[HN Gopher] Mozilla's open source AI strategy
___________________________________________________________________
Mozilla's open source AI strategy
Author : nalinidash
Score : 177 points
Date : 2026-01-13 12:00 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.mozilla.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.mozilla.org)
| oidar wrote:
| That sounds admirable. But it doesn't sound like a fast browser.
| everyday7732 wrote:
| That's because the article isn't about a browser - it's a tech
| stack for running ai.
| TheCraiggers wrote:
| Well it does say that compute is a current bottleneck, but I
| doubt that'll stay that way forever. There's a ton of resources
| going into making AI run locally, quickly. It's already gotten
| loads better just last year.
| striking wrote:
| Maybe, but I would argue that some of these features are
| genuinely useful and important. Take translation, for example.
| It's not great to have to send off a page that potentially
| contains identifying content to Google, but it is the easiest
| way to handle the matter. Firefox uses local AI to perform a
| decent translation relatively quickly, and I'd like them to
| work on improving that capability.
| bondarchuk wrote:
| Many things that are not browsers are genuinely useful and
| important, this alone doesn't mean Mozilla should be doing
| them.
| striking wrote:
| Translation is a necessary part of the web browsing
| experience for many people.
| bluebarbet wrote:
| Agreed on all counts. Right now there's not even a keyboard
| shortcut implemented (fiddly context menu only), and the
| translations are sometimes dodgy too, but I still use it.
| It's such peace of mind to know that the translation is
| happening entirely locally.
| LunaSea wrote:
| I'm really not optimistic about this initiative.
|
| - Mozilla.ai agent platform: No link with the browser. Just a
| closed-source SaaS competitor to the many existing agentic
| platforms like LangChain / LangGraph.
|
| - Mozilla Data Collective: It's been made clear now that sadly
| data licensing doesn't matter and if you use less data than your
| competitor, your model will be inferior.
|
| - Real deployments: Basically getting into the public contracts
| and consulting grift with no priori experience. Probably banking
| on EU open source funding & co.
|
| - Mozilla Ventures: Redistributing a token amount of the money
| they are already not making (gift from Google) to fund Open
| Source research.
|
| - Newsletter
| everyday7732 wrote:
| Looks like the Mozilla.ai platform is Saas but the tools
| themselves are open source, so you could just use them
| elsewhere.
| LunaSea wrote:
| Indeed, but LangChain / LangGraph tools are also Open Source
| so its not really Mozilla bringing their Open Source culture
| as a differentiating factor from their competitors.
| everyday7732 wrote:
| Ah. I had assumed that these were tools built or
| contributed to by Mozilla.
| LunaSea wrote:
| Mozilla is indeed developing some Open Source AI tools
| which will then be used in their proprietary and paying
| SaaS AI agent platform.
|
| What I meant to say is that existing competing solutions
| like LangGraph and LangChain are already Open Source
| themselves. So releasing Open Source AI libraries is not
| a new twist that Mozilla is bringing.
| drnick1 wrote:
| Mozilla has stopped being relevant to open source long ago. It's
| are every bit as corporate as Google these days.
| cubefox wrote:
| That's completely false!
| pacman1337 wrote:
| You probably like watching ads because Firefox is only browser
| you will have a true ad free experience. Unfortunately Firefox
| is slower than chrome has less support for audio, copy pasting
| is broken etc. So I use both depending what I am doing.
| marczellm wrote:
| What's a hyperscn/laller?
| realberkeaslan wrote:
| Hyperscalers (e.g., Azure, Google Cloud, AWS)
| nusl wrote:
| I guess replies on this thread are evident that Mozilla has lost
| much of the trust and goodwill it once enjoyed. Admittedly I am
| also very skeptical that Mozilla has the ability or genuine
| interest to make this work.
| rzmmm wrote:
| I'm hopeful. The open source AI ecosystem could benefit from
| large players like Mozilla making moves.
| wolvoleo wrote:
| In what world is Mozilla large?
| Larrikin wrote:
| There is always a pile on on Firebox for not being perfect.
| Sometimes with valid complaints. But if you dig deeper nearly
| always the commenter is using a version of Chrome and justifies
| it over Firefox for a very shallow or outdated reason. Firefox
| would do well to listen to some of the criticism about the
| browser and ignore the noise about anything else
|
| There's also the cohort of bad web developers that only test on
| Chrome
| pjmlp wrote:
| Including everyone that ships Chrome with their application
| as "native" app.
|
| VSCode gets a pass, because apparently it is the only
| programmer's editor that many only care about providing
| plugins nowadays.
| no_wizard wrote:
| The ubiquity of their plugin model is why. Near all editors
| have a VS code plugin compatible layer
| pjmlp wrote:
| Yeah, and with it Eclipse wins a second time, especially
| on embedded where Eclipse CDT forks were replaced by
| VSCode forks.
|
| "Project Ticino: Microsoft's Erich Gamma on Visual Studio
| Code past, present, and future"
|
| https://www.theregister.com/2021/01/28/erich_gamma_on_vs_
| cod...
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > Near all editors have a VS code plugin compatible layer
|
| Huh, never heard about this before, and took a look at
| emacs and vim/neovim as those are the two most popular
| editors I know of, neither can run VS code plugins,
| that'd be crazy if true.
| freedomben wrote:
| Very long time vim/neovim user here. I can't remember
| names atm and can't check, but I have definitely seen
| plugins that run a headless or subset of VScode in the
| background to pull info from it. It may not be super
| common, but it is being done
| devsda wrote:
| You are probably referring to language support plug-ins.
|
| IIRC, debugger support for java needed a component from
| one of the official plug-ins.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| If you count LSP (Language Server Protocol) as a VSCode
| plugin-compatible layer as LSP was built and standardized
| by the VSCode team (so many do), then Emacs and Neovim
| are _full_ of VSCode-compatible plugins today. One of
| Neovim 's selling points right now over bare Vim is
| better/more direct LSP support.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| Ah, if LSP is what parent meant with "VS code plugin
| compatible layer" then what you say makes sense, I
| personally also moved from vim to neovim mainly because
| of better LSP support.
|
| But I understood "VS code plugin compatible layer" to
| mean there is something that lets you run VSCode plugins
| with other editors, which is what I haven't seen anywhere
| (yet?).
| iLemming wrote:
| Except Emacs doesn't have "plugins". They are called
| "packages" and not plugins for specific reasons - they
| are more like libraries than plugins. In Emacs, one can
| change/override the behavior of any function (built-in or
| third party) with some enormous flexibility not easily
| achievable in other editors.
| morcus wrote:
| As someone that uses Firefox as my main browser on desktop
| and mobile, I am curious here - what exactly are the
| complaints with Firefox?
|
| I'm using 3+ year old hardware that was mid-range even when
| it was new and it seems to do everything I would want with
| reasonable performance.
| soganess wrote:
| Major problems with Firefox include: - full
| uBlock support - the ability to still be themed
| - first-party isolation
|
| ...Okay, okay, I'm being too cheeky.
|
| The common wisdom is that overall Firefox can feel
| bottlenecked at render and draw times ("less snappy"). That
| could be a result of a slower JavaScript engine (takes
| longer to get to drawing), or a result of poorer hardware
| acceleration (slower drawing), or a less optimized
| multiprocessing/multithreading model (more resource
| contention when drawing).
