Mozilla Thunderbolt

The EU didn’t make these mandatory. They’re a form of malicious compliance, executed so that the common perception is that these laws are there to get in the way of regular folks.

Most websites shouldn’t require cookie pop-up. They do because they’re spying on you in some way and need to notify you of that.

I love them. They are not mandatory, only shady websites that rather sell users information than providing a barely functional homepage. Yes the popups suck, but I'm very happy that this exposes the behavior and priorities of the industry.

You clearly misunderstand when they are required and how they are legally required to work, the key points (as I take them) that are often misunderstood are:

* They are not about cookies, but any persistent identifier

* If a identifier is needed for your core functionality (ads/tracking is not a core functionality) and not misused for other purposes you do not need consent

* It is required to be as easy to decline as it is to consent

* Not consenting is not allowed to degrade or gate the content

* Even if you consent to tracking/cookies you should be allowed to withdraw that consent

Do you not agree with these points?

>"99.9%"

I despise "centrist-moderation" just like any other guy but maybe "entrepreneurial dignity" is not 100% of something but 65\pm1% homeownership

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mapped-europes-homeownershi...

I think a piece of software running on donations is not running off "charity". It's just a business model to not charge every user. Similar to how Twitch streamers operate, or my local theater group.

You can read how they spent money in 2024 [1].

[1] https://blog.thunderbird.net/2025/10/state-of-the-bird-2024-...

So yeah, especially in light of the lightning bolt logo and "thunderbolt.io" domain name, I think it's confusing enough that I'm honestly surprised there's no "Thunderbolt is a registered trademark of Intel Corporation used under license" notice on the site.

Though from Thunderbolt 3 onward Intel has been the sole developer.

The Mozilla org continues to produce a very capable browser, but it's now 3rd or fourth fiddle on a stage their misteps helped orchestrate in their demotion.

Edit: clarification

While it is meant to be an alternative to Chrome's profile switching, it is more a workaround than a complete replacement. I need entirely different sets of extensions for personal, work, and school environments, something containers can't do.

Firefox's actual profile support is beyond terrible. To launch a separate instance, Firefox requires many more clicks than Chrome, all within a Windows-2000-style UI. Not to mention that there are weird glitches in their implementation.

Firefox is not usable for me until they actually spend time improving their multiple profile support.

1. The inability to set a specific page for new tabs to open on. That is ridiculous.

2. The mobile version sucks, specifically because bookmarks are buried under an absurd number of menu levels. And they're also broken up (without user approval or any way to stop it) into "mobile" and "desktop" bookmarks. WHY? The entire point of syncing is to have them all the same.

I want to like Firefox. I went back to Firefox for the first time in decades last year and gave it up after a couple months because #2 was that annoying. So brain-dead.

Oh yeah, and another one was that "never remember history" does, in fact, remember history. What Firefox really does is "stop adding to history." And the bug report on it resulted in several YEARS of debate over how to "fix" it. The latest I saw is that they're actually NOT going to fix it, but rather add more text (somewhere) to say basically, "This doesn't do what you think it's going to do."

If fixing a defect like that requires years of committee back-and-forth, the product is finished.

- PWA support on Linux

- better performance

- devtools should be able to handle sites with large amounts of js with sourcemaps

- fix a number of bugs that have been open for a long time

- don't lag behind standards as much (I'm not talking about things where they intentionally don't implement problematic "standards" pushed by google)

- make it feasible to embed gecko in other projects similar to how chromium is used by electron and webkit is used in "webviews"

See e.g.

https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1ljns9o/freshly_re...

Debugging the extension on Chrome, it works great. On Firefox, it is nearly impossible. There are a litany of compatibility issues that make it "different" than Chrome, despite the extension being very much standards based. It is really frustrating and makes me dread getting bug reports.

To be fair, Safari is even worse and I haven't even touched Edge yet.

As much as I'd love to have options in the marketplace, standards based compatibility between offerings should be a top line requirement.

[0] https://oj-hn.com

It seems like every thread talking about Firefox always has someone asking that question, so if you search back you should find plenty of reasons. Unfortunately, it’s been my observation that valid and polite criticisms always get downvoted. I don’t understand why. It’s not like downvotes are going to make the problems disappear.

Most of us would like Firefox to succeed, and it’s none of our faults that Mozilla is constantly neglecting it and going off on wild goose projects which get promptly abandoned.

