>> He says he could begin to block ad blockers in Firefox and estimates that’d bring in another $150 million, but he doesn’t want to do that. It feels off-mission.
> It may be just me, but I read this as “I don't want to but I'll kill AdBlockers in Firefox for buckerinos ”.
Yes, that does seem like a pretty uncharitable interpretation of that quote. I read it as "we won't do it, even though it would bring in $150M USD".
I have used Firefox as my default browser through thick and thin for damn near two decades.
If Mozilla killed andblocking extensions I’d switch to Helium Browser in a heartbeat since they’re maintaining manifest v2 support for uBO and even ship it OOTB.
Yeah but they haven't and they're not going to, so what's the point of fantasizing about what you would do in that situation? It's like tough guy syndrome, where a person constantly fantasizes about what they would do in the imaginary situation where one of their friends or family is disrespected, or doomsday preppers who spend their life imagining what they would do in an apocalypse that never comes.
That stuff belongs on archiveofourown.com, not news.ycombinator.com.
Relax, man. It's perfectly reasonable to say that you would stop using a browser if they killed adblock support. Saying so is not "tough guy" syndrome because switching which browser you use is not a tough thing to do.
It is tough guy syndrome, because it's projecting a hypothetical scenario to performatively declare what you would do in that hypothetical, attempting to hold a third party accountable for something they're not actually doing. Try to follow the ball instead of lecturing me to relax ;)
Is there an extension that limits JS to things that actually improve websites (like the bare minimum needed to render a page usable under most metrics)
(- it's kind of behavior extension on tag level, yet has JS - and it's orthogonal, like CSS or XSLT, unlike JS which is.. untamed and invasive; i.e. there is video (any) tag but you could (+)DIY not touching the document - I played with MPlayer as a plugin there for all the codecs and my customs.)
Exactly. And I’m one of those that uses Firefox sync, and prefers all the things Firefox comes with, including the developer tools. The only thing it lacks is the integrated Google Lighthouse reporting.
Except by that point you've executed all their JavaScript. The FBI recommends ad blockers as a safety measure. Bouncing on the site still exposes you to risk.
Same. Without uBlock Origin I'll drop Firefox. There are very few reasons to put up with its "niche browser that nobody tests" status if they won't even allow me to block ads. They should just give up and end Firefox development already if they're going down that route.
I'm doing as much to keep Firefox alive as anybody.
Wherever I've worked as a dev in a decade I've always developed Firefox-first and let the testers turn up Chrome issues. So the products that I am involved with just work with Firefox all the time.
I know there are a lot of people like me, people who are passionate and engaged with technology but have problems with "big tech" and if they turn people like me away than it really will be a "niche browser that nobody tests"
I developed and tested my personal site on Firefox. If I were a professional web developer, I'd work just like you do.
But let's not kid ourselves. We're an absolute minority. For every one of us, there are hundreds, thousands of developers who literally do not give a shit so long as their paychecks hit their accounts. Actually they're likely to write Firefox off as some irrelevant niche market the company can afford to lose because it's less work for them if they do.
(1) I like to think that professional web developers are foxier than average
(2) It just takes one on the team to make the difference
(3) Practically compatibility with Firefox is pretty good. Maybe once a month I use an e-commerce site or other e-business site where I have to drop down to Chrome, Edge or Safari.
I haven't compared it in years, but Firefox's bookmark sync is better than Google's, it is a reason why I have stuck with it.
I think Firefox manages hundreds of tabs better than Chrome does as far as memory usage goes. I haven't used Chrome seriously in years, but people continue to complain about how RAM hungry Chrome is so I assume it is still an issue.
But Mozilla has been doing odd things that makes me question them. I would move to some Chromium based browser if ublock origin was... blocked... pun intended... because the web does prefer Chrome over Firefox. If this 3rd party browser is able to integrate some of the functionality of ublock origin that Firefox chose to remove; I would use it over the reasons I listed above in a heartbeat.
It's only Firefox that is never satiated with however much memory I throw at it. Any time my machine slows, the solution is to kill Firefox. Not sure what exactly they are doing wrong.
Go to about:processes and kill whichever website's subprocess is using the most memory. Sometimes it's the main process but more commonly it's a specific site. Looking at You, Tube.
I want to take this opportunity to thank Raymond Hill for his enormous gift to humanity. I've done this many times over the years, and it's always worth the time to do it again.
Thank you, gorhill! And thanks to all the people maintaining it and all the filter lists!
Most adblocker developers throughout history have routinely taken millions of dollars to weaken their adblockers, though. That's why we're all using uBO instead of uB.
They say everyone has a price. Wouldn't you for ten million? A hundred million? A billion dollars? It would be extremely irrational not to. You could always donate 70% of it to Ladybird, and still come out ahead.
You could always secretly continue helping the adblocking mission under a different name. Even if you signed a contract not to.
Incorrect, Raymond Hill authored both extensions, both being forks of HTTP Switchboard.
Raymond got overwhelmed with managing an open source project of uBlock's size and let Chris Aljoudi take over. Adblock later purchased it from Chris.
Meanwhile, Raymond had forked uBlock, creating uBO, and continued to improve it on his own terms. After seeing what happened with Adblock, he has no intention of selling either uMatrix or uBO.
Is Brave so persona-non-grata? I find that it's a 'don't ask don't tell' because of some ancient politics. If Firefox is becoming suspect, WHAT is left?
I found Chrome+adblockers NOT good enough. I like (and hate) Brave's shield, as I never figured out how to use wildcards to whitelist a whole domain / subdomain, it seems per-host. But that Brave shield WORKS.
I use both uBO and NoScript and wondered if I really needed uBO if I blocked YouTube as I've planned.
However, it leads to Mozilla's earlier weird design choice where you have to install addon if you only want to disable JavaScript on sites - or allow it from only the selected domains.
Years later I haven't found a sensible explanation why they ditched that choice.
I've understood that you can still do it in Chrom(e/ium) and combined with a good updated blocklist in /etc/hosts or like it would provide most of the functionality of an adblock.
Who selects these CEOs? It almost seems like a caste system at this point. You can be a complete clown, but it's the best we have in our small caste so you're the one.
This is just another way of saying "we are forgoing a substantial amount of money in order to stay true to our principles."
It's a very basic and boring thing to say, and if any other CEO said this, nobody would care.
IMO, this is one of the reasons why it's so hard to find a good CEO for Mozilla. Anything you do or say will get picked apart in the most uncharitable way by the community. Who would want that, especially when you're probably also taking a pay cut compared to your other options (and if the board tries to raise your salary... well, you're going to get attacked for that too).
Is it him or is it you? I'd think within the Mozilla organization is a data trove of telemetry which renders a fairly good picture of how many users actually are using ad blockers.
Yep, and that's how he arrived at the $number. If a small number of people were using ad blockers, the cited sum would approach $0 since disabling ad blockers would affect very few page views, right?
I think it is him. Chrome making blocking harder is one of the issues that has been pushing some users away (and a good portion of those in the direction of FF). If FF is not better is that regard then those moving away for that reason will go elsewhere, and those who are there already at least in part for that reason will move away.
If this happened it would be the final straw for me, if I wasn't already looking to change because of them confirming the plan to further descend into the great “AI” cult.
Not sure what your point is? It doesn't matter the number of users, because the GP's point is that those users are going to immediately bail, for a browser thsy supports ad block.
So that extra money will never materialize. And usage numbers will again crater. This is the point.
(You can disagree with that assessment, but that has nothing to do with telemetry, which cannot gauge users hanging around with blocked .. adblockers)
>Whether he will do it, is actually secondary to the fact that he thinks cutting adblock can bringing in money.
I'm sorry but this is like borderline gibberish.
You could rationally understand that there's a financial incentive to selling out... and choose not to sell out. Did you make it to the and? I didn't think so. The fact that you're simply able to assess that selling out has a dollar amount associated with it isn't a confession unless you're so pot committed to your Mozilla Derangement Syndrome that you've chosen to throw charitable interpretation out the window.
You're entertaining a hypothetical that was already rejected, and your point of emphasis is that they didn't reject it hard enough to satisfy you. I'm sorry but that's the nothingburger of the century.
It's a common cognitive error called Moral Thought-Action Fusion. The idea is that thinking about an action implies a desire to perform the action. You will see these in other circumstances as well. One place it is commonly used is in describing non-religious moral systems that must form their moral bases without axioms from God. A non-religious person may form a considered position against murder, for instance, but the fact that they state the pros and cons before choosing against is considered evidence that they wanted to.
The core reasoning system here is probably moral intuitionism: if you have an explanation for why something is bad, it is not something you consider intuitively bad and consequently you must be wanting to do it.
I think I've seen it in online communities a lot more in the last couple of decades, and I suspect it's just a characteristic of the endless march of Eternal September.
Don't really agree here. The point against him is thinking in a very shallow way that stopping ad block means bringing in so much, which I guess is true in a certain basic level, but ignores how shitty that would contribute to making the internet.
And believe it or not, human behavior is such that something that is not even i in the space of possibilities is much less likely to occur that something that has been considered and rejected. It might have been rejected ow, but what the calculus changes?
To some extent I agree, but if someone is deep in the weeds of speculation, not just saying pros and cons of murder in general but also having drawn up lists of people with pros and cons of murdering each of them and possible ways of doing so, then that's starting to get a little suspicious. Perhaps not bad in itself, but suspicious.
Right now, Firefox's market share is a rounding error compared to Chrome. Users are starting to switch away from Chrome because it's currently in step 3 (in spades). That trend will not continue if Firefox beats Chrome to the bottom of the pig-pen. Firefox's current focus on AI is concerning enough, but mirroring Chrome's shift to Manifest v3 (i.e. What killed full-blooded ad blocking in Chrome) would be outright suicide.
Mozilla needs to listen to their users. Most don't particularly want "let me run that through an AI for you" popups everywhere. Practically nobody running Firefox wants to be cut off from effective ad blocking.
Monetization is hard, for Mozilla in particular. It was always weird that most of their funding came from Google. Now that Google is yanking it, Mozilla needs to find alternative sources of filthy lucre. However, if they destroy their product's only competitive advantages, there will be nothing left to monetize. If Firefox remains a browser that can provide decent privacy and ad-blocking then Mozilla has a chance to find alternative revenue streams. If, instead, Mozilla throws those advantages away to make a quick buck, that's the last buck they'll ever make.
Indeed, Mozilla has a particular bad habit of not listening to customers.
It shows even in the UI design. Features like tab pinning and tab groups work in ways that are sub-optimal to how users want to use them. A pinned tab should not be tied to a specific URL. If you go their forums you see a lot complaints, and weird thing is all the nonsensical arguments that their reps advance as to how these features should work the way they currently are. I as a longtime Firefox user can immediately see what is wrong with these features as implemented, but the devs won't listen. I wonder if they use FF themselves.
Firefox is also the only app on my MacBook that consistently brings the system to a crawl. Almost every single time my machines slows down, the solution is to kill Firefox. It's got to the point I don't even need to use Activity Monitor, I just kill Firefox and and system recovers.
It's gotten to the point I'm seriously looking at alternatives, trying out Orion and Helium browsers.
This is academic discussion, where you think when X is said it means this, somebody (others here) think its that and so on. Grasping straws and all. I guess when around Christmas work churn slows down and some people spend more (too much?) time here.
I don't think HN comments have an irrational burning pit of hate for Mozilla. If Mozilla was shaped more like the Tor foundation in their words and actions I think a lot more people would be supportive.
There is no "HN comments". Each commenter has its own sensibilities. Some of them just saw the word Adblock from new ceo and went full defense mode without trying to understand that the guy was just talking about what he feels is good, and there is no need to come with the worst possible interpretation of each sentence.
Firefox has a market share around 3%. Even most technologists stopped using it long ago. Many banks and government websites don’t even support it anymore and loudly tell people to use Chrome instead, especially in developing countries.
Nothing can kill Firefox, because it’s already dead for all practical purposes.
I use Firefox as my daily browser. If i have a website that fails to work, I might try chrome maybe once every two months. And then it usually also doesn't work. So for all browsing I do on the internet, Firefox works like a charm
Get the OneTab extension. It'll save and close all those tabs. That way you won't have Firefox crashing during startup once you exceed the number of tabs it can handle (a few thousand).
Reading comments here about problems using Firefox is odd to me as I never run into them. I feel like people are taking about totally different browsers. I don't remember the last time I had page rendering issues or was asked to use a different browser.
Same. I mean, I'm sure there have been cases where I've switched to Chrome for certain things. I just got a custom viewfinder for my partner for Christmas, is showing a bunch of photos of the cruise that we went on. And they have an online editor for it, but the editor seemed to be glitching when using Firefox. So I moved to Chrome. Later I realized I was just misunderstanding and it actually just worked fine in Firefox.
And I'm able to access my bank, my credit cards, my utility bills, in Firefox without issue. So I'm not sure what people are talking about.
One thing I am familiar with though in the aftermath of gamergate was a bunch of motivated reasoning to complain about games and insist that they had design flaws or bugs, when really? The bugs weren't real but were kind of just a different way of saying We Don't Like This Game. And so reports of perceived bugs in some cases are as much a social phenomenon as they are a sincere representation of software functionality.
I don't want to say there's no bugs but for every one person's unsubstantiated anecdote, I seem to be able to find two people able to reproduce a functional version of the experience without issue. And just to zoom in on the bank login issue in particular, I use a credit union with an old decrepit HTTP site that was recently updated to a slightly less old and decrepit HTTP site. Plaid is unable to successfully log in, but the web interface works perfectly fine on Firefox mobile.
Most of the service sites I use are fine in Firefox running on Linux. The only thing I use that is problematic is the Microsoft 365 with Teams portal an employer uses. So I have Chromium just for that one.
I've been using Linux on my desktop for ten years and I definitely experience bugs and performance issues with Firefox from time to time that don't occur in Chrome. It's rare but common enough to keep Chrome around as a fallback.
A few: Developer tools are quite slow; Airline websites often break during checkout; JS games and video players sometimes stutter or use a lot of CPU
My favorite anecdote on this front: someone posted a comment on Lemmy, a fediverse alternative to Reddit, claiming Arch was "broken" and Linux users were delusional for thinking it was functional for the average person.
And when people ask them what they meant, they revealed that they used some package from the arch user repository that apparently required manual compiling for every update.
And instead of thinking that this wasn't the unusual behavior of a particular package, they insisted that this was the normal Linux packaging experience, which was why Linux as a whole was a terrible operating system.
A bunch of commenters chimed in emphasizing that the whole package distribution system in Linux is designed to among other things, handle dependencies and avoid manual compiling (though it's available as an option), and they were all dismissed as just being fanboy apologists.
It's not page rendering issues, usually, since Firefox and Chrome pretty much support all the same things.
What you run into the most is the website saying, hey, it looks like you are not using a browser we have tested against, so we are not going to let you log in. Please come back when you have Chrome, edge, or Safari.
That happens quite often these days. Last week I was filling in a govt form (EU country), submit button didn't work in FF, so I had to resort to using Microsoft Chrome. On my company's training platform videos aren't rendered in FF. Another shitty corporate portal which shows my salary and holidays doesn't work in FF at all, completely. What else... A few smaller payment providers weren't working in FF over past two years. Ghost of the Skype before being finally killed only worked in Chrome clones. Stadia only worked in Chrome (yes, I used it and it was fine).
Also many sites show significant degradation in FF lately. Youtube works like shit in FF, once every 10 page opens it just gets stuck half way with part of the background loaded, like black with black empty frames on top. Or just empty page. No, it never finishes loading from that state, and neither it can reload on F5. But opening a new tab works fine and YT loads normally.
And to finish off this rant, FF has now started corrupting my open tabs after opening FF with saved session. This never happened since this feature was implemented and in 2025 has happened 3 times already. And in mozilla bugtracker all tickets about this are ignored for years now. Meanwhile they are developing some crappy bells and whistles, instead of fixing fundamental bugs.
If not for Chrome monopoly, I would consider switching browsers. Ladybird can't come soon enough. Mozilla has lost touch with reality.
Having switched to Firefox about 10 months ago, one thing I notice is every site I visit works but a lot of sites load way slower than Chrome. YouTube is a big one.
How much of that is Firefox rendering being worse vs artificial slowdowns by Google owned sites kind of doesn't matter in the end. Objectively it's a slower browsing experience but I solely use it for uBlock Origin.
I've been using Orion browser (WebKit-based with support for Chrome and Firefox extensions) for quite some time and haven't had this issue with YouTube, but I've definitely experienced the same with Firefox. If it's an issue of artificial slowdowns, you'd think they'd apply it to anything not running on Chrome's engine, which makes me think it's specifically Firefox's rendering causing this issue.
For me the biggest offender are usually Google products and sometimes the lazy-coded website written by incompetents and whose audience is the tech illiterate (i.e. some websites involving schools/teaching) that just tell you "use latest Chrome just to be sure, download here" to, well, just be sure.
Notable mentions for government websites that are like 10 years in the past and that are still on the "Supports Firefox" side because, well, they are just always late to everything.
Usually that's because of third party cookies the government websites love to use for authentication. FF and Safari by default blocks them but both can be disabled temporarily to use those websites. Chrome is more lax on them since ad networks love cross origin cookies as well.
While governments battle big tech on some issues, they are very much on the same side on others. They both want more tracking for example - the governments want to regulate it, and there is a battle for control of the data, but both want the data to be collected by someone.
3% market share is 150 million active users give or take. That's no death by any count in the software world.
Gosh, I really wish Mozilla would just dig into their user-base and find a way to adequately become sustainable... or find a way to make it work better as a foundation that is NOT maintained by Google, ie like the Wiki Foundation. I do spend a LOT of time in FF, can't anyone see there's a value beyond selling ads and personal info that could make Mozilla more sustainable, dependable and resilient?
I think you're right, but it's important to emphasize many of these attempts to tell the story of market share get major facts catastrophically wrong. The decline in Firefox market share from like 33% to below 10% is mostly because the world pivoted to mobile, and Firefox "dominance" was in a world of desktop browsers. It was defaults and distribution lock-in as the world pivoted to mobile that led to the change in market share. As well as the web as a whole effectively tripling in number of users, and Google leveraging its search monopoly and pushing out Chromebooks effectively at cost.
For some reason that part of the story always seems to get omitted, which I find bizarre. But the web pivoted to mobile and Google flexed its monopoly powers. I would argue that upwards of 95% of the change in market share is explained by those two factors.
What happened in the last 6 months or so to affect those numbers? According to them, Chrome increased in percentage quite a but recently and the others all got "compressed" towards 0.
Looking at the last 10 years gives a different perspective (not great for Firefox but maybe underscores something is different recently in general):
I can't imagine browsing the web on my phone and tablet without Firefox mobile. That would honestly be the biggest loss once this CEO takes this nonsense to the logical end.
I'm genuinely curious. What does FireFox mobile have over it's competition?
You can't install UBlock Origin on mobile.
Like I still use FireFox on mobile, just purely out of habit. I don't really see anything better about it (I am quite inexperienced when it comes to phones).
I use several extensions on Fennec mobile: AdGuard AdBlocker, Google & YouTube cookie consent popup blocking, NoScript, Privacy Badger, Translate this page, Web Archives, uBlacklist
When they say "don't support it anymore", does that mean they're back to the IE era of using Chrome specific technologies so it doesn't work in any browser, do they use user-agent sniffing and show a big popup, or is it just that they're not testing it in FF anymore? The latter shouldn't be an issue as long as they use standards, the only thing they would run into in this day and age is browser specific bugs - but Safari seems to have that the most.
Most of those sites are doing a little move called "lying". I occasionally (once every couple of months) run into a site claiming to not support Firefox. I can't recall a single site that wasn't a tech demo of some bleeding edge feature of Chrome that didn't magically start working when I turned on my Chrome UserAgent.
(Hey, if you work at Snapchat: fix your shit. Your desktop site is by far the most mainstream website I've come across that lies like this)
that 3% is of total users including mobile which chrome is king because it's basically force fed to users. this is important because there is no choice with browsers for the common mobile user, most of them don't know what is a browser even if they used it every day.
also in the 2000s IE was king because guess what? that was what came preinstalled with winxp
Exactly! I keep banging this drum but I'm fascinated by the possibility of Android being required to have a pop-up where people can choose different browsers, as a potential remedy to Google's monopoly. Because engineering a path dependency on Google search, from mobile hardware, to software, to default browsers, to default search on the browser, I think is part of how they've enforced their monopoly. There's been a legal judgment that they are, in fact a monopoly, but I don't think any remedy has been decided on yet. And there's a lot of historical precedent for a pop-up to select a default as a remedy to software monopolies.
