Introduction
Introduction Statistics Contact Development Disclaimer Help
_______ __ _______
| | |.---.-..----.| |--..-----..----. | | |.-----..--.--.--..-----.
| || _ || __|| < | -__|| _| | || -__|| | | ||__ --|
|___|___||___._||____||__|__||_____||__| |__|____||_____||________||_____|
on Gopher (inofficial)
Visit Hacker News on the Web
COMMENT PAGE FOR:
Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo
okokwhatever wrote 15 hours 14 min ago:
Money calls
ponker wrote 16 hours 11 min ago:
What does Mozilla do these days?
stainablesteel wrote 18 hours 4 min ago:
DEI and ESG don't work anymore, now people are latching onto AI
wherever they can
they're all just marketing scams. if these people actually implement AI
in ways that isn't needed it just kills the product
the built-in language translation feature of firefox is great, because
it's locally ran
i don't want my browser fetching commands from random servers just to
implement AI in a browser that was working fine without it
webreac wrote 22 hours 54 min ago:
My wish list:
- A secure email (with optional encryption/signature, with whitelists)
- IM (with point to point encryption).
- identity management (I would love delegating the login/password
ceremonial to Mozilla instead of reinventing the well for each site).
It seems I have trust in Mozilla.
qwertox wrote 23 hours 30 min ago:
> People want software that is fast, modern, but also honest about what
it does.
I want my browser to be able to run uBlock Origin, so therefore people
want more than just what is specified above. I did quit using Google
Chrome because they banned uBO (I know the command-line-flags hack
still works, but for how long?).
If Firefox also bans uBO through removal of Manifest v2 without
offering a proper alternative, then it's just as big of a piece of crap
as Chrome is. Due to lack of real choices, I could as well move back to
Chrome. I'm currently using Vivaldi.
betamint wrote 23 hours 50 min ago:
I think the fundamental problem with Firefox and Mozilla is, that
people want an organization to maximize Firefox, but Mozilla is an
organization maximizing something else while preserving Firefox.
The fundamental problem is expectation and reality mismatch, and is
being 'solved' from two directions: new ideal browsers, or criticism
of Mozilla in the hope that it improves.
tchbnl wrote 1 day ago:
Mozilla went to shit after Brendan Eich was ousted.
urig wrote 1 day ago:
Lost me right about in the middle when he started chirping AI AI AI
like a parrot. AI and trust do not go hand in hand. Focus on privacy,
transparency and simplicity because instead. Good luck.
unsungNovelty wrote 1 day ago:
Copying portion of the comment I said under another comment:
I and many stuck with Firefox despite being it being horrible until
quantum release because Mozilla was aligned with community. But their
tech is better now but they aren't aligned with community.
It was the community that made Firefox overtake IE. They seem to forget
that.
Unless its gonna come pre-installed like chrome, they need community
make the user base grow. They are absolutely dumb for going after a
crowd who are happy with Chrome while shitting on the crowd which want
to be with them.
CivBase wrote 1 day ago:
I switched back to Firefox around the quantum release and have been
very happy with it since. I certainly have some complaints, but it's
night and day compared to what Google wants me to deal with.
unsungNovelty wrote 1 day ago:
Ofcourse it is. But that also doesn't make my above comment wrong
though. Not to mention, many were silent for so long against their
actions. Now it looks like the entire community has started voicing
against it. The ball is now on Mozilla's court.
Not to mention there is more than just technical aspect with
Firefox and community. A lot of people have invested a ton of time
in it.
Mozilla warrants all the flack they are getting. I am just saying
they can't virtue signal their way through this. It wont work.
koolala wrote 1 day ago:
Got my first change in Firefox today that says "Nightly uses AI to read
your Open Tabs". Says its local but I really have zero trust for
telemetry on this kind of stuff.
NegativeK wrote 1 day ago:
One of the secondary awful things about AI is that I have to hear news
sources I like listening to complain about it constantly.
This AI hype is frustrating, but it's also frustrating that it
dominates conversations with valid points that are identical to the
last five times it was talked about.
ipdashc wrote 1 day ago:
At this point it's almost more annoying than the AI hype in the first
place.
The hype by now at least seems pretty much self aware. It's
mind-boggling to me that people don't realize all the Mozilla stuff
is completely empty/PR fluff. You have to say you're an "AI first
company" because that's the only thing investors want to hear in
2025. Everyone knows it's all fluff, they say it anyways. I will wait
and see if it actually meaningfully affects their product or not.
The complaints meanwhile are spammed everywhere, and like you said,
it's the same exact content every time. We get it, new features that
you aren't going to use are annoying. Disable them or just don't use
them, is is really that big a deal? The CEO literally says they will
all be able to be disabled.
jmyeet wrote 1 day ago:
Mozilla has been in a dire place for years. Notably someone years ago
posted a chart showing how exec salary keeps going up while marketshare
keeps going down [1].
In the Microsoft antitrust trial in the 1990s, the court established
that having a browser monopoly was anticompetitive. Sadly, we've
allowed this situation to repeat on mobile so Chrome and Safari now
dominate. Windows has a lot of default Edge installs (and set as the
default browser, particularly in corporate settings) but it's really
just a Webkit skin at this point.
Now iOS does technically allow third-party browsers but they're just
Safari skins and they're not as good (eg at different times they have
more limited features like not havintg the latest Javascript engine).
I really think we need to end the bundled exclusive apps on mobile for
certain things.
Until then I'm really not sure what Mozilla's path forward is. They've
tried to pivot on things like privacy but I don't think any of these
make sense or at least won't produce a revenue source to justify the
investment. How do you fund something like Mozilla? And how do you
create value for users?
[1]
[1]: https://itdm.com/mozilla-firefox-usage-down-85-but-why-are-exe...
motbus3 wrote 1 day ago:
"It will evolve into a modern AI browser and support a portfolio of new
and trusted software additions."
I stopped reading there. I just want a browser. Nothing else
ggm wrote 1 day ago:
I know quite a few non-tech firefox users. None of them want the AI
integration. I am wary of confirmation bias, but I feel this is one of
those simpsons headmaster meme moments: Am I wrong? No, I am right! the
users are wrong! the users want me to spend millions developing AI for
firefox instead of all the other things.
orblivion wrote 1 day ago:
> It will evolve into a modern AI browser
Next time I run into Richard Stallman I should ask him for tips on
browsing the web
mmooss wrote 1 day ago:
I think this is a great insight and great leadership.
While the for-profit world, and many others, have embraced extremes of
predatory capitalism, contempt for users, and disinformation, Mozilla
has a fantastic opportunity to compete on its unique capabilities:
It's not under pressure to adapt that business culture - no private
equity, Wall Street, etc. pushing it; its culture is antithetical to
those things; and its culture has always been geared toward service to
the community and trust.
The insight and leadership is to find this word, which hasn't been used
much (I think many in business or politics would laugh at it), is
incredibly powerful and a fundamental social need, and is clear
guidance for everyone and every activity at Mozilla and for customers.
Imagine using a company's products and not having to think about them
trying to cheat you.
MerrimanInd wrote 1 day ago:
IMO Zen Browser fixed a lot of the Firefox UI painpoints while keeping
what I like about it. It would be a smart move to make the Zen UI the
canonical version of Firefox. Especially since features like vertical
tabs, folders, pins, split screen, and new tab previews are more in the
power user use case and Chrome has entirely dominated the casual user
demographic.
doublextremevil wrote 1 day ago:
Mozilla should restructure its governance such that leadership is
elected by their employees - preferably their software developers.
keeda wrote 1 day ago:
Everyone is reacting negatively to the focus on AI, but does Mozilla
really have a choice? This is going to be a rehash of the same dynamic
that has happened in all the browser wars: Leading browser introduces
new feature, websites and extensions start using that feature,
runner-up browsers have no choice but to introduce that feature or
further lose marketshare.
Chrome and Edge have already integrated LLM capabilities natively, and
webpages and extensions will soon start using them widely:
- [1] - [2] Soon you will have pages that are "Best viewed in Chrome /
Edge" and eventually these APIs will be standardized. Only a small but
passionate minority of users will run a non-AI browser. I don't think
that's the niche Firefox wants to be in.
I agree that Mozilla should take the charge on being THE
privacy-focused browser, but they can also do so in the AI age. As an
example, provide a sandbox and security features that prevent your
prompts and any conversations with the AI from being exfiltrated for
"analytics." Because you know that is coming.
[1]: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/built-in
[2]: https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2025/05/19/introducing-the...
fergie wrote 1 day ago:
I think youre mixing up two seperate concerns: functionality and
standards. It seems to me that there could absolutely be a "dumb
browser" that sticks to (and develops) web standards and is also
relatively popular
cheesecompiler wrote 1 day ago:
What is the use case with these? Even larger models skip details.
Small models are terrible at summarizing and writing.
wnevets wrote 1 day ago:
> Everyone is reacting negatively to the focus on AI, but does
Mozilla really have a choice?
Do these type of also-ran strategies actually work for a competitor
the size of Mozilla? Is AI integration required for them to grow or
at least maintain?
My hunch is this will hurt Firefox more than help it. Even if I were
to believe their was a meaningful demand for these kind of features
in the browser I doubt Mozilla is capable of competing with the likes
of Google & Microsoft in meaningful matter in the AI arena.
keeda wrote 1 day ago:
I think Mozilla can get pretty far with one of the smaller open
source models. Alternatively, they could even just use the models
that will inevitably come bundled with the underlying OS, although
their challenge then would be in providing a homogenous experience
across platforms.
I don't think Mozilla should get into the game of training their
own models. If they did I'd bet it's just because they want to
capitalize on the hype and try to get those crazy high AI
valuations.
But the rate at which even the smaller models are getting better, I
think the only competitive advantage for the big AI players would
be left in the hosted frontier models that will be extremely
jealously guarded and too big to run on-device anyway. The local,
on-device models will likely converge to the same level of
capabilities, and would be comparable for any of the browsers.
MerrimanInd wrote 1 day ago:
I think you're right but there's also an opportunity to sell picks
when everyone is digging for gold. Like AI-driven VS Code forks, you
have AI companies releasing their own browsers left and right. I
wonder if Mozilla could offer a sort of white-labeling and
contracting service where they offer the engine and some
customization services to whatever AI companies want their own
in-house browsers. But continue to offer Firefox itself as the "dumb"
(from an AI perspective) reference version. I'm not sure exactly what
they could offer over just forking Chromium/Firefox without support
but it would be a great way to have their cake and eat it too.
dagurp wrote 1 day ago:
Of course they have a choice. Firefox started going downhill IMO
because they kept copying Chrome. Vivaldi decided not to include AI
until a good use case was found for it. This announcement was met
with a lot of positivity.
afarah1 wrote 1 day ago:
Of course they have a choice. Just don't do it. All you said are
predictions of what may or may not happen in the future. The opposite
could be true - the audience at large may get sick of AI tools being
pushed on them and prefer the browser that doesn't. No one knows. But
even if you are right, supporting an hypothetical API that extensions
and websites may or may not use and pushing opt-out AI tooling in the
browser itself are very different things.
keeda wrote 1 day ago:
Sure, these features may never catch on... but if they do, consider
the risk to Firefox: an underdog with dwindling market share that
is now years behind capabilities taken for granted in other
browsers. On the other hand, if these features don't pan out, they
could always be deprecated with little hit to marketshare.
Strategically I think Mozilla cannot take that risk, especially as
it can get feature parity for relatively low cost by embracing
open-source / open-weights models.
As an aside, a local on-device AI is greatly preferable from a
privacy perspective, even though some harder tasks may need to be
sent to hosted frontier models. I expect the industry to converge
on a hybrid local/remote model, largely because it lets them
offload inference to the users' device.
There's not much I could do about a hosted LLM, but at least for
the local model it would be nice to have one from a company not
reliant on monetizing my data.
RickyLahey wrote 1 day ago:
i wouldn't touch anything from Mozilla with a twenty-foot pole
espeed wrote 1 day ago:
Rather than develop its own AI ( [1] ), Firefox should develop a system
to pipe your html rendered browsing history in real time so external
local services can process it ( [2] ). See [3] Firefox probably won't
suddenly have the best AI, but it could be the only browser that does
this. Previous:
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45926779
[2]: https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/archive-your-browser-hist...
[3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45743918
[4]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46018789
peppersghost93 wrote 1 day ago:
"Firefox will remain our anchor. It will evolve into a modern AI
browser and support a portfolio of new and trusted software additions."
reading this genuinely disgusts me. I am so tired of this nonsense
being shoved where it doesn't belong. I just want a fast browser that
stays out of the way.
shevy-java wrote 1 day ago:
Now Mozilla only needs to find a CEO that understands tech.
neilv wrote 1 day ago:
> As Mozilla moves forward, we will focus on becoming the trusted
software company.
That's what I'd do.
The question is whether they really mean it.
Mozilla will have to recover from some history of disingenuous and
incompetent leadership.
shmerl wrote 1 day ago:
What I want to see instead of all this AI nonsense is replacing Gecko
with Servo and implementing Vulkan rendering.
stodor89 wrote 1 day ago:
Well it surely cannot get any wor-
> ...investing in AI...
Ugh, nevermind.
teknopaul wrote 1 day ago:
Fire fix usage went from I forget what but really significant down to
the level people don't build site for it anymore.
Pretty sure it's because they made security changes that broke the
Intranet.
What you want una browser is that it t works. Not some security pop-up
telling it doesn't work. Especially if you wrote the website.
Still annoying evert time [1] is flagged as insecure
[1]: https://127.0.0.1
teknopaul wrote 1 day ago:
#6 in hacker news ChatGPT images announcement doesn't work in Firefox
Android as a perfect example.
[1]: https://openai.com/index/new-chatgpt-images-is-here/
stack_framer wrote 1 day ago:
> As Mozilla moves forward, we will focus on becoming the trusted
software company.
Does this sentence feel incomplete to anyone else? Is it supposed to
say "the most trusted software company" or is it supposed to be an
emphasis (i.e. the trusted software company)?
etempleton wrote 1 day ago:
I was on board with this until he said, Firefox would become a
“modern AI browser.” I am not sure what that looks like or means,
and I am not sure anyone really does. It feels like some kind of
obligatory statement to appease someone somewhere.
mcpar-land wrote 1 day ago:
> Firefox will grow from a browser into a broader ecosystem of trusted
software. Firefox will remain our anchor. It will evolve into a modern
AI browser and support a portfolio of new and trusted software
additions.
Please don't.
fuddle wrote 1 day ago:
"Mozilla's former CEO, Mitchell Baker, earned nearly $7 million in
2022, with compensation rising from around $3 million in 2020 to over
$5.5 million in 2021 and $6.9 million in 2022"
I wonder how much the new CEO is making now.
star-glider wrote 1 day ago:
Just to clarify how outrageous the Mozilla CEO compensation is,
consider that Tim Cook makes 0.019% of Apple's revenue in
compensation ($75M on $391BN of revenue). For Sundar Pichai (Google),
it's 0.003%; Samsung is 0.0001%; Nadella at Microsoft is 0.032%.
For Mozilla? 1.18%! That's almost FORTY TIMES these other companies.
Apple revolutionized mobile computing; Google revolutionized search,
Microsoft owns enterprise software, and Samsung is one of the largest
hardware manufacturers in the world. Mozilla makes a second-rate web
browser whose sole distinguishing feature is supporting a
community-built addon that does a great job blocking Youtube ads.
I could give $100k per year to Mozilla for the rest of my life, and
my lifetime donation would cover less than half of the CEO's salary.
LunaSea wrote 1 day ago:
I wonder what the percentage would be if you were to remove the
$500M yearly check by Google.
missedthecue wrote 1 day ago:
Compensation for employees is not based solely on revenue. CEOs of
major global organizations cost a lot of money.
locallost wrote 1 day ago:
Yeah, considering how poorly it went and how much market share they
lost I also always thought it was outrageous... Also so many people
laid off and projects shut down. I don't have any insight, and I
could be way off, but it always felt like the company was captured
by bureaucracy and drained as long as it was possible. Again I
could be way off, as I don't have any personal connections to it. I
was a regular user until around 10 years ago, but Chrome just
leapfrogged them and that was it. There was at one point nothing
left other than nostalgia.
edit: I still remember using Mozilla which was this "good thing"
but somehow clunky, and then getting so excited when trying Phoenix
for the first time, which was then renamed to Firebird, and lastly
Firefox. It was so "obviously" the right thing to use.
pentagrama wrote 1 day ago:
At least he seems focused on Firefox.
Hopefully this translates into clearer direction for Firefox and better
execution across the company, instead of pushing multiple micro
products that are likely destined to fail, as Mozilla has done over the
past 5+ years.
From his LinkedIn profile [1], his recent roles have been consistently
centered on Firefox:
Chief Executive Officer
Dec 2025 - Present · 1 mo
-------
General Manager of Firefox
Jul 2025 - Dec 2025 · 6 mos
-------
SVP of Firefox
Dec 2024 - Jul 2025 · 8 mos
-------
He appears to have a solid background in product thinking, feature
development, and UX. If his main focus remains on Firefox, that could
be a positive sign for the product and its long term direction.
[1]: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anthonyed/
BoredPositron wrote 1 day ago:
He rarely held a job for more than a year and a half throughout his
entire career...
gkoberger wrote 1 day ago:
Having worked at Mozilla a while ago, the CEO role is one I wouldn't
wish on my worst enemy. Success is oddly defined: it's a non-profit
(well, a for-profit owned by a non-profit) that needs to make a big
profit in a short amount of time. And anything done to make that profit
will annoy the community.
I hope Anthony leans into what makes Mozilla special. The past few
years, Mozilla's business model has been to just meekly "us-too!"
trends... IoT, Firefox OS, and more recently AI.
What Mozilla is good at, though, is taking complex things the average
user doesn't really understand, and making it palpable and safe. They
did this with web standards... nobody cared about web standards, but
Mozilla focused on usability.
(Slide aside, it's not a coincidence the best CEO Mozilla ever had was
a designer.)
I'm not an AI hater, but I don't think Mozilla can compete here.
There's just too much good stuff already, and it's not the type of
thing Mozilla will shine with.
Instead, if I were CEO, I'd go the opposite way: I'd focus on privacy.
Not AI privacy, but privacy in general. Buy a really great email
provider, and start to own "identity on the internet". As there's more
bots and less privacy, identity is going to be incredibly important
over the years.. and right now, Google defacto owns identity. Make it
free, but also give people a way to pay.
Would this work? I don't know. But like I said, it's not a job I envy.
aaron_m04 wrote 6 hours 7 min ago:
> it's a non-profit (well, a for-profit owned by a non-profit) that
needs to make a big profit in a short amount of time.
Can you please elaborate on this need to make a big profit? Where
does the need come from?
reactordev wrote 14 hours 59 min ago:
I’m sorry but Mozilla is out of their league now.
Firefox is all they have. They know the web, but that’s where it
ends. They haven’t been relevant outside of web standards for more
than a decade.
28304283409234 wrote 16 hours 39 min ago:
I would pay 20 euros per month forever if I could just have firefox,
as a product, without all the tracking and tracing and dark patterns.
Let me be the customer.
rvba wrote 23 hours 52 min ago:
Every time Mozilla CEO changes HN gets a set of "its so difficult"
propaganda
Those CEOs get 6M per year and cannot figure out to focus on core
product: Mozilla, keep a war chest, dont spend on politics.
Also cut all bullshit projects that are made for self promotion and
dont help Mozilla as a browser.
When will real extensions return? Never?
Now they want to kill adblocks too
nailer wrote 1 day ago:
Just ask for money. 10 USD a year in the app store. I’d pay it.
chironjit wrote 1 day ago:
Adding my 2 cents worth to this: why is there not a Mozilla family
internet suite of privacy browser, VPN, relay, tracker blocker, etc
for one price? I already pay for family plans for other services, so
this is a no brainer if it exists.
Right now, all of Mozilla's products are not even available in a
standardised form in key countries. For example, I pay for Mozilla
relay and VPN, and these are not available in the same countries!
Mind you, I'm lucky to have actual access to several countries, and
so I can work around this. But really, why can't this team just put
everything in one place for me?
Besides relay and Mozilla VPN, I am also paying for Bit warden
password manager.
I'm also willing to pay for a privacy-first email(though I haven't
done so yet), and please have a family plan that bundles all of this
together!
If Norton can have an Internet Suite, why can't Mozilla?
arijun wrote 1 day ago:
I wouldn’t mind privacy-focused AI tools, either (as long as they
don’t cram it in our faces). On its AI search assist, DDG has a
button to open up a private session with GPT, which I use on
occasion.
Izkata wrote 1 day ago:
> And anything done to make that profit will annoy the community.
I don't keep close track of this, but as far as I remember they
haven't tried donations that go only to Firefox/Thunderbird/etc of
the person's choice, instead of Mozilla as a whole. That's what
people always claim they want in these threads. I doubt donations
would be enough, but I think doing it like that would at least be a
step in a direction people like instead of are annoyed by, as long as
they don't go nagging like Wikipedia.
e2le wrote 17 hours 5 min ago:
Thunderbird is entirely funded by donations for some years now and
is more than enough. In 2024, Thunderbird received $10.3M (19%
increase over the previous year) in donations which was used to
employ 43 people.
[1]: https://blog.thunderbird.net/2025/10/state-of-the-bird-202...
dblohm7 wrote 1 day ago:
They do that for Thunderbird now.
CuriousRose wrote 1 day ago:
Fully agree with this.
- Mozilla SSL Certs - for corporations that don't want Let's Encrypt
- Mozilla Mail - a reliable Exchange/Google Mail alternative
(desperately needed imo)
- Thunderbird for iOS - why is this not a thing yet?
- Mozilla Search - metasearch that isn't based on Bing/DDG/Google
- Mozilla HTTPS DNS - although Cloudflare will probably always do
this better
All seemingly low-hanging fruit with brand alignment.
endemic wrote 15 hours 44 min ago:
Re-launch FirefoxOS -- not for smartphones, but as a
privacy-focused ChromeOS competitor. Give students Mozilla/Firefox
brand awareness while prying them out of Google's clutches.
e2le wrote 17 hours 27 min ago:
> Mozilla Mail
Aren't they already moving towards this? The Thunderbird team
recently announced ThunderMail which will have an optional $9/year
plan. [1] > Thunderbird for iOS [2] > We’ve also seen the
overwhelming demand to build a version of Thunderbird for the iOS
community. Unlike the Android app, the iOS app is being built from
the ground up.
[1]: https://www.tb.pro/en-US/thundermail/
[2]: https://blog.thunderbird.net/2025/10/state-of-the-bird-202...
palata wrote 22 hours 31 min ago:
> All seemingly low-hanging fruit with brand alignment.
Genuinely interested: are you a developer? Doesn't sound like
low-hanging fruit to me.
There are already many alternatives to Gmail, I don't think Mozilla
would make a lot of money there. And I don't know if they are
making a lot of money with their Mozilla VPN (which I understand is
a wrapper around Mullvad): why would I pay Mozilla instead of
Mullvad?
There are alternative search engines, like Kagi in the US and
Qwant/Ecosia in Europe (though only Qwant seems to keep the servers
in Europe).
What I want from Mozilla, really, is a browser. And I would love to
donate to that specifically, but I don't think I can.
CuriousRose wrote 9 hours 55 min ago:
It is certainly not low hanging fruit in the development effort
space, but they can utilise open source projects in ways that MS
cannot due to licensing, and therefore have much more resources
overall in terms of community dev contributions.
kakacik wrote 22 hours 7 min ago:
A reliable, corporate-friendly, with advanced support model
alternative of Exchange + AD is something that could sink a titan
like Microsoft in 2 decades, at least its non-cloud business (but
then for cloud alone they are just one of many, nothing special
there).
Literally everybody is fu*king fed up with M$ arrogance. But you
can't get rid of Active Directory and Exchange. Make comparable
alternative (with say 80% of most used use cases, no need to die
on some corner case hill) and many many corporations will come.
This won't come from some startup, it has to be a company like
Mozilla.
MarsIronPI wrote 21 hours 35 min ago:
> A reliable, corporate-friendly, with advanced support model
alternative of Exchange + AD is something that could sink a
titan like Microsoft in 2 decades, at least its non-cloud
business (but then for cloud alone they are just one of many,
nothing special there).
Ooh, imagine if they also threw in some kind of Teams
alternative, maybe based on XMPP or Matrix! That might get a
lot of attention.
palata wrote 21 hours 57 min ago:
Are you sure of that? There have been alternatives to Microsoft
Office for decades. Yet most businesses use and pay for
Microsoft Office, even though their employees most likely don't
need anything that doesn't exist in those alternatives.
Why would it be different with email?
kakacik wrote 16 hours 37 min ago:
I don't think you understand what I was writing about - none
of that is MS Office. Thats another topic, but without this
(and say some sort of domain propagation rules) bigger
corporations will never move out of MS.
palata wrote 12 hours 45 min ago:
My understanding is that you say "someone could make an
alternative to X and that would kill Microsoft because
everybody hates Microsoft".
My answer is "there have been examples of alternatives to
Microsoft products for decades, and it hasn't killed
Microsoft at all, so I don't see why it would be different
for another service (in your case, email)".
Did I misunderstand your point?
mghackerlady wrote 16 hours 57 min ago:
Nobody got fired for buying ~~IBM~~ Microsoft. People trust
Mozilla though, they've built their brand on not sucking as
bad as M$ and Google
rvba wrote 23 hours 52 min ago:
Nobody wants this.
People want firefox.
gwd wrote 23 hours 45 min ago:
That's like saying, "Nobody wants Adwords; people want Chrome."
True but besides the point. Salaries have to be paid somehow.
Some options I can think of for paying salaries:
- Go the Wikipedia route, stay entirely free, and beg for
donations on a regular basis
- Start charging for Firefox; or for Firefox Premium
- Use Firefox as a loss-leader to build a brand, and use that
brand to sell other products (which is essentially what GP is
suggesting).
How would you pay for developers' salaries while satisfying
"people [who] want firefox"?
palata wrote 22 hours 23 min ago:
> That's like saying, "Nobody wants Adwords; people want
Chrome."
Bad comparison, but I understand your point.
> Salaries have to be paid somehow.
I would be interested in knowing how much of what Mozilla does
brings money. Isn't it almost exclusively the Google contract
with Firefox?
As a non-profit, Mozilla does not seem to be succeeding with
Firefox. Mozilla does a lot of other things (I think?) but I
can't name one off the top of my head. Is Google paying for all
of that, or are the non-Firefox projects succeeding? Like would
they survive if Firefox was branched off of Mozilla?
And then would enough people ever contribute to Firefox if it
stopped getting life support from Google? Not clear either.
It's a difficult situation: I use Firefox but I regularly have
to visit a website on Chrom(ium) because it only works there.
It doesn't sound right that Google owns the web and Firefox
runs behind, but if Chrome was split from Google, would it be
profitable?
gwd wrote 1 hour 48 min ago:
> Bad comparison, but I understand your point.
I'm not sure why you think so; it seems pretty close to me.
Chrome and Firefox are exact competitors; both require a
large amount of development investment. Neither one are
being charged for, which means their development needs to be
supported some other way.
The people using Chrome don't want Adwords, but it's Adwords
that is paying for Chrome's development. People using
Firefox don't want email or Mozilla certificates or what-not,
but something needs to fund Firefox's development.
> ...if Chrome was split from Google, would it be profitable?
They'd have to figure out a different business model,
wouldn't they?
palata wrote 1 hour 32 min ago:
> They'd have to figure out a different business model,
wouldn't they?
Doesn't mean that there exists a business model that would
be profitable, does it?
GuestFAUniverse wrote 1 day ago:
Quant and Ecosia are already building their own (European) index
in a joint venture.
Mozilla Search is totally uninteresting (to me).
palata wrote 22 hours 39 min ago:
Nitpick: "Qwant"
MYEUHD wrote 1 day ago:
> Thunderbird for iOS - why is this not a thing yet?
There's no release yet, but it's being worked on.
[1]: https://github.com/thunderbird/thunderbird-ios
Tepix wrote 1 day ago:
As a US corporation, Mozilla cannot compete on privacy focused
services. If they want to focus on privacy (which I think is
great), they should ship software that improves privacy, not offer
services.
fsflover wrote 1 day ago:
Are you saying that a warrant canary isn't useful?
hermanzegerman wrote 1 day ago:
He is saying that no one outside of the US will trust them with
their data, because of the US Cloud Act and similar
legislation.
There is a reason Proton & Co are based in Switzerland and not
in the US
graemep wrote 23 hours 9 min ago:
They can compete where the alternatives are also US based
services.
They can compete in the US.
There are also many people who are more concerned about
privacy from businesses than from governments. There are also
people who are more concerned about privacy from their own
government than a foreign government.
Although the Cloud Act and similar issues with the US are
much discussed here, I see no sign it loses American big tech
much business.
black_puppydog wrote 14 hours 51 min ago:
> There are also many people who are more concerned about
privacy from businesses than from governments.
We're living in an interesting time that may (or may well
not!) turn out to be a pivot point in this question. People
being ICE'd based on data traces they leave in commercial
products may well make this kind of question more tangible
to non-technical folks.
> Although the Cloud Act and similar issues with the US are
much discussed here, I see no sign it loses American big
tech much business.