|
| I honestly can't see it in the real world, but synthetic
| benchmark are pretty clear on that front.
| Yoric wrote:
| Hum.
|
| I have at home 13 year old hardware running Firefox and no
| performance complaints.
| LunaSea wrote:
| > what exactly are the complaints with Firefox?
|
| If you are a (the) leading browser like Firefox once was,
| the "what are the complaints?" is the right question.
|
| If you are a minor browser like Firefox currently is (~2.5%
| market share), the "what is it doing better?" is the
| correct question.
| jampekka wrote:
| The Firefox market share was eaten largely by the
| enormous and legally dubious marketing campaigns by
| Google and Microsoft. Hard to see how Mozilla could
| compete with constant forced nags and defaults in the
| most widely used websites and operating systems.
| LunaSea wrote:
| The Firefox market share was eaten by being worse than
| Chrome, especially around the developer tools and
| extensions market places at the time.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| There's a lot of opinions and anecdata in that. Firefox
| was almost never as bad as it was marketed to be (by its
| competition), and Chrome was certainly never as good as
| it was marketed to be (by an evil ad company pretending
| to be a good, well adjusted internet benefit company).
| dandellion wrote:
| I don't know why people left Firefox, but I know why *I*
| did. And it was three or four years ago (after using it
| for 15 years) because I got annoyed at them for removing
| many features that I used over the years, and because I
| tried a Crommium based browser and it just had better
| performance and better ad-blocking. That's just one
| anecdote, but feel free to correlate it with other
| anecdotes to find some patterns and reach your own
| conclusion.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| My father, who is very non-technical has never left
| Firefox and stuck with it for decades, even against
| Microsoft and Chrome's tactics to try to claim default
| browser and constantly install them into his face. My
| father particularly hates Chrome because he never
| understands how it keeps reinstalling itself despite his
| best efforts. His taskbar is often a mess of all three
| browsers because he can't figure out how to keep Edge and
| Chrome unpinned. My father sees Chrome installing itself
| and auto-pinning to his taskbar and Start Menu as the
| _exact same_ IE-level adware /spyware shenanigans that
| led to him fleeing to Firefox in the first place.
|
| I returned to Firefox again after years of IE8+ and
| Spartan Edge. I've never liked the "mouthfeel" of Chrome,
| have generally felt it to be bloated and slow and ad-
| heavy adware (though not as strongly as my father and I
| often do know how Chrome gets backdoor installed through
| shameful adware deals like with Adobe), and when Edge
| switched to being just another Chromium I still felt the
| same in my dislike of Chromium and I went back to
| Firefox. (Spartan Edge had _so much_ better performance
| and battery usage than Chromium. It 's death was not
| mourned by enough people.)
|
| Feel free to correlate these two counter-anecdotes with
| more and see if you find some patterns to reach your own
| conclusion. That's the fun of anecdata and marketing,
| there are patterns on every side, you can interpret it
| how you want. "Popularity" isn't facts, pattern matching
| based on popularity of certain anecdotes can lead to
| incorrect conclusions. _Especially_ when Marketing is
| involved. Marketing is about making popular things that
| aren 't necessarily facts, especially when an advertiser
| is unscrupulous and no one is busy enforcing truth in
| advertising laws.
| zamadatix wrote:
| It was a big factor, but so were things like the way they
| treated their mobile browser for years and years, which
| is the platform 2/3 of browser traffic now originates.
|
| According to statcounter's stats, Firefox never cracked
| 1% of monthly mobile traffic any month from when stats
| started in 2009. Even Opera and UC have more than double
| Firefox's average for the last year and they are just
| Chromium forks users are downloading off the stores.
| Yoric wrote:
| For context, I recall that for years and years, Firefox
| was the highest ranked mobile browser. Mozilla invested a
| lot in mobile, Firefox devs had to rewrite the Android
| linker, invent new ways of starting binaries on Android,
| etc. just to make Firefox work (all of which were later
| used by Chrome for Android).
|
| It still didn't make a dent in mobile browser shares.
|
| Sure, Mozilla could have invested even more in Firefox
| mobile, but at some point, this would have come at the
| expense of Firefox desktop, which was the source of ~100%
| of the funding.
| zamadatix wrote:
| What Firefox was doing 4 months after Android 1.0 GA'd
| would indeed been unlikely to have made a dent in mobile
| share compared to what effort was going on once Android
| had a billion users. Why put all of that effort in before
| something is even used to just then let it rot for years
| anyways? In the end, they ended up spending the resources
| to refresh it in 2019 anyways - by which time billions
| had already decided Firefox was just a battery hog and
| slow on mobile.
|
| It's a sad story because Firefox was so good on mobile
| when nobody had a chance to use it then it was crap when
| they did. On desktop Firefox is still the #1 non-bundled
| browser, things went so poorly on mobile they can't even
| come close to that today. In a parallel universe timings
| were inverted and Firefox may have even had more users on
| mobile than it does desktop today.
| sunaookami wrote:
| No, Chrome was genuinely better than Firefox back then.
| Firefox didn't have multiprocess until many years later
| and Flash constantly crashed the browser.
| duped wrote:
| > what is it doing better
|
| adblock is the single most important feature of a web
| browser to me. Firefox has the best adblock support.
| LunaSea wrote:
| I agree, although Chrome has extensions like uBlock
| Origin Lite and Privacy Badger which are decent enough
| for most people and uses.
| morcus wrote:
| > decent enough for most people and uses.
|
| Except for the very big use case of mobile browsing,
| where only Firefox allows extensions.
| hedora wrote:
| I'd argue they aren't, but the number one threat actor in
| the privacy space is Google.
|
| I occasionally have to use Chrome to test with it. Can
| someone explain concisely how it manages Google logins?
| They clearly bolted it in at some low level to help
| violate privacy, and or shove dark patterns.
|
| Also, the out of the box spam and dark patterns are over
| the top. It reminds me of Win 95 bundled software
| bullshit.
|
| That's to say nothing of their B-tier properties, like
| Google TV or YouTube client:
|
| When the kids use this garbage it's all "Bruh, what is
| this screen?", or "I swear I'm not touching the remote!"
|
| (The official YouTube client loses monitor sync(!!) as it
| rapid cycles through ads on its own now. I guess this is
| part of an apparent google-run ad fraud campaign, since
| it routinely seems to think it ran > 5-10 ads to
| completion in ~15 seconds. We can't even see all the ads
| start because each bumps the monitor settings around,
| which has the effect of auto-mute.)
| pluralmonad wrote:
| Supporting a proper ad blocker makes it automatically
| superior than any of the more popular browsers. The fact
| most people don't mind being fuel for the machine is
| another issue.
| pessimizer wrote:
| There was a long period of time during which firefox
| users _weren 't sure_ whether they were going to follow
| chrome (like they did on _every single other thing._ )
| They're still user-hostile and their values are
| inscrutable; I have no trust that they won't kill ad
| blocking next year, or the year after. Requiring add-ons
| to be signed was a more radically hostile leap than
| moving to ManifestV3 would be.