Granted in Google's case, it seems that the Monopoly judgment was with respect to ad markets, but locking people into search to serve ads might be understood as part of the structure of that monopoly.
My software stopped working because its drawing on canvas in a way that causes firefox to glitch with hw acceleration enabled. Not one of my customers/users complained
The only reasons I've ever put effort into Firefox support in my software was A) I find it helps push me to write towards standards better if I include multiple browser engines, which makes it more likely I'll support Safari without extra effort, which is difficult for me to test on because I don't daily drive any Apple devices (works about 80% of the time), and B) to avoid the shit-fit I would receive if I ever posted it as a "Show HN." It has never come up as an actual user requirement.
Yeah, every website has different stats about user-agents, depends a lot on the types of users you attract. I bet HN has Firefox usage ratio above 15% for sure, while sites like Instagram probably has way below the global average.
Global browser marketshare never made much sense. You need to figure out what your users use, then aim to be compatible for most of those, and ignore any global stats.
As of December 7th, Firefox is 10.3% of traffic there. This makes it the #2 browser, after Chrome (at 62.2%) -- a spot it has been dueling with Edge over for the last year or so.
I'm inclined to think that "people visiting wikipedia" is a fairly representative sample of "normal users", overall.
Have not used Chrome-based browsers 3+ years and never had problem with Firefox. Sometimes Safari was not working 100% - but nothing serious. Maybe it is because, only page from google I use is Youtube; however Firefox has best experience there, even better than Chrome - thanks to proper uBlock Origin.
Given the current state of the Chrome family of browsers and the anti adblocker stance from Google, i'd think that alone would guarantee Firefox a steady user base.
Not sure how users cope with Chrome-based browsers and intrusive ads.
That's just a wishful thinking. Too many ordinary users accept ads as inevitable annoyances and don't even know about the very existence of adblockers.
I've tried a few times to convince people in my life who would self describe as "bad with computers" to download an adblocker, but they usually find the friction too high. Adding extensions is unfamiliar for most, and even if it seems very basic for us, the non-tech people I know don't really want to deal with the risk of unknown unknowns from that, let alone switching to a healthier browser. (Perhaps reasonable since it feels like these days half the extensions on the Chrome Web Store are spyware or adware behind the scenes.)
I also suspect that those who lived through the days of frequent Windows errors and Chrome running out of memory all the time often expect software to fail in weird and unexpected ways, and a lot of people adopt a "don't fix it if it isn't broken" mindset.
Still, uBlock Lite and Brave browser are definitely easy wins and I'm glad to see more random people in my life using them than I would have expected. :)
If it's the computer of an older family member or something, just put Firefox and ubo on their system for them and be done with it. They will use whatever software is preloaded, and being shown how to use it is a much lower barrier to entry than the cognitive load of finding, vetting, installing, and configuring new software.
I used to try to patiently explain why people should do xyz. Now I explain to people why I'm going to change xyz on their device, and if they don't slam the breaks I just do what needs to be done right then. If someone doesn't know what an adblocker is they are getting one so they can see for themselves and reflect on what companies have been putting them through for years to make some incremental amount of money.
That's really funny. Yes, in case it wasn't clear for others reading this and thinking about installing these, it's almost certain that uBlock Origin and Brave browser will not cause you any problems and if you're using stock Chrome I really encourage you improve your situation dramatically for ~5 minutes worth of effort.
> Many banks and government websites don’t even support it
Because their web developers are too lazy to write anything to proper standards. They're doing some kind of lazy "Check for Chrome, because everyone must be running that, if not, redirect to an Unsupported page".
I've yet to find a website that "refuses" to work in Firefox which doesn't work just fine when I use a user agent switching extension to present a standard Chrome on MacOS or Chrome on Windows useragent.
Yeah, the article's quoting didn't help its case. It doesn't seem fair to quote someone saying [I don't think X is a good idea] as evidence they are about to do X.
That being said, in the original context [0] it does sound a lot more like an option on the table. That original article presents it as the weakest of a list of things they're about to explore - but who knows, maybe the journalist has butchered what was said. It is an ambiguous idea without more context about how close it is to Mozilla trying to make life hard for ad-blockers.
In addition "off-mission" is a pretty weak way to describe completely destroying your credibility and betraying your user base. Building the Firefox phone was off mission. Buying Pocket was off mission. Maybe it's just me, but selling your remaining faithful users down the river to make a quick buck from advertisers seems a little, I don't know... worse than that?
The part about making money through advertising and selling data to 3rd parties (though "search and AI placement deals") is already not a good sign. Planning to make their money through ads and surveillance capitalism is already making it impossible to say "I always know my data is in my control. I can turn the thing off, and they’re not going to do anything sketchy"
Except that expressing loud doubts about something ethically dubious is often a sign that an opposite action will be taken. So many business people want this moral excuse "but I had doubts" while being totally cynical
"feels off mission" exposes how little conviction there is behind this position.
That is a flimsy tissue paper statement about a concept that should be a bedrock principle.
It's irrationally charitable to give it any credit at all. Especially in context where anyone who's awake should understand they need to be delivering an unquestionably clear message about unquestionably clear goals and core values, because this ain't that.
Or rather, it is a clear message, just a different message to a different audience.
Part of being CEO/running a business is considering all options, but it doesn't mean it will ever move beyond the ROI/risk phase. Ever read one of the risk assessments in a companies public filings? It's the same thing.
All options that are in line with the organization’s mission.
The CEO of an organization like Mozilla even considering blocking adblockers for profit is like the president of Amnesty International considering to sell lists of dissidents to the secret police.
> The CEO of an organization like Mozilla even considering blocking adblockers for profit is like the president of Amnesty International considering to sell lists of dissidents to the secret police.
No, for Amnesty International it would be more like not considering somebody a political prisoner because the country that took the prisoner is a 1st world country and they don't want to expose themselves on a matter that would risk the donations from a certain population.
Yes, that happened in the aftermath of the Catalan attempt at peaceful independence in October 2017 by Amnesty International Spain.
It's not hard to imagine the last default search contract negotiation had Google go "we'll give you $x if you kill manifest v2, $x-$150 million if you don't."
for it to be considered, somebody must have offered to pay that 150M. Or he considered going to somebody (we all know that somebody is Google) and asking them for that money in return for killing ad blockers.
> You wouldn't calculate the expected RoI of killing adblockers if killing adblockers was never considered.
I agree, although if someone isn't the kind of person who would calculate that, they're probably not the person who will become the CEO of a company that size in the first place. I don't think organizations have the right incentives in place to push people with those values to the top.
You wouldn't calculate a figure and publish it as the first step in any reasonable price negotiation. Any pricing you mention publicly would be double or triple the number you are willing to accept. By the time you are talking publicly about realistic numbers you are well into the private negotiations.
I agree with all the people saying it would drive a lot of the remaining users away, and I hope they don't do it. But I'm not remotely surprised that they considered following what their biggest competitor (Chrome) already did.
Because Chrome was built by the world's biggest advertising company. If the World Wildlife Fund started selling ivory to pay the bills, would that not be surprising?
That analogy doesn't really work, though: Mozilla's goal is not specifically to fight against online advertising. Ad-blocking is connected to their goals, definitely, but they clearly have to make compromises, and I'm not that surprised that they'd think about that one.
Why? They have ample free cashflow. They haven't had money problems in 10 years. If they're worried about Google withdrawing support they should save money in an endowment, not do things to help Google.
I only use Firefox over Chrome because it has adblock. So where does the $150 million comes from if people won't use it without adblock? Seems comrade didn't think this through...
“I wouldn’t sell sexual services. I’ve spent an evening checking the going market rate for someone my age in my area and it’s 2k! Can you believe that? That’s a ton of money! Totally not going to do it though”.
It’s an eyebrow raising comment at the very least.
like hoping for the best, but planning for the worst, you must interpret people's intentions using the same methodology. By quoting that axing adblock could be bringing $150mil, but also saying that he doesn't want to do it, it's advertising that a higher price would work - it's a way to deniably solicit an offer.
So then we should interpret Bruno adopting this uncharitable interpretation as evidence they are intentionally trying to ruin Mozillas reputation rather than sincerely analysing an interview, right?
And in turn my comment above is not a honest remark that your suggested interpretation strategy seems to be selectively applied, but rather an attempt to hurt your standing with your peers.
That's supposedly The Verge paraphrasing the CEO (Unfortunately I can't verify because the full article requires subscription.) I would like to know what the CEO actually said because "it feels off-mission" is a strange thing for the leader of the mission to say. I would hope that they know the mission inside out. No need to go by feels.
> In our conversation, Enzor-DeMeo returns often to two things: that Mozilla cares about and wants to preserve the open web, and that the open web needs new business models. Mozilla’s ad business is important and growing, he says, and he worries “about things going behind paywalls, becoming more closed off.” He says the internet’s content business isn’t exactly his fight, but that Mozilla believes in the value of an open and free (and thus ad-supported) web.
> At some point, though, Enzor-DeMeo will have to tend to Mozilla’s own business. “I do think we need revenue diversification away from Google,” he says, “but I don’t necessarily believe we need revenue diversification away from the browser.” It seems he thinks a combination of subscription revenue, advertising, and maybe a few search and AI placement deals can get that done. He’s also bullish that things like built-in VPN and a privacy service called Monitor can get more people to pay for their browser. He says he could begin to block ad blockers in Firefox and estimates that’d bring in another $150 million, but he doesn’t want to do that. It feels off-mission.
> One way to solve many of these problems is to get a lot more people using Firefox. And Enzor-DeMeo is convinced Mozilla can get there, that people want what the company is selling. “There is something to be said about, when I have a Mozilla product, I always know my data is in my control. I can turn the thing off, and they’re not going to do anything sketchy. I think that is needed in the market, and that’s what I hope to do.”
I don't like how he assumes that a free internet must be ad-supported. The ad-supported web is hideous, even with their ads removed. A long, convoluted, inane mess of content.
On the other hand, the clean web feels more direct, to the point, and passionate. I prefer to read content written by passion, not by money seeking purposes.
That's not correct. Linux is free, almost all open source is, many projects, websites are done out of passion.
I contribute to open source projects and nobody "gave me something", as I did it because I wanted to make it better. Like me, there are many others. Nobody is "the product" there.
What the saying you are misrepresenting means is "carefully check free things as you may be the product". Not "free things cannot exist, you either are the product or you pay".
Linux development is paid for either directly or in-kind by companies including Red Hat, IBM, Canonical, Oracle, and others. It's free to use and mostly open source but if it existed only on passion it would be something far less than it actually is.
People need to eat and have a roof over their heads.
Those companies pay the improvements they want for their usage case, which is usually far removed from what normal users want. I don't really need support for thousands of CPUs and terabytes of RAM.
Do you remember what Linux was like before the big corporations started contributing/supporting it? Just getting X11 working with your video card and monitor could take hours or days. Setting up a single server could easily be a "project" taking weeks. And god forbid you ever had to update it.
That in particular was thanks to the X.Org foundation. And while it made things easier, it didn't take "days" setting up a graphics, it took hours at most. And setting up a server didn't take weeks, it was an 1-2 day task at worst.
> If something is free (en masse), you are probably a product.
If something being free ever mattered to your privacy, it hasn't for a long time. Today no matter how expensive something is you are probably a product anyway. Unethical and greedy companies don't care how much money you paid them, they'll want the additional cash they'll get from selling you out at every opportunity. Much of my favorite software is free and doesn't compromise my privacy.
Fine, but don't make my machine do work as part of the agreement between host and advertiser (the only reason I can utilize an ad blocker in the first place). And definitely don't try to make it so my machine can't object to you trying. On top of all that, most places want to take my money, AND force ads, AND make my machine part of the process.
I thought the "free" in "free web" was supposed to mean "free as in freedom," not "free as in beer." Have we really reached the point where the CEO of Mozilla no longer understands or cares about that distinction?
"Uncharitable interpretation" is putting it mildly. I don't know the context for the quote but imagine being the CEO. You might give one hour interview outlining the tradeoffs you need to do to keep things running, and a random blogger takes a 5 second clip, makes an absurd interpretation and ends up on hackernews.
Right, I was ready for the headline to be this like deep dive into the history of letting go of several engineers, or assessing the costs of purchasing pocket, or a deep dive into source code changes related to dabbling in ad tech or something.
You know, actual reporting sourcing something new. But in truth, it was just extrapolating a bunch of sweet nothings from the freezing of a quote already published in The Verge. It reminds me of Boston media market sports reporting. You're a sports writer, you have a deadline, and you have to take Curt Schilling's press conference and try and turn it into a story. So take something he said and squeeze it dry, trying to extract some implication of clubhouse drama, to drive the next new cycle and survive to your next paycheck as a reporter. That's the grift, that's the grind.
I'm concerned about the original quote which has a very weak sentiment. "it feels off-mission". Not something strong like "I'm completely against it" or "we'll never do that".
Even better would be similar to the article sentiment: "we could get 150 million now but degrade one of our few features that distinguishes us from other browsers + break a lot user trust, which would bring greater losses in the long term".
That just seems like an ordinary case of purity test syndrome. What they said is they don't want to do it, but they're being convicted of a hypothetical belief in wanting to hypothetically do it maybe, maybe which is the last refuge of scoundrels who have no stronger sourcing for more well-grounded accusations. But in internet comment sections there's no need for accountability or charitable interpretation, and so you can accuse someone of practically anything and it's their job to bend over backwards against the most skeptical interpretations to pass the purity test. So there's a metagame not just of indicating your values but of extrapolating as to all the possible permutations of uncharitable interpretation that could lead to accusations so that you have to artfully construct your phrasing to get out ahead of that. It's never on the internet trolls making the accusation to be accountable to ordinary norms of charitable interpretation.
It costs the CEO of Mozilla nothing to make hard, convicted statements that all their users agree with. If it was me, the quote would be something like "but then they'd need to find a new CEO, because I'd be in prison for what I'd do to anyone who even suggested it".
Literally the only people who talk about Mozilla, or read things about what Mozilla is up to, are unusually motivated power users who really, really care about ad blocking and privacy. They may still have other users, but those people are coasting on momentum from when their grandkid installed Firefox on their computer years ago. They're not reading interviews with the new CEO. Yet Mozilla seems to consistently fail utterly at messaging to their only engaged users.
It's not even that they're doing evil shit, they're just absolutely terrible at proclaiming that they are committed to not doing evil shit.
That's peanuts. Google would pay them a lot more to disable adblocking for good. And it sounds like this guy would do it for the right amount. That said, it is kind of a lackluster article.
Can someone explain how banning ad blockers from Firefox would bring in money for Mozilla? I can see how it would bring in money for other actors such as news outlets, YouTube, etc., but Mozilla doesn't have a big website where they are showing ads.
CEOs are well known for turning down money, and always resisting the urge to squeeze every last drop of good will from an acquired property, right?
I think it's an apt warning, I'd have to read the literal interview transcripts to really draw a conclusion one way or the other. But the simple fact that this is on his mind, and felt like mentioning killing ad block was something Mozilla could do, and is considering doing, was a safe thing to say to a journalist... There's not a chance in hell I'd say anything remotely like that to a journalist.
When someone tells you who they are, believe them.
It isn't even true that it would bring $150M. This is a calculation accounting on users staying on Firefox.
If they do that, most of the remaining users would flee and goodbye to your millions if you don't have any userbase anymore to justify asking money to anyone.
I have seen these discussions in companies where privacy is the selling point.
These kind of questions usually come from non-engineers, people in product or sales who see privacy as a feature or marketing point, and if the ROI is higher they don't give a fuck and would pitch anything that would make a buck
Do you really harbor so much charity towards tech CEOs that you can't see its other meaning as at least equally as likely?
It costs Mozilla literally nothing to reassure its privacy and user-controlled principles. Instead we got a jk...unless... type of response. This is cowardice and like another commenter has said, a negotiation offer disguised as a mission statement.
They don't care if their plans cause long term harm as long as they can cash out after the short term profits come in. As long as there are new companies/products to jump to and exploit next they're making money which is all they care about.
The estimate does sound reasonable if it's an one-off payment. I agree that no one would pay that amount of money each year to keep adblocking from Firefox.
It's not impossible that people would pay Firefox that much yearly to keep their current user-base from using ad blockers. However, what is impossible is to imagine Firefox would have anything close to their current user base if people were prevented from using ad blockers. Most likely they would shrink to almost 0 users overnight if they did this. There are very few reasons to use Firefox over Chrome or Safari (or even Edge) other than the much better ad blocking (or any ad blocking, on mobile).
That doesn't explain the apparent market share of 2--3%, which is still quite large if you think about.
I believe most non-techie users are just lingering, using Firefox just because they used to. Since Firefox doesn't have a built-in ad blocking and the knowledge about adblocking is not universal (see my other comment), it is possible that there are a large portion of Firefox users who don't use adblockers and conversely adblocking users are in a minority. If this is indeed the case, Mozilla can (technically) take such a bet as such policy will affect a smaller portion of users. But that would work only once; Mozilla doesn't have any more option like that after all. That's why I see $150M is plausible, but only once.
Of course, I don't know the actual percent of FF users that use ad block. But I think it's far more likely that it is a majority of current FF users, rather than it being a negligible minority. I think 2-3% of web users is not an implausible approximation of how many people use ad block overall on the web. It's not an obscure technology, it's quite well known, even if few people bother with it.
Edit: actually I'm way off - it seems estimates are typically around 30-40% of overall users on the web having some kind of ad blocker. So, the Firefox percentage being 60-80+% seems almost a given to me.
I mean, that's also exactly what you would say if you had a $150M offer on the table, had received a lot of push back and were now just checking the waters and waiting to consolidate your position.
I’d happily pay $100 a year for Firefox WITH an adblocker as long as part of the money is put towards ongoing internet freedom and preventing attestation
As with all the comments about "I'd pay X dollars to not be the product", it's been shown over and over again that paying money is not going to void corporate desire to simply double dip by raising prices while also showing ads.
Or for a similar point, it's been shown over and over that attempting to crowdsource the revenue is a staggeringly unrealistic response with no real world precedent in the history either of browsers or online crowdsourced funding. You would think that would matter to people who point to that as a possible panacea.
Actual attempts to get users to pay for the browser itself, like what Opera did, simply didn't work and led to the insolvency of the browser and having to sell it off to someone harvesting its users as data.
I wish the CEO of Mozilla could have stated the commitment a little more strongly than “it feels off-mission”. Privacy, user control, and security of the web browsing experience are (or should be) the CORE of Mozilla's mission. This isn’t a decision to take lightly on vibes. Allowing ad-blockers (or any content manipulation plugins users want) should be a deep commitment.
No, they are accurately observing that the "I don't want to do it" and "feels off mission" statements are FAR weaker than they can be and should be.
Such weak statements are either a real mistake or show movement away from those principles which should be bedrock for Mozilla and towards some justification to abandon those principles.
It's not like the industry has no precedents on this. "Don't Be Evil" was the motto of a company that is now one of the apex predators in the surveillance capitalism ecosystem.
Unwise to try to dismiss and laugh off legitimate alarms.
Instead of criticizing an actual contract to engage with a third party or a code push or an affirmative statement, you're attempting to parse a random combination of tea leaves and chicken entrails to indict Mozilla for a hypothetical thing that they explicitly said they're not doing. If that's not scraping the bottom of the barrel, it's only because you're able to imagine an even lower bottom than that that you're willing to reach for.
"we won't do this" But you didn't say you'd never do this.
"okay we'll never do this" But you didn't say you'd never ever do this.
"fine we'll never ever do this" But you didn't say that it's never entered your mind once.
They said they won't do it and your interpretation is to demand they said it with more words? Come on, let's stop this nonsense. Can Firefox users ever be happy?
Imagine you are in a marriage and your spouse say: "I can sleep with other people, doesn’t want to do that. It feels off-mission".
I don't understand context, but my honest reaction will be: "WTF, you just said? What type of relationship you think we have if we discuss such things?"
I definitely understand why people worry. This is just crazy to weight trust in money. If this is on the table and discussed internally, then what we are talking about?
Yeah, I've once said in a relationship "Look, sure, she maybe pretty, but I want to be with you, so no, I am not going to reach out to her, don't worry". Apparently, it was a poor way to word this idea.
