed the number of tabs it can handle (a few thousand).
By versteegen 2025-12-189:57 Tip: the crashing is caused by certain extensions such as OneTab and All Tabs Helper which for some reason seem to cause all the tabs to load, just when restoring a session. Temporarily disable these extensions before restoring, then you can reenable.
By b112 2025-12-1711:32 I have 117 thousand tabs, and it starts up fine. Just adjust your shm ratio.
(I'm kidding)
By Tarq0n 2025-12-1712:29 I've had it function just fine around 9000 tabs.
By lxgr 2025-12-1712:00 Doesn't Firefox natively unload tabs these days?
By fl0id 2025-12-1711:48 You can also just do tab groups in ffx
Amateur numbers... I've tested over 10000 (not right now)... It used to get really slow after 9000, but things seem to have improved.
By codedokode 2025-12-1713:121 reply Were all tabs loaded though? If one tab takes 10 Mb of RAM (very low estimate; many take 50-100 Mb, especially Youtube), then 10K tabs require 100Gb.
By arzig 2025-12-1713:29 I’ve started seeing tabs that weigh in at multiple gbs. Cloud provider consoles are particularly egregious examples here.
By mlmonkey 2025-12-1712:03 I use Chrome and have 1500 tabs on my MacBook Pro. I'm a packrat.
> Many banks and government websites don’t even support it anymore and loudly tell people to use Chrome instead, especially in developing countries.
I cannot remember the last time I came across one myself.
Reading comments here about problems using Firefox is odd to me as I never run into them. I feel like people are taking about totally different browsers. I don't remember the last time I had page rendering issues or was asked to use a different browser.
Same. I mean, I'm sure there have been cases where I've switched to Chrome for certain things. I just got a custom viewfinder for my partner for Christmas, is showing a bunch of photos of the cruise that we went on. And they have an online editor for it, but the editor seemed to be glitching when using Firefox. So I moved to Chrome. Later I realized I was just misunderstanding and it actually just worked fine in Firefox.
And I'm able to access my bank, my credit cards, my utility bills, in Firefox without issue. So I'm not sure what people are talking about.
One thing I am familiar with though in the aftermath of gamergate was a bunch of motivated reasoning to complain about games and insist that they had design flaws or bugs, when really? The bugs weren't real but were kind of just a different way of saying We Don't Like This Game. And so reports of perceived bugs in some cases are as much a social phenomenon as they are a sincere representation of software functionality.
I don't want to say there's no bugs but for every one person's unsubstantiated anecdote, I seem to be able to find two people able to reproduce a functional version of the experience without issue. And just to zoom in on the bank login issue in particular, I use a credit union with an old decrepit HTTP site that was recently updated to a slightly less old and decrepit HTTP site. Plaid is unable to successfully log in, but the web interface works perfectly fine on Firefox mobile.
Most of the service sites I use are fine in Firefox running on Linux. The only thing I use that is problematic is the Microsoft 365 with Teams portal an employer uses. So I have Chromium just for that one.
By seanhunter 2025-12-1721:45 Teams is straight up broken on web and in its native client. Not sure it’s fair to blame firefox for that.
Its the same kind of people that claim Linux is too unstable for them, and when you ask when they tried it they say 15 years ago.
By mattmcal 2025-12-1718:29 I've been using Linux on my desktop for ten years and I definitely experience bugs and performance issues with Firefox from time to time that don't occur in Chrome. It's rare but common enough to keep Chrome around as a fallback.
A few: Developer tools are quite slow; Airline websites often break during checkout; JS games and video players sometimes stutter or use a lot of CPU
By glenstein 2025-12-1717:47 My favorite anecdote on this front: someone posted a comment on Lemmy, a fediverse alternative to Reddit, claiming Arch was "broken" and Linux users were delusional for thinking it was functional for the average person.
And when people ask them what they meant, they revealed that they used some package from the arch user repository that apparently required manual compiling for every update.
And instead of thinking that this wasn't the unusual behavior of a particular package, they insisted that this was the normal Linux packaging experience, which was why Linux as a whole was a terrible operating system.
A bunch of commenters chimed in emphasizing that the whole package distribution system in Linux is designed to among other things, handle dependencies and avoid manual compiling (though it's available as an option), and they were all dismissed as just being fanboy apologists.
By stephen_g 2025-12-1722:38 Yes, I wonder if the rise of the Web Platform Tests have made browser behaviour much more consistent?
It happens so rarely, I don’t keep Chrome installed and have to download a new version of Ungoogled Chromium when I need to see if something only works in Chrome, which I can only remember doing about twice in the last year!
By bityard 2025-12-1713:33 It's not page rendering issues, usually, since Firefox and Chrome pretty much support all the same things.
What you run into the most is the website saying, hey, it looks like you are not using a browser we have tested against, so we are not going to let you log in. Please come back when you have Chrome, edge, or Safari.
By ffuxlpff 2025-12-1713:29 Never had this problem - so far - on Linux. Maybe it has something to do with using a sucker operating systems.
By Yizahi 2025-12-1711:48 That happens quite often these days. Last week I was filling in a govt form (EU country), submit button didn't work in FF, so I had to resort to using Microsoft Chrome. On my company's training platform videos aren't rendered in FF. Another shitty corporate portal which shows my salary and holidays doesn't work in FF at all, completely. What else... A few smaller payment providers weren't working in FF over past two years. Ghost of the Skype before being finally killed only worked in Chrome clones. Stadia only worked in Chrome (yes, I used it and it was fine).
Also many sites show significant degradation in FF lately. Youtube works like shit in FF, once every 10 page opens it just gets stuck half way with part of the background loaded, like black with black empty frames on top. Or just empty page. No, it never finishes loading from that state, and neither it can reload on F5. But opening a new tab works fine and YT loads normally.
And to finish off this rant, FF has now started corrupting my open tabs after opening FF with saved session. This never happened since this feature was implemented and in 2025 has happened 3 times already. And in mozilla bugtracker all tickets about this are ignored for years now. Meanwhile they are developing some crappy bells and whistles, instead of fixing fundamental bugs.
If not for Chrome monopoly, I would consider switching browsers. Ladybird can't come soon enough. Mozilla has lost touch with reality.
Having switched to Firefox about 10 months ago, one thing I notice is every site I visit works but a lot of sites load way slower than Chrome. YouTube is a big one.
How much of that is Firefox rendering being worse vs artificial slowdowns by Google owned sites kind of doesn't matter in the end. Objectively it's a slower browsing experience but I solely use it for uBlock Origin.
By neodymiumphish 2025-12-1713:39 I've been using Orion browser (WebKit-based with support for Chrome and Firefox extensions) for quite some time and haven't had this issue with YouTube, but I've definitely experienced the same with Firefox. If it's an issue of artificial slowdowns, you'd think they'd apply it to anything not running on Chrome's engine, which makes me think it's specifically Firefox's rendering causing this issue.
By bcraven 2025-12-1711:45 User-Agent Switcher usually sorts them out
In which country are you seeing that?
For me the biggest offender are usually Google products and sometimes the lazy-coded website written by incompetents and whose audience is the tech illiterate (i.e. some websites involving schools/teaching) that just tell you "use latest Chrome just to be sure, download here" to, well, just be sure. Notable mentions for government websites that are like 10 years in the past and that are still on the "Supports Firefox" side because, well, they are just always late to everything.
I live in Australia and I can't log into government services using my myGov account on Firefox. Works fine on Chromium.
By misir 2025-12-1712:04 Usually that's because of third party cookies the government websites love to use for authentication. FF and Safari by default blocks them but both can be disabled temporarily to use those websites. Chrome is more lax on them since ad networks love cross origin cookies as well.
By iamtedd 2025-12-1711:40 I have no issues with mygov in firefox (on linux of all platforms). I don't even whitelist ublock origin on that domain. Check your other extensions.
By yen223 2025-12-1717:53 I live in Australia and have been using Firefox for all my myGov needs without even thinking about it
Which service do you have issues with?
By someNameIG 2025-12-1719:58 Just to test I just logged into myGov then through Firefox and it worked fine.
Wow. Force-Supporting the same company they're battling daily, on multiple issues.
By graemep 2025-12-1713:07 Lack of joined up thinking.
While governments battle big tech on some issues, they are very much on the same side on others. They both want more tracking for example - the governments want to regulate it, and there is a battle for control of the data, but both want the data to be collected by someone.
By aryonoco 2025-12-184:42 MyGov works fine on Firefox but I do use incognito window with no extensions for them. I’d say it’s probably one of your extensions.
By kgwxd 2025-12-1711:27 Seems really dumb to let a crappy bank site dictate what browser you use for everything else.
By ojosilva 2025-12-1711:42 3% market share is 150 million active users give or take. That's no death by any count in the software world.
