> It may be just me, but I read this as “I don't want to but I'll kill AdBlockers in Firefox for buckerinos ”.
Yes, that does seem like a pretty uncharitable interpretation of that quote. I read it as "we won't do it, even though it would bring in $150M USD".
No, it will just kill the browser. The fact he thinks otherwise tells me how out of touch he is.
I like Firefox (for safety) and Vivaldi (Chromium browser, it's easier to use) on Android mobile. On iOS, Safari is simple and sufficient, but I would prefer UBO there, however we all know Apple will never allow extensions for Safari.
Ever since Google moved to Manifest v3, Chrome is a no go.
If Mozilla killed andblocking extensions I’d switch to Helium Browser in a heartbeat since they’re maintaining manifest v2 support for uBO and even ship it OOTB.
The web is unusable without a proper Adblock.
It's a privacy nightmare as well. Few people reason how much data they give away to a host of shady companies just by letting ads display.
There is server-side now (and previously) hosted by the site owner.
It’s a lost cause to fight this. I admire you all for using FF because uBO just for the experience, but it’s only a partial data block. Serverside and thumbprinting- you can’t be anonymous even with Tor, VPN, etc.
Unusable for the commenter perhaps, based on his choices, but not unusable in an absolute sense
For example, I have been using the web without an adblock for several decades.^1 I see no ads
Adblocking is only necessary when one uses a popular graphical web browser
When I use an HTTP generator and a TCP client then no "adblock" is necessary
When I use a text-only browser then no "adblock" is necessary
Websites that comprise "the web" are only one half of the ad delivery system
The other half is the client <--- user choice
Firefox is controlled and distribuited by an entity that advocates for a "healthy online advertising ecosystem" and sends search query data to an online advertising services company called Google in exchange for payment. Ex-Mozilla employees left to join Google and start another browser called "Chrome"
These browsers are designed to deliver advertising. That's why an "adblock" extension is needed
When one uses a client that is not controlled and distributed by a company that profits from advertising services, that is not designed to deliver advertising, then an "adblock" may not be needed. I also control DNS and use a local forward proxy
The web is "usable" with such clients. For example, I read all HN submissions using clients that do not deliver or display ads. I am submitting this comment without using a popular graphical web browser
1. Obviously there are some exceptions, e.g., online banking, e-commerce, etc. For me, this is a small minority of web usage
The web is usuable with a variety of clients, not only the ones designed to deliver ads
So you browser as if it were 1999? Yup, no ads back then.
(JS has few good uses, but is too excessive. Less code is always better - and an art.)
(- it's kind of behavior extension on tag level, yet has JS - and it's orthogonal, like CSS or XSLT (BTW. see that hack: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41245159), unlike JS which is.. untamed and invasive; i.e. there is video (any) tag but you could (+)DIY not touching the document - like custom playing with MPlayer or VLC as a plugin there for all AV formats or sorting filtering editing whatever, all aside custompacks? :)
- or, what about the other way, like a firewall ??
Right, that could be nice use of AI to extract only the good parts, or at least, to adjust the rules for https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/requestcontro... by function.
whenever i'm off my home wifi network, i have wireguard configured to connect home and get me that ad blocking. it's so nice.
yes, i prefer to use brave for personal stuff and i use edge for work stuff (reasons,,, don't ask)
These days I’m using AdGuard on iOS and ublock origin with Firefox on everything else.
It amazes me that every link the kid's school sends is a tracking link, and not always the same tracker.
And yet somehow most people in the world use it every day without an adblocker...
Yeah but they haven't and they're not going to, so what's the point of fantasizing about what you would do in that situation? It's like tough guy syndrome, where a person constantly fantasizes about what they would do in the imaginary situation where one of their friends or family is disrespected, or doomsday preppers who spend their life imagining what they would do in an apocalypse that never comes.
That stuff belongs on archiveofourown.com, not news.ycombinator.com.
I think the only person fantasizing here is you, about what random strangers on discussion forums do all day when not responding directly to topics at hand.
Wherever I've worked as a dev in a decade I've always developed Firefox-first and let the testers turn up Chrome issues. So the products that I am involved with just work with Firefox all the time.
I know there are a lot of people like me, people who are passionate and engaged with technology but have problems with "big tech" and if they turn people like me away than it really will be a "niche browser that nobody tests"
But let's not kid ourselves. We're an absolute minority. For every one of us, there are hundreds, thousands of developers who literally do not give a shit so long as their paychecks hit their accounts. Actually they're likely to write Firefox off as some irrelevant niche market the company can afford to lose because it's less work for them if they do.
(2) It just takes one on the team to make the difference
(3) Practically compatibility with Firefox is pretty good. Maybe once a month I use an e-commerce site or other e-business site where I have to drop down to Chrome, Edge or Safari.
May our new AI co-workers put those thousands into the poorhouse for shoddy worksmanship.
I haven't compared it in years, but Firefox's bookmark sync is better than Google's, it is a reason why I have stuck with it.
I think Firefox manages hundreds of tabs better than Chrome does as far as memory usage goes. I haven't used Chrome seriously in years, but people continue to complain about how RAM hungry Chrome is so I assume it is still an issue.
But Mozilla has been doing odd things that makes me question them. I would move to some Chromium based browser if ublock origin was... blocked... pun intended... because the web does prefer Chrome over Firefox. If this 3rd party browser is able to integrate some of the functionality of ublock origin that Firefox chose to remove; I would use it over the reasons I listed above in a heartbeat.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-disc...
Thank you, gorhill! And thanks to all the people maintaining it and all the filter lists!
You could always secretly continue helping the adblocking mission under a different name. Even if you signed a contract not to.
Raymond got overwhelmed with managing an open source project of uBlock's size and let Chris Aljoudi take over. Adblock later purchased it from Chris.
Meanwhile, Raymond had forked uBlock, creating uBO, and continued to improve it on his own terms. After seeing what happened with Adblock, he has no intention of selling either uMatrix or uBO.
https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix
I don't know the implications of that, it's the only tool I've ever found that lets me feel in control of what programs my browser is executing.
You're right, let me try to amend my statement: at the point uBlock Origin was forked, Raymond disowned the earlier uBlock, and it had become unrelated to him, hence "not the same author" (even if it was started by him). My point was that Raymond didn't want to become involved in the pay-per-ads-let-through scheme the commenter I was replying to mentioned.
However, it leads to Mozilla's earlier weird design choice where you have to install addon if you only want to disable JavaScript on sites - or allow it from only the selected domains.
Years later I haven't found a sensible explanation why they ditched that choice.
I've understood that you can still do it in Chrom(e/ium) and combined with a good updated blocklist in /etc/hosts or like it would provide most of the functionality of an adblock.
I found Chrome+adblockers NOT good enough. I like (and hate) Brave's shield, as I never figured out how to use wildcards to whitelist a whole domain / subdomain, it seems per-host. But that Brave shield WORKS.
Now people are going back to Chrome? Really?
Meaning they select each other, because they're all on each other's board.
For me as a user it is, but is it for him as a CEO?
I'm sorry but this is like borderline gibberish. You could rationally understand that there's a financial incentive to selling out... and choose not to sell out. Did you make it to the and? I didn't think so. The fact that you're simply able to assess that selling out has a dollar amount associated with it isn't a confession unless you're so pot committed to your Mozilla Derangement Syndrome that you've chosen to throw charitable interpretation out the window.
You're entertaining a hypothetical that was already rejected, and your point of emphasis is that they didn't reject it hard enough to satisfy you. I'm sorry but that's the nothingburger of the century.
The core reasoning system here is probably moral intuitionism: if you have an explanation for why something is bad, it is not something you consider intuitively bad and consequently you must be wanting to do it.
I think I've seen it in online communities a lot more in the last couple of decades, and I suspect it's just a characteristic of the endless march of Eternal September.
And believe it or not, human behavior is such that something that is not even i in the space of possibilities is much less likely to occur that something that has been considered and rejected. It might have been rejected ow, but what the calculus changes?
Not sure if that's legal or whatever but killing ad blockers is probably worth it for Google.
If this happened it would be the final straw for me, if I wasn't already looking to change because of them confirming the plan to further descend into the great “AI” cult.
So that extra money will never materialize. And usage numbers will again crater. This is the point.
(You can disagree with that assessment, but that has nothing to do with telemetry, which cannot gauge users hanging around with blocked .. adblockers)
1. Innovate
2. Dominate
3. Enshitify to cash in.
You can't skip step #2.
Right now, Firefox's market share is a rounding error compared to Chrome. Users are starting to switch away from Chrome because it's currently in step 3 (in spades). That trend will not continue if Firefox beats Chrome to the bottom of the pig-pen. Firefox's current focus on AI is concerning enough, but mirroring Chrome's shift to Manifest v3 (i.e. What killed full-blooded ad blocking in Chrome) would be outright suicide.
Mozilla needs to listen to their users. Most don't particularly want "let me run that through an AI for you" popups everywhere. Practically nobody running Firefox wants to be cut off from effective ad blocking.
Monetization is hard, for Mozilla in particular. It was always weird that most of their funding came from Google. Now that Google is yanking it, Mozilla needs to find alternative sources of filthy lucre. However, if they destroy their product's only competitive advantages, there will be nothing left to monetize. If Firefox remains a browser that can provide decent privacy and ad-blocking then Mozilla has a chance to find alternative revenue streams. If, instead, Mozilla throws those advantages away to make a quick buck, that's the last buck they'll ever make.
It shows even in the UI design. Features like tab pinning and tab groups work in ways that are sub-optimal to how users want to use them. A pinned tab should not be tied to a specific URL. If you go their forums you see a lot complaints, and weird thing is all the nonsensical arguments that their reps advance as to how these features should work the way they currently are. I as a longtime Firefox user can immediately see what is wrong with these features as implemented, but the devs won't listen. I wonder if they use FF themselves.
Firefox is also the only app on my MacBook that consistently brings the system to a crawl. Almost every single time my machines slows down, the solution is to kill Firefox. It's got to the point I don't even need to use Activity Monitor, I just kill Firefox and and system recovers.