Yes, people tend to try to dig out additional information from the particular wording (talk about a hidden channel) based on how they would phrase the same message themselves. That's why communication is hard.
"It feels off-mission" is incredibly weak opposition to something that would go against core values. It just means this guy's price is higher than 150 million dollars.
Everybody has their price. I'm ideologically opposed to advertising but if someone put 150 million dollars on my table and told me to stop making an issue out of it I think I'd take the money. Being set for life trumps being called a hypocrite.
It's kinda frustrating that Mozilla's CEO thinks that axing ad-blockers would be financially beneficial for them. Quite the opposite is true (I believe) since a ton of users would leave Firefox for alternatives.
The whole web ecosystem was first run by VC money and everything was great until every corner was taken, the land grab was complete and the time to recoup the investment has come.
Once the users were trapped for exploitation, it doesn’t make sense to have a browser that blocks ads. How are they supposed to pay software salaries and keep the lights on? People don’t like paying for software, demand constant updates and hate subscriptions. They all end up doing one of those since the incentives are perverse, that’s why Google didn’t just ride the Firefox till the end and instead created the Chrome.
It doesn’t make sense to have trillion dollars companies and everything to be free. The free part is until monopolies are created and walled gardens are full with people. Then comes the monetization and those companies don’t have some moral compass etc, they have KPI stock values and analytics and it’s very obvious that blocking ads isn’t good financially.
I agree with the untrue and revisionism bit, but I disagree with it being the opposite of what happened.
People were trying to figure out how to make money off of the Internet from the early days of the Internet being publicly accessible (rather than a tool used by academic and military institutions). It can be attributed to the downfall of Gopher. It can be attributed to the rise of Netscape and Internet Explorer. While the early web was nowhere near as commercial as it is today, we quickly saw the development of search engines and (ad supported) hosting services that were. By the time 2000's hit, VC money was very much starting to drive the game. In the minds of most people, the Internet was only 5 to 10 years old at that point. (The actual Internet may be much older, but few people took notice of it until the mid-1990's.)
> People don’t like paying for software, demand constant updates and hate subscriptions.
Yes, No, Yes?
I don't demand constant updates. I don't want constant updates. Usually when a company updates software it becomes worse. I am happy with the initial version of 90% of the software I use, and all I want is bug fixes and security updates.
I suspect then it doesn't matter whether Mozilla kills itself or not. You should be fine with the current release of Firefox. Maybe you'd lose the installer, so all you have to do is put it somewhere safe and you're good.
If a time comes when there are zero free browser with effective ad-blocking, it will create space for a non-free browser that does it. It would create a whole ecosystem.
I currently pay zero for ad-blocking (FF + uBlock Origin) and it works perfectly; but I would pay if I had to.
I think they are trying to balance it between making as much as money possible, risking being sued for monopolistic practices and risking exodus. Microsoft once overplayed their hand and the anger and consumer dissatisfaction was so strong that people left Internet Explorer en masse.
So the best situation for google would be to have borderline monopoly where they pay for the existence of their competition and the competition(Firefox) blocks adblockers too by default but leaving Chrome and Firefox is harder than forcing installin adblockers through the unofficial way.
So basically, all the people who swear they never clicked ads manage to block ads, Firefox and Chrome print money by making sure that ads are shown and clocked by the masses.
while i may agree with the first line, rest are little skewed perspective.
> People don’t like paying for software, demand constant updates and hate subscriptions.
hate subscription?? may be. if it's anything like Adobe then yes, people will hate.
that constant update, is something planted by these corporates, and their behavior manipulation tactics.
People were happily paying for perpetual software, which they can "own" in a cd//dvd.
People weren't happily paying, there was huge pirate business that was run on porn, gambling ads and spyware revenue. Then there were organizations with lots of lawyers paid by the "pay once use forever" companies to enforce the pay part because people didn't want to pay.
One time fee software ment that once your growth slows down you no longer make money and have plenty of customers to support for free. That's why this model was destroyed by the subscription and ad based "free" software.
The last example is Affinity which was the champion of pay once use forever model, very recently they end up getting acquired and their software turned into "free" + subscription.
The long tail of the web, likely consisting of mostly small or noncommercial sites, are currently numerically huge but individually low traffic. Meanwhile, user attention is dominated by a relatively small set of commercial and platform sites.
That was ine inception age when very few people were online, its not the stage of mass adoption. The mass adoption starts with the dot.com era with mass infrastructure build up.
But sure, if you think that we should start counting from these years you can do that and add a "public funded" era at the beginning.
I came to the web after dotcom and most of the content (accessibke trough search) was blogs and forums. It wasn’t until SEO that fake content started to grow like weeds.
There were companies that were making some money but those were killed or acquired by companies that give their services for free. Google killed the blogs by killing their RSS reader since they were long into making money stage and their analytics probably demonstrated that it is better people search stuff than directly going to the latest blog posts.
It's the same thing everywhere, the whole industry is like that. Uber loses money until there's no longer viable competition then lose less money by jacking up the prices. The tech is very monopolistic, Peter Thiel is right about the tech business.
The existing online mass is what attracted the VC in the first place, same as it ever was. It was mostly privately funded and very much a confederacy (AOL vs Prodigy vs BBS) at the time, much like now.
The only reason Mozilla matters in the eyes of Google is because it gives the impression there's competition in the browser market.
But Firefox's users are the kind who choose the browser, not use whatever is there. And that choice is driven in part by having solid ad-blockers. People stick with Firefox despite the issues for the ad-blocker. Take that away and Firefox's userbase dwindles to even lower numbers to the point where nobody can pretend they are "competition". That's when they lose any value for Google.
Without the best-of-the-best ad-blocking I will drop Firefox like a rock and move to the next best thing, which will have to be a Chromium based browser. I'll even have a better overall experience on the web when it comes to the engine itself, to give me consolation for not having the best ad-blocker.
It might be financial beneficial once as an up-front payment,
but long term, as others have mentioned, really not good for the project to remove the only feature that gives firefox a defensible way to fill it's niche in the market.
> Quite the opposite is true (I believe) since a ton of users would leave Firefox for alternatives.
Yes but keep in mind that’s not an individual problem that is solved by switching browsers. If a browser engine dies, the walls get closer and the room smaller. With only Chromium and WebKit left, we may soon have a corporate owned browsers pulling in whatever direction Google and Apple wants. I can think of many things that are good for them but bad for us. For instance, ”Web Integrity” and other DRM.
And users would flee not just because they're seeing the ads but because Firefox is obviously the slowest browser again. Stripping the ads is a big performance boost, so right now Firefox feels snappier than Chrome on ad-laden pages.
I think people like to imagine it's not viable because the most commonly known adblocker refuses to release the version for it. Negative news somehow stick better.
Fortunately it's not the only one and for example Adguard works perfectly fine.
I use the Duck Duck Go browser for almost everything. I is open source for iOS/Android/macOS platforms, but I think there are parts of their platform that are not. The DDG browser hits all my privacy requirements.
I prefer Firefox over Chromium. But I much more prefer having a working ad blocker. Therefore I support that statement and when Firefox starts removing support for that, I'm out and there's enough alternatives I can go to, even tho they're Chromium based.
Apple doesn't collect your browsing data, they build in privacy controls that are pretty much as strong as they can manage given the state of the world, and while it doesn't support uBO, it supports a variety of pretty solid adblockers (I use AdGuard, which, AFAICT, Just Works™ and even blocks YouTube ads most of the time, despite their arms race).
Pro-crypto, anti-gay-marriage, GamerGate culture war case study. Eich CHOSE to leave Mozilla, and was NOT fired, in fact he said himself the board begged him to stay and offered him other positions, despite GamerGate troll claims to the contrary.
To this day, GamerGate trolls still virtue signal they use Brave in support of Eich's anti-gay-marriage bigotry, and still obsessively attack and harass Mozilla just because Eich voluntarily left, and they still falsely claim he was fired. (Just watch them prove my point here and now, just because the facts don't fit their narrative!)
The Brendan Eich Controversy
In March 2014, Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript and a co-founder of Mozilla, was appointed CEO of the Mozilla Corporation. His appointment faced immediate and significant backlash when it was widely reported that he had made a personal donation of $1,000 to support California's Proposition 8 in 2008, a ballot initiative that banned same-sex marriage.
The controversy led to widespread criticism, internal dissent among employees, and public boycotts. Less than two weeks into the role, Eich voluntarily resigned as CEO, stating he could not be an effective leader under the circumstances.
The "GamerGate" Connection
The "GamerGate" movement, which emerged in late 2014 (months after Eich's resignation), was an online campaign ostensibly concerned with ethics in video game journalism, though it quickly devolved into a broader culture war, often associated with online harassment and conservative/libertarian critiques of progressive culture.
Members of the "GamerGate" community began using Eich's resignation as a prominent case study for their arguments.
They framed his departure as an example of political correctness and a "witch hunt" leading to professional consequences for private political beliefs (sometimes referred to as "cancel culture").
Eich himself later founded Brave Software, the company behind the Brave Browser, and his story continues to be referenced in discussions about workplace politics, free speech, and the tech industry.
Amazing how they continue not to cater to their core audience. They literally have lost 90% of their market share from their peak, I guess I can see the temptation to try to regain it by reaching out to others, but doing that at the expense of your core is a terrible business strategy. It's not like those users are all that sticky, they're leaving as Mozilla pisses them off, and likely Mozilla are going to be left with what they stand for - which these days is nothing.
It's sad, I'm sure there was a better path Mozilla could have taken, but they've had a decade or more of terrible management. I wonder if the non-profit / corp structure hasn't helped, or if it's just a later-stage company with a management layer who are disconnected from the original company's mission and strategy.
> Amazing how they continue not to cater to their core audience.
Who is Mozilla's core audience? From what I remember, it's not addon-users, as most users never have used even just a single addon.
> They literally have lost 90% of their market share from their peak,
To be fair, it's not entirely their own fault. Competition is strong, especially from Google and Apple. Even with perfect decisions, they likely would still have lost big since their peak. The market for alternative Browsers isn't as big any more as it used to be.
> To be fair, it's not entirely their own fault. Competition is strong, especially from Google and Apple. Even with perfect decisions, they likely would still have lost big since their peak. The market for alternative Browsers isn't as big any more as it used to be.
Their peak in share was also pre-chrome. They've basically been losing the battle slowly for over a decade.
> From what I remember, it's not addon-users, as most users never have used even just a single addon.
If most users who install Firefox do so for superior adblocking and those same users are also very likely to turn off telemetry (which I think some privacy/adblock extensions probably do by default?), then at Mozilla's end one might get the impression that "most users don't use extensions" - even though the vast majority of users do.
So to answer the questions of:
> Who is Mozilla's core audience?
It's probably the kind of user that has telemetry off. You don't know much if anything about them.
Update-checks are not included in telemetry. And I would think most people using addons still do update their addons from time to time, or even have the auto-check active. There is also the download-stats from their server-side, so I would think they do have a good enough picture of their numbers. Might be they could be 10% off, but surely are there not tens or even hundreds of millions of stealth-users around.
> It's probably the kind of user that has telemetry off. You don't know much if anything about them.
Don't think so, most people don't give a f** about this. Tech-people on that level are even in the industry a minority. And on the other side, those stealth-users are worthless for Mozilla, because they can't make money from google with them. So for a project needing to make money with usersnumbers, everyone who is out of this, isn't core audience anyway.
> It's probably the kind of user that has telemetry off.
If less than 4% of users use uBO, which the kind of users you're referencing claim is the primary reason they use Firefox, I doubt many users disable telemetry either.
I am thinking of it as: people who care about privacy and/or an independent web browser. That seems mostly in line with what the Mozilla Foundation's principles are stated to be.
Maybe it's not that. But if not, what is it? How do they otherwise have any positive differentiation versus their competition? It surely can't be claimed to be any sense of "users who want an AI browser" because surely those people are going to use ChatGPT's browser, not Mozilla's.
Thanks, I think this was what I was searching. Strange that it's not appearing in my search-results.
Relevant part from the site: [..]Add-on usage measured here reflects multiple facets of browser customization, including web extensions, language packs, and themes.[..]
40% is a big minority, but not really what I would call core audience, especially when language packs and themes are also counted here. And 5 of the top 10-addons in that statistic are language packs.
Though, UBlock Origin is #1 with 9.6% user-share, and it's shown to have 10.5 million users on the store-page, which means there are at best only around 100 Million users left with Firefox on desktop? Seems worse than I thought.
Ublock Origin has 10,488,339 Users listed on it's Mozilla store-page at the moment, AdBlock Plus has 3,188,401 Users. And Firefox has surely still far more than those ~14 million users.
There was an article from Mozilla, some years ago, going more into the details about this, but I'm not sure where. Though, I found another one[1] from 2021, which starts with only one third of the users having installed an addon.
Every tech CEO loves to cosplay as "announcing the iPhone" 2007 Steve Jobs but nobody ever tries to cosplay as the "pulling Apple back from the brink by focusing on core competencies" 1997 Steve Jobs.
The day Mozilla fired Brendan Eich for political reasons, Firefox died. It just took a while for everyone to realise that. That was when they collectively decided that other things are more important to them than the quality and usability of Firefox.
The new CEO is just the final nail in their coffin.
I don't know, if the CEO of some software I used suddenly came out as anti-miscegenation, and started donating money to the cause, I'd stop using the software until the CEO was fired too.
So you agree: for you, it's more important that the Mozilla CEO shares your political views, than that Mozilla makes a quality product.
That's exactly what the parent post is talking about. When Mozilla started prioritizing political correctness over software quality, software quality predictably declined. That's why they are struggling now: they reduced their user base to the tiny group of political extremists that will put up with an inferior product for the sake of political signaling.
By the way, Eich didn't “come out” as anything. His private donation (a mere $1000) was exposed by people who wanted to cancel him for his political views. It wasn't Eich who forced the issue, it was his political opponents, who do not tolerate any viewpoint diversity. Eich's views weren't even fringe or extreme at the time: Proposition 8 passed with support from the majority of Californian voters.
> So you agree: for you, it's more important that the Mozilla CEO shares your political views, than that Mozilla makes a quality product.
He doesn't have to share all of them, but we have to have enough overlap for him to consider me & my friends enough of a human being to share the same rights that he does.
As another commenter pointed out, there are beliefs heinous enough that will override the quality of optional software that I might choose to use.
I think the correct formulation is: "There are political views that the CEO of Mozilla could hold which would be sufficient for me to abandon the use of products that Mozilla makes". And I think that would be non-controversial for most people.
Are you referring to his donation to prop 8? Im a younger dev and a bit out of the loop but how would that be anti-miscegenation? Wasn’t that more related to gay marriage?
I used anti-miscegenation as a stand-in, as an example of a ludicrous, indefensible position to hold today, while there are still holdouts who apparently think that gay marriage is some sort of affront to the moral fabric of society.
Oh okay, I see. It is wild to see how much things change because amongst my generation your analogy makes sense, but at the time prop 8 was passed by a majority of Californians.
Exactly. It's one thing to be an idiot on Twitter, it's another for you to donate money to a cause specifically designed to deny rights to people - a cause that was actually successful for a time. That's something that speaks to a fundamental lack of empathy that I'm not sure he's ever directly addressed.
But in any case, I've heard this argument before, and the timeline doesn't make sense. At the time he resigned, Chrome was very firmly ahead of Firefox, and given his track record with Brave, the idea that Eich would have single-handedly saved Mozilla is also pretty dubious to me.
It seems like a disingenuous and lazy talking point tailor made to blame the demise of Firefox on a culture war politics, when in reality it's the fact that Google was willing to throw much more time and resources at the browser market than a non-profit, unimpeded by the same sort of anti-trust and lack of development that brought Internet Explorer low.
A) Firing a CEO because there is an immediate, massive public shaming of them is entirely rational from a business perspective
B) This is the hill you want to die on? That being a bigot should be a protected status for CEOs?
> This is the hill you want to die on? That being a bigot should be a protected status for CEOs?
That is a wildly uncharitable take. I'm not OP, but I believe that nobody, CEOs or otherwise, should be fired for their activities outside of work. That can be political beliefs, but doesn't have to be either. And yes, that means that sometimes someone whose beliefs you find repugnant is going to have a good job. That is the price of a free society, and I think it's worth it.
Firefox improved in quality significantly between 2014 and the recent decline. And it's not like Brave has shown incredibly good judgement in these areas.
I'd say it's complicated. If you are running a company in San Francisco I think you want to be sensitive to the culture there. That cause of gay marriage that he opposed was not one of these radicalism for the sake of radicalism queer positions you see on Twitter-dervied platforms but something mainstream at the root. I think of how on The Bulwark podcasts you hear gay people with a conservative but never-Trump viewpoint describing their cozy family life and it just sounds so sweet... and mainstream making the opposition to it not seem so mainstream.
On the other hand I think San Francisco is part of the Mozilla problem because it is less than an hour on the 101 to go see people at Facebook and Google yet they are distant from the 99% of of web developers and web users that live somewhere else whose use Firefox because they don't like what Chrome stands for.
I wish Mozilla was in Boulder or Minneapolis or Cleveland or Dublin or some other second-tier but vibrant city where they might have the capacity to listen to us rather than be in the same monoculture that brings us Chrome and Instagram.
Yeah no, (1) Mozilla was going to be in for a tough go no matter what; I don't think Eich would have fared any better. But (2) you can't donate to stop your own employees and users from having civil rights without repercussions.
People with an axe to grind always hide what Brendan Eich did behind "politics" which is a dishonest slight of hand.
> Yeah no, (1) Mozilla was going to be in for a tough go no matter what; I don't think Eich would have fared any better.
Nobody knows this for sure. We do know that Eich was fired for political reasons, and not because of his technological direction.
This betrays a decision making process that prioritizes political correctness above leadership qualities and technical contributions.
> you can't donate to stop your own employees and users from having civil rights without repercussions.
Why not? Why can't the CEO of Mozilla have his own private political views just like anyone else, and donate his own private money to whatever democratic causes he likes?
This really isn't obvious to anyone except the people, like you, who view Mozilla as a political project first, and as a software project a distant second.
Firing your CEO for not being sufficiently aligned with the American Democratic Party only makes sense if you assume the purpose of Mozilla is to push American Democratic politics, rather than make good software that anyone in the world may use (spoiler alert: many users of open-source software are not American Democrats!)
> Firing your CEO for not being sufficiently aligned with the American Democratic Party
This is not what happened. He gave money to a cause with the explicit goal of using that money to prevent his coworkers and users from having equal civil rights based on an inalienable trait they were born with.
That's not an "American Democratic Party" alignment issue, and if you genuinely believe it is, your dog whistle may be broken. It's sounding an awful lot like a normal whistle.
He has a right to do that without fear of government retaliation. But Mozilla has a right to fire him for being a bad person because of it.
That's just factually wrong. Proposition 8 deprived nobody of any rights. Gay couples could get exactly the same rights as straight couples through a domestic partnership, or get married out of state, as even Wikipedia admits:
> A same-sex marriage lawfully performed in another state or foreign jurisdiction on or after November 5, 2008 was fully recognized in California, but Proposition 8 precluded California from designating these relationships with the word "marriage." These couples were afforded every single one of the legal rights, benefits, and obligations of marriage.
Note the last sentence!
Additionally, proposition 8 was not extreme. It was carried by a majority of California voters, and Barack Obama said at the time: “I personally believe that marriage is between a man and a woman” which is essentially what the proposition established too, though Obama opposed using a ballot proposition to settle the issue.
> He has a right to do that without fear of government retaliation. But Mozilla has a right to fire him for being a bad person because of it.
I never argued that Mozilla doesn't have the right to fire people for their political views. We're just establishing that Eich _was_ fired for his political views, and that that shows Mozilla had become a political organization first, and a technological company second.
In a politically neutral technology company there should be room for people who side with Barack Obama and the majority of Californian voters. The fact that that is not true of Mozilla proves it's not a politically neutral company; it's a political project that inherited a software project they are not particularly interested in maintaining except as a vehicle for further promoting their politics.
Equivocating speech and crime as both being "violence" (of similar class, deserving the similar response) is a fallacy that lets people justify murder in response to disagreement as long as it's deemed serious enough.
Really? Having an opinion endorsed by the mainstream doctrine of several world religions with billions of adherents is the same as robbing a bank?
That being said, I disagree with Eich and it probably made sense for the org to let him go given how his views might impact public perception of Mozilla.