Gosh, I really wish Mozilla would just dig into their user-base and find a way to adequately become sustainable... or find a way to make it work better as a foundation that is NOT maintained by Google, ie like the Wiki Foundation. I do spend a LOT of time in FF, can't anyone see there's a value beyond selling ads and personal info that could make Mozilla more sustainable, dependable and resilient?
This 3% number is deceptive.
The whole desktop market is cratering.
I was talking to a reddit mod a few months ago. He was looking at the subreddit stats. 95% of his users were on mobile.
Think about that. We desktop users are dinosaurs.
So FireFox having a 3% market share might actually mean more than half of desktop users are on FireFox.
It is the desktop where Firefox has a 4% market share right now. Once you consider all traffic it drops down to 2%.
Source: https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worl...
By glenstein 2025-12-1717:53 I think you're right, but it's important to emphasize many of these attempts to tell the story of market share get major facts catastrophically wrong. The decline in Firefox market share from like 33% to below 10% is mostly because the world pivoted to mobile, and Firefox "dominance" was in a world of desktop browsers. It was defaults and distribution lock-in as the world pivoted to mobile that led to the change in market share. As well as the web as a whole effectively tripling in number of users, and Google leveraging its search monopoly and pushing out Chromebooks effectively at cost.
For some reason that part of the story always seems to get omitted, which I find bizarre. But the web pivoted to mobile and Google flexed its monopoly powers. I would argue that upwards of 95% of the change in market share is explained by those two factors.
By derbOac 2025-12-1712:24 What happened in the last 6 months or so to affect those numbers? According to them, Chrome increased in percentage quite a but recently and the others all got "compressed" towards 0.
Looking at the last 10 years gives a different perspective (not great for Firefox but maybe underscores something is different recently in general):
https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worl...
I can't imagine browsing the web on my phone and tablet without Firefox mobile. That would honestly be the biggest loss once this CEO takes this nonsense to the logical end.
I'm genuinely curious. What does FireFox mobile have over it's competition?
You can't install UBlock Origin on mobile.
Like I still use FireFox on mobile, just purely out of habit. I don't really see anything better about it (I am quite inexperienced when it comes to phones).
You can install uBlock Origin on Firefox mobile; it's the only reason I use it.
Oh wow TIL. Thanks, that is amazing.
I just looked it up. 2023 was when it started. I'm surprised Android even allows something like this.
Yeah at some point it wasn't possible. I think Mozilla did some workaround by having a bunch of wetted extensions?
By literallywho 2025-12-180:10 Pretty sure even back then, uBO was on the list of vetted extensions. I remember using it prior to 2023 (since like 2019), on my old OnePlus 6. There may have been a period it wasn’t available, but surely it wasn’t gone for too long.
By rurban 2025-12-1712:43 I use several extensions on Fennec mobile: AdGuard AdBlocker, Google & YouTube cookie consent popup blocking, NoScript, Privacy Badger, Translate this page, Web Archives, uBlacklist
When they say "don't support it anymore", does that mean they're back to the IE era of using Chrome specific technologies so it doesn't work in any browser, do they use user-agent sniffing and show a big popup, or is it just that they're not testing it in FF anymore? The latter shouldn't be an issue as long as they use standards, the only thing they would run into in this day and age is browser specific bugs - but Safari seems to have that the most.
By OkayPhysicist 2025-12-1716:56 It's exclusively UA sniffing. IMO, Firefox should take the nuclear option and just start reporting the Chrome UA.
By p-e-w 2025-12-1711:11 No, they mostly just show a popup telling you to use Chrome. Websites work fine if you switch the user agent.
By mosquitobiten 2025-12-1711:291 reply that 3% is of total users including mobile which chrome is king because it's basically force fed to users. this is important because there is no choice with browsers for the common mobile user, most of them don't know what is a browser even if they used it every day. also in the 2000s IE was king because guess what? that was what came preinstalled with winxp
By glenstein 2025-12-1717:55 Exactly! I keep banging this drum but I'm fascinated by the possibility of Android being required to have a pop-up where people can choose different browsers, as a potential remedy to Google's monopoly. Because engineering a path dependency on Google search, from mobile hardware, to software, to default browsers, to default search on the browser, I think is part of how they've enforced their monopoly. There's been a legal judgment that they are, in fact a monopoly, but I don't think any remedy has been decided on yet. And there's a lot of historical precedent for a pop-up to select a default as a remedy to software monopolies.
Granted in Google's case, it seems that the Monopoly judgment was with respect to ad markets, but locking people into search to serve ads might be understood as part of the structure of that monopoly.
By seanhunter 2025-12-1721:43 This is completely untrue in my experience. I use firfox exclusively on my personal laptop and have done exclusively for years. I don’t even have chromium installed.
I can’t remember the last time a website was unusable on firefox. It’s certainly not common.
By OkayPhysicist 2025-12-1716:50 Most of those sites are doing a little move called "lying". I occasionally (once every couple of months) run into a site claiming to not support Firefox. I can't recall a single site that wasn't a tech demo of some bleeding edge feature of Chrome that didn't magically start working when I turned on my Chrome UserAgent.
(Hey, if you work at Snapchat: fix your shit. Your desktop site is by far the most mainstream website I've come across that lies like this)
By J_Shelby_J 2025-12-1720:37 > Even most technologists stopped using it long ago.
Funny, because chrome has always been the browser for laptops users, while Firefox has always been the browser of power users.
Wikimedia stats from last year put it at 15% of desktop browsers, ahead of Safari and Edge.
By embedding-shape 2025-12-1711:21 Yeah, every website has different stats about user-agents, depends a lot on the types of users you attract. I bet HN has Firefox usage ratio above 15% for sure, while sites like Instagram probably has way below the global average.
Global browser marketshare never made much sense. You need to figure out what your users use, then aim to be compatible for most of those, and ignore any global stats.
By Timwi 2025-12-1711:22 I wouldn't be surprised if there's a correlation between people frequenting Wikimedia websites and people using Firefox. It would be nice to know.
If people are curious, all the stats for Wikimedia properties are here: https://analytics.wikimedia.org/dashboards/browsers/#desktop...
As of December 7th, Firefox is 10.3% of traffic there. This makes it the #2 browser, after Chrome (at 62.2%) -- a spot it has been dueling with Edge over for the last year or so.
I'm inclined to think that "people visiting wikipedia" is a fairly representative sample of "normal users", overall.
By ted_dunning 2025-12-1717:36 I'm inclined to think that "people visiting wikipedia" skews heavily towards "people who like facts" which is distinctly not a normal web viewer.
My software stopped working because its drawing on canvas in a way that causes firefox to glitch with hw acceleration enabled. Not one of my customers/users complained
By moron4hire 2025-12-1712:46 The only reasons I've ever put effort into Firefox support in my software was A) I find it helps push me to write towards standards better if I include multiple browser engines, which makes it more likely I'll support Safari without extra effort, which is difficult for me to test on because I don't daily drive any Apple devices (works about 80% of the time), and B) to avoid the shit-fit I would receive if I ever posted it as a "Show HN." It has never come up as an actual user requirement.
> Many banks and government websites don’t even support it
Because their web developers are too lazy to write anything to proper standards. They're doing some kind of lazy "Check for Chrome, because everyone must be running that, if not, redirect to an Unsupported page".
I've yet to find a website that "refuses" to work in Firefox which doesn't work just fine when I use a user agent switching extension to present a standard Chrome on MacOS or Chrome on Windows useragent.
By CoastalCoder 2025-12-1711:441 reply Are you sure they're all lazy?
Another pretty common experience for developers is wanting to do things "the right way", but being overridden by management.
By OkayPhysicist 2025-12-1716:58 Yes, because in this case "the right way" is to do nothing.
By timeon 2025-12-1711:48 Have not used Chrome-based browsers 3+ years and never had problem with Firefox. Sometimes Safari was not working 100% - but nothing serious. Maybe it is because, only page from google I use is Youtube; however Firefox has best experience there, even better than Chrome - thanks to proper uBlock Origin.
Given the current state of the Chrome family of browsers and the anti adblocker stance from Google, i'd think that alone would guarantee Firefox a steady user base.
Not sure how users cope with Chrome-based browsers and intrusive ads.
By lifthrasiir 2025-12-1711:031 reply That's just a wishful thinking. Too many ordinary users accept ads as inevitable annoyances and don't even know about the very existence of adblockers.
By yupyupyups 2025-12-1711:551 reply Maybe because they don't know any better.
By lifthrasiir 2025-12-1712:011 reply Of course, but how would you convince them to switch? Not just your friends, but as a whole.
By computerfriend 2025-12-1717:40 If only they could see ads for ad blockers.