|
| The people still complaining about firefox are its most
| faithful users. The reason some are vicious is because
| they are trapped - they'll consider cutting their use of
| the internet before using an non-FOSS browser. 90% of
| firefox's users _left._ People who could stand a closed
| browser have already decided to use one. You 're in an
| extreme minority if you even know anything about firefox
| to complain about. This year the Linux desktop, of all
| impossible things, has become more popular than firefox.
|
| Yet there's still this confidence and attitude about even
| the remaining users that comes from being spoon-fed cash
| by your direct competitor in return for nothing.
| evilduck wrote:
| My primary complaint is that they have a bunch of ad
| placements on the product out of the box when it's opened
| for the first time and any time I set up a new system I
| have to go configure Firefox to not be annoying by default.
| It makes the Firefox experience feel subversive and
| untrustworthy because this freshly installed application is
| obviously bedfellows with advertisers. I know I can't trust
| advertisers with my data or browser behavior, so why should
| I trust Firefox with it? If I stop using Firefox for a
| little while, they _so helpfully_ offer to reset my
| configuration back to default so those ads will get shown
| again. It's a hostile experience.
|
| Additionally, my perception (from posts and discussions
| like these, I'm not a financial analyst and I have no
| meaningful insights into their business) is also that they
| probably receive enough funding through non-advertising
| means that they don't actually need to do this if they were
| to pare back the nonsense spending they're so greatly known
| for.
| Yoric wrote:
| > Additionally, my perception (from posts and discussions
| like these, I'm not a financial analyst and I have no
| meaningful insights into their business) is also that
| they probably receive enough funding through non-
| advertising means that they don't actually need to do
| this if they were to pare back the nonsense spending
| they're so greatly known for.
|
| Last time I checked, Mozilla received 90%+ of its funding
| from Google. This is a situation that nobody likes
| (except Google, of course). These ads are an attempt to
| diversify income streams.
|
| People are really unhappy that Mozilla gets money from
| Google, but also extremely vocally unhappy whenever
| Mozilla attempts to find other sources.
|
| I haven't seen anyone suggest alternate solutions yet.
| wolvoleo wrote:
| I use Firefox almost exclusively on desktop and android and
| I'm still pretty critical of it.
|
| Especially because I know I'm one of very few people that
| uses it that much.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| > There is always a pile on on Firebox for not being perfect.
|
| I don't have a problem w/ Firefox not being perfect. I have a
| problem with the Mozilla Foundation spending money on
| seemingly random other stuff and not on Firefox.
| account42 wrote:
| > But if you dig deeper nearly always the commenter is using
| a version of Chrome
|
| Pure cope
| lamontcg wrote:
| It really seems like all the complaints about firefox are
| mostly ego-deflection.
|
| People know it is wrong to stay on Chrome and empower Google
| to the extent that it is, but they're stuck on that workflow
| and don't want to change, so they find nits to pick about
| firefox and get very LOUD about that. Then it becomes
| Mozill's fault that they're still using Chrome, and you can't
| blame them for anything.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > There is always a pile on on Firebox for not being perfect.
|
| Nobody has ever complained about anything _not being
| perfect._ That 's just something dishonest people say when
| they want to avoid mentioning specific criticisms.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| The other problem is, they will eventually axe this initiative
| if it doesn't produce anything meaningful to them, and will
| have been wasted resources that could have gone to Firefox
| itself.
| mmooss wrote:
| > I guess replies on this thread are evident that Mozilla has
| lost much of the trust and goodwill it once enjoyed. Admittedly
| I am also very skeptical that Mozilla has the ability or
| genuine interest to make this work.
|
| That reverses cause and effect to a great degree. Many are very
| skeptical because they read everyone slamming it. It's a mob
| psychology.
| Yoric wrote:
| I feel that, at some point around the Brendan Eich-gate, the
| Internet decided that Mozilla was always wrong. Change the
| shape of tabs? We received rape threats. Change it back? Bomb
| threats. Bringing in new APIs for add-ons that make Firefox
| faster, more secure, more stable and doesn't break all the
| time? No, we want addon $X, we don't care about security.
|
| I'm not going to claim that everything Mozilla has done is
| right, but the bad will of the tech crowd is a bit exhausting.
|
| Writing this as a former Firefox contributor.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| I never worked on Firefox, and am often critical of Mozilla,
| but I can second this sentiment. It's seemed like everything
| Mozilla does makes everyone mad, all the time. It's
| frustrating.
| oever wrote:
| I'm still happy with mozilla. Keep it up!
| lamontcg wrote:
| Also, compared to the scale of harm that Google does and
| the risk of it de facto controlling the web with the
| chromium engine, all the things that Mozilla does to piss
| people off should be small potatoes.
| encom wrote:
| As a former Firefox user, I got fed up with the constant
| change for the sake of change. Why change the tabs? They were
| fine the way they were. People got mad about the addon
| situation since it broke their workflows because of vague
| technical reasons. And Mozilla usually ignored user protests
| while pointing at telemetry, and did whatever they wanted to,
| users be damned.
|
| At least that's how it looked from this side. I switched to
| Vivaldi some 4-5 years ago, and it looks and works pretty
| much the same since I started using it. New features and
| changes have happened, but they've been able to be
| ignored/disabled/hidden _without_ doing CSS brain surgery.
|
| If/when the Google Adblockerblocker changes trickles down to
| Vivaldi I may have to crawl back to Firefox, but I dread the
| prospect.
| sunaookami wrote:
| In the latest version they changed something AGAIN, when
| you drag a tab too far to the left it's pinned
| automatically. Literally nobody asked for it and it makes
| me so angry, god I hate Mozilla. I only use Fiefox because
| it's the last browser with Manifest V2 (I have a lot of
| these add-ons) and as an add-on dev they made me even more
| angry with having double standards regarding their shitty
| add-on review system.
| Yoric wrote:
| > And Mozilla usually ignored user protests while pointing
| at telemetry, and did whatever they wanted to, users be
| damned.
|
| When I worked on Firefox, most of the changes happened
| exactly because user research determined that users wanted
| them and/or that not having them hurt the product. We
| changed the tabs at least once because users thought that
| the old shape of tabs made the browser feel slow (true
| story, sadly). We changed the add-on API (after having
| warned add-on developers for at least 6 years) because the
| old API was incompatible with multi-threading, multi-
| process, sandboxing, which in turn was really bad for both
| performance and security.
|
| I'll absolutely grant you that Mozilla hasn't been very
| good at communicating these choices, but again, the sheer
| hostility of tech crowds is exhausting.
| glenstein wrote:
| Anyone can hip fire an accusation from the philosopher's
| chair (potty), and it's like that thing about a falsehood
| circling the world five times before the truth even gets
| out of bed.
|
| Against the avalanche of claims that they've "done
| nothing", it can be tedious to pull out examples of, say,
| major projects achieving huge performance improvements in
| WebGPU, but meanwhile it costs nothing to claim Firefox
| has "done nothing since Quantum" which I've heard claimed
| in these parts in full sincerity.
