[HN Gopher] The Mozilla Cycle, Part III: Mozilla Dies in Ignominy
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The Mozilla Cycle, Part III: Mozilla Dies in Ignominy
Author : holysoles
Score : 73 points
Date : 2025-11-22 20:21 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (taggart-tech.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (taggart-tech.com)
| undeveloper wrote:
| This is a very pessimistic post about mozilla, and a lot of it is
| warrented -- but also it's trivial to disable the AI stuff. dead
| simple. so until that day comes, I'll still be supporting mozilla
| (for now, using firefox relay). It looks like till then google
| will be propping up mozilla to avoid looking like a browser
| monopoly, and i'm not sure about a future where the community
| maintains the remains of the firefox source.
| nicce wrote:
| It is not about disabling AI; rather all the made effort for AI
| is away from something else.
| sir_pepe wrote:
| It does not count as "easy" if the features don't stay
| disabled.
| undeveloper wrote:
| I have had no issues with this, but n=1.
| zzo38computer wrote:
| Maybe it is possible to make it (and other functions) to stay
| disabled by the enterprise policies file.
| m000 wrote:
| The problem with AI integrations in Firefox is not in whether
| they could be disabled or not.
|
| Given that Mozilla Foundation isn't swimming in cash,
| "investing" in AI (a well known money sink) makes very little
| sense and will definitely undermine the development of their
| core product (the freaking browser).
|
| Also, the timing of their Nov. 13 announcement is pretty bad.
| There is already chatter that AI may be a bubble bigger than
| the dotcom bubble. For a company that doesn't have deep
| pockets, it would be prudent to take the back seat on this.
| tempest_ wrote:
| I mean maybe it needs to be said again but
|
| > Given that Mozilla Foundation isn't swimming in cash,
| "investing" in AI (a well known money sink) makes very little
| sense and will definitely undermine the development of their
| core product (the freaking browser).
|
| The browser doesn't make any money (the Google search bar
| money would not be replaced by another entity if they
| stopped). That is why Microsoft abandoned theirs and why
| Safari is turning in to IE. Every one of these threads
| lambasting Mozilla for the "side projects" doesnt seem to
| have an answer for how does mozilla make money.
|
| Often it will be people complaining they can't "donate
| directly to browser development" not realizing that it will
| be peanuts compared to the google money. Most people in the
| market wont pay for a web browser.
| dale_glass wrote:
| > Also, the timing of their Nov. 13 announcement is pretty
| bad. There is already chatter that AI may be a bubble bigger
| than the dotcom bubble. For a company that doesn't have deep
| pockets, it would be prudent to take the back seat on this.
|
| Unless Mozilla plans to spend millions on cloud GPUs to train
| their own models, there seems to be little danger of that.
| They're just building interfaces to existing weights somebody
| else developed. Their part of the work is just browser code
| and not in real danger from any AI bubble.
| sfink wrote:
| It could still be at risk as collateral damage. If the AI
| bubble pops, part of that would be actual costs being
| transmitted to users, which could lead to dramatically
| lower usage, which could lead to any AI integration
| becoming irrelevant. (Though I'd imagine the financial
| shocks to Mozilla would be much larger than just making
| some code and design irrelevant, if Mozilla is getting more
| financially tied to the stock price of AI-related
| companies?)
|
| But yeah, Mozilla hasn't hinted at training up its own
| frontier model or anything ridiculous like that. I agree
| that it's downstream of that stuff.
| kev009 wrote:
| It's pretty clear opportunists displaced the software
| ideologues at Mozilla a long time ago, but I still find the
| products to be more palatable than alternatives. It would take
| a long time to burn off all relevance of Firefox and
| Thunderbird even without adequate maintenance.
| pdpi wrote:
| It's also trivially easy to disable ads in the Windows start
| menu, but the fact that they're even there is shocking.
|
| I use Firefox because I want to do at least _something_ to keep
| the web browser market from becoming a monoculture again, but
| they're making it increasingly hard to justify.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Sadly Firefox has been out of our browser matrix for several
| years now, it is only taken into consideration by FE teams
| when the customers explicitly ask for it being supported.
|
| I also use because I care, but at 3% hardly any business does
| any longer.
| wredcoll wrote:
| I had a ceo type person ask me just last week if we were
| testing on firefox and I kinda did a double take.
| psyclobe wrote:
| Huh, I sorta like my ai pane in Firefox..
