That is revisionist history. Firefox succeeded because MS was sitting on their hands with IE, and it was stagnating. Firefox didnt do the opposite of what IE - you could argue Mozilla was doing what MS should have been.
It wasnt about "respecting users", or "agency" but simply implemented standards properly.
And that's going to be a hard problem with Chrome because you're up against a browser that is moving very, very, fast.
It was a better browser through and through, maybe because MS slept on IE or maybe not, but in the end it isn't revisionist to say they beat MS's proverbial posterior because the browser was better.
But also, google spent a mountain of money advertising chrome.
I think this factor isn't given enough weight in the shift to Firefox.
At that time, the largest pain point in web development was (by a long shot) browser compatibility.
When developers fell in love with Firefox, they started pushing business requirements away from IE and towards the browser that didn't feel like it was their enemy. Alongside with this there was also massive shift to start taking web standards seriously, which is another area where IE dropped the ball spectacularly
It took a few years, but eventually pointy haired managers got sick of our whining and gave in.
Having lived through the browser wars, this is my new favorite fact about the whole thing.
It really was a very different time, and you couldn't have convinced me back then that I would miss it one day.
Once Chrome came along with their devtools, improvements quickly escalated between the 2 before Google eventually won out.
I can't recall the exact point in time when my use of Firefox fell off, but it was probably due to the account integrations with Chrome.
Not to mention preferential treatment like the Youtube anti-IE campaign [1]
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/4/18529381/google-youtube-in...
Chrome was a lot faster and a lot lighter (in the beginning)
Neither KDE nor OS X ever shipped their built-in Web Inspector prior to the appearance of Firebug in 2006, and by that point WebKit and Safari were already in full swing. The very first iteration[1] of Web Inspector appeared around the same time as Firebug and was an original contribution by Apple; it wasn't borrowed from KHTML.
1. <https://web.archive.org/web/20070621162114/https://webkit.or...>
Mozilla didn't "take on" IE. Mozilla reclaimed their lost browser position. IE kicked the proverbial posterior of Netscape which both Netscape and Mozilla struggled to reclaim right up until the release of Firefox.
The case was specifically about IE integration in Windows, so it definitely had an impact.
I think this is probably what the comment was thinking about.
MS presented the choice for a browser from 2009->2011.
IDK that MS has ever actually fixed the situation since their last fine in 2013.
IIRC, firefox really started taking off around Firefox 3, which was first released in 2006. Looks like they officially beat IE in 2010. That does seem to line up with MS's implementation of the browser choice screen.
It wasnt about "respecting users", or "agency" but simply implemented standards properly.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape:
In November 2007, IE had 77.4% of the browser market, Firefox 16.0%, and Netscape 0.6%20% of adult Americans had broadband at home by early 2004 - https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2006/05/28/part-1-broad... - which is not a majority but had heavy overlap with the group that wasn't just settling for IE6. Similar with Facebook - it was driven by the mostly-young tech-forward early-adopter crowd that either had broadband at home or was at university with fast internet.
The extension ecosystem, tabs, plugins, and notably whatever effort they did behind the scenes to ensure that companies that did streaming video etc. would work with their browser all played out really well.
I think the ultimate problem is that Mozilla's mission of a standards-compliant web with open-source browsers everywhere ultimately did get achieved. The era of "Works with IE6" badges has ended and the top browsers run on open-source engines. Despite our enthusiasm at the time for it, I think the truth is that Firefox was probably just a vehicle for this, much bigger, achievement.
Now that it's been achieved, Mozilla is in the fortunate place where Firefox only needs to exist as a backstop against Chrome sliding into high-proprietary world while providing the utility to Google that they get to say they're not a monopoly on web technologies.
Mozilla's search for a new mission isn't some sign of someone losing their way. It's just what happens to the Hero of Legend after he defeats the Big Bad. There's a post-denouement period. Sam Gamgee gets to go become Mayor of the Shire, which is all very convenient, but a non-profit like Mozilla would much rather find a similar enough mission that they can apply their vast resources to. That involves the same mechanics as product development, and they're facing the same primary thing: repeated failure.
That's just life.