By purplehat_ 2025-12-1711:212 reply I've tried a few times to convince people in my life who would self describe as "bad with computers" to download an adblocker, but they usually find the friction too high. Adding extensions is unfamiliar for most, and even if it seems very basic for us, the non-tech people I know don't really want to deal with the risk of unknown unknowns from that, let alone switching to a healthier browser. (Perhaps reasonable since it feels like these days half the extensions on the Chrome Web Store are spyware or adware behind the scenes.)
I also suspect that those who lived through the days of frequent Windows errors and Chrome running out of memory all the time often expect software to fail in weird and unexpected ways, and a lot of people adopt a "don't fix it if it isn't broken" mindset.
Still, uBlock Lite and Brave browser are definitely easy wins and I'm glad to see more random people in my life using them than I would have expected. :)
By yummypaint 2025-12-1713:16 If it's the computer of an older family member or something, just put Firefox and ubo on their system for them and be done with it. They will use whatever software is preloaded, and being shown how to use it is a much lower barrier to entry than the cognitive load of finding, vetting, installing, and configuring new software.
I used to try to patiently explain why people should do xyz. Now I explain to people why I'm going to change xyz on their device, and if they don't slam the breaks I just do what needs to be done right then. If someone doesn't know what an adblocker is they are getting one so they can see for themselves and reflect on what companies have been putting them through for years to make some incremental amount of money.
The last time uBlock Origin caused me any pain was a on a toys r us rewards management site.
By purplehat_ 2025-12-1711:49 That's really funny. Yes, in case it wasn't clear for others reading this and thinking about installing these, it's almost certain that uBlock Origin and Brave browser will not cause you any problems and if you're using stock Chrome I really encourage you improve your situation dramatically for ~5 minutes worth of effort.
It's a common cognitive error called Moral Thought-Action Fusion. The idea is that thinking about an action implies a desire to perform the action. You will see these in other circumstances as well. One place it is commonly used is in describing non-religious moral systems that must form their moral bases without axioms from God. A non-religious person may form a considered position against murder, for instance, but the fact that they state the pros and cons before choosing against is considered evidence that they wanted to.
The core reasoning system here is probably moral intuitionism: if you have an explanation for why something is bad, it is not something you consider intuitively bad and consequently you must be wanting to do it.
I think I've seen it in online communities a lot more in the last couple of decades, and I suspect it's just a characteristic of the endless march of Eternal September.
Don't really agree here. The point against him is thinking in a very shallow way that stopping ad block means bringing in so much, which I guess is true in a certain basic level, but ignores how shitty that would contribute to making the internet.
And believe it or not, human behavior is such that something that is not even i in the space of possibilities is much less likely to occur that something that has been considered and rejected. It might have been rejected ow, but what the calculus changes?
By LordDragonfang 2025-12-1721:13 > which I guess is true in a certain basic level...
Which is the level he's acknowledging it on. Short term profit that cannibalises product value and user goodwill is all-too-common in the modern corporate climate, and he's acknowledging the elephant in the room.
> ...but ignores how shitty that would contribute to making the internet
Presumably, that would be the reason "he considers it "off-mission""
While I agree that him phrasing his reason not to so weakly instead of "doing so would kill firefox" is a little concerning, a CEO probably doesn't want to be overly honest about the other, less investor-friendly elephant in the room, "the only reason anyone uses Firefox is for uBO".
But also, we don't actually know how exactly he said it, since it's not a direct quote. For all we know, it was an offhanded remark, or he said it in a tone that meant he knew what a terrible idea it was. We're trying to read tea-leaves from a single paraphrased remark.
By im3w1l 2025-12-1718:33 To some extent I agree, but if someone is deep in the weeds of speculation, not just saying pros and cons of murder in general but also having drawn up lists of people with pros and cons of murdering each of them and possible ways of doing so, then that's starting to get a little suspicious. Perhaps not bad in itself, but suspicious.
By stuartjohnson12 2025-12-1711:541 reply I don't think HN comments have an irrational burning pit of hate for Mozilla. If Mozilla was shaped more like the Tor foundation in their words and actions I think a lot more people would be supportive.
By rat9988 2025-12-1713:13 There is no "HN comments". Each commenter has its own sensibilities. Some of them just saw the word Adblock from new ceo and went full defense mode without trying to understand that the guy was just talking about what he feels is good, and there is no need to come with the worst possible interpretation of each sentence.
Yeah, the article's quoting didn't help its case. It doesn't seem fair to quote someone saying [I don't think X is a good idea] as evidence they are about to do X.
That being said, in the original context [0] it does sound a lot more like an option on the table. That original article presents it as the weakest of a list of things they're about to explore - but who knows, maybe the journalist has butchered what was said. It is an ambiguous idea without more context about how close it is to Mozilla trying to make life hard for ad-blockers.
[0] https://www.theverge.com/tech/845216/mozilla-ceo-anthony-enz...
By tdeck 2025-12-1711:20 In addition "off-mission" is a pretty weak way to describe completely destroying your credibility and betraying your user base. Building the Firefox phone was off mission. Buying Pocket was off mission. Maybe it's just me, but selling your remaining faithful users down the river to make a quick buck from advertisers seems a little, I don't know... worse than that?
By autoexec 2025-12-1710:57 The part about making money through advertising and selling data to 3rd parties (though "search and AI placement deals") is already not a good sign. Planning to make their money through ads and surveillance capitalism is already making it impossible to say "I always know my data is in my control. I can turn the thing off, and they’re not going to do anything sketchy"
By luckylion 2025-12-1719:00 It might just as well have been something that was supposed to sound young and fun ("I don't want to do that") and ends up leaving too much room for interpretation.
If you have the power to do something, saying you might do it but that you don't want to makes people imagine you'd do it. If you have a knife and talk about how you "might stab people, but don't want to", that's a very different message than having a knife and saying "obviously I'm not going to stab people, violence is not an option".
The latter reassures, the former depends heavily on what the recipient of the message thinks of you, and whether they can imagine you stabbing people.
If that quote was accurate, then either he just said something and wanted to wing it, or they should reconsider their communication strategists.
Except that expressing loud doubts about something ethically dubious is often a sign that an opposite action will be taken. So many business people want this moral excuse "but I had doubts" while being totally cynical
Logically that is setting up an argument where no matter what the CEO says you're going to assume they're going to take an action. If they say yea, obviously it is a yes. If they say nay, it means they're thinking about it which is basically a yes! That is a completely reasonable position, often it makes sense to ignore what someone says and focus only on their capabilities. But if that is the situation then it doesn't make any sense to quote what someone says because it is about to be ignored.
By kunley 2025-12-188:44 My point is to have an evaluation of the cynicism behind that guy's words; so it's not about ignoring what he says - in fact, the opposite
By Brian_K_White 2025-12-1711:291 reply "feels off mission" exposes how little conviction there is behind this position.
That is a flimsy tissue paper statement about a concept that should be a bedrock principle.
It's irrationally charitable to give it any credit at all. Especially in context where anyone who's awake should understand they need to be delivering an unquestionably clear message about unquestionably clear goals and core values, because this ain't that.
Or rather, it is a clear message, just a different message to a different audience.
You wouldn't calculate the expected RoI of killing adblockers if killing adblockers was never considered.
Part of being CEO/running a business is considering all options, but it doesn't mean it will ever move beyond the ROI/risk phase. Ever read one of the risk assessments in a companies public filings? It's the same thing.
Finally, a situation besides “are we the baddies” where a Mitchell and Webb sketch is highly relevant.
By clarionbell 2025-12-1713:23 Have you tried "Introduce AI summaries and kill the adblockers" ?
By kace91 2025-12-1713:00 Part of being a CEO is also being the public face of the product, and knowing what to say and how.
On day one he’s put his appearance on the top of hacker news under “is Mozilla trying to kill himself?”.
By jayd16 2025-12-180:28 Yes, the problem is that it is considered an option at all. Are they running ROIs on harvesting passwords, blackmailing users and infecting all clients with malware?
All options that are in line with the organization’s mission.
The CEO of an organization like Mozilla even considering blocking adblockers for profit is like the president of Amnesty International considering to sell lists of dissidents to the secret police.
By darkwater 2025-12-1711:25 > The CEO of an organization like Mozilla even considering blocking adblockers for profit is like the president of Amnesty International considering to sell lists of dissidents to the secret police.
No, for Amnesty International it would be more like not considering somebody a political prisoner because the country that took the prisoner is a 1st world country and they don't want to expose themselves on a matter that would risk the donations from a certain population.
Yes, that happened in the aftermath of the Catalan attempt at peaceful independence in October 2017 by Amnesty International Spain.
By mystraline 2025-12-1711:35 But the secret police said they would "real good care" of those dissidents, while sliding double the money initially offered.
By boomboomsubban 2025-12-1710:471 reply It's not hard to imagine the last default search contract negotiation had Google go "we'll give you $x if you kill manifest v2, $x-$150 million if you don't."
edited to correct my misunderstanding.