If that is true (which it may or may not be) then it would
also mean competing on privacy isn't a winning move,
whether within or outside the US.
aydyn wrote 1 day ago:
lots of people seem to trust apple
Tepix wrote 17 hours 38 min ago:
Yes but Apple is also avoiding collecting a huge amount of
data, e.g. by doing things on-device.
reactordev wrote 14 hours 56 min ago:
Ok, keep telling yourself that as you can’t remove
iCloud…
fsflover wrote 14 hours 59 min ago:
[1] [2] [3]
[1]: https://appleinsider.com/articles/24/04/10/apple...
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43047952
[3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42014588
[4]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34299433
vaylian wrote 1 day ago:
Marketing can do a lot to create trust.
It's not all or nothing. Depending on your threat model,
Apple's services might be fine. But I guess most people
don't think enough about the implications of storing many
years worth of data at a US company like Apple.
philipallstar wrote 1 day ago:
Apple has actually proven itself over a long period of time
on this issue. Maybe Mozilla has as well (do they encrypt
telemetry logs etc for people with a Mozilla login?) but I
haven't heard so much about that.
fsflover wrote 14 hours 51 min ago:
[1]: https://sneak.berlin/20231005/apple-operating-sy...
sneak wrote 21 hours 20 min ago:
Wrong. Apple explicitly preserves a backdoor in the e2ee
of iMessage for the USG.
tfehring wrote 14 hours 2 min ago:
Source?
sneak wrote 2 hours 14 min ago:
[1]: https://www.reuters.com/article/world/exclus...
rurban wrote 22 hours 6 min ago:
Did you really forgot about Snowden's Apple slide? Also
their phones are routinely mirrored at the border. Just
to support the unconstitutional government agenda of
policing thoughts and speech.
JumpCrisscross wrote 17 hours 5 min ago:
> Did you really forgot about Snowden's Apple slide?
Was Apple coöperating or were they hacked? (I remember
the smiley face for Gmail. Google, in that case, was
hacked.)
pmontra wrote 1 day ago:
> Thunderbird for iOS - why is this not a thing yet?
They are building Thunderbird Android over K9 Mail, which is an
Android app. They would have to start from scratch on iOS, which of
course is feasible but it takes more time.
dyauspitr wrote 1 day ago:
Agree with a lot of this except Mozilla Search. Search is already
or very soon going to be an entirely LLM driven space.
khaelenmore wrote 1 day ago:
Precisely why we need a reliably working search engine without
llm, ai and other nonsense
mghackerlady wrote 16 hours 54 min ago:
I predict the next gen search engines will be a return to form
of the early web-directory style of known good pages and having
to be vetted to appear in results
MarsIronPI wrote 1 day ago:
> - Mozilla Search - metasearch that isn't based on Bing/DDG/Google
As much hate as Brave gets overall, I think Mozilla should take a
page from Brave's book if they're going to make a search engine. I
think they should have their own index, possibly supplemented by
Bing or Google. Let people opt-in to using their browsers to help
crawl for the search engine index, like Brave does. Then add in
some power-user features like goggles and custom ranking, and
they'd have a pretty compelling search engine. They should even be
able to subsidize it somewhat with advertising: DDG and Brave
Search are the only two websites I allow ads on, because they're
usually relevant and they're never intrusive.
vjvjvjvjghv wrote 1 day ago:
Why is Brave getting hate? Their browsers are treating me very
well on mobile and desktop. I am always horrified when I see how
the web looks for other people with all ads.
freehorse wrote 1 day ago:
For many reasons, one being that they were injecting urls with
their affiliate codes to unsuspecting users.
armedpacifist wrote 17 hours 21 min ago:
This was in 2020. Brendan Eich addressed this in a blogpost
iirc, with a perfectly plausible explanation. It seemed like
a bad/unfortunate design decision, which happens all the time
in software development and not the conspiracy theory people
claimed it to be. It was fixed in a matter of days.
If this is the main reason to not use Brave then I'm genuinly
interested in hearing about the other reasons. I might learn
something I wasn't aware of.
I don't understand all the hate Brave gets either. It passes
pretty much all privacy tests ootb and I see 0 ads, on
desktop and mobile. This is what actually matters to me.
freehorse wrote 12 hours 54 min ago:
I don't think the past controversies were just unfortunate,
"mistakes" or conspiracy theories, but products of their
business model + opportunistic execution. I just don't
trust brave and think I have better options for a browser.
If I had to choose between brave and chrome, I would use
brave. If you like/prefer using brave, honestly good for
you.
estimator7292 wrote 1 day ago:
They could partner with Kagi. Pretty much everyone trusts Kagi,
so if Mozilla convinces them to get on board, Mozilla must be
actually serious about being trustworthy.
mghackerlady wrote 17 hours 0 min ago:
I wouldn't partner with them, but if they do make a search
engine they should take a page out of their book and focus on
giving quality results. They can start by blacklisting any seo
blogspammy site and instead try and direct you to the best
results for any search first (for example, a wikipedia article
or relevant docs)
MarsIronPI wrote 21 hours 36 min ago:
Meh, my trust in Kagi is kinda shot, given that they seem to
have forgotten that sales tax existed[0].
[0]:
[1]: https://d-shoot.net/kagi.html
input_sh wrote 1 day ago:
> Pretty much everyone trusts Kagi
...on a forum run by its investors whose goal is to push Kagi,
sure. Outside of this forum, nobody knows about a fringe little
search engine that is paywalled and only has 62k users.
For a brand like Mozilla, even something as dumb as Ecosia
would be a better fit, as they have about 250x the number of
users of Kagi.
freehorse wrote 1 day ago:
> on a forum run by its investors
They are not VC funded afaik, and esp not YC funded.
> 250x the number of users
If you offer the service for free and serve ads in "privacy
respecting way" sure you get more users. But anyway this is a
mozilla's states goal too, so it would fit.
input_sh wrote 15 hours 8 min ago:
[1] Third paragraph. They didn't go down the official YC
route, they just let their initial users invest in it. How
many of those investors do you think are among us here
pushing it at every opportunity because it's in their
(undisclosed) financial interest to do so? Even when it
makes no sense to do so like here?
[1]: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/company/
freehorse wrote 11 hours 46 min ago:
> How many of those investors do you think are among us
here pushing it
Probably a bunch are users here, but
1. the amount of money (~2.5m) gathered in a 2-year
period from 93 people seem peanuts in VC terms, if we are
talking about YC itself rather than random users
2. their whole approach and strategy seems to aim towards
a sustainable, long term development rather than quick
profit (so far)
3. there does not seem to be any obvious link between
them and YC itself in general
4. even if some of the 93 people are "pushing it" here,
quite a few other users do the same without being
investors (I have done/do it), and the former would
probably do it without being investors anyway. There are
bigger problems than some random people who invested in
some company write once in a while supporting comments in
some forum online.
I guess "forum run by its investors" can be interpreted
as either the users of the forum are investors or the
admins/owners are, so I tried to address both.
I think it is more like that users here are more prone to
like kagi and want to pay for search (they spend more
time online on a computer, they have jobs where web
search is important to them etc), so you have people
saying how great kagi is, but their experience does not
necessarily extend to the general population as much
because most people do not care as much about these
things to think they are worth paying. Rather than most
of them being actually kagi investors and trying to get
people subscribe to kagi for their investment to grow.
People can also just be satisfied with a product/service
and talk about it.
veqq wrote 1 day ago:
Kagi is just an AI company. (That was always their stated
goal...)
CuriousRose wrote 1 day ago:
> Let people opt-in to using their browsers to help crawl for the
search engine index, like Brave does.
This is really cool.
I'd be happy with a re-branded SearX/SearXNG, with a paid cloud
hosted instance from Mozilla that uses a shared base index plus
your own crawled pages or optionally contribute your crawls back
to the shared index.
amluto wrote 1 day ago:
How about: Mozilla HTTPS To My Router (or printer or any other
physically present local object) in a way that does not utterly
suck?
Seriously, there’s a major security and usability problem, it
affects individual users and corporations, and neither Google nor
Apple nor Microsoft shows the slightest inclination to do anything
about it, and Mozilla controls a browser that could add a nice
solution. I bet one could even find a creative solution that
encourages vendors, inoffensively, to pay Mozilla a bit of money to
solve this problem for them.
Also:
> Thunderbird for iOS - why is this not a thing yet?
Indeed. Apple’s mail app is so amazingly bad that there’s
plenty of opportunity here.
Affric wrote 1 day ago:
Apple mail steadfastly refusing to permit me to see an email
address so I can verify the source of an email.
Truly the most cursed.
vladvasiliu wrote 1 day ago:
How so? You can tap the from / to fields and it shows the
addresses.
nneonneo wrote 1 day ago:
When you tap one of those fields it bounces you to a contact
card. If it is an existing contact (for example, yourself),
you just get the full contact card. If that contact card has
multiple addresses (my contact card lists ten), you get no
indication of which one it was sent to.
At some point in time the actual email address used was
flagged with a little “recent” badge - by itself a
confusingly-worded tag - but even that doesn’t show up
consistently.
It’s stupid because there’s really no reason to play hide
and seek with the email address - that’s an identifier that
people should generally be familiar with (since you have to
use it reasonably often), and lots of people have multiple
addresses that they can receive mail at.
internet2000 wrote 21 hours 18 min ago:
> When you tap one of those fields it bounces you to a
contact card.
They've changed that behavior a few versions ago:
[1]: https://i.imgur.com/J965L1Z.png
VanTheBrand wrote 1 day ago:
It’s so stupid but what I do is click forward which reveals
the email in the compose window.
SamDc73 wrote 1 day ago:
> Mozilla Mail - a reliable Exchange/Google Mail alternative
(desperately needed imo)
I think the privacy industry is oversaturated we already have:
ProtonMail, Tuta and Mailbox Mail
CuriousRose wrote 1 day ago:
I'm thinking more at an SMB level, not necessarily for secure
mail, PGP and the like.
IMAP + CalDev + CardDev sat on-top of cPanel is getting a bit
long in the tooth for companies that want exchange-like mail
solutions outside of the big two. Unfortunately MS and Google run
the "spam" filters as well, so you really need an established
company that they can't afford to irritate to enter the space -
see Mozilla - to reliably force acceptance of enterprise mail
outside the Duopoly they have.
Zoho is trying their best also in this space - not sure how
successful they have been on the trusted email provider and
integration front.
veqq wrote 1 day ago:
> IMAP + CalDev + CardDev sat on-top of cPanel is getting a bit
long in the tooth
Why so?
CuriousRose wrote 9 hours 51 min ago:
- Very irritating to setup on mobile clients (iOS profiles
are not a good solution)
- Usually hosted on shared VPSs where IP reputation is
decimated (wonder how this will be affected by pure IPv6
hosts)
- Patching is often manual and forgotten about (n = 1)
- Backups are often an afterthought
gkoberger wrote 1 day ago:
Agreed, this is why I think they should buy.
binwang wrote 1 day ago:
> Mozilla Mail - a reliable Exchange/Google Mail alternative
(desperately needed imo)
Thunderbird Pro was announced a while back, still not GA though
chiefalchemist wrote 1 day ago:
Merge Mozilla (including Firefox Relay, Mozilla VPN, etc ) with
FastMail or Proton, price it reasonably and I’d be on board. If it
worked well I’d recommend it to anyone I could.
I understand email isn’t easy but it difficult to imagine why
Mozilla didn’t seize the opportunity.
Yoric wrote 1 day ago:
FWIW, I remember when Mozilla started experimenting with AI, and that
was way ahead of the curve (around 2015, iirc?)
But yeah, I agree that buying a great email provider would be a very
interesting step. And perhaps partnering with Matrix.
dabockster wrote 1 day ago:
They need to give Thunderbird more resources first.
Arathorn wrote 1 day ago:
On the Matrix side we would love for Mozilla (or MZLA) to become a
paid Matrix hosting provider. Element has ended up focusing on
digitally-sovereign govtech ( [1] ) in order to prevail, and it's
left a hole in the market.
[1]: https://element.io/en/sectors
wirrbel wrote 1 day ago:
i work for a for-profit owned by a non-profit. This is a weird take.
You can shape a product, sure you need to bring in a profit, but
there are options of working with your owner (the non-profit) that
you just don't have in a publicly traded company.
I am sure people would queue up for the job, fully aware of what it
entails.
wcchandler wrote 1 day ago:
Privacy, identity, and more importantly, anonymity are one of those
things I keep thinking about. A few months back I had this idea of
comparing the need to that of credit reporting agencies. You have
the big 3 - Equifax, Experian, TransUnion. They provide credit
information to companies that want it. You request the info, they
provide it. There's a fee for retrieving it. I think our personal
identities should be treated similarly. We sign up for various
online services and provide some PII, but not much. Why should the
website be able to store that information? Maybe they shouldn't be
able to. Instead, lets permit these identity brokers to control our
private information. Name, address, email, etc. Then whenever a
companies needs that info, for whatever reason, they query the
identity broker, get select info they need and be done. Token based
access could permit the site to certain data, for certain periods of
time. You can review the tokens at a later date and make sure only
the ones you care about get the info. Large companies that already
participate in this space (Google, Microsoft, etc.) can separate out
this business function and have it be isolated from their core
products. I was thinking it'd require an act of congress to get
implemented, and that may be possible. But instead of having that as
a hard requirement, maybe just a branding/badge/logo on services.
Say your product respects your privacy and uses data brokers for your
privacy.
Going a step further, how do we encourage use? Aside from personal
privacy, what if social media sites allowed us to use our identities
to validate comments or attachments? Similar to the idea of a token,
we upload a photo of our cat. We permit FB access to that cat pic,
generate the token, say it's good until we revoke it. We revoke it,
and now that picture will fail to load. We can also restrict access
to our cat picture. By requesting access to the cat pic, another
user provides their identity as well. If their identity is allowed
to view it, then it can render. Similar to comments. It's just a
string, but we can invalidate a token and make access to it no longer
possible.
What about digital hoarding? Can't we screenshot everything or
scrape the website and store it for later? Yes. But that's no
longer a trusted source. Everything can be faked, especially as AI
tools advance. Instead, by using the identity broker, you can verify
if a statement was actually said. This will be a mindshift. Similar
to how wikipedia isn't a credible source in a term paper, a
screenshot is not proof of anything.
Identity brokers can also facilitate anonymous streams. Similar to a
crypto wallet, separate personas can be generated by an identity. An
anonymous comment can be produced and associated with that randomized
persona. The identity broker can store the private key for the
persona, possibly encrypted by the identity in some manner, or it can
be stored elsewhere, free for the identity to resume using should
they want to.
It's an interesting problem to think about.
trinsic2 wrote 1 day ago:
Why cant Mozilla go the same route with Firefox as Thunderbird where
its community supported, I wonder?
bpye wrote 1 day ago:
Web standards move very quickly, the only other two parties that
keep up today are Google with Blink and Apple with WebKit.
skeeter2020 wrote 1 day ago:
Anil Dash wrote something relevant recently: [1] His point (which I
agree with - softly) is that Mozilla could approach this from a more
nuanced perspective that others cannot, like not anti-AI but anti
"Big AI". Facilitate what people are already doing (and outside of
the HN bubble everyone is using AI all the time, even if it's just
what we think is "dumb" stuff) throught the FF lens. Like a local LLM
that runs entirely in an extension or similar. THere's no shortage of
hard, valuable things that big tech won't do because of $$$.
[1]: https://www.anildash.com/2025/11/14/wanting-not-to-want-ai/
FarhadG wrote 1 day ago:
Super well stated and interesting point regarding (general) privacy.
I miss the days where Mozilla (Firefox) was known to be the "fastest
browser." It worked and such an easy transition for users (including
myself) who were tired of the bloated browser experience.
rapnie wrote 1 day ago:
> Instead, if I were CEO, I'd go the opposite way: I'd focus on
privacy.
Where it comes to AI in that regard, I would also focus on direct
human connection. Where AI encapsulates people in bubbles of tech
isolation and social indirection.
m463 wrote 1 day ago:
> I'd focus on privacy.
I would love that. that said, right now firefox unstoppably and
constantly phones home
autoexec wrote 1 day ago:
Does this not work anymore? [1] I've been perfectly willing to
spend an hour making countless changes using about:config to beat
Firefox (or its forks) into submission on every install, but that
only works while they continue to give us the ability.
[1]: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-stop-firefox-maki...
tsoukase wrote 1 day ago:
Firemail should be the name of a free and privacy oriented email
client wholly owned by Mozilla with a web and mobile app. I would
sign up instantly and gradually migrate from gmail, while being
assured for its sustainability.
coder543 wrote 1 day ago:
A free and privacy-oriented hosted service that people have to pay
to maintain? That is a confusing concept. How would the incentives
be aligned?
dpark wrote 1 day ago:
“Free”. Therein lies the Mozilla problem. Everyone wants
everything free.
It’s real hard to compete with Google who happily gives out free
email and browser because they can monetize attention.
Sailemi wrote 1 day ago:
Maybe not exactly what you’re looking for but Thunderbird is
working on a paid email service:
[1]: https://www.tb.pro/en-US/
dabockster wrote 1 day ago:
They were also supposedly working on mobile apps. I'd pay some
solid money for Thunderbird mobile if it was a good product.
macspoofing wrote 1 day ago:
> What Mozilla is good at ...
Firefox - the one thing they do not want to work on is the only thing
that makes them special.
autoexec wrote 1 day ago:
I might be in the minority here, but I actually like Thunderbird.
dabockster wrote 1 day ago:
I've daily driven Thunderbird for over a decade. You have very
few options for having a single program manage multiple email
accounts outside of Outlook and Thunderbird anymore. Maybe Apple
Mail on Mac (and whatever Microsoft is preloading on Windows
these days), but that's it.
mmooss wrote 1 day ago:
I assume they work on Firefox 10x more than anything else. Is there
data?
glenstein wrote 1 day ago:
>Firefox - the one thing they do not want to work on
I'm sorry but this is complete nonsense. Just this year they pushed
12 major releases, with thousands of patches, including WebGPU
efficiency improvements, updated PDF engine, numerous security
fixes, amounting to millions of lines of new code. They maintain a
codebase that rivals that of Chrome and of the Linux Kernel and
push the equivalent of Rust's entire codebase on a monthly basis.
roenxi wrote 1 day ago:
> They maintain a codebase that rivals that of Chrome and of the
Linux Kernel and push the equivalent of Rust's entire codebase on
a monthly basis.
Is that comparison supposed to make their management of the code
base seem better or worse? Chrome, Linux and Rust are arguably
colossi in their niches (Rust having the weakest claim).
Firefox's niche is Chrome's and it doesn't do that well. It used
to be that at least Firefox had it's own little area with more
interesting extensions but obviously that was too hard for them
to handle - yes I'm still grumpy about ChatZilla.
MarsIronPI wrote 21 hours 28 min ago:
You might be interested to know that there are still some
legacy extensions that work on today's Firefox. Specifically,
when Firefox breaks VimFX, I'm done with it. But while it
works, I'm sticking with Firefox. It's like having the power
of Qutebrowser but with the extensions and performance of
Firefox.
glenstein wrote 1 day ago:
Well I replied to a comment suggesting they weren't working on
Firefox, by noting how much work is being done on Firefox. But
you seem like you want to change the subject to a different
one, which is the extent to which you can gauge "success"
relative to competitors, or infer management efficiency, which
is fine but orthogonal to my point.
gkoberger wrote 1 day ago:
They do work on it. A lot.
But the issue is browsers don't make money. You can't charge for
it, you can't add ads to it, etc. You're competing with the biggest
companies in the world (Google, Apple), all of whom are happy to
subsidize a browser for other reasons.
account42 wrote 23 hours 58 min ago:
That should not be a problem for a nonprofit which the Mozilla
foundation supposedly is.
gwd wrote 23 hours 43 min ago:
Non-profit doesn't mean non-revenue. They don't have to pay
their investors, but they certainly need to pay their
developers.
account42 wrote 23 hours 30 min ago:
Most nonprofits don't generate "revenue" from their
"product". They provide a valuable service and get paid by
people who agree with the mission.
Rastonbury wrote 16 hours 5 min ago:
Based on comments in here and people willing to pay I
wonder why they haven't got the Wikipedia route of getting
donations, would that piss off a lot of users? I do think
most people would understand a non-profit needs donations.
enlyth wrote 1 day ago:
Doesn't Firefox make them the lion's share of their profits just
from the Google payments?
If they let Firefox atrophy to the point it will have no market
share, let's see how that works out for them
tigroferoce wrote 1 day ago:
You can and you should. There are people that are happy to pay
for email, for search, for videos, for news, for music. I don't
see why there wouldn't be people happy to pay for a browser.
The idea that software is free is completely wrong and should be
something that an organization like Mozilla should combat. If
software is free, there can be no privacy, it's as simple as
that.
palata wrote 22 hours 10 min ago:
> I don't see why there wouldn't be people happy to pay for a
browser.
I admittedly didn't check the numbers, but a comment in a
sibling thread says that if Mozilla was to replace their
revenue with donations, they would have to become one of the
biggest charities in America.
Is that even realistic? Like would they make that kind of money
just from donations?
dabockster wrote 1 day ago:
> The idea that software is free is completely wrong
> If software is free, there can be no privacy, it's as simple
as that.
Strongly agreed. Free software, either $0 or through stronger
licenses like the GPL, have their economics completely shifted
as an unintended side effect. Those new economics tend to favor
clandestine funding sources (eg ads or malicious supply chain
code).
But sustainable funding honestly isn't Mozilla's strong suite
(or tech's in general, for that matter).
Wowfunhappy wrote 1 day ago:
> But the issue is browsers don't make money.
What?! Browsers might as well be money printers! Have you heard
how much money Google pays Apple to be the default search engine
in Safari?
The higher Firefox’s user numbers, the more money Mozilla can
make from search engine deals. Conversely, if Mozilla keeps
trying to push a bunch of other initiatives while Firefox
languishes and bleeds users, Mozilla will make less money.
If you don’t like this form of revenue… well, I don’t know
what to tell you, because this is how web browsers make money.
And trying other stuff doesn’t seem to be working.
palata wrote 22 hours 13 min ago:
On the other hand, we typically find it unfair that Google can
buy their search supremacy by being the default search engine.
We can't complain about Mozilla taking the money from Google
and at the same time complain because they take the money from
Google :-).
viraptor wrote 1 day ago:
> You can't charge for it
They could try. I just keep hearing people who would pay for no
extra features as long as it paid for actual Firefox development
and not the random unrelated Mozilla projects. I would pay a
subscription. But they don't let me.
qudat wrote 16 hours 59 min ago:
They honestly should charge for it.
freehorse wrote 21 hours 51 min ago:
The problem I (and others that I see here) have is the lack of
trust in mozilla's model, esp long term. Their economic
reliance in google, their repeatedly stated goals of trying to
engineer ad-delivery systems that "respect privacy", their very
high CEO salaries, and their random ventures do not inspire
much trust, confidence and alignment in their goals. And also
the unclear relationships with their for and non-profit parts.
If they can convince me that some subscription for firefox will
strictly go for firefox development, that firefox will not
pivot to ads (privacy respecting or not), and all the other
stuff they have, including executives' salaries and whatnot,
are completely separated, I would be more than happy to
subscribe.
cjpearson wrote 1 day ago:
You can't effectively paywall it because not only is it open
source, but there are many nearly equivalent competitors all of
which are free. Any subscribers would essentially be donors.
There are people like yourself who would be happy to donate,
but not nearly enough. Replacing MoCo's current revenue with
donors would require donations at the level of Doctors without
Borders, American Cancer Society, or the Make-a-Wish
Foundation.
Turning into one of the largest charities in America overnight
simply isn't realistic. A drastic downsizing to subsist on
donor revenue also isn't wise when Mozilla already has to
compete with a smaller team. And "Ladybird does it" isn't a
real argument until and unless it graduates from cool project
to usable and competitive browser.
dabockster wrote 1 day ago:
> You can't effectively paywall it because not only is it
open source, but there are many nearly equivalent competitors
all of which are free.
You're forgetting that people will buy a product on brand
identity alone. If the Firefox brand is solid enough, those
forks won't matter.
palata wrote 22 hours 16 min ago:
I think the point is that if it was open source but free,
it would require donations. And given the money that
Mozilla spends every year, it would mean that the amount of
donations they would need to receive would make them one of
the biggest charities in America. Which sounds implausible.
I think the argument makes sense, to be honest.
rtpg wrote 1 day ago:
Thunderbird has succeeded at doing this and is in a somewhat
similar spot (though huge asterisk there given the existence
of Chrome)
viraptor wrote 1 day ago:
Oh no, it would be a donation and it's not going to
completely replace all the funding of the parent entity of
the project mentioned, therefore it's not realistic or worth
trying. Right... That's a lot of arguments unrelated to what
I wrote.
palata wrote 22 hours 18 min ago:
> That's a lot of arguments unrelated to what I wrote.
What I understand they are saying is that donations
wouldn't be nearly enough. Which is related to what you
wrote, which is that you would gladly donate to Firefox
(not Mozilla, but Firefox).
They compared it to the largest non-profits in America,
presumably because if we look at the money spent by Mozilla
every year, that's similar. Right now Google pays for
Mozilla, and if you wanted to replace that with donations,
it would have to become one of the biggest charities in
America. Which does not sound plausible.
If I understood correctly, I'm not the OP :)
beej71 wrote 1 day ago:
They could make it so we could subsidize development like with
Thunderbird.
rapind wrote 1 day ago:
> that needs to make a big profit in a short amount of time
Why? might be I'm just missing something, but I don't understand why
this needs to be a goal of theirs?
e584 wrote 1 day ago:
The best that Mozilla can do for AI is to make Firefox more headless
and scriptable.
CarbonJ wrote 1 day ago:
What would you like to see from Firefox to make it more headless
and scriptable? Are there specific usecases you're interested in
supporting?
slau wrote 1 day ago:
I'd love to be able to modify JS at runtime on random websites.
Too often there's a bug, or a "feature" that prevents me from
using a service, that I could fix by removing an event or
something in the JS code.
holowoodman wrote 1 day ago:
That's what development tools are for. Or
Greasemonkey/Violentmonkey.
whatever1 wrote 1 day ago:
This. I want a password/passkey/auth and bookmark manager that work
across platforms and devices.
DANmode wrote 1 day ago:
Well, then I’ve gotta bust your balls here and tell you to step
away from the Win98 machine, because that’s been around for some
time.
Even secure, privacy-respecting versions!
mattmaroon wrote 1 day ago:
It's weird when someone's wish list is something you've been
doing for years for free.
mrguyorama wrote 17 hours 34 min ago:
I would love if there was some magic way I could share my
passwords between my desktop and phone Firefox installs without
a damn login or account, because I don't want a damn account.
Maybe like a couple large QR codes or something.
But golly that's a niche request.
DANmode wrote 10 hours 6 min ago:
You’re looking for text files and self management over
Wireguard.
mattmaroon wrote 1 day ago:
Don't you have this already? Chrome and Firefox both have these.
Devices have solid password manager integration, I use mine across
3 OSes and who knows how many devices.
dpark wrote 1 day ago:
I think password manager integration is pretty janky but that’s
not something Mozilla can solve in general.
whatever1 wrote 1 day ago:
No passkeys, no authenticators.
DANmode wrote 1 day ago:
Bitwarden is spoken highly of!
tigroferoce wrote 1 day ago:
I second Bitwarden. It works well, and it even has a business
model.
the_biot wrote 1 day ago:
You're assuming Mozilla would be successful at a privacy play because
they are a trusted organization. I can't stress this enough: they are
not.
flerchin wrote 1 day ago:
A privacy play would be more successful from Mozilla if I were
paying them for it. The incentives would be aligned. I cannot pay
google for privacy, because they are incentivized against that.
autoexec wrote 1 day ago:
Paying a company for something doesn't mean that the company
isn't going to also sell every scrap of your data they can get
their hands on. If the company is unethical you are always going
to be the product. Mozilla is either going to be an ethical
company or it isn't and how much money you give them won't make
any difference. Mozilla has not always been an ethical company,
but I don't think it's too late for them to turn that around,
even if it will take time for trust to be rebuilt. I still want
them to be the hero we need them to be.
mmooss wrote 1 day ago:
What is that based on?
You can trust your doctor much more about your knee and much less
about their billing. Trust isn't binary and isn't per
person/organization/object, but varies by person and (activity?).
And anything will be trusted more or less by different people. Is
there evidence of who trusts Mozilla with what, and how much? The
the fact that you don't trust them or that some on HN don't trust
them isn't evidence.
Also, each of us is both commentator and agent. When we say 'I
trust X' or 'I don't trust X', we both communicate our thoughts and
change others' thoughts.
the_biot wrote 1 day ago:
That's a fair question. It's of course my opinion, not hard fact,
but here goes:
- They have for years been trying to add stuff to Firefox that
nobody wants, and were privacy violations. The "marketing
studies" come to mind.
- They have for decades been wasting their time and money on
everything BUT Firefox, and failing at literally all of it. You
can't help but notice the stellar incompetence of Mozilla
leadership.
- They have for a long time been raking in hundreds of millions
of dollars a year from Google, pissing it away on useless stuff,
but mostly on enriching the management layer. How can somebody
like Mitchell Baker be making millions of dollars a year while
simultaneously seeing Firefox market share drop to damn near
zero? This is a thoroughly corrupt organization.
mmooss wrote 1 day ago:
> They have for decades been wasting their time and money on
everything BUT Firefox
They invest the vast majority of their resources in Firefox.
And they have had some incredible successes: Rust, Let's
Encrypt ...
> How can somebody like Mitchell Baker be making millions of
dollars a year while simultaneously seeing Firefox market share
drop to damn near zero?
