Mozilla's New CEO Confirms Firefox Will Become an "AI Browser"

If they go in this direction they're going full bore.

I love how with tech, now the only future that anyone can imagine is one that nobody but tech executives want.

The only fact that there is a "CEO" of Firefox is in itself asinine.

>> I’m not sure he knows the type of person that actually uses Firefox

I'm sure he does, but he is trying to get different users.

The problem Firefox has is that it has accumulated "problem" users who are only there because they've left everywhere else.

In other words, people didn't choose Firefox cause its better, they chose it because it "wasn't x". They were offended by some action of their last browser, and left.

This is the worst user demographic to have. They'll only hang around till you do something that offends them. Which will inevitably happen.

With 2% market share the goal of the new CEO is not to pander to existing users. It's to convince new users to switch because Firefox is better.

And after the acquisition it seems they abandoned the browser and it is independent again since 2023 [1]

[1] https://www.waterfox.com/blog/a-new-chapter-for-waterfox/

Your cursory search likely provided outdated info. [0] Quoting from it's maintainer: [1]

    Waterfox is independent again: [0]

    And System1 are an “ad-tech” company but the term should be used loosely. The ownership made sense as they are a search engine aggregator and they own a bunch of old school search engines like DogPile, InfoSpace etc. Nothing to do with what people associate ad-tech with, i.e. tracking you across the web or collecting personal data.

[0] https://www.waterfox.com/blog/a-new-chapter-for-waterfox/

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37435511

I recommend you check out Zen.

The thing is, market share reports don't show evidence that Mozilla is doing really important work. From reading the comments here, firefox's literal reason for existing is ad blocking and "not chrome". Compatibility with websites is on the decline, websites breaking on firefox are on the increase. Rust is one of the few positives that I can see yet Mozilla has transferred trademarks and "infrastructure assets" to a new rust foundation of some sort that seems to mean that they're now independent of Mozilla.

The internet market makers think that ad blocking is antisocial, so in fact mozilla's firefox only reason for being is that its not the internets favorite browser which is a hell of a mission statement to offer, but thats as generous an assessment as I can make with those fellows, hell I still use firefox out of habit but I always keep a chrome install for the times firefox just doesn't work, but even then I'm just lazy and even when running firefox I've never installed an ad blocker which seems to increasingly be firefox's reason for existence.

There is the Ladybird browser project:

https://ladybird.org/

I guess they will get a lot of interest after this new round of Mozilla bullshit.

For a few quarters until it kills the product. A golden parashute I guess ?

What platform are you on? I use Ungoogled Chromium on desktop (uBlock Origin still works if you install it from GitHub) and Cromite on mobile (some AdBlock built-in), mainly because both of these just give you a clean and compatible browser without any frills. I noped out of Firefox back whenever it was that they started prompting me to make an account to sync every time I opened it, but I still use LibreWolf at work to test compatibility.

Do you mind catching me up on what happened to Arc? It was a HN darling IIRC and now I get very "we don't talk about it anymore" vibes.

I jumped to Vivaldi. I was drawn to it by the amount of personalization it offers and after spending a bit of time setting it up to my liking it is now my daily browser.

I don't use the integrated calendar or mail client, just the browser and you don't notice these features are even there since they don't spam you.

It is chromium based however.

Check out Helium. I switched from Brave to try it out and works pretty great. Just no Widevine support (though possible on Linux).

I'm also still a FF user, but I'm eyeing Waterfox [1] and Floorp [2], both FF forks. Waterfox has the stronger privacy focus out of the two, but Floorp doesn't strike me as being any less private that vanilla FF.

1: https://www.waterfox.com/

2: https://floorp.app/

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned Librewolf. It had sensible defaults and just works. I barely care about the privacy aspects. I just don't want to touch the settings

I‘ve been a happy user of https://helium.computer for a few months now after a previous Mozilla faux-pas. So far I don’t miss Firefox in the slightest

Probably lynx. If a website doesn't work on lynx it probably doesn't respect you either.

firefox has several privacy focused forks. waterfox, librewolf and zen are options.

Those are related, not duplicates.

I can't speak for everyone, but as a certified Firefox Preferrer my concern is this:

One day I will update my browser (after putting it off for a few days since the "restart Firefox to apply updates" button appears) and my user chrome will be moved around to make room for some new star/diamond-shaped button or additional side-panel, then I'll have to dig around in the settings or about:config to disable it and maybe even tweak my userChrome.css to accommodate it. From then on my list of things to do every time I set up Firefox on a new device will be one item longer, and I will feel ever more like my core tools do not have my interests at heart as I have to hack away at extraneous bits and pop open the hood to fiddle with knobs to get them to work normally without looking like a billboard for useless and half-abandoned features.

It was that coupled with his oddly specific statement of banning ad blockers bringing in $150mm like they modeled it already. Two exact opposite statements you'd want from the CEO of the last bastion of sanity in the internet browser landscape.