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| I also liked Pocket integration.
|
| But the naive purists seem determined to team up with the
| genuinely evil in every walk of life, so Chrome monoculture
| seems inevitable.
|
| And it's not like Google or Microsoft is going to do anything
| with AI that is worse than this, right?
| espeed wrote:
| Someone needs to convince Firefox rather than develop its own AI
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45926779) to develop a
| system to pipe your html rendered browsing history in real time
| so external local services can process it
| (https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/archive-your-browser-
| hi...). See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45743918
|
| Firefox probably won't suddenly have the best AI, but they could
| have the only browser that does this.
| Am4TIfIsER0ppos wrote:
| They'd probably reject that idea under some bullshit privacy or
| security excuse Wayland-like reasoning. Also why we don't have
| XUL extensions anymore and why they'll eventually copy chrome
| on that manifest crap.
| D13Fd wrote:
| I don't really care that much about the AI junk. But I'm on my
| very last straw with Firefox. Recent mobile versions just cannot
| seem to remember any default search engine setting other than
| Google. It drives me insane that they can do all these other
| things but the search engine bug has lingered for weeks.
| sfink wrote:
| This article is annoying. It's not wrong, but it also doesn't
| come across as terribly relevant without suggesting some vaguely
| plausible alternative. The closest it comes is that everyone
| should go back to using "regular" search engines that will return
| "regular" pages. and that if all the players (browser makers +
| search engines) did that then everything would be just fine.
|
| That'd be great, if that pristine Web still existed to search and
| people were happy with today's results of searching it. But in
| the real world, the Web is a pile of auto-generated and auto-
| assembled fragments of slop, SEO-optimized to death, puddled atop
| and all around the surviving fragments of value. (The value is
| still there! I suspect the total value in the Web has never
| stopped increasing. Just like those monkeys are always typing out
| more and more Shakespeare.) Also in the real world, people are
| decisively choosing the AI-generated summaries and fevered
| imaginings. Not for everything, but web search -> URL -> page
| visit is becoming a declining percentage that won't always be
| able to support everything that it does today.
|
| It's not that I particularly want AI in my browser. I would say
| that I emphatically don't, except that automatic translation is
| really nice, and Firefox's automatic names for tab groups are
| pretty cool, and I'm sure here and there people will come up with
| other pieces. I'm actually ok with AI that targets real needs,
| which is 0.01% of what people are pushing it for. But I also
| think that we're past the point where NOT having AI in the
| browser is a sustainable position. (In terms of number of users
| and therefore financially.)
|
| Should Mozilla be head over heels in love with AI, as it appears
| to be now? I'd definitely prefer if it weren't. But telling
| Mozilla "don't do bad thing, it'll make you irrelevant and have
| no users" is fine and dandy but ultimately pointless unless you
| have an alternative that doesn't require the entire world to
| cooperate in turning back the clock.
|
| (Disclosure: Mozilla pays me a salary to write bugs.)
|
| (And working code! I write some of that too!)
|
| (And no, I currently don't do anything that adds AI to the
| browser, nor can I think of anything I'd want to work on that
| would add any AI.)
| cbondurant wrote:
| I don't particularly care about mozilla so much as I care about
| Firefox, gecko, and the continued existence of at least ONE other
| browser.
|
| I don't want to use a blink based browser. If/When mozilla
| finally dies I don't have high hopes that Firefox won't just die
| with it.
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