It's gotten to the point I'm seriously looking at alternatives, trying out Orion and Helium browsers.
Can you elaborate? Are they winding down their their participation in search licensing deals?
How do Mozilla's costs look?
We don't know what he really thinks. Maybe he knows it's a risk he wouldn't want to take but presents it as a goodwill
Nothing can kill Firefox, because it’s already dead for all practical purposes.
... damn do I have adhd?????
(I'm kidding)
I cannot remember the last time I came across one myself.
A few: Developer tools are quite slow; Airline websites often break during checkout; JS games and video players sometimes stutter or use a lot of CPU
And when people ask them what they meant, they revealed that they used some package from the arch user repository that apparently required manual compiling for every update.
And instead of thinking that this wasn't the unusual behavior of a particular package, they insisted that this was the normal Linux packaging experience, which was why Linux as a whole was a terrible operating system.
A bunch of commenters chimed in emphasizing that the whole package distribution system in Linux is designed to among other things, handle dependencies and avoid manual compiling (though it's available as an option), and they were all dismissed as just being fanboy apologists.
And I'm able to access my bank, my credit cards, my utility bills, in Firefox without issue. So I'm not sure what people are talking about.
One thing I am familiar with though in the aftermath of gamergate was a bunch of motivated reasoning to complain about games and insist that they had design flaws or bugs, when really? The bugs weren't real but were kind of just a different way of saying We Don't Like This Game. And so reports of perceived bugs in some cases are as much a social phenomenon as they are a sincere representation of software functionality.
I don't want to say there's no bugs but for every one person's unsubstantiated anecdote, I seem to be able to find two people able to reproduce a functional version of the experience without issue. And just to zoom in on the bank login issue in particular, I use a credit union with an old decrepit HTTP site that was recently updated to a slightly less old and decrepit HTTP site. Plaid is unable to successfully log in, but the web interface works perfectly fine on Firefox mobile.
What you run into the most is the website saying, hey, it looks like you are not using a browser we have tested against, so we are not going to let you log in. Please come back when you have Chrome, edge, or Safari.
Also many sites show significant degradation in FF lately. Youtube works like shit in FF, once every 10 page opens it just gets stuck half way with part of the background loaded, like black with black empty frames on top. Or just empty page. No, it never finishes loading from that state, and neither it can reload on F5. But opening a new tab works fine and YT loads normally.
And to finish off this rant, FF has now started corrupting my open tabs after opening FF with saved session. This never happened since this feature was implemented and in 2025 has happened 3 times already. And in mozilla bugtracker all tickets about this are ignored for years now. Meanwhile they are developing some crappy bells and whistles, instead of fixing fundamental bugs.
If not for Chrome monopoly, I would consider switching browsers. Ladybird can't come soon enough. Mozilla has lost touch with reality.
How much of that is Firefox rendering being worse vs artificial slowdowns by Google owned sites kind of doesn't matter in the end. Objectively it's a slower browsing experience but I solely use it for uBlock Origin.
For me the biggest offender are usually Google products and sometimes the lazy-coded website written by incompetents and whose audience is the tech illiterate (i.e. some websites involving schools/teaching) that just tell you "use latest Chrome just to be sure, download here" to, well, just be sure. Notable mentions for government websites that are like 10 years in the past and that are still on the "Supports Firefox" side because, well, they are just always late to everything.
Which service do you have issues with?
While governments battle big tech on some issues, they are very much on the same side on others. They both want more tracking for example - the governments want to regulate it, and there is a battle for control of the data, but both want the data to be collected by someone.
Funny, because chrome has always been the browser for laptops users, while Firefox has always been the browser of power users.
Gosh, I really wish Mozilla would just dig into their user-base and find a way to adequately become sustainable... or find a way to make it work better as a foundation that is NOT maintained by Google, ie like the Wiki Foundation. I do spend a LOT of time in FF, can't anyone see there's a value beyond selling ads and personal info that could make Mozilla more sustainable, dependable and resilient?
The whole desktop market is cratering.
I was talking to a reddit mod a few months ago. He was looking at the subreddit stats. 95% of his users were on mobile.
Think about that. We desktop users are dinosaurs.
So FireFox having a 3% market share might actually mean more than half of desktop users are on FireFox.
Source: https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worl...
For some reason that part of the story always seems to get omitted, which I find bizarre. But the web pivoted to mobile and Google flexed its monopoly powers. I would argue that upwards of 95% of the change in market share is explained by those two factors.
Looking at the last 10 years gives a different perspective (not great for Firefox but maybe underscores something is different recently in general):
https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worl...
You can't install UBlock Origin on mobile.
Like I still use FireFox on mobile, just purely out of habit. I don't really see anything better about it (I am quite inexperienced when it comes to phones).
I just looked it up. 2023 was when it started. I'm surprised Android even allows something like this.
Granted in Google's case, it seems that the Monopoly judgment was with respect to ad markets, but locking people into search to serve ads might be understood as part of the structure of that monopoly.
(Hey, if you work at Snapchat: fix your shit. Your desktop site is by far the most mainstream website I've come across that lies like this)
Global browser marketshare never made much sense. You need to figure out what your users use, then aim to be compatible for most of those, and ignore any global stats.
As of December 7th, Firefox is 10.3% of traffic there. This makes it the #2 browser, after Chrome (at 62.2%) -- a spot it has been dueling with Edge over for the last year or so.
I'm inclined to think that "people visiting wikipedia" is a fairly representative sample of "normal users", overall.
Not sure how users cope with Chrome-based browsers and intrusive ads.
I also suspect that those who lived through the days of frequent Windows errors and Chrome running out of memory all the time often expect software to fail in weird and unexpected ways, and a lot of people adopt a "don't fix it if it isn't broken" mindset.
Still, uBlock Lite and Brave browser are definitely easy wins and I'm glad to see more random people in my life using them than I would have expected. :)
I used to try to patiently explain why people should do xyz. Now I explain to people why I'm going to change xyz on their device, and if they don't slam the breaks I just do what needs to be done right then. If someone doesn't know what an adblocker is they are getting one so they can see for themselves and reflect on what companies have been putting them through for years to make some incremental amount of money.
Because their web developers are too lazy to write anything to proper standards. They're doing some kind of lazy "Check for Chrome, because everyone must be running that, if not, redirect to an Unsupported page".
I've yet to find a website that "refuses" to work in Firefox which doesn't work just fine when I use a user agent switching extension to present a standard Chrome on MacOS or Chrome on Windows useragent.
Another pretty common experience for developers is wanting to do things "the right way", but being overridden by management.
That being said, in the original context [0] it does sound a lot more like an option on the table. That original article presents it as the weakest of a list of things they're about to explore - but who knows, maybe the journalist has butchered what was said. It is an ambiguous idea without more context about how close it is to Mozilla trying to make life hard for ad-blockers.
[0] https://www.theverge.com/tech/845216/mozilla-ceo-anthony-enz...
If you have the power to do something, saying you might do it but that you don't want to makes people imagine you'd do it. If you have a knife and talk about how you "might stab people, but don't want to", that's a very different message than having a knife and saying "obviously I'm not going to stab people, violence is not an option".
The latter reassures, the former depends heavily on what the recipient of the message thinks of you, and whether they can imagine you stabbing people.
If that quote was accurate, then either he just said something and wanted to wing it, or they should reconsider their communication strategists.
That is a flimsy tissue paper statement about a concept that should be a bedrock principle.
It's irrationally charitable to give it any credit at all. Especially in context where anyone who's awake should understand they need to be delivering an unquestionably clear message about unquestionably clear goals and core values, because this ain't that.
Or rather, it is a clear message, just a different message to a different audience.
The original quote was apparently said without an understanding of the customer base as if ad blockers were not a core piece of their value proposition.
This person doesn't understand their customer if they think it's going to bring in more money to cut ad blockers... It would bring in far less money because they would lose most of their customer base. It's not off mission: it's off Target.
On day one he’s put his appearance on the top of hacker news under “is Mozilla trying to kill himself?”.
The CEO of an organization like Mozilla even considering blocking adblockers for profit is like the president of Amnesty International considering to sell lists of dissidents to the secret police.
No, for Amnesty International it would be more like not considering somebody a political prisoner because the country that took the prisoner is a 1st world country and they don't want to expose themselves on a matter that would risk the donations from a certain population.
Yes, that happened in the aftermath of the Catalan attempt at peaceful independence in October 2017 by Amnesty International Spain.
edited to correct my misunderstanding.
I agree, although if someone isn't the kind of person who would calculate that, they're probably not the person who will become the CEO of a company that size in the first place. I don't think organizations have the right incentives in place to push people with those values to the top.
Why? They have ample free cashflow. They haven't had money problems in 10 years. If they're worried about Google withdrawing support they should save money in an endowment, not do things to help Google.
It’s an eyebrow raising comment at the very least.
Even better would be similar to the article sentiment: "we could get 150 million now but degrade one of our few features that distinguishes us from other browsers + break a lot user trust, which would bring greater losses in the long term".
That's supposedly The Verge paraphrasing the CEO (Unfortunately I can't verify because the full article requires subscription.) I would like to know what the CEO actually said because "it feels off-mission" is a strange thing for the leader of the mission to say. I would hope that they know the mission inside out. No need to go by feels.
> In our conversation, Enzor-DeMeo returns often to two things: that Mozilla cares about and wants to preserve the open web, and that the open web needs new business models. Mozilla’s ad business is important and growing, he says, and he worries “about things going behind paywalls, becoming more closed off.” He says the internet’s content business isn’t exactly his fight, but that Mozilla believes in the value of an open and free (and thus ad-supported) web.
> At some point, though, Enzor-DeMeo will have to tend to Mozilla’s own business. “I do think we need revenue diversification away from Google,” he says, “but I don’t necessarily believe we need revenue diversification away from the browser.” It seems he thinks a combination of subscription revenue, advertising, and maybe a few search and AI placement deals can get that done. He’s also bullish that things like built-in VPN and a privacy service called Monitor can get more people to pay for their browser. He says he could begin to block ad blockers in Firefox and estimates that’d bring in another $150 million, but he doesn’t want to do that. It feels off-mission.