If Mozilla was not busy "offering" (renamed the no-thank-you setting once again) so many "experiences" they could be doing much of the same stuff they did back in the day.
Google released Chrome with a massive advertising campaign, reaching even to television. They put ads for Chrome on the world's biggest web properties. It was packaged in installers. Not to say it wasn't a good browser - but it wasn't obviously better than Firefox. This marketing campaign bought them a ton of marketshare.
Mozilla's response, instead of sticking by Mozilla evangelists, nearly all of whom were power users, was to decide that the browser was too complicated for its users. It needed to be more like Chrome. It needed to be the browser for the proverbial grandma. So they axed features (like Panorama), configurability, and extensibility, alienating everyone who really cared. Only they didn't have the marketing heft of Google, so they didn't get Grandma, either.
Ever since then they've been panicking and grasping at straws and shoving in shovelware like Pocket in obviously vain attempts to regain what they had. And they never will, until they make people like you and me LOVE Firefox again.
What are the sorts of features you think they should consider adding?
Maybe it’s because I’m a power user and they tend to cater to power users, idk — that’s definitely what the comment above yours is hinting at.
But at this point, I think we can all agree that whatever Mozilla is doing now isn’t working… so maybe power users are worth a shot again?
The AI stuff is the perfect example. Are there people who like AI? Certainly. Will they use firefox? Probably not.
At this stage firefox is the anti-establishment choice. That crowd hates AI. Betting on AI might make sense if you are chrome. It doesn't make sense if you are firefox.
You can store your custom preferences in user.js file - Firefox will copy those to prefs.js at startup.
From your link:
The user.js[1] file is optional. If you have one whenever the application is started it will overwrite any settings in prefs.js with the corresponding settings from user.js.
Out of the five options available, only one is European (the one I am using). What I don't like is how I cannot add my own custom endpoint. What if I run Mistral locally (with Ollama, for example) and want to use that?
Also, I really do think there should be a fat warning about uploading data from browser to a third party. Yes, every bloody time. Not everything the browser shows is publicly available data. There are people who are going to break the law with this tool (ie. using PII with LLM), and the people who are damaged are going to be innocent third parties who didn't opt-out or opt-in anything.
The BS with not being easily able to disable a feature like this is probably to deter, or because 'user studies' showed people don't want to disable it. Well, fuck that. It isn't rocket science to have a checkbox which just deals with these values in about:config.
Set up your preferred self-hosted web interface (OpenWebUI or whatever, I haven't looked into this for a while), point it at ollama, and then configure it in Firefox:
browser.ml.chat.provider = http://localhost:3000/
At home I point this at Kagi Assistant, at work I point it to our internal GenAI platform's chat endpoint.
Highly recommend everyone check it out. Handily trounces all the tab management extensions I’ve tried over the years on FF and Chrome
I now see there's also a "Create alt texts automatically" for pdfjs. This actually seems one of the more useful AI features I've seen. But I've never noticed it exists as I don't need this accessibility feature. You can disable it in the pdfjs (no about:config needed).
In short, Firefox is not forcing anyone to use AI and ways to disable it are not that obfuscated.
Here are instructions on how to disable all of it:
https://github.com/Aetherinox/firefox-telemetry-block
(and no, you can't do it with just a few checkboxes in the prefs, you have to go into the advanced pref editor and look up some stuff.)
I don’t fill my house with tools and products I don’t want and I’m not willing to have them on my computer screen either.
I can understand criticism on the development time that may have been better spent, but it's harder for something that is fairly easily disabled and not user-hostile in intent.
I disabled the AI stuff immediately on my side (though the regular UI, not about:config settings) and never saw anything AI-related in Firefox afterwards.
Couldn't have said it better myself. Similarly, current youtube is unusable without element blocking and custom CSS editing. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a way to remove UI elements from Firefox, no?
Citation definitely needed. ChatGPT has almost a billion users.
I do agree with the main point that this should be easy to turn off, but let's not pretend that everyone hates AI as much as the average HN nerd.
Also, you could argue that Firefox's only remaining users are the average HN nerd and therefore it shouldn't pursue AI, but that's exactly the problem.
https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2025/09/17/ai-in-america...