| ofrzeta wrote:
| It's the "vocal minority", right? Sure it's not fun to
| receive threats but it's a known fact that communicating over
| the Internet makes people unhinged. Maybe there's stuff to
| complain about but I am a happy Firefox user for .. what?
| over two decades! :) so, thanks for that.
| ACCount37 wrote:
| If no one is sending you stupid threats online, are you even
| alive?
| philipallstar wrote:
| > Mozilla was born to change this, and Firefox succeeded beyond
| what most people thought possible -- dropping Internet Explorer's
| market share to 55% in just a few years and ushering in the Web
| 2.0 era.
|
| Is this true? I can see from here[0] that its peak was 32%, as IE
| was really on the back burner but before Chrome had fully risen
| to dominance, but I wouldn't claim that it was responsible for
| IE's market share drop.
|
| [0] https://mspoweruser.com/firefox-statistics
| codebyaditya wrote:
| You're right on the numbers....Firefox never had majority
| share. The stronger claim is causal influence, not dominance. I
| recently read somewhere that the Firefox (and later Chrome)
| forced standards compliance and broke IE's de-facto monopoly
| mindset. IE's decline was gradual and multi-factor, but Firefox
| clearly shifted developer and user expectations.
| angoragoats wrote:
| No one is claiming, here or in the article, that Firefox ever
| had a majority share.
|
| I don't know if the 55% number for IE is 100% correct but it
| sounds like the right ballpark to me. The browser market was
| a lot more fragmented 15+ years ago, so saying that IE had
| 55% market share and Firefox had 32%, leaving 13% for other
| browsers, sounds completely right to me.
| diffeomorphism wrote:
| When do you think the "web 2.0 era" was?
|
| Web 2.0 is around 2003 or so and chrome would not even exist
| for another few years. Giving Firefox/phoenix/Netscape the
| majority credit for the first fall of IE seems accurate.
|
| The rise of chrome happened afterwards and by then IE also fell
| much deeper than 55%.
| freedomben wrote:
| Yeah, my anecdotal memories aren't worth much, but in that
| era it was all IE or Firefox. Even once Chrome came along it
| still took quite some time before I noticed it popping up on
| normie people's systems.
| LamaOfRuin wrote:
| Opera was also essential at this point, not in terms of
| market share, but of innovation in the browser space with
| features that would eventually spread to everything else.
| kbelder wrote:
| That shouldn't be forgotten. There was a time when the 1%
| or so of users that ran Opera were getting a much better
| experience than any other browser. It was far superior for
| several years, until all of its innovations were copied by
| other vendors.
| linuxftw wrote:
| I think this is a good initiative. Having major software
| components be part of foundations, rather than single-vendor
| backed, is always a good thing. TBD if this succeeds or not, but
| I think they are doing a good thing here.
| maxdo wrote:
| A render css company will try to change the future of ai
| brainless wrote:
| I like the high level points but unless Mozilla finds revenue
| from this, are they not doing too much with mostly donation based
| revenue?
| conartist6 wrote:
| Being the agent of the user isn't particularly profitable. For
| example: companies want the users to be shown ads, and users
| generally don't want to be shown ads. But _profit_ , which is
| to say money you make without having to directly work for it,
| comes from selling the user's interests away. Like, perhaps,
| choosing to take a bribe to cement Google's search monopoly, a
| fundamentally anticompetitive behavior which, even as it makes
| cash for Mozilla, costs the web far, far more.
|
| They've lost their way completely as an independent entity, and
| a post like this that doesn't reaaally seem to grasp that
| weight of that conundrum comes no closer to convincing me that
| they can find their way back to the light.
| whinvik wrote:
| I will be honest. I love that post, makes me want to go see what
| they are doing.
|
| However, I haven't seen anything from Mozilla in recent years
| that makes me trust this has a future.
| bigbadfeline wrote:
| I'll be honest, when I see another "Hate Firefox" fest, I ask
| only one question "Quo bono?"
|
| > I haven't seen anything from Mozilla in recent years that
| makes me trust this has a future.
|
| As opposed to what? Chrome? What's the future there?
|
| The various Firefox derivatives will die a quick death if
| Firefox dies. The strings attached to Chrome derivatives make
| them pointless. So, what's left? What are we discussing here?
| There's no alternative, it's that simple.
|
| On the other hand, joining the hate-fest on various forums
| cannot and does not help Mozilla to find a better way. One is
| peeved by this, another by that, go figure... I'd call it
| childish if it wasn't so damaging.
| pjmlp wrote:
| What I care about is the non-existent Firefox strategy, but
| Mozilla is making me not care to fully embrace ChromeOS Platform.
| rafterydj wrote:
| I'll be contrarian to the thread sentiment and say: Mozilla has
| misstepped in the past, and will continue to do so, and they're
| partially funded by competitors for antitrust reasons, etc.
|
| That said, I can't really disagree with anything in this. As a
| developer (and socially conscious human) I want to move in the
| direction of openness.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I think the problem many of us have is it feels like Mozilla
| invests more effort into everything other than its browser, we
| see the things they do outside of Mozilla, I mean it was so bad
| Thunderbird had to become its own foundation due to lack of
| funding!
|
| I would love for there to be a world where Mozilla maintains
| Firefox and can make for product projects that provide higher
| value. I also have a pipe dream of one day someone like (and if
| they read this, and anyone who reads this will think I'm crazy)
| CloudFlare just buys Firefox itself from Mozilla so it can
| finally be funded correctly. CloudFlare has an interesting
| talent pool and I'm sure there's people who work with Rust /
| have worked with Rust who can help fund something like Firefox.
| Then I would like to see them create a true open foundation
| whose entire bottom line goes towards Firefox, not to anything
| else.
|
| Free the fox from corporate shennanigans. By my own corporate
| shennanigans. And CF could be swapped out with any company bold
| enough to free the fox.
| dralley wrote:
| > I think the problem many of us have is it feels like
| Mozilla invests more effort into everything other than its
| browser, we see the things they do outside of Mozilla, I mean
| it was so bad Thunderbird had to become its own foundation
| due to lack of funding!
|
| And then people simultaneously complain that Mozilla is
| reliant on Google for funding. There are not many good
| revenue options available for a browser other than selling
| search defaults - and AI may start choking off that revenue
| as well - but Mozilla also can't touch AI without being
| screamed at.
|
| I mean, even literally this one sentence is self-
| contradictory. Thunderbird is not their browser. You complain
| that they "invest more effort into everything other than
| their browser" and then complain that they don't invest
| enough in Thunderbird.
|
| No win situation for them in terms of public opinion.
|
| * They can't get diversify their revenue to be less dependent
| on Google without doing things that people view as
| "distractions"
|
| * They don't get credit when the "distractions" are for the
| public good, like LetsEncrypt, Rust, Opus / AV1, etc.
|
| * They get punished for de-prioritizing "distractions" like
| Thunderbird and Servo and Rust because those distractions are
| popular.
|
| * For years they were simultaneously being dragged for
| dropping the XUL extension ecosystem, and also dragged for
| low performance and lack of multiprocessing and a bunch of
| other things which were being kneecapped hard by the XUL
| extension ecosystem.
|
| It's not like I love their management or anything, certainly
| they've made mistakes, but the narcissism of small
| differences hits them with full force relative to every other
| competitor in the space.