By jamesnorden 2025-12-1711:01 Firefox supports Manifest v3, they just didn't kill Manifest v2 after implementing it.
By gr4vityWall 2025-12-1710:48 > You wouldn't calculate the expected RoI of killing adblockers if killing adblockers was never considered.
I agree, although if someone isn't the kind of person who would calculate that, they're probably not the person who will become the CEO of a company that size in the first place. I don't think organizations have the right incentives in place to push people with those values to the top.
By littlecranky67 2025-12-1710:501 reply for it to be considered, somebody must have offered to pay that 150M. Or he considered going to somebody (we all know that somebody is Google) and asking them for that money in return for killing ad blockers.
By grayhatter 2025-12-1713:21 That was my read too, he's making a public offer, and setting the minimum negotiation price.
By freeopinion 2025-12-1713:05 You wouldn't calculate a figure and publish it as the first step in any reasonable price negotiation. Any pricing you mention publicly would be double or triple the number you are willing to accept. By the time you are talking publicly about realistic numbers you are well into the private negotiations.
By duskdozer 2025-12-1710:53 I could see myself saying something like that despite having no intention to do it. But I'm also not a CEO.
I agree with all the people saying it would drive a lot of the remaining users away, and I hope they don't do it. But I'm not remotely surprised that they considered following what their biggest competitor (Chrome) already did.
Because Chrome was built by the world's biggest advertising company. If the World Wildlife Fund started selling ivory to pay the bills, would that not be surprising?
That analogy doesn't really work, though: Mozilla's goal is not specifically to fight against online advertising. Ad-blocking is connected to their goals, definitely, but they clearly have to make compromises, and I'm not that surprised that they'd think about that one.
By lukeschlather 2025-12-1717:30 > they clearly have to make compromises
Why? They have ample free cashflow. They haven't had money problems in 10 years. If they're worried about Google withdrawing support they should save money in an endowment, not do things to help Google.
“I wouldn’t sell sexual services. I’ve spent an evening checking the going market rate for someone my age in my area and it’s 2k! Can you believe that? That’s a ton of money! Totally not going to do it though”.
It’s an eyebrow raising comment at the very least.
By RossBencina 2025-12-1710:581 reply > It feels off-mission.
That's supposedly The Verge paraphrasing the CEO (Unfortunately I can't verify because the full article requires subscription.) I would like to know what the CEO actually said because "it feels off-mission" is a strange thing for the leader of the mission to say. I would hope that they know the mission inside out. No need to go by feels.
Here's that part of the article:
> In our conversation, Enzor-DeMeo returns often to two things: that Mozilla cares about and wants to preserve the open web, and that the open web needs new business models. Mozilla’s ad business is important and growing, he says, and he worries “about things going behind paywalls, becoming more closed off.” He says the internet’s content business isn’t exactly his fight, but that Mozilla believes in the value of an open and free (and thus ad-supported) web.
> At some point, though, Enzor-DeMeo will have to tend to Mozilla’s own business. “I do think we need revenue diversification away from Google,” he says, “but I don’t necessarily believe we need revenue diversification away from the browser.” It seems he thinks a combination of subscription revenue, advertising, and maybe a few search and AI placement deals can get that done. He’s also bullish that things like built-in VPN and a privacy service called Monitor can get more people to pay for their browser. He says he could begin to block ad blockers in Firefox and estimates that’d bring in another $150 million, but he doesn’t want to do that. It feels off-mission.
> One way to solve many of these problems is to get a lot more people using Firefox. And Enzor-DeMeo is convinced Mozilla can get there, that people want what the company is selling. “There is something to be said about, when I have a Mozilla product, I always know my data is in my control. I can turn the thing off, and they’re not going to do anything sketchy. I think that is needed in the market, and that’s what I hope to do.”
By shaky-carrousel 2025-12-1711:411 reply I don't like how he assumes that a free internet must be ad-supported. The ad-supported web is hideous, even with their ads removed. A long, convoluted, inane mess of content.
On the other hand, the clean web feels more direct, to the point, and passionate. I prefer to read content written by passion, not by money seeking purposes.
By lifthrasiir 2025-12-1712:043 reply If something is free (en masse), you are probably a product. If you don't want to be a product you need to give something out instead, like ads.
By shaky-carrousel 2025-12-1712:401 reply That's not correct. Linux is free, almost all open source is, many projects, websites are done out of passion.
I contribute to open source projects and nobody "gave me something", as I did it because I wanted to make it better. Like me, there are many others. Nobody is "the product" there.
What the saying you are misrepresenting means is "carefully check free things as you may be the product". Not "free things cannot exist, you either are the product or you pay".
By SoftTalker 2025-12-1716:471 reply Linux development is paid for either directly or in-kind by companies including Red Hat, IBM, Canonical, Oracle, and others. It's free to use and mostly open source but if it existed only on passion it would be something far less than it actually is.
People need to eat and have a roof over their heads.
By shaky-carrousel 2025-12-1717:421 reply Those companies pay the improvements they want for their usage case, which is usually far removed from what normal users want. I don't really need support for thousands of CPUs and terabytes of RAM.
By SoftTalker 2025-12-1717:491 reply Do you remember what Linux was like before the big corporations started contributing/supporting it? Just getting X11 working with your video card and monitor could take hours or days. Setting up a single server could easily be a "project" taking weeks. And god forbid you ever had to update it.
By shaky-carrousel 2025-12-1718:05 That in particular was thanks to the X.Org foundation. And while it made things easier, it didn't take "days" setting up a graphics, it took hours at most. And setting up a server didn't take weeks, it was an 1-2 day task at worst.
By autoexec 2025-12-1716:45 > If something is free (en masse), you are probably a product.
If something being free ever mattered to your privacy, it hasn't for a long time. Today no matter how expensive something is you are probably a product anyway. Unethical and greedy companies don't care how much money you paid them, they'll want the additional cash they'll get from selling you out at every opportunity. Much of my favorite software is free and doesn't compromise my privacy.
By kgwxd 2025-12-1712:48 Fine, but don't make my machine do work as part of the agreement between host and advertiser (the only reason I can utilize an ad blocker in the first place). And definitely don't try to make it so my machine can't object to you trying. On top of all that, most places want to take my money, AND force ads, AND make my machine part of the process.
By Snarwin 2025-12-1713:07 I thought the "free" in "free web" was supposed to mean "free as in freedom," not "free as in beer." Have we really reached the point where the CEO of Mozilla no longer understands or cares about that distinction?
I'm not sure it's that uncharitable...
The original quote was apparently said without an understanding of the customer base as if ad blockers were not a core piece of their value proposition.
This person doesn't understand their customer if they think it's going to bring in more money to cut ad blockers... It would bring in far less money because they would lose most of their customer base. It's not off mission: it's off Target.
By xedrac 2025-12-1720:11 I would go as far to say that ad blockers are the primary value proposition of Firefox at this point. If they lose that, I have little reason to use it on my phone or my workstations.
> a pretty uncharitable interpretation
like hoping for the best, but planning for the worst, you must interpret people's intentions using the same methodology. By quoting that axing adblock could be bringing $150mil, but also saying that he doesn't want to do it, it's advertising that a higher price would work - it's a way to deniably solicit an offer.
By SiempreViernes 2025-12-1711:05 So then we should interpret Bruno adopting this uncharitable interpretation as evidence they are intentionally trying to ruin Mozillas reputation rather than sincerely analysing an interview, right?
And in turn my comment above is not a honest remark that your suggested interpretation strategy seems to be selectively applied, but rather an attempt to hurt your standing with your peers.
"Uncharitable interpretation" is putting it mildly. I don't know the context for the quote but imagine being the CEO. You might give one hour interview outlining the tradeoffs you need to do to keep things running, and a random blogger takes a 5 second clip, makes an absurd interpretation and ends up on hackernews.
By glenstein 2025-12-1718:07 Right, I was ready for the headline to be this like deep dive into the history of letting go of several engineers, or assessing the costs of purchasing pocket, or a deep dive into source code changes related to dabbling in ad tech or something.
You know, actual reporting sourcing something new. But in truth, it was just extrapolating a bunch of sweet nothings from the freezing of a quote already published in The Verge. It reminds me of Boston media market sports reporting. You're a sports writer, you have a deadline, and you have to take Curt Schilling's press conference and try and turn it into a story. So take something he said and squeeze it dry, trying to extract some implication of clubhouse drama, to drive the next new cycle and survive to your next paycheck as a reporter. That's the grift, that's the grind.
By kristjank 2025-12-1711:25 Do you really harbor so much charity towards tech CEOs that you can't see its other meaning as at least equally as likely?
It costs Mozilla literally nothing to reassure its privacy and user-controlled principles. Instead we got a jk...unless... type of response. This is cowardice and like another commenter has said, a negotiation offer disguised as a mission statement.