For example, someone getting a google search result containing an AI response is technically interacting with AI but not necessarily making use of its response or even wanting to see it in the first place. Or perhaps someone suspects their insurance premiums were decided by AI (whether that's true or not). Or customer service that requires you go through a chat bot before you get real service.
However, realistically Firefox is a niche browser now and will stay so. So niche that appealing to the minority becomes a valid strategy again.
Sometimes, there's a butler in there who seems absentminded and can only remember things up to a few thousand words. He once stacked all your dishes in the refrigerator and dumped all the food into the sink.
Other times, there's a demon in there who seems hellbent on destroying the innocence of your children and ripping apart your family. He once gave your children snuff films and instructions to build a bomb.
Just don't open the door if you don't like it... Some people are impossible to please.
> I've added a room to your home.
They’ve added a room to their home. That they let you live in, for free.
I’ll also mention that the room right next to it had all the contents you claim to take issue with.
The problem here is that you shouldn’t leave children home alone, not that it has two potentially dangerous rooms. There’s several more such rooms in your house, and you wouldn’t let them cook or use your power tools by themselves either (not until they prove they can be trusted with that anyway).
Completely reasonable things to do.
How else would we recoup our investment in the hugely expensive, unpredictable butler/demon spawning machines?
>The problem here is that you shouldn’t leave children home alone, not that it has two potentially dangerous rooms. There’s several more such rooms in your house, and you wouldn’t let them cook or use your power tools by themselves either (not until they prove they can be trusted with that anyway).
Depends on age, and the children in question. Also, if I have power tools it's because I chose them. And neither amnesiac butlers nor stochastic demons are necessary to not starve in the way that cooking food is, so the assessments of risk and basic good sense are not comparable.
They don't let you stay there for free. They let you stay there because the world's biggest advertising company pays them to.
I mean... yeah? Do you use every feature of every piece of software you have installed?
...had functionally nondeterminstic, unpredictable results in response to how I use them.
...written in long-form English text with confidence and no guarantee of factual accuracy.
...coaxed children into codependent pseudo-relationships with ML models or encouraged suicide.
AI isn't a new feature; it's a new category. And the people who don't understand why some of us don't want it everywhere don't understand that distinction, or else are financially motivated to ignore it and gaslight everyone about the categorical boundaries crossed.
I use LLMs and diffusion style image generators... Where I understand the model I've chosen, can control it locally, and have enough tacit knowledge to double check the outputs before I go ahead with something. I don't trust Mozilla to ensure any of those things anymore. They've long since burned that credibility.
This is such a common fallacy that I think it should be given a name. When you believe that the people who disagree with you must either be ignorant or malicious. Leaves no room for honest disagreement or discussion. Maybe the "dumb-or-evil" fallacy?
- Icon bar: Back, Forward, Reload, Bookmark
- Save Page As...
- Select All
- Take Screenshot
- Ask An AI Chatbot
- View Page Source
- Inspect Accessibility Properties
- Inspect
I would bet that 99% of Firefox users have never ever even once clicked on any of the options besides the first one (icon bar).
This include things like using AI to assist with rendering/processing of PDF, looking at the flags.
As a Firefox users, this seems very troubling to me.
The author claims to be an "IaaS engineer", surely, he can figure out how to write a firefox plugin, that can do what he wants, and use that to help non-technical users, and if it becomes popular enough will probably effect the change he wishes to see.
Most new "features" are by now covered by an existing setting and/or policy. Yet I recognize a pattern of introducing new "but did you opt out of THIS NEW thing?" or "but did you opt out of VERSION TWO of this previously rejected thing?" setting/policy. It has become unsafe to upgrade to new Firefox releases, because each one will disrespect previous user choice in another unexpected way.
If you are concerned, they do have what is called a 'changelog' that will explain all of the new features and how to switch them off if you like.
In this case, yeah, having a single option to toggle off AI settings makes plenty of sense to curate a settings page for! But it’s probably a prioritization or product problem, not a technical issue.
when the AI tab/sidebar appeared, I just closed it. that's it. and it never appeared again. I didn't need to change any special setting.
maybe there was another dialog or two which asked me to enable AI something which I answered No and dont remember.
this article is written in bad faith, Firefox is not pushing AI at every opportunity like Edge for example