| devsda wrote:
| It is more easier to secure revenue/funding from Google
| once they retain existing market share and gain more. They
| need to improve the product for that to happen.
|
| With all the distractions they are abandoning their primary
| product and they are bleeding whatever miniscule market
| share they have. This means Google has more leverage over
| them and can eventually stop the funding once their market
| share drops beyond a threshold say 0.5% because we all know
| antitrust is not a strong reason anymore to keep FF alive
| based on trends of recent rulings.
| dralley wrote:
| If we're being completely honest, improving the quality
| of the product would not meaningfully improve their
| market share. That worked in the early 2000s when the
| competition (internet explorer) was utterly stagnant and
| the internet-using population was composed predominantly
| of techies willing to try new things. Browsers are
| commodities now, and most people aren't going to try a
| new browser when they're already using Chrome / Safari on
| their mobile device with all of the integrations that are
| available between the two.
|
| Chrome gained marketshare not just because it was a good
| product but because they paid Adobe, Oracle, and legions
| of freeware antivirus providers lots of $$$ to put a
| checked-by-default box in their installers to install
| Google Chrome and make it the default browser for anyone
| not paying enough attention to uncheck the boxes, and
| because they targeted Firefox users visiting google.com
| with popups advertising how much better Chrome was.
| Mozilla could never do that and they would be excoriated
| if they tried. And as I mentioned, many of the aspects of
| Chrome that were indeed superior, were met with kicking
| and screaming when Mozilla tried to follow, e.g. choosing
| performance over the XUL extension ecosystem.
|
| Sadly I think their best hope to regain marketshare is to
| indirectly benefit from Linux to capturing marketshare
| from Windows.
| devsda wrote:
| End users are easily influenced but they could have
| targeted developers.
|
| I think they should have pushed for a gecko based
| electron alternative. End user dont really care if their
| favourite markdown editor or notes software is based on
| electron or gecko but it would have made sure that
| developers do not target, develop and test for only
| chromium based browsers.
| dralley wrote:
| Developers are no longer a significant fraction of the
| pie, and a significant fraction of _those_ are web
| developers or do web development, and those users will in
| all likelihood primarily use what _their_ users are
| using, which isn 't Firefox.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| That would probably also be considered a "distraction" by
| HN. Electron isn't built by the Chrome team.
|
| It also wouldn't be directly revenue diversification. You
| can't beat Electron by selling an alternative.
|
| Firefox has somewhat tried to target developers. There's
| Developer Edition with a "direct to the dev tools" focus.
| Firefox's Dev Tools still generally are somewhat ahead of
| Safari's _and_ Chrome 's (though not always Edge's, even
| in the Edgmium era one of the few teams that still exists
| that doesn't upstream everything immediately is Edge's
| Dev Tools work). Firefox was directly ahead on Flexbox
| and CSS Grid debugging tools, though now everyone else
| has copied them. (Not to mention that the history of Dev
| Tools in the first place all points back to Firebug and
| other Firefox extensions that went mainstream and then
| made sense to prioritize as out-of-the-box tools.)
|
| Firefox probably can't do much _more_ to target
| developers on its own, from a browser perspective.
| Targeting developers doesn 't seem to move the needle
| enough in marketshare, either.
|
| It's not just Electron that developers are stuck in
| "develop and test for only chromium based browsers"
| modes. There's also all the top-down pressure in
| corporate environments to standardize on only one browser
| to "cut down" on "testing costs". There are the board
| room-driven development cycles of "I only care if it
| looks good on the CEO's iPhone" or "the CEO is into
| Android this year, that's the focus, everything else is
| garbage". There's also the hard to avoid spiral of
| "Firefox marketshare is low, don't worry about it" to
| more sites not working as well in Firefox to Firefox
| marketshare getting lower to more "don't worry about it"
| websites and so on.
| jcranmer wrote:
| > I think they should have pushed for a gecko based
| electron alternative.
|
| They did! At least three different versions of it!
| glenstein wrote:
| >If we're being completely honest, improving the quality
| of the product would not meaningfully improve their
| market share.
|
| Exactly right. They _did_ the dang thing with Project
| Quantum, a massive rewrite of the browser, a massive leap
| forward in stability and performance. The thing everyone
| asked for. And they..... continued to lose market share.
| Because there are other factors, like monopoly power, and
| distribution lock-in.
|
| You don't have to imagine what it looks like for a
| browser company to lap the field with an excellent
| development team, creative revenue raising ideas, being
| ahead of the curve on mobile, having best in class
| stability and performance, and building out features that
| their core user base loves and swears by. Because Opera
| was that company in the 2000s and 2010s.
|
| But even Opera had to sell to a new ownership group and
| abandon their Presto engine for Chromium. Because, like
| Spock said, you can make every decision correctly and
| still lose. Which is kind of depressing, but it at least
| helpfully bursts the bubble of people claiming changes in
| market share are a one-to-one relationship to specific
| decisions about which features to build in a browser.
| blibble wrote:
| > There are not many good revenue options available for a
| browser other than selling search defaults
|
| if they had set up an endowment instead of blowing it on
| unrelated pointless crap for decades they would have been
| self-funded indefinitely
|
| they were pulling in over $500 MILLION a year
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| 500 million could net you about 50 to 70 million annually
| if you put it all on the S&P 500... A few years of this
| and you're a self-funded non-profit...
| drnick1 wrote:
| Reminder: Ladybird is being developed by a handful of
| people with contributions from the community. It's far
| from being complete, but it clearly shows that you don't
| need an enormous budget to build a Web browser entirely
| from scratch, let alone maintain one.
| AuthAuth wrote:
| Ladybird should not be in the conversation. Its nowhere
| near FF or even usable as a browser.
| glenstein wrote:
| They're doing that. Their endowment is invested and it
| does grow by a non-trivial amount, though I don't know
| the exact numbers off the top of my head.
| glenstein wrote:
| >if they had set up an endowment
|
| Mozilla has had an endowment for, I think, ~15 years now,
| and they have invested it and grown it from around $90
| million to around $1.2 billion and counting. Which now is
| a firewall in case of emergency, as well as a resource
| that's helping to stand up a VC fund which is one of
| their most interesting pathways to diversifying revenue.
| pdpi wrote:
| > And then people simultaneously complain that Mozilla is
| reliant on Google for funding. There are not many good
| revenue options available for a browser other than selling
| search defaults - and AI may start choking off that revenue
| as well - but Mozilla also can't touch AI without being
| screamed at.
|
| Proton Mail, Google Workspace, iCloud, Dropbox are all
| viable money-making products that line up well with
| Mozilla's core mission if they made their own alternatives.
| Persona could've been really good, if one of these products
| existed and had enough traction to build a user base that
| made third parties want to depend on Persona.
|
| There is a world where Mozilla built services people
| actually want instead of focusing on trust-eroding gimmicks
| like Pocket, and they'd be thriving right now.
| glenstein wrote:
| >And then people simultaneously complain that Mozilla is
| reliant on Google for funding. There are not many good
| revenue options available for a browser other than selling
| search defaults - and AI may start choking off that revenue
| as well - but Mozilla also can't touch AI without being
| screamed at.