I'm concerned about the original quote which has a very weak sentiment. "it feels off-mission". Not something strong like "I'm completely against it" or "we'll never do that".
Even better would be similar to the article sentiment: "we could get 150 million now but degrade one of our few features that distinguishes us from other browsers + break a lot user trust, which would bring greater losses in the long term".
By glenstein 2025-12-1718:02 That just seems like an ordinary case of purity test syndrome. What they said is they don't want to do it, but they're being convicted of a hypothetical belief in wanting to hypothetically do it maybe, maybe which is the last refuge of scoundrels who have no stronger sourcing for more well-grounded accusations. But in internet comment sections there's no need for accountability or charitable interpretation, and so you can accuse someone of practically anything and it's their job to bend over backwards against the most skeptical interpretations to pass the purity test. So there's a metagame not just of indicating your values but of extrapolating as to all the possible permutations of uncharitable interpretation that could lead to accusations so that you have to artfully construct your phrasing to get out ahead of that. It's never on the internet trolls making the accusation to be accountable to ordinary norms of charitable interpretation.
By prmoustache 2025-12-1712:06 It isn't even true that it would bring $150M. This is a calculation accounting on users staying on Firefox.
If they do that, most of the remaining users would flee and goodbye to your millions if you don't have any userbase anymore to justify asking money to anyone.
By dizhn 2025-12-1711:06 That's peanuts. Google would pay them a lot more to disable adblocking for good. And it sounds like this guy would do it for the right amount. That said, it is kind of a lackluster article.
By mossTechnician 2025-12-1713:00 OpenAI CEO Sam Altman once boasted that the company hadn’t "put a sexbot avatar in ChatGPT yet." Two months later, they did[0].
Interpreting the Mozilla CEO the same way may not be charitable, but it is certainly familiar.
[0]: https://futurism.com/future-society/sam-altman-adult-ai-reve...
By tschumacher 2025-12-1712:55 Can someone explain how banning ad blockers from Firefox would bring in money for Mozilla? I can see how it would bring in money for other actors such as news outlets, YouTube, etc., but Mozilla doesn't have a big website where they are showing ads.
By matheusmoreira 2025-12-1717:49 "It feels off-mission" is incredibly weak opposition to something that would go against core values. It just means this guy's price is higher than 150 million dollars.
Everybody has their price. I'm ideologically opposed to advertising but if someone put 150 million dollars on my table and told me to stop making an issue out of it I think I'd take the money. Being set for life trumps being called a hypocrite.
By grayhatter 2025-12-1713:15 CEOs are well known for turning down money, and always resisting the urge to squeeze every last drop of good will from an acquired property, right?
I think it's an apt warning, I'd have to read the literal interview transcripts to really draw a conclusion one way or the other. But the simple fact that this is on his mind, and felt like mentioning killing ad block was something Mozilla could do, and is considering doing, was a safe thing to say to a journalist... There's not a chance in hell I'd say anything remotely like that to a journalist.
When someone tells you who they are, believe them.
By KurSix 2025-12-1716:54 The issue isn't the explicit "we won't do it," it's that it was framed as a concrete, priced option at all
By rchaud 2025-12-1717:07 How would it bring in $150m? Is that some tranche of funding Google is witholding from them until they disable extensions?
By Raed667 2025-12-1712:41 I have seen these discussions in companies where privacy is the selling point.
These kind of questions usually come from non-engineers, people in product or sales who see privacy as a feature or marketing point, and if the ROI is higher they don't give a fuck and would pitch anything that would make a buck
By ikrenji 2025-12-1718:22 I only use Firefox over Chrome because it has adblock. So where does the $150 million comes from if people won't use it without adblock? Seems comrade didn't think this through...
By OkayPhysicist 2025-12-1717:38 It costs the CEO of Mozilla nothing to make hard, convicted statements that all their users agree with. If it was me, the quote would be something like "but then they'd need to find a new CEO, because I'd be in prison for what I'd do to anyone who even suggested it".
Literally the only people who talk about Mozilla, or read things about what Mozilla is up to, are unusually motivated power users who really, really care about ad blocking and privacy. They may still have other users, but those people are coasting on momentum from when their grandkid installed Firefox on their computer years ago. They're not reading interviews with the new CEO. Yet Mozilla seems to consistently fail utterly at messaging to their only engaged users.
It's not even that they're doing evil shit, they're just absolutely terrible at proclaiming that they are committed to not doing evil shit.
By anothernewdude 2025-12-1710:333 reply It wouldn't bring in their estimate, it'd kill the browser.
By cryptonym 2025-12-1710:36 Maybe they'd still get paid $150M for that, while only having to barely keep the browser alive, with no user request, for illusion of non-monopoly.
Fewer devs, more bucks, big win for the execs on the short term.
By Croftengea 2025-12-1710:381 reply Right? This is what all these MBAs and supply chain efficiency experts never get.
By autoexec 2025-12-1711:03 They don't care if their plans cause long term harm as long as they can cash out after the short term profits come in. As long as there are new companies/products to jump to and exploit next they're making money which is all they care about.
By lifthrasiir 2025-12-1710:371 reply The estimate does sound reasonable if it's an one-off payment. I agree that no one would pay that amount of money each year to keep adblocking from Firefox.
It's not impossible that people would pay Firefox that much yearly to keep their current user-base from using ad blockers. However, what is impossible is to imagine Firefox would have anything close to their current user base if people were prevented from using ad blockers. Most likely they would shrink to almost 0 users overnight if they did this. There are very few reasons to use Firefox over Chrome or Safari (or even Edge) other than the much better ad blocking (or any ad blocking, on mobile).
By lifthrasiir 2025-12-1712:122 reply That doesn't explain the apparent market share of 2--3%, which is still quite large if you think about.
I believe most non-techie users are just lingering, using Firefox just because they used to. Since Firefox doesn't have a built-in ad blocking and the knowledge about adblocking is not universal (see my other comment), it is possible that there are a large portion of Firefox users who don't use adblockers and conversely adblocking users are in a minority. If this is indeed the case, Mozilla can (technically) take such a bet as such policy will affect a smaller portion of users. But that would work only once; Mozilla doesn't have any more option like that after all. That's why I see $150M is plausible, but only once.
By anothernewdude 2025-12-189:45 Ad-blockers are the most used extensions on firefox. Origin itself has 10m installs, there are others with 3m and few with 1m installs.
By simiones 2025-12-1712:34 Of course, I don't know the actual percent of FF users that use ad block. But I think it's far more likely that it is a majority of current FF users, rather than it being a negligible minority. I think 2-3% of web users is not an implausible approximation of how many people use ad block overall on the web. It's not an obscure technology, it's quite well known, even if few people bother with it.
Edit: actually I'm way off - it seems estimates are typically around 30-40% of overall users on the web having some kind of ad blocker. So, the Firefox percentage being 60-80+% seems almost a given to me.
By caycep 2025-12-1721:18 Ah, instead of AGILE, it's MAFIA nowadays
By staticassertion 2025-12-1713:171 reply People are absolutely somersaulting through hoops to try to make "I don't want to do that" into "I'm going to do it" in the comments lol
No, they are accurately observing that the "I don't want to do it" and "feels off mission" statements are FAR weaker than they can be and should be.
Such weak statements are either a real mistake or show movement away from those principles which should be bedrock for Mozilla and towards some justification to abandon those principles.
It's not like the industry has no precedents on this. "Don't Be Evil" was the motto of a company that is now one of the apex predators in the surveillance capitalism ecosystem.
Unwise to try to dismiss and laugh off legitimate alarms.
Instead of criticizing an actual contract to engage with a third party or a code push or an affirmative statement, you're attempting to parse a random combination of tea leaves and chicken entrails to indict Mozilla for a hypothetical thing that they explicitly said they're not doing. If that's not scraping the bottom of the barrel, it's only because you're able to imagine an even lower bottom than that that you're willing to reach for.
By toss1 2025-12-1719:58 >>you're attempting to parse a random combination of tea leaves and chicken entrails
It is exactly the opposite — it is reading the actual language used for its intended meaning.
Every CEO is expected to not only understand the issues he faces and is managing, but to ALSO carefully choose the words to describe the situation and the intentions of the organization he leads.
When a CEO makes a statement about what should be a core fundamental principle of an organization, we can certainly expect that CEO to choose their words carefully.
Those words are, or at least should be, the exact opposite of "tea leaves and chicken entrails".
If the CEO is sloppy and the chosen words should actually be considered "tea leaves and chicken entrails", that is a different problem of a less-than-competent CEO.
If those words were actually chosen carefully, consider these two statements:
The actual statement: "[I don't] want to do that. It feels off-mission"
A different statement: "This is a core fundamental principle of Mozilla and I will not lead the company in that direction — not on my watch".