Maybe there was no realistic way to do better. Maybe thanks to
Baker, Mozilla still exists.
With Firefox market share plummeting, and little prospect for
competing with Google on a free commodity product, Mozilla
needed and needs to find other products and not just watch the
ship go down.
What's your solution? Do you really think they could make
Firefox so good that the non-technical public would go through
the effort of dropping Chrome, despite Google's enormous
marketing advantage?
the_biot wrote 23 hours 29 min ago:
> They invest the vast majority of their resources in
Firefox.
Says who? I have never seen figures that show this. It also
doesn't excuse the gigantic amounts of money wasted on
irrelevant things, or executive salaries.
> And they have had some incredible successes: Rust, Let's
Encrypt ...
That's pretty charitable. LE was a wider industry initiative,
and while Rust was incubated in Mozilla AFAIK, they also let
it slip through their fingers.
> Maybe there was no realistic way to do better. Maybe thanks
to Baker, Mozilla still exists.
How on earth are you defending her behavior? It was utterly
shameless and indefensible. Do you work for Mozilla?
> Mozilla needed and needs to find other products
No, it doesn't. It needs to bank its giant wad of cash and
learn to live off the interest plus whatever it can get in
donations. Mozilla does not need to be a for-profit company,
it needs to be a non-profit making a browser. That was always
supposed to be the mission, from day one.
> Do you really think they could make Firefox so good that
the non-technical public would go through the effort of
dropping Chrome
They did when IE was shoved down people's throats, and
Firefox was the better browser. They did when Chrome came
around and started taking over. Most people even now get
pushed to Edge or Safari, yet still end up using Chrome.
People switching browsers is a thing.
mmooss wrote 13 hours 56 min ago:
Any other belief or possibility is "utterly shameless and
indefensible", and therefore of suspect motivation. Doubt
is difficult, but certainty is ridiculous (said someone).
hamdingers wrote 1 day ago:
That's a great question, honestly, and I like your framing of
trust.
I do not trust Mozilla to keep a product alive. I was frustrated
by Firefox OS and more recently Pocket, but everything they've
tried or acquired aside from the browser itself (and Thunderbird
I guess?) has failed and been shut down. That has burned a lot of
people along the way.
For this reason I can't see myself becoming a user of any future
Mozilla projects.
mmooss wrote 1 day ago:
That makes much more sense. I wonder what the non-HN public
thinks - most of those products, like Firefox OS, were
essentially unknown outside HN-like populations. Pocket was
better known.
But yes, that is part of trust and I'd like to see them address
it.
dabockster wrote 1 day ago:
Firefox is still heavily used by Linux OSes as the default
browser. But I think that's mostly momentum at this point. If
more people knew about Mozilla's organizational challenges,
then I think Firefox would get ditched.
mmooss wrote 1 day ago:
If they like the browser, why would they care about
organizational challenges? Do Google's organization
challenges cost them Chrome users?
palata wrote 22 hours 0 min ago:
Do they like the browser, or do they like the fact that
it's not owned by Google?
When I use Firefox, either it's because I don't have a
choice (my distro doesn't ship Chromium in a way I like,
i.e. not Flatpak) or because I make an effort to
"support" Firefox. But once in a while, I need to use
Chrom(ium) because the website doesn't work on Firefox.
Not that it is necessarily Firefox' fault, but the fact
remains that if Chrome was an independent non-profit, I
would most likely use Chrome and not Firefox.
mh- wrote 1 day ago:
I think a tangential interesting question is: how many
monthly active users does Firefox have, that choose to use
Firefox? Not people who "click the internet icon", etc.
Like you, I suspect the brand recognition and loyalty is
much, much lower than many people in this thread believe it
to be. Not talking about among the highly-technical HN
audience; just at large.
zero0529 wrote 1 day ago:
Trust is relative and it is subjective meaning that I trust Mozilla
more than I trust google but I also trust them in general, enough
at least that they support most of my internet browsing. Unless you
mean something else ?
mixmastamyk wrote 1 day ago:
The job was always very easy, fire all of the pure managers and sock
the google money into an endowment before it runs out. Then focus on
privacy as you mentioned.
They’ve taken in several billion dollars by now. Let that sink in.
They're supposedly a non-profit, so this plan is the well-trodden
playbook.
But of course no Manager instance could imagine such a thing. Cue
Upton Sinclair quote.
dabockster wrote 1 day ago:
Yep. Mozilla is effectively just a tax dodge for Google anymore.
Heck, this AI first announcement was probably strongly influenced
behind the scenes by Google to create an appearance of competition
similar to Microsoft's and Apple's relationship in the 1990s.
Also, ironically, I just switched full time to Brave only
yesterday.
glenstein wrote 1 day ago:
>sock the google money into an endowment before it runs out.
They did that! Why are people proposing that like it's a new idea?
mixmastamyk wrote 1 day ago:
If they were on a sustainable trajectory they wouldn't be selling
their soul for advertising money and other ill-advised revenue
projects that contradict their stated mission.
glenstein wrote 16 hours 39 min ago:
Okay, but now you're changing the subject. The claim was that
they don't have an endowment or that they're not investing it.
But they are.
The truth is the vast majority of organizations with an
endowment are not able to rely on it in perpetuity, I think
there's a small subset of organizations that basically amounts
to a bunch of elite universities. So it's not the intended or
functional or actual purpose of any endowment to be permanent
firewall against any conceivable financial hazard for all
eternity. Having at one point worked for a non-profit myself
that had an endowment, generally, what you do is you calculate
how long an organization's operations could be funded by that
endowment, and is one of a portfolio of metrics for gauging the
financial health of a non-profit. It's more properly understood
as a firewall to create some breathing space in the face of
financial uncertainty. Again, reaching back to my limited stint
at a non-profit, they withdrew a little bit from their
endowment during the 2008-2009 financial crisis, as well as
during covid. It's rarely the case that an endowment can fund
an organization in perpetuity.
And maybe I'm crazy but if someone falsely accuses Mozilla of
not maintaining an endowment, it seems relevant to point out
that they do actually have one.
mixmastamyk wrote 15 hours 53 min ago:
No—they did not cut costs enough to build a sufficient
endowment. Again, income of several billion dollars.
That is plenty for an endowment to build a browser+ in
perpetuity... like an order of magnitude in excess.
Ladybird/servo are successfully building on perhaps 1% of
that?
I'm sure they have some money in the bank and it gets
interest, but obviously not enough or handled well enough to
avoid the temptation to start an advertising project due to
their unsustainable spending rate.
You keep trying to make it sound like they "did everything
they could." No, they did not by a long shot.
autoexec wrote 1 day ago:
They could be on a sustainable trajectory and still sell their
soul purely out of greed. I'm not suggesting that Mozilla is
actually doing that, I just wanted to point out the
possibility.
shevy-java wrote 1 day ago:
Indeed - Google successfully undermined Mozilla here. It was a huge
mistake to get addicted to the Google money; now it is too late to
change it.
account42 wrote 23 hours 49 min ago:
Technically the foundation could still change the direction. But
they won't because leadership is essentially shared between the
corp and foundation.
YetAnotherNick wrote 1 day ago:
Care to explain how would they get the money in the process you
described? Selling privacy to Google or someone is the only money
maker they have.
There is no reason to believe manager pay is even 10% of the total
expense.
mixmastamyk wrote 1 day ago:
Mozilla took in the money from the distant past all the way into
the present. They have leaned into privacy the whole time, while
not being perfect.
At some point they ease off the google money or it goes away
itself. And they move forward on privacy.
Google was less demanding in the past as well; they continue to
give Apple billions each year.
There are a number of privacy-oriented business models, as listed
here: [1] - while not as lucrative as some, combined with an
endowment its a good living that many companies would envy.
[1]: https://aol.codeberg.page/eci/status.html
maxrmk wrote 1 day ago:
Google (currently) pays Mozilla $400-500 million a year to be the
default search engine in firefox.
edit: in 2023 they took in $653M in total, $555M of which was
from Google. They spent $260M on software development, and $236M
on other things.
ethbr1 wrote 1 day ago:
The "other things" is what most people seem to have problem
with.
Mozilla burns a batshit amount of money on feel good fancies.
If it were focused on its core mission -- building great
software in key areas -- it would see it can't afford this,
because that's the same money that if saved would make them
financially independent of Google.
pseudalopex wrote 1 day ago:
> Mozilla burns a batshit amount of money on feel good
fancies.
How much?
stock_toaster wrote 1 day ago:
> In 2018, Baker received $2,458,350 in compensation from
Mozilla.
> In 2020, after returning to the position of CEO,
Baker's salary was more than $3 million.
> In 2021, her salary rose again to more than $5.5
million,
> and again to over $6.9 million in 2022.
>
>
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker#Mozilla_Founda
tion_and_Mozilla_Corporation
pseudalopex wrote 1 day ago:
And what percent of revenue was this?
ethbr1 wrote 1 day ago:
0.55% in 2018, rising to 1.1% in 2022
pseudalopex wrote 11 hours 47 min ago:
Saving 1.1% of revenue would make them financially
independent of Google?
vondur wrote 1 day ago:
>$236M on other things
This is from another poster. I'm guessing stuff not related
to Firefox development.
pseudalopex wrote 1 day ago:
$236M included facilities, administration, marketing, and
so on.
account42 wrote 23 hours 40 min ago:
Yes, they should trim most of that fat.
pseudalopex wrote 11 hours 46 min ago:
How much is fat?
tectec wrote 1 day ago:
What's the quote?
Teever wrote 1 day ago:
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his
salary depends upon his not understanding it."
I agree with the person you're responding to. Decades of funding
and they have zero savings to show for it.
Though it's questionable as to how much big players like Google
would have continued to fund Mozilla if they had seen Mozilla
making the financial moves that would have made it an independent
and self-sufficient entity.
lesuorac wrote 1 day ago:
> Though it's questionable as to how much big players like
Google would have continued to fund Mozilla if they had seen
Mozilla making the financial moves that would have made it an
independent and self-sufficient entity.
Look at how much money Google gave to Apple (Safari) vs Mozilla
(FireFox) per year.
The CEO has unarguable been doing a poor job. Losing market
share has lost them more potential revenue than any of their
pet projects raised.
gkoberger wrote 1 day ago:
Well, they have over a billion in the bank. Which is both a ton
of money, but also goes away quickly when you're a large
company paying lots of money to salaries.
zug_zug wrote 1 day ago:
So if you have a billion in the bank, you can collect 5%
return and never touch the money. So you get $50m a year to
pay enough engineers to make a browser.
That's plenty of money if they recognize they need a super
lean company with 0 bloat and a few highly paid experts who
focus on correctness and not bullshit features.
account42 wrote 23 hours 47 min ago:
But then they can't LARP as a silicon valley tech giant
with million dollar CEO salaries.
vjvjvjvjghv wrote 1 day ago:
Exactly! With such an endowment they should be able to
develop a browser and maybe some other stuff with a small
team that’s focused on tech and not social justice.
glenstein wrote 1 day ago:
>So if you have a billion in the bank,
I just want to note that this is what is sometimes called
carouseling. Which is, instead of acknowledging the
original accusation was not correct, which is what should
be happening, this comment just proceeds right on to the
next accusation.
What is happening, psychologically speaking, that is
causing a mass of people to spew one confidently wrong
accusation after another? They don't have an endowment
(they do!). Well they're not investing it! (they are). Well
they're not working on the browser! (they shipped 12 major
releases with thousands of patches per release with
everything from new tab grouping and stacking to improved
gpu performance to security fixes)
This is like a dancing sickness or something.
Teever wrote 1 day ago:
> "...if they had seen Mozilla making the financial moves
that would have made it an independent and
self-sufficient entity."
Does their endowment fund enable them to be an
independent and self-sufficient entity?
In other words, Can they live off it in perpetuity?
glenstein wrote 1 day ago:
Let's start with the acknowledgement of carouseling.
wtallis wrote 1 day ago:
There's nothing to acknowledge. You're asking
everyone to accept the presumption embedded in the
statement that a billion dollars "goes away quickly
when you're a large company paying lots of money to
salaries", namely that Mozilla should be a large
company and should rely on a steady stream of outside
money instead of seeking sustainable financial
independence. But Mozilla's lack of focus and
excessive spending on side projects is a major part
of the complaints against Mozilla, and you aren't
even trying to make a reasonable case that Mozilla
needs to be spending money like that.
Teever wrote 1 day ago:
I don't understand how what you're accusing me of
pertains to anything I've written here today.
pseudalopex wrote 1 day ago:
The question is if their endowment can fund a
competitive independent web browser in perpetuity.
Looking at other web browsers suggests no.
roenxi wrote 1 day ago:
That isn't really the best way to think about
not-for-profit schemes like Mozilla. Every organisation
eventually becomes corrupted (as in fact we see with
Mozilla), so creating an eternal pot of money for something
is not strategically sensible.
If good people are in charge, they'll just spend everything
and rely on ongoing donations. If nobody thinks it is worth
donating too then it is time to close up shop. Keep a bit
of a buffer for the practical issue of bad years, sure, but
the idea shouldn't be to set up an endowment.
pseudalopex wrote 1 day ago:
How many engineers are enough to make a browser? How do you
know?
Vivaldi employ 28 developers and 33 others to make an
unstable Chromium fork and email program.[1]
Bloat and bullshit features to you are minimum requirements
to someone else.
[1]: https://vivaldi.com/team/
rdiddly wrote 1 day ago:
There are about 800 unique weekly committers to the
Chromium project, so that's a start at gauging the number
for that project. A little harder to find that same
figure for Firefox, but Wikipedia says Mozilla Corp had
about 750 employees as of 2020.
Anyway, if you have $50M, you can afford 500 people at
$100k, or 250 people at $200k. So you simply declare,
this is how many people it takes to make a browser, and
set your goals and timetables accordingly. I feel like
the goals and direction might be more important than the
number of bodies you throw at it, but maybe that's
naïve. But when the product is mature like Firefox (or
Chrome for that matter) you do have some flexibility on
the headcount.
pseudalopex wrote 1 day ago:
Another comment observed your cost estimates were low.
> But when the product is mature like Firefox (or
Chrome for that matter) you do have some flexibility on
the headcount.
Google could reduce Chrome development to maintenance
and remain dominant for years. It would be much like
Internet Explorer 6. Firefox falling too far behind in
performance or compatibility would be fatal.
Fnoord wrote 1 day ago:
Maybe they should quit their presence in the Bay Area.
The rent is insanely high. Not just of an office, also
the workers. Besides, freedom of speech, liberty, DEI
are each under pressure in USA. Mozilla is very much
welcome here in Europe :-)
tikhonj wrote 1 day ago:
You're significantly underestimating fully-loaded cost
per person + other expenses. An engineer making a $200k
salary is going to cost the company something like
$300k, and there are some additional fixed overheads.
And $200k is quite a bit less than your competitors are
paying.
So you're looking at something more like 150 employees
total of which <100 are going to be pure engineers, and
that's stretching your budget and operations pretty
aggressively while also fighting an uphill battle for
recruiting skilled and experienced engineers. (And
browser development definitely needs a core of
experienced engineers with a relatively niche set of
skills!)
rdiddly wrote 15 hours 40 min ago:
None of those figures are what the engineer makes,
they're costs. And they're illustrative, not literal.
You won't pay everyone at the same rate either for
example, and not all will be engineers either, and I
totally left both those facts out of it. Oh no! And
also omitted the fact that a company whose vision and
ideals people agree with can hire said people for
less money, which again brings us back around to the
point that the vision might be more important.
tigroferoce wrote 1 day ago:
Working at Mozilla should be more than money.
$200k/year is more than enough to be happy in most of
the world. You don't need to compete on rock stars
that must live in San Francisco, and focus on people
that are happy with a high paying job and have enough
idealism to accept "only" $200k/year.
account42 wrote 23 hours 45 min ago:
Exactly. One of the biggest problems with Mozilla
is that they see themselves as akin to Google et
al.
shevy-java wrote 1 day ago:
Ladybird had fewer devs, so what were these devs at
Vivaldi doing?
I don't think your argument has a lot of merit. 28 is not
a magic number.
pseudalopex wrote 1 day ago:
> Ladybird had fewer devs, so what were these devs at
Vivaldi doing?
The Ladybird developers have not produced a browser
comparable to Firefox or Vivaldi. Vivaldi have not
produced a browser engine comparable to Ladybird of
course.
> I don't think your argument has a lot of merit. 28 is
not a magic number.
28 is a magic number was not a reasonable
interpretation of my comment.
gsich wrote 1 day ago:
Yet.
pseudalopex wrote 1 day ago:
Yes. This discussion is now. Not in a future which
may not arrive.
prepend wrote 1 day ago:
Brave has about 300 employees and don’t break out
engineers [0]. One of them is Brandon Eich so that counts
for a bunch.
Their revenue is only $52M so kinda what Mozilla would
earn off their endowment.
[0]
[1]: https://getlatka.com/companies/brave.com
pseudalopex wrote 1 day ago:
Latka are not reliable. And you assumed Brave were
profitable?
Brave make a Chromium fork and a search engine. Does a
search engine or a web browser engine require more
people?
FooBarWidget wrote 1 day ago:
Brave doesn't make their own browser engine.
nightski wrote 1 day ago:
Why is so much profit needed?
gkoberger wrote 1 day ago:
Depends on how you look at it. They made $653 million in 2023, most
coming from their biggest competitor, Google.
They don't need this much money, but it means more layoffs and
cutting scope drastically. It's expensive to run a modern browser.
Jolter wrote 1 day ago:
Do you mean they need income, or do you actually mean profit?
In a nonprofit, you don’t need layoffs unless you’re losing
money (negative profit), normally.
gkoberger wrote 1 day ago:
Yeah you're right, I said profit in the original post because
it was a nice polyptoton, but I did indeed mean revenue. That's
on me!
wvh wrote 1 day ago:
I'm still sad they shelved Mozilla Persona due to low adoption. There
is a hole in the market around privacy and identity, and Mozilla
would be a natural choice to fill it, but it's going to be an uphill
battle to get major sites and end users on board. Not a job to be
envious about indeed.
ethbr1 wrote 1 day ago:
1000%
The two places it's mind boggling that Mozilla doesn't have a
product are (1) identity (especially as a provider to 3rd parties)
and (2) instant messaging (especially on mobile).
They were important 10 years ago, they're more important today, and
the existing providers all have huge privacy concerns.
fsflover wrote 1 day ago:
> instant messaging
Doesn't Mozilla have their own Matrix server?
nicoburns wrote 1 day ago:
It does, but it's mostly for coordinating development rather
than a consumer facing product. Personally I'm not convinced
Mozilla IM would make sense though. It's a crowded msrket with
lots of other options.
fsflover wrote 1 day ago:
There are not many options for a secure, e2e messaging not
relying on a single point of failure (including Signal), with
a good UX and a possibility of video calls. I only know of
Matrix. A AFAIK there are not so many trusted servers.
pseudalopex wrote 1 day ago:
What would be Mozilla's revenue model for instant messaging?
account42 wrote 1 day ago:
They could start acting like the nonprofit they are supposedly
are instead of LARPing as silicon valley tech bros.
ethbr1 wrote 1 day ago:
Ads?
Nothing says you have to track users, if you're not looking to
optimize ad monetization per user.
And I daresay there are a fair number of companies who would
love to get even blind exposure to Mozilla's userbase.
pseudalopex wrote 1 day ago:
Why would people use Mozilla's app and not WhatsApp,
iMessage, Signal, or others?
ethbr1 wrote 1 day ago:
Privacy, availability, popularity respectively.
mikestorrent wrote 1 day ago:
Signal is already ostensibly private, available, and
popular enough, and doesn't have ads... why compete?
IMO Mozilla should just double down on the browser and do
everything they can to keep it as a lifeline for Free
Software devices to be able to participate on the
internet as first class citizens.
fsflover wrote 15 hours 10 min ago:
Signal intentionally made their messaging rely on a
single, central point of failure, perfect for targeting
by all sorts of criminals and governments. If Mozilla
provides a Matrix server, I will seriously consider it.
glenstein wrote 1 day ago:
And just to add, I kind of mourn FirefoxOS. We couldn't have
guessed it at the time, but as of 2025, Google is pushing developer
verification and stepping closer and closer to ecosystem lockdown.
It would have been a great time for an alternative mobile OS 10+
years in the making, to welcome all the energy that has gone into
beautiful projects like F-Droid.
If I could time travel into the past, in addition to preventing all
the bad things (e.g. Young Sheldon), I might have told Yahoo they
should flex some financial muscle while they still had relevance
and worked to mobilize (no pun intended) developer time, energy,
etc and perhaps even provide a baseline ecosystem of stock apps to
support FirefoxOS.
chrismorgan wrote 1 day ago:
> We couldn't have guessed it at the time, but as of 2025, Google
is pushing developer verification and stepping closer and closer
to ecosystem lockdown.
We did guess it. Google were already past their “don’t be
evil” days in 2013. They were possibly better than other
companies of similar scale, but the decline was already clearly
beginning. People had long warned that Google could not be
trusted to keep Android open in the long term, that eventually
their benevolence would fade. A good chunk of the enthusiasm
around Firefox OS was in breaking the duopoly and the idea of a
platform that would be much harder to lock down.
glenstein wrote 16 hours 36 min ago:
Fair point, I think I have to concede that you're right that it
was perhaps perceivable at that time. In my defense, I will say
that we are seeing some pretty concrete actions out in the wild
in 2025 that we were only speculating on in 2013 heightening
the urgency of the issue.
fsflover wrote 1 day ago:
> And just to add, I kind of mourn FirefoxOS.
Today, we have Mobian, postmarketOS, PureOS and many more
GNU/Linux OSes for smartphones.
prmoustache wrote 1 day ago:
Back then Firefox was a brand with decent recognition.
fsflover wrote 2 hours 54 min ago:
Isn't Debian today also such a brand? Mobian is just Debian
with minimal changes to run on mobile.
Flere-Imsaho wrote 1 day ago:
It's too late.
If I want to interact with modern society, I have to use
banking apps, the NHS app, WhatsApp, numerous IoT apps... The
list is endless. Many of these will refuse to run on rooted
phones.
Google and Apple won. We can learn from this and hope the next
big thing to come along has some competition from the truly
open source side of computing.
fsflover wrote 1 day ago:
> It's too late.
Too late for what? Librem 5 is my daily driver. Would you
also say that in the 90s Windows "won" and "it was too late"?
Please stop with the security/privacy nihilism,
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27897975
vpShane wrote 1 day ago:
They didn't 'win' - use a laptop. Phones are decent for
certain things but no, you don't need to use WhatsApp, IoT
apps -- most have bluetooth, and you don't have to 'interact
with modern society'
Interact with good circles of people and stuff. I mean, it's
cool that my pixel is some mini high powered TPU computer
that can run apps, F-Droid etc, but I only really care about
the 5g data link within it.
If any app refuses to run due to rooted phone -> open a
browser go to the web version.
I know that you know these things and I'm not trying to make
any point other than: no, you don't have to use those things.
but if you want to, you can.
the next big thing to come is already here, Linux with its
infinite mix of desktop environments, user environments,
distros with pre-set up things. You can have a device use
your SIM/e-SIMS.
Google and Apple's push notification system being locked for
what they deem allowed and control the push tokens, browsers
have push notifications too.
All I'm saying is: Google and Apple didn't win anything and
there's great things like GrapheneOS, plus Google's TPU chips
are awesome.
But, they most certainly didn't 'Win' and 'modern society' is
crazy.
mafuy wrote 1 day ago:
Don't close your eyes from reality. I am forced to use a
phone app to log in into any of the several banks that I
use. There is no web version.
endemic wrote 15 hours 42 min ago:
cool story, I can log in to all my banks on the web!
fsflover wrote 23 hours 49 min ago:
I use Librem 5 as a daily driver. I switched my bank to
avoid an app. I do my banking on their website.
MarsIronPI wrote 21 hours 31 min ago:
> I switched my bank to avoid an app.
When feasible, this sounds like a great reason to
switch banks. If enough people did this, banks would
all offer web apps instead of forcing native apps.
aaronax wrote 1 day ago:
A law can fix that!
mikestorrent wrote 1 day ago:
We need more politicians that aren't afraid of banks.
zx8080 wrote 1 day ago:
Sure, for those who has money for lobbying.
fsflover wrote 1 day ago:
Or for those who support [1] or similar.
[1]: https://eff.org
glenstein wrote 1 day ago:
Well that's a fantastic point, and interesting in this
context because the whole gambit of FirefoxOS was to use
progressive web apps. The browser rather than the Linux
ecosystem becomes the trusted execution environment and PWAs
actually ask less of your bank or (insert security agency)
than even Android or iOS development.
benoau wrote 1 day ago:
I installed FirefoxOS on a phone years ago, it wasn't even bad
really.
szatkus wrote 1 day ago:
The main problem with Firefox OS was that it was really slow.
At the same time it was targeting budget phones.
But on the other hand progress was quite good. Back in the days
I was maintaining unofficial images for Alcatel Fire. Each
version was a little bit faster, but you really can't do much
when the whole OS is a browser running on a device with with
256MB of RAM and a single core CPU.
_heimdall wrote 1 day ago:
Wasn't webOS effectively an OS built on web standards and
effectively just a browser engine?
The Pre had 256MB and something like a 600mHZ processor.
While it was no speed demon, I was always impressed with the
animations and multitasking they pulled off with it.
mikestorrent wrote 1 day ago:
People forget we used the web on 100mHz 486s with maybe
16MB of RAM and sites like Slashdot were plenty usable.
_heimdall wrote 1 day ago:
Granted sites like Slashdot didn't used react server
components.
flaburgan wrote 1 day ago:
I use it as my primary phone for 2 years, first with the Flame,
then with a Z3C.
For me Firefox OS was the finale move of Mozilla, either it
successes and Mozilla becomes a major actor again or it fails
and they slowly die. And thebmy decided to kill it right when
it was becoming stable enough.
glenstein wrote 1 day ago:
It's another damned if you do, damned if you don't. FirefoxOS
is regularly listed by commenters as an example of a wasteful
side bet, whereas my feeling is more along the lines of
yours, that it was striding greatly, as the saying goes, and
attempting to be a major actor.
A big part of the market share loss was due to monopoly and
distribution lockdown of a controlled platform tightly tied
to hardware, so I can certainly see the strategic wisdom of
the attempt. I suspect they didn't have the resources to
press forward, they had a lot less money then than they do
now. Which makes it all the more maddening that Yahoo's role
as a partner was so muted; it could have made the difference
for both of them.
MattTheRealOne wrote 1 day ago:
As with most new operating systems, its biggest problem was
lack of apps. Mozilla seemed to abandon Firefox OS right as
Progressive Web Apps were starting to take off, which would
have done a lot to fix that problem.
greatgib wrote 1 day ago:
What would be nice is something like the Python foundation, people can
be a reasonable membership to become "members" of the organisation with
a right proposal and vote for decisions.
knodi wrote 1 day ago:
Bring back Mozilla OS - Android based! Privacy focused.
50208 wrote 1 day ago:
I hope like hell Mozilla leadership can just go back to focusing on
what is actually important: making a free, fast, secure, private web
browser.
aucisson_masque wrote 1 day ago:
> people agency in how it works. Privacy, data use, and AI must be
clear and understandable. Controls must be simple. AI should always be
a choice — something people can easily turn off. People should know
why a feature works the way it does and what value they get from it.
> Second: our business model must align with trust. We will grow
through transparent monetization that people recognize and value.
> Third: Firefox will grow from a browser into a broader ecosystem of
trusted software. Firefox will remain our anchor. It will evolve into a
modern AI browser and support a portfolio of new and trusted software
additions.
I like what the interim CEO was doing, focusing more on the browser and
forgetting these side projects that leads to nowhere, but it seems it's
back to business with this one.
wackget wrote 1 day ago:
> "a modern AI browser"
No thanks. Absolutely not.
cmcaleer wrote 1 day ago:
The only thing that gives some slight semblance of hope is that he at
least acknowledges that Mozilla is vulnerable and he very very briefly
mentions needing new sources of revenue.
No mention of an endowment (like Wikipedia has) or concrete plans to
spend money efficiently or in a worthwhile way, and I sure hope
‘invest in AI’ doesn’t mean ‘piss away 9 figures that could
have set up an endowment to give Mozilla some actual resilience’.
I hope is that he’s at least paranoid enough about Mozilla’s
revenue sources to do anything about their current position that gives
them resiliency. Mozilla has for well over a decade now been in a
pathetic state where if Google turns off the taps it is quite simply
over. He talks a lot about peoples’ trust in Mozilla. I don’t
really remember what he’s talking about to be honest, but if Mozilla
get to a point where they seem like they can exist without them simply
being Google’s monopoly defence insurance, perhaps I’ll remember
the feeling of trusting Mozilla. I miss it.
lenerdenator wrote 1 day ago:
Mozilla needs to get back to just being a browser project with
foundation-based corporate governance.
I don't get why everything has to include the latest trend. Do what the
Linux kernel project does: be a bazaar. If someone wants to create
deeper AI integration into Firefox, they'll pick up that task, put it
in a branch, and the community will discuss whether it merits inclusion
in the main. If it does, it'll be there; if not, it won't be.