> One way to solve many of these problems is to get a lot more people using Firefox. And Enzor-DeMeo is convinced Mozilla can get there, that people want what the company is selling. “There is something to be said about, when I have a Mozilla product, I always know my data is in my control. I can turn the thing off, and they’re not going to do anything sketchy. I think that is needed in the market, and that’s what I hope to do.”
On the other hand, the clean web feels more direct, to the point, and passionate. I prefer to read content written by passion, not by money seeking purposes.
I contribute to open source projects and nobody "gave me something", as I did it because I wanted to make it better. Like me, there are many others. Nobody is "the product" there.
What the saying you are misrepresenting means is "carefully check free things as you may be the product". Not "free things cannot exist, you either are the product or you pay".
People need to eat and have a roof over their heads.
If something being free ever mattered to your privacy, it hasn't for a long time. Today no matter how expensive something is you are probably a product anyway. Unethical and greedy companies don't care how much money you paid them, they'll want the additional cash they'll get from selling you out at every opportunity. Much of my favorite software is free and doesn't compromise my privacy.
like hoping for the best, but planning for the worst, you must interpret people's intentions using the same methodology. By quoting that axing adblock could be bringing $150mil, but also saying that he doesn't want to do it, it's advertising that a higher price would work - it's a way to deniably solicit an offer.
And in turn my comment above is not a honest remark that your suggested interpretation strategy seems to be selectively applied, but rather an attempt to hurt your standing with your peers.
You know, actual reporting sourcing something new. But in truth, it was just extrapolating a bunch of sweet nothings from the freezing of a quote already published in The Verge. It reminds me of Boston media market sports reporting. You're a sports writer, you have a deadline, and you have to take Curt Schilling's press conference and try and turn it into a story. So take something he said and squeeze it dry, trying to extract some implication of clubhouse drama, to drive the next new cycle and survive to your next paycheck as a reporter. That's the grift, that's the grind.
It costs Mozilla literally nothing to reassure its privacy and user-controlled principles. Instead we got a jk...unless... type of response. This is cowardice and like another commenter has said, a negotiation offer disguised as a mission statement.
I think it's an apt warning, I'd have to read the literal interview transcripts to really draw a conclusion one way or the other. But the simple fact that this is on his mind, and felt like mentioning killing ad block was something Mozilla could do, and is considering doing, was a safe thing to say to a journalist... There's not a chance in hell I'd say anything remotely like that to a journalist.
When someone tells you who they are, believe them.
If they do that, most of the remaining users would flee and goodbye to your millions if you don't have any userbase anymore to justify asking money to anyone.
Literally the only people who talk about Mozilla, or read things about what Mozilla is up to, are unusually motivated power users who really, really care about ad blocking and privacy. They may still have other users, but those people are coasting on momentum from when their grandkid installed Firefox on their computer years ago. They're not reading interviews with the new CEO. Yet Mozilla seems to consistently fail utterly at messaging to their only engaged users.
It's not even that they're doing evil shit, they're just absolutely terrible at proclaiming that they are committed to not doing evil shit.
Everybody has their price. I'm ideologically opposed to advertising but if someone put 150 million dollars on my table and told me to stop making an issue out of it I think I'd take the money. Being set for life trumps being called a hypocrite.
Interpreting the Mozilla CEO the same way may not be charitable, but it is certainly familiar.
[0]: https://futurism.com/future-society/sam-altman-adult-ai-reve...
These kind of questions usually come from non-engineers, people in product or sales who see privacy as a feature or marketing point, and if the ROI is higher they don't give a fuck and would pitch anything that would make a buck
Fewer devs, more bucks, big win for the execs on the short term.
I believe most non-techie users are just lingering, using Firefox just because they used to. Since Firefox doesn't have a built-in ad blocking and the knowledge about adblocking is not universal (see my other comment), it is possible that there are a large portion of Firefox users who don't use adblockers and conversely adblocking users are in a minority. If this is indeed the case, Mozilla can (technically) take such a bet as such policy will affect a smaller portion of users. But that would work only once; Mozilla doesn't have any more option like that after all. That's why I see $150M is plausible, but only once.
Edit: actually I'm way off - it seems estimates are typically around 30-40% of overall users on the web having some kind of ad blocker. So, the Firefox percentage being 60-80+% seems almost a given to me.
Actual attempts to get users to pay for the browser itself, like what Opera did, simply didn't work and led to the insolvency of the browser and having to sell it off to someone harvesting its users as data.
Such weak statements are either a real mistake or show movement away from those principles which should be bedrock for Mozilla and towards some justification to abandon those principles.
It's not like the industry has no precedents on this. "Don't Be Evil" was the motto of a company that is now one of the apex predators in the surveillance capitalism ecosystem.
Unwise to try to dismiss and laugh off legitimate alarms.
It is exactly the opposite — it is reading the actual language used for its intended meaning.
Every CEO is expected to not only understand the issues he faces and is managing, but to ALSO carefully choose the words to describe the situation and the intentions of the organization he leads.
When a CEO makes a statement about what should be a core fundamental principle of an organization, we can certainly expect that CEO to choose their words carefully.
Those words are, or at least should be, the exact opposite of "tea leaves and chicken entrails".
If the CEO is sloppy and the chosen words should actually be considered "tea leaves and chicken entrails", that is a different problem of a less-than-competent CEO.
If those words were actually chosen carefully, consider these two statements:
The actual statement: "[I don't] want to do that. It feels off-mission"
A different statement: "This is a core fundamental principle of Mozilla and I will not lead the company in that direction — not on my watch".
One could technically say "they both say 'Not today'".
But that would be absurd, and stupidly throwing out significant meaning in what the CEO chose to say and how he chose to say it.
He made the first vague statement with weasel words instead of something resembling the bold and unambiguous statement resembling the second statement.
The statement he did make is "I don't want to", which type of statement has often preceded an eventual "sorry, we had to".
There is a lot to make Firefox users nervous, and his choice of statement here did not help matters.
"we won't do this" But you didn't say you'd never do this. "okay we'll never do this" But you didn't say you'd never ever do this. "fine we'll never ever do this" But you didn't say that it's never entered your mind once.
They said they won't do it and your interpretation is to demand they said it with more words? Come on, let's stop this nonsense. Can Firefox users ever be happy?
He didn't say it is off-mission. But just that it feels. My guess is that he is looking at a higher number.
I don't understand context, but my honest reaction will be: "WTF, you just said? What type of relationship you think we have if we discuss such things?"
I definitely understand why people worry. This is just crazy to weight trust in money. If this is on the table and discussed internally, then what we are talking about?
'T' in Mozilla Firefox means 'Trust'.
Once the users were trapped for exploitation, it doesn’t make sense to have a browser that blocks ads. How are they supposed to pay software salaries and keep the lights on? People don’t like paying for software, demand constant updates and hate subscriptions. They all end up doing one of those since the incentives are perverse, that’s why Google didn’t just ride the Firefox till the end and instead created the Chrome.
It doesn’t make sense to have trillion dollars companies and everything to be free. The free part is until monopolies are created and walled gardens are full with people. Then comes the monetization and those companies don’t have some moral compass etc, they have KPI stock values and analytics and it’s very obvious that blocking ads isn’t good financially.
Categorically untrue and weird revisionism. Basically the opposite of what actually happened.
People were trying to figure out how to make money off of the Internet from the early days of the Internet being publicly accessible (rather than a tool used by academic and military institutions). It can be attributed to the downfall of Gopher. It can be attributed to the rise of Netscape and Internet Explorer. While the early web was nowhere near as commercial as it is today, we quickly saw the development of search engines and (ad supported) hosting services that were. By the time 2000's hit, VC money was very much starting to drive the game. In the minds of most people, the Internet was only 5 to 10 years old at that point. (The actual Internet may be much older, but few people took notice of it until the mid-1990's.)
Yes, No, Yes?
I don't demand constant updates. I don't want constant updates. Usually when a company updates software it becomes worse. I am happy with the initial version of 90% of the software I use, and all I want is bug fixes and security updates.
I currently pay zero for ad-blocking (FF + uBlock Origin) and it works perfectly; but I would pay if I had to.
So the best situation for google would be to have borderline monopoly where they pay for the existence of their competition and the competition(Firefox) blocks adblockers too by default but leaving Chrome and Firefox is harder than forcing installin adblockers through the unofficial way.
So basically, all the people who swear they never clicked ads manage to block ads, Firefox and Chrome print money by making sure that ads are shown and clocked by the masses.
Huh? Nexus was funded by CERN.
Newsgrounds was never investor funded.
Yahoo! Directory was just two guys, and you paid to be listed. There were no investors involved.
WebCrawler was a university project. Altavista was a research project.
But sure, if you think that we should start counting from these years you can do that and add a "public funded" era at the beginning.
The mentality of the age was portrayed like this in SV: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo
There were companies that were making some money but those were killed or acquired by companies that give their services for free. Google killed the blogs by killing their RSS reader since they were long into making money stage and their analytics probably demonstrated that it is better people search stuff than directly going to the latest blog posts.
It's the same thing everywhere, the whole industry is like that. Uber loses money until there's no longer viable competition then lose less money by jacking up the prices. The tech is very monopolistic, Peter Thiel is right about the tech business.
> People don’t like paying for software, demand constant updates and hate subscriptions.
hate subscription?? may be. if it's anything like Adobe then yes, people will hate.
that constant update, is something planted by these corporates, and their behavior manipulation tactics. People were happily paying for perpetual software, which they can "own" in a cd//dvd.
One time fee software ment that once your growth slows down you no longer make money and have plenty of customers to support for free. That's why this model was destroyed by the subscription and ad based "free" software.
The last example is Affinity which was the champion of pay once use forever model, very recently they end up getting acquired and their software turned into "free" + subscription.
To convince people to buy they had to add genuinely useful features. I would have bought a new version with new features and better performance. I wouldn’t have bought a new version same as the previous one with AI crammmed in it
What do you mean. Support contracts were not included by default. Consumers had some initial support to fight off instant reclamations.