One could technically say "they both say 'Not today'".
But that would be absurd, and stupidly throwing out significant meaning in what the CEO chose to say and how he chose to say it.
He made the first vague statement with weasel words instead of something resembling the bold and unambiguous statement resembling the second statement.
The statement he did make is "I don't want to", which type of statement has often preceded an eventual "sorry, we had to".
There is a lot to make Firefox users nervous, and his choice of statement here did not help matters.
By jajuuka 2025-12-1717:01 This is just tone policing.
"we won't do this" But you didn't say you'd never do this. "okay we'll never do this" But you didn't say you'd never ever do this. "fine we'll never ever do this" But you didn't say that it's never entered your mind once.
They said they won't do it and your interpretation is to demand they said it with more words? Come on, let's stop this nonsense. Can Firefox users ever be happy?
By skywhopper 2025-12-1713:41 I wish the CEO of Mozilla could have stated the commitment a little more strongly than “it feels off-mission”. Privacy, user control, and security of the web browsing experience are (or should be) the CORE of Mozilla's mission. This isn’t a decision to take lightly on vibes. Allowing ad-blockers (or any content manipulation plugins users want) should be a deep commitment.
By LtWorf 2025-12-1718:25 It would bring users leaving.
By Ensorceled 2025-12-1712:25 I mean, that's also exactly what you would say if you had a $150M offer on the table, had received a lot of push back and were now just checking the waters and waiting to consolidate your position.
By kgwxd 2025-12-1711:38 Mentioning it is just the first of many softening phases. Its abuse 101. At some point we'll have "made him do it".
By csomar 2025-12-1711:03 > It feels off-mission.
He didn't say it is off-mission. But just that it feels. My guess is that he is looking at a higher number.
By hsbauauvhabzb 2025-12-1710:492 reply I’d happily pay $100 a year for Firefox WITH an adblocker as long as part of the money is put towards ongoing internet freedom and preventing attestation
As with all the comments about "I'd pay X dollars to not be the product", it's been shown over and over again that paying money is not going to void corporate desire to simply double dip by raising prices while also showing ads.
Or for a similar point, it's been shown over and over that attempting to crowdsource the revenue is a staggeringly unrealistic response with no real world precedent in the history either of browsers or online crowdsourced funding. You would think that would matter to people who point to that as a possible panacea.
Actual attempts to get users to pay for the browser itself, like what Opera did, simply didn't work and led to the insolvency of the browser and having to sell it off to someone harvesting its users as data.
By homebrewer 2025-12-1719:201 reply You might want to look up Thunderbird crowd funding over the past couple of years. Spoiler: it's been very successful.
By glenstein 2025-12-1720:45 Check Firefox's annual budget compared to Thunderbird's annual budget and get back to me.
By arealaccount 2025-12-1711:062 reply Orion browser is a thing
By handedness 2025-12-1722:41
By saubeidl 2025-12-1711:12 A closed source thing.
Imagine you are in a marriage and your spouse say: "I can sleep with other people, doesn’t want to do that. It feels off-mission".
I don't understand context, but my honest reaction will be: "WTF, you just said? What type of relationship you think we have if we discuss such things?"
I definitely understand why people worry. This is just crazy to weight trust in money. If this is on the table and discussed internally, then what we are talking about?
'T' in Mozilla Firefox means 'Trust'.
Yeah, I've once said in a relationship "Look, sure, she maybe pretty, but I want to be with you, so no, I am not going to reach out to her, don't worry". Apparently, it was a poor way to word this idea.
By speed_spread 2025-12-1712:441 reply "Fucking her brains out would feel off mission"
By Joker_vD 2025-12-1713:02 Yes, people tend to try to dig out additional information from the particular wording (talk about a hidden channel) based on how they would phrase the same message themselves. That's why communication is hard.
By tokai 2025-12-1711:10 Oh no, we're not supposed to actually parse the words a CEO spew forth. Get out of here.
By baxtr 2025-12-1712:13 "It feels off-mission" is very different from "It's absolutely off-mission and against everything we stand for".
By cgfjtynzdrfht 2025-12-1720:27 [dead]
By jajuuka 2025-12-1716:53 Standard Firefox users looking for anything to be mad about. Even when it makes zero sense.
It's kinda frustrating that Mozilla's CEO thinks that axing ad-blockers would be financially beneficial for them. Quite the opposite is true (I believe) since a ton of users would leave Firefox for alternatives.
The whole web ecosystem was first run by VC money and everything was great until every corner was taken, the land grab was complete and the time to recoup the investment has come.
Once the users were trapped for exploitation, it doesn’t make sense to have a browser that blocks ads. How are they supposed to pay software salaries and keep the lights on? People don’t like paying for software, demand constant updates and hate subscriptions. They all end up doing one of those since the incentives are perverse, that’s why Google didn’t just ride the Firefox till the end and instead created the Chrome.
It doesn’t make sense to have trillion dollars companies and everything to be free. The free part is until monopolies are created and walled gardens are full with people. Then comes the monetization and those companies don’t have some moral compass etc, they have KPI stock values and analytics and it’s very obvious that blocking ads isn’t good financially.
By mattacular 2025-12-1712:501 reply > The whole web ecosystem was first run by VC money and everything was great until every corner was taken,
Categorically untrue and weird revisionism. Basically the opposite of what actually happened.
I agree with the untrue and revisionism bit, but I disagree with it being the opposite of what happened.
People were trying to figure out how to make money off of the Internet from the early days of the Internet being publicly accessible (rather than a tool used by academic and military institutions). It can be attributed to the downfall of Gopher. It can be attributed to the rise of Netscape and Internet Explorer. While the early web was nowhere near as commercial as it is today, we quickly saw the development of search engines and (ad supported) hosting services that were. By the time 2000's hit, VC money was very much starting to drive the game. In the minds of most people, the Internet was only 5 to 10 years old at that point. (The actual Internet may be much older, but few people took notice of it until the mid-1990's.)
By sedatk 2025-12-1721:42 > People were trying to figure out how to make money off of the Internet from the early days of the Internet being publicly accessible
People were doing that even in ARPANET days. The commercial aspect was seen as a strong incentive to make ARPANET accessible by the masses.
> People don’t like paying for software, demand constant updates and hate subscriptions.
Yes, No, Yes?
I don't demand constant updates. I don't want constant updates. Usually when a company updates software it becomes worse. I am happy with the initial version of 90% of the software I use, and all I want is bug fixes and security updates.
By renewiltord 2025-12-1717:411 reply I suspect then it doesn't matter whether Mozilla kills itself or not. You should be fine with the current release of Firefox. Maybe you'd lose the installer, so all you have to do is put it somewhere safe and you're good.
By renewiltord 2025-12-1721:231 reply Yes yes, I don't want updates. I just want updates. haha.
> People don’t like paying for software, demand constant updates and hate subscriptions.
constant updates
By renewiltord 2025-12-185:37 "Don't give me security updates every time there's a security issue. Instead do it occasionally because I like my vulnerabilities to be a surprise"
If a time comes when there are zero free browser with effective ad-blocking, it will create space for a non-free browser that does it. It would create a whole ecosystem.
I currently pay zero for ad-blocking (FF + uBlock Origin) and it works perfectly; but I would pay if I had to.
By mrtksn 2025-12-1713:11 I think they are trying to balance it between making as much as money possible, risking being sued for monopolistic practices and risking exodus. Microsoft once overplayed their hand and the anger and consumer dissatisfaction was so strong that people left Internet Explorer en masse.
So the best situation for google would be to have borderline monopoly where they pay for the existence of their competition and the competition(Firefox) blocks adblockers too by default but leaving Chrome and Firefox is harder than forcing installin adblockers through the unofficial way.
So basically, all the people who swear they never clicked ads manage to block ads, Firefox and Chrome print money by making sure that ads are shown and clocked by the masses.
> The whole web ecosystem was first run by VC money
Huh? Nexus was funded by CERN.
Newsgrounds was never investor funded.
Yahoo! Directory was just two guys, and you paid to be listed. There were no investors involved.
WebCrawler was a university project. Altavista was a research project.
By gr4vityWall 2025-12-1710:501 reply People seem to forget the non-commercial web ever existed.
By mycall 2025-12-1712:44 The long tail of the web, likely consisting of mostly small or noncommercial sites, are currently numerically huge but individually low traffic. Meanwhile, user attention is dominated by a relatively small set of commercial and platform sites.
That was ine inception age when very few people were online, its not the stage of mass adoption. The mass adoption starts with the dot.com era with mass infrastructure build up.
But sure, if you think that we should start counting from these years you can do that and add a "public funded" era at the beginning.
I came to the web after dotcom and most of the content (accessibke trough search) was blogs and forums. It wasn’t until SEO that fake content started to grow like weeds.