Mozilla's continued existence in recent history has relied on money from their primary competitor to stay in operation. Some have argued that doing seemingly unrelated projects like the one announced today is an effort to buy their freedom as it were. I'm arguing that's a distraction and that something closer to Linux or wiki foundation model would allow them to concentrate their efforts where it makes the most sense, as their current governance model is inherently based on a conflict of interest.

Opera was also a technically excellent browser, and we've seen that that alone is not enough to justify its existence in the long term.

https://github.com/thunderbird/thunderbolt/blob/main/docs/fa...

I see Firefox now as the new Opera, a technically good browser making dubious extensions that no one asked for until it dies a slow, spiraling death. My plea is simply to not go down that road any further...

The fact that is being run like one, albeit poorly is exactly the problem.

I don't think you realize the irony in calling my post childish here. "C'mon" I guess?

Microsoft stopped building their own browser engine because it didn't suit their business needs and they could still get a controlling share with significantly less effort by recycling webkit/blink for the umpteenth time. That makes total sense for them. Mozilla has, in the past, guided and pushed back on corporate interests.

Today, a large portion of the web now stands, built from the bones of the original khtml project, which was unceremoniously made by a handful of volunteers on the KDE project. Let's not pretend a rendering engine it's an entirely _impossible_ task. It is a LOT of work, and I laud the effortor of the few tireless individuals that make it their work, but in the end it's another piece of software, not unlike an OS. The history goes:

KHTML -> WebKit -> Blink

Meanwhile:

Mosaic -> Netscape -> Gecko

Maybe we find maintaining the second lineage is too great a burden and the web just becomes a defacto standard, guided entirely by 3 corporations. It's not what we want, but I guess at this point it's probably what we deserve.

Investing on AI is not going to make them less financially reliant on Google.

I want them to go cap-in-hand to other countries and say "if you don't fund us then you are letting the US and surveillance capitalism get between your citizens and their government" and "do you really know what Chrome is doing with your data?"

I don't want to pretend they are simply part of a browser marketplace, but rather have them realize they are part of a civil rights effort, with powerful non-market forces they can ally with.

And I want those governments to commit to progressive enhancement guidelines like https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/technology/using-progressi... so new alternatives like Ladybird can start, and further require their agencies to test on a Firefox branch with no AI, no location tracking, full ad-blocking, etc. because while the market is free to ignore certain non-profitable users, a government should not be allowed to ignore some of its citizens.

I don't see a contradiction there.

The world may need Firefox but it's funny how people complain about Mozilla's dependence on Google while also complaining about every attempt to become more financially independent from Google.

https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share

If you were not working with Mozilla Asian area, you know far too less. They had a browser in China that redirect to different website for profit before every connection and some affiliation. By doing so, is it privacy or not? Oh, look at Mozilla Japan volunteers, they shut everything up because things went wrong.

They're certainly doing better than others in this space, but their track record does not inspire confidence for anyone concerned about their privacy and data.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla#Controversies

Coming soon the browser rebrand to Thunderfox! :)

https://github.com/servo/stylo

Nevertheless, AI use is not what really stood out to me. It’s that it’s SO MUCH CODE. I have no idea how you guys maintain or reason about the quality or security of something like this. Good luck, I guess.

  Language      Files     Lines   Blanks  Comments     Code
  ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
  TypeScript      760    109110    14500      7397    87213
  JSON             41     22056        6         0    22050
  Markdown         56      7150     2086         0     5064
  YAML             33      3965      406       208     3351
  ... and many more with fewer than 1k lines

Especially curious because I see a whole lot of hardcoded english text in there…

I just checked one old take home task in Angular I did last year and the total number of lines is over five million over 35k+ files.

https://ghloc.vercel.app/thunderbird/thunderbolt?branch=main claims 141k and most of it is Typescript.

Floorp comes with additional custom interface features, workspaces (tabs grouping) and mouse gestures. And bit better profiles feature - Mozilla decided to redo it recently which lead to some problems.

Mullvad has build in VPN, DoH and proxy as an extension, and comes with uBo and NoScript.

There's Zen browser that has a quite uncommon UI, and obscure Pale Moon that IIRC still tries to provide old XUL/XPCOM extensions - which often leads to pages rendering issues.