Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

For me as a user it is, but is it for him as a CEO?

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.

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

Believe me when I say this but 99.99999% of the human population does not give a shit what is Firefox, Chrome, Edge, Brave, whatever.

Their survival is completely detached from how "good" it is. As long as it runs, opens a page, opens picture, plays video.

We all live in the tech bubble, to them its an "app" that is "annoying me with ads". And that if they know its an ad, not just part of the page. That is if they even know its a page, not just something my son told me to click if I want to go to "Facebook".

Nothing can kill Firefox, because it’s already dead for all practical purposes.

If you have the power to do something, saying you might do it but that you don't want to makes people imagine you'd do it. If you have a knife and talk about how you "might stab people, but don't want to", that's a very different message than having a knife and saying "obviously I'm not going to stab people, violence is not an option".

The latter reassures, the former depends heavily on what the recipient of the message thinks of you, and whether they can imagine you stabbing people.

If that quote was accurate, then either he just said something and wanted to wing it, or they should reconsider their communication strategists.

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.

> 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.”

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.

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.

Fewer devs, more bucks, big win for the execs on the short term.

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.

Categorically untrue and weird revisionism. Basically the opposite of what actually happened.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

Surely Mac is the only place there is a viable non-Chromium alternative (Safari)?

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).

WebKit is[1][2].

[1]: https://webkit.org/downloads/ [2]: https://webkit.org/webkit-on-windows/

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.

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.

Firefox literally was a mainstream browser at one point. Internet Explorer sucked. Safari didn't suck but it was nobody's favorite either except some really hard-core Apple fans.

Yes, Chrome was revolutionary when it came out. And yes, Firefox seemed to struggle with legacy architectural decisions that limited their ability to catch up. But Firefox was still differentiated and had a loyal fan base. Loyal fan base is exactly what can keep a project or product alive through a downturn. All they had to do was focus on the browser. They did some great things along the way like popularizing DoH. But it's 2025 and there's still no UI for switching profiles that any normal person might be able or want to use. Can you really blame people for giving up?

https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/usage-behavior

Their peak in share was also pre-chrome. They've basically been losing the battle slowly for over a decade.

Source?

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.

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.")

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 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...

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...

Anyone remembers when Firebug was released?

Today we have amazing dev tools in all browsers but back in the day Firebug was such a game changer.

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.

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.

[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/

Eich didn't suddenly come out against anything in 2014. People dug up his prior funding.

Demanding permanent ostracization for supporting a majority position is fairly anti-democratic. You can beat someone in a process (Eich's side lost) without demanding total victory forever or declaring more than half of a whole society as permanent villains. In 2008 55% of the US opposed gay marriage, 36% supported it.

https://poll.qu.edu/Poll-Release-Legacy?releaseid=1194

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.

Applying modern sensibilities to history is stupid.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20111017161259/http://www.quinni...

[2] https://www.politico.com/blogs/ben-smith/2008/08/obama-says-...

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.

Equivocating speech and crime as both being "violence" (of similar class, deserving 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.

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!)

I don't know why bring up Android when it is already Google product.

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.

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)

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.

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.