> He says he could begin to block ad blockers in Firefox and estimates that’d bring in another $150 million, but he doesn’t want to do that. It feels off-mission.
LOL the day that Firefox stops me from running what I want is the day I'll get rid of it.
I still think it was a mistake for Firefox to dump its old plugin model. The customisation was a USP for Firefox and many useful tweaks and minor features have never been replaced.
Today the ability to run proper content blockers is still a selling point for Firefox but obviously wouldn't be if they started to meddle with that as well. (Has there ever been a more obvious case of anticompetitive behaviour than the biggest browser nerfing ad blocking because it's owned by one of the biggest ad companies?)
Other than customisation the only real advantage I see for Firefox today is the privacy angle. But again that would obviously be compromised if they started breaking tools like content blockers that help to provide that protection.
They...already do that? They stopped allowing unsigned addons, even if you allow them in about:config (a power-user feature). Even Chrome allows you to toggle the option to do that -- in a more user-friendly way! -- and actually honors it, so I don't think it's the massive security hole everyone claims.
I think people are wildly overreacting. There is a new CEO and he wants to make a splash so the throws around "AI" that's it. Of course there will be AI related features in firefox, there already are! Wait and see what the actual specifics are before reacting?
Also, a small minor detail here: We're not paying for firefox! why are so many people feeling entitled? Mozilla has to do something other than beg Google to survive. Perhaps we need a fork of firefox that is sustained by donations and is backed by a non-profit explicilty chartered to make decisions based on community feedback? I don't see a problem with that wikipedia-like approach, I don't think any of the forks today have a good/viable org structure that is fully non-profit (as in it won't seek profit at all). Mozilla has bade some bad decisions recently, but they're a far cry from the world-ended outcry they're getting.
If we don't donate to Mozilla and we don't pay them money, then we have to be the product at some point. Even if they don't it to be that way, they have to placate to some other business interests.
I hope the EU also pays attention, perhaps some of their OSS funding can help setup an alternate org.
Waiting until the thing is done to voice your opinions on the thing is a very poor strategy if you want to have any influence over what the thing turns out to even be.
>>> Also, a small minor detail here: We're not paying for firefox! why are so many people feeling entitled? Mozilla has to do something other than beg Google to survive.
Because some of us have supported, donated to, advocated for, and participated in the firefox and mozilla communities over the years, and feel betrayed by the abandonment of principles, kowtowing to adtech surveillance "features", and overall enshittification of a once beloved browser that we hoped would allow for an alternative to the chrome blob, as they once were to the atrocity that was internet explorer.
It's perfectly reasonable to call out foundations and organizations that utterly abandon and fail to live up to principles. Mozilla is just a PR wing for Alphabet and whitewashing the chromification of all browsers, at this point.
Ladybug and some other alternatives will come around. I don't see any future in which Mozilla returns to principles - the people leeching off / running the foundation won't ever be interested in returning to a principled stance, but to change the brand, or pursue profit, or some other outcome that is divergent from the expectations and consideration of the original supporters. They keep trying to commodify and branch out and waste insane amounts of money on nonsense, and hire CEOs that lose the plot before they ever start the job. Mozilla is functionally dead, for whatever vision of it a lot of us might once have had.
By the time they'd have a chance to fix anything, maybe it'll be practical to have an AI whip up a new browser engine and we'll all have bespoke, feature complete privacy respecting browsers built on the fly.
Because the AI implementations they’ve already done are shit? Buttons on by default, features that are annoying to remove for normal users (the context menu ‘search with chatbot’).
It’s just garbage, get this shit out of here. Stop adding things to my window without permission and stop with the popups announcing them to me.
Anyone who seriously wants this will seek it out. Leave the rest of us alone.
1. Why would I donate to Mozilla? Mozilla hates me.
2. When Mozilla was 30% of the browser market rather than 3%, they could have easily cleaned up on donations. If they had made whatever extension transition that they thought they needed to do but while protecting all contemporary extension capabilities and not using it as a power grab to limit user control, they'd still have 30% of the market. If they hadn't made the business decision to permanently be a wonky Chrome, people wouldn't think of them as a wonky Chrome.
3. Mozilla has plenty of money. If you can't create a sustainable browser with a billion and a half dollars in the bank and a fully-featured browser, it's because you don't want to. You already have the browser, you can't whine about how complicated it is to create a browser. Pay developers with the interest. Stop paying these useless weirdo executives a fortune.
But enough about Mozilla. If you're some Bitcoin or startup billionaire, I'll ask you the same thing. Firefox is sitting right there and licensed correctly. You want people to respect you and remember you nicely when you're dead? Take it, fork it, put that same billion and a half into a trust, and save an open door to the Internet at a time when it's really needed. You've won in life, it will be easy to make people trust you if your ambition is just to do good. Steal Firefox, put it on the right track, and people will flock back to it. I know Ladybird is interesting, but a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.
The web without ublock origin is a hellscape. Whenever I try another browser, I immediately go back to firefox.
Do these people even know their users?
For example:
Fedora Silverblue default Firefox install had an issue with some Youtube videos due to codecs. So I tried watching youtube on Chromium. Ads were so annoying I stopped watching by the second time I tried to watch a video. Stopped watching youtube until I uninstalled default firefox install and added Firefox from flathub. If the option to use a good adblocker gets taken away I 'll most likely dramatically reduce my web browsing.
P.S. Maybe someone ports Vanadium to desktop Linux? If firefox goes away that 'd be my best case desktop browser. Using it on my mobile ;)
Genuinely can someone with knowledge of the business explain why they aren't simply doubling down on making Firefox better? Is there an existential problem facing them that they are trying to solve by adding AI into the browser?
Their Google dependency is their existential problem. They're limited by what they can do with "making Firefox better" while effectively being a client state. An off the books Google department. Doomed to forever being a worse funded Chrome because they can't do too much to anger their patron.
By selling browser UI real estate to AI companies[0] they reduce the power Google has over them. If they get to the point where no individual company makes up a majority of their revenue, it allows them to focus on their mission in a much broader way.
Yeah but is this entirely true though? It seems Google pays FF just for existing, to protect them from antitrust litigation (or what's left of it); so Google can't really stop paying FF and can't try to kill it, as its death would be extremely counter productive. FF may be freer than it thinks.
Same as for Apple, the amount Google pays will vary. Firefox will probably still exist with 10% of Google's money, except execs Mozilla execs would be in a very different situation.
Google pay Mozilla hundreds of millions of dollars each year to place Google as the default browser. It's by far their biggest income stream. In 2023 it was reported as 75% of their revenue.
There's no world in which 75% of your revenue coming from Google doesn't influence what you do. Even if it's not the main driver of all decisions, pissing off Google is a huge risk for them.
If the plaintiff pays 500 million to the judge and the defendant goes to jail, there's no proof that the judge wouldn't have made the same decision without the 500 million. If you're a fool, you'll sneer and ask "Where's the proof?"
I'm not sure how well know this is, but besides their contract with Google to be the default search option, Firefox does earn money through revenue share with all other default search options. A normal healthy company would just rely on those. Growing the user base would therefore grow the amount of rev-share income. So improving the product by itself, and thus attracting users, does make money - and probably enough to run Firefox and Mozilla. Just not enough to pay their CEO.
it's a completely obvious "problem" -- more users are easier to monetize, even if they "simply" go the Wikipedia donations model
many people stated that they are happy to do targeted donations (ie. money earmarked strictly for Firefox development only, and it cannot be used for bullshit outreach programs and other fluff)
and if they figure out the funding for the browser (and other "value streams") then they can put the for-profit opt-in stuff on top
Google pays Mozilla, Mozilla has more money, Mozilla spends more money (especially in compensations to a bloated C-level), Mozilla needs more money, Google threatens with paying less, Mozilla will lube up and bend over.
They don't really need money. Look at Mozilla's CEO compensation for example. It was 7 million USD in 2022. Seven. Million. For ruining a bastion of the open internet.
is that too much money for one person? well, apparently it depends on who do you ask. and even if the board members who approved it might thought it's too much, it still could have been cheaper than to fire the CEO and find a new one and keep Mozilla on track.
CEO compensation is usually a hedge against risks that are seen as even more costly, even if the performance of the CEO is objectively bad.
framing Mozilla/Firefox as some kind of bastion is simply silly - especially if it's supplied by the gigantic fortress kingdom of G, and makes more money on dividends and interest than on selling any actual products or services.
it's a ship at sea with a sail that's too big and a rudder that's unfortunately insignificant.
but whatever metaphor we pick it needs to transform into a sustainable ecosystem, be that donation or sales based.
You can't monetize a browser. They have to keep trying to create new products, but they inevitably fail. Pocket, FirefoxOS, Persona, all dead. This new stuff will fail too, because Mozilla has no USP and no way to create a best-in-class product in any market. So they rely on imitating what everyone else is doing, but with more "crunchy" vibes ("values", "trust", "we're a nonprofit") because that's the only angle they can compete on. They missed mobile completely so even their browser is bleeding users and dying.
The way to interpret Mozilla is that they're a dying/zombie company, fighting heroically to delay the inevitable.
I'd pay $10 a month for a browser, I pay that much for music and TV shows and I spend more time in a browser.
I'm sure the market doesn't agree with me but I pay more for things that are less useful.
You very much can if all the competitors are either a) ad-ridden, ai-infested, bloated monstrosities or b) don't provide the functionality people want. In that case, there's apparently lots of demand which could easily support either a pay-once or a low-subscription-fee model.
They already do monetize it, every search engine included by default paid to be there. They forcefully remove those that don't pay from existing installations without the user's permission, as they did with yandex.
What they could do is get funding from sovereign tech funds.
I don't think the rest of the world likes their dependencies on US companies and their love for surveillance.
Of course, to do it right means ensuring there's enough non-US organizational structure with the know-how to take over the project should things go pear-shaped, and oversight to spot of the pear is taking shape.
But that's what governments can do, assuming they don't want to be under the thumb of the US. ("Oh, you think tariffs are bad? We'll do to you like we did those ICC judges and shut off all your accounts.")
Fork Firefox, bundle uBlock Origin, Sponsor Block et el and sell it is a consumer web security product (that's not complete shit) with a monthly subscription. Use some of the proceeds to support the devs working on the underlying tech, similar to what Valve are doing for Wine, Proton and Fex.
Bonus points:
1. Multi layered approach to dealing with ads and other malware.
2. A committment to no AI or other bloat - that's not what I'm paying you for.
Please enlighten me. How does one make a browser "better" these days?
- They were ahead of the game with extensions. Then everyone copied them.
- They were ahead of the game with tabs. Then everyone copied them.
- They were ahead of the game with containers. Then everyone copied them.
- They are still the best browser to use for an ad free internet experience.
- The only flaw I can think of, is they are not leaders in performance. Chrome loads faster. But that's because Chrome cheats by stealing your memory on startup.
How would you make FireFox better? When you say they should be making FireFox better, what should they be doing? Maybe they should hire you for ideas.
Because to me, they seem to be constantly trying to make FireFox better. It's just hit or miss.
Extensions was a hit. Tabs was a hit. Containers was a hit. They had a shit tonne of misses over the decades. We just don't remember them.
The crypto and ai stuff just happens to be a miss.
First, I would stop breaking up the stuff that works. Firefox was ahead of the game with extensions, then deprecated the long tail for a rewrite that took three years [1] (during which Firefox mobile had a grand total of 9 extensions) and even then it's hard for me today to know which extensions work on mobile. They were similarly ahead of the game with containers, and yet they still don't work on private mode [2] and probably never will. That's two out of three hits where they tripped over their own two feet[3].
Second, do the one thing that users have been requesting for decades: let me donate to the browser development. Not to the Mozilla Foundation, not to internet freedom causes, to Firefox. The Mozilla foundation explicitly says that they don't want to be "the Firefox company", and yet I'd argue they should.
Third, go on the offensive. I get the impression that, with the exception of ad-blocking, Firefox is simply playing catch-up to any idea coming from Chrome regardless of whether it makes sense or not. Would Firefox had removed FTP support had Chrome not done it before?
And fourth, make all these weird experiments extensions.
> [3] I always associated tabs with Opera, though.
Yeah as someone who picked up Firefox when it was Phoenix, it was “free Opera with a less-odd-feeling UI”. That was basically the initial (great!) sales pitch.
What got me installing it on any computer belonging to a person I would have to help support was the auto-pop-blocking and that it performed a ton better than IE/Netscape/Mozilla. Opera also performed better and I think it also blocked pop ups out of the box, but it wasn’t free (well, kinda, but the free edition… had ads).
Make Firefox fully and exclusively a tool in service of the user.
Eliminate - both in code and by policy - anything that compromises privacy. If a new feature or support of a new technology reduces privacy, make it optional. Give me a switch to turn it off.
Stop opting the user into things. No more experiments. No more changing of preferences or behavior during upgrade.
Give the user more control; more opportunities for easy and powerful automation and integration.
Not only would this win me back as a user, I'd pay for the privilege. I'm paying for Kagi and happy to be doing so. I'd love to pay for an open source browser I could trust and respect.
In my experience Chrome does not just load faster, but it also uses less memory than Firefox because of its more aggressive tab hibernation that is enabled by default.
On my laptop I had to switch from Firefox to Chrome because it kept filling up all of my RAM resulting in other applications crashing.
> - They were ahead of the game with extensions. Then everyone copied them.
They were ahead of the game with extensions, then they destroyed their own extensions. They copied everyone else, not the other way around.
> - They were ahead of the game with tabs. Then everyone copied them.
They were ahead of the game with tabs. Then while destroying their extensions they made vertical tabs harder, while still leaving it as a charitable contribution by the community instead of an internal project, and slow-walked it for a decade. I still have to do weird CSS to make them look right, because they decided to have an opinionated sidebar for no particular reason.
> - They are still the best browser to use for an ad free internet experience.
This, again, is not their fault. It's because of a man who they don't pay, who has had to battle with them on multiple occasions. Their only contribution is not accepting a Chrome standard completely. Imagine wanting to be given credit for not exactly copying your neighbor, after an enormous amount of pressure was brought to bear. It's my belief that Google decided that Firefox wouldn't kill ad blocking in the end, because it would have looked horrible in antitrust court. Now that's over (Obama judges don't believe in antitrust), and you can expect Firefox to kill it soon enough.
> Because to me, they seem to be constantly trying to make FireFox better. It's just hit or miss.
Nah. They kept telling me, while ignoring everyone's complaints about their actual experiences, that the most important thing was to reduce startup time for some unknown reason.
Yes it does. Having a browser that truly has the user's back, without always trying to compromise the user's interests in favor of advertisers - that would be a benefit to society.
Possibly, but that's an absurdly overbroad mission.
Organizations with clear, focused missions are much more likely to be able to achieve them than organizations that want to be everything to everybody.
"Make and maintain Firefox as the best browser for people who care about internet freedom, privacy, and extensibility" would be a perfectly reasonable mission.
I feel the problem they're trying to solve with that is "EB isn't sufficiently pissed off with the gradually deteriorating user experience yet so instead of actually displaying the page we'll have a big modal popup telling him how great the AI tools are and how he should try them!"
I do not want to try your AI tools, Mozilla, yours or anyone else's.
Mozilla has hired a lot of execs from Meta and bought an ad company, looking through a lot of their privacy policy at the time, a lot of it involves rewriting it to say that they can serve you sponsored suggestions when you're searching for things in their search bar and stuff and sharing out some of that data with third parties etc.
Firefox was bringing in half a billion a year for the last decade, if they would've just invested that money in low risk money market accounts (instead of paying their csuite executives millions of dollars in salary and putting the rest on non-Firefox related related social causes), the company would be able to easily survive off the interest alone.
I've been using Firefox since 2006 and have defended it for decades even when they've made questionable decisions that have gotten everybody upset with them. But this time it wasn't just making stupid decisions to try and fund the company, this time they actuality sold out their own customers.
In public announcement in the above link explaining why they removed "we don't sell your data" from the FAQ, the rationality was that some jurisdictions define selling data weirdly, they cited California's definition as an example but California's definition is exactly what I would consider the definition of selling my personal data.
They're justifying this by saying that they need it to stay alive since they're not going to be getting money from Google anymore, but I argue that you shouldn't sell out your customer base on the very specific reason anyone would choose you. I would rather pay a monthly fee to use Firefox to support them, but even if you gave them $500 million today they would just squander it away like they've done since forever so I really don't have any solution I can think of which frustrates me.
I switched to Orion (and use Safari if a site doesn't work in Orion), which can be a little buggy at times but I'm happy that it's not based on chrome at least.
The funny thing about removing "we don't sell your data" is that Mozilla before that was giving your data away for free. Now they just could be compensated.
A decent chunk of the users who bothered installing an adblock would also be bothered enough to install a FF fork with adblock, so I doubt the revenue increase would be much.
As for calling it "off-mission": yes, what's even the point of FF if that's the route it goes on?
Do any of these forks have the ability to sync, either with Firefox or something self hosted? Or are they all just basically reskins with a single toggle added or such?
Yes you can actually self-host both Firefox sync server [1] and use Firefox accounts (which also can be self-hosted [2] and someone put something simpler in docker image [3]). And those can be used even with Firefox itself not only the forks.
Good point. I'd actually be happy to pay a couple of bucks a month for a good syncing solution based on an open source protocol, to make it easier for me to use the same history and preferences across browsers, IDEs and other such tools. It's actually a similar need and setup to that of a password manager, so I wonder if this is something Bitwarden could take on.
I think it's too late for Mozilla, since it seems they already squandered most of their good will, userbase and money.
At any rate, I think their only good path of to get rid of Gecko.
The best would be to replace it with a finished version of Servo, which would give them a technically superior browser, assuming Google doesn't also drop Blink for Servo. It may be too late for this, but AI agents may perhaps make finishing Servo realistic.
The other path would be to switch to Chromium, which would free all the Gecko developers to work on differentiating a Chromium-based Firefox from Chrome, and guarantee that Firefox is always better than Chrome.
>The other path would be to switch to Chromium, which would free all the Gecko developers to work on differentiating a Chromium-based Firefox from Chrome, and guarantee that Firefox is always better than Chrome
No they would get fired, unless Firefox found a new big project to earn money from, which at the moment is not very likely.
I doubt AI agents are going to greatly accelerate the development of something as big and complex as Servo. It seems more realistic that Firefox would be built around either Blink (from Chromium) or Webkit to lean on Google/Apple.
I don't think it's too late at all. I mean, there's recurring outrage whenever Mozilla does something silly again but all through that Firefox is still a fantastic browser. Don't under-value the many quieter parts of Mozilla who just keep kicking ass day in day out.
There's nothing particularly wrong with it, but developing a browser engine and keeping up with new web standards is quite a bit of work. And web developers won't all test on a browser with 2-3% market share, so there's more risk of sites not rendering quite right because the engine is different.
Long-time Firefox user* here. If Mozilla weakens the ability to block ads or control content, and/or introduces intrusive AI features that I can't easily disable, then I'm done. I'll go to Waterfox or whatever. Tired of Mozilla's attitude.
* Windows and Android. I even pay for their vpn because there is apparently no way to pay for the browser, which is what I actually use.
... and most of that money comes in the form of sponsored browser/search integration w/ their competitors.
In that set of circumstances, the main qualification for CEO is likely 'plays nice with Google'. Given that, I'm not surprised that Mozilla underperforms.
Beating Google in the browser market might be considered hostile to their sponsors.
There's an elephant in the room: why is maintaining a web browser costing $400M/y?
The web standards are growing faster than non-profit engines can implement them.
Google & Apple are bloating the web specs in what looks like regulatory capture.
If Blink/Webkit dominate for long enough, they will lock everything down with DRMs & WEI. Maybe it's time to work on lighter protocols like Gopher & Gemini that don't need 20GB of RAM to open 20 tabs ?
> There's an elephant in the room: why is maintaining a web browser costing $400M/y?
Is that actually the case though? I find it hard to believe that Mozilla has anywhere close to 1500 senior developers working on just Firefox. My guess is that the bulk of that money is spent on unrelated adventures and overhead.
Google Chrome is likely around $400M, while Mozilla's core browser team is around $200M but are technologically far behind. Hard to find precise numbers, it's just an order of magnitude estimate
In what sense is Mozilla behind? Chrome is an advertising delivery platform, they have fundamentally different goals and that $400M they spend on Chrome is not mostly going to technology that I want in my browser, that's the point. Just because Chrome builds telemetry features doesn't mean Mozilla needs them too.