|
| Wish I read this before posting my comment, I
| wholeheartedly agree at every level. The criticisms are a
| mile wide, an inch deep, and sometimes legitimate, but
| often deeply contradictory, and there's no attitude of
| accountability or self awareness when someone jumps in for
| the millionth time saying "don't get distracted" but also
| "offer something new to generate revenue".
|
| And the factual literacy of the drive-by critics is,
| unfortunately, sometimes brutally off the mark and even
| veering into conspiratorial. Some unfortunate threads
| appear to be young adults reading a Mozilla 990 filing for
| the first time and misreading a conspiracy into every
| single line, very casual attitudes about accusing them of
| falsifying financial statements or accusations of
| controlled opposition, or ridiculous suggestions that they
| spend down their endowment on "engineering" to no
| particular end, and sometimes completely misrepresenting
| how much of a time suck and energy suck certain projects
| were (e.g. blockchain is sometimes on the Rap Sheet of Bad
| Things, but they basically wrote a white paper or two).
|
| Which, as you note, isn't to say there's no legitimate
| concerns: "privacy preserving ads" is a contradiction in
| terms, the strategic reliance on Google is precarious, and
| side bets like Pocket were left to languish. In normal
| times I might consider myself a critic. But unfortunately
| too often the comment section is an out of control orgy of
| completely uninformed cheap shots, with an ounce of truth
| to every pound of confidently incorrect accusation. And
| that phenomenon, to my mind, is as big as any misstep
| Mozilla is or isn't making.
| shafyy wrote:
| Sure, it's not like CloudFare centralizes enough of the
| internet infrastructure, let's also give them one of the few
| (more or less) independent browsers.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I think it is an interesting fit that makes sense.
| CloudFlare works on the web, and they aren't out here
| bubbling up how you view the web or altering it in any way,
| unlike Google or Bing which curate what results you get.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| Give it time.
| Vinnl wrote:
| At the same time, Firefox last year gained tab groups,
| vertical tabs, a user-friendly profile switcher. Split view
| and tab notes are under development. It sometimes feels like
| it's moving faster than ever, and that's disregarding all AI
| features.
|
| (Disclosure: I work at Mozilla, but not on Firefox.)
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I kept up with it a lot during the Oxidation years and it
| felt like Firefox was getting a LOT then, while I'm sure
| its still getting attention (I was testing Firefox Quantum
| the second it come out), and I still use it daily, I'm just
| expressing the overall of how I and others feel, I dont
| feel they're ALWAYS messing up with Firefox, but it
| definitely feels like Mozilla does too many moonshot things
| that fail and it leaves anyone wondering if the money was
| better spent invested in Firefox itself.
| criticalfault wrote:
| all this should have been developed in 2000s
|
| different point of view: tab grouping took 20+y to develop
| (since opera had it in 2000s).
|
| in 2026 firefox should have: - fast ui - fast js - fast
| rendering - hw acceleration for video - same look and feel
| on all platforms - faster adblocker
|
| just the basics, no? didn't add more advanced features
| here.
|
| and let's see what is actually here: - UI rendered via
| HTML/xul. an abomination. a slow abomination at that. right
| clicking something can show you stagers of rendering of a
| menu. - check any Js benchmarks, you will see how FF stands
| - rendering,... there was a talk in one of the conferences
| explaining timing requests and time-to-picture. this may be
| blamed on the standards, but chrome does it better - video
| hw acceleration on Linux? is this actually working? and I
| don't mean 3/100 relevant codecs - same look and feel -
| done - AdBlock is the only advantage you have over other
| platforms. it would make sense to implement this in the
| browser and not rely on Js and extensions
|
| it's sad and funny that people with only a couple million
| are going to soon catch up to Mozilla and make it obsolete,
| by building a Bowser engine, not only a shell around
| blink/WebKit.
| glenstein wrote:
| Look at what happened to Opera. They fell apart,
| abandoned their Presto engine for Chromium and sold to an
| outside investment group and now they serve ads based on
| user data.
|
| There was, in my opinion, no better browser company past
| or present than Opera in the 2000s and 2010s (sorry
| Mozilla). But their example exposes the fallacy of
| assuming that building out great features guarantees
| market share gains.
| glenstein wrote:
| >I think the problem many of us have is it feels like Mozilla
| invests more effort into everything other than its browser,
|
| Unfortunately the side bets are disproportionately visible
| relative to the vast majority of what they actually do, which
| is ship millions of lines of code in browser improvements
| every quarter, keeping pace with Google despite a fraction of
| Google's resources.
|
| I certainly think a better strategic partner than Google
| would be ideal. Yahoo had a strategically promising moment
| that slipped through its fingers that I think will always be
| a what-if. Cloudflare is interesting because they're very
| much a create-a-blue-ocean kind of company, and the problem
| with browsers has always been that the browser space simply
| isn't a revenue driver, it's something you subsidize from
| other businesses.
|
| Firefox is, remarkably, the most successful self funded
| browser engine in the history of the world, but many great
| companies have come and gone in this space (e.g. Opera) and
| still fell behind. They invest more in the browser now than
| they ever have, they have shipped more production Rust code
| than anybody. But that's not louder than the noise in the
| modern internet.
|
| I think you're right that someone like Cloudflare would be an
| interesting partner and I can't think of a better one off the
| top of my head. And if AI is eclipsing search, that threatens
| search licensing they're currently relying on. I don't know
| what AI in the browser is, what new norms, what new
| expectations, what core concepts are going to matter the
| most. But _something_ is going to change and you have to get
| out ahead of that now, to be relevant tomorrow.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| I'm not sure Mozilla has shipped more Rust code than
| anybody, FWIW. The obviously have a lot, but so have other
| companies as well.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| CloudFlare relies on it in key projects, which is why I
| feel like if I had to pick any tech company to consider
| taking a hold of Firefox, they'd be my top pick. I know
| some people are skeptical of them, but they have not
| goofed yet. Maybe if the CEO ever steps down I'll change
| my views on CF.
| glenstein wrote:
| In the browser space they have. Google has been a lot
| more tentative about working it into their various
| toolkits.
| pcmaffey wrote:
| It's an interesting choice to frame this initiative around "open
| AI". That's quite a battle to pick right out of the gate.
| drnick1 wrote:
| The open source community will start taking Firefox seriously
| again when all the AI shit is removed for good and _real_
| improvements to performance and privacy are made.
|
| Despite all the posturing about "respecting your privacy and
| freedom," the stock configuration of Firefox is trivially
| fingerprintable. At the very least, a privacy-focused browser
| should adopt the Tor patches and report standardized spoofed
| values for hardware components and disable by default all privacy
| invasive anti-features like WebGL. This isn't difficult to do,
| but illustrates the gap between empty promises and what is
| actually delivered.
| plagiarist wrote:
| I am going with the Waterfox / Librewolf forks
| freedomben wrote:
| I'd definitely love to see them take some steps, but at the
| points where a minor increase in privacy leads to a much worse
| UX for average people (aka, "why doesn't this site work in FF,
| FF sucks!" because they don't know they have to enable
| something). If Firefox becomes a browser that is harder to use
| then it will only ever be used by the extremely small niche of
| people that care about that. That will only further lead to
| more "not tested on Firefox" web development. I already have to
| have Chrome available on my machine because of sites like
| Ramp.com and Mailgun that don't work on Firefox, and that would
| only get worse.