Operate on donations of time and money with a clear goal of what the
project should be.
muragekibicho wrote 1 day ago:
I have a laptop with 4 GB of ram and firefox keeps crashing. I wish
they'd fix this instead of saddling me with AI features I don't need.
cpburns2009 wrote 1 day ago:
It continues to amaze me how a company racking in over 500 million a
year in revenue can continue to fail so spectacularly. With that income
there's no reason they shouldn't be the leading browser. Doubling down
on AI is only going to burn more money while they continue to lose
market share.
sfink wrote 1 day ago:
Are you implying that the direct competitor, Chrome, is taking in the
same or less? Chrome has a much larger staff (excluding the rest of
Google), so I guess they must all be earning a small fraction of
Mozilla staff salaries. Such dedicated people!
cpburns2009 wrote 1 day ago:
My point is Mozilla achieves practically nothing despite making
half a billion ad dollars for free from Google. If Wikipedia's
numbers are right, that's $730,000 per employee.
sfink wrote 1 day ago:
Ah, but your words say Mozilla should be doing more than nothing,
they should in fact be winning:
> With that income there's no reason they shouldn't be the
leading browser.
despite having less resources than their primary competitor.
Well, our primary competitor. I work for Mozilla. Which
apparently means I'm making $730K. Maybe that's why I pay my
house cleaner with a suitcase full of cash every week. Who isn't
as happy about it as she could be, on account of not existing.
Some people are picky about that.
I'd love to be growing our market share dramatically, since I put
in a lot of work when I'm not on HN. Sadly I've been told that
work is achieving practically nothing. I will point out that
practically nothing does at least include still having enough
sway in standards committees to hold the line against an ad-tech
company whose incentives all push in the dystopic direction that
everything is currently headed in. (Ok, maybe not fully holding
the line...) If that stops being the case and Mozilla stops
making a difference, then I believe I could still get a job
elsewhere for a fair bit more than I'm currently making.
Oh wait, I forgot I'm already making $730K. Maybe not, then.
someNameIG wrote 1 day ago:
They're the only modern usable browser engine not developed by a
multi-trillion dollar corp. I'd say that's a pretty big
achievement.
cpburns2009 wrote 1 day ago:
They're developed by a billion dollar corp riding on their past
success from when they challenged the leader of that time,
Microsoft.
someNameIG wrote 1 day ago:
And their engine is still around, how's the leader of the
times web engine going?
throwaway613745 wrote 1 day ago:
Mozilla for the love of God I do not want “AI features” in the tool
I use to do my online banking. Stop this madness.
Nobody is switching away from Firefox because it’s not agentic.
But there might be a small amount of people willing to switch away from
Chromium slop browsers BECAUSE IT ISNT.
Why do you think Waterfox and Librewolf leave this crap out?
TrevorFSmith wrote 1 day ago:
If AI feature are on by default then no thanks!
This is how to burn what little trust remains: "AI should always be a
choice — something people can easily turn off."
It has to be opt-in or you're not worthy of trust.
sfink wrote 1 day ago:
I find this whole "I gotta be able to turn off AI!" thing to be
silly, personally. Do you also want to be able to turn off anything
that uses binary search? Perhaps anything written in C++? Ooh, maybe
it's nested for loops! Those kinda suck, give me an option to turn
those off!
My indelicately expressed point is that the algorithm or processing
model is not something anyone should care about. What matters? Things
like: is my data sent off my device? Is there any way someone else
can see what I'm doing or the data I'm generating? Am I burning large
amounts of electricity? But none of those are "is it AI or not?"
Firefox already has a good story about what is processed locally vs
being sent to a server, and gives you visibility and control over
that. Why aren't the complaints about "cloud AI", at least? Why is it
always "don't force-feed me AI in any form!"?
(To be clear, I'm no cheerleader for AI in the browser, and it
bothers me when AI is injected as a solution without bothering to
find a problem worth solving. But I'm not going to argue against
on-device AI that does serve a useful purpose; I think that's great
and we should find as many such opportunities as possible.)
monegator wrote 1 day ago:
> AI should always be a choice — something people can easily turn off
and a couple of lines below
> It will evolve into a modern AI browser
Besides the obvious "what the fuck is an AI browser?" aren't the two
mutually exclusive?
oytmeal wrote 1 day ago:
I swear I've heard this trust angle used by so many CEOs throughout the
years. When I hear this I know nothing good is on the way.
behringer wrote 1 day ago:
If the next update fails to remove ads on by default we can assume
these are empty promises.
[1]: https://www.quora.com/How-do-I-disable-sponsored-suggestions-a...
tiahura wrote 1 day ago:
Why does firefox need a CEO? Is the Linux model not feasible?
hollerith wrote 1 day ago:
The Linux Foundation has an executive director, which is the usual
title (not CEO) for the head of a non-profit.
Barrin92 wrote 1 day ago:
Because Mozilla is an explicitly mission driven non-profit. Linux
doesn't really have a model, the closest equivalent is basically
Chromium which is to say it's an open source project to which
extremely large companies donate the vast majority of developer
hours.
desireco42 wrote 1 day ago:
From my perspective, Firefox, a while back, just stopped working on
issues that matter. They got into politics, they tried to do
everything, but not as good.
If they just focused to produce a good browser, they would be way
ahead. And time when you could get $100Ms from Google are slowly coming
to an end. Money attracts grifters and this is what brought them down
from my perspective.
Now, just to be honest, I wish they find a way. We always could use
alternatives. Just don't expect this alternative to come from Mozilla.
smileson2 wrote 1 day ago:
I've never understood their massive activism arm, it's always seemed
bloated and ineffective compared to organizations I donate money to
like the EFF
desireco42 wrote 1 day ago:
just grifters siphooning money
eviks wrote 1 day ago:
> Firefox will remain our anchor. It will evolve into a modern AI
browser
Aligning yourself with garbage generators is how you lose trust.
Meanwhile, the top user requested features still point to basic
deficiencies of browser UI
lionkor wrote 1 day ago:
Well Ladybird [0] it is
[0]:
[1]: https://ladybird.org/
ares623 wrote 1 day ago:
I know it's very shallow but the marketing page gives me the ick. I
have been Pavlov'd that websites with such designs are
scams/vaporware.
lionkor wrote 1 day ago:
Fair, but I've been following Andreas Kling since he started
(publically) with SerenityOS back a couple years ago, and he's a
real hacker -- as real as they come.
I've watched hours of how he works on YouTube, it's fantastic, if
anyone can lead a browser team, its him.
shayway wrote 1 day ago:
I'm reading HN on my laptop outside, and a ladybug landed on my
screen right as I was reading this comment. It's sitting there as I
write this. I know this doesn't contribute to the discussion in any
way but it's so neat I just needed to share.
nine_k wrote 1 day ago:
> it is
You must be meaning "will be". Because the first alpha release is
promised some time in 2026. So hopefully by 2028 it will be solid
enough.
GalaxyNova wrote 1 day ago:
You can use it right now if you build it from source, in fact I am
writing this HN comment from it.
hamdingers wrote 1 day ago:
Is this usable day to day yet? I built it a few months ago and there
were showstopper bugs on any nontrivial website.
Exciting project nonetheless.
rvz wrote 1 day ago:
And we can at least donate directly to Ladybird's development [0]
Unlike Mozilla which Firefox is completely funded with Google's
money.
[0]
[1]: https://donorbox.org/ladybird
smt88 wrote 1 day ago:
You can donate to any nonprofit and stipulate that your money be
used only for a certain purpose, and they're legally bound by it.
sfink wrote 1 day ago:
Not relevant here. Yes, you can donate to Mozilla.org and
stipulate whatever you like, but Mozilla.org does not develop
Firefox so telling them to use it for developing Firefox will do
about as much good as telling them to use it to resurrect
unicorns. Mozilla.org owns Mozilla Corporation, which is a
for-profit entity that develops Firefox, but thus far the
corporation hasn't wanted the complications and restrictions that
would come from accepting donations.
smt88 wrote 1 day ago:
Everything I can find online says that there are contributors
working for both Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation
sfink wrote 1 day ago:
Contributors are people. Donations are dollars. People ≠
dollars.
Unless you grind them up and eat them as sausages, but don't
do that. The anti-theft threads will get stuck in your teeth.
smt88 wrote 1 day ago:
The contributors are paid by Mozilla Foundation. This is
not complicated.
sfink wrote 1 day ago:
Hm. I'm dumb so you'll need to spell it out for me.
MoFo and MoCo both have contributors, yes. Both have
unpaid contributors, which apparently are not who you're
talking about. Both also have paid people who work for
them. Whether or not you call them "contributors" or
"employees" doesn't matter much, I guess. But still, MoFo
contributors, paid or not, do not work on Firefox.
Firefox is not a MoFo product. Most MoCo contributors do
work on Firefox. Firefox is a MoCo product. It's
confusing because MoFo owns MoCo, but owning a company
does not mean its products are your products, nor that
you can freely assist with those products (especially in
an arms-length setup involving taxes, which is the very
reason for the MoFo/MoCo split in the first place.) MoFo
does other things, non-Firefox things, like advocacy and
pissing off HN commenters who assume that "Mozilla does
X" headlines always mean MoCo is doing X.
One of us is confused. I have that uneasy sensation I get
when something is going "whoosh!" over my head, so it
might be me.
smt88 wrote 1 day ago:
> Most MoCo contributors do work on Firefox. Firefox is
a MoCo product.
This is true.
> But still, MoFo contributors, paid or not, do not
work on Firefox.
This is not true, based on what I've read about it. Do
you have personal experience with these orgs that
suggests otherwise?
Regardless, nothing is stopping Foundation funds from
being directed to Firefox development. If someone gave
them, for example, $1M that could only be spent on
Firefox, they could pay Corporation or an external
consultancy to contribute to the open-source Firefox
repositories.
This is already happening, either through Foundation or
Corporation. One of the biggest Servo contributors
works for a FOSS consultancy.
There are corollaries to what I'm describing in most
large nonprofits in the US. You get money that a donor
requires you to spend in a certain way, and you spend
that money that way. If you can't do it with in-house
people, you give it to consultants.
sfink wrote 17 hours 1 min ago:
> This is not true, based on what I've read about it.
Do you have personal experience with these orgs that
suggests otherwise?
Yes, I work for MoCo.
> Regardless, nothing is stopping Foundation funds
from being directed to Firefox development. If
someone gave them, for example, $1M that could only
be spent on Firefox, they could pay Corporation or an
external consultancy to contribute to the open-source
Firefox repositories.
I don't really understand the whole setup, but I
believe tax law is what is stopping this. What you
are describing would be fraud (or something like it;
IANAL). Money flows MoCo->MoFo (via dividends).
Paying MoCo for something directly or hiring
consultants to provide value would be "private
inurement" [1], a phrase which here means that
lawyers like scary words. It is using tax-exempt
money to enrich private individuals.
But the tl;dr is that the MoFo/MoCo split was created
specifically so that money could flow MoCo->MoFo and
not the other way around, in order for MoCo to do
business-y stuff without jeopardizing MoFo's
non-profit status. Nvidia's game where it pays
companies to buy their chips would not fly in the
non-profit sector.
> This is already happening, either through
Foundation or Corporation. One of the biggest Servo
contributors works for a FOSS consultancy.
Servo was split out from Mozilla during COVID, and
sadly is now completely unaffiliated. It is in the
Linux Foundation Europe now. (Igalia is great,
though!)
[1]: https://legalclarity.org/private-inurement-d...
BoredPositron wrote 1 day ago:
Now they put a LinkedIn cowboy in charge. Great.
colesantiago wrote 1 day ago:
"The World’s Most Trusted Software Company"
I'm sure the new leader of the trojan horse (fox?) is not going to
pivot to AI...
"...Third: Firefox will grow from a browser into a broader ecosystem of
trusted software. Firefox will remain our anchor. It will evolve into a
modern AI browser and support a portfolio of new and trusted software
additions..."
"It will evolve into a modern AI browser"
and there it is, the most "trusted" software company pivoting to AI.
netdevphoenix wrote 1 day ago:
I love Mozilla but this feels like marketing imo.
From the article: "AI should always be a choice — something people
can easily turn off" and "Firefox will remain our anchor. It will
evolve into a modern AI browser". I highly doubt you will be able to
turn of the transformer tech features in an AI browser imo. And they
won't make a separate browser for this.
This really feels like the beginning of the end for Mozilla, sadly.
Are there any true alternatives (not dependent on financing or any
engines from third parties) to Google, if you wish to use the web in
2025?
AnonC wrote 1 day ago:
> This really feels like the beginning of the end for Mozilla, sadly.
This has been said numerous times over the decades anytime Mozilla
has done something. Thankfully (at least for me), it hasn’t come
true so far.
dabockster wrote 1 day ago:
I switched to Brave. Even with its cryptocurrency stuff bundled, it's
easily disabled and not in your face at all. And their adblock tech
is an amazing uBlock successor.
baobabKoodaa wrote 1 day ago:
I stopped using Brave after they began to shove ads into the splash
screen.
moltopoco wrote 1 day ago:
That is also easily disabled. I think there are five or six
things that I need to disable in a fresh Brave installation and
then it's perfect.
__loam wrote 1 day ago:
Safari lol
dabockster wrote 1 day ago:
Safari has like 20% market share right now. The only thing holding
it back is that it's Mac only. If Apple got a Windows version going
again, it'd eat Chrome for lunch.
20after4 wrote 1 day ago:
The beginning of the end was a long time ago. We are well past the
middle of the end of Mozilla.
bambax wrote 1 day ago:
> It will evolve into a modern AI browser
OMG, please, no! What are they thinking and who wants an "AI
browser"?
> Are there any true alternatives
Firefox with blocked updates works pretty well.
mminer237 wrote 1 day ago:
Not updating works until an exploit fixed years ago exfiltrates
your bank info
account42 wrote 23 hours 1 min ago:
If that's the price to pay for having a working browser until
then.
skrtskrt wrote 1 day ago:
Kagi's Orion browser is 1.0 on Mac and working on the first full
Linux release - it's built on WebKit.
That WebKit is a "third party" dependency but it's still a break from
the browser monoculture and it doesn't seem like Mozilla has as much
interest in pushing the browser engine space forward after pulling
back from Servo.
smaudet wrote 1 day ago:
> This really feels like the beginning of the end for Mozilla, sadly.
I really feel like every time Mozilla announces something, someone
gets paid to leave comments like this around. I've seen many
"beginning of the end" comments like this, and so far, it hasn't
happened.
What I do see is a lot of bashing, and hypocrisy, and excuses for why
its OK that you don't personally try to do better...
stephen_g wrote 1 day ago:
Even as someone who is still a Firefox user - the browser now has
about half the browser market share as Edge... Absolutely nobody
needs to be paid to write these kind of comments!
Honestly the last 5-10 years has been a disaster for Firefox...
mrguyorama wrote 16 hours 29 min ago:
The vast majority of these people complaining are using something
like Brave or just plain Chrome.
They aren't expressing genuine criticisms for the most part.
Tons of them literally work at google.
Like, there's a poster a couple threads over insisting "Brave is
great, you just have to ignore the crypto shit and change a bunch
of settings" and like, somehow brave doesn't get regular 600 post
long threads about how it's "Dead" and "It's the end" and "I have
never used Firefox in my life but I certainly wont now!"
It's absurd.
"Mozilla's CEO makes $6 million" says people who get very angry
if you suggest we should pay the managerial class less of the
worlds money and also never seem to complain about any other CEO
making that money and don't say anything about how much the CEO
of Brave makes or how much money Google as a whole sucks out of
reality to do whatever they want with, including subsidizing a
browser to kill any competition.
Firefox got big because every young tech nerd installed it on
everyone's machine and then a few years later, google literally
paid tons of installers to also bundle and install Chrome and
make it the default browser and everyone here always insists that
people who did not choose to use firefox and did not even notice
they now use chrome are somehow going to pay real money for
firefox?
Meanwhile Opera is showing how nobody gives a shit about any of
this "Privacy" nonsense in the market, and the important features
are things like "you can install a theme your favorite youtuber
made for shits and giggles" and "Advertising to children"
You want browser engine diversity? Guess what, that's Firefox
right now. There is nothing else. That's why I use Firefox.
There's nowhere else to go.
smaudet wrote 1 day ago:
Perhaps not paid, but. I think even if it's natural (I myself
have been known to make a disparaging remark in their direction),
I still suspect some level of manipulation (why was I saying
these things? Out of frustration or because I'd heard something
worrying and negative news sticks better than positive?).
Sure, firefox has had some issues, and nobody is denying the
market share is an issue but:
1) It has worked reliably for the past 10 years
2) Mozilla and firefox have not disappeared, in fact it has
created a number of useful services worth paying for.
Meanwhile, I keep hearing these negative "the world is ending"
comments regarding what amounts to a "force for good" in this
world, and I have to wonder.
How many of these people making these comments recently switched
to chrome, and are saying this as an excuse?
mcpar-land wrote 1 day ago:
Personally try to do what better? Run Mozilla? Make a browser?
smaudet wrote 1 day ago:
Personally not support monopolies? If firefox is not working, do
you have a solution/alternative?
Dylan16807 wrote 1 day ago:
Are you trying to say that complaining about Mozilla's mistakes
supports monopolies?
If yes then that's an unreasonable standard to hold people to.
If no then I can't figure out what your comment means.
smaudet wrote 1 day ago:
Not at all. To clarify, saying something is "over", without
really saying what your plan is, is low effort.
"This is a problem, and here is what I/we should do", takes a
bit more effort.
Firefox is still open source last I checked. You can still
contribute, write bugs, write letters to the CEO, etc...
I'm only taking issue with tendency people have to throw
shade without offering a solution.
Dylan16807 wrote 18 hours 11 min ago:
"low effort" is a completely different statement from
supporting monopolies. If that's what you actually meant,
sure I guess.
But it's really hard for a normal person to do much about
steering firefox other than helping raise a fuss.
Sometimes there isn't "a solution".
pjmlp wrote 1 day ago:
I still use Firefox, however it has been away from our browser matrix
since 2019, very few customers worry with browsers under 5% market
share.
shadowgovt wrote 1 day ago:
"Anchor" is interesting. Because it could mean cornerstone or it
could mean the thing weighing the company down.
trentnix wrote 1 day ago:
The beginning of the end was getting rid Brendan Eich for wrongthink.
This is the middle of the end.
coryrc wrote 1 day ago:
He resigned April 3, 2014 after two weeks in the role.
According to [1] Google Chrome exceeded Firefox market share in
early 2012 after a steady rise starting in 2009 afaict.
If his resignation was involved, it was a symptom and not a cause.
The end was already forecasted at least two years earlier.
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/137ephs/firefoxs...
bigyabai wrote 1 day ago:
Having seen what Brave became, I'm extremely happy that Eich wasn't
allowed to bring his "vision" to my favorite browser.
Tempest1981 wrote 1 day ago:
Brave is great. Takes just a few seconds to turn off the bloat.
Anyone try Helium?
LexiMax wrote 1 day ago:
Even in a compromised state, if given the choice between Firefox
and Brave, I would choose Firefox 10 out of 10 times. A closed
source chromium fork put out by a business that still isn't sure
what its business model is and already has a fair number of
"whoopsies" under its belt is a complete non-starter for me.
That is, given the choice between Firefox and Brave. For what
it's worth, my current browser is Zen, and I'm quite happy with
it.
homebrewer wrote 1 day ago:
Brave is 100% FOSS. At least the client side, I've not looked
into their server applications.
[1]: https://github.com/brave
LexiMax wrote 1 day ago:
Fair enough. I'd still be very hesitant to use it on account
of it being a chrome fork. Moreover, I don't really
understand how Brave expects to be a viable business without
deeply betraying their userbase at some point.
It admittedly is a gut feeling, but Brave started out with a
browser and some handwavy crypto magic beans and seemed like
it careened from idea to idea looking for a business model,
occasionally stepping on toes along the way. They have
products like AI integration, a VPN and a firewall, but those
aren't particularly stand-out products in a very crowded
market.
As a point of comparison, Kagi started out with a product
that people were willing to pay for, and grew other services
from there. I feel comfortable giving them money, and I'd be
willing to at least try their browser - if it ever releases
for Windows.
dabockster wrote 1 day ago:
Your points are valid. But what made me finally switch was
that it is open source, that it has been out for roughly a
decade now, and that Brendan Eich's opinions from 2014 are
mostly based on his Catholic faith at the time (which
obviously is likely to have changed/evolved now that we're
a decade later).
> Moreover, I don't really understand how Brave expects to
be a viable business without deeply betraying their
userbase at some point.
They have a way better merch store than Mozilla. They
should expand that.
"MERCHANDISING! Where the real money from the movie is
made!"
Dylan16807 wrote 1 day ago:
> which obviously is likely to have changed/evolved now
that we're a decade later
I refuse to make any assumptions there. Either he says
he changed, or I treat him like he hasn't changed.
nticompass wrote 1 day ago:
This is why I've been using Firefox forks like Zen or LibreWolf.
These forks will disable/strip out the AI stuff, so I never have to
see it.
vpShane wrote 1 day ago:
LibreWolf ftw, I switched to it, installed my extensions and am not
looking back. Would be nice to have a mobile Firefox(LibreWolf)
with all extensions, I should go look around F Droid again.
in ff if you're reading this go to about:config and type privacy -
why these aren't immediately obvious in the Settings is beyond me
MattTheRealOne wrote 1 day ago:
IronFox is essentially LibreWolf for mobile:
[1]: https://gitlab.com/ironfox-oss/IronFox
FuriouslyAdrift wrote 1 day ago:
Palemoon still exists...
TehCorwiz wrote 1 day ago:
This is why I'm hopeful that at least one of Ladybird, Flow, and
Servo emerge as a viable alternative to the current crop.
atlintots wrote 1 day ago:
I recently learned of Flow, and I don't understand why people group
it together with Ladybird and Servo, which are both developing the
browser engine from scratch mostly, while Flow seems to be based on
Chromium. Is Flow doing anything different compared to the numerous
other Chromium-based browsers? Genuinely curious.
nicoburns wrote 1 day ago:
Are you talking about [1] ? I wasn't aware of this project
before, but it appears to a new chromium based browser.
The Flow people are talking about when they talk about Ladybird
and Servo is [2] which does have it's own engine. It has a
similar level of standards compliance to Servo and Ladybird,
although it's not open source which puts it in a somewhat
different category.
[1]: https://flow-browser.com
[2]: https://www.ekioh.com/flow-browser/
JoshTriplett wrote 1 day ago:
> Are there any true alternatives (not dependent on financing or any
engines from third parties)
Servo is still a work in progress, but their current positions give a
great deal of hope.
rvz wrote 1 day ago:
> This really feels like the beginning of the end for Mozilla, sadly.
The moment Mozilla failed to stop being dependent on Google's money
whilst being true to their own mission in being a 'privacy first
browser' it already was the end and the damage in trust was done.
In 2007, the CEO at the time said they could live without Google's
money - Now, their entire survival was tied to Google funding them
[0] and got rewarded for failure whilst laying off hundreds of
engineers working on Firefox.
Other than the change in leadership after 17 years of mis-direction,
the financial situation has still not changed.
Do you still trust them now?
> Are there any true alternatives (not dependent on financing or any
engines from third parties) to Google, if you wish to use the web in
2025?
After thinking about it, the only viable browser that is not funded
by Google (Firefox 75%, Safari (>20%) and Chrome) is Ladybird. [1]
[0] [1]
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20120105090543/https://www.compu...
[2]: https://ladybird.org/
glenstein wrote 1 day ago:
>In 2007, the CEO at the time said they could live without Google's
money
Can you say more about where that quote came from? I'm seeing it as
being from 2015.
[1]: https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/firefox-ma...
rvz wrote 1 day ago:
It is from an archived link which is also in my comment and the
article's date is from 2007: [0]
[0]
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20120105090543/https://www.c...
rdm_blackhole wrote 1 day ago:
> The moment Mozilla failed to stop being dependent on Google's
money whilst being true to their own mission in being a 'privacy
first browser' it already was the end and the damage in trust was
done.
I understand your position but what is the alternative funding
source that could keep a company making a free browser running?
Apple funds Safari's development but it's basically a side project
for them, Google funds Chrome's development as side project to
their ad business, Edge is the same for Microsoft.
Obviously we don't want Firefox to become ad-supported so that
leaves either donations which to be honest does not work (see all
the OS projects that ask for donations when you install NPM
packages for reference) or they need to start charging money (we
know how well that worked out for Netscape) or finally find another
corporate sponsor willing to shove billions of dollars each year
into a product that will not improve their bottom line.
I am all for alternatives and I agree with you that something needs
to change but the real question is how?
Maybe I am presumptuous in this assumption but I am pretty sure
that if Mozilla had another palatable solution on the table, they
would have probably implemented it by now.
> After thinking about it, the only viable browser that is not
funded by Google (Firefox 75%, Safari (>20%) and Chrome) is
Ladybird.
Ladybird is sponsored by many big companies as well. What makes you
think that somehow their fate will be any different than Firefox?
Do you believe that Shopify for example is more altruistic than
Google and therefore should be trusted more?
I personally don't.
In my opinion the problem is the expectation that things should be
free always on the internet and we can thank Google and Facebook
for that. Most people these days who are not in the tech world
simply have no idea how many hours and how much money it takes to
create something, having it used by people and iterating on it day
in day out until it is in a good shape and can be used by the
general public.
Therefore besides a small cohort of users in tech (like Kagi's
customers for example who understand that a good search engine is
not free), the vast majority of people will not accept to have to
pay for a browser. Which brings us back to the question I asked
above.
Who will fund this supposedly free for all browser that does not
track you, that does not show you any ads, that does not
incorporate AI features, that does not try to up-sell you or scam
you? From my vantage point it's not like there are 100s of
solutions to get out of this conundrum.
lavela wrote 1 day ago:
I honestly think the answer is tax money. It should be clear by
now, that a browser is (critical) infrastructure and it should be
funded as such. Ideally by multiple, non-aligned states.
pessimizer wrote 1 day ago:
> Google funds Chrome's development as side project to their ad
business
> Obviously we don't want Firefox to become ad-supported
Firefox is currently ad-supported. They take an enormous amount
of money from Google, an ad company.
nottorp wrote 1 day ago:
> donations which to be honest does not work
It would work if I knew my donations go towards the fucking
browser and not towards "AI" or whatever the craze was before it.
Since they refuse to do that, I don't donate.
Seattle3503 wrote 1 day ago:
How man large software projects do that? Blender and...?
Mozilla would have to become like Wikipedia, with a large
fundraising focus. Its not like Wikipedia evades criticism for
that approach.
nottorp wrote 1 day ago:
I think Firefox has a sizable minority of users that are
aware of its importance and would donate for "a fucking
browser".
Tbh I would also donate for a nagging team that publicly
pressures various corporate sites into continuing to support
firefox (like my cell phone provider, i can't download
invoices with FF since 3 months).
What I wouldn't donate for is "me too" initiatives like "AI"
and corporate bullshit. Or even charity initiatives if done
by Mozilla. It's not Mozilla's job. Their job is to keep a
working browser alternative up.
And as it's been stated in techie discussions time and time
again, they don't need to be that large for just "a fucking
browser". But that would diminish the CEO's status so we get
what we have now instead.
glenstein wrote 1 day ago:
I was going to say a similar thing. I'm still not sure I have
seen an example of a browser at the scale of Firefox (hundreds
of millions of users, 30 million lines of code) being
successfully monetized, basically ever, unless it was entirely
subsidized by a trillion dollar company that was turning its
users into the product. Or alternatively, succeeding by selling
off its users for telemetry or coasting off of Chromium and tying
their destiny to Google.
All the "just monetize differently" comments are coming from a
place of magical thinking that nobody has actually thought
through. Donations are a feel good side hustle, but completely
unprecedented for any but Wikipedia to raise money that's even
the right order of magnitude. Any attempts at offering monetized
services run into delusional and contradictory complaints from
people who treat them to "focus on the browser" but also to
branch out and monetize. Hank Green has used the term hedonic
skepticism for the psychology of seeking to criticize for its
entertainment value, which I think is a large part of what this
is.
For a more serious answer on funding, I think the most
interesting thing in this space is their VC fund. Mozilla has
been brilliant in building up and carefully investing their nest
egg from nearly two decades of search licensing, and while it's
not Ycombinator, they have the beginnings of a VC fund that may
be a very interesting kind of Third Way, so to speak, depending
on how that goes.
Seattle3503 wrote 1 day ago:
> Hank Green has used the term hedonic skepticism for the
psychology of seeking to criticize for its entertainment value,
which I think is a large part of what this is.
I'm fascinated by this concept. Us it expanded anywhere?
glenstein wrote 16 hours 32 min ago:
I agree, it's fascinating and I believe a necessary term. I
just recall him using it on his tik tokk. And come to think
of it it might have actually been John Green (oops).
But basically his idea was that hedonic skepticism. Was this
kind of like reflexive unthinking doubt of the sincerity of
any institutional effort to do any form of social good
whatsoever. It seems to over correct towards skepticism and
is motivated, not by factual veracity but by the kind of
entertainment value of being skeptical and jaded about
everything. And so the idea that the center for disease
control might really sincerely want to stop the spread of
measles, if you're a hedonic skeptic, you laugh at how
ridiculous and naive. It is to believe that they might have
your best interests at heart. Which I think overlooks the
simple possibility that sometimes we stand up institutions in
response to real societal needs, and that you can have an
appropriate and healthy skepticism of politicians and policy
makers acting in their own self-interest while also
appreciating that there do exist purpose-driven organizations
that roll out programs and policies based on a genuine
interest in solving problems.
rdm_blackhole wrote 1 day ago:
Thank you for your comment.
I am glad I am not the only one who is asking the tough
questions regarding this problem.