But Firefox's users are the kind who choose the browser, not use whatever is there. And that choice is driven in part by having solid ad-blockers. People stick with Firefox despite the issues for the ad-blocker. Take that away and Firefox's userbase dwindles to even lower numbers to the point where nobody can pretend they are "competition". That's when they lose any value for Google.
Without the best-of-the-best ad-blocking I will drop Firefox like a rock and move to the next best thing, which will have to be a Chromium based browser. I'll even have a better overall experience on the web when it comes to the engine itself, to give me consolation for not having the best ad-blocker.
Yes but keep in mind that’s not an individual problem that is solved by switching browsers. If a browser engine dies, the walls get closer and the room smaller. With only Chromium and WebKit left, we may soon have a corporate owned browsers pulling in whatever direction Google and Apple wants. I can think of many things that are good for them but bad for us. For instance, ”Web Integrity” and other DRM.
Surely Mac is the only place there is a viable non-Chromium alternative (Safari)?
Fortunately it's not the only one and for example Adguard works perfectly fine.
It's also a closed source browser developed by Apple. It's not competing with Firefox. Everyone contemplating switching to safari over Firefox are not being honest - they're not even on the same playing field.
This line gets thrown around a lot, but if you look at the supported features, Safari is honestly pretty up-to-date on the actual ratified web standards.
What it doesn't tend to do is implement a bunch of the (often ad-tech focused) drafts Google keeps trying to push through the standards committee
The only problem is: what's the difference between the forks, and which is the best? I have no idea.
Apple doesn't collect your browsing data, they build in privacy controls that are pretty much as strong as they can manage given the state of the world, and while it doesn't support uBO, it supports a variety of pretty solid adblockers (I use AdGuard, which, AFAICT, Just Works™ and even blocks YouTube ads most of the time, despite their arms race).
Alternatives like maybe a fork of Firefox with the adblocker-blocker removed?
WebKit is[1][2].
[1]: https://webkit.org/downloads/ [2]: https://webkit.org/webkit-on-windows/
> This guide provides instructions for building WebKit on Windows 8.1
Pro-crypto, anti-gay-marriage, GamerGate culture war case study. Eich CHOSE to leave Mozilla, and was NOT fired or "canceled", in fact he said himself the board begged him to stay and offered him other positions, despite GamerGate troll repeated false claims to the contrary.
To this day, GamerGate trolls still virtue signal they use Brave in support of Eich's anti-gay-marriage bigotry, and still obsessively attack and harass Mozilla just because Eich voluntarily left despite being asked to stay, and they still falsely claim he was fired. (Just watch them prove my point here and now, just because the facts don't fit their narrative!) Eich's GamerGate fans are simply bigoted liars.
The Brendan Eich Controversy
In March 2014, Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript and a co-founder of Mozilla, was appointed CEO of the Mozilla Corporation. His appointment faced immediate and significant backlash when it was widely reported that he had made a personal donation of $1,000 to support California's Proposition 8 in 2008, a ballot initiative that banned same-sex marriage.
The controversy led to widespread criticism, internal dissent among employees, and public boycotts. Less than two weeks into the role, Eich voluntarily resigned as CEO, stating he could not be an effective leader under the circumstances.
The "GamerGate" Connection
The "GamerGate" movement, which emerged in late 2014 (months after Eich's resignation), was an online campaign ostensibly concerned with ethics in video game journalism, though it quickly devolved into a broader culture war, often associated with online harassment and conservative/libertarian critiques of progressive culture.
Members of the "GamerGate" community began using Eich's resignation as a prominent case study for their arguments.
They framed his departure as an example of political correctness and a "witch hunt" leading to professional consequences for private political beliefs (sometimes referred to as "cancel culture").
Eich himself later founded Brave Software, the company behind the Brave Browser, and his story continues to be referenced in discussions about workplace politics, free speech, and the tech industry.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28317391
DonHopkins on Aug 26, 2021 | parent | context | favorite | on: Why are hyperlinks blue?
How many times does this need to be repeated? Mozilla didn't fire Brendan Eich. He resigned of his own free will, against the Mozilla board's request that he stay. His own words and the Mozilla FAQ quoted below, I'm not just making this up. Down the following thread, Brendan suggested googling "constructive separation" -- but I'm not sure if he meant for that euphemism to apply to how he left his job at Mozilla, or to how he wanted to cancel and destroy existing happy same sex marriages in California against their consent. All of the google results have to do with marriage, not employment. Brendan, care to clarify?
As JavaScript proves, Brendan Eich never really understood the concept of equality: https://dorey.github.io/JavaScript-Equality-Table/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24127716
DonHopkins 3 months ago | on: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses ...
Eich was not forced out or fired. In fact, just the opposite: the board actually tried to get Eich to stay, but he decided to leave all on his own. Don't try to rewrite history to make an ideological point. It's all very well and unambiguously documented what really happened, and there's no excuse for you spreading that misinformation.
https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/04/05/faq-on-ceo-resignat...
Q: Was Brendan Eich fired?
A: No, Brendan Eich resigned. Brendan himself said:
“I have decided to resign as CEO effective April 3rd, and leave Mozilla. Our mission is bigger than any one of us, and under the present circumstances, I cannot be an effective leader. I will be taking time before I decide what to do next.”
Brendan Eich also blogged on this topic.
Q: Was Brendan Eich asked to resign by the Board?
A: No. It was Brendan’s idea to resign, and in fact, once he submitted his resignation, Board members tried to get Brendan to stay at Mozilla in another C-level role.
It's a common misconception which is a key part of the narrative that Brendan's Alt-Right Incel GamerGate supporters were doing their best to spread at the time (GamerGate was in full swing when he resigned, and the Alt-Right jumped on the issue at the expense of Mozilla), in order to help Brendan play the victim (instead of respecting Brendan's own victims and co-workers whose marriages he wanted to terminate) and make him a martyr. (Not that I think you're one of them, but they unfortunately succeeded at spreading the misconception that Brendan was fired far and wide, in the service of their cultural war.)
Edit: And do you acknowledge that Brendan wanted to cancel many same sex marriages in California? And do you agree or disagree with him that those marriages should have been canceled? Because he got what he paid for, Proposition 8 passed, and those marriages WERE canceled. Which is worse: canceling one job, or thousands of marriages?
Edit 2: It's pretty rich that Brendan would claim to be the one suffering from a hostile work environment, when he was the one who wanted to destroy the marriages of his co-workers and users. Was it too much for him to bear facing the dirty looks of his co-workers who he didn't believe deserved the same rights as he enjoyed? Bullies are always playing the victim.
Breaking apart other people's marriages sounds more like "destructive separation" to me.
Edit:
tune-nova: You obviously care enough to reply, and your argument is incoherent claptrap, so you seem quite flustered. And GamerGate trolls care enough to continue trolling about this after a decade, and MAGA cares enough to make homophobia and transphobia a major issue, and they're still trying to overturn Obergefell v. Hodges, so you're wrong and you know it.
handedness: What's incredibly unfair and absolutely fanatical is denying gays the right to marry who they love, and nothing I said can hold a candle to the homophobic bigotry you are defending. And Eich was NOT FIRED despite the MANY people in this thread still making that false claim a decade later. We all know what side of history you are on: the wrong one.
Do people in California care that slightly under 50% of my state's population are at or below poverty level? Do they care that most of the rest spend 55-60% of our income on food? Do they care that our life expectancy is 15 years lower than that in California, mostly because of terrible pollution caused by extraction and processing of minerals which our beloved government then sells to the US and several European countries, and pockets the money?
Do they care about conflict minerals in general, used to build electronics for their enjoyment? Have they done anything about this?
This American political bickering does not even register on our radars when choosing a web browser.
"Europe's problems are the world's problems but the world's problems are not Europe's problems.", as India's Mr. Jaishankar is fond of saying.
The same can be said about the US.
It's sad, I'm sure there was a better path Mozilla could have taken, but they've had a decade or more of terrible management. I wonder if the non-profit / corp structure hasn't helped, or if it's just a later-stage company with a management layer who are disconnected from the original company's mission and strategy.
Who is Mozilla's core audience? From what I remember, it's not addon-users, as most users never have used even just a single addon.
> They literally have lost 90% of their market share from their peak,
To be fair, it's not entirely their own fault. Competition is strong, especially from Google and Apple. Even with perfect decisions, they likely would still have lost big since their peak. The market for alternative Browsers isn't as big any more as it used to be.
If most users who install Firefox do so for superior adblocking and those same users are also very likely to turn off telemetry (which I think some privacy/adblock extensions probably do by default?), then at Mozilla's end one might get the impression that "most users don't use extensions" - even though the vast majority of users do.
So to answer the questions of:
> Who is Mozilla's core audience?
It's probably the kind of user that has telemetry off. You don't know much if anything about them.
> It's probably the kind of user that has telemetry off. You don't know much if anything about them.
Don't think so, most people don't give a f** about this. Tech-people on that level are even in the industry a minority. And on the other side, those stealth-users are worthless for Mozilla, because they can't make money from google with them. So for a project needing to make money with usersnumbers, everyone who is out of this, isn't core audience anyway.
If less than 4% of users use uBO, which the kind of users you're referencing claim is the primary reason they use Firefox, I doubt many users disable telemetry either.
Their peak in share was also pre-chrome. They've basically been losing the battle slowly for over a decade.
I am thinking of it as: people who care about privacy and/or an independent web browser. That seems mostly in line with what the Mozilla Foundation's principles are stated to be.
Maybe it's not that. But if not, what is it? How do they otherwise have any positive differentiation versus their competition? It surely can't be claimed to be any sense of "users who want an AI browser" because surely those people are going to use ChatGPT's browser, not Mozilla's.
Relevant part from the site: [..]Add-on usage measured here reflects multiple facets of browser customization, including web extensions, language packs, and themes.[..]
40% is a big minority, but not really what I would call core audience, especially when language packs and themes are also counted here. And 5 of the top 10-addons in that statistic are language packs.