Having a "lighter standard" simply means people will have to write native apps, one per platform. I understand Apple wants this, but for Mozilla that should be the antithesis of what they're trying to achieve.
The Mozilla Foundation does lots of "spreading awareness" but does not contribute to Firefox development.
That is the most vexing part. I want to donate for Firefox development. Not marketing, not side projects, let me just fund the devs. But no, that is not possible.
Blender is a huge success story relying on sponsors and donations, Wikipedia is swimming in money but no we can't just have a free browser.
No we need to have a Mozilla Corporation that lives on Google money for being the controlled opposition i.e. technically avoiding monopoly situation thing. After all CEOs can't get rich on donations, can they?
Ironically Wikimedia is also throwing money around to side projects, outreach, etc. But luckily for them their products are essentially run by volunteers.
The Foundation owns the trademarks, and mostly does evangelism. The (subsiduary) Corporation actually develops the browser (and accepts a bunch of revenue from Google for Search placement)
I just noticed last week that Chrome was putting multiple versions of some 4GB AI model [1] on my hard disk that I'd never asked for, so when I upgraded my laptop I took the opportunity to switch to Firefox, and now this.
My image of Mozilla as a bastion for user first software just shattered.
last I checked, firefox doesn't download AI models unless you try to use a (clearly-labeled) feature that requires them. you can also manage/uninstall them at about:addons
totally uncharitable interpretation of the quote linked here aside, how is providing an interface for using fully local models not user first software?
While that would be miles better, there's still plenty wrong with it. Most advertising is designed to trick people into either buying something that they don't need at all (e.g. consuming more soda instead of drinking water, or getting some gadget, or more clothes than they need), or into buying the an objectively worse option (e.g. buying a more expensive fridge that will actually last less time). This is the goal of B2C advertising: tricking people to behave less rationally in their consumption behavior.
The only way to avoid this is to just block ads - even unobtrusive content-relevant ads. You may think ads can't trick you, but that has been shown time and time again to be false.
That's an even more evil ad than the obnoxious and irrelevant variety because something related to my interests has a higher chance of successfully manipulating me.
Yeah I think that might be a worse statement than the one daydreaming about eliminating their remaining market share by abandoning the only thing keeping anyone around. It’s a gross premise to operate from. And bullshit.
Well, is no mistery that today the best versioins of Firefox are the non official versions like waterfox and zen.
NObody trusts mozilla anymore, specially after they turned into an add company and started paying their CEOs exorbitating ammounts, considering what was being invested in their core business (supposedly making a better browser).
I'm not familiar with Zen, but how do you reconcile that Waterfox frequently lags behind upstream Firefox in terms of security fixes? Yes, you get a perceived gain in privacy, but is that worth potentially exposing yourself to additional vulnerabilities?
> lags behind upstream Firefox in terms of security fixes
I’m not sure why this has become a thing - usually I either release Waterfox the week before ESR releases (the week the code freeze happens and new version gets tagged) or, if I’m actively working on features and they need to coincide with the next update I push, I will release on the same Tuesday the ESR releases.
You can check the GitHub tag history for Waterfox to see it’s been that way for a good while :)
Yes, you get a perceived gain in privacy, but is that worth potentially exposing yourself to additional vulnerabilities?
Speaking only for myself, and regardless of whether this is actually true (see sibling comment): yes. Absolutely. A non-privacy focused browser like Firefox has vulnerabilities/data leaks by design that are worse than hypothetical ones that I probably will not be subject to browsing my usual benign set of websites.
I think AI in the browser could be useful. It just isn't that useful now.
So far, the most useful "AI feature" Firefox has ever shipped is the page translation system, which uses a local AI to work. I wouldn't mind seeing more of things like that.
Eventually, "browser use" skill in AIs is going to get better too. And I'd trust Firefox with an official vendor agnostic "AI integration" interface, one that allows an AI of user's choice to drive it, over something like OpenAI's browser - made solely by one AI company for its own product.
Yeah I use a plugin for similar translation functionality, but with a local llama.cpp instance instead. Definitely useful and has increased my usage. Also works nicely on the Android version of the app.
Disabling ad blocking goes hand in hand with an "AI Browser" strategy.
Ad blocking relies on the ability to use filters to block network requests at the browser level, and visual elements at the DOM level. "AI Browsers" are designed to add bloat to the browsing experience, by offering to summarize something, or providing contextual information like say, a product recommendation that pulls data from a third party site. Network request and DOM element blocking would instantly negate that.
On the contrary, ad blockers and 'AI browsers' goes hand in hand. On one side is naive browser that displays pages as-is, on the other is user agent that shows what is relevant to the user. Ad blockers are just more static / more deterministic variants of that.
If Mozilla were to kill adblockers, there's basically no reason to not use Chromium. It's pretty much the only relevant difference between Chromium and Firefox these days.
It's truly impressive how they've managed to do every user-hostile trick Google Chrome also did over the years, except for no real clear reason besides contempt for their users autonomy I suppose. Right now the sole hill Mozilla really has left is adblockers, and they've talked about wanting to sacrifice that?
It truly boggles the mind to even consider this. That's not 150 million, that's the sound of losing all your users.
Clearly Google have an iron hand over Mozilla. They want it to remain semi-alive for competitiveness purposes but also ad-block free in order to keep the last user's attention to ads. There might be an under the table agreement between G and the CEO that we will never find. After a while Firefox might become abandoned because nobody in power wants it any more.
It's so tiring how everything around us is being engineered to make us miserable for the sake of profit. That in itself creates misery, almost seemingly for the sake of misery. A just world would punish this behavior.
Don't count on it. Have you ever seen how much time and effort has been put in making Firefox, Safari and Chrome compliant and performant? It'll take Ladybird ages to get anywhere near.
Someone could try to merge e,g, V8 and Servo, once that's in decent shape. But even then it'll be time consuming to build an acceptable UI, cookie and history management, plugin interface, etc.
Ladybird is pretty good today. A lot of web apps, even complex ones, just work. It's reached high compliance scores for web standards in a shockingly quick period. See here: https://youtu.be/VqzbqsIlaNI?si=YPdwbApq4nVYlPMQ&t=209
And servo: I wish that one would get more mention as it's quite far along. Having multiple competing browsers again that are not controlled by megacorps would be great. Ladybird for browsing, Servo for embedding.
What Firefox needs is a new steward and move out, literally. The unruly business practices aren't just normalized, they are an expectation. The blathering ceo wasn't even aware his job is to hide that. The fox will die in this toxic ecosystem.
When someone working for A is doing something that would clearly harm A to the benefit of B, I usually start wondering if that someone really works for A or there's something fishy going on. Mozilla is wasting a huge load of money coming from the Google agreement (another conflict of interests) to pay huge salaries to their CEO over the years. If there's something they lack it's openness about goals, not money.
Firefox has been lagging in Web features for a long time. I have been a Zen browser user for about a year, and recently moved back to Arc just because almost all interactive websites look bad on the Firefox engine; somehow, they don't have the same level of JS API support as Chrome does, especially for WebRTC, Audio, or Video. And this is frustrating that they think the problem is the AdBlockers!
Is the whole issue not that they are less of a band of activists than they used to be. Now it is suddenly no longer about free and open source software, but more of means to run the whole machine, which is why they probably have profit oriented CEO as bad as that is.
IMO they need to be more a crew of activists than they are now. Fight against stuff like intrusion of AI in every single part of our lives and such.
They are probably a money laundy scheme this days. I used to donate every year to Mozilla. Of course, small ammounts because Im not rich. Today they would have to beat this money from my hands.
They're not going to be able to make a case to Google that they need $500M annually to only spend on a browser. They're barely in charge of their own company.
> I've been using Firefox before it was called that.
Call me petty but I still can't let this one go. At the time they basically stole the Firebird name from the database project and did not hesitate to use AOL's lawyers to bully the established owners of the name. So they didn't actually become shady over night. It's in their DNA.
Let's assume that Mozilla is not doing super hot and that's why their CEO is contemplating this topic.
Obviously we are not happy about ads, but we all understand that having money is pretty neat (if only to pay ones salary). Help the CEO fella: What great, unused options is Mozilla missing to generate revenue through their browser?
I feel like this question has been valid for almost as long as I can remember (e.g. the Mr. Robot extension incident). I find myself struggling to tell if Mozilla is an inherently flawed company or if it's just inherent to trying to survive in such a space.
I think the writing for Mozilla was on the wall for a solid decade now. The time to look for alternatives and to switch to other (pretty unknown) niche browsers was at least 5 years ago. I don't even remember the time when I downloaded and used Firefox anymore.
I would stop using Firefox if Enzor-DeMeo would block or cripple ad blockers.
While it is not my main browser (Vivaldi is), I have 5 installs of Firefox Portable for different things, like one for YouTube, one for testing pages against Firefox and so on.
Mozilla/ Firefox is irrelevant and ultimately doomed to ever smaller numbers.
That's because their users are driven by opinions and principles, and those are the worst, most disloyal kind of users. They're always threatening to leave, and will take the slightest offense to do so.
Chrome wins because its user base doesn't care. The browser is just a tool, not a religion. It's installed, they use it, they're barely aware it exists and most of Joe Public doesn't even know Google makes it.
So sure. For you it's ad blockers. For someone else it's their donation plan. Or Google funding. Or their corporate structure. Or their management.
When your marketing is about something else, other than the product itself, you always end up with edge-case-customers.
People use Chrome because it's the best browser. Less than 3% use Firefox. And all I read from Firefox users is how bad everything is (or will be).
No, Firefox's market share isn't a foil to monopoly (Safari has 5 times more users. Crumbs Edge has twice the users.)
I care about Firefox, but I really just wish all the whiners would just do what they threaten and use something else. But they won't because everything else is worse (for some or other principles reason.)
Now I fully expect to be downvoted because the only people reading this article in the first place are Firefox whiners. Which is kinda my point.
It's pretty hard to recommend Firefox to others when everything written by existing users is so negative.
An ad blocker is a very useful tool. Being able to block ads effectively makes the browser much better. I'm not sure how you can call that "religion".
> People use Chrome because it's the best browser.
No they don't. They use Chrome because every Google service nags the shit out of them to use Chrome. People aren't as rational as you make them out to be.
It was already dying and with no chances of making up share, most online usage comes from mobile, nobody cares about installing Firefox there but us nerds.
> He says he could begin to block ad blockers in Firefox and estimates that’d bring in another $150 million, but he doesn’t want to do that. It feels off-mission.
It would be amusing if the only browser left that could run ad-blockers was Safari.
>> He says he could begin to block ad blockers in Firefox and estimates that’d bring in another $150 million, but he doesn’t want to do that. It feels off-mission.
> I read this as “I don't want to but I'll kill AdBlockers in Firefox for buckerinos ”.
I completely disagree. First of all the original quote is paraphrasing, so we don't know in which tone it was delivered, but calling something "off-mission" doesn't at all sound like "we'd do it for money" to me.
This is how I read it too, feels like a misinterpreted quote taken out of context. Everyone at Mozilla is probably well aware that removing adblockers would make them lose probably the majority of their users.
They're between a rock and a hard place. Introduce AI and alienate whatever users you have left. Do not introduce AI and alienate whatever investors you have left.
I think blocking ad blockers (the whole FFing point of using Firefox is freedom to do use those) would be the shortest path for him out of the door as a CEO.
It's so tone deaf that it is likely to probe the community into drastic action if he were to attempt to push that through. Including probably much of the developer community. I'm talking the kind of action that boils down to forking and taking a large part of the user base along. Which is why that would be very inadvisable.
The problem with being a CEO of a for profit corporation, which is what he is, is that his loyalty is to shareholders, not to users. The Mozilla Foundation and the corporation are hopelessly inter dependent at this point. The foundation looks increasingly like a paper tiger given the decision making and apparent disconnect with its user base which it is supposed to serve.
All the bloated budgets, mis-spending on offices, failed projects, fancy offices, juicy executive salaries at a time where revenue from Google continued to be substantial all while downsizing developer teams and actually laying some off isn't a great look. Stuff like this just adds to the impression that they are increasingly self serving hacks that don't care about the core product: Firefox. This new CEO isn't off to a great start here.
yeah pretty sure its a private corp under the ownership of the parent foundation. no shareholders so not sure why they new guy said what he said.. theres no one to impress
Sorry to get on one of my political hobby horses but...
We actually need to consider the possibility that yes, it is. More precisely, that the new CEO is trying to do that.
It doesn't take a grand conspiracy to join an organisation on false premises. It's totally easy. You can, today, go join a political party without agreeing with them at all, with the intent to sabotage them. Or another organization, including a workplace.
And just like some people just lie for amazingly little reason, I'm increasingly convinced some people do this. Maybe for a sense of control, maybe because they think they'll get rewarded. For every person who holds a crazy belief in public, there's probably one who holds the same belief but doesn't feel the need to let others in on it. As the world gets more paranoid, it'll get worse, open fears are the top of the iceberg.
If Enzor-Demeo ends up tanking Mozilla, there are plenty of people who will be happy with that. It's not as if his career will be over, far from it. Ask Nick Clegg or Stephen Elop. We all need to wake up to the idea that maybe the people who are supposed to be on our side aren't actually guaranteed to be unless we have solid mechanisms in place to ensure it.
With DNS over https Firefox has the answer against you already built in. And back then they were very keen on implementing it as soon as possible. They even sold it as helping against censorship. It's maybe just a question of time how long good old Firefox will allow you to censor ads...
I understand where people are coming from with these takes... but look at the details, Mozilla is practically dead already. They are almost solely funded by Google.
Look at browser stats, what they're doing is not working and asking them to continue doing it will kill them. They have to change or they will die.
Their core audience (people on this site) is shrinking constantly. You can not save them.
I feel like this is a case where a bunch of smart people like something so much, or the idea of something, that they've completely blinded themselves to the facts.
We are missing the context how the statement was said in the interview. The CEO is new and not used to the scrutiny that position brings, especially for Mozillas CEO given their purported ideals. It is quite possible he said this as something absurd -> "If making money was our only goal we would have some other options. We could for example disable all adblockers, to get more money from our advertising sponsor Google, at least 150 million USD. But we can not and won't do that, as it would feel completely off-mission for everyone and harm us long-term. So we always keep our mission in mind." Then the journalists shortens it to the blip in the verge article and the reaction twists it around a bit more, assuming disabling adblockers was on the table as a serious suggestion.
Or it could be it really was on the table since they just entered the advertising business and think AI is the future of Mozilla, a "fuck those freeloaders", heartfelt from the Porsche driving MBAs in Mozilla's management. Who knows. But it's a choice which interpretation one assumes.
> Killing one of its advantages over the Chromium engine, being able to have a fucking adblocker that's actually useful, and that nowadays is a fucking security feature due to malvertising, will be another nail in the coffin, IMHO.
Well, it would be a shot in the head. What would be the point of using Firefox if it can't block ads better than Chrome, and on mobile as well???
Doing so would not "bring in an additional 150 millions, or 50 millions, or 1 million! It would kill the product instantly.
Part of the "problem" is that people don't care about any of those products, except Firefox.
Mozilla needs to figure out how much they need to maintain Firefox, nothing else. I suspect that's not the entirety of the $200 million they currently spend on "development costs". Everything else they receive in donations and partnership fees should go directly into an investment portfolio which will be used to keep Firefox development active in the future.
If they didn't care about anything else, the Google money could fund Firefox for at least two years per yearly fee.
Yeap. It's mentioned in their financial reports that user donations represent more than 99.9% of our annual revenue[0]. Also seems their staff is mainly engineers/developers, and all the expenses are concentrated to their product*. Thunderbird doing what Firefox should.
As of right now Thunderbird doesn't make any money, it relies on 'Donations' which isn't at all sustainable.
I can see Thunderbird is planning to do a pro plan, but it is behind a waitlist so the total sum of revenue Thunderbird is making relative to Google's $500M deal is close to zero.
Unfortunately Firefox is basically already dead, it has an incredibly small market share and it will never grow again because their leadership is affected by the corporate mind virus.
I know most HN users are on Firefox, but they should get used to an alternative now, not when its inevitable death happens.
My key problem is not knowing what the real good alternatives are? I've trusted Mozilla for so long that I've fallen out of touch with a market that never really changed as much as it has in the last few years.
I dont know how anyone could take mozilla seriously after they integrated google analytics into it about 10 years ago for no reason I can fathom. It immediately made me think somethings off, and I never used it again.
Instead I thought screw it and just went nuts deep into chrome, atleast it was more functional.
ps - ( apparently mozilla took it out sometime later , but to me the damage to its reputation was done)
It really seems like all large tech corporations are trying their hardest to kill themselves, and failing because the market is so rigged.
Remember when Kodak ignored digital cameras and became irrelevant? That was bad because it decreased shareholder value. That will not be allowed to happen again.
It feels like the only reasonable path forward would be for the EU to buy Mozilla and fund it as a public resource.
Capital extraction is fundamentally opposed to user freedom. If we want an open web, we, the people need to be maintaining it and not rely on MBA types to do it for us.
Sincerely, I'm just using Firefox ATM because of Sidebery.
If I could use something similar on Brave, I would go back in an instant.
My main issues with FF are that it is a battery hog on MacOS, doesn't have AV1 playing capabilities (or it has, but I would need to go through some configuring that I don't need to do in other browsers) and sometimes it stalls in certain pages (that's probably not FF fault, but that the web developers don't optimize for it... but still, it's not a problem on Brave, so, I don't really care for apologising for it).
This Mozilla fiasco has convinced me that being a nonprofit isn't enough. We need a web browser that is actively hostile towards corporations and surveillance capitalism.
> This Mozilla fiasco has convinced me that being a nonprofit isn't enough
I'm not sure to what extent Mozilla actually functions as a nonprofit. All the bits one cares about (i.e. FireFox) are developed by the for-profit subsidiary, which is at least somewhat beholden to Google/Microsoft for revenue...
Corporations, private equity, the ever encroaching monopolies and centralization of economic power, the steady march towards authoritarianism... all of these things are connected and are making our lives shittier. We should oppose them.
How so? Corporate and surveillance capitalism's infrastructure is built on copyleft software. The equivocation of license dogmatism with social good and sustainability that those movements were never actually aligned with is part of what's left socially minded technologies and communities so vulnerable to the predation that led the web to this current mess.
I realize that a FOSS browser is an absolutely enormous monstrosity of a project. An undertaking akin to a whole FOSS OS. But it's also comparably important, especially when no FOSS alternatives exist in the browser space. We (I mean that very loosely, not having contributed anything myself) have managed to produce _several_ FOSS OS-es. Why are we seemingly completely fucked if Mozilla does in fact kill itself/Firefox? I don't doubt that we are, I just don't understand.
You can't kill ad-blockers in a browser, unless you don't allow running AI models in browsers (which will become very soon an integral part of your browsing usage - for some of us it already is, mostly through extension).
I will one day just add "Remove all ads on the page I am browsing" into my BROWSER_AI.md file.
> It may be just me, but I read this as “I don't want to but I'll kill AdBlockers in Firefox for buckerinos ”.
Yes, that does seem like a pretty uncharitable interpretation of that quote. I read it as "we won't do it, even though it would bring in $150M USD".
No, it will just kill the browser. The fact he thinks otherwise tells me how out of touch he is.
If Mozilla killed andblocking extensions I’d switch to Helium Browser in a heartbeat since they’re maintaining manifest v2 support for uBO and even ship it OOTB.
The web is unusable without a proper Adblock.
It's a privacy nightmare as well. Few people reason how much data they give away to a host of shady companies just by letting ads display.
Yeah but they haven't and they're not going to, so what's the point of fantasizing about what you would do in that situation? It's like tough guy syndrome, where a person constantly fantasizes about what they would do in the imaginary situation where one of their friends or family is disrespected, or doomsday preppers who spend their life imagining what they would do in an apocalypse that never comes.
That stuff belongs on archiveofourown.com, not news.ycombinator.com.
(JS has few good uses, but is too excessive. Less code is always better - and an art.)
(- it's kind of behavior extension on tag level, yet has JS - and it's orthogonal, like CSS or XSLT, unlike JS which is.. untamed and invasive; i.e. there is video (any) tag but you could (+)DIY not touching the document - I played with MPlayer as a plugin there for all the codecs and my customs.)