By mrtksn 2025-12-1711:21 That's the time when VC's were making huge investments into the web tech, most companies were losing crazy money.
The mentality of the age was portrayed like this in SV: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo
There were companies that were making some money but those were killed or acquired by companies that give their services for free. Google killed the blogs by killing their RSS reader since they were long into making money stage and their analytics probably demonstrated that it is better people search stuff than directly going to the latest blog posts.
It's the same thing everywhere, the whole industry is like that. Uber loses money until there's no longer viable competition then lose less money by jacking up the prices. The tech is very monopolistic, Peter Thiel is right about the tech business.
By officialchicken 2025-12-1711:27 The existing online mass is what attracted the VC in the first place, same as it ever was. It was mostly privately funded and very much a confederacy (AOL vs Prodigy vs BBS) at the time, much like now.
I take your point, but I think the comment was referring to Web 2.0.
By timeon 2025-12-1711:57 Yeah Web 2.0 was scam but internet is broader than that.
while i may agree with the first line, rest are little skewed perspective.
> People don’t like paying for software, demand constant updates and hate subscriptions.
hate subscription?? may be. if it's anything like Adobe then yes, people will hate.
that constant update, is something planted by these corporates, and their behavior manipulation tactics. People were happily paying for perpetual software, which they can "own" in a cd//dvd.
People weren't happily paying, there was huge pirate business that was run on porn, gambling ads and spyware revenue. Then there were organizations with lots of lawyers paid by the "pay once use forever" companies to enforce the pay part because people didn't want to pay.
One time fee software ment that once your growth slows down you no longer make money and have plenty of customers to support for free. That's why this model was destroyed by the subscription and ad based "free" software.
The last example is Affinity which was the champion of pay once use forever model, very recently they end up getting acquired and their software turned into "free" + subscription.
By rightbyte 2025-12-1712:37 > One time fee software ment that once your growth slows down you no longer make money and have plenty of customers to support for free.
What do you mean. Support contracts were not included by default. Consumers had some initial support to fight off instant reclamations.
By wrxd 2025-12-1719:44 It wasn’t one time fee though. The one time fee bought a copy of the software and its patches. A couple of years later a new version would come out and people had the choice between keeping using the old version or buying the new one.
To convince people to buy they had to add genuinely useful features. I would have bought a new version with new features and better performance. I wouldn’t have bought a new version same as the previous one with AI crammmed in it
Ditto. A fully functional uBlock Origin is the only remaining reason why I'm still sticking with Firefox despite everything
By gvurrdon 2025-12-1710:41 Containers are also very useful indeed; I have to log into various different Google and Github accounts and can do this in a single browser window.
By vanschelven 2025-12-1712:00 It's financially beneficial for them in exactly the same way as setting yourself on fire makes you warmer
Mozilla has pressure from their sugar daddy, Google, to weaken ad-blockers.
By buran77 2025-12-1710:40 The only reason Mozilla matters in the eyes of Google is because it gives the impression there's competition in the browser market.
But Firefox's users are the kind who choose the browser, not use whatever is there. And that choice is driven in part by having solid ad-blockers. People stick with Firefox despite the issues for the ad-blocker. Take that away and Firefox's userbase dwindles to even lower numbers to the point where nobody can pretend they are "competition". That's when they lose any value for Google.
Without the best-of-the-best ad-blocking I will drop Firefox like a rock and move to the next best thing, which will have to be a Chromium based browser. I'll even have a better overall experience on the web when it comes to the engine itself, to give me consolation for not having the best ad-blocker.
It might be financial beneficial once as an up-front payment, but long term, as others have mentioned, really not good for the project to remove the only feature that gives firefox a defensible way to fill it's niche in the market.
By ntoskrnl_exe 2025-12-1713:38 That wouldn’t seem so much out of the ordinary, long-term thinking CEO is an oxymoron these days.
By klabb3 2025-12-1713:08 > Quite the opposite is true (I believe) since a ton of users would leave Firefox for alternatives.
Yes but keep in mind that’s not an individual problem that is solved by switching browsers. If a browser engine dies, the walls get closer and the room smaller. With only Chromium and WebKit left, we may soon have a corporate owned browsers pulling in whatever direction Google and Apple wants. I can think of many things that are good for them but bad for us. For instance, ”Web Integrity” and other DRM.
By agumonkey 2025-12-1710:30 i left chrome to avoid ads.. i'd rather use dillo than ads infested firefox
Which alternatives though? On Mac at least, I'm not aware of any viable non-Chromium alternatives.
By swiftcoder 2025-12-1710:472 reply > On Mac at least, I'm not aware of any viable non-Chromium alternatives
Surely Mac is the only place there is a viable non-Chromium alternative (Safari)?
By deanc 2025-12-1712:16 There is Orion which is built on top of WebKit so you get a lot of the battery life optimisations built into Safari
I think people like to imagine it's not viable because the most commonly known adblocker refuses to release the version for it. Negative news somehow stick better.
Fortunately it's not the only one and for example Adguard works perfectly fine.
By array_key_first 2025-12-1719:261 reply Safari is even further behind chrome in feature set than Firefox.
By array_key_first 2025-12-1719:482 reply Maybe, maybe not. It's getting dangerously close to the modern day IE, where some websites just don't work right and everyone has to do arcane shit to make their websites cross platform.
It's also a closed source browser developed by Apple. It's not competing with Firefox. Everyone contemplating switching to safari over Firefox are not being honest - they're not even on the same playing field.
By swiftcoder 2025-12-1720:351 reply > It's getting dangerously close to the modern day I.E.
This line gets thrown around a lot, but if you look at the supported features, Safari is honestly pretty up-to-date on the actual ratified web standards.
What it doesn't tend to do is implement a bunch of the (often ad-tech focused) drafts Google keeps trying to push through the standards committee
By array_key_first 2025-12-1721:28 I would agree, except for CSS. You still see checks for webkit in CSS fairly regularly.
The only way you can possibly view Safari as "the modern day IE" is if you consider the authoritative source for What Features Should Be Supported to be Chrome.
You should probably think about that for a bit, in light of why IE was IE back in the day.
By littlestymaar 2025-12-188:31 > The only way you can possibly view Safari as "the modern day IE" is if you consider the authoritative source for What Features Should Be Supported to be Chrome.
No. Safari is the modern IE in the sense that it's the default browser on a widely used OS, and it's update cycle is tied to the update of the OS itself by the user, and it drags the web behind by many years because you cannot not support its captive user-base.
It's even worse than IE in a sense, because Apple prevents the existence of an alternative browser on that particular OS (every non-safari OSes on iOS are just a UI on top of Safari).
By mcv 2025-12-1712:36 There are a ton of Firefox forks, especially in order to keep Firefox but without these sort of shenanigans.
The only problem is: what's the difference between the forks, and which is the best? I have no idea.
By mark_l_watson 2025-12-1712:10 I use the Duck Duck Go browser for almost everything. I is open source for iOS/Android/macOS platforms, but I think there are parts of their platform that are not. The DDG browser hits all my privacy requirements.
By actionfromafar 2025-12-1710:501 reply What problems do people have? I use Firefox on Mac since a decade at least.
By janv 2025-12-1711:15 Orion is pretty viable alternative. Based on WebKit.
By 7bit 2025-12-1711:59 I prefer Firefox over Chromium. But I much more prefer having a working ad blocker. Therefore I support that statement and when Firefox starts removing support for that, I'm out and there's enough alternatives I can go to, even tho they're Chromium based.
By saubeidl 2025-12-1711:11 Zen is basically Firefox with Arc's UX. It's by far my favorite browser.
...Safari??
Apple doesn't collect your browsing data, they build in privacy controls that are pretty much as strong as they can manage given the state of the world, and while it doesn't support uBO, it supports a variety of pretty solid adblockers (I use AdGuard, which, AFAICT, Just Works™ and even blocks YouTube ads most of the time, despite their arms race).
By littlestymaar 2025-12-188:25 > Apple doesn't collect your browsing data
That's what their marketing want you to believe, at least.
Their privacy policy is very clear it's not the case though:
> we may collect a variety of information, including:
> […]
> Usage Data. Data about your activity on and use of our offerings, such as app launches within our services, including browsing history; search history;
(emphasis mine)
By timeon 2025-12-1712:03 Question was about non-Chromium browsers. Although Brave's custom ad-blocker is not bad.
By mattbee 2025-12-1712:54 And users would flee not just because they're seeing the ads but because Firefox is obviously the slowest browser again. Stripping the ads is a big performance boost, so right now Firefox feels snappier than Chrome on ad-laden pages.
By KurSix 2025-12-1716:58 The users most likely to leave are the ones who actively recommend Firefox to others and keep it installed on friends' and family's machines...
By PurpleRamen 2025-12-1712:12 Knowing an option, doesn't mean it's his goal. It's probably just a regular offer from Google, they always decline.