| drnick1 wrote:
| > I'd definitely love to see them take some steps, but at the
| points where a minor increase in privacy leads to a much
| worse UX for average people
|
| Disabling Javascript or even just third party scripts does
| lead to major breakage, but reporting spoofed values for
| identifiers like Tor does not. The Arkenfox user.js does all
| of this and more, but these options are not enabled by
| default. This shows that Firefox does not care much about
| privacy in practice.
|
| The only "breakage" that I have encountered with such a
| hardened configuration is related to the spoofing of the time
| zone. But the fundamental issue is that Javascript/browsers
| should have not been designed to allow websites to extract
| this kind of personal information in the first place. But
| even that is not enough and users are still fingerprintable.
| In an ideal world, the only thing a website should see is the
| originating IP and nothing else.
|
| If anything, Brave has done more to harden Chromium than
| Mozilla has with Firefox, even though Brave comes with its
| own set of problems (scammy crypto integrations, AI, VPN and
| other stuff).
| mmooss wrote:
| > Disabling Javascript or even just third party scripts
| does lead to major breakage
|
| Maybe that's true for the websites you visit, like HN.
|
| Very many, very popular sites don't run without JavaScript,
| including most shopping, social media, mapping, etc etc.
| Yoric wrote:
| > Disabling Javascript or even just third party scripts
| does lead to major breakage, but reporting spoofed values
| for identifiers like Tor does not. The Arkenfox user.js
| does all of this and more, but these options are not
| enabled by default. This shows that Firefox does not care
| much about privacy in practice.
|
| I suspect that it shows that Firefox developers do a good
| job at making Firefox work, and this good job enables forks
| to work.
| encom wrote:
| >only ever be used by the extremely small niche[...]
|
| Isn't that pretty much the current situation?
| fwip wrote:
| Unfortunately, the guys in charge at Mozilla are clearly
| enamored with AI. They like it so much (and value users so
| little), that they'll let it write the whole damn PR blog post
| about company strategy.
| sfink wrote:
| Yes, it's the stock configuration to be not broken. If you are
| ok with breakage in exchange for less fingerprinting, the
| config setting privacy.resistFingerprinting is right there:
| https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/resist-fingerprinting
|
| It is an uplift from Tor, and I believe Tor just enables it in
| their build, though it doesn't end up being quite the same. Tor
| is always going to be better for this.
|
| But turning it on in the stock Firefox configuration would be
| suicide in terms of market share. When "I want maximal privacy"
| fights "I want this site to work", guess which one wins?
| Yoric wrote:
| It's a really hard line to walk.
|
| If you put too much in your Telemetry/crash reports, yeah,
| users become fingerprintable.
|
| On the other hand, if you return spoofed values, it means that
| Firefox developers cannot debug platform/hardware-specific
| crashes. If you disable Telemetry, improving performance
| becomes impossible, because you're suddenly unable to determine
| where your users suffer. If you remove WebGL, plenty of
| websites suddenly stop working, and people assume that Firefox
| is broken.
| encom wrote:
| Sure, but then don't go grandstanding about privacy. You
| can't have both.
|
| And saying that improving performance is impossible without
| it is hyperbolic. Developers did that before every major
| application turned into actual spyware. Profilers still work
| without it.
| Yoric wrote:
| Profilers only work once you have identified the problem.
| Telemetry lets you find out about it in the first place.
| drnick1 wrote:
| > If you put too much in your Telemetry/crash reports, yeah,
| users become fingerprintable.
|
| It's not only what gets send to Mozilla as telemetry or crash
| reports that is a problem. That can be turned off (many Linux
| distros do), or firewalled.
|
| The main issue is that websites can more or less accurately
| identify users uniquely by extracting information that they
| should not have access to if the browser was designed with
| privacy in mind.
|
| This includes, but is not limited to, fonts installed, system
| language, time zone, window size, browser version, hardware
| information (number of cores, device memory), canvas
| fingerprint, and many others attributes. When you combine all
| of that with the originating IP address, you can reliably
| determine who visited a website, because that information is
| shared and correlated with services where people identify
| themselves (Google accounts, Facebook, Amazon, etc.) Even
| masking your IP may not be enough because typically there is
| enough information in the other data points to track you
| already.
| Yoric wrote:
| All of this is true, but it's a problem of the entire web
| platform and specs, so if you want to favor untraceability
| above compatibility, you'll need a dedicated privacy-
| hardened browser. Firefox aims to be better at privacy, but
| still respect the web specs.
| catapart wrote:
| > So: Are you in?
|
| Nope! Very happy to be entirely out, thanks.
| mentalgear wrote:
| Like many here on HN, I'm skeptical, also about Mozilla, but the
| blog post is compelling in its plan plus there's a new CEO in
| town.
|
| So I think what we can do is give them the benefit of the doubt
| and approach this with cautious optimism for now instead of just
| negativity.
| vuggamie wrote:
| The new CEO centered AI ("It's Time to Evolve Firefox Into an
| AI Browser") in his first communication to the community.
| Spawned at least three new forks and introduced people to
| LibreWolf.
|
| His first communication reduced trust: "It is a privilege to
| lead an organization with a long history of standing up for
| people and building technology that puts them first."
|
| Now let's put people first by making Firefox an AI first
| browser. Enzor-Demeo would have made an excellent Microsoft
| product manager. Too bad he didn't get the job.
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| New CTO too. This post is written by Raffi Krikorian who joined
| in September.
| https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/leadership/mozilla-welco...
| tomcam wrote:
| How about finishing Servo?
| fyrn_ wrote:
| They've fully disowned Servo. On the plus side that means you
| can donate to Servo directly, and the project actually has a
| decent amount of contributors now
| PedroBatista wrote:
| Good decision for a change, now looking at execution track record
| and ability to stick with it..
|
| yeah, that's where the bad news start.
|
| They have a tendency to go from trend to trend and always a "me
| too, I'm here" player. Deliver first and stick with it, Mozilla's
| goodwill fund is long gone to be excited about "mission
| statements".
| rubyfan wrote:
| > _Now AI is becoming the new intermediary. It's what I've
| started calling "Layer 8" -- the agentic layer that mediates
| between you and everything else on the internet. These systems
| will negotiate on our behalf, filter our information, shape our
| recommendations, and increasingly determine how we interact with
| the entire digital world._
|
| This is a sad statement. It reminds me of Wall-E. Big tech
| created the environmental ruins of today's internet through
| perverse incentives. Now we need robots to go sift through the
| garbage and think for us so we don't have to be exposed to the
| toxic internet.
|
| It feels like we have lost so much.
| zb3 wrote:
| > So: Are you in?
|
| No, I just want Mozilla to focus on Firefox, the browser.
| TomMasz wrote:
| As a long-time Firefox user, I don't want them to have an "AI
| strategy", I want them to have a browser improvement strategy.