Wherever I've worked as a dev in a decade I've always developed Firefox-first and let the testers turn up Chrome issues. So the products that I am involved with just work with Firefox all the time.
I know there are a lot of people like me, people who are passionate and engaged with technology but have problems with "big tech" and if they turn people like me away than it really will be a "niche browser that nobody tests"
But let's not kid ourselves. We're an absolute minority. For every one of us, there are hundreds, thousands of developers who literally do not give a shit so long as their paychecks hit their accounts. Actually they're likely to write Firefox off as some irrelevant niche market the company can afford to lose because it's less work for them if they do.
(2) It just takes one on the team to make the difference
(3) Practically compatibility with Firefox is pretty good. Maybe once a month I use an e-commerce site or other e-business site where I have to drop down to Chrome, Edge or Safari.
I haven't compared it in years, but Firefox's bookmark sync is better than Google's, it is a reason why I have stuck with it.
I think Firefox manages hundreds of tabs better than Chrome does as far as memory usage goes. I haven't used Chrome seriously in years, but people continue to complain about how RAM hungry Chrome is so I assume it is still an issue.
But Mozilla has been doing odd things that makes me question them. I would move to some Chromium based browser if ublock origin was... blocked... pun intended... because the web does prefer Chrome over Firefox. If this 3rd party browser is able to integrate some of the functionality of ublock origin that Firefox chose to remove; I would use it over the reasons I listed above in a heartbeat.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-disc...
Thank you, gorhill! And thanks to all the people maintaining it and all the filter lists!
You could always secretly continue helping the adblocking mission under a different name. Even if you signed a contract not to.
Raymond got overwhelmed with managing an open source project of uBlock's size and let Chris Aljoudi take over. Adblock later purchased it from Chris.
Meanwhile, Raymond had forked uBlock, creating uBO, and continued to improve it on his own terms. After seeing what happened with Adblock, he has no intention of selling either uMatrix or uBO.
I found Chrome+adblockers NOT good enough. I like (and hate) Brave's shield, as I never figured out how to use wildcards to whitelist a whole domain / subdomain, it seems per-host. But that Brave shield WORKS.
Now people are going back to Chrome? Really?
However, it leads to Mozilla's earlier weird design choice where you have to install addon if you only want to disable JavaScript on sites - or allow it from only the selected domains.
Years later I haven't found a sensible explanation why they ditched that choice.
I've understood that you can still do it in Chrom(e/ium) and combined with a good updated blocklist in /etc/hosts or like it would provide most of the functionality of an adblock.
Meaning they select each other, because they're all on each other's board.
It's a very basic and boring thing to say, and if any other CEO said this, nobody would care.
IMO, this is one of the reasons why it's so hard to find a good CEO for Mozilla. Anything you do or say will get picked apart in the most uncharitable way by the community. Who would want that, especially when you're probably also taking a pay cut compared to your other options (and if the board tries to raise your salary... well, you're going to get attacked for that too).
For me as a user it is, but is it for him as a CEO?
Not sure if that's legal or whatever but killing ad blockers is probably worth it for Google.
If this happened it would be the final straw for me, if I wasn't already looking to change because of them confirming the plan to further descend into the great “AI” cult.
So that extra money will never materialize. And usage numbers will again crater. This is the point.
(You can disagree with that assessment, but that has nothing to do with telemetry, which cannot gauge users hanging around with blocked .. adblockers)
I'm sorry but this is like borderline gibberish. You could rationally understand that there's a financial incentive to selling out... and choose not to sell out. Did you make it to the and? I didn't think so. The fact that you're simply able to assess that selling out has a dollar amount associated with it isn't a confession unless you're so pot committed to your Mozilla Derangement Syndrome that you've chosen to throw charitable interpretation out the window.
You're entertaining a hypothetical that was already rejected, and your point of emphasis is that they didn't reject it hard enough to satisfy you. I'm sorry but that's the nothingburger of the century.
The core reasoning system here is probably moral intuitionism: if you have an explanation for why something is bad, it is not something you consider intuitively bad and consequently you must be wanting to do it.
I think I've seen it in online communities a lot more in the last couple of decades, and I suspect it's just a characteristic of the endless march of Eternal September.
And believe it or not, human behavior is such that something that is not even i in the space of possibilities is much less likely to occur that something that has been considered and rejected. It might have been rejected ow, but what the calculus changes?
1. Innovate
2. Dominate
3. Enshitify to cash in.
You can't skip step #2.
Right now, Firefox's market share is a rounding error compared to Chrome. Users are starting to switch away from Chrome because it's currently in step 3 (in spades). That trend will not continue if Firefox beats Chrome to the bottom of the pig-pen. Firefox's current focus on AI is concerning enough, but mirroring Chrome's shift to Manifest v3 (i.e. What killed full-blooded ad blocking in Chrome) would be outright suicide.
Mozilla needs to listen to their users. Most don't particularly want "let me run that through an AI for you" popups everywhere. Practically nobody running Firefox wants to be cut off from effective ad blocking.
Monetization is hard, for Mozilla in particular. It was always weird that most of their funding came from Google. Now that Google is yanking it, Mozilla needs to find alternative sources of filthy lucre. However, if they destroy their product's only competitive advantages, there will be nothing left to monetize. If Firefox remains a browser that can provide decent privacy and ad-blocking then Mozilla has a chance to find alternative revenue streams. If, instead, Mozilla throws those advantages away to make a quick buck, that's the last buck they'll ever make.
It shows even in the UI design. Features like tab pinning and tab groups work in ways that are sub-optimal to how users want to use them. A pinned tab should not be tied to a specific URL. If you go their forums you see a lot complaints, and weird thing is all the nonsensical arguments that their reps advance as to how these features should work the way they currently are. I as a longtime Firefox user can immediately see what is wrong with these features as implemented, but the devs won't listen. I wonder if they use FF themselves.
Firefox is also the only app on my MacBook that consistently brings the system to a crawl. Almost every single time my machines slows down, the solution is to kill Firefox. It's got to the point I don't even need to use Activity Monitor, I just kill Firefox and and system recovers.
It's gotten to the point I'm seriously looking at alternatives, trying out Orion and Helium browsers.
Can you elaborate? Are they winding down their their participation in search licensing deals?
How do Mozilla's costs look?
We don't know what he really thinks. Maybe he knows it's a risk he wouldn't want to take but presents it as a goodwill
Nothing can kill Firefox, because it’s already dead for all practical purposes.
... damn do I have adhd?????
(I'm kidding)
I cannot remember the last time I came across one myself.
And I'm able to access my bank, my credit cards, my utility bills, in Firefox without issue. So I'm not sure what people are talking about.
One thing I am familiar with though in the aftermath of gamergate was a bunch of motivated reasoning to complain about games and insist that they had design flaws or bugs, when really? The bugs weren't real but were kind of just a different way of saying We Don't Like This Game. And so reports of perceived bugs in some cases are as much a social phenomenon as they are a sincere representation of software functionality.
I don't want to say there's no bugs but for every one person's unsubstantiated anecdote, I seem to be able to find two people able to reproduce a functional version of the experience without issue. And just to zoom in on the bank login issue in particular, I use a credit union with an old decrepit HTTP site that was recently updated to a slightly less old and decrepit HTTP site. Plaid is unable to successfully log in, but the web interface works perfectly fine on Firefox mobile.
A few: Developer tools are quite slow; Airline websites often break during checkout; JS games and video players sometimes stutter or use a lot of CPU
And when people ask them what they meant, they revealed that they used some package from the arch user repository that apparently required manual compiling for every update.
And instead of thinking that this wasn't the unusual behavior of a particular package, they insisted that this was the normal Linux packaging experience, which was why Linux as a whole was a terrible operating system.
A bunch of commenters chimed in emphasizing that the whole package distribution system in Linux is designed to among other things, handle dependencies and avoid manual compiling (though it's available as an option), and they were all dismissed as just being fanboy apologists.
What you run into the most is the website saying, hey, it looks like you are not using a browser we have tested against, so we are not going to let you log in. Please come back when you have Chrome, edge, or Safari.
Also many sites show significant degradation in FF lately. Youtube works like shit in FF, once every 10 page opens it just gets stuck half way with part of the background loaded, like black with black empty frames on top. Or just empty page. No, it never finishes loading from that state, and neither it can reload on F5. But opening a new tab works fine and YT loads normally.
And to finish off this rant, FF has now started corrupting my open tabs after opening FF with saved session. This never happened since this feature was implemented and in 2025 has happened 3 times already. And in mozilla bugtracker all tickets about this are ignored for years now. Meanwhile they are developing some crappy bells and whistles, instead of fixing fundamental bugs.
If not for Chrome monopoly, I would consider switching browsers. Ladybird can't come soon enough. Mozilla has lost touch with reality.
How much of that is Firefox rendering being worse vs artificial slowdowns by Google owned sites kind of doesn't matter in the end. Objectively it's a slower browsing experience but I solely use it for uBlock Origin.
For me the biggest offender are usually Google products and sometimes the lazy-coded website written by incompetents and whose audience is the tech illiterate (i.e. some websites involving schools/teaching) that just tell you "use latest Chrome just to be sure, download here" to, well, just be sure. Notable mentions for government websites that are like 10 years in the past and that are still on the "Supports Firefox" side because, well, they are just always late to everything.
Which service do you have issues with?
While governments battle big tech on some issues, they are very much on the same side on others. They both want more tracking for example - the governments want to regulate it, and there is a battle for control of the data, but both want the data to be collected by someone.
Gosh, I really wish Mozilla would just dig into their user-base and find a way to adequately become sustainable... or find a way to make it work better as a foundation that is NOT maintained by Google, ie like the Wiki Foundation. I do spend a LOT of time in FF, can't anyone see there's a value beyond selling ads and personal info that could make Mozilla more sustainable, dependable and resilient?
The whole desktop market is cratering.
I was talking to a reddit mod a few months ago. He was looking at the subreddit stats. 95% of his users were on mobile.
Think about that. We desktop users are dinosaurs.
So FireFox having a 3% market share might actually mean more than half of desktop users are on FireFox.
Source: https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worl...
For some reason that part of the story always seems to get omitted, which I find bizarre. But the web pivoted to mobile and Google flexed its monopoly powers. I would argue that upwards of 95% of the change in market share is explained by those two factors.
Looking at the last 10 years gives a different perspective (not great for Firefox but maybe underscores something is different recently in general):
https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worl...
You can't install UBlock Origin on mobile.
Like I still use FireFox on mobile, just purely out of habit. I don't really see anything better about it (I am quite inexperienced when it comes to phones).
I just looked it up. 2023 was when it started. I'm surprised Android even allows something like this.
(Hey, if you work at Snapchat: fix your shit. Your desktop site is by far the most mainstream website I've come across that lies like this)
Granted in Google's case, it seems that the Monopoly judgment was with respect to ad markets, but locking people into search to serve ads might be understood as part of the structure of that monopoly.
Global browser marketshare never made much sense. You need to figure out what your users use, then aim to be compatible for most of those, and ignore any global stats.
As of December 7th, Firefox is 10.3% of traffic there. This makes it the #2 browser, after Chrome (at 62.2%) -- a spot it has been dueling with Edge over for the last year or so.
I'm inclined to think that "people visiting wikipedia" is a fairly representative sample of "normal users", overall.
Not sure how users cope with Chrome-based browsers and intrusive ads.
I also suspect that those who lived through the days of frequent Windows errors and Chrome running out of memory all the time often expect software to fail in weird and unexpected ways, and a lot of people adopt a "don't fix it if it isn't broken" mindset.
Still, uBlock Lite and Brave browser are definitely easy wins and I'm glad to see more random people in my life using them than I would have expected. :)
I used to try to patiently explain why people should do xyz. Now I explain to people why I'm going to change xyz on their device, and if they don't slam the breaks I just do what needs to be done right then. If someone doesn't know what an adblocker is they are getting one so they can see for themselves and reflect on what companies have been putting them through for years to make some incremental amount of money.
Because their web developers are too lazy to write anything to proper standards. They're doing some kind of lazy "Check for Chrome, because everyone must be running that, if not, redirect to an Unsupported page".
I've yet to find a website that "refuses" to work in Firefox which doesn't work just fine when I use a user agent switching extension to present a standard Chrome on MacOS or Chrome on Windows useragent.
Another pretty common experience for developers is wanting to do things "the right way", but being overridden by management.
That being said, in the original context [0] it does sound a lot more like an option on the table. That original article presents it as the weakest of a list of things they're about to explore - but who knows, maybe the journalist has butchered what was said. It is an ambiguous idea without more context about how close it is to Mozilla trying to make life hard for ad-blockers.
[0] https://www.theverge.com/tech/845216/mozilla-ceo-anthony-enz...
That is a flimsy tissue paper statement about a concept that should be a bedrock principle.
It's irrationally charitable to give it any credit at all. Especially in context where anyone who's awake should understand they need to be delivering an unquestionably clear message about unquestionably clear goals and core values, because this ain't that.
Or rather, it is a clear message, just a different message to a different audience.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_4J4uor3JE
On day one he’s put his appearance on the top of hacker news under “is Mozilla trying to kill himself?”.
The CEO of an organization like Mozilla even considering blocking adblockers for profit is like the president of Amnesty International considering to sell lists of dissidents to the secret police.
No, for Amnesty International it would be more like not considering somebody a political prisoner because the country that took the prisoner is a 1st world country and they don't want to expose themselves on a matter that would risk the donations from a certain population.
Yes, that happened in the aftermath of the Catalan attempt at peaceful independence in October 2017 by Amnesty International Spain.
edited to correct my misunderstanding.
I agree, although if someone isn't the kind of person who would calculate that, they're probably not the person who will become the CEO of a company that size in the first place. I don't think organizations have the right incentives in place to push people with those values to the top.
Why? They have ample free cashflow. They haven't had money problems in 10 years. If they're worried about Google withdrawing support they should save money in an endowment, not do things to help Google.
It’s an eyebrow raising comment at the very least.
like hoping for the best, but planning for the worst, you must interpret people's intentions using the same methodology. By quoting that axing adblock could be bringing $150mil, but also saying that he doesn't want to do it, it's advertising that a higher price would work - it's a way to deniably solicit an offer.
And in turn my comment above is not a honest remark that your suggested interpretation strategy seems to be selectively applied, but rather an attempt to hurt your standing with your peers.
That's supposedly The Verge paraphrasing the CEO (Unfortunately I can't verify because the full article requires subscription.) I would like to know what the CEO actually said because "it feels off-mission" is a strange thing for the leader of the mission to say. I would hope that they know the mission inside out. No need to go by feels.
> In our conversation, Enzor-DeMeo returns often to two things: that Mozilla cares about and wants to preserve the open web, and that the open web needs new business models. Mozilla’s ad business is important and growing, he says, and he worries “about things going behind paywalls, becoming more closed off.” He says the internet’s content business isn’t exactly his fight, but that Mozilla believes in the value of an open and free (and thus ad-supported) web.
> At some point, though, Enzor-DeMeo will have to tend to Mozilla’s own business. “I do think we need revenue diversification away from Google,” he says, “but I don’t necessarily believe we need revenue diversification away from the browser.” It seems he thinks a combination of subscription revenue, advertising, and maybe a few search and AI placement deals can get that done. He’s also bullish that things like built-in VPN and a privacy service called Monitor can get more people to pay for their browser. He says he could begin to block ad blockers in Firefox and estimates that’d bring in another $150 million, but he doesn’t want to do that. It feels off-mission.
> One way to solve many of these problems is to get a lot more people using Firefox. And Enzor-DeMeo is convinced Mozilla can get there, that people want what the company is selling. “There is something to be said about, when I have a Mozilla product, I always know my data is in my control. I can turn the thing off, and they’re not going to do anything sketchy. I think that is needed in the market, and that’s what I hope to do.”
On the other hand, the clean web feels more direct, to the point, and passionate. I prefer to read content written by passion, not by money seeking purposes.
I contribute to open source projects and nobody "gave me something", as I did it because I wanted to make it better. Like me, there are many others. Nobody is "the product" there.
What the saying you are misrepresenting means is "carefully check free things as you may be the product". Not "free things cannot exist, you either are the product or you pay".
People need to eat and have a roof over their heads.
If something being free ever mattered to your privacy, it hasn't for a long time. Today no matter how expensive something is you are probably a product anyway. Unethical and greedy companies don't care how much money you paid them, they'll want the additional cash they'll get from selling you out at every opportunity. Much of my favorite software is free and doesn't compromise my privacy.
You know, actual reporting sourcing something new. But in truth, it was just extrapolating a bunch of sweet nothings from the freezing of a quote already published in The Verge. It reminds me of Boston media market sports reporting. You're a sports writer, you have a deadline, and you have to take Curt Schilling's press conference and try and turn it into a story. So take something he said and squeeze it dry, trying to extract some implication of clubhouse drama, to drive the next new cycle and survive to your next paycheck as a reporter. That's the grift, that's the grind.
Even better would be similar to the article sentiment: "we could get 150 million now but degrade one of our few features that distinguishes us from other browsers + break a lot user trust, which would bring greater losses in the long term".
Literally the only people who talk about Mozilla, or read things about what Mozilla is up to, are unusually motivated power users who really, really care about ad blocking and privacy. They may still have other users, but those people are coasting on momentum from when their grandkid installed Firefox on their computer years ago. They're not reading interviews with the new CEO. Yet Mozilla seems to consistently fail utterly at messaging to their only engaged users.
It's not even that they're doing evil shit, they're just absolutely terrible at proclaiming that they are committed to not doing evil shit.
I think it's an apt warning, I'd have to read the literal interview transcripts to really draw a conclusion one way or the other. But the simple fact that this is on his mind, and felt like mentioning killing ad block was something Mozilla could do, and is considering doing, was a safe thing to say to a journalist... There's not a chance in hell I'd say anything remotely like that to a journalist.
When someone tells you who they are, believe them.
If they do that, most of the remaining users would flee and goodbye to your millions if you don't have any userbase anymore to justify asking money to anyone.
These kind of questions usually come from non-engineers, people in product or sales who see privacy as a feature or marketing point, and if the ROI is higher they don't give a fuck and would pitch anything that would make a buck
It costs Mozilla literally nothing to reassure its privacy and user-controlled principles. Instead we got a jk...unless... type of response. This is cowardice and like another commenter has said, a negotiation offer disguised as a mission statement.
Fewer devs, more bucks, big win for the execs on the short term.
I believe most non-techie users are just lingering, using Firefox just because they used to. Since Firefox doesn't have a built-in ad blocking and the knowledge about adblocking is not universal (see my other comment), it is possible that there are a large portion of Firefox users who don't use adblockers and conversely adblocking users are in a minority. If this is indeed the case, Mozilla can (technically) take such a bet as such policy will affect a smaller portion of users. But that would work only once; Mozilla doesn't have any more option like that after all. That's why I see $150M is plausible, but only once.
Edit: actually I'm way off - it seems estimates are typically around 30-40% of overall users on the web having some kind of ad blocker. So, the Firefox percentage being 60-80+% seems almost a given to me.
Actual attempts to get users to pay for the browser itself, like what Opera did, simply didn't work and led to the insolvency of the browser and having to sell it off to someone harvesting its users as data.
Such weak statements are either a real mistake or show movement away from those principles which should be bedrock for Mozilla and towards some justification to abandon those principles.
It's not like the industry has no precedents on this. "Don't Be Evil" was the motto of a company that is now one of the apex predators in the surveillance capitalism ecosystem.
Unwise to try to dismiss and laugh off legitimate alarms.
"we won't do this" But you didn't say you'd never do this. "okay we'll never do this" But you didn't say you'd never ever do this. "fine we'll never ever do this" But you didn't say that it's never entered your mind once.
They said they won't do it and your interpretation is to demand they said it with more words? Come on, let's stop this nonsense. Can Firefox users ever be happy?
I don't understand context, but my honest reaction will be: "WTF, you just said? What type of relationship you think we have if we discuss such things?"
I definitely understand why people worry. This is just crazy to weight trust in money. If this is on the table and discussed internally, then what we are talking about?
'T' in Mozilla Firefox means 'Trust'.
He didn't say it is off-mission. But just that it feels. My guess is that he is looking at a higher number.
Interpreting the Mozilla CEO the same way may not be charitable, but it is certainly familiar.
[0]: https://futurism.com/future-society/sam-altman-adult-ai-reve...
Everybody has their price. I'm ideologically opposed to advertising but if someone put 150 million dollars on my table and told me to stop making an issue out of it I think I'd take the money. Being set for life trumps being called a hypocrite.