Though, UBlock Origin is #1 with 9.6% user-share, and it's shown to have 10.5 million users on the store-page, which means there are at best only around 100 Million users left with Firefox on desktop? Seems worse than I thought.
Source?
> over 40% of Firefox users have at least 1 installed add-on
There was an article from Mozilla, some years ago, going more into the details about this, but I'm not sure where. Though, I found another one[1] from 2021, which starts with only one third of the users having installed an addon.
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/blog/firefoxs-most-popular-innova...
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/extensions-addons/heres-...
> He says he could begin to block ad blockers in Firefox and estimates that’d bring in another $150 million, but he doesn’t want to do that. It feels off-mission.
LOL the day that Firefox stops me from running what I want is the day I'll get rid of it.
Today the ability to run proper content blockers is still a selling point for Firefox but obviously wouldn't be if they started to meddle with that as well. (Has there ever been a more obvious case of anticompetitive behaviour than the biggest browser nerfing ad blocking because it's owned by one of the biggest ad companies?)
Other than customisation the only real advantage I see for Firefox today is the privacy angle. But again that would obviously be compromised if they started breaking tools like content blockers that help to provide that protection.
Edit: My Hitler parody of when Firefox introduced this (almost 10 years ago now!): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taGARf8K5J8
Do these people even know their users?
For example: Fedora Silverblue default Firefox install had an issue with some Youtube videos due to codecs. So I tried watching youtube on Chromium. Ads were so annoying I stopped watching by the second time I tried to watch a video. Stopped watching youtube until I uninstalled default firefox install and added Firefox from flathub. If the option to use a good adblocker gets taken away I 'll most likely dramatically reduce my web browsing.
P.S. Maybe someone ports Vanadium to desktop Linux? If firefox goes away that 'd be my best case desktop browser. Using it on my mobile ;)
Also, a small minor detail here: We're not paying for firefox! why are so many people feeling entitled? Mozilla has to do something other than beg Google to survive. Perhaps we need a fork of firefox that is sustained by donations and is backed by a non-profit explicilty chartered to make decisions based on community feedback? I don't see a problem with that wikipedia-like approach, I don't think any of the forks today have a good/viable org structure that is fully non-profit (as in it won't seek profit at all). Mozilla has bade some bad decisions recently, but they're a far cry from the world-ended outcry they're getting.
If we don't donate to Mozilla and we don't pay them money, then we have to be the product at some point. Even if they don't it to be that way, they have to placate to some other business interests.
I hope the EU also pays attention, perhaps some of their OSS funding can help setup an alternate org.
Because some of us have supported, donated to, advocated for, and participated in the firefox and mozilla communities over the years, and feel betrayed by the abandonment of principles, kowtowing to adtech surveillance "features", and overall enshittification of a once beloved browser that we hoped would allow for an alternative to the chrome blob, as they once were to the atrocity that was internet explorer.
It's perfectly reasonable to call out foundations and organizations that utterly abandon and fail to live up to principles. Mozilla is just a PR wing for Alphabet and whitewashing the chromification of all browsers, at this point.
Ladybug and some other alternatives will come around. I don't see any future in which Mozilla returns to principles - the people leeching off / running the foundation won't ever be interested in returning to a principled stance, but to change the brand, or pursue profit, or some other outcome that is divergent from the expectations and consideration of the original supporters. They keep trying to commodify and branch out and waste insane amounts of money on nonsense, and hire CEOs that lose the plot before they ever start the job. Mozilla is functionally dead, for whatever vision of it a lot of us might once have had.
By the time they'd have a chance to fix anything, maybe it'll be practical to have an AI whip up a new browser engine and we'll all have bespoke, feature complete privacy respecting browsers built on the fly.
1. Why would I donate to Mozilla? Mozilla hates me.
2. When Mozilla was 30% of the browser market rather than 3%, they could have easily cleaned up on donations. If they had made whatever extension transition that they thought they needed to do but while protecting all contemporary extension capabilities and not using it as a power grab to limit user control, they'd still have 30% of the market. If they hadn't made the business decision to permanently be a wonky Chrome, people wouldn't think of them as a wonky Chrome.
3. Mozilla has plenty of money. If you can't create a sustainable browser with a billion and a half dollars in the bank and a fully-featured browser, it's because you don't want to. You already have the browser, you can't whine about how complicated it is to create a browser. Pay developers with the interest. Stop paying these useless weirdo executives a fortune.
But enough about Mozilla. If you're some Bitcoin or startup billionaire, I'll ask you the same thing. Firefox is sitting right there and licensed correctly. You want people to respect you and remember you nicely when you're dead? Take it, fork it, put that same billion and a half into a trust, and save an open door to the Internet at a time when it's really needed. You've won in life, it will be easy to make people trust you if your ambition is just to do good. Steal Firefox, put it on the right track, and people will flock back to it. I know Ladybird is interesting, but a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.
Instead of which he inverts it "we'd get like $150m if we did this thing we won't do because well.. we haven't decided to." with the implicit "... yet"
And I agree with comments below: he discounts risk side loss of income because of people walking away.
By selling browser UI real estate to AI companies[0] they reduce the power Google has over them. If they get to the point where no individual company makes up a majority of their revenue, it allows them to focus on their mission in a much broader way.
[0]These will be very expensive listings should this feature become popular: https://assets-prod.sumo.prod.webservices.mozgcp.net/media/u...
There's no world in which 75% of your revenue coming from Google doesn't influence what you do. Even if it's not the main driver of all decisions, pissing off Google is a huge risk for them.
Why would there be any proof?
In 2021 they got $500M "royalties" (this is their payment from Google) with only $75k revenue from all other sources, including $7.5k donations.
many people stated that they are happy to do targeted donations (ie. money earmarked strictly for Firefox development only, and it cannot be used for bullshit outreach programs and other fluff)
and if they figure out the funding for the browser (and other "value streams") then they can put the for-profit opt-in stuff on top
The problem is the MBAs.
(Yes it's technically a company, but it's a company owned by a non profit.)
is that too much money for one person? well, apparently it depends on who do you ask. and even if the board members who approved it might thought it's too much, it still could have been cheaper than to fire the CEO and find a new one and keep Mozilla on track.
CEO compensation is usually a hedge against risks that are seen as even more costly, even if the performance of the CEO is objectively bad.
https://www.ecgi.global/sites/default/files/working_papers/d...
framing Mozilla/Firefox as some kind of bastion is simply silly - especially if it's supplied by the gigantic fortress kingdom of G, and makes more money on dividends and interest than on selling any actual products or services.
it's a ship at sea with a sail that's too big and a rudder that's unfortunately insignificant.
but whatever metaphor we pick it needs to transform into a sustainable ecosystem, be that donation or sales based.
The way to interpret Mozilla is that they're a dying/zombie company, fighting heroically to delay the inevitable.
You very much can if all the competitors are either a) ad-ridden, ai-infested, bloated monstrosities or b) don't provide the functionality people want. In that case, there's apparently lots of demand which could easily support either a pay-once or a low-subscription-fee model.
I don't think the rest of the world likes their dependencies on US companies and their love for surveillance.
Of course, to do it right means ensuring there's enough non-US organizational structure with the know-how to take over the project should things go pear-shaped, and oversight to spot of the pear is taking shape.
But that's what governments can do, assuming they don't want to be under the thumb of the US. ("Oh, you think tariffs are bad? We'll do to you like we did those ICC judges and shut off all your accounts.")
They could be lean and focus on firefox only.
Now they get 150m from google, spend just a part on firefox and rest on failures and hobby projects to get promoted.
If they were focued on core business, 1) they would have a war chest 2) they could leave off donations
https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4387539/firefox-money-invest...
Bonus points:
1. Multi layered approach to dealing with ads and other malware.
2. A committment to no AI or other bloat - that's not what I'm paying you for.
3. Syncable profiles.
- They were ahead of the game with extensions. Then everyone copied them.
- They were ahead of the game with tabs. Then everyone copied them.
- They were ahead of the game with containers. Then everyone copied them.
- They are still the best browser to use for an ad free internet experience.
- The only flaw I can think of, is they are not leaders in performance. Chrome loads faster. But that's because Chrome cheats by stealing your memory on startup.
How would you make FireFox better? When you say they should be making FireFox better, what should they be doing? Maybe they should hire you for ideas.
Because to me, they seem to be constantly trying to make FireFox better. It's just hit or miss.
Extensions was a hit. Tabs was a hit. Containers was a hit. They had a shit tonne of misses over the decades. We just don't remember them.
The crypto and ai stuff just happens to be a miss.
First, I would stop breaking up the stuff that works. Firefox was ahead of the game with extensions, then deprecated the long tail for a rewrite that took three years [1] (during which Firefox mobile had a grand total of 9 extensions) and even then it's hard for me today to know which extensions work on mobile. They were similarly ahead of the game with containers, and yet they still don't work on private mode [2] and probably never will. That's two out of three hits where they tripped over their own two feet[3].
Second, do the one thing that users have been requesting for decades: let me donate to the browser development. Not to the Mozilla Foundation, not to internet freedom causes, to Firefox. The Mozilla foundation explicitly says that they don't want to be "the Firefox company", and yet I'd argue they should.
Third, go on the offensive. I get the impression that, with the exception of ad-blocking, Firefox is simply playing catch-up to any idea coming from Chrome regardless of whether it makes sense or not. Would Firefox had removed FTP support had Chrome not done it before?
And fourth, make all these weird experiments extensions.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2023/12/14/three-years-after-its-reva...
[2] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1330109
[3] I always associated tabs with Opera, though.
[4] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2024/a...
Yeah as someone who picked up Firefox when it was Phoenix, it was “free Opera with a less-odd-feeling UI”. That was basically the initial (great!) sales pitch.
What got me installing it on any computer belonging to a person I would have to help support was the auto-pop-blocking and that it performed a ton better than IE/Netscape/Mozilla. Opera also performed better and I think it also blocked pop ups out of the box, but it wasn’t free (well, kinda, but the free edition… had ads).