| luisgvv wrote:
| Agree, I'm not the kind of guy that has 100 tabs open (10 at
| the time I'm typing this), but when I came back 2 years ago I
| noticed that it isn't as snappy and fast as it used to be 15
| years ago before I switched to Chrome.
| culi wrote:
| Firefox has improved significantly. It's improvement strategy
| is mostly focused on what developers ask them to focus on.
| They've had great performance on the yearly interops
|
| https://wpt.fyi/interop-2021
|
| https://wpt.fyi/interop-2022
|
| https://wpt.fyi/interop-2023
|
| https://wpt.fyi/interop-2024
|
| https://wpt.fyi/interop-2025
| 28304283409234 wrote:
| Please let me pay for Firefox and have the proceed fund Firefox
| directly. This is not 1999 anymore. We are all wealthy grown ups
| now.
| pmontra wrote:
| Yes, but how large is the subset of Firefox users that are
| willing to pay for a browser? Take that number and multiply it
| either by 10 o by 100 and you get the order of magnitude.
|
| I googled this
| https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1mhks3h/firefoxs_w...
|
| Let's say we are at 100 million users. If only 1 out of 100
| pay, it's 10 to 100 million dollars per year. A lot of money or
| a puny amount, it depends.
| rpastuszak wrote:
| a) It's insane how little we pay for browsers given their
| utility. b) Many people would be happy to pay extra for a
| browser to support free access for others (The Guardian was a
| decent example of that IIRC).
| 28304283409234 wrote:
| And they claim to have at least 200 million users. If 1% pays
| a yearly fee of 10 dollars, surely that's enough to fund
| development.
| AuthAuth wrote:
| Agreed, I subscript to random Mozilla products like VPN and
| Relay to pay them but I dont need those and would hate to have
| them waste extra development time on improving those services.
| I would rather fund the browser directly.
| glenstein wrote:
| Even the most successful online annual fundraising drive that
| exists, Wikipedia, raises less than half of what Mozilla gets
| annually from search licensing. And Mozilla in a best case
| scenario probably can't match Wikipedia's fundraising for a
| number of reasons.
|
| It would feel good and I certainly wouldn't mind it, but it's
| much closer to a drop in the bucket than a panacea.
| mkroman wrote:
| I don't understand how they expect offline LLM models to work in
| a meaningful capacity for users.. Isn't there a single
| multilingual person working at Mozilla?
|
| All of the small LLM models break down as soon as you try to do
| something that isn't written in English, because - surprise -
| they're just too small.
|
| There would need to be a hardware breakthrough, or they would
| have to somehow solve the heavy cost of switching the models
| between pages.
|
| Instead of useful AI stuff that is a clear improvement to
| accessibility, they're insistent on ham-fisting LLM solutions
| that no one have even asked for.
|
| Off the top of my head, they could instead:
|
| 1. Integrate something like whisper to add automatic captions to
| videos or transcribe audio
|
| 2. Integrate one of the many really great text to speech models
| to read articles or text out loud
| capitainenemo wrote:
| Mozilla did integrate TTS into Firefox - in fact, one of the
| better FOSS TTS AI models out their was their initiative.
| https://github.com/mozilla/TTS
| mkroman wrote:
| Ah yeah, there's this: https://github.com/mozilla/TTS
|
| I can't seem to find anything that mentions a Firefox
| integration though?
| capitainenemo wrote:
| Click Reader mode on a web page, then the read aloud option
| in the sidebar.
|
| Note that how well it works on Linux will depend on your
| distro and default settings, as is common for Linux world.
| They do try to provide setup instructions if your linux
| distro has issues.
|
| ... now whether _that_ model is integrated by default, no
| idea. I imagine that depends on size.
|
| Oh, and mozilla's off-line translate for private
| translation of web pages... that's another neat AI thing
| they added that I've found super helpful. Chrome still
| requires sending the content to their servers.
| mkroman wrote:
| Ah cool, thanks, didn't know this existed. I just get a
| dummy message when playing audio, so I'll play around
| with some speech dispatcher[1] solutions later!
|
| > Oh, and mozilla's off-line translate for private
| translation of web pages... that's another neat AI thing
| they added that I've found super helpful.
|
| Yes, it's awesome! And one of my favorite additions to
| Firefox in many years, it's stuff like that they should
| focus on if they want AI, imo.
|
| [1]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Speech_dispatcher
| b1085436 wrote:
| I genuinely don't understand the "permissioned data" assumption.
| Presumably, all the current models that were trained on
| illegitimate scraping of vastly larger sources will always have
| the upper hand (in terms of raw power, obviously at the cost of
| regurgitating evil stuff too), because they just have absorbed
| way more diverse data in their training. So the models trained on
| ethical datasets only will not be able to compete, unless they
| too rely on a common base of "foundational sin" data and just add
| those datasets as an ethical layer to cover the rotten roots.
|
| Is it really possible to start training from scratch at this
| stage and compete with the existing models, using only ethical
| datasets? Hasn't it been established that without the stolen
| data, those models could not exist or compete?
| bingemaker wrote:
| > Small models have gotten remarkably good. 1 to 8 billion
| parameters, tuned for specific tasks
|
| What models is Mozilla talking about?
| internet_points wrote:
| Firefox does offline translation and offline tts. It is quite
| amazing. Unfortunately half the tech crowd is like "BURN
| anything that has been in the same room as AI" and the other
| half is yoloing agentic browsers and uploading all their pron
| history to the datalakes
| yogthos wrote:
| In my view, this is the exact right approach. LLMs aren't going
| anywhere, these tools are here to stay. The only question is how
| they will be developed going forward, and who controls them.
| Boycotting AI is a really naive idea that's just a way for people
| to signal group membership.
|
| Saying I hate AI and I'm not going to use it is really trending
| and makes people feel like they're doing something meaningful,
| but it's just another version of trying to vote the problem away.
| It doesn't work. The real solution is to roll up the sleeves and
| built an a version of this technology that's open, transparent,
| and community driven.
| josh-sematic wrote:
| Strange to me that they don't mention HuggingFace, which I think
| of as a pretty leading player in open{source|weight|data} AI.
| nilshauk wrote:
| I detest AI on the grounds that it causes an overuse of our
| planet's resources as well as stealing IP and exploiting
| underpaid data workers.
|
| However, if Mozilla can launch something capable that steals the
| thunder from all the closed source AI alternatives that might
| make the bubble pop finally.
|
| Stock markets shook when Deepseek came on the scene and proved
| that clever coding might make up for using older hardware. The
| market leaders' moat suddenly didn't seem so impenetrable. In
| that same vein Mozilla might make a real dent by truly
| commodifying AI. AI stocks are highly valued currently because
| there's an idea that the leaders have something no one can copy.
| johnea wrote:
| Has mozilla ever hired a CEO on the premise of "Our top priority
| is resolving the long standing bugs in our web and email
| clients"?
|
| I'm still bitching, years later, about thunderbird failing to
| update IMAP folder contents (i.e. sync with server) until I click
| on the folder.
|
| While it may still reign as the "capital of the industry",
| there's a certain kind of technical brain damage that comes from
| being located in the bay area.
|
| Let's just call it "proximity to venture capital"...
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