In reality it boils down to replacing 1 income stream provided
by Google with one or more new income streams.
That means that Mozilla needs something to sell and quickly.
Or use their VC funds as you said, but we know VC funds need to
deploy a lot of capital and then hope that one of their
companies makes it big to recoup their investments and
eventually make a profit.
I am not sure if betting the entire future of Mozilla on this
VC venture would be a wise move to be honest. It's just too
unpredictable.
glenstein wrote 1 day ago:
For sure. Like any side bet it should be staged and
complementary rather than all or nothing.
blm126 wrote 1 day ago:
I believe you stated the problem in a way that its unsolvable.
Charge your customers money, so you can work for them. I'm not
nearly as certain as you are that Netscape failed because it was
charging money. Netscape just stopped updating for multiple years
at the height of the browser wars.
For Firefox in particular, I would 100% be willing to pay for it.
Individuals like me who will pay are rare, but companies that
will pay aren't. I think the answer for modern Mozilla is a Red
Hat style model. Charge a reasonable amount of money. Accept that
someone is going to immediately create a downstream fork. Don't
fight that fork, just ignore it. Let the fork figure out its own
future around the online services a modern browser wants to
provide.
Then, lean hard into the enterprise world. Figure out what
enterprise customers want. The answer to that is always for
things to never, ever change and the ability to tightly control
their users. That isn't fun code to write, but its profitable and
doesn't run counter to Mozilla's mission. That keeps Mozilla
stable and financially independent.
Mozilla will maintain lots of influence to push forward their
mission, because hopefully their enterprise customer base is big,
but also they are the ones actually doing the work to make the
downstream fork possible.
rdm_blackhole wrote 1 day ago:
> I believe you stated the problem in a way that its
unsolvable.
I think you misunderstood me. I asked a question because the
answer is far from obvious. If the solution to this problem was
obvious, we wouldn't be having the same discussion on HN every
6 months when a new press release from Mozilla comes out.
I am very much interested by what people think the solution
should be. Now, you mentioned Enterprise customers which is
interesting because usually what I have read on this sort of
threads was that Mozilla had made many mistakes (I agree),
Mozilla should change their ways by removing this feature or
adding this feature but almost everyone conveniently forgets
that at the end of the day someone has to pay for all this
stuff.
> Charge your customers money, so you can work for them.
Which is what I mentioned in my comment. Start charging people.
The problem is how do you convince the general public to use
Firefox instead of Chrome or Edge, especially is you need to
pay for the software?
If privacy was a selling point, then Meta would have closed
shop many years ago.
> I'm not nearly as certain as you are that Netscape failed
because it was charging money. Netscape just stopped updating
for multiple years at the height of the browser wars.
It doesnt matter because we will never know. The reality is
that people expect to browse the internet for free. Asking them
for cash has never been done at this scale.
If Mozilla was to start charging money tomorrow, you would find
that many people would object to that and most people would
simply move to Chrome because why not?
> Then, lean hard into the enterprise world. Figure out what
enterprise customers want. The answer to that is always for
things to never, ever change and the ability to tightly control
their users. That isn't fun code to write, but its profitable
and doesn't run counter to Mozilla's mission. That keeps
Mozilla stable and financially independent.
I understand the comparison with Red hat but I am doubtful that
this model will work. Red Hat helps companies ship stuff, it
makes people more productive, it increases the bottom line.
What would a paid version of Firefox do that makes people more
productive or makes companies money that they couldn't get from
Chrome? I am genuinely asking because again, it's mot very
clear to me.
> Mozilla will maintain lots of influence to push forward their
mission, because hopefully their enterprise customer base is
big, but also they are the ones actually doing the work to make
the downstream fork possible.
That is big assumption that has not been proven at this time. I
think that making any sort of plans based on hypothetical paid
version is highly speculative.
glenstein wrote 1 day ago:
Firefox is reportedly rolling out an enterprise option in 2026
so we'll see how that goes.
rolph wrote 1 day ago:
>what is the alternative funding source that could keep a company
making a free browser running?<
i wonder how linux does it?
linus and anthony should have a head to head.
rdm_blackhole wrote 1 day ago:
I think you are comparing apples to oranges here. Linux is made
of many distros, each one with their own strong points and
features. Many different maintainers matain them. There is no
single point of funding for them.
Mozilla on the other hand makes basically one semi well-known
product (and other even less known stuff) and gives it away for
free.
If tomorrow Google pulls the plug, who will pay for the
salaries of the engineers who maintain Firefox? The general
public does not care if Firefox lives or dies. In my circle of
friends and family, I am the only one who uses Firefox. Most
people are on Chrome or Brave. That's it.
Someone in the comments above mentioned that Mozilla could
release a paid version for Enterprise customers, imitating Red
Hat in a way, but I am highly skeptical that Enterprise
customers in times such as these will be willing to pay for
something that they can get for free from Google or Microsoft.
I guess we will have to wait and see.
rolph wrote 1 day ago:
1) Linux is made of many distros, each one with their own
strong points and features. Many different maintainers matain
them. There is no single point of funding for them.
2) Mozilla on the other hand makes basically one semi
well-known product.
the way i see it mozilla has one thing to do, and didnt do it
very well.
the linux GNU gang has a mountain to contend with and has has
moved a mountain.
so what would be the secret sauce that mozilla doesnt have.
Seattle3503 wrote 1 day ago:
> I am highly skeptical that Enterprise customers in times
such as these will be willing to pay for something that they
can get for free from Google or Microsoft.
They would have to build a better enterprise offering.
Companies like Chrome because can use Google as their IDP,
and when their employees log in with their company account
the company can push certs and security politicies to their
Chrome install.
Firefox doesn't have that level of integration with Google
security services.
reinar wrote 1 day ago:
> i wonder how linux does it?
they don't? There's no company, or rather - a lot of them,
Linux kernel moves forward like 80% by corporate contributors.
For some of them it's critical part of their infrastructure,
some of them need to get their device drivers mainlined, for
some of them it's gpl magic at work.
Linux desktop experience, however, leaves a lot to be desired.
Companies aren't interested to contribute to a browser when
they can just reskin chromium or build on blink directly and
community cannot match the pace.
worik wrote 1 day ago:
> Linux desktop experience, however, leaves a lot to be
desired.
No, it does not.
It is a wonderful world fill of variety, choice and diversity
Seattle3503 wrote 1 day ago:
Linux and FF have comparable desktop market share.
account42 wrote 22 hours 55 min ago:
Moving in very different directions though.
mschuster91 wrote 1 day ago:
> Apple funds Safari's development but it's basically a side
project for them, Google funds Chrome's development as side
project to their ad business, Edge is the same for Microsoft.
Edge is a Chromium fork so essentially they don't have that much
work in keeping up.
this_user wrote 1 day ago:
What even is an "AI browser"? It's a browser, it's mainly supposed to
render web pages / web apps. There is no obvious reason why it would
need any AI features.
estimator7292 wrote 1 day ago:
If someone tries to sell you an AI browser, tell them I've got some
pictures of apes to sell
AnonC wrote 1 day ago:
Technically, a browser is a “user agent”, and it could be
argued that some AI features (with privacy) can help in being a
better user agent.
stronglikedan wrote 1 day ago:
Comet, for one
CamperBob2 wrote 1 day ago:
It is really incredibly nice to be able to highlight a passage,
right click on it, and select "Summarize" or "Explain this."
That's all FireFox does at the moment. It's an option on the
right-click menu. You can ignore it. If nobody told you the evil
AI thingy was there, you would probably never notice it.
account42 wrote 23 hours 9 min ago:
It's a lot nicer to exercise your brain and maybe learn
something.
CamperBob2 wrote 17 hours 18 min ago:
If Luddism is your idea of "learning something," well... other
sites beckon.
jmiskovic wrote 1 day ago:
A browser with current definition obviously doesn't "need" AI. And
we also know all too well how it's going to turn out - they will
both use the AI to push ads onto us and also collect and sell our
personal data.
However, a strong locally-executed AI would have potential to
vastly improve our experience of web! So much work is done in
browsers could be enhanced or automated with custom agents. You'd
no longer need any browser extensions (which are privacy nightmare
when the ownership secretly changes hands). Your agents could
browse local shops for personalized gifts or discounts, you could
set up very complex watches on classified ads. You could work
around any lacking features of any website or a combination of
several websites, to get exactly what you seek and to filter out
anything that is noise to you. You would be able to seamlessly
communicate with the Polish internet subculture, or with Gen Alpha,
all without feeling the physical pain. With an AGI-level AI maybe
even the Reddit could be made usable again.
Of course this is all assuming that the web doesn't adapt to become
even more closed and hostile.
mplewis wrote 17 hours 26 min ago:
These are all the same sort of vaporware promises that come
straight from every AI booster. These features will never exist
and you should feel bad for pretending they might.
apothegm wrote 21 hours 34 min ago:
You must use extensions for very different things than I do.
NothingAboutAny wrote 1 day ago:
man not a single one of those examples sounds like something I'd
need, or even need an AI agent to do.
I keep seeing the ads for AI browsers and the only thing I can
think about is the complete and utter lack of a use case, and
your post only solidifies that further.
not that I'm disagreeing with you per se, I'm sure some people
have a workflow they can't automate easily and they need a more
complicated and expensive puppateer.js to do it.
I just dont know what the heck I'd use it for.
jmiskovic wrote 1 day ago:
I find it very hard to believe that either every site you
interact with works exactly as you want it to work, or that you
have the time/capacity to adjust them all with custom
extensions. I get that there are downsides but you don't see
any upsides?
mrguyorama wrote 17 hours 21 min ago:
No. No upsides.
Again, what can an LLM possibly do to help? Summarize the
page I'm already reading? I don't want a summary, that's
dumb. People who think their time is so precious they have to
optimize a five minute read into a ten cent API call and one
minute read of possibly wrong output are just silly. You
aren't "freeing up time", you are selling your reality.
Buy stuff for me? Why? Buying shit online is so easy most
people do it on the toilet. I've bought things on the
internet while blackout drunk. I also have a particular view
of "Value" that no LLM will ever replicate, and not only do I
have no interest in giving someone else access to my
checkbook, I certainly do not want to give it to a third
party who could make money off that relationship.
How would I no longer need browser extensions? You're saying
the LLM would reliably block ads and that functionality will
be managed by the single human being who has reliably done
that for decades like uBlock origin? How will LLMs replace
my gesture based navigation that all these hyper-productivity
focused fools don't even seem to know exists? It certainly
won't replace my corporate required password manager.
>You would be able to seamlessly communicate with the Polish
internet subculture, or with Gen Alpha, all without feeling
the physical pain
Come on, get over yourself.
> With an AGI-level AI
So Mozilla, who isn't even allowed to spend $6 million on a
CEO is somehow magically going to invent super AI that runs
locally? Get a grip.
NothingAboutAny wrote 1 day ago:
I have extensions for the sites that need them and everything
else is fine? occasionally I guess there'll be something in
another language I want translated but I just copy paste the
text into google translate or similar.
what sites out there are so unusable you'd need an LLM to fix
them for use?
high_na_euv wrote 1 day ago:
Translation?
Image search?
Live captions?
Dubbing?
Summary?
Rewrite text better?
dangus wrote 1 day ago:
Exactly. There’s doom and gloom in this thread but the truth is
that the early adopters who are using AI-integrated browsers love
them.
Mozilla having unique features is what made it popular in the
first place (tabbed browsing versus IE6).
amrocha wrote 1 day ago:
I’m not exactly surprised that AI grifters that have probably
bet all their life savings on nvidia “love” their AI
browsers.
dangus wrote 16 hours 22 min ago:
Shit on it all you want, the utility of AI is undeniable.
Laggards say exactly what you’re saying now.
amrocha wrote 15 hours 6 min ago:
It’s actually very deniable. Check this out i’m gonna
do it now. AI has been a net negative to my life. Boom,
denied.
mitthrowaway2 wrote 1 day ago:
I get very annoyed by generative AI, but to be fair I could
imagine an AI-powered "Ctrl+F" which searches text by looser
meaning-based matches, rather than strict character matches; for
example Ctrl+AI+F "number of victims" in a news article, or
Ctrl+AI+F "at least 900 W" when sorting through a list of
microwave ovens on Walmart.
Or searching for text in images with OCR. Or searching my own
browsing history for that article about that thing.
mrguyorama wrote 16 hours 47 min ago:
>"at least 900 W" when sorting through a list of microwave
ovens on Walmart.
Newegg has that as a built in filter.
Why do you people keep insisting I "need" an LLM to do things
that are standard features?
I find shopping online for clothes to suck, but there's nothing
an LLM can do to fix that because it's not a magic machine and
I cannot try on clothes at home. So instead, I just sucked it
up and went to Old Navy.
Like, these things are still lying to my face every single day.
I only use them when there's no alternative, like quickly
porting code from python to Java for an emergency project. Was
the code correctly ported? Nope, it silently dropped things of
course, but "it doesn't need to be perfect" was the spec.
>Or searching for text in images with OCR.
That thing that was a mainline feature of Microsoft OneNote in
2007 and worked just fine and I STILL never used? I thought it
was the neatest feature but even my friend who runs everything
out of OneNote doesn't use it much. Back in middle school we
had a very similar Digital Notebook application that predates
OneNote with a similar feature set, including the teachers
being able to distribute Master copies of notes for their
students, and I also did not use OCR there.
The ONE actual good use case of LLMs that anyone has offered me
did not come from techbros who think "Tesla has good software"
is not only an accurate statement but an important point for a
car, it came from my mom. Turns out, the text generation
machine is pretty good at generating text in French to make
tests! Her moronic (really rich of course, one of the richest
in the state) school district refused to buy her any materials
at all for her French classes, so she's been using ChatGPT. It
does a great job, because that's what these machines are
actually built for, and she only has to fix up the output
occasionally, but that task is ACTUALLY easy to verify, unlike
most of the things people use these LLMs for.
She STILL wouldn't pay $20 monthly for it. That shouldn't be
surprising, because "Test generator" for a high school class is
a one time payment of $300 historically, and came with your
textbook purchase. If she wasn't planning on retiring she would
probably just do it the long way. A course like that is a
durable good.
avazhi wrote 1 day ago:
Translate sure.
Image search? I have a search engine for that.
Live captions? Didn’t ask for that, wouldn’t use it.
Dubbing? Ditto.
Summary? Wouldn’t trust an AI for that, plus it’s just more
tik-tokification. No fucking thanks. I don’t need to experience
life as short blips of everything.
Rewrite text better? Might as well kill myself once I’m ready
to let a predictive text bot write shit in my place.
So… no thanks.
somebodythere wrote 1 day ago:
You personally wouldn't use live captions and dubbing, so
there's no point building it for the millions of people who
need it as an accessibility feature?
avazhi wrote 1 day ago:
They can use addons, but it shouldn’t be built in to the
browser. Not all that complicated.
high_na_euv wrote 21 hours 33 min ago:
Because of what?
Why it must be addon? Because Ai has negative connotations?
avazhi wrote 16 hours 50 min ago:
Bloat? Security? Privacy? Larger codebase to maintain?
Lack of focus by a Browseer company? Speed?
tigroferoce wrote 1 day ago:
Live captions and dubbing can be a game changer for:
- non native speakers
- moving away from the english-centric web
- impaired people
avazhi wrote 1 day ago:
Couldn’t care less about any of that. English is the
world’s dominant language and will remain so for the
foreseeable future. There’s nothing wrong with that. And
subtitles exist already or can be generated by addons. Most
people don’t use them. So, once again, maybe don’t
inconvenience the vast majority of users for some small
subset of the population.
high_na_euv wrote 21 hours 31 min ago:
Just say that you dont care about other ppl, that's it,
lol.
English proficiency is pretty high bar. Thats multi year
effort
avazhi wrote 16 hours 44 min ago:
I mean, sure. I don’t generally give a shit about other
people. That’s also not really relevant here. There
will always be a dominant language. Currently, it happens
to be English and it will remain English into the near
future (250+ years). If you attend even a shitty school
in a third world country today you are taught English as
a second language. Look at the Philippines or sub-Saharan
African countries. Everybody speaks English + their
native language.
Crying about English’s global penetration is super
weird while also being pointless, since it’s a fait
accompli at this point.
komali2 wrote 1 day ago:
> English is the world’s dominant language and will
remain so for the foreseeable future.
Based on the fact that you said this I'm going to assume
you can't read/write Mandarin, apologies if that's
incorrect because that leads to my second assumption which
is that you're unaware of the astonishingly vast amount of
content and conversation related to open source and AI/ML
you're missing out on as a result of not being able to
read/write Mandarin.
avazhi wrote 1 day ago:
What does what you wrote have to do with what I wrote, or
the comment I was replying to? Literally every reasonably
educated Chinese person speaks English as a 2nd language.
I'm missing out on all sorts of shit I'd find interesting
by virtue of not being a prodigious polyglot. That fact
has nothing to do with English being the global language
for literally everything in every domain, nor with the
fact that in-browser language translation doesn't require
baked-in AI.
stephen_g wrote 1 day ago:
Yes, Translate is the only one I want - and we already have
that!
The worst is anything that tries to suggest stuff in text
fields or puts buttons etc. to try and get you to "rewrite with
AI" or any nonsense like that - makes me just want to burn
anything like that to the ground.
godelski wrote 1 day ago:
> Image search? I have a search engine for that.
I'd use it. Why does it need to be another site? I'd trust
Mozilla more than I trust Google. Do you really feel different?
Plus, Search by Image[0] is one of the most popular extensions,
with 3x as many people using it as tree-style tabs.
I don't use it but a grammar tool is the next most popular[1],
so I could see this being quite a useful feature.
But the other stuff, I'm with you. I like translate but I
personally don't care for dubbing, summarizing, or anything
else.
[0] [1]
[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/search_...
[2]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/languag...
avazhi wrote 1 day ago:
But that’s exactly my point - addons already solve these
problems without baking them in natively. Adding AI just
creates bloatware/privacy/security/maintenance problems that
are already solved by users being able to customise the
browser for their own needs.
godelski wrote 1 day ago:
I do get that and I'm like 60% with you, but I'm just
saying that it is easy to get a bit in a bubble and Mozilla
needs to cater to the average person. And let's be honest,
we aren't the average user.
Personally I'm fine as long as it continues to be easy to
disable and remove. Yeah, I'd rather it be opt-in instead
of opt-out but it's not a big price to pay to avoid giving
Chrome more power over the internet. At the end of the day
these issues are pretty small fish in comparison.
avazhi wrote 1 day ago:
I mean, Chrome/Google have already won the browser wars
and it isn't even close. 'Average' persons don't use
Firefox, period - they use Chrome. I dunno when you last
looked at browser market share, but Firefox is already
extremely niche. Trying to cater to the 'average user'
when your entire userbase consists of power users is
asinine but Mozilla clearly doesn't understand this. They
think it's still 2008 or something.
godelski wrote 17 hours 15 min ago:
Do you use Firefox?
If not, why not?
Do normal people use Firefox?
I've successfully migrated my girlfriend, parents, and
several friends. Half those friends don't even know how
to program. So yes, normal people can use Firefox and
they really don't notice the difference.
> Chrome/Google have already won the browser wars
It isn't over till its over. It's trivial to make a
stand in this fight. It is beyond me why a large
portion of HN users aren't using FF or one of its
derivatives. Of all people they should be more likely
to understand what's at stake here...
avazhi wrote 16 hours 52 min ago:
Yes I use FF. You’ve completely misunderstood my
point.
Your comment about how YOU had to get the people
close to you to use FF was exactly my point. Techies
are the only people who use FF now without it being
foisted onto them by their techie friends.
homarp wrote 1 day ago:
local LLM assisted 'tampermonkey' userscript generation?
homarp wrote 1 day ago:
Local RAG on your browsed pages (either automatically, manually
or a mix (allow/disallow domains/url) ?
dotancohen wrote 1 day ago:
> Translation?
Sounds like a great OS feature. I might want to use this in my
PDF viewer and Office viewer as well.
> Image search?
Sounds like a web site, not a browser feature.
> Live captions?
Sounds like a great OS feature. I might want to use this in VLC
as well.
> Dubbing?
Sounds like a great OS feature. I might want to use this in VLC
as well.
> Summary?
Sounds like a great OS feature. I might want to use this in my
PDF viewer and Office viewer as well.
> Rewrite text better?
Sounds like a great OS feature. I might want to use this in my
PDF viewer and Office viewer as well.
inopinatus wrote 1 day ago:
The mindset of every browser vendor is that they are the OS
now, and all that kernel and userland guff merely supporting
infrastructure.
marcosdumay wrote 1 day ago:
> Sounds like a great OS feature.
Cool, and some DEs make it possible to start implementing this
for most applications today. But Mozilla is not KDE or Gnome,
so the most they can do is to make this on their software, and
make it easy to copy for the entire system.
> Sounds like a web site, not a browser feature.
Sounds like a bit of lack of imagination on your part. Do you
think the same for text search?
>
baobun wrote 1 day ago:
> But Mozilla is not KDE or Gnome
Exactly. Would be nicer if they did their own features
somewhat right (including interfaces for configuration and
disabling approachable for non-engineers) before they
scope-creep the entire desktop.
esafak wrote 1 day ago:
So you're not going to get it until your OS decides to, and if
its implementation is poor you're SOL?
iAMkenough wrote 1 day ago:
I much prefer every individual piece of software and website
I interact with implement their own proprietary AI features
that compete for my attention and interfer with each other.
dotancohen wrote 1 day ago:
Choose the implementation that you like, or contribute to
help make one better. Just like all other software on your
computer.
Don't like Libreoffice's implementation of Word support?
Install Koffice. I take it you've never installed non-OEM
software on your computer?
dpark wrote 1 day ago:
Why would anyone install Koffice when clearly they would
wait for the OS to support Word directly?
smaudet wrote 1 day ago:
Not at all. If you want or need a feature it's not some "my
browser has to support it or my OS does" dichotomy.
As a couple parents up stated, there's no technical reason a
browser has to have a transformer embedded into it. There
might be a business reason like "we made a dumb choice and
don't have the manpower to fix it", but I doubt this is
something they will accept, at least with a mission statement
like they have.
bastardoperator wrote 1 day ago:
All those things we had before AI?
lenerdenator wrote 1 day ago:
Technically, many of those things often were AI.
They just existed before the GenAI craze and no one cared
because AI wasn't a buzzword at the time. Google Translate
absolutely was based on ML before OpenAI made it a big deal to
have things "based on AI".
But just putting stuff in your browser that hooks into
third-party services that use ML isn't enough anymore. It has
to be front and center otherwise, you're losing the interest
of... well, someone. I'm not sure who at this point. I don't
care, personally.
amrocha wrote 1 day ago:
Yes, tools have used machine learning, nobody is questioning
or denying that.
But that’s not what the CEO of mozilla means when he says
he will turn Firefox into an AI browser.
It means there will be stupid fucking LLMs shoved in your
face.
zamadatix wrote 1 day ago:
Many of these things were "AI" but the marketing hype hadn't
gotten there yet. E.g. the local translation in FF is a
transformer model, as was Google translate in the cloud since
2018 (and still "AI" looong before that, just not transformer
based).
criddell wrote 1 day ago:
Most of those things weren't very good before AI was applied.
Translation specifically was pretty bad before Google applied
machine learning methods to it around 2007 when it became very
good almost overnight.
amrocha wrote 1 day ago:
Stop blurring the lines, google translate using machine
learning has nothing to do with turning firefox into an ai
browser
nani8ot wrote 1 day ago:
It has everything to do with it. Mozilla explicitly talked
about AI in the context of their relatively new translation
feature a year or two back. Live captions also uses "AI".
The term AI includes machine learning in marketing speech.
amrocha wrote 1 day ago:
If that was the case that means Firefox is already an AI
browser. But he wouldn’t be talking about AI browsers
if he planned on maintaining the current features and
approach, would he?
mort96 wrote 1 day ago:
Google Translate isn't what's meant when tech CEOs say "AI"
in 2025.
johannes1234321 wrote 1 day ago:
What tech CEO says is "a text box with magic" Google
translate fulfills that and there are ways to integrate
with LLM if technology marketing is important.
Unless it is nVidia's CEO, who wants to sell specific
hardware, they mostly care about the buzz of the term, not
a specific technology, though.
jorvi wrote 1 day ago:
Google Translation never "became very good" and it still
isn't when you compare it to DeepL or Kagi.
Where it excels is quantity. Often, niche languages are only
available on Google Translate.
criddell wrote 1 day ago:
Google Translate became very good compared to what came
before it. Other stuff is better now and one day we will
say the tools of today are trash.
jorvi wrote 1 day ago:
No, even when they switched to machine learning their
translations still made mistakes that would have made you
look goofy. And even today their models still make
mistakes that are just weird.
It is especially baffling because Google has much better
data sets and much more compute than their competitors.
cosmic_cheese wrote 1 day ago:
Safari does most of this by leveraging system-level AI features,
some of which are entirely local (and in turn, can be and do get
used elsewhere throughout the system and native apps). This model
makes a lot more sense to me than building the browser around an
LLM.
freehorse wrote 1 day ago:
Firefox uses local models for translation, summarisation and
possibly other stuff. As it is not restricted on one platform,
I guess that it has to use its own tools, while apple (or
macos/ios focused software in general) can use system level
APIs. But the logic I guess is the same.
christkv wrote 1 day ago:
A bored LLM that will constantly hit reload on hackernews hoping to
see something new.
temp0826 wrote 1 day ago:
Why use a drinking bird pointed at your F5 key when data centers
crammed full of GPUs (and a touch of global warming) will do?
icepush wrote 1 day ago:
If they can perfect that feature, then users can be done away
with once and for all.
TheBigSalad wrote 1 day ago:
This is the equivalent of Blockbuster rejecting Netflix.
bee_rider wrote 1 day ago:
Blockbuster could have bought Netflix, stifled the idea, and then
lost to… whatever, Vine or YouTube or something.
These stories just look compelling and obvious in retrospect,
when we can see how the dice landed.
cosmic_cheese wrote 1 day ago:
At the risk of becoming the infamous iPod and Dropbox posters, I
really don't think so. My browser having an LLM directly
integrated adds nothing for my use cases that couldn't be
accomplished with a web service or dedicated tool/app. For me, an
integrated LLM running concurrently with my browser just
represents a whole lot of compute and/or network calls with
little added value and I don't think that this is unusual.
zamadatix wrote 1 day ago:
Better yet, if an LLM does add value to the use cases why is it
that I have one "integrated" LLM when editing a document in the
webpage, another "integrated" LLM in the browser, and then an
"integrated" LLM in the OS. If there is value to be had I want
it to integrate with the different things on the system as they
exist just like I do, not be shoehorned into whatever company
abc decided to bundle with just their product(s) too.
cosmic_cheese wrote 1 day ago:
Yep. I mention this in my other reply, but having the LLM be
system-level (and preferably, user replaceable) and leveraged
as needed by applications (and thus, not redundant) is
clearly the best model. Apple is currently the closest to
this, offering system level third party LLM integrations, but
a Linux distribution would be the best positioned to achieve
that goal to its fullest extent.
brians wrote 1 day ago:
Having something that read everything I read and could talk
with me about it, help remember things and synthesize?
That’s awesome. Follow links and check references.
cosmic_cheese wrote 1 day ago:
This use case feels better served by a dedicated utility with
a specialized UI rather than shoehorned into a browser. It'd
fit the macOS services model (which adds items to context and
application menus, e.g. "Research this…" when
right-clicking a link or text selection) and could optionally
also be summoned by the system app launcher (like Spotlight).
christophilus wrote 1 day ago:
Time will tell, but I doubt it.
idiotsecant wrote 1 day ago:
I'm excited about what Kagi is doing: [1] I have no illusions that
they will turn into google the first chance they get, all companies
do. But for now they seem pretty good.
[1]: https://orionbrowser.com/
wyre wrote 1 day ago:
Google is what it is because of advertising. Kagi's whole raison
d'etre is to have a search engine without advertising.
idiotsecant wrote 1 day ago:
google is what it is because they have shareholders and need to
make money. Maybe Kagi gets around that by setting up as a PBC, I
hope so. I am not holding my breath.
baggachipz wrote 1 day ago:
Not sure why you're getting downvoted. Orion has matured as a
browser and just hit 1.0. It's mac- and ios-only for now, but linux
and windows ports are in the works. It has ad-blocking out of the
box and has zero telemetry. I use it every day.
rdm_blackhole wrote 1 day ago:
But Orion has the exact same issue that we are facing now with
Chrome and Edge and Firefox. Orion is funded by Kagi, so it's a
money losing venture. If Kagi folds tomorrow, who will pick the
pieces and continue its' development?
Replace Orion with Chrome and Kagi with Google and you will find
that we are in the same exact boat. Browsers cost money to
maintain. Money has to come from somewhere. If the general public
does not want to pay then who does?
Furthermore, what makes you think that Kagi will not one day do
the same exact thing that Google has done with Chrome? Are you
willing to bet that it won't happen?
And I am not here to bash on Kagi, I am one of their customers
but I will not use Orion for the same reason I don't use Chrome.
baggachipz wrote 1 day ago:
If Kagi goes tits-up, you could switch to another browser. I
don't see how this is a permanent decision.
worik wrote 1 day ago:
> Not sure why you're getting downvoted
Orion browser is proprietary
That would be my guess.