Once the users were trapped for exploitation, it doesn’t make sense to have a browser that blocks ads. How are they supposed to pay software salaries and keep the lights on? People don’t like paying for software, demand constant updates and hate subscriptions. They all end up doing one of those since the incentives are perverse, that’s why Google didn’t just ride the Firefox till the end and instead created the Chrome.
It doesn’t make sense to have trillion dollars companies and everything to be free. The free part is until monopolies are created and walled gardens are full with people. Then comes the monetization and those companies don’t have some moral compass etc, they have KPI stock values and analytics and it’s very obvious that blocking ads isn’t good financially.
Categorically untrue and weird revisionism. Basically the opposite of what actually happened.
People were trying to figure out how to make money off of the Internet from the early days of the Internet being publicly accessible (rather than a tool used by academic and military institutions). It can be attributed to the downfall of Gopher. It can be attributed to the rise of Netscape and Internet Explorer. While the early web was nowhere near as commercial as it is today, we quickly saw the development of search engines and (ad supported) hosting services that were. By the time 2000's hit, VC money was very much starting to drive the game. In the minds of most people, the Internet was only 5 to 10 years old at that point. (The actual Internet may be much older, but few people took notice of it until the mid-1990's.)
Yes, No, Yes?
I don't demand constant updates. I don't want constant updates. Usually when a company updates software it becomes worse. I am happy with the initial version of 90% of the software I use, and all I want is bug fixes and security updates.
I currently pay zero for ad-blocking (FF + uBlock Origin) and it works perfectly; but I would pay if I had to.
So the best situation for google would be to have borderline monopoly where they pay for the existence of their competition and the competition(Firefox) blocks adblockers too by default but leaving Chrome and Firefox is harder than forcing installin adblockers through the unofficial way.
So basically, all the people who swear they never clicked ads manage to block ads, Firefox and Chrome print money by making sure that ads are shown and clocked by the masses.
> People don’t like paying for software, demand constant updates and hate subscriptions.
hate subscription?? may be. if it's anything like Adobe then yes, people will hate.
that constant update, is something planted by these corporates, and their behavior manipulation tactics. People were happily paying for perpetual software, which they can "own" in a cd//dvd.
One time fee software ment that once your growth slows down you no longer make money and have plenty of customers to support for free. That's why this model was destroyed by the subscription and ad based "free" software.
The last example is Affinity which was the champion of pay once use forever model, very recently they end up getting acquired and their software turned into "free" + subscription.
What do you mean. Support contracts were not included by default. Consumers had some initial support to fight off instant reclamations.
Huh? Nexus was funded by CERN.
Newsgrounds was never investor funded.
Yahoo! Directory was just two guys, and you paid to be listed. There were no investors involved.
WebCrawler was a university project. Altavista was a research project.
But sure, if you think that we should start counting from these years you can do that and add a "public funded" era at the beginning.
The mentality of the age was portrayed like this in SV: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo
There were companies that were making some money but those were killed or acquired by companies that give their services for free. Google killed the blogs by killing their RSS reader since they were long into making money stage and their analytics probably demonstrated that it is better people search stuff than directly going to the latest blog posts.
It's the same thing everywhere, the whole industry is like that. Uber loses money until there's no longer viable competition then lose less money by jacking up the prices. The tech is very monopolistic, Peter Thiel is right about the tech business.
But Firefox's users are the kind who choose the browser, not use whatever is there. And that choice is driven in part by having solid ad-blockers. People stick with Firefox despite the issues for the ad-blocker. Take that away and Firefox's userbase dwindles to even lower numbers to the point where nobody can pretend they are "competition". That's when they lose any value for Google.
Without the best-of-the-best ad-blocking I will drop Firefox like a rock and move to the next best thing, which will have to be a Chromium based browser. I'll even have a better overall experience on the web when it comes to the engine itself, to give me consolation for not having the best ad-blocker.
Yes but keep in mind that’s not an individual problem that is solved by switching browsers. If a browser engine dies, the walls get closer and the room smaller. With only Chromium and WebKit left, we may soon have a corporate owned browsers pulling in whatever direction Google and Apple wants. I can think of many things that are good for them but bad for us. For instance, ”Web Integrity” and other DRM.
Surely Mac is the only place there is a viable non-Chromium alternative (Safari)?
Fortunately it's not the only one and for example Adguard works perfectly fine.
The only problem is: what's the difference between the forks, and which is the best? I have no idea.
Apple doesn't collect your browsing data, they build in privacy controls that are pretty much as strong as they can manage given the state of the world, and while it doesn't support uBO, it supports a variety of pretty solid adblockers (I use AdGuard, which, AFAICT, Just Works™ and even blocks YouTube ads most of the time, despite their arms race).
Alternatives like maybe a fork of Firefox with the adblocker-blocker removed?
WebKit is[1][2].
[1]: https://webkit.org/downloads/ [2]: https://webkit.org/webkit-on-windows/
> This guide provides instructions for building WebKit on Windows 8.1
To this day, GamerGate trolls still virtue signal they use Brave in support of Eich's anti-gay-marriage bigotry, and still obsessively attack and harass Mozilla just because Eich voluntarily left, and they still falsely claim he was fired. (Just watch them prove my point here and now, just because the facts don't fit their narrative!)
The Brendan Eich Controversy
In March 2014, Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript and a co-founder of Mozilla, was appointed CEO of the Mozilla Corporation. His appointment faced immediate and significant backlash when it was widely reported that he had made a personal donation of $1,000 to support California's Proposition 8 in 2008, a ballot initiative that banned same-sex marriage.
The controversy led to widespread criticism, internal dissent among employees, and public boycotts. Less than two weeks into the role, Eich voluntarily resigned as CEO, stating he could not be an effective leader under the circumstances.
The "GamerGate" Connection
The "GamerGate" movement, which emerged in late 2014 (months after Eich's resignation), was an online campaign ostensibly concerned with ethics in video game journalism, though it quickly devolved into a broader culture war, often associated with online harassment and conservative/libertarian critiques of progressive culture.
Members of the "GamerGate" community began using Eich's resignation as a prominent case study for their arguments.
They framed his departure as an example of political correctness and a "witch hunt" leading to professional consequences for private political beliefs (sometimes referred to as "cancel culture").
Eich himself later founded Brave Software, the company behind the Brave Browser, and his story continues to be referenced in discussions about workplace politics, free speech, and the tech industry.
It's sad, I'm sure there was a better path Mozilla could have taken, but they've had a decade or more of terrible management. I wonder if the non-profit / corp structure hasn't helped, or if it's just a later-stage company with a management layer who are disconnected from the original company's mission and strategy.
Who is Mozilla's core audience? From what I remember, it's not addon-users, as most users never have used even just a single addon.
> They literally have lost 90% of their market share from their peak,
To be fair, it's not entirely their own fault. Competition is strong, especially from Google and Apple. Even with perfect decisions, they likely would still have lost big since their peak. The market for alternative Browsers isn't as big any more as it used to be.
Their peak in share was also pre-chrome. They've basically been losing the battle slowly for over a decade.
If most users who install Firefox do so for superior adblocking and those same users are also very likely to turn off telemetry (which I think some privacy/adblock extensions probably do by default?), then at Mozilla's end one might get the impression that "most users don't use extensions" - even though the vast majority of users do.
So to answer the questions of:
> Who is Mozilla's core audience?
It's probably the kind of user that has telemetry off. You don't know much if anything about them.
> It's probably the kind of user that has telemetry off. You don't know much if anything about them.
Don't think so, most people don't give a f** about this. Tech-people on that level are even in the industry a minority. And on the other side, those stealth-users are worthless for Mozilla, because they can't make money from google with them. So for a project needing to make money with usersnumbers, everyone who is out of this, isn't core audience anyway.
If less than 4% of users use uBO, which the kind of users you're referencing claim is the primary reason they use Firefox, I doubt many users disable telemetry either.
I am thinking of it as: people who care about privacy and/or an independent web browser. That seems mostly in line with what the Mozilla Foundation's principles are stated to be.
Maybe it's not that. But if not, what is it? How do they otherwise have any positive differentiation versus their competition? It surely can't be claimed to be any sense of "users who want an AI browser" because surely those people are going to use ChatGPT's browser, not Mozilla's.
https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/usage-behavior
Relevant part from the site: [..]Add-on usage measured here reflects multiple facets of browser customization, including web extensions, language packs, and themes.[..]
40% is a big minority, but not really what I would call core audience, especially when language packs and themes are also counted here. And 5 of the top 10-addons in that statistic are language packs.
Though, UBlock Origin is #1 with 9.6% user-share, and it's shown to have 10.5 million users on the store-page, which means there are at best only around 100 Million users left with Firefox on desktop? Seems worse than I thought.
Source?
> over 40% of Firefox users have at least 1 installed add-on
There was an article from Mozilla, some years ago, going more into the details about this, but I'm not sure where. Though, I found another one[1] from 2021, which starts with only one third of the users having installed an addon.
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/blog/firefoxs-most-popular-innova...
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/extensions-addons/heres-...
The new CEO is just the final nail in their coffin.
That's exactly what the parent post is talking about. When Mozilla started prioritizing political correctness over software quality, software quality predictably declined. That's why they are struggling now: they reduced their user base to the tiny group of political extremists that will put up with an inferior product for the sake of political signaling.
By the way, Eich didn't “come out” as anything. His private donation (a mere $1000) was exposed by people who wanted to cancel him for his political views. It wasn't Eich who forced the issue, it was his political opponents, who do not tolerate any viewpoint diversity. Eich's views weren't even fringe or extreme at the time: Proposition 8 passed with support from the majority of Californian voters.
He doesn't have to share all of them, but we have to have enough overlap for him to consider me & my friends enough of a human being to share the same rights that he does.
As another commenter pointed out, there are beliefs heinous enough that will override the quality of optional software that I might choose to use.
But in any case, I've heard this argument before, and the timeline doesn't make sense. At the time he resigned, Chrome was very firmly ahead of Firefox, and given his track record with Brave, the idea that Eich would have single-handedly saved Mozilla is also pretty dubious to me.
It seems like a disingenuous and lazy talking point tailor made to blame the demise of Firefox on a culture war politics, when in reality it's the fact that Google was willing to throw much more time and resources at the browser market than a non-profit, unimpeded by the same sort of anti-trust and lack of development that brought Internet Explorer low.
That is a wildly uncharitable take. I'm not OP, but I believe that nobody, CEOs or otherwise, should be fired for their activities outside of work. That can be political beliefs, but doesn't have to be either. And yes, that means that sometimes someone whose beliefs you find repugnant is going to have a good job. That is the price of a free society, and I think it's worth it.
A society free enough to fund hatred, but not one free enough for employers to make decisions based on that?
On the other hand I think San Francisco is part of the Mozilla problem because it is less than an hour on the 101 to go see people at Facebook and Google yet they are distant from the 99% of of web developers and web users that live somewhere else whose use Firefox because they don't like what Chrome stands for.
I wish Mozilla was in Boulder or Minneapolis or Cleveland or Dublin or some other second-tier but vibrant city where they might have the capacity to listen to us rather than be in the same monoculture that brings us Chrome and Instagram.
People with an axe to grind always hide what Brendan Eich did behind "politics" which is a dishonest slight of hand.
Nobody knows this for sure. We do know that Eich was fired for political reasons, and not because of his technological direction.
This betrays a decision making process that prioritizes political correctness above leadership qualities and technical contributions.
> you can't donate to stop your own employees and users from having civil rights without repercussions.
Why not? Why can't the CEO of Mozilla have his own private political views just like anyone else, and donate his own private money to whatever democratic causes he likes?
This really isn't obvious to anyone except the people, like you, who view Mozilla as a political project first, and as a software project a distant second.
Firing your CEO for not being sufficiently aligned with the American Democratic Party only makes sense if you assume the purpose of Mozilla is to push American Democratic politics, rather than make good software that anyone in the world may use (spoiler alert: many users of open-source software are not American Democrats!)
Eich resigned.
> private political views
Donations are public material support. Not private views.
This is not what happened. He gave money to a cause with the explicit goal of using that money to prevent his coworkers and users from having equal civil rights based on an inalienable trait they were born with.
That's not an "American Democratic Party" alignment issue, and if you genuinely believe it is, your dog whistle may be broken. It's sounding an awful lot like a normal whistle.
He has a right to do that without fear of government retaliation. But Mozilla has a right to fire him for being a bad person because of it.
> A same-sex marriage lawfully performed in another state or foreign jurisdiction on or after November 5, 2008 was fully recognized in California, but Proposition 8 precluded California from designating these relationships with the word "marriage." These couples were afforded every single one of the legal rights, benefits, and obligations of marriage.
Note the last sentence!
Additionally, proposition 8 was not extreme. It was carried by a majority of California voters, and Barack Obama said at the time: “I personally believe that marriage is between a man and a woman” which is essentially what the proposition established too, though Obama opposed using a ballot proposition to settle the issue.
> He has a right to do that without fear of government retaliation. But Mozilla has a right to fire him for being a bad person because of it.
I never argued that Mozilla doesn't have the right to fire people for their political views. We're just establishing that Eich _was_ fired for his political views, and that that shows Mozilla had become a political organization first, and a technological company second.
In a politically neutral technology company there should be room for people who side with Barack Obama and the majority of Californian voters. The fact that that is not true of Mozilla proves it's not a politically neutral company; it's a political project that inherited a software project they are not particularly interested in maintaining except as a vehicle for further promoting their politics.
Equivocating speech and crime as both being "violence" (of similar class, deserving the similar response) is a fallacy that lets people justify murder in response to disagreement as long as it's deemed serious enough.
That being said, I disagree with Eich and it probably made sense for the org to let him go given how his views might impact public perception of Mozilla.
> He says he could begin to block ad blockers in Firefox and estimates that’d bring in another $150 million, but he doesn’t want to do that. It feels off-mission.
LOL the day that Firefox stops me from running what I want is the day I'll get rid of it.
Today the ability to run proper content blockers is still a selling point for Firefox but obviously wouldn't be if they started to meddle with that as well. (Has there ever been a more obvious case of anticompetitive behaviour than the biggest browser nerfing ad blocking because it's owned by one of the biggest ad companies?)
Other than customisation the only real advantage I see for Firefox today is the privacy angle. But again that would obviously be compromised if they started breaking tools like content blockers that help to provide that protection.
Edit: My Hitler parody of when Firefox introduced this (almost 10 years ago now!): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taGARf8K5J8
Also, a small minor detail here: We're not paying for firefox! why are so many people feeling entitled? Mozilla has to do something other than beg Google to survive. Perhaps we need a fork of firefox that is sustained by donations and is backed by a non-profit explicilty chartered to make decisions based on community feedback? I don't see a problem with that wikipedia-like approach, I don't think any of the forks today have a good/viable org structure that is fully non-profit (as in it won't seek profit at all). Mozilla has bade some bad decisions recently, but they're a far cry from the world-ended outcry they're getting.
If we don't donate to Mozilla and we don't pay them money, then we have to be the product at some point. Even if they don't it to be that way, they have to placate to some other business interests.
I hope the EU also pays attention, perhaps some of their OSS funding can help setup an alternate org.
Because some of us have supported, donated to, advocated for, and participated in the firefox and mozilla communities over the years, and feel betrayed by the abandonment of principles, kowtowing to adtech surveillance "features", and overall enshittification of a once beloved browser that we hoped would allow for an alternative to the chrome blob, as they once were to the atrocity that was internet explorer.
It's perfectly reasonable to call out foundations and organizations that utterly abandon and fail to live up to principles. Mozilla is just a PR wing for Alphabet and whitewashing the chromification of all browsers, at this point.
Ladybug and some other alternatives will come around. I don't see any future in which Mozilla returns to principles - the people leeching off / running the foundation won't ever be interested in returning to a principled stance, but to change the brand, or pursue profit, or some other outcome that is divergent from the expectations and consideration of the original supporters. They keep trying to commodify and branch out and waste insane amounts of money on nonsense, and hire CEOs that lose the plot before they ever start the job. Mozilla is functionally dead, for whatever vision of it a lot of us might once have had.
By the time they'd have a chance to fix anything, maybe it'll be practical to have an AI whip up a new browser engine and we'll all have bespoke, feature complete privacy respecting browsers built on the fly.
1. Why would I donate to Mozilla? Mozilla hates me.
2. When Mozilla was 30% of the browser market rather than 3%, they could have easily cleaned up on donations. If they had made whatever extension transition that they thought they needed to do but while protecting all contemporary extension capabilities and not using it as a power grab to limit user control, they'd still have 30% of the market. If they hadn't made the business decision to permanently be a wonky Chrome, people wouldn't think of them as a wonky Chrome.
3. Mozilla has plenty of money. If you can't create a sustainable browser with a billion and a half dollars in the bank and a fully-featured browser, it's because you don't want to. You already have the browser, you can't whine about how complicated it is to create a browser. Pay developers with the interest. Stop paying these useless weirdo executives a fortune.
But enough about Mozilla. If you're some Bitcoin or startup billionaire, I'll ask you the same thing. Firefox is sitting right there and licensed correctly. You want people to respect you and remember you nicely when you're dead? Take it, fork it, put that same billion and a half into a trust, and save an open door to the Internet at a time when it's really needed. You've won in life, it will be easy to make people trust you if your ambition is just to do good. Steal Firefox, put it on the right track, and people will flock back to it. I know Ladybird is interesting, but a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.
Do these people even know their users?
For example: Fedora Silverblue default Firefox install had an issue with some Youtube videos due to codecs. So I tried watching youtube on Chromium. Ads were so annoying I stopped watching by the second time I tried to watch a video. Stopped watching youtube until I uninstalled default firefox install and added Firefox from flathub. If the option to use a good adblocker gets taken away I 'll most likely dramatically reduce my web browsing.
P.S. Maybe someone ports Vanadium to desktop Linux? If firefox goes away that 'd be my best case desktop browser. Using it on my mobile ;)
By selling browser UI real estate to AI companies[0] they reduce the power Google has over them. If they get to the point where no individual company makes up a majority of their revenue, it allows them to focus on their mission in a much broader way.
[0]These will be very expensive listings should this feature become popular: https://assets-prod.sumo.prod.webservices.mozgcp.net/media/u...
There's no world in which 75% of your revenue coming from Google doesn't influence what you do. Even if it's not the main driver of all decisions, pissing off Google is a huge risk for them.
Why would there be any proof?
In 2021 they got $500M "royalties" (this is their payment from Google) with only $75k revenue from all other sources, including $7.5k donations.
many people stated that they are happy to do targeted donations (ie. money earmarked strictly for Firefox development only, and it cannot be used for bullshit outreach programs and other fluff)
and if they figure out the funding for the browser (and other "value streams") then they can put the for-profit opt-in stuff on top
The problem is the MBAs.
(Yes it's technically a company, but it's a company owned by a non profit.)
is that too much money for one person? well, apparently it depends on who do you ask. and even if the board members who approved it might thought it's too much, it still could have been cheaper than to fire the CEO and find a new one and keep Mozilla on track.
CEO compensation is usually a hedge against risks that are seen as even more costly, even if the performance of the CEO is objectively bad.
https://www.ecgi.global/sites/default/files/working_papers/d...
framing Mozilla/Firefox as some kind of bastion is simply silly - especially if it's supplied by the gigantic fortress kingdom of G, and makes more money on dividends and interest than on selling any actual products or services.
it's a ship at sea with a sail that's too big and a rudder that's unfortunately insignificant.
but whatever metaphor we pick it needs to transform into a sustainable ecosystem, be that donation or sales based.
The way to interpret Mozilla is that they're a dying/zombie company, fighting heroically to delay the inevitable.
You very much can if all the competitors are either a) ad-ridden, ai-infested, bloated monstrosities or b) don't provide the functionality people want. In that case, there's apparently lots of demand which could easily support either a pay-once or a low-subscription-fee model.
I don't think the rest of the world likes their dependencies on US companies and their love for surveillance.
Of course, to do it right means ensuring there's enough non-US organizational structure with the know-how to take over the project should things go pear-shaped, and oversight to spot of the pear is taking shape.
But that's what governments can do, assuming they don't want to be under the thumb of the US. ("Oh, you think tariffs are bad? We'll do to you like we did those ICC judges and shut off all your accounts.")
They could be lean and focus on firefox only.