By ErroneousBosh 2025-12-1712:23 > Quite the opposite is true (I believe) since a ton of users would leave Firefox for alternatives.
Alternatives like maybe a fork of Firefox with the adblocker-blocker removed?
There's only two alternatives, safari and chrome-based browsers. Safari isn't cross platform either
By woadwarrior01 2025-12-1711:491 reply > Safari isn't cross platform either
WebKit is[1][2].
[1]: https://webkit.org/downloads/ [2]: https://webkit.org/webkit-on-windows/
By simiones 2025-12-1712:06 That second link says it all about how wise it would be to try:
> This guide provides instructions for building WebKit on Windows 8.1
By KAMSPioneer 2025-12-1712:071 reply They already said "Chromium-based browsers."
By DonHopkins 2025-12-1718:182 reply [flagged]
By tune-nova 2025-12-1719:57 You can't even imagine how little the rest of the world cares about this.
Do people in California care that slightly under 50% of my state's population are at or below poverty level? Do they care that most of the rest spend 55-60% of our income on food? Do they care that our life expectancy is 15 years lower than that in California, mostly because of terrible pollution caused by extraction and processing of minerals which our beloved government then sells to the US and several European countries, and pockets the money?
Do they care about conflict minerals in general, used to build electronics for their enjoyment? Have they done anything about this?
This American political bickering does not even register on our radars when choosing a web browser.
"Europe's problems are the world's problems but the world's problems are not Europe's problems.", as India's Mr. Jaishankar is fond of saying.
The same can be said about the US.
By handedness 2025-12-1719:26 What an incredibly unfair and even fanatical take on what happened.
By CamouflagedKiwi 2025-12-1710:304 reply Amazing how they continue not to cater to their core audience. They literally have lost 90% of their market share from their peak, I guess I can see the temptation to try to regain it by reaching out to others, but doing that at the expense of your core is a terrible business strategy. It's not like those users are all that sticky, they're leaving as Mozilla pisses them off, and likely Mozilla are going to be left with what they stand for - which these days is nothing.
It's sad, I'm sure there was a better path Mozilla could have taken, but they've had a decade or more of terrible management. I wonder if the non-profit / corp structure hasn't helped, or if it's just a later-stage company with a management layer who are disconnected from the original company's mission and strategy.
By PurpleRamen 2025-12-1712:207 reply > Amazing how they continue not to cater to their core audience.
Who is Mozilla's core audience? From what I remember, it's not addon-users, as most users never have used even just a single addon.
> They literally have lost 90% of their market share from their peak,
To be fair, it's not entirely their own fault. Competition is strong, especially from Google and Apple. Even with perfect decisions, they likely would still have lost big since their peak. The market for alternative Browsers isn't as big any more as it used to be.
> From what I remember, it's not addon-users, as most users never have used even just a single addon.
If most users who install Firefox do so for superior adblocking and those same users are also very likely to turn off telemetry (which I think some privacy/adblock extensions probably do by default?), then at Mozilla's end one might get the impression that "most users don't use extensions" - even though the vast majority of users do.
So to answer the questions of:
> Who is Mozilla's core audience?
It's probably the kind of user that has telemetry off. You don't know much if anything about them.
By PurpleRamen 2025-12-1713:201 reply Update-checks are not included in telemetry. And I would think most people using addons still do update their addons from time to time, or even have the auto-check active. There is also the download-stats from their server-side, so I would think they do have a good enough picture of their numbers. Might be they could be 10% off, but surely are there not tens or even hundreds of millions of stealth-users around.
> It's probably the kind of user that has telemetry off. You don't know much if anything about them.
Don't think so, most people don't give a f** about this. Tech-people on that level are even in the industry a minority. And on the other side, those stealth-users are worthless for Mozilla, because they can't make money from google with them. So for a project needing to make money with usersnumbers, everyone who is out of this, isn't core audience anyway.
By chmod775 2025-12-1723:51 > Don't think so, most people don't give a f* about this.
Most people are not Firefox users.
> It's probably the kind of user that has telemetry off.
If less than 4% of users use uBO, which the kind of users you're referencing claim is the primary reason they use Firefox, I doubt many users disable telemetry either.
By nerdponx 2025-12-181:43 I believe some Linux distributions patch Firefox to change default settings including disabling telemetry. Probably not a big factor, but still something to think about.
By CamouflagedKiwi 2025-12-1713:36 > Who is Mozilla's core audience?
I am thinking of it as: people who care about privacy and/or an independent web browser. That seems mostly in line with what the Mozilla Foundation's principles are stated to be.
Maybe it's not that. But if not, what is it? How do they otherwise have any positive differentiation versus their competition? It surely can't be claimed to be any sense of "users who want an AI browser" because surely those people are going to use ChatGPT's browser, not Mozilla's.
By nerdponx 2025-12-181:42 Remember when the whole reason people liked Firefox is that it was super customizable? There was a time when it was THE power user browser. Things only went sideways after Chrome came out.
Firefox literally was a mainstream browser at one point. Internet Explorer sucked. Safari didn't suck but it was nobody's favorite either except some really hard-core Apple fans.
Yes, Chrome was revolutionary when it came out. And yes, Firefox seemed to struggle with legacy architectural decisions that limited their ability to catch up. But Firefox was still differentiated and had a loyal fan base. Loyal fan base is exactly what can keep a project or product alive through a downturn. All they had to do was focus on the browser. They did some great things along the way like popularizing DoH. But it's 2025 and there's still no UI for switching profiles that any normal person might be able or want to use. Can you really blame people for giving up?
40% of Firefox users use addons.
By PurpleRamen 2025-12-1713:12 Thanks, I think this was what I was searching. Strange that it's not appearing in my search-results.
Relevant part from the site: [..]Add-on usage measured here reflects multiple facets of browser customization, including web extensions, language packs, and themes.[..]
40% is a big minority, but not really what I would call core audience, especially when language packs and themes are also counted here. And 5 of the top 10-addons in that statistic are language packs.
Though, UBlock Origin is #1 with 9.6% user-share, and it's shown to have 10.5 million users on the store-page, which means there are at best only around 100 Million users left with Firefox on desktop? Seems worse than I thought.
By nateglims 2025-12-1717:41 > To be fair, it's not entirely their own fault. Competition is strong, especially from Google and Apple. Even with perfect decisions, they likely would still have lost big since their peak. The market for alternative Browsers isn't as big any more as it used to be.
Their peak in share was also pre-chrome. They've basically been losing the battle slowly for over a decade.
> From what I remember, it's not addon-users, as most users never have used even just a single addon.
Source?
I looked up "firefox addon usage" and this was the second result https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/usage-behavior
> over 40% of Firefox users have at least 1 installed add-on
By Yossarrian22 2025-12-1713:081 reply Before they changed their ToS to allow selling my data I had spent the last 2 decades with telemetry disabled and adblocker installed
What’s the story on the TOS change? This is the first I’m hearing about it.
By LauraMedia 2025-12-1717:19 A while ago they changed their TOS from something along the lines of "We will never sell your data" to "Your data is safe"
By PurpleRamen 2025-12-1713:03 Ublock Origin has 10,488,339 Users listed on it's Mozilla store-page at the moment, AdBlock Plus has 3,188,401 Users. And Firefox has surely still far more than those ~14 million users.
There was an article from Mozilla, some years ago, going more into the details about this, but I'm not sure where. Though, I found another one[1] from 2021, which starts with only one third of the users having installed an addon.
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/blog/firefoxs-most-popular-innova...
By lurk2 2025-12-1713:10 > About one-third of Firefox users have installed an add-on before
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/extensions-addons/heres-...
By pepperball 2025-12-1722:012 reply > Amazing how they continue not to cater to their core audience.
I’ve seen this across several industries now.
The “core audience” is too small and too particular. There is another audience, much easier to please, much much larger, much more money can be made off them. Why stick to your niche “core audience”?
By Etherlord87 2025-12-1722:43 No, it's not much easier to please. You will compete with Chrome and you will lose. It is the core audience that is much easier to please, because those are loyal users that trust you and all you have to do is respect this trust by providing a stable service without nasty surprises.
By sb057 2025-12-1723:01 Well Mozilla has completely failed at it, for starters.
When you've already lost most of your mass-market appeal, the only defensible strategy left is to double down on the people who still care
By Ezhik 2025-12-1717:14 Every tech CEO loves to cosplay as "announcing the iPhone" 2007 Steve Jobs but nobody ever tries to cosplay as the "pulling Apple back from the brink by focusing on core competencies" 1997 Steve Jobs.
By nerdponx 2025-12-181:33 Conspiracy theory: Mozilla leadership is bad on purpose as a form of sabotage. Erode the fan base until it just wears away and dies on its own. Then there will be no one to challenge the Microsoft Google Apple hegemony.