That might be OK for you, but I have been burnt, as have many
others, by proprietary software
If there is a choice, I make it
bigyabai wrote 1 day ago:
My two cents - I'm not doing the "proprietary browser" shtick
again. Unless I have real assurance that the software isn't going
to become a $50/month SaaS, why should I leave my perfectly good
current browser?
I get the feeling this kind of product will only appeal to
unconscious iOS and macOS users. Windows and Linux users have
much better (and freer) options than a WebKit wrapper.
rrradical wrote 1 day ago:
I tried Orion about a year ago. I tried using the profile
sandboxing. Logging into my google account in one profile also
logged me in in another profile.
I can definitely excuse some bugs (there were crashes for example
that I didn’t overly mind; I understand I was using prerelease
software). But something like account containers should be built
fundamentally to disallow any data sharing. If data sharing is a
bug, and not fundamentally disallowed by the architecture, then
it’s going to happen again later.
So for that reason I’m not bullish on orion.
zamadatix wrote 1 day ago:
I'd be interested if the issue you ran into was actually due to
poor architecture or just something not fully implemented in the
pre-release. Unfortunately, it's closed source - so hard to tell
from the outside.
rrradical wrote 1 day ago:
Well it was definitely a bug. It worked in some cases (I think
it even worked in google at first, and then a few days later it
manifested). And the feature was advertised, even though,
again, they never claimed the software to be release quality.
But my point is that, similar to security, you don't want to
build this kind of feature piece meal. Either the containers
are fundamentally walled off or they aren't.
zamadatix wrote 1 day ago:
I understand what your claim is, I just disagree it's that
blanket. You could e.g. absolutely build the UI for a profile
switcher before your implementation of the backend changes
are merged without carrying implications of how well that
will handle isolation in the same way in security you could
implement the null cipher in TLS to test that portion of the
code without it forever implying you have bad encryption.
ChrisArchitect wrote 1 day ago:
Verge interview with some comments about AI: [1] ( [2] )
[1]: https://www.theverge.com/tech/845216/mozilla-ceo-anthony-enzor...
[2]: https://archive.ph/li0ig
mnls wrote 1 day ago:
Firefox exists as long as uBlock exists. It’s a niche product and the
only (thin) argument about using it is “don’t let Google become a
monopoly" (the very same company that keeps Mozilla alive).
Its terrible management decisions, its questionable telemetry and at
the end of the day, its performance are the reasons why it will never
catch up and it will never get new users.
bachmeier wrote 1 day ago:
Oh, let's see who's going to be the leader of the organization that's
going to save privacy on the internet. Bet he has a track record of
valuing free information and user privacy.
Wait, just like the last CEO, the only way to find out anything about
him is a LinkedIn page. I'd have to create an account, log in, and
consent to letting them collect and do anything they want with my
information.
Apparently Mozilla doesn't have the technical capability of displaying
an html web page that doesn't require a login and surrendering to data
collection in order to view. Now try to find information about Satya
Nadella without giving up your privacy.
ekr____ wrote 1 day ago:
[1]: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/leadership/#anthony-enzo...
account42 wrote 10 min ago:
Is he even real? Probably just bad filters but that picture looks
almost AI generated.
pjmlp wrote 1 day ago:
Well good luck with those 3%, assuming that incrementing market share
is actually the main goal for the new CEO.
suprjami wrote 1 day ago:
You want "Trust"?
Cut executive pay 75% back to what Brendan was getting paid, and invest
that money in the company instead of lining your own pockets.
Ditch the AI crap that nobody wants or needs and focus on making a good
browser and email application, and advertising them to increase user
count.
Anything less than this is not trustworthy, it's just another lecherous
MBA who is hastening the death of Mozilla.
zetanor wrote 1 day ago:
> Aspiration: doing for AI what we did for the web.
> Strength: $1.3B in reserves + diverse operating models (product, deep
tech, venture, philanthropy) make Mozilla unusually free to bet
long-term.
> Strategy: Pillar 1: AI. Pillar 2: AI. Pillar 3: AI.
Oh yes.
mgbmtl wrote 1 day ago:
I for one, am grateful to Mozilla for still being around, pushing for
an open web.
Their documentation is excellent, the improvements and roadmap for
Thunderbird made me finally adopt it, and I appreciate their
privacy-friendlier translation services. uBO works great in Firefox,
and I can't stand using a browser without its full features.
About MBA types: the free software project I work for has an MBA type,
which I initially resented as being an outsider. However, they manage
the finances, think about team and project growth long-term (with heavy
financial consequences), and ignore the daily technical debates (which
are left to the lead devs), and listen to users, big and small. Some
loud users like to complain that we don't listen to them, and sometimes
we kick them out, because we do listen to users.
I don't know much about Mozilla internals, if I am to judge from the
results: Mozilla is still here, despite everyone saying for 10+ years
that they are going to die. They are still competitive. They are still
holding big tech accountable, despite having a fraction of their power.
I can imagine that they make a lot of people here very uncomfortable.
ByThyGrace wrote 1 day ago:
> despite everyone saying for 10+ years that they are going to die.
What many people have been saying in my experience is pretty much the
opposite: that Mozilla isn't going anywhere because Google wants them
(needs them) to be around. That it's their antitrust Trojan horse.
AuthAuth wrote 1 day ago:
They dont need an anti trust trojan horse the US gov has 0
intention of enforcing anti trust.
miki_oomiri wrote 1 day ago:
If I were the CEO, I would:
- focus 100% on Firefox Desktop & Mobile
- just a fast solid minimalist browser (no AI, no BS)
- other features should be addons
- privacy centric
- builtin, first-class, adblocker
- run on donations
- partner with Kagi
- layoff 80% of the non-tech employees
I worked for them for many years, I guarantee you that Mozilla will be
fine without all the non-sense people, just put engineers in charge.
matheusmoreira wrote 16 hours 39 min ago:
> I guarantee you that Mozilla will be fine without all the non-sense
people
> just put engineers in charge
I would like that but is that even possible? Look at Wikipedia. Look
at schools. Once an organization develops a bad case of fat
"administrator" class, can it be cured or is it terminal?
I don't want to get my hopes up for nothing.
mmooss wrote 1 day ago:
> Mozilla will be fine without all the non-sense people, just put
engineers in charge.
That's always said by the engineers and never seems more than the
obvious egocentric bias: What I do is important, everyone and
everythying else is pointless.
miki_oomiri wrote 1 day ago:
Yep. I’ll die on the hill. Engineer and designers. That’s all
we really need.
We started with a very very small team and did all the heavy
lifting. Then they started adding PM, marketing, market people, HR,
…
We were striving when we were not drowning in meetings, KPIs,
management, emails, …
mmooss wrote 1 day ago:
Who provides resources to the Es and Ds? Who hires new ones? Who
raises money from investors and banks, and ensures you have cash
flow and ROI? How do you manage 100 Es and Ds without a PM?
Small teams are more efficient but (obviously) can't produce at
scale. When you scale up, there's enough HR or finance or
marketing, or PM, etc. work for full-time specialists. And larger
orgs need bureaucracy - if you have a way around that, the world
is yours.
waz0wski wrote 7 hours 2 min ago:
What you call scaling up sounds more like monetization. Others
(especially customers) might call it enshittification instead.
Youtube is a great example of how bad it can get.
Why Mozilla won't let people financially contribute directly to
Firefox development and continues to pursue these stupid
monetization paths is a mystery.
mmooss wrote 6 hours 18 min ago:
I mean scaling up - growing the organization.
account42 wrote 1 hour 16 min ago:
That should not be a goal of a nonprofit. The goal should
be to make a browser, not a vehicle to justify the CEO's
obscene salary.
broadsidepicnic wrote 1 day ago:
Good, agreed. Let's just hope Anthony will read this.
Also, speaking of trust, return the "never sell your data" to the
FAQ.
robinhood wrote 1 day ago:
No. Kagi uses Google results behind the scenes. Partner with
Duckduckgo, yes. Or others. But please stop fueling Google, even
indirectly.
account42 wrote 1 hour 13 min ago:
DDG uses Bing instead, that's not really any better. Ideally a
Browser should not partner with any websites. It's always been a
deal with the devil even when Google was not as evil.
pndy wrote 1 day ago:
Frankly, looking at the shape of Firefox I don't think that Mozilla
cares for it at all - they just hold the brand because it's really
well-established.
What would be the best solution today is to convince all these
Firefox spinoff projects into combining forces and fully forking
Firefox away from Mozilla, and don't look back. But seeing what
happens around, how various projects - even the smallest ones are
being lead, the moods in communities, I highly doubt that's actually
possible.
thesuitonym wrote 1 day ago:
I don't know that a partnership with Kagi is the move, as great as
the two work for me. The last thing you want users to see when
starting up a new browser is a paywall. It would be rad to see
Firefox treat Kagi as a first-class citizen, but I think a true
partnership would be detrimental to both.
Agree with you on everything else, though.
hamdingers wrote 1 day ago:
Kagi already has their own WebKit based browser, not sure they'd be
interested in that partnership.
mgbmtl wrote 1 day ago:
Donations only get you so far. Take a mid-sized project, that needs
$500k per year (a few devs, very modestly paid, zero expenses). It's
a lot of money. It requires a huge user base. Say you have 500k
users, and 5% donate $25 per year (I'm optimistic). And that's just
$500k US, a few devs, zero expenses. A project that size probably has
audit requirements, hosting costs, accounting, legal, trademarks,
etc.
I see finances for a few free software projects, and many of them
really struggle to get donations year after year, in a way that helps
make the project predictable and sustainable.
For the US, people want you to be a 501c3, and then you need a EU
equivalent. Canadians are unlikely to give to a US org (especially
these days), but the market is too small to setup a local charity. So
you need partners. All that has many compliance requirements and
paperwork, so you need non-tech employees for the fundraising and
accounting.
Eventually your big donors start blackmailing the project if you
don't do what they want, and often their interests are not aligned
with most users. You need various income sources.
account42 wrote 1 hour 20 min ago:
Oh no a nonprofit has to do nonprofit things. Can't be done, I tell
you. Impossible.
zihotki wrote 1 day ago:
With 1.3b in reserves, it's enough for funding development for many
years to come if they fire most of management and close irrelevant
to the browser things.
glenstein wrote 1 day ago:
It would be organizational suicide to spend down their endowment
just because they can. Right now it exists as a firewall to buy
them some time in the event that search licensing goes away,
which I think is exactly what they should have done with it.
And it's been talked to death before but the idea that the
browser side bets are at some prohibitive cost is an
unsubstantiated myth, conjured into existence by vibes in comment
sections. It's the HN equivalent of American voters who think
foreign aid is 50% of the federal budget.
skywal_l wrote 1 day ago:
Do you realize what 1.300.000.000$ is? Say you invest most of
it in a safe way to get you inflation + 2%. That gives you
26.000.000$ every year. You can pay 100 engineers with this.
Firefox is a browser. Sure a browser is complicated but 100
motivated and talented engineers is more than enough to make a
good product if you focus on what matters.
There is no excuse to what is going on.
glenstein wrote 1 day ago:
How do you think they got that money in the first place?
They've been growing this fund from $100MM in the 2010s to
where it is now, by carefully managing and investing it.
Hilariously, you're here presenting something Mozilla has
already been doing for nearly two decades like it's a new
idea that only you have thought of. Yes, I realize how much
that is: enough to cover their operating costs for like 2.5
years.
And sure, it's amazing how much an endowment can do if you
give up and wipe out most of their staff and embrace magical
thinking.
amrocha wrote 1 day ago:
The point is that the organization is bloated because of
the search money.
The sustainable way forward for Mozilla is to fire most of
their staff, keep a reasonable number of engineers, and
focus on building a solid privacy focused browser instead
of trend chasing like they’re doing now. Reduce
operational costs and live off of the profits on their
investments.
Exactly what about that is magical thinking?
hosteur wrote 1 day ago:
I dont even think they employ close to 100 FTE devs actually
working on Firefox at this point.
pseudalopex wrote 1 day ago:
Mozilla spent $260 million on software development in
2023.[1] How do you believe they spent it?
Vivaldi employ 28 developers to produce an unstable
Chromium fork and email program for comparison.[2] [1]
[1]: https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2024/mozil...
[2]: https://vivaldi.com/team/
glenstein wrote 1 day ago:
Props for citing real numbers! I hope other people
reading this thread are looking at your comment and
understanding that this is how you make reality based
comments. One tidbit I will add: that's more than they
have ever spent on development historically, including
after adjusting for inflation. IIRC it's about quadruple
what they spent back when browsers were desktop only when
they had their highest market share.
hosteur wrote 1 day ago:
Well, I do not believe $260 million went to Firefox
development. I would be surprised if the majority of that
went to other non-Firefox projects like:
Various AI initiatives (Mozilla.ai, Orbit, etc.)
Mozilla VPN
Mozilla Monitor
Pocket
Firefox Relay
Fakespot
Mozilla Social
Mozilla Hubs
... just to name a few.
skywal_l wrote 1 day ago:
You forgot CEO comp: 7.000.000 in 2022[0]
[0]:
[1]: https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2022/m...
pseudalopex wrote 1 day ago:
Most of these projects are open source. Anyone can see
how much more active Firefox development is.
Mozilla.ai's featured projects sounded like things
Firefox's AI features would use.
Orbit was a Firefox extension. Firefox integrated its
features. You considered this not Firefox development?
Mozilla VPN and Mozilla Monitor are interfaces to other
companies' services. And they are non Google revenue
sources.
Mozilla Social was a Mastodon instance. How much
software development did you believe running a Mastodon
instance required?
glenstein wrote 1 day ago:
I think you're probably about as dead wrong as it's
possible to be on this front. First they ship millions
of new LoC to Firefox on a monthly basis so the
engineering efforts are open for all the world to see.
Secondly, if more than half(!?!) was spent on, say,
Pocket, or Fakespot, then you would see a rise and fall
in spending coinciding with the onramp and closure of
those programs over their lifetimes. But in reality we
have seen a steady upward march in spending, and so the
interpretation that passes the sanity check is that
they fold these into their existing budget with the
existing development capacity they have which is
variously assigned to different projects, including(!!)
Firefox, where again, their annual code output is
monumental and rivals Google.
Again I have to note the blizzard of contradictory
accusations throughout this thread. According to one
commenter the problem is they are biting off more than
they can chew and need to scale back all of the
excessive Firefox development they are doing (and I
recall previous commenters speculating that 30+ million
LoC was not evidence of their hard work but "bloat"
that was excessive and that they probably could cut a
lot of it out without losing functionality). But for
you, the obvious problem is they're wasting all that
capacity on side projects and not putting enough effort
in the browser.
skywal_l wrote 1 day ago:
> First they ship millions of new LoC to Firefox on a
monthly basis so the engineering efforts are open for
all the world to see.
Who is they? You mean the thousands of unpaid
developers?[0]
[0]
[1]: https://openhub.net/p/firefox/factoids
quchen wrote 1 day ago:
To expand on Firefox mobile: if you haven’t tried it, give it a
shot. uBlock Origin works just like on desktop. I have seen maybe
five ads on my phone browser (including Youtube!) since buying it in
2019.
cpburns2009 wrote 1 day ago:
My only complaint about Firefox on Android is it's slow even with
ad blocking. Chrome is noticeably faster. Brave gives you the best
of both worlds: speed and ad blocking.
BoredPositron wrote 1 day ago:
...on android.
josefresco wrote 1 day ago:
Can I get details on ad blocking in Firefox on iOS? I have an ad
blocker which works well in Safari but not Firefox. What am I
missing?
krelian wrote 1 day ago:
It doesn't work on iOS. All browsers in iOS are Safari with a
different frontend. Apple doesn't allow it to be any different.
MattTheRealOne wrote 1 day ago:
But many browsers on iOS support ad blockers. Most like Brave
and Vivaldi have it built in. Others like Orion and Edge have
added support for extensions. Firefox is one of the only that
does not have any support for an ad blocker.
xandrius wrote 1 day ago:
I think you might need to use Nightly version for this.
lionkor wrote 1 day ago:
The only issue is that Firefox on mobile is visibly breaking a
couple of sites every now and then; if you can put up with that for
no ads (I can), then its great.
nine_k wrote 1 day ago:
Which? I've never seen this through many years of daily use.
spacechild1 wrote 1 day ago:
Yes! I can confirm it works just like on desktop. I'm shocked when
I have to use other people's phones. How do they put up with all
these ads?
Iolaum wrote 1 day ago:
This! So many times!
1970-01-01 wrote 1 day ago:
The only answer is for them to go back to "plan A" and do their own
things. Stop copying Chrome. Stop looking at Safari and Edge. Stop the
rapid release nonsense. Go back to the fundamentals of speed, security,
and stability on desktops and leave the rest to plugins. Once desktop
is back on track, they should begin fixing mobile. When both are great,
do nothing else except bugfix and performance fixes. We want this and
nothing more.
pluc wrote 1 day ago:
> AI should always be a choice — something people can easily turn
off.
One sentence later:
> It will evolve into a modern AI browser
One more sentence later:
> In the next three years, that means investing in AI that reflects the
Mozilla Manifesto
I mean if you wanted to concretely see how much ignoring their users is
in their DNA.
What a daring approach. Truly worth the millions he's gonna earn.
suprjami wrote 1 day ago:
You really only need to make $2M before you can live off the interest
forever. That's the goal of these people imo.
whywhywhywhy wrote 1 day ago:
The mozilla exec salaries are way higher than that.
throw7 wrote 1 day ago:
"Trust" and "AI" are mutually exclusive. Not really impressed with
this guy. My guess is the board vetted this guy to be more politically
correct than anything else.
alberth wrote 1 day ago:
Dumb question: who’s Firefox target user?
Chrome is able to capture the mass consumer market, due to Google’s
dark pattern to nag you to install Chrome anytime you’re on a Google
property.
Edge target enterprise Fortune 500 user, who is required to use
Microsoft/Office 365 at work (and its deep security permission ties to
SharePoint).
Safari has Mac/iOS audience via being the default on those platform
(and deep platform integration).
Brave (based on Chromium), and LibreWolf (based on Firefox) has even
carved out those user who value privacy.
---
What’s Firefox target user?
Long ago, Firefox was the better IE, and it had great plugins for web
developers. But that was before Chrome existed and Google capturing the
mass market. And the developers needed to follow its users.
So what target user is left for a Firefox?
Note: not trolling. I loved Firefox. I just don’t genuine understand
who it’s for anymore.
J_Shelby_J wrote 1 day ago:
Non-laptop users.
dabockster wrote 1 day ago:
> I just don’t genuine understand who it’s for anymore.
It still gets bundled a TON on Linux. So if you use Linux a lot,
Firefox gets into your muscle memory.
But honestly, that bundling is likely just momentum from the 2010s.
Better tech exists now.
lukewrites wrote 1 day ago:
Somehow its target user group includes my father, who is 90 years
old. As far as I can recall, we got him using Firefox years ago and
he became a committed user.
I wish more browsers would target seniors. Accessibility and
usability is universally a nightmare.
mmooss wrote 1 day ago:
It's an island of trust in an ocean of predatory capitalism.
account42 wrote 1 hour 4 min ago:
It was that once.
Zak wrote 1 day ago:
It seems to me Android users who want to block ads are a strong
target market. Desktop Chrome has extensions and despite the nerf, it
has adblockers that mostly work; Android Chrome doesn't have
extensions.
A built in adblocker would probably help Firefox attract those users,
but might destroy their Google revenue stream.
cyberrock wrote 1 day ago:
I think the problem with that is that Firefox Android with uBO
still feels like it has worse First Contentful Paint than Chrome
Android. Even on a high-end phone the difference can feel
ridiculous; sites render after 1-2s on Chrome but sometimes I can
count up to 5 with FF.
The benefits of having uBO might matter more to you and me, but
let's not forget that faster rendering was arguably the main reason
Chrome Desktop got popular 20 years ago, which caused Firefox to
rewrite its engine 2 (3?) times since then to catch up. 20 years
later this company still hasn't learned with Android.
Zak wrote 1 day ago:
Maybe I'm less sensitive to that, but I hadn't really noticed on
a phone that wasn't high-end in 2020 and certainly isn't now.
I'll have to pay attention to sites being slow and compare a
Chromium-based browser next time I notice one.
I switched from Firefox desktop to Chrome when Chrome was new
because it was multi-process and one janky page couldn't hang or
crash the whole browser. I vaguely remember the renderer being a
little faster, but multi-process was transformative. Firefox took
years to catch up with that.
I'm very sensitive to ads though. If a browser doesn't have a
decent adblocker, I'm not using it. Perhaps surprisingly, the
Chromium browser with good extension support on Android is Edge.
thesuitonym wrote 1 day ago:
> What’s Firefox target user?
It seems as if you ask Mozilla, the answer would be "Not current
Firefox users."
I really don't know the answer to this question, and I don't know if
Mozilla has defined it internally, which probably leads to a lot of
the problems that the browser is facing. Is it the privacy focused
individual? They seem to be working very hard against that. Is it the
ad-sensitive user? Maybe, but they're not doing a lot to win that
crowd over.
It kind of feels like Firefox is not targeted at anyone in
particular. But long gone are the days when you can just be an
alternative browser.
Maybe the target user is someone who wants to use Firefox, regardless
of what that means.
glenstein wrote 1 day ago:
Me! I want the best thing that's not Google or Chromium. Right now
that's Firefox. Maybe someday it will be Ladybird.
protoster wrote 1 day ago:
I use Firefox because I don't want to use a browser provided by an
advertising company e.g. Chrome.
28304283409234 wrote 1 day ago:
Yet ... with firefox that is exactly what you are using. Except
there's a proxy in the middle (Mozilla).
account42 wrote 1 hour 8 min ago:
It isn't even indirect anymore since Mozilla bought an
advertising company.
protoster wrote 1 day ago:
I'm raising my hands, you got me.
__alexs wrote 1 day ago:
Just one that is entirely funded by an advertising company?
protoster wrote 1 day ago:
There are three browsers: FF, Chrome, Safari. I'm not on Apple so
FF is the least worst option.
lionkor wrote 1 day ago:
Firefox users are people who would use LibreWolf, but installed it,
tried it, saw it doesn't have dark mode, and figured that Firefox was
good enough after all.
TiredOfLife wrote 1 day ago:
> Dumb question: who’s Firefox target user?
Partly me. It's the only browser where I can disable AV1 support to
work around broken HW acceleration on Steam Deck.
Also tab hoarders. (I migrated to Chrome 3 years ago to try and get
rid of my tab hoarding)
sfink wrote 1 day ago:
I've been using Firefox for a long time, longer than it's had that
name, and it used to be excellent for my tab hoarding habits.
Specifically, it could handle a large number of tabs, and every
couple of months it would crash and lose all of them. I would have
to start over from scratch, with an amazing sense of catharsis and
freedom, and I never had to make the decision on my own that I
would never be able to make.
Now, it's no better than the others. I'm at 1919 tabs right now,
and it hasn't lost any for many years. It's rock solid, it's good
at unloading the tabs so I don't even need to rely on
non-tab-losing crash/restarts to speed things up, and it doesn't
even burn enough memory on them to force me to reconsider my ways.
This is a perfect example of how Mozilla's mismanagement has driven
Firefox into the ground. Bring back involuntary tab bankruptcy and
spacebar heating!
DamnInteresting wrote 1 day ago:
> Dumb question: who’s Firefox target user?
These days, it seems to be people who:
* Don't want to be using a browser owned by an ethically dubious
corporation
* Want a fully functional ad blocker
* Prefer vertical tabs
account42 wrote 1 hour 12 min ago:
* But don't really care about privacy that much
someNameIG wrote 1 day ago:
> Want a fully functional ad blocker
Is this even the case? UBO has ~10 million users going by the
extension store, Firefox has over 150 million users.
So less than 10% of Firefox installs also have UBO.
akagusu wrote 1 day ago:
The problem is the list keeps shrinking since now Mozilla Corp is
an ethically dubious corporation.
charcircuit wrote 1 day ago:
Brave already has an adblocker built into the browser itself and
supports vertical tabs.
whynotmaybe wrote 1 day ago:
> Want a fully functional ad blocker
My main reason but also
* want to ensure competition because I'm sure that once it's
chromium all the way, we're gonna have a bad time.
Bolwin wrote 1 day ago:
Mind you, you can get all that and more in a browser like vivaldi.
And that market is.. small. Vivaldi doesn't have to develop a
browser engine
suprjami wrote 1 day ago:
Ostensibly nerds. Linux users and maybe Mac users. Technical people
who understand more about the software industry than all Mozilla Corp
management since Brendan.
It's difficult to monetize us when the product is a zero dollar
intangible, especially when trust has been eroded such that we've all
fled to Librewolf like you said.
It's difficult to monetize normies when they don't use the software
due to years of continuous mismanagement.
I think giving Mozilla a new CEO is like assigning a new captain to
the Titanic. I will be surprised if this company still exists by
2030.
account42 wrote 1 hour 9 min ago:
Mozilla is (or at least started as) a nonprofit. Even corporation
is only there to fulfill the nonprofit goals. They shouldn't even
be thinking about monetization they should be thinking about
getting donations and securing grants.
glenstein wrote 1 day ago:
Right and to your point, there's not a whole lot of precedent for
browsers successfully funding themselves when the browser itself is
the primary product.
Opera was the lightweight high performance extension rich,
diversely funded, portable, adapted to niche hardware, early to
mobile browser practically built from the dreams of niche users who
want customization and privacy. They're a perfect natural
experiment for what it looks like to get most, if not all decisions
right in terms of both of features users want, as well as creative
attempts to diversify revenue. But unfortunately, by the same token
also the perfect refutation of the fantasy that making the right
decisions means you have a path to revenue. If that was how it
worked, Opera would be a trillion dollar company right now.
But it didn't work because the economics of web browsers basically
doesn't exist. You have to be a trillion dollar company already,
and dominate distribution of a given platform and force preload
your browser.
Browsers are practically full scale operating systems these days
with tens of millions of lines of code, distribued for free.
Donations don't work, paying for the browser doesn't work. If it
did, Opera (the og Opera, not the new ownership they got sold to)
would still be here.
username223 wrote 1 day ago:
> Browsers are practically full scale operating systems these
days with tens of millions of lines of code, distributed for
free.
Well there's your problem! Google owns the server, the client,
and the standards body, so ever-increasing complexity is
inevitable if you play by their rules. Tens of thousands of lines
of code could render the useful parts of the web.
glenstein wrote 1 day ago:
Can you say more? I do think Google has effectively pushed
embrace-extend-extinguish, changing the rules so that it's a
game they can win. And I do think part of the point of web
standards protocols is to limit complexity. So I agree the
rules as they exist now favor Google. I think the "real"
solution was for the standards bodies to stay in control but
seems like that horse left the barn.
0x3f wrote 1 day ago:
Yes, I would literally pay a nominal fee for Firefox if I were
confident in the org's direction. As things stand though, the
trust is gone as you said.
ishtanbul wrote 1 day ago:
What browser should I use then? I quit chrome in a futile attempt to be
tracked less. They killed support for my adblocker.
cpburns2009 wrote 1 day ago:
Brave. It's a Chromium fork with a built-in ad blocker that's
equivalent to uBlock Origin. It works great on Android too.
ares623 wrote 1 day ago:
It is sad that the choice is either an AI browser or a Blockchain
browser
suprjami wrote 1 day ago:
Librewolf
zamalek wrote 1 day ago:
Would any of these soft forks survive without Mozilla working on
Firefox?
account42 wrote 14 min ago:
Depends, will I win the jackpot?
The forks do not currently have the manpower to take up the full
maintenance of a browser but that does not mean it's impossible
that they'll be able to rally enough developers in case Mozilla
implodes. A lot of people want a truly free browser to exist.
Currently Firefox (barely) manages to fulfill that role and keeps
many of those people from spending their time/money on
alternatives.
suprjami wrote 1 day ago:
No
neom wrote 1 day ago:
fwiw I've been running brave for the past 5 years and it seems fine,
they put a bunch of weird shit in it you need to turn off, but
otherwise it...browses the internet well?
catapart wrote 1 day ago:
> AI should always be a choice — something people can easily turn
off.
Welp. Starting off on the wrong foot. "AI should always be a choice -
something people can easily opt in to".
Can't teach what there's profit in not learning, etc. Oh well.
TiredOfLife wrote 1 day ago:
Same with tabs, sandboxing or pop-up blocking. All of the features
should be opt-in.
summermusic wrote 1 day ago:
> AI should always be a choice — something people can easily turn
off.
Literally 5 sentences later:
> [Firefox] will evolve into a modern AI browser…
catapart wrote 1 day ago:
Neat! I didn't make it that far. Nice thing about red flags is,
there's no value in continuing after you see them. Turns out, the
thing the red flag made me accuse them of was their stated goal.
Case in point!
henning wrote 1 day ago:
Can't imagine a worse angle for regaining trust than doubling down on
AI slop.
colechristensen wrote 1 day ago:
I don't trust Mozilla. I don't trust them with my donation money. I
don't trust their software any more than other browser vendors.
"Third: Firefox will grow from a browser into a broader ecosystem of
trusted software. Firefox will remain our anchor. It will evolve into a
modern AI browser and support a portfolio of new and trusted software
additions."
Yeah, no. Just make a browser that doesn't suck. Mozilla has been
wasting a ton of money, lost almost all of their market share, and have
been focusing on making new products nobody wants for a VERY long time
and this looks to continue.
sam_goody wrote 1 day ago:
Good for them.
Currently they spend millions of dollars (that mostly come from people
wanting to support their browser) on huge salaries and projects that
have nothing to do with their browser. At the same time they keep on
taking steps to alienate those that are donating or using their
products.
The bar for success is pretty low - stop wasting all them bucks, and
stop alienating your users.
If you could do that, there is plenty of next steps.
Good luck
wodenokoto wrote 1 day ago:
No, their millions of dollars dont come mostly from people wanting to
support their browser.
It comes from search ads on google.com
sam_goody wrote 1 day ago:
I agree that most of their money comes from Google (at least for
now).
But when you load their home page ( [1] ), the first thing you are
greeted with is a banner that says they have raised over $6M in
their last campaign alone.
So, it seems that millions are being donated by users.
The claim that most of those users want it to go to their browser
is not supported or refuted by that page, but I have read a
detailed breakdown of all their donations and attempts to guess
what people really think they are donating for, and it matched my
original statement - though I haven't got the time to search now,
what do _you_ think people are donating for?
[1]: https://www.mozillafoundation.org
TiredOfLife wrote 1 day ago:
It's literally impossible to donate to Mozilla for Firefox.
nefasti wrote 1 day ago:
What product or market mozilla still relevant?
Of all the sites I manage, or companies I worked with in the last 5
years mozilla browsers were less than 1% of the userbase.
rjh29 wrote 1 day ago:
1% of all internet users is an absolutely gigantic user base.
spacechild1 wrote 1 day ago:
In Germany and France Mozilla has about the same market share as
Edge, in Austria it's even more. Yes, Mozilla makes some dumb
decision, but I think the bigger problem is that computer literacy
has declined overall. Most people don't even realize they have a
choice. Things like ad-blockers and privacy should be taught in
schools.
Fiveplus wrote 1 day ago:
Does anyone else feel like the "Trust" angle is the only card they have
left to play? Technically, Chrome is faster on JS benchmarks. Edge has
better OS integration on Windows and comes by default. Safari wins on
battery life on Mac. Firefox's only unique selling point is "We aren't
a massive data vampire." If they clutter the browser with AI which
inherently requires data processing, often in the cloud, they dilute
their only true differentiator.
runiq wrote 1 day ago:
It is the angle that is important to ME, a European user. I would
happily throw moneydollars at the browser project but the Mozilla
suits won't allow me to, for whatever-the-fuck reason.
AnonC wrote 1 day ago:
> If they clutter the browser with AI which inherently requires data
processing, often in the cloud
Where are you getting the “often in the cloud” from? So far
Firefox has some local models for certain features. Using a specific
cloud based AI is a conscious decision by the user within the
sidebar.
Klonoar wrote 1 day ago:
They also still lack significant security improvements that Chrome
has.
dabockster wrote 1 day ago:
> Firefox's only unique selling point is "We aren't a massive data
vampire."
The fact that they haven't moved away from apparently needing 90%+ of
their money to come from Google, after more than a decade of that
being an issue, means that claim is a moot point. This "AI first"
move was probably heavily influenced by Google behind the scenes too.
t23414321 wrote 1 day ago:
Yes, there is no more: plugins, XBL, original extensions, and XSLT is
removed not from Chrome but from the web standards !
Anything left ?
iberator wrote 1 day ago:
Why do you need THAT fast js for? Firefox is amazing speed even if
second in the benchmarks.
robinhood wrote 1 day ago:
To me, Firefox has way better dev tools than Chrome. I don't even
mention Safari here - who can stand their horrible dev tools? Firefox
has a fantastic add on marketplace which competes with Chrome's.
Firefox without too many addons actually do not drain battery life on
MacOS. Firefox has "native" profile management with real separation
of cookies. JS benchmarks provide no value to me, since I try to
avoid heavy-JS web apps anyway.
I don't know. As a dev and user, Firefox wins on every single aspect
for me. I understand that every user is different. But I'm glad it
exists.
lelanthran wrote 1 day ago:
> Technically, Chrome is faster on JS benchmarks.
I'm not browsing benchmarks :-/
When I do then chrome will have an advantage.
Meanwhile, in the real world, a JS engine can be half the speed of
the Chrome one and the browser can still be faster, because blocking
ads is what gives you the biggest speed up.
All the performance advantages in the world fail to matter if you're
still loading ads.
g947o wrote 1 day ago:
On my Android phone, Chrome opens web pages noticeably (and
consistently) faster than Firefox. And I wasn't using a stopwatch.
I am literally making a sacrifice to use Firefox.
gizzlon wrote 1 day ago:
Not my experience. They feel similar, even with 16 tabs in
Firefox and 1 in Chrome
lelanthran wrote 1 day ago:
> On my Android phone, Chrome opens web pages noticeably (and
consistently) faster than Firefox.
How fast a page opens is irrelevant if that page contains ads.
munificent wrote 1 day ago:
I find that any performance benefits Chrome and Safari have are more
than offset by the performance benefits Firefox gets by being
massively better at blocking ads and the huge amount of JS and
tracking garbage that comes with them.
Firefox always feels snappier to me, and I think most of that comes
from less time downloading a bunch of ad shit I don't want anyway.
hosteur wrote 1 day ago:
Firefox is the only browser that actually blocks all ads effectively
using ublock origin. Even youtube, etc.
unethical_ban wrote 1 day ago:
>Firefox's only unique selling point is "We aren't a massive data
vampire."
That's a big selling point. Along with "still allows ad-blocking
extensions".
Besides being able to turn off all online AI features, and the fact
that forks like Librewolf will inevitably strip it out, I am stunned
by how HN readers think "Translate this for me immediately and
accurately" and related functions are not desirable to the average
person.
fyrn_ wrote 1 day ago:
Fitefox has faster WASM and WebGPU at least.
Kind of doesn't matter since Chrome has bloated the standard so much
that many websites only work in chrome
MaxBarraclough wrote 1 day ago:
> faster WASM and WebGPU
Regarding WASM at least, it seems to depend.
[1]: https://arewefastyet.com/
glenstein wrote 1 day ago:
And, a different way of stating the same thing, they're actually
way ahead of everybody in shipping production Rust code in the
browser, which is a big part of the efficiency gains in recent
years.
1718627440 wrote 1 day ago:
They are still the only browser I know, which has actual useful
chrome like changing the stylesheet, is CUA compliant and behaves and
feel like a native GTK+ app (now-a-days only after restoring the OS
window bar and enabling the menubar).
They also have useful keyboard behaviour and provide both a search
and a URL bar, which makes it effortless to search locally and
perform additional refinery searches while hunting down something,
because you can change the search term without returning to the
search website. Searching via the search engines portal is also
often slower than via the search bar on crappy connections. Their
search provider integration is also great (not sure how other
browsers are in this regard) which makes opening a Wikipedia or MDN
page about a specific topic a single action, without needing to look
at a search result list.
There Profile Manager is also a breeze (not the new crap), it allows
to open any URL in any Profile by clicking on any link in another
program.
The extension system and the advanced configuration is also quite
good.
eviks wrote 1 day ago:
> They also have useful keyboard behaviour
Like not being able to change the default shortcuts?
1718627440 wrote 1 day ago:
> Like not being able to change the default shortcuts?
Sure, I would also love if Firefox would work like Emacs or some
configurable KDE program, but at least I can access most things
without needing to touch a mouse and bulk operation actually work
unlike Thunderbird where they basically broke the whole UI a few
years back and haven't fixed it since.
Do you know another browser that supports somewhat up-to-date
non-Chrome-specific Web features and is better on the features I
listed?
padenot wrote 1 day ago:
We're implementing it though: about:keyboard in a Nightly build
does what you expect, this is tracked in [1] and dependencies.
[1]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2000731
uzerfcwn wrote 1 day ago:
Thanks for sharing this! Went and changed some keybinds right
away.
eviks wrote 1 day ago:
No, it doesn't do what I expect, the list of the default
rebindable keybinds is small, can't bind multiple shortcuts to
a single function, can't bind without modifiers- if I recall
correctly after trying it out a while ago.
ksec wrote 1 day ago:
>Technically.....
Since its birth, Firefox is still the only browser that manage
multiple ( hundreds or in some cases, thousands! [1] ) tabs better
than any browser. And in my view in the past 12 - 24 months Firefox
has managed to be as fast as chrome. While Chrome also improved on
its multiple Tab browsing experience.
Safari.... I dont know why this battery life argument keeps coming up
because it is not the case. It hasn't been so for at least 5 - 6
years.
Mozilla could have played the trust angle when they have the good
will and money. They could have invested into SaaS that provides
better revenue generations other than getting it from Google. They
could also have partnered with Wikipedia before they got rotten. But
now I am not even sure if they still have the "trust" card anymore.
Gekco is still hard to be embedded, XULRunner could have been
Electron. They will need to get into survival mode and think about
what is next.
[1]: https://www.tomshardware.com/software/mozilla-firefox/firefo...
dabockster wrote 1 day ago:
I think Brave has the potential to be the next Firefox if they can
run their company right.
NitpickLawyer wrote 1 day ago:
> Safari.... I dont know why this battery life argument keeps
coming up because it is not the case. It hasn't been so for at
least 5 - 6 years.
Uhh, not my experience. I default any video watching longer than a
short clip to safari. It is still the best browser for video IME.
pca006132 wrote 1 day ago:
I remember people saying that chromium is better at sandboxing than
firefox, so more secure.
yardie wrote 1 day ago:
> Safari.... I dont know why this battery life argument keeps
coming up because it is not the case. It hasn't been so for at
least 5 - 6 years.
I can assure you, this is still true. I use Chrome when plugged in
at my desk and Safari for everything else on the go. Chrome still
isn't great on memory or battery life.
embedding-shape wrote 1 day ago:
Have you compared with something else than Chrome? Otherwise it
might be that Chrome is just very power hungry compared to
Safari, but maybe Firefox is more efficient by now? Chrome has
slowly turned into a monster on it's own, not unlike what they
competed against initially when Chrome first arrived.
aucisson_masque wrote 1 day ago:
Safari use less CPU power than Firefox, chrome being the worst
of them all.
It's even more obvious when watching video where safari will be
5 to 10 points lower than Firefox.
Harder to say when it's rendering page but the fact of the
matter is that I tried both for years, Firefox always drain the
battery faster.
ksec wrote 1 day ago:
>It's even more obvious when watching video where safari will
be 5 to 10 points lower than Firefox.
Safari uses macOS for video so the points will be on macOS.
Firefox uses it own internal video decoder. That is why image
and video codec support on Safari is dependent on macOS
upgrade not Safari.
concinds wrote 1 day ago:
Safari uses OS frameworks but they're called from Safari
subprocesses and counted as part of Safari.
exogen wrote 1 day ago:
No doubt the browsers are constantly leapfrogging each other, so
this isn't always the case. But, anecdotally: switching from Chrome
to Safari actually felt like I got a new computer. The difference
was that apparent.
dawnerd wrote 1 day ago:
Safari is fast and performant but once you load a heavy web app
that uses a lot of memory safari will kill the tab. It’s
incredibly frustrating to have a page reload with a banner simply
saying the site was using too much memory and was reloaded.
Especially when you’re on a maxed out MacBook with plenty of
resources.
WorldPeas wrote 1 day ago:
I will also note that Safari is almost /too/ deeply integrated
in the system, when I'm running a high-stress task elsewhere,
my browser would jitter or hang, the same couldn't be said for
chromium, for some reason.
exogen wrote 1 day ago:
I agree, in practice I see this occasionally on gigantic GitHub
pull requests with 1000+ files, or very clunky
Atlassian/Confluence pages. I'd say both sides need to work on
their resource management!
(On that note, many complaints about Safari I hear from
developers fall on my ears as "I don't care about web
compatibility!" as it has never NOT been the case on the web
that you need to care about feature support and resource
management.)
dijit wrote 1 day ago:
> Safari.... I dont know why this battery life argument keeps
coming up because it is not the case. It hasn't been so for at
least 5 - 6 years.
I mean, observably, this is still the case.
Now, luckily the M-series laptops have such insane battery life
that it barely matters compared to before... but I can still
observe about an hour of battery life difference between Safari and
Chrome on an M2 Macbook Air (running Sequoia). Now, my battery life
is still in the region of 7.5 hours, so even if it's a large
difference it's not impacting my workday yet (though the battery is
at 90% max design capacity from wear).
I know this, because there are days where I only use chrome, and
days where I only use Safari, and I do roughly the same work on
each of those days.
wilkystyle wrote 1 day ago:
I suspect that the people making these claims that Safari is no
longer the most battery efficient are not Apple users. It's quite
easy to empirically validate which browsers are most efficient by
looking at the average energy impact in Activity Monitor. Safari
is the winner, Chrome/Brave are not far behind, and Firefox is
the clear loser.
ksec wrote 1 day ago:
I use all three.
Safari loses out when you run with a lot of Tabs. Both Chrome
and Firefox knows when to unload tabs. ( Firefox even have
about:unloads to tell you the order of Tabs it will unload! )
Try opening Tab Overview in Safari and it will start loading
all the website for thumbnails, paging out to disk due to low
memory, writing hundreds of GB to page. It also put Tabs on low
running priority in the background rather than pausing them
like Firefox or Chrome. ( Not sure if that is still the case
with Safari 26, at least it was with 18 ). To combat that,
restarting the browser time to time helps.
Safari is well tuned for iOS as a single tab, single page
usage. On MacOS when doing many tabs it start to get slow and
inefficient. And this is very much a Safari issue not an Webkit
issue because Orion is a lot better at it.
And yes I have filed Radar report for many of the issues but I
have come to the conclusion Apple doesn't care about multi tab
usage on desktop Safari.
phantasmish wrote 1 day ago:
I think the difference is fundamental to the engine and the gap
will be hard to close, too (I mean, how long has it been and
the gap remains?). WebKit-based ultralight browsers remain
usable after you’ve cranked hardware specs down far enough
that nothing based on Chrome or Firefox’s engines do.
Resource use among the three engines seems to differ at some
kind of low, basic architecture level.
mossTechnician wrote 1 day ago:
"Trust" is just community goodwill, and Mozilla has steadily been
chipping away at that goodwill by pivoting to AI and ad businesses,
and occasionally implying that it's the community that wants things
like AI, and it's the community's fault for misunderstanding their
poorly written license agreement.
mikkupikku wrote 1 day ago:
What does "faster JS" actually get me? Youtube is probably the most
heavy site I and I think most people use, I'm certainly not trying to
do heavy scientific computation in my browser, so what difference
does it really make?
Anyway, Firefox's killer feature is still extensions, despite
everything that's happened on that front. There's nothing like Tree
Style Tabs for Chrome (not usably implemented anyway) and while I
think maybe Brave has it, Firefox has uMatrix which is better than
anything Brave uses (Brave may share lists or even code with that,
but the uMatrix UI is where its at.)
aleph4 wrote 1 day ago:
Well, that's kind of their whole point-- can AI be done in a way that
guards privacy. It's not impossible even with cloud processing.
And "Trust" should be a big deal-- unfortunately most people don't
care and Chrome has a much bigger marketing budget (and monopoly on
Android).
112233 wrote 1 day ago:
Confidential compute (intel, amd and nvidia) already is a thing and
has nothing to do with mozilla. Without such drastic measures, no,
it IS impossible with regular cloud processing.
afavour wrote 1 day ago:
Mozilla (in its previous form) has long been doomed. Mobile cemented
it, I think. Browsers are part of the operating system and getting
users to switch from the default is an incredible uphill climb.
Especially when browsers are essentially utilities, there are so few
unique compelling features.
That lack of connection to tech giants is a strength in the trust
angle. And I think they’re right to be thinking about AI: people
are using it and there does need to be an alternative to tech
giants/VC funded monsters
Will they be successful? The odds are stacked against them. But if
they’re not going to even try then what purpose will they serve any
more?
Zak wrote 1 day ago:
It's interesting that most people on Windows PCs switch to Chrome
when Edge is the default. It was obvious why people switched from
IE6 to Firefox and later from IE7 to Chrome; IE was terrible;
Firefox was better; Chrome was better still. Edge is not obsolete,
unstable, or a security nightmare the way IE was.
Chrome even has significant user share on Mac OS; the numbers I'm
finding are around 40%.
It's hard to guess whether people are much less inclined to switch
browsers on mobile than on desktop, or if they just like Chrome.
Either way, the odds are against anyone who tries to compete with
it.
AnonC wrote 1 day ago:
> It's interesting that most people on Windows PCs switch to
Chrome when Edge is the default
This is primarily because most people on Windows use Gmail and
other Google services, and any time you visit a Google web
property from a non-Chrome browser, there’s a prominent
“Install Chrome” button that’s placed on those. Without
Google’s web properties pushing Chrome even to this day, Chrome
may not continue to be as big.
SoftTalker wrote 1 day ago:
IDK. I tried Orion on iOS and within five minutes I knew I was
never going back to Safari.
glenstein wrote 1 day ago:
Right. The myth that keeps getting confidently repeated in HN
comment sections is that Mozilla supposedly lost market share due
to a series of strategic missteps. But it basically was about the
pivot to mobile, and the monopoly lock-in of Google. Actually think
one fantastic remedy for Google's search monopoly might be allowing
the use of alternative browsers on Android via a pop-up rather than
preloading and privileging Chrome. Because browsers and mobile are
part of the strategy of creating a path dependency tied to Google
search.
But to your point, I think the simple reality is that LLMs are
increasingly taking the place of search and so having all your
funding based on search licensing might be risky when it's at least
possible that we're going to be in a new paradigm sooner than
later.
I honestly think AI in the browser right now is generally very
half-baked and doesn't have any well thought out applications, and
raises all kinds of trust issues. I can think of good applications
(eg browse the Kindle unlimited store for critically acclaimed hard
sci-fi books), but there might be better ones that I'm not thinking
of. It just might make sense to be involved so you went caught
flat-footed by some new application that quickly progresses into
something people expect. And of course because HN commenters are
famously self-contradictory in response to literally everything
Mozilla does, it's a damned if they do damned if they don't
situation: if they load AI into the browser it's pointless feature
bloat. If they don't then they were sitting on their thumbs while
the world moved on when they should have been reinventing
themselves and finding new paths to revenue.
aleph4 wrote 1 day ago:
You said it better than me. This is the real reason Firefox has
declined, and it's basically because of a monopoly.
aleph4 wrote 1 day ago:
Exactly.
Unfortunately, we live in a time when anti-trust regulations mean
nothing.
The fact that it's difficult to separate Chrome from Android dooms
most competitors, which is bad for everyone.
fidotron wrote 1 day ago:
As a semi Rust hater, but Firefox user, I believe Mozilla should go
absolutely all-in on Rust, for a mixture of direct and indirect
effects. That and/or launch an open source e-Reader development
project.
No MBA type is going to be able to do anything of the sort.
nottorp wrote 1 day ago:
Setting aside questions like "is Rust a religion or actually
useful"...
Rewrites tend to kill software projects. Even if you don't
completely change the language to boot.
tcauduro wrote 1 day ago:
Looking at their strategy doc, it doesn't seem like they hear their
users at all. It's riddled with AI. In fact their aspiration is
"doing for AI what we did for the web." Oh boy!
[1]: https://blog.mozilla.org/wp-content/blogs.dir/278/files/2025...
4gotunameagain wrote 1 day ago:
I will eat my hat if Google had nothing to do with the demise of
Mozilla, what an absolute disgrace.
How incompetent can they be, how out of touch with their core (and
arguably only) product ?
Nobody wants AI in firefox.
mrguyorama wrote 16 hours 6 min ago:
They are looking at OperaGX and Brave selling literal spyware and
still growing marketshare and correctly recognizing that the only
people willing to switch browsers in the current day do not give
a shit about any of that stuff and are weirdos looking for
"features"
Look at all the people in this very comment section insisting
that Mozilla is just the worst while using fucking chrome or
chromium. Mozilla knows they will never get that market back,
because that market just hates Mozilla for "reasons", usually
"They fired a guy for being openly hostile"
The thing google did to cause the demise of firefox was pay to
bundle chrome with tons of things users installed, and put a
giant "Install Chrome for BEST EXPERIENCE" banner on every single
page they control. Sane governments would have broken them up for
their clear anti-competitive practices, but at the same time the
vast majority of the users they "lost" never knew they had
firefox in the first place and didn't notice when it got changed.
These users never even noticed when conficker changed their
browsers to literal adware FFS, they certainly didn't "Choose" a
browser freely.
t23414321 wrote 1 day ago:
Leaving XSLT in web standards and in Firefox would let it keep
some comfy useful niche.
Is that right if Google don't want to keep it - then no one can
have it ?!
BTW JavaScript (to replace it all) _is not_ a _web standard_ (but
it is Oracle trademark).
slig wrote 1 day ago:
>I will eat my hat if Google had nothing to do with the demise of
Mozilla
One has to be truly naive to think they get half a bi a year from
Google "just because." They have less than 5% of desktop market
share and ZERO mobile presence.
IMHO, they wouldn't get this kind of money if they had a
competent, technical C-suite that actually cared about creating a
truly competitive free browser. The money is flowing because, not
in spite of, the current C-suite.
Larrikin wrote 1 day ago:
Nobody wants three or four corporations manipulating and
controlling information (with a mix of hallucinations) all behind
a subscription. The large tech companies have nearly universally
lost all trust.
The models I've run recently on Ollama seem to about as good as
the models I was running at work a year ago. The tech isn't there
yet, but I see a path. I would be fine with that enhancing, not
replacing, my usage.
F3nd0 wrote 1 day ago:
Do we know for a fact that 'nobody wants AI in Firefox'?
mossTechnician wrote 1 day ago:
We know for a fact that whenever Mozilla solicits feedback for
AI additions, it heavily leans negative.
[1]: https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/building-ai...
the_pwner224 wrote 1 day ago:
[flagged]
tomhow wrote 1 day ago:
Please don't fulminate or sneer like this on HN. The
guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better
here.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
0x3f wrote 1 day ago:
Yeah, but there's a selection bias present in most feedback
like this, isn't there? People are more motivated to submit
feedback when something annoys them. This is speaking as
someone who is also annoyed by AI features.
mossTechnician wrote 21 hours 56 min ago:
That's a slightly different question, but an important one:
the presence of a group criticizing a feature doesn't mean
the absence of a different group requesting it!
When Mozilla initially made the Connect forums, it was to
solicit requests for new features. I can't stress enough
how few people joined the forum to request more AI in their
browser.
wejick wrote 1 day ago:
I want a good AI integration with Firefox.
The current chatgpt shim is horrible, something more refined
would be nice.
koolala wrote 1 day ago:
Would you pay $20 a month for it? Like Cursor but for your
browser?
thesuitonym wrote 1 day ago:
Why though?
CivBase wrote 1 day ago:
Extension (adblock) support on mobile is worth more to me than
anything you just listed off.
kryllic wrote 1 day ago:
It's the only realistic alternative to a chromium-based browser if
someone wants to make their own fork. I use the Zen browser, and it
strips out some stuff I'm not a huge fan of in baseline Firefox.
Manifest v3 not rearing its ugly head is also a huge plus, as a
competent adblocker is essential these days.
perlgeek wrote 1 day ago:
They also have the "extensions that can do real ad blocking" angle.
dig1 wrote 1 day ago:
chromium-ungoogled works perfectly fine with "extensions that can
do real ad blocking" ;)
DaSHacka wrote 1 day ago:
Ungoogled Chromium is maintaining Manifest V2 support in the
fork?
dig1 wrote 17 hours 31 min ago:
AFAIK Manifest v2 is still part of the chromium codebase, and
there is an intention to continue supporting it, depending on
how difficult that turns out to be.
freedomben wrote 1 day ago:
Indeed, manifest v2 support alone is a killer feature that will
keep me on FF as long as they support it.
It definitely helps that it's also a great (though imperfect)
browser.
netdevphoenix wrote 1 day ago:
The wider point here is that you can only use FF as long as
Mozilla can fund it and Mozilla can only fund it as long as
Google funds them. At some point, it will be cheaper for Google
to pay monopoly fines than funding Mozilla.
lelanthran wrote 1 day ago:
There's penalties other than fines for abusive monopolies.
Fines are only the slightest punishment.
mghackerlady wrote 16 hours 51 min ago:
I can't remember the last time a monopoly got punished
properly
SoftTalker wrote 1 day ago:
Fines aren't a way to just buy your way out of obeying the law.
At some point if they persist in monopolistic activities then
they will get broken up.
WorldPeas wrote 1 day ago:
I don't think the FTC prioritizes that right now
DaSHacka wrote 1 day ago:
I don't think they've prioritized that ever in recent
memory, or they would have already been broken up a long
time ago.
WawaFin wrote 1 day ago:
I've been using Chrome with uBlock Origin Lite and not even once I
found a case when this version of uBlock was behaving differently
(as less efficient) than the "full" uBlock Origin
Maybe I'm just lucky, but even this argument is quite ... meh
mkozlows wrote 1 day ago:
How's that work for you on Android? Firefox on Android with
uBlock is the huge win.
WawaFin wrote 16 hours 6 min ago:
I have a device wide adblocker
rpdillon wrote 1 day ago:
I commented about this a few weeks ago here about this, but
essentially: v2 allows you to block things you can't see, but you
still probably don't want, like folks hiding cloud analytics
behind CNAME cloaking to allow it to appear as a first-party site
rather than Google Analytics, for example.
You won't "feel" this in your day-to-day browsing, but if you're
concerned about your data being collected, v2 matters.
zamadatix wrote 1 day ago:
I've found it a bit like "what car did you drive in to work with
today" in that any typical current and working car is not going
to be a stark difference to a high end car in terms of how fast
you get there... but you'd definitely notice a piece of crap with
a donut, broken heating, and screeching brakes causing you
problems if that's what you were comparing instead.
I.e. I can count the number of times I said "wow, uBO Lite didn't
make this site usable but loading up Firefox with uBO and it
worked fine" on one hand. At the same time, if I ever look and
compare how much is actually getting blocked, uBO is definitely
blocking way more. Doing a side by side compare of dozens of
sites it becomes easier to see minor differences I wouldn't
otherwise have noted, but may not have mattered as much.
sunaookami wrote 1 day ago:
There are a lot more Manifest V2 only extensions than only
Adblockers.
IshKebab wrote 1 day ago:
Doesn't work for Prime Video ads. Tbh I don't mind that too much.
0x3f wrote 1 day ago:
Does it not still suck at blocking YouTube video ads? As in, you
get a delay before videos start playing.
wilkystyle wrote 1 day ago:
I don't even have this issue with uBlock Origin Lite on mobile
Safari. I'm fully browser-based on mobile for YouTube these
days. No ads, no delay.
whywhywhywhy wrote 1 day ago:
That's not sucking at blocking thats YouTube intentionally
adding a delay to make it seem like their experience is
degraded when it isn't. If you turn the slider up to full it
only happens very rarely.
I'm sure this will all change eventually though and YouTube has
a loophole planned so ad blocking on manifest 2.0 is
impossible.
0x3f wrote 1 day ago:
I'm not really sure of the actual mechanism, but on Firefox
with a fully updated block list the delay doesn't seem to
happen for me. Whereas I could never quite get rid of it on
Chrome. This was a while ago, though, when they first
introduced it.
embedding-shape wrote 1 day ago:
I use uBlock Origin with Firefox on Linux, and it seems
like that delay happens maybe on 30% of the YouTube videos
for me, with no rhyme or reason to which ones. And
reloading the same video multiple times show consistent
behavior if it loads fast/slow, not sure what's going on.
aleph4 wrote 1 day ago:
Yes, although they can't go all in on that because it doesn't help
monetization...
bamboozled wrote 1 day ago:
Have you tried Brave?
thesuitonym wrote 1 day ago:
Brave is adware.
embedding-shape wrote 1 day ago:
Technically, both Chrome and Firefox are adware too, since
Google's main business is ads, and Firefox/Mozilla get a lot of
money from Google to display Google as a search engine in
Firefox (an ad :) )
thesuitonym wrote 1 day ago:
Firefox doesn't sell BATs, in-browser notification ads, or
new tab takeovers. The closest you can get is a pinned site
in the new tab page (new installs only) and ads in Pocket, or
whatever they're calling that new tab thing these days. [1]
[1]: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/advertising/solutions/
[2]: https://brave.com/brave-ads/browser/
wyre wrote 1 day ago:
Calling Firefox adware is a stretch at best, and disingenuous
at worst. Adware doesn't mean that the software survives
because of one advertisement that that user can turn off.
mikkupikku wrote 1 day ago:
Only if you opt-in to that misfeature, last I checked. It's
opt-in, not opt-out.
thesuitonym wrote 1 day ago:
I don't know, Brave says it's every third new tab.
[1]: https://brave.com/brave-ads/browser/
cpburns2009 wrote 1 day ago:
The new tab ads can be disabled with 2 clicks.
thesuitonym wrote 1 day ago:
I love how quickly the goalpost moves from "No ads" to
"Only opt in ads" to "Ads can be disabled with two
clicks."
Quit coping and just admit it, Brave is adware. If you
like it, that's cool, totally your choice. It's fast,
performant adware. But it's adware all the same.
cpburns2009 wrote 1 day ago:
Firefox has ads in the same places.
[1]: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/sponsor-p...
thesuitonym wrote 1 day ago:
whataboutism gets you nowhere. Brave is still adware.
Dylan16807 wrote 1 day ago:
When we're talking about reasons to switch
browsers, then saying they both have the same
behavior is not whataboutism. It's extremely
important context to the complaint.
bamboozled wrote 1 day ago:
It might be adware but I’ve actually never
noticed the ads!
Also it’s the only browser on my phone that I can
use to browse the web without ads…
DaSHacka wrote 1 day ago:
As is Firefox, and Chrome.
So really, there's no point in singling it out.
cpburns2009 wrote 1 day ago:
It's strange you're so adamant to label Brave
adware while dismissing concerns that Firefox
engages in very similar "adware" practices.
lkbm wrote 1 day ago:
Looks like I'm getting a ProtonMail ad every few new tabs.
I never noticed because I've never looked at the new tab
page. Doesn't noticeably slow it down to have the ad there,
luckily.
thesuitonym wrote 1 day ago:
So, to reiterate: Brave is adware.
lurk2 wrote 1 day ago:
A few years ago. Crashed constantly and didn’t support tagging
bookmarks.
bamboozled wrote 1 day ago:
Never crashed once for me.
Larrikin wrote 1 day ago:
It's good enough when some terrible lazy web designer only tested
on Chrome. It does nothing to protect against the future when
Google decides they are sick of people trying to get around their
Ad Block ban and change the license because no one has any real
alternatives anymore.
Also blocking is not as good as intentionally poisoning with
something like Ad Nauseum
coffeebeqn wrote 1 day ago:
What’s the current licensing mode? Can they fork their own
version at that point in time and develop it open source ?
pseudalopex wrote 1 day ago:
No Chromium fork developer not called Microsoft have the
resources to maintain a web browser engine.
But focus on the license overlooks a more important threat.
Google made Web Environment Integrity so services could
require approved devices, operating systems, and browsers.
Resistance led Google to remove it from desktop for now. But
they kept something like it in Android. And they will try
again.
cpeterso wrote 1 day ago:
Chromium uses the BSD license. Google could take Chromium
closed source tomorrow without needing to change the license.
EbNar wrote 1 day ago:
Been running it since 2021. The adblocker is simply great. A d
keeps getting better.
EbNar wrote 14 hours 7 min ago:
and*
alex1138 wrote 1 day ago:
It's interesting because I've heard Manifest 3 was an effort to not
make extensions quite have full trust capability and isn't as odious
as it sounds but it's also Google, so...
transcriptase wrote 1 day ago:
Ah Manifest 3: Will still happily allow an extension to silently
transmit all of your browsing and AI chat history to data brokers
to be packaged and sold to the highest bidder.
While conveniently and regrettably unavoidably nerfing ad blockers
:(
For your safety of course.
deaddodo wrote 1 day ago:
Have you tried using Manifest V3 adblockers on Chrome? They're not
nearly as capable or useful as the old ones.
whoisthemachine wrote 1 day ago:
Looking at his LinkedIn profile, he seems to be the MBA type, with
little to no technical experience. For the past year he's been the SVP
or GM of Firefox, whatever that means. Take that as you will...
tanepiper wrote 1 day ago:
His one technical skill is building PowerPoint decks...
ecshafer wrote 1 day ago:
It looks like they chose a Product Manager and MBA. Why can't we get a
software engineer or computer scientist?
sunshine-o wrote 1 day ago:
Yes and he is writing like an MBA/Product Manager (or is it the AI?)
Actually he is most likely a drone. Meaning he is speaking like he
believes he is the CEO of a public company talking to the
shareholders, so of course he talks about how AI is changing
software.
But guess what Mozilla is not a public company, there is no stock to
pump and the thing it really miss is its users. Going from 30% to
less than 5% market share in 15 years with a good product.
Actually I am pretty sure the users who left just do not want to much
AI.
But he is an MBA drone so he is just gonna play the same music as
every other MBA drone.
pndy wrote 1 day ago:
I'm afraid they're delegated to coding nowadays and even open source
projects are run like corporations with attached "foundations"
parasites where funneling out money on unrelated stuff occurs.
This piece linked is a dry marketing and nothing else, and I don't
believe in a single bit this guy is saying or will ever say.
The line about AI being always a choice that user can simply turn it
off: I need to go to about:config registry to turn every occurrence
of it in Firefox. So there's that.
hobofan wrote 1 day ago:
Why do you think a software engineer or computer scientist would be
more qualified?
missedthecue wrote 1 day ago:
This site in general has a massive hate boner for any part of a
corporate structure that isn't the engineering department. Sales,
admin, marketing, legal, HR, etc... all get flak from the HN
community for being irredeemably idiotic wastes of space.
dabockster wrote 1 day ago:
"Hacker News commenters are frequently unaware that their use
cases and customer preferences do not reflect the average
customer demand in the market." - [1] There's a reason I put that
in my profile. :^)
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46192577
missedthecue wrote 1 day ago:
One of my favorite examples of this is when HNers insist that
if only an auto-manufacturer would make a simple car with
tactile buttons and no screen or creature comforts it would
sell like hotcakes.
izacus wrote 1 day ago:
Sounds like HN users represent an underserved and untapped
market and are being rational market actors while discussing
their preferences.
philjackson wrote 1 day ago:
They need to build a great product as well as somehow fund the
project. Seem like those credentials match the requirements.
abcd_f wrote 1 day ago:
They had one. Until he made a fatal mistake of giving a tenner to the
wrong people.
smt88 wrote 1 day ago:
Eich chose to resign due to internal and external protest in the
form of petitions and resignations.
No one forced him to do anything, and Mozilla itself certainly
didn't force him out.
His free speech was met with the free speech of others, and he
decided it was too painful to stay in that spotlight.
How would you prefer it to have gone?
mm263 wrote 1 day ago:
Not to have him cancelled in the first place. No need to pretend
that doing something under the mob pressure is the same as doing
something entirely willingly
smt88 wrote 1 day ago:
Far, far more people have protested the positions of power held
by (for example) Joe Rogan and Dave Chappelle. They ignored the
cancellation attempts, and they're richer and more influential
today than they were a few years ago.
"Cancellation" is a state of being famous enough that your
controversial beliefs upset a large, loud number of people. In
Eich's case, it threatened to have no effect on his career. He
chose to change his career because of it.
Eich expressed his First Amendment rights, and other people
expressed theirs in return. Why should either of them give up
those rights for fear of offending the other?
jsheard wrote 1 day ago:
But then he went on to make Yet Another Chromium Fork, so it
doesn't seem like he was particularly attached to Gecko or what it
stands for in the browser engine market anyway. What's to say that
Mozilla wouldn't have given up the fight and pivoted to Chromium,
like Opera and Edge did, if he was still in charge?
jorvi wrote 1 day ago:
It isn't really Yet Another Chromium Fork, they're the company
that does most anti-ad research / development. Stuff like Project
Sugarcoat[0]. Their adblocking engine is also native and does not
depend on Manifest V2, making it work better than any blocker
that has to switch to MV3 when Google removes MV2.
And they're the only browser that has a functional alternative
for webpage-based ads. Active right now. And you can instead fund
pages / creators by buying BAT directly instead of watching
private ads.
On top of that, Brave's defaults are much more privacy-protecting
than Firefox's, you only get good protection on Firefox if you
harden the config by mucking about in about:config.
People love to hate on Brave because they made some weird grey
area missteps in the past (injecting affiliate links on crypto
sites and pre-installing a deactivated VPN) and they're involved
in crypto. But its not like Firefox hasn't made some serious
missteps in the past, but somehow Firefox stans have decided to
forget about the surreptitiously installed extension for Mr.
Robot injected ads (yes really).
If people could be objective for a second they'd see that Brave
took over the torch from Firefox and has been carrying it for a
long time now.
[0]
[1]: https://brave.com/research/sugarcoat-programmatically-ge...
dabockster wrote 1 day ago:
Yeah, I realized this recently. I want rendering engine
competition, but it's clear that Mozilla isn't capable of doing
that anymore.
sharps1 wrote 1 day ago:
They originally started with Gecko and switched to Chromium.
"There were a ton of issues using Gecko, starting with (at the
time) no CDM (HTML5 DRM module) so no HD video content from the
major studios, Netflix, Amazon, etc. -- Firefox had an Adobe deal
but it was not transferable or transferred to any other browser
that used Gecko -- and running the gamut of paper-cuts to major
web incompatibilities especially on mobile, vs. WebKit-lineage
engines such as Chromium/Blink."
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28941623
dabockster wrote 1 day ago:
And nowadays, I'd argue that there's more human eyeballs
watching the Chromium source code vs the Firefox code.
afavour wrote 1 day ago:
Is there a name for the fallacy where you assume the path not
taken is much better? Because I agree, this is that. Mozilla’s
challenges are foundational, Eich as CEO wouldn’t have made a
dramatic difference in outcomes.
sct202 wrote 1 day ago:
And he went in on integrating trendy things like Ads that pay
crypto and AI integrated into the browser, so it's not like there
wouldn't be AI if he were in charge.
LunaSea wrote 1 day ago:
Maybe that was necessary because they don't get a $500M check
every year. Kinda makes things more difficult.
phoronixrly wrote 1 day ago:
Translation: he had donated to ban same-sex marriage in
California[1]
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Eich#Appointment_to_...
neom wrote 1 day ago:
He gave $1000 donation to support a ban on gay marriage, to be
clear.
dabockster wrote 1 day ago:
In 2014, which is over a decade ago now.
Wikipedia also says he's Catholic. From what I understand, the
Church's positions on such things have evolved at least somewhat
since then. His views could have totally changed or evolved since
then (can't find anything publicly myself).
RobotToaster wrote 1 day ago:
In political terms $1000 is basically nothing.
sunshine-o wrote 1 day ago:
Brendan Eich is a rich nerd who probably got cornered in a party
by someone smart and signed $1000 check.
It is like blaming me for giving $10 to an bump without checking
what he was gonna do with it.
sfink wrote 1 day ago:
No part of this is true, fwiw. His salary at Mozilla was not
high and he was a strong advocate of keeping executive
compensation low (and as supporting evidence, that compensation
shot up soon after he left). He may have made more from Brave,
but that was obviously well after the donation. He also never
backed down from his donation and the directly implied
opposition to gay marriage, only stating that it comes from his
personal beliefs and that he refused to discuss those openly.
(I disagree with his position on gay marriage, or at least the
position that I can infer from his donation, but I agree with
his right and decision to keep it a private matter.)
I had... complex but mostly positive feelings about Eich in the
time I worked for him (indirectly), but I can state
unequivocally that he's not someone who would bend his
principles as a result of getting cornered at a party.
sunshine-o wrote 1 day ago:
What I meant is he is a guy who have evolved in the center of
the tech revolution in the 90s and 2000s. If he is not
horribly bad with money he probably made a lot at least in
various investments.
So I would guess $1000 was almost nothing to him. He is not
really supporting anything by donating $1000.
I listened to him in a interview once, he really feel like a
nice guy.
sunaookami wrote 1 day ago:
A ban that was supported by the majority at the time and the
donation was six years old at the time he became CEO.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44461541
add-sub-mul-div wrote 1 day ago:
I wonder if in hindsight he's embarrassed to have been on the
wrong side of history. Imagine spending your time and money
fighting inevitable social change. Fighting gay marriage is
just a time-shifted fight against women voting or interracial
marriage.
ecshafer wrote 1 day ago:
No, those are all completely separate things.
tstrimple wrote 15 hours 7 min ago:
Only to bigots.
amatecha wrote 1 day ago:
they really are kind of the same thing: basic human
rights.
ceejayoz wrote 1 day ago:
To Godwin a little, sometimes the right thing is not the
majority thing.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_Landmesser
bigstrat2003 wrote 1 day ago:
The point was not "whatever the majority wants is therefore
good". The point is that if you were to apply the "you get
fired from your job for this" standard evenly, the majority
of the country would've had to get fired from their jobs.
That is a pretty unreasonable standard to apply, imo.
Also, come on man. It's in really bad taste to compare stuff
to the Holocaust. Nobody was being murdered here, it's not
remotely the same.
pygy_ wrote 1 day ago:
There is a difference between having an opinion and
spending money to promote it.
Also, beside the direct murders as @ceejayoz mentioned, the
social exclusion of LGBT folks drives far too many of them
to many of them to suicide.
The legalization of same sex marriage cause a noticeable
drop in their suicide rate ( [1] ).
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_among_LGBTQ_...
ceejayoz wrote 1 day ago:
> The point is that if you were to apply the "you get fired
from your job for this" standard evenly, the majority of
the country would've had to get fired from their jobs.
Standards should be higher for folks with more power. The
cashier at the grocery store expressing bigoted beliefs
won't harm me much; my boss doing it is more serious.
> Nobody was being murdered here, it's not remotely the
same.
I assure you, homophobia has its murder victims. (Including
a good number of Holocaust ones.)
RobotToaster wrote 1 day ago:
> Standards should be higher for folks with more power.
Joe Biden voted for the "Defense of Marriage Act", Yet
many LGBT people supported him becoming president.
lotsofpulp wrote 1 day ago:
Supporting one of two candidates in a first past the
post election is simply supporting the lesser evil.
There is no other information to glean.
account42 wrote 41 min ago:
Same goes for CEOs.
kbelder wrote 1 day ago:
Obama opposed gay marriage as well. As did many
prominent politicians, left and right.
The swing from opposing it to supporting it was a huge
cultural shift, and I'm not sure I've seen anything
like that happen so quickly, except maybe during a time
of war. It went from being opposed by a strong
majority to supported by a strong majority in... maybe
5-8 years? It was pretty impressive, and I think it's
a sign that the marketplace of ideas can still
function.
It helps a lot that it's really a harmless thing. It's
giving people more freedom, not taking any away from
anyone, and so as soon as it became clear that it
wasn't causing a problem, everybody shrugged and went
'ok'.
ecshafer wrote 1 day ago:
And people don't have to all agree on the same things. People can
get together to work towards cause X and then individually
believe in mutually exclusive causes alpha, beta, gamma.
Timpanzee wrote 1 day ago:
Just because people can get together to work towards a cause
while believing in mutually exclusive ideals, that doesn't mean
it's the most effective way for people to work together. The
ability to do a thing and the ability to do a thing well is a
big difference.
hamdingers wrote 1 day ago:
Donating any amount of money to prevent people you don't know
from marrying each other is a clear sign of disordered
thinking. Nothing more or less.
Y_Y wrote 1 day ago:
I'd donate to a campaign to ban child marraige, is that
disordered?
hamdingers wrote 1 day ago:
If you think adults marrying other adults and adults
marrying children are in any way equivalent, as you imply,
then yes your thinking is deeply disordered.
marky1991 wrote 1 day ago:
That's not what he said or implied, he's merely
responding to your argument 'Donating any amount of money
to prevent people you don't know from marrying each
other'. I think you might have a justifiable argument
here, but it's not clear at all to me what it is.
hamdingers wrote 1 day ago:
I cannot imagine the mental model you're working with
if my observation is not crystal clear despite omitting
the word "adults" in my initial post. Both your and
Y_Y's responses read as bad faith to me, but it could
be extraordinary ignorance.
In either case I have no idea how to make it clearer
for you. Good luck.
__alexs wrote 1 day ago:
Yes people can and should have differences of opinion but a
line is crossed when you openly campaign to eliminate the
differences of opinion by curtailing the freedoms of the people
you disagree with.
Brendan is the one that crossed a line.
charcircuit wrote 1 day ago:
>curtailing the freedoms you disagree with
So pretty much any law that is opposed by someone. Shop
lifting shouldn't be legal because there are people who like
free stuff. Curltailing the freedom of people who want free
stuff improves society by protecting people's property.
__alexs wrote 1 day ago:
Who's rights are gay people impeding on in this analogy?
charcircuit wrote 1 day ago:
There doesn't have to be any for my analogy to make
sense.
Saying that a law is bad because it prohibits someone
from doing something is a position of anarchy.
__alexs wrote 1 day ago:
I didn't say a law was bad.
charcircuit wrote 1 day ago:
Okay, I assumed that was meant by "cross a line."
DoctorOW wrote 1 day ago:
Queer people aren't causes, they're people. Imagine I worked on
the Brave browser, and in my personal time maintained a website
aimed at discouraging personal relationships with him. This
would probably make me difficult to work with, despite my
personal views not impacting the quality of my work. You might
say these examples aren't one-to-one, and you're right. My
example doesn't actually push any legislation forbidding him
from having a relationship with a consenting person, and it
costs a hell of a lot less than $1000.
account42 wrote 1 hour 1 min ago:
Marriages aren't people. And you probably unknowingly depend
on a lot of people that despise many things you consider part
of your identity. Touch grass and let people have opinions
different from your own.
kbelder wrote 1 day ago:
If you were on a hiring committee, and your
otherwise-qualified-candidate had a political opinion you
objected to in this way, perhaps with a similar donation,
would you refuse to hire them?
madeofpalk wrote 1 day ago:
Depends what you mean by “political opinion”.
If it’s about government fiscal policy, probably not. If
it’s more along the lines of discriminating against or
undermining people’s rights, then yeah I would refuse to
hire them.
account42 wrote 58 min ago:
Perhaps we need stronger laws against discrimination
then.
amrocha wrote 1 day ago:
If you were about to hire a candidate and then found out
that they donate regularly to the “Arrest kbelder and
deport them to El Salvador” fund, would you hire them?
kbelder wrote 1 day ago:
Is that a no?
amrocha wrote 1 day ago:
It’s easy to claim neutrality when it’s other
people being oppressed
kbelder wrote 1 day ago:
Ok. I actually think you ought to be able to refuse
to hire somebody you disagree with like that. I
think you would be very wrong in doing so, though.
amrocha wrote 15 hours 7 min ago:
Would it be wrong to refuse to hire a neonazi? What
kind of people do you think your organization will
attract if you start hiring neonazis?
account42 wrote 57 min ago:
Ones that are sane enough not to bring culture
war drama to the office.
losvedir wrote 1 day ago:
I dunno. Public Defenders (and defense attorneys in general,
but PDs don't get oodles of cash) have to work with some
pretty reprehensible people sometimes.
I used to live in Bahrain while my wife worked in oil and
gas, and a lot of her colleagues had some... pretty
different... views from us but we still got along. Hell, the
country itself has a pretty significant Sunni / Shia divide,
with employees being one or the other and they managed to
work with each other just fine.
I think in general people should be able to work with others
that they have significant differences in opinion with. Now,
in tech, we've been privileged to be in a seller's (of labor)
market, where we can exercise some selectivity in where we
work, so it's certainly a headwind in hiring if the CEO is
undesirable (for whatever reason), but plenty of people still
will for the cause or the pay or whatever. You just have to
balance whether the hiring problems the CEO may or may not
cause are worth whatever else they bring to the table.
phyzome wrote 1 day ago:
That's kind of the point of PDs, though. There's nothing
similar in the corporate context.
driverdan wrote 1 day ago:
> Public Defenders (and defense attorneys in general, but
PDs don't get oodles of cash) have to work with some pretty
reprehensible people sometimes.
That doesn't mean they believe in the awful things their
clients do.
lelanthran wrote 1 day ago:
That's the point. You don't need an alignment of beliefs
to work together.
losvedir wrote 1 day ago:
That's exactly my point. They are able to do their job
despite not believing in their clients, which for public
defenders even means trying to let their clients go free,
which is a fair bit further than is asked of a tech
employee who disagrees with their CEO.
halfmatthalfcat wrote 1 day ago:
Public Defenders do not have a choice at who they
defend.
lalaland1125 wrote 1 day ago:
It's not really possible to do that when the opposing beliefs
are so fundamental. Mozilla had, and has, a lot of LGBT staff.
How could you expect those staff to work under and trust a CEO
opposed to their very existence as equal members of society?
LunaSea wrote 1 day ago:
And how many Mozilla were fired while the CEO increased her
pay to more than $7M per year?
How can staff members feel trust and been seen as equals when
they get fired to make place for someone that is already
earning 70x their wage. All while tanking the company to new
lows.
marky1991 wrote 1 day ago:
It's basic tolerance, it's not that hard. You do your job and
collect your paycheck at the end of the week, same as
everyone else.
amatecha wrote 1 day ago:
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
marky1991 wrote 21 hours 38 min ago:
Could you summarize this into an argument of your own?
account42 wrote 47 min ago:
"I want to discriminate against others but still claim
to be righteous."
kbelder wrote 1 day ago:
>It's basic tolerance, it's not that hard.
That's right. To get a bit philosophical, it's interesting
to see some people's justifications about how they are
right to be intolerant in the ways they want to be, while
still believing that they are free-thinking and tolerant.
A lot of convoluted arguments are really about keeping
one's self-image intact, justifying beliefs that are
contradictory but which the person really wants to believe.
I think that is a trap that is more dangerous for
intelligent people.
For what it's worth, I support and supported gay marriage
at the time, but don't think people should be forced out of
their job for believing otherwise. Thoughts and words you
disagree with should be met with alternative thoughts and
words.
ecshafer wrote 1 day ago:
Ive worked with Catholics and my views on sola scriptura and
the authority of the Pope never came up once. Ive worked with
Muslims, and it was never an issue. Ive worked with Hindus.
Ive worked with Chinese, Pakistanis, Indians, Bangladeshis,
Nigerians, Brazilians, Kenyans, Russians, Ukrainians, Poles,
Ghanans, Mexicans, and many other nationalities. I have been
on many teams and in my companies with a combinatorial
explosion of fundamentally incompatible beliefs.
So yes I do expect staff to work under a ceo that is opposed
to gay marriage, an idea that I would bet globally has a less
than 50% popular support.
funflame wrote 1 day ago:
Have you donated to anti-Muslim, anti-Christian etc.
platforms in a public fashion while working with them?
Because you would've found quite quickly how that changes
the interactions.
I don't mind working with someone who has incompatible
views with me, but I'd be quite unhappy working with
someone who was actively working on undermining my rights.
ecshafer wrote 1 day ago:
That depends. I have donated to Religious missionary work
publicly, that could be seen by an extremist of any other
religion who sees this as a zero sum game as anti their
religion. But I don't bring this up in work because that
is uncouth and not what my job is about, and would expect
the same from co-workers. Eich also didn't donate
publicly, this was dug up and then foisted upon him. If
someone were to dig through records they could find my
donations and party affiliations, which is what they did
to him. He was being professional, they were the ones
that were taking his private views and forcing them into
the public sphere.
wtallis wrote 1 day ago:
> taking his private views and forcing them into the
public sphere
Donations in an effort to change the law are
fundamentally a public action, whether or not the
government requires the fact of your donation to be
publicly disclosed. Seeking to use the law to hurt
people is not a private view.
losvedir wrote 1 day ago:
> It's not really possible to do that when the opposing
beliefs are so fundamental.
Sure it is. I've lived and worked in the Middle East and in
China. People do it all the time.
0x000xca0xfe wrote 1 day ago:
What's so fundamental about marriage?
I don't think childless couples (of any gender) should get
any societal advantages yet I have no problem working with
people that disagree. Why has everything to be
black-or-white, left-or-right, with us or against us? That's
not a productive way to think about others.
yupyupyups wrote 1 day ago:
In a liberal context, marriage means nothing except for
being a symbol of a union between two people. But all
rules, obligations and rights that make marriage a
meaningful institution are rooted in religion, and are
hence not always respected outside of religion.
You could argue that there are laws that only apply to
married couples, and that THAT brings meaning to marriage.
But:
Firstly, generally speaking, even the most important
features of a marriage are not protected by law, most
notably: fidelity. So the law is disjoint from what's
traditionally considered to be obligations within marriage.
That leaves the legal definition at the whims of
contemporary polititians. Therefore, law cannot assign the
word "marriage" any consistent meaning throughout time.
Secondly, to my limited knowledge, the line between a
married couple and two people living together is
increasingly getting blurred by laws that apply marriage
legal obligations even to non-married couples if they have
lived together for long enough. It suggests that law-makers
do not consider a ceremony and a "marriage" announcement to
be what should really activate these laws, but rather other
factors. Although, they seem to acknowledge that an
announcement of a marriage implies the factors needed to
activate these laws. If that makes sense...
So marriage is inherently a religious institution that in a
religious context comes with rules, obligations and rights.
Hence why people who take religion seriously will find it
offensive that somebody that completely disregards these
rules calls themselves married.
DonHopkins wrote 10 hours 28 min ago:
So you're also against Atheist Marriage, then?
dbdr wrote 1 day ago:
For one, being childless is a choice (mostly, especially
since adoption is a possibility). It's indeed OK to have
different opinions for what how laws apply differently to
people based on their choices. Being gay is not a choice,
it is rather similar to race/ethnic background, and it's
generally not OK to have laws that treat people differently
based on something like that. I'm sure there are more
nuances to add, but it seems to me that makes it quite a
different situation.
SoftTalker wrote 1 day ago:
I don't think everyone agrees that being gay is not a
choice. There are no outward physical indicators of a
person's sexual orientation. It's entirely behavorial and
therefore plausibly under the conscious control of the
person. Now, I would agree that a person doesn't choose
which gender he is attracted to, but it not something
than anyone else can see and immediately understand as an
inborn characteristic.
Clearly being black, or hispanic, or asian, or white are
physical characteristics. Far fewer people would argue
that there is any element of choice in that.
DonHopkins wrote 10 hours 29 min ago:
It doesn't even matter if being gay is a choice or not.
PEOPLE STILL DESERVE THE FREEDOM TO CHOOSE WHO THEY
MARRY. It's basic human rights.
sudokatsu wrote 1 day ago:
This is the craziest example of “if I can’t see it,
it [might not] exist” I have ever witnessed.
lovelearning wrote 1 day ago:
If there's nothing fundamental about marriage and it's just
some weird coliving arrangement, then why ban it for only
some groups in the first place? Nothing productive or even
rational about it.
Why is the reaction seen as irrational or immature but not
the action that triggered it?
bigstrat2003 wrote 1 day ago:
> Why is the reaction seen as irrational or immature but
not the action that triggered it?
The analogous (but with an opposite direction) action
would be campaigning to make gay marriage legal. Nobody
has a problem with people doing that. The reason people
object to Eich's firing is because it is a very clear
escalation in the culture war, not because they have
strong opinions about gay marriage.
lalaland1125 wrote 1 day ago:
What unjust "advantages" do you think childless couples get
that you would want to get rid?
Pretty much all of the legal benefits of marriage are
contractual, not financial, and come at no cost to the
public.
Things like spousal medical rights, a joint estate, etc
don't come at the expense of anybody else.
SoftTalker wrote 1 day ago:
Taxes would be a big one. There are substantial tax
benefits to being married.
lotsofpulp wrote 1 day ago:
No, there aren’t. In fact, there was a tax penalty
for being married until 2017 TCJA.
lalaland1125 wrote 1 day ago:
The tax benefits are sorta oversold.
The main benefits are tax free gifts between partners
and filing jointly, both of which seem very reasonable
and wouldn't be of value to single people.
The actual tax breaks most people think about are tied
to dependents in your household, not marriage.
servercobra wrote 1 day ago:
Your thinking applies equally to all people. His donation
tries to take away a right from a minority group. They're
quite different.
dpkirchner wrote 1 day ago:
It has to be us vs against us because that's what law is
all about -- outlawing certain actions.
It's one thing to believe as you do, it's quite another to
push for legislation that would (in your example) deny
childless couples societal advantages, whatever that
actually means.
If you're not in favor of a-or-b arguments the answer is to
allow a and b, eh?
4gotunameagain wrote 1 day ago:
Oh yes, totally worth it to risk THE FREE INTERNET because of
that.
philipwhiuk wrote 1 day ago:
He's not defending "THE FREE INTERNET" at his new place.
(Which for the record, is less important than physical
freedom).
LunaSea wrote 1 day ago:
Maybe that has to do with Brave not getting a free check to
the tune iof $500M Google every year.
That makes it more difficult to create "free internet" type
projects.
Orygin wrote 23 hours 12 min ago:
Probably comes from the Crypto scam integrated into the
browser.
I find it funny some people shit on Firefox for adding
Pocket, but defend Brave for adding crypto scams to the
browser.
LunaSea wrote 22 hours 55 min ago:
I don't defend Brave adding this feature or believe that
it is even a good idea but how does this constitute a
scam?
Orygin wrote 22 hours 45 min ago:
> I don't defend Brave
Maybe not, but you spend quite some time spitting on
Mozilla for taking money from Google.
LunaSea wrote 17 hours 53 min ago:
Yes, because (1) they spent that money badly as can
be seen from the non-Google revenue numbers of
Mozilla and Firefox's market share and (2) people are
comparing practices of a company that gets $500M for
free and a practices of a company that is essentially
bootstrapped, which makes no sense.
joshstrange wrote 1 day ago:
> risk THE FREE INTERNET because of that
Come off it, as if he is the only one who can save us. Spare
me.
dvngnt_ wrote 1 day ago:
Wouldn't it make more sense to have them program and let a product
person handle big picture ideas
lawn wrote 1 day ago:
The track record of MBA's destroying companies says otherwise.
What Mozilla needs is a change in leadership direction, not another
MBA.
tredre3 wrote 1 day ago:
I very much doubt that the track record of companies fronted by
an hands-on engineer is much better. If anything they probably
fail faster on average so we never hear about them.
LunaSea wrote 1 day ago:
Most of the big tech companies were started and led by
technical people.
tensegrist wrote 1 day ago:
i feel like there ought to be a meaningfully large market for a
"trusted" company where part of the brand identity is being able to
form sentences that do not include the token "ai", especially with e.g.
microsoft's recent excesses in this direction, but what do i know about
the alleged realities of running a tech company in $YEAR
<- back to front page
You are viewing proxied material from codevoid.de. The copyright of proxied material belongs to its original authors. Any comments or complaints in relation to proxied material should be directed to the original authors of the content concerned. Please see the disclaimer for more details.