Now they get 150m from google, spend just a part on firefox and rest on failures and hobby projects to get promoted.
If they were focued on core business, 1) they would have a war chest 2) they could leave off donations
https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4387539/firefox-money-invest...
Bonus points:
1. Multi layered approach to dealing with ads and other malware.
2. A committment to no AI or other bloat - that's not what I'm paying you for.
3. Syncable profiles.
- They were ahead of the game with extensions. Then everyone copied them.
- They were ahead of the game with tabs. Then everyone copied them.
- They were ahead of the game with containers. Then everyone copied them.
- They are still the best browser to use for an ad free internet experience.
- The only flaw I can think of, is they are not leaders in performance. Chrome loads faster. But that's because Chrome cheats by stealing your memory on startup.
How would you make FireFox better? When you say they should be making FireFox better, what should they be doing? Maybe they should hire you for ideas.
Because to me, they seem to be constantly trying to make FireFox better. It's just hit or miss.
Extensions was a hit. Tabs was a hit. Containers was a hit. They had a shit tonne of misses over the decades. We just don't remember them.
The crypto and ai stuff just happens to be a miss.
First, I would stop breaking up the stuff that works. Firefox was ahead of the game with extensions, then deprecated the long tail for a rewrite that took three years [1] (during which Firefox mobile had a grand total of 9 extensions) and even then it's hard for me today to know which extensions work on mobile. They were similarly ahead of the game with containers, and yet they still don't work on private mode [2] and probably never will. That's two out of three hits where they tripped over their own two feet[3].
Second, do the one thing that users have been requesting for decades: let me donate to the browser development. Not to the Mozilla Foundation, not to internet freedom causes, to Firefox. The Mozilla foundation explicitly says that they don't want to be "the Firefox company", and yet I'd argue they should.
Third, go on the offensive. I get the impression that, with the exception of ad-blocking, Firefox is simply playing catch-up to any idea coming from Chrome regardless of whether it makes sense or not. Would Firefox had removed FTP support had Chrome not done it before?
And fourth, make all these weird experiments extensions.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2023/12/14/three-years-after-its-reva...
[2] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1330109
[3] I always associated tabs with Opera, though.
[4] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2024/a...
Yeah as someone who picked up Firefox when it was Phoenix, it was “free Opera with a less-odd-feeling UI”. That was basically the initial (great!) sales pitch.
What got me installing it on any computer belonging to a person I would have to help support was the auto-pop-blocking and that it performed a ton better than IE/Netscape/Mozilla. Opera also performed better and I think it also blocked pop ups out of the box, but it wasn’t free (well, kinda, but the free edition… had ads).
Eliminate - both in code and by policy - anything that compromises privacy. If a new feature or support of a new technology reduces privacy, make it optional. Give me a switch to turn it off.
Stop opting the user into things. No more experiments. No more changing of preferences or behavior during upgrade.
Give the user more control; more opportunities for easy and powerful automation and integration.
Not only would this win me back as a user, I'd pay for the privilege. I'm paying for Kagi and happy to be doing so. I'd love to pay for an open source browser I could trust and respect.
On my laptop I had to switch from Firefox to Chrome because it kept filling up all of my RAM resulting in other applications crashing.
They were ahead of the game with extensions, then they destroyed their own extensions. They copied everyone else, not the other way around.
> - They were ahead of the game with tabs. Then everyone copied them.
They were ahead of the game with tabs. Then while destroying their extensions they made vertical tabs harder, while still leaving it as a charitable contribution by the community instead of an internal project, and slow-walked it for a decade. I still have to do weird CSS to make them look right, because they decided to have an opinionated sidebar for no particular reason.
> - They are still the best browser to use for an ad free internet experience.
This, again, is not their fault. It's because of a man who they don't pay, who has had to battle with them on multiple occasions. Their only contribution is not accepting a Chrome standard completely. Imagine wanting to be given credit for not exactly copying your neighbor, after an enormous amount of pressure was brought to bear. It's my belief that Google decided that Firefox wouldn't kill ad blocking in the end, because it would have looked horrible in antitrust court. Now that's over (Obama judges don't believe in antitrust), and you can expect Firefox to kill it soon enough.
> Because to me, they seem to be constantly trying to make FireFox better. It's just hit or miss.
Nah. They kept telling me, while ignoring everyone's complaints about their actual experiences, that the most important thing was to reduce startup time for some unknown reason.
What can Mozilla Firefox do to make their 500 million without Google?
I wish Firefox would be that browser.
Organizations with clear, focused missions are much more likely to be able to achieve them than organizations that want to be everything to everybody.
"Make and maintain Firefox as the best browser for people who care about internet freedom, privacy, and extensibility" would be a perfectly reasonable mission.
I do not want to try your AI tools, Mozilla, yours or anyone else's.
I dropped firefox 9 months so after they updated their privacy policy and removed "we don't sell your data" from their FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43213612
Mozilla has hired a lot of execs from Meta and bought an ad company, looking through a lot of their privacy policy at the time, a lot of it involves rewriting it to say that they can serve you sponsored suggestions when you're searching for things in their search bar and stuff and sharing out some of that data with third parties etc.
Firefox was bringing in half a billion a year for the last decade, if they would've just invested that money in low risk money market accounts (instead of paying their csuite executives millions of dollars in salary and putting the rest on non-Firefox related related social causes), the company would be able to easily survive off the interest alone.
I've been using Firefox since 2006 and have defended it for decades even when they've made questionable decisions that have gotten everybody upset with them. But this time it wasn't just making stupid decisions to try and fund the company, this time they actuality sold out their own customers.
In public announcement in the above link explaining why they removed "we don't sell your data" from the FAQ, the rationality was that some jurisdictions define selling data weirdly, they cited California's definition as an example but California's definition is exactly what I would consider the definition of selling my personal data.
They're justifying this by saying that they need it to stay alive since they're not going to be getting money from Google anymore, but I argue that you shouldn't sell out your customer base on the very specific reason anyone would choose you. I would rather pay a monthly fee to use Firefox to support them, but even if you gave them $500 million today they would just squander it away like they've done since forever so I really don't have any solution I can think of which frustrates me.
I switched to Orion (and use Safari if a site doesn't work in Orion), which can be a little buggy at times but I'm happy that it's not based on chrome at least.
As for calling it "off-mission": yes, what's even the point of FF if that's the route it goes on?
[1] https://github.com/mozilla-services/syncstorage-rs
[2] https://mozilla.github.io/ecosystem-platform/tutorials/devel...
[3] https://github.com/jackyzy823/fxa-selfhosting
> Do any of these forks have the ability to sync, either with Firefox or something self hosted?
The Firefox Sync web service is provided by Mozilla but can be self hosted: https://github.com/mozilla-services/syncstorage-rs. That could also be used in forks. See e.g. https://librewolf.net/docs/faq/#can-i-use-firefox-sync-with-... . I don't understand what you mean by sync with Firefox.
> Or are they all just basically reskins with a single toggle added or such?
Hard to generalize, but definitely not all of them. see e.g. https://lwn.net/Articles/1012453/
At any rate, I think their only good path of to get rid of Gecko.
The best would be to replace it with a finished version of Servo, which would give them a technically superior browser, assuming Google doesn't also drop Blink for Servo. It may be too late for this, but AI agents may perhaps make finishing Servo realistic.
The other path would be to switch to Chromium, which would free all the Gecko developers to work on differentiating a Chromium-based Firefox from Chrome, and guarantee that Firefox is always better than Chrome.
No they would get fired, unless Firefox found a new big project to earn money from, which at the moment is not very likely.
* Windows and Android. I even pay for their vpn because there is apparently no way to pay for the browser, which is what I actually use.
2018: $2,458,350
2020: Over $3 million
2021: $5,591,406.
2022: $6,903,089.
2023: ~$7m
Mozilla declined to detail the CEO's salaries for 2024+
In that set of circumstances, the main qualification for CEO is likely 'plays nice with Google'. Given that, I'm not surprised that Mozilla underperforms.
Beating Google in the browser market might be considered hostile to their sponsors.
If Mozzilla brings AI or removes ad blocks then they are every way just worse Chrome and there is zero reason to use them over Chrome.
I guess I should already start porting my Firefox extensions over to Chrome since this ship is sinking stupid fast.
Android blocking side loading is more or less in the same ballpark.
I don't know why bring up Android when it is already Google product.
The web standards are growing faster than non-profit engines can implement them. Google & Apple are bloating the web specs in what looks like regulatory capture.
If Blink/Webkit dominate for long enough, they will lock everything down with DRMs & WEI. Maybe it's time to work on lighter protocols like Gopher & Gemini that don't need 20GB of RAM to open 20 tabs ?
Is that actually the case though? I find it hard to believe that Mozilla has anywhere close to 1500 senior developers working on just Firefox. My guess is that the bulk of that money is spent on unrelated adventures and overhead.
The Mozilla Foundation has received around USD ~26 million in 2023 in donation from the Mozilla Corporation (~70%) and other sources (~30%).
That is the most vexing part. I want to donate for Firefox development. Not marketing, not side projects, let me just fund the devs. But no, that is not possible.
Blender is a huge success story relying on sponsors and donations, Wikipedia is swimming in money but no we can't just have a free browser.
No we need to have a Mozilla Corporation that lives on Google money for being the controlled opposition i.e. technically avoiding monopoly situation thing. After all CEOs can't get rich on donations, can they?
My image of Mozilla as a bastion for user first software just shattered.
[1]: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/get-started
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/on-device-models
totally uncharitable interpretation of the quote linked here aside, how is providing an interface for using fully local models not user first software?
> and thus ad-supported
What a sad view of the web. Advertisement is a net-negative for society.
The only way to avoid this is to just block ads - even unobtrusive content-relevant ads. You may think ads can't trick you, but that has been shown time and time again to be false.
Only what makes money has any value in their view. That's also why MBA types are the wrong type of person to run something like Mozilla.
NObody trusts mozilla anymore, specially after they turned into an add company and started paying their CEOs exorbitating ammounts, considering what was being invested in their core business (supposedly making a better browser).
I’m not sure why this has become a thing - usually I either release Waterfox the week before ESR releases (the week the code freeze happens and new version gets tagged) or, if I’m actively working on features and they need to coincide with the next update I push, I will release on the same Tuesday the ESR releases.
You can check the GitHub tag history for Waterfox to see it’s been that way for a good while :)
Speaking only for myself, and regardless of whether this is actually true (see sibling comment): yes. Absolutely. A non-privacy focused browser like Firefox has vulnerabilities/data leaks by design that are worse than hypothetical ones that I probably will not be subject to browsing my usual benign set of websites.
(Posted from Waterfox)
Firefox is only good for getting forked into better browser like Mullvad Browser, LibreWolf and Tor Browser.
So far, the most useful "AI feature" Firefox has ever shipped is the page translation system, which uses a local AI to work. I wouldn't mind seeing more of things like that.
Eventually, "browser use" skill in AIs is going to get better too. And I'd trust Firefox with an official vendor agnostic "AI integration" interface, one that allows an AI of user's choice to drive it, over something like OpenAI's browser - made solely by one AI company for its own product.
Curious if LibreWolf can survive the next 25 years or even longer than Firefox.
Ad blocking relies on the ability to use filters to block network requests at the browser level, and visual elements at the DOM level. "AI Browsers" are designed to add bloat to the browsing experience, by offering to summarize something, or providing contextual information like say, a product recommendation that pulls data from a third party site. Network request and DOM element blocking would instantly negate that.
I've moved to Librewolf myself.
It's truly impressive how they've managed to do every user-hostile trick Google Chrome also did over the years, except for no real clear reason besides contempt for their users autonomy I suppose. Right now the sole hill Mozilla really has left is adblockers, and they've talked about wanting to sacrifice that?
It truly boggles the mind to even consider this. That's not 150 million, that's the sound of losing all your users.
Someone could try to merge e,g, V8 and Servo, once that's in decent shape. But even then it'll be time consuming to build an acceptable UI, cookie and history management, plugin interface, etc.
This is an old article but has some good examples:
https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4387539/firefox-money-invest...
IMO they need to be more a crew of activists than they are now. Fight against stuff like intrusion of AI in every single part of our lives and such.
Call me petty but I still can't let this one go. At the time they basically stole the Firebird name from the database project and did not hesitate to use AOL's lawyers to bully the established owners of the name. So they didn't actually become shady over night. It's in their DNA.
Obviously we are not happy about ads, but we all understand that having money is pretty neat (if only to pay ones salary). Help the CEO fella: What great, unused options is Mozilla missing to generate revenue through their browser?
Closed source adware and crypto scams?!
Be the gang all f'n ready
I feel like this question has been valid for almost as long as I can remember (e.g. the Mr. Robot extension incident). I find myself struggling to tell if Mozilla is an inherently flawed company or if it's just inherent to trying to survive in such a space.
While it is not my main browser (Vivaldi is), I have 5 installs of Firefox Portable for different things, like one for YouTube, one for testing pages against Firefox and so on.
That's because their users are driven by opinions and principles, and those are the worst, most disloyal kind of users. They're always threatening to leave, and will take the slightest offense to do so.
Chrome wins because its user base doesn't care. The browser is just a tool, not a religion. It's installed, they use it, they're barely aware it exists and most of Joe Public doesn't even know Google makes it.
So sure. For you it's ad blockers. For someone else it's their donation plan. Or Google funding. Or their corporate structure. Or their management.
When your marketing is about something else, other than the product itself, you always end up with edge-case-customers.
People use Chrome because it's the best browser. Less than 3% use Firefox. And all I read from Firefox users is how bad everything is (or will be).
No, Firefox's market share isn't a foil to monopoly (Safari has 5 times more users. Crumbs Edge has twice the users.)
I care about Firefox, but I really just wish all the whiners would just do what they threaten and use something else. But they won't because everything else is worse (for some or other principles reason.)
Now I fully expect to be downvoted because the only people reading this article in the first place are Firefox whiners. Which is kinda my point.
It's pretty hard to recommend Firefox to others when everything written by existing users is so negative.
An ad blocker is a very useful tool. Being able to block ads effectively makes the browser much better. I'm not sure how you can call that "religion".
> People use Chrome because it's the best browser.
No they don't. They use Chrome because every Google service nags the shit out of them to use Chrome. People aren't as rational as you make them out to be.
So they need some kind of pivot.
It would be amusing if the only browser left that could run ad-blockers was Safari.
https://donorbox.org/ladybird
> I read this as “I don't want to but I'll kill AdBlockers in Firefox for buckerinos ”.
I completely disagree. First of all the original quote is paraphrasing, so we don't know in which tone it was delivered, but calling something "off-mission" doesn't at all sound like "we'd do it for money" to me.
It's so tone deaf that it is likely to probe the community into drastic action if he were to attempt to push that through. Including probably much of the developer community. I'm talking the kind of action that boils down to forking and taking a large part of the user base along. Which is why that would be very inadvisable.
The problem with being a CEO of a for profit corporation, which is what he is, is that his loyalty is to shareholders, not to users. The Mozilla Foundation and the corporation are hopelessly inter dependent at this point. The foundation looks increasingly like a paper tiger given the decision making and apparent disconnect with its user base which it is supposed to serve.
All the bloated budgets, mis-spending on offices, failed projects, fancy offices, juicy executive salaries at a time where revenue from Google continued to be substantial all while downsizing developer teams and actually laying some off isn't a great look. Stuff like this just adds to the impression that they are increasingly self serving hacks that don't care about the core product: Firefox. This new CEO isn't off to a great start here.
We actually need to consider the possibility that yes, it is. More precisely, that the new CEO is trying to do that.
It doesn't take a grand conspiracy to join an organisation on false premises. It's totally easy. You can, today, go join a political party without agreeing with them at all, with the intent to sabotage them. Or another organization, including a workplace.
And just like some people just lie for amazingly little reason, I'm increasingly convinced some people do this. Maybe for a sense of control, maybe because they think they'll get rewarded. For every person who holds a crazy belief in public, there's probably one who holds the same belief but doesn't feel the need to let others in on it. As the world gets more paranoid, it'll get worse, open fears are the top of the iceberg.
If Enzor-Demeo ends up tanking Mozilla, there are plenty of people who will be happy with that. It's not as if his career will be over, far from it. Ask Nick Clegg or Stephen Elop. We all need to wake up to the idea that maybe the people who are supposed to be on our side aren't actually guaranteed to be unless we have solid mechanisms in place to ensure it.
No, Mozilla has been tanking for a decade already. Less than 5% of market share, and zero mobile.
Look at browser stats, what they're doing is not working and asking them to continue doing it will kill them. They have to change or they will die.
Their core audience (people on this site) is shrinking constantly. You can not save them.
I feel like this is a case where a bunch of smart people like something so much, or the idea of something, that they've completely blinded themselves to the facts.
Or it could be it really was on the table since they just entered the advertising business and think AI is the future of Mozilla, a "fuck those freeloaders", heartfelt from the Porsche driving MBAs in Mozilla's management. Who knows. But it's a choice which interpretation one assumes.
Well, it would be a shot in the head. What would be the point of using Firefox if it can't block ads better than Chrome, and on mobile as well???
Doing so would not "bring in an additional 150 millions, or 50 millions, or 1 million! It would kill the product instantly.
Grow a pair already. And stop calling normal average "typical"
Firefox
Mozilla VPN
Mozilla Monitor
Firefox Relay
MDN Plus
Thunderbird
-
Some of these products are just repackaged partnerships.
-
Firefox - Funded by Google with the search partnership bringing in $500M in revenue. (free)
Mozilla VPN - Repackaged Mullvad VPN and using Mullvad servers.
Mozilla Monitor - Repackaged HaveIBeenPwned. (free)
Firefox Relay - No different to Simplelogin and not open source. (free)
MDN Plus - Be honest, you wouldn't pay for this since this was offered for a long time for free, MDN is already free.
Thunderbird - Most likely funded by Google (free) (using Firefox Search Revenue)
-
Be honest, would you pay for any of Mozilla's products when most of these can be found for free or close to free?
That is the problem.
Mozilla needs to figure out how much they need to maintain Firefox, nothing else. I suspect that's not the entirety of the $200 million they currently spend on "development costs". Everything else they receive in donations and partnership fees should go directly into an investment portfolio which will be used to keep Firefox development active in the future.
If they didn't care about anything else, the Google money could fund Firefox for at least two years per yearly fee.
I would pay for Firefox if it was focused on privacy and customizabilty, not telemetry and LLMs.
[0]: https://blog.thunderbird.net/2023/05/thunderbird-is-thriving...
*Though Thunderbird is Gecko-based so can be said in part, perhaps a significant one, they're depending on Firefox development.
As of right now Thunderbird doesn't make any money, it relies on 'Donations' which isn't at all sustainable.
I can see Thunderbird is planning to do a pro plan, but it is behind a waitlist so the total sum of revenue Thunderbird is making relative to Google's $500M deal is close to zero.
That means people can self host (for privacy and incase the private relays are unstable) and not give money to Mozilla.
Besides 1€/month is not going to cover anything of the costs to run the service.
the question is more "how to replace the free money from google by real clients,and still get the same margin as google free money"
I know most HN users are on Firefox, but they should get used to an alternative now, not when its inevitable death happens.
Our family is already super happy with Kagi as a web search engine, and it sounds like they're doing good things on the browser side too.
Instead I thought screw it and just went nuts deep into chrome, atleast it was more functional.
ps - ( apparently mozilla took it out sometime later , but to me the damage to its reputation was done)
Remember when Kodak ignored digital cameras and became irrelevant? That was bad because it decreased shareholder value. That will not be allowed to happen again.
Capital extraction is fundamentally opposed to user freedom. If we want an open web, we, the people need to be maintaining it and not rely on MBA types to do it for us.
If I could use something similar on Brave, I would go back in an instant.
My main issues with FF are that it is a battery hog on MacOS, doesn't have AV1 playing capabilities (or it has, but I would need to go through some configuring that I don't need to do in other browsers) and sometimes it stalls in certain pages (that's probably not FF fault, but that the web developers don't optimize for it... but still, it's not a problem on Brave, so, I don't really care for apologising for it).
Half a billion, they are both milking and lying to you
I'm not sure to what extent Mozilla actually functions as a nonprofit. All the bits one cares about (i.e. FireFox) are developed by the for-profit subsidiary, which is at least somewhat beholden to Google/Microsoft for revenue...
... they said. Not against users.
I will one day just add "Remove all ads on the page I am browsing" into my BROWSER_AI.md file.