Eliminate - both in code and by policy - anything that compromises privacy. If a new feature or support of a new technology reduces privacy, make it optional. Give me a switch to turn it off.
Stop opting the user into things. No more experiments. No more changing of preferences or behavior during upgrade.
Give the user more control; more opportunities for easy and powerful automation and integration.
Not only would this win me back as a user, I'd pay for the privilege. I'm paying for Kagi and happy to be doing so. I'd love to pay for an open source browser I could trust and respect.
On my laptop I had to switch from Firefox to Chrome because it kept filling up all of my RAM resulting in other applications crashing.
They were ahead of the game with extensions, then they destroyed their own extensions. They copied everyone else, not the other way around.
> - They were ahead of the game with tabs. Then everyone copied them.
They were ahead of the game with tabs. Then while destroying their extensions they made vertical tabs harder, while still leaving it as a charitable contribution by the community instead of an internal project, and slow-walked it for a decade. I still have to do weird CSS to make them look right, because they decided to have an opinionated sidebar for no particular reason.
> - They are still the best browser to use for an ad free internet experience.
This, again, is not their fault. It's because of a man who they don't pay, who has had to battle with them on multiple occasions. Their only contribution is not accepting a Chrome standard completely. Imagine wanting to be given credit for not exactly copying your neighbor, after an enormous amount of pressure was brought to bear. It's my belief that Google decided that Firefox wouldn't kill ad blocking in the end, because it would have looked horrible in antitrust court. Now that's over (Obama judges don't believe in antitrust), and you can expect Firefox to kill it soon enough.
> Because to me, they seem to be constantly trying to make FireFox better. It's just hit or miss.
Nah. They kept telling me, while ignoring everyone's complaints about their actual experiences, that the most important thing was to reduce startup time for some unknown reason.
What can Mozilla Firefox do to make their 500 million without Google?
I wish Firefox would be that browser.
Organizations with clear, focused missions are much more likely to be able to achieve them than organizations that want to be everything to everybody.
"Make and maintain Firefox as the best browser for people who care about internet freedom, privacy, and extensibility" would be a perfectly reasonable mission.
I do not want to try your AI tools, Mozilla, yours or anyone else's.
The new CEO is just the final nail in their coffin.
Eich didn't suddenly come out against anything in 2014. People dug up his prior funding.
Demanding permanent ostracization for supporting a majority position is fairly anti-democratic. You can beat someone in a process (Eich's side lost) without demanding total victory forever or declaring more than half of a whole society as permanent villains. In 2008 55% of the US opposed gay marriage, 36% supported it.
There's three options on every stance: support, oppose, and neutral. When in doubt, you should be neutral - not opposed.
Just because everyone else is opposing gay marriage, or integration, or emancipation, doesn't mean you should.
Maybe you don't have the time or energy to try to find out what path you should take. Okay, fair. You can always do nothing. You can literally say "I don't know enough about this to have an opinion".
But following the majority IS NOT that. You ARE taking a hard stance if you do that! You're making a choice, and that means you better understand that choice. You are responsible for it, accountable to it!
This was an utterly unreasonable description of being judged unqualified for 1 job.
It depends a lot on what that position is. Donating your personal wealth to discriminate against a marginalized group, which includes many of your employees is worth calling out.
Segregation was once a "majority position" in this country. Shaming segregationists was a really effective way to change that. For example, George Wallace, who eventually redeemed himself.
Applying modern sensibilities to history is stupid.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20111017161259/http://www.quinni...
[2] https://www.politico.com/blogs/ben-smith/2008/08/obama-says-...
That's exactly what the parent post is talking about. When Mozilla started prioritizing political correctness over software quality, software quality predictably declined. That's why they are struggling now: they reduced their user base to the tiny group of political extremists that will put up with an inferior product for the sake of political signaling.
By the way, Eich didn't “come out” as anything. His private donation (a mere $1000) was exposed by people who wanted to cancel him for his political views. It wasn't Eich who forced the issue, it was his political opponents, who do not tolerate any viewpoint diversity. Eich's views weren't even fringe or extreme at the time: Proposition 8 passed with support from the majority of Californian voters.
He doesn't have to share all of them, but we have to have enough overlap for him to consider me & my friends enough of a human being to share the same rights that he does.
As another commenter pointed out, there are beliefs heinous enough that will override the quality of optional software that I might choose to use.
Of course there are views so extreme almost nobody would put up with them. But at the same time, being tolerant of differences of opinion is an important aspect of a free society and a functioning democracy. There is a word for people who cannot tolerate even the smallest difference of opinion: bigots.
But differences of opinion aren't binary; they lie on a spectrum. Similarly, bigotry lies on a spectrum. The person who doesn't brook the smallest disagreement is a greater bigot that only considers the most odious points of view beyond the pale.
For an extreme example, consider these cases: 1) A CEO is fired for arguing that the US government should round up all Jews and put them in extermination camps Nazi Germany style. 2) A CEO is fired for arguing that the local sales tax should be raised by 0.25 percentage points.
Are these cases exactly the same? You could argue in both cases the CEO gets fired for expressing sufficiently unorthodox political views, but that doesn't cut at the heart of the matter. Clearly it's necessary to quantify how extreme those views are. The extent to which the board that fires their CEO is bigoted depends on how unreasonable the CEO's views are; they are inversely proportional.
So now back to Eich. What was his sin? He donated $1000 to support Proposition 8, which restricted the legal definition of marriage to couples consisting of a man and a woman. This view was shared at the time by Barack Obama and a majority of California voters. It didn't strip gay couples of any formal rights: all the same rights could be obtained through a domestic partnership or an out-of-state marriage. It was just a nominal dispute about what the word “marriage” means.
Clearly this is a relatively unimportant issue; closer to a tax dispute than a genocide. You can disagree with Eich and the Californian public on this one, but being unable to tolerate their point of view doesn't make them monsters; it makes you a bigot.
The fact that Mozilla didn't allow their CEO to deviate from the majority point of view on this issue (again, a minority viewpoint in California at the time!) revealed Mozilla to be a heavily politicized, extremely bigoted corporation, that puts ideological conformity first.
I think human beings should be allowed to interact with other human beings freely as well and they should be able to choose to not interact as well. So, should you dislike blue products sufficiently (as is my duty as a Gooner) or even should you not, you should be able to speak. So whatever your motivation, I think any human should have the right to say "I will not use the product of any company that continues to work with this company that uses the colour blue in its products".
Governments and the monopolies they grant should be constrained in certain respects, but for free humans anywhere to choose not to use the work of other free humans should be permitted. One of my friends is a firebrand on Twitter - people accuse her of racism and so on. Presumably people will choose to not work with me because of the fact that she is my friend. So be it. They can even choose, over this, to not work with anyone who will work with me. They can choose to flood-fill my entire network over this. I cannot demand from them that they work with these people - that would constrain their freedom.
If Mozilla Corp decided that Brendan Eich should no longer be CEO, that's Mozilla Corp's prerogative. I think it is good that we live in an at-will state.
The argument has various nuances regarding immutable characteristics and monopolies and the role of government. I'll leave it to you to fill these gaps in a reasonable fashion or, if you leave your email here then I will write an appropriately detailed blog post and mail you a link when I'm done.
I think treating every human with equal dignity goes beyond politics. While the specific context here was political, but that is only the context, not the principle.
As an example, Loving v Virginia, the Supreme Court case that struck down all anti-miscegenation laws, was in 1967. In 1968, a Gallup poll indicated that less that 20% of white Americans "approved of marriage between whites and non-whites."
Three decades later, in 2000, Alabama finally voted to repeal its (inactive) law, and a full 40% of voters voted to keep the racist, useless law in their state constitution.
But in any case, I've heard this argument before, and the timeline doesn't make sense. At the time he resigned, Chrome was very firmly ahead of Firefox, and given his track record with Brave, the idea that Eich would have single-handedly saved Mozilla is also pretty dubious to me.
It seems like a disingenuous and lazy talking point tailor made to blame the demise of Firefox on a culture war politics, when in reality it's the fact that Google was willing to throw much more time and resources at the browser market than a non-profit, unimpeded by the same sort of anti-trust and lack of development that brought Internet Explorer low.
That is a wildly uncharitable take. I'm not OP, but I believe that nobody, CEOs or otherwise, should be fired for their activities outside of work. That can be political beliefs, but doesn't have to be either. And yes, that means that sometimes someone whose beliefs you find repugnant is going to have a good job. That is the price of a free society, and I think it's worth it.
Imagine, instead, the opinion he expressed outside of work is that Firefox sucks and nobody should use it. Should he be fired then?
As a CEO, your opinion and perspective is MARKETING. You determine if customers stay or leave. And causing customers to leave is obviously a fireable offense.
A society free enough to fund hatred, but not one free enough for employers to make decisions based on that?
On the other hand I think San Francisco is part of the Mozilla problem because it is less than an hour on the 101 to go see people at Facebook and Google yet they are distant from the 99% of of web developers and web users that live somewhere else whose use Firefox because they don't like what Chrome stands for.
I wish Mozilla was in Boulder or Minneapolis or Cleveland or Dublin or some other second-tier but vibrant city where they might have the capacity to listen to us rather than be in the same monoculture that brings us Chrome and Instagram.
Equivocating speech and crime as both being "violence" (of similar class, deserving similar response) is a fallacy that lets people justify murder in response to disagreement as long as it's deemed serious enough.
Also, you can absolutely be fired for just saying something and that's been the case forever. As a CEO, you are essentially marketing your company. Marketing it poorly and losing customers can, and will, get you fired - in every company, ever.
That being said, I disagree with Eich and it probably made sense for the org to let him go given how his views might impact public perception of Mozilla.
People with an axe to grind always hide what Brendan Eich did behind "politics" which is a dishonest slight of hand.
Nobody knows this for sure. We do know that Eich was fired for political reasons, and not because of his technological direction.
This betrays a decision making process that prioritizes political correctness above leadership qualities and technical contributions.
> you can't donate to stop your own employees and users from having civil rights without repercussions.
Why not? Why can't the CEO of Mozilla have his own private political views just like anyone else, and donate his own private money to whatever democratic causes he likes?
This really isn't obvious to anyone except the people, like you, who view Mozilla as a political project first, and as a software project a distant second.
Firing your CEO for not being sufficiently aligned with the American Democratic Party only makes sense if you assume the purpose of Mozilla is to push American Democratic politics, rather than make good software that anyone in the world may use (spoiler alert: many users of open-source software are not American Democrats!)
Eich resigned.
> private political views
Donations are public material support. Not private views.
> Donations are public material support. Not private views.
Not really? Nobody would know what causes Eich donates to if they didn't make an effort to look it up and broadcast that information.
Even if you take that view, are you saying that nobody who works for Mozilla is allowed to make any political donations ever? Or are you simply saying that you Mozillians aren't allowed to donate money to conservative causes? Because it sounds a lot like the second one, and then we're back to the original allegation: that Mozilla today is a political project first, and a technological project second. Otherwise, how do you explain Mozilla caring so much about which political campaigns its employees donate to?
CEOs are never fired is false objectively. CEOs must earn support. And there was no reason to state false information if you believed everyone would understand the context of the facts.
> Not really?
Really. Public records are public.
> Nobody would know what causes Eich donates to if they didn't make an effort to look it up and broadcast that information.
No one would know most news stories if someone didn't research and publish them. No one would know what Mozilla's CEO was paid if no one looked it up and published it.
> Even if you take that view, are you saying that nobody who works for Mozilla is allowed to make any political donations ever?
People are allowed to make donations. People are allowed to choose who they follow or support or not.
And jobs have different standards. Eich remained CTO years after his donation was published with little controversy.
> Otherwise, how do you explain Mozilla caring so much about which political campaigns its employees donate to?
Who are Mozilla to you? The board appointed Eich CEO years after his donation was published
If, as you say, "We both know that CEOs are never fired", then you are objectively a bald faced liar for also saying "Eich was fired for political reasons". That means you very well know your argument doesn't hold any water, so you had to lie in order to make a dishonest emotional appeal instead. Your other posts in this discussion are full of lies and logical fallacies, too.
We have been over this so many times that I'm dumbfounded you think your lie would not be immediately challenged, and it's ridiculous for you to beclown yourself by attempting to back-pedal after you said it. Just delete your comment if you're so ashamed you got caught lying. Or maybe consider not lying in the first place, and give up your indefensible beliefs.
It's your own fault you lost this argument because you decided to attempt such a pathetically transparent lie, and you can't back-pedal enough to make up for that. Face it, you're just a dishonest bigot on the wrong side of history, still salty that gay marriage is finally legal, impotent to do anything about it besides being a lying keyboard warrior troll.
I hope for your own family's sake that your own straight marriage isn't so fragile that it was undermined by gay marriage being legal, as Brendan's and other homophobic bigot's tired arguments claim is the insidious threat of gay marriage.
Maybe you made bad life choices and want to punish people who didn't, but that's on you, so don't take it out on gay people, even if you're one of the jealous hateful closeted self loathing ones yourself.
>I hope for your own family's sake that your own straight marriage isn't so fragile that it was undermined by gay marriage being legal, as Brendan's and other homophobic bigot's tired arguments claim is the insidious threat of gay marriage.
>Maybe you made bad life choices and want to punish people who didn't, but that's on you, so don't take it out on gay people, even if you're one of the jealous hateful closeted self loathing ones yourself.
This is a particularly egregious post that I think warrants more intervention than just a flag @dang. This user has been doing this quite a lot, over a period of many months, if you search his posts for the word "Eich" or "bigot".
This is not what happened. He gave money to a cause with the explicit goal of using that money to prevent his coworkers and users from having equal civil rights based on an inalienable trait they were born with.
That's not an "American Democratic Party" alignment issue, and if you genuinely believe it is, your dog whistle may be broken. It's sounding an awful lot like a normal whistle.
He has a right to do that without fear of government retaliation. But Mozilla has a right to fire him for being a bad person because of it.
> A same-sex marriage lawfully performed in another state or foreign jurisdiction on or after November 5, 2008 was fully recognized in California, but Proposition 8 precluded California from designating these relationships with the word "marriage." These couples were afforded every single one of the legal rights, benefits, and obligations of marriage.
Note the last sentence!
Additionally, proposition 8 was not extreme. It was carried by a majority of California voters, and Barack Obama said at the time: “I personally believe that marriage is between a man and a woman” which is essentially what the proposition established too, though Obama opposed using a ballot proposition to settle the issue.
> He has a right to do that without fear of government retaliation. But Mozilla has a right to fire him for being a bad person because of it.
I never argued that Mozilla doesn't have the right to fire people for their political views. We're just establishing that Eich _was_ fired for his political views, and that that shows Mozilla had become a political organization first, and a technological company second.
In a politically neutral technology company there should be room for people who side with Barack Obama and the majority of Californian voters. The fact that that is not true of Mozilla proves it's not a politically neutral company; it's a political project that inherited a software project they are not particularly interested in maintaining except as a vehicle for further promoting their politics.
I dropped firefox 9 months so after they updated their privacy policy and removed "we don't sell your data" from their FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43213612
Mozilla has hired a lot of execs from Meta and bought an ad company, looking through a lot of their privacy policy at the time, a lot of it involves rewriting it to say that they can serve you sponsored suggestions when you're searching for things in their search bar and stuff and sharing out some of that data with third parties etc.
Firefox was bringing in half a billion a year for the last decade, if they would've just invested that money in low risk money market accounts (instead of paying their csuite executives millions of dollars in salary and putting the rest on non-Firefox related related social causes), the company would be able to easily survive off the interest alone.
I've been using Firefox since 2006 and have defended it for decades even when they've made questionable decisions that have gotten everybody upset with them. But this time it wasn't just making stupid decisions to try and fund the company, this time they actuality sold out their own customers.
In public announcement in the above link explaining why they removed "we don't sell your data" from the FAQ, the rationality was that some jurisdictions define selling data weirdly, they cited California's definition as an example but California's definition is exactly what I would consider the definition of selling my personal data.
They're justifying this by saying that they need it to stay alive since they're not going to be getting money from Google anymore, but I argue that you shouldn't sell out your customer base on the very specific reason anyone would choose you. I would rather pay a monthly fee to use Firefox to support them, but even if you gave them $500 million today they would just squander it away like they've done since forever so I really don't have any solution I can think of which frustrates me.
I switched to Orion (and use Safari if a site doesn't work in Orion), which can be a little buggy at times but I'm happy that it's not based on chrome at least.
The end users are not their customers. They haven't been for a long, long time.
As for calling it "off-mission": yes, what's even the point of FF if that's the route it goes on?
[1] https://github.com/mozilla-services/syncstorage-rs
[2] https://mozilla.github.io/ecosystem-platform/tutorials/devel...
> Do any of these forks have the ability to sync, either with Firefox or something self hosted?
The Firefox Sync web service is provided by Mozilla but can be self hosted: https://github.com/mozilla-services/syncstorage-rs. That could also be used in forks. See e.g. https://librewolf.net/docs/faq/#can-i-use-firefox-sync-with-... . I don't understand what you mean by sync with Firefox.
> Or are they all just basically reskins with a single toggle added or such?
Hard to generalize, but definitely not all of them. see e.g. https://lwn.net/Articles/1012453/
* Windows and Android. I even pay for their vpn because there is apparently no way to pay for the browser, which is what I actually use.
At any rate, I think their only good path of to get rid of Gecko.
The best would be to replace it with a finished version of Servo, which would give them a technically superior browser, assuming Google doesn't also drop Blink for Servo. It may be too late for this, but AI agents may perhaps make finishing Servo realistic.
The other path would be to switch to Chromium, which would free all the Gecko developers to work on differentiating a Chromium-based Firefox from Chrome, and guarantee that Firefox is always better than Chrome.
No they would get fired, unless Firefox found a new big project to earn money from, which at the moment is not very likely.
2018: $2,458,350
2020: Over $3 million
2021: $5,591,406.
2022: $6,903,089.
2023: ~$7m
Mozilla declined to detail the CEO's salaries for 2024+
In that set of circumstances, the main qualification for CEO is likely 'plays nice with Google'. Given that, I'm not surprised that Mozilla underperforms.
Beating Google in the browser market might be considered hostile to their sponsors.
If Mozzilla brings AI or removes ad blocks then they are every way just worse Chrome and there is zero reason to use them over Chrome.
I guess I should already start porting my Firefox extensions over to Chrome since this ship is sinking stupid fast.
Android blocking side loading is more or less in the same ballpark.
I don't know why bring up Android when it is already Google product.
The Mozilla Foundation has received around USD ~26 million in 2023 in donation from the Mozilla Corporation (~70%) and other sources (~30%).
That is the most vexing part. I want to donate for Firefox development. Not marketing, not side projects, let me just fund the devs. But no, that is not possible.
Blender is a huge success story relying on sponsors and donations, Wikipedia is swimming in money but no we can't just have a free browser.
No we need to have a Mozilla Corporation that lives on Google money for being the controlled opposition i.e. technically avoiding monopoly situation thing. After all CEOs can't get rich on donations, can they?
The web standards are growing faster than non-profit engines can implement them. Google & Apple are bloating the web specs in what looks like regulatory capture.
If Blink/Webkit dominate for long enough, they will lock everything down with DRMs & WEI. Maybe it's time to work on lighter protocols like Gopher & Gemini that don't need 20GB of RAM to open 20 tabs ?
Is that actually the case though? I find it hard to believe that Mozilla has anywhere close to 1500 senior developers working on just Firefox. My guess is that the bulk of that money is spent on unrelated adventures and overhead.
My image of Mozilla as a bastion for user first software just shattered.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/on-device-models
totally uncharitable interpretation of the quote linked here aside, how is providing an interface for using fully local models not user first software?
> and thus ad-supported
What a sad view of the web. Advertisement is a net-negative for society.
The only way to avoid this is to just block ads - even unobtrusive content-relevant ads. You may think ads can't trick you, but that has been shown time and time again to be false.
Only what makes money has any value in their view. That's also why MBA types are the wrong type of person to run something like Mozilla.
NObody trusts mozilla anymore, specially after they turned into an add company and started paying their CEOs exorbitating ammounts, considering what was being invested in their core business (supposedly making a better browser).
I’m not sure why this has become a thing - usually I either release Waterfox the week before ESR releases (the week the code freeze happens and new version gets tagged) or, if I’m actively working on features and they need to coincide with the next update I push, I will release on the same Tuesday the ESR releases.
You can check the GitHub tag history for Waterfox to see it’s been that way for a good while :)
Speaking only for myself, and regardless of whether this is actually true (see sibling comment): yes. Absolutely. A non-privacy focused browser like Firefox has vulnerabilities/data leaks by design that are worse than hypothetical ones that I probably will not be subject to browsing my usual benign set of websites.
(Posted from Waterfox)
Firefox is only good for getting forked into better browser like Mullvad Browser, LibreWolf and Tor Browser.
So far, the most useful "AI feature" Firefox has ever shipped is the page translation system, which uses a local AI to work. I wouldn't mind seeing more of things like that.
Eventually, "browser use" skill in AIs is going to get better too. And I'd trust Firefox with an official vendor agnostic "AI integration" interface, one that allows an AI of user's choice to drive it, over something like OpenAI's browser - made solely by one AI company for its own product.
Curious if LibreWolf can survive the next 25 years or even longer than Firefox.
Someone could try to merge e,g, V8 and Servo, once that's in decent shape. But even then it'll be time consuming to build an acceptable UI, cookie and history management, plugin interface, etc.
It's truly impressive how they've managed to do every user-hostile trick Google Chrome also did over the years, except for no real clear reason besides contempt for their users autonomy I suppose. Right now the sole hill Mozilla really has left is adblockers, and they've talked about wanting to sacrifice that?
It truly boggles the mind to even consider this. That's not 150 million, that's the sound of losing all your users.
Ad blocking relies on the ability to use filters to block network requests at the browser level, and visual elements at the DOM level. "AI Browsers" are designed to add bloat to the browsing experience, by offering to summarize something, or providing contextual information like say, a product recommendation that pulls data from a third party site. Network request and DOM element blocking would instantly negate that.
I've moved to Librewolf myself.
IMO they need to be more a crew of activists than they are now. Fight against stuff like intrusion of AI in every single part of our lives and such.
Obviously we are not happy about ads, but we all understand that having money is pretty neat (if only to pay ones salary). Help the CEO fella: What great, unused options is Mozilla missing to generate revenue through their browser?
Call me petty but I still can't let this one go. At the time they basically stole the Firebird name from the database project and did not hesitate to use AOL's lawyers to bully the established owners of the name. So they didn't actually become shady over night. It's in their DNA.
You know what would be neat? If the Gemini protocol were slightly expanded for video/image embeds, and then having Firefox/Ladybird support it out of the box.
Closed source adware and crypto scams?!
I feel like this question has been valid for almost as long as I can remember (e.g. the Mr. Robot extension incident). I find myself struggling to tell if Mozilla is an inherently flawed company or if it's just inherent to trying to survive in such a space.
While it is not my main browser (Vivaldi is), I have 5 installs of Firefox Portable for different things, like one for YouTube, one for testing pages against Firefox and so on.
That's because their users are driven by opinions and principles, and those are the worst, most disloyal kind of users. They're always threatening to leave, and will take the slightest offense to do so.
Chrome wins because its user base doesn't care. The browser is just a tool, not a religion. It's installed, they use it, they're barely aware it exists and most of Joe Public doesn't even know Google makes it.
So sure. For you it's ad blockers. For someone else it's their donation plan. Or Google funding. Or their corporate structure. Or their management.
When your marketing is about something else, other than the product itself, you always end up with edge-case-customers.
People use Chrome because it's the best browser. Less than 3% use Firefox. And all I read from Firefox users is how bad everything is (or will be).
No, Firefox's market share isn't a foil to monopoly (Safari has 5 times more users. Crumbs Edge has twice the users.)
I care about Firefox, but I really just wish all the whiners would just do what they threaten and use something else. But they won't because everything else is worse (for some or other principles reason.)
Now I fully expect to be downvoted because the only people reading this article in the first place are Firefox whiners. Which is kinda my point.
It's pretty hard to recommend Firefox to others when everything written by existing users is so negative.
An ad blocker is a very useful tool. Being able to block ads effectively makes the browser much better. I'm not sure how you can call that "religion".
> People use Chrome because it's the best browser.
No they don't. They use Chrome because every Google service nags the shit out of them to use Chrome. People aren't as rational as you make them out to be.
It would be amusing if the only browser left that could run ad-blockers was Safari.
> I read this as “I don't want to but I'll kill AdBlockers in Firefox for buckerinos ”.
I completely disagree. First of all the original quote is paraphrasing, so we don't know in which tone it was delivered, but calling something "off-mission" doesn't at all sound like "we'd do it for money" to me.
Be the gang all f'n ready
This is an old article but has some good examples:
https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4387539/firefox-money-invest...
It's so tone deaf that it is likely to probe the community into drastic action if he were to attempt to push that through. Including probably much of the developer community. I'm talking the kind of action that boils down to forking and taking a large part of the user base along. Which is why that would be very inadvisable.
The problem with being a CEO of a for profit corporation, which is what he is, is that his loyalty is to shareholders, not to users. The Mozilla Foundation and the corporation are hopelessly inter dependent at this point. The foundation looks increasingly like a paper tiger given the decision making and apparent disconnect with its user base which it is supposed to serve.
All the bloated budgets, mis-spending on offices, failed projects, fancy offices, juicy executive salaries at a time where revenue from Google continued to be substantial all while downsizing developer teams and actually laying some off isn't a great look. Stuff like this just adds to the impression that they are increasingly self serving hacks that don't care about the core product: Firefox. This new CEO isn't off to a great start here.
We actually need to consider the possibility that yes, it is. More precisely, that the new CEO is trying to do that.
It doesn't take a grand conspiracy to join an organisation on false premises. It's totally easy. You can, today, go join a political party without agreeing with them at all, with the intent to sabotage them. Or another organization, including a workplace.
And just like some people just lie for amazingly little reason, I'm increasingly convinced some people do this. Maybe for a sense of control, maybe because they think they'll get rewarded. For every person who holds a crazy belief in public, there's probably one who holds the same belief but doesn't feel the need to let others in on it. As the world gets more paranoid, it'll get worse, open fears are the top of the iceberg.
If Enzor-Demeo ends up tanking Mozilla, there are plenty of people who will be happy with that. It's not as if his career will be over, far from it. Ask Nick Clegg or Stephen Elop. We all need to wake up to the idea that maybe the people who are supposed to be on our side aren't actually guaranteed to be unless we have solid mechanisms in place to ensure it.
No, Mozilla has been tanking for a decade already. Less than 5% of market share, and zero mobile.
It's not that he's some secret agent or some mentally ill person who wants to destroy the company while twirling his mustache, it's that he's a person carefully chosen by people who have made large fortunes from Firefox through indirect means. He would be chosen to destroy it in a way optimized for their gain, like Elop was chosen by the board to turn Nokia into a cheap, obvious Microsoft buy, Clegg was chosen to enable the Tory government, or Sturgeon to make sure that indyref2 never happened.
Google is under no antitrust threat at all anymore. Obama judges don't believe in antitrust. Google wants to get out of paying that 500M/yr, and shitting up Firefox is a great way to do it. They'd be more than happy to throw a couple dozen of those Ms to Enzor-DeMeo or whoever will help them get that done.
How much you willing to bet that he becomes Mozilla's highest paid CEO in history, ruins the product completely, then leaves and ends up an exec at Google or some 80% owned by Google offshoot founded by a Google alum?
Or it could be it really was on the table since they just entered the advertising business and think AI is the future of Mozilla, a "fuck those freeloaders", heartfelt from the Porsche driving MBAs in Mozilla's management. Who knows. But it's a choice which interpretation one assumes.
So they need some kind of pivot.
Well, it would be a shot in the head. What would be the point of using Firefox if it can't block ads better than Chrome, and on mobile as well???
Doing so would not "bring in an additional 150 millions, or 50 millions, or 1 million! It would kill the product instantly.
Look at browser stats, what they're doing is not working and asking them to continue doing it will kill them. They have to change or they will die.
Their core audience (people on this site) is shrinking constantly. You can not save them.
I feel like this is a case where a bunch of smart people like something so much, or the idea of something, that they've completely blinded themselves to the facts.
Firefox
Mozilla VPN
Mozilla Monitor
Firefox Relay
MDN Plus
Thunderbird
-
Some of these products are just repackaged partnerships.
-
Firefox - Funded by Google with the search partnership bringing in $500M in revenue. (free)
Mozilla VPN - Repackaged Mullvad VPN and using Mullvad servers.
Mozilla Monitor - Repackaged HaveIBeenPwned. (free)
Firefox Relay - No different to Simplelogin and not open source. (free)
MDN Plus - Be honest, you wouldn't pay for this since this was offered for a long time for free, MDN is already free.
Thunderbird - Most likely funded by Google (free) (using Firefox Search Revenue)
-
Be honest, would you pay for any of Mozilla's products when most of these can be found for free or close to free?
That is the problem.
Mozilla needs to figure out how much they need to maintain Firefox, nothing else. I suspect that's not the entirety of the $200 million they currently spend on "development costs". Everything else they receive in donations and partnership fees should go directly into an investment portfolio which will be used to keep Firefox development active in the future.
If they didn't care about anything else, the Google money could fund Firefox for at least two years per yearly fee.
I would pay for Firefox if it was focused on privacy and customizabilty, not telemetry and LLMs.
[0]: https://blog.thunderbird.net/2023/05/thunderbird-is-thriving...
*Though Thunderbird is Gecko-based so can be said in part, perhaps a significant one, they're depending on Firefox development.
As of right now Thunderbird doesn't make any money, it relies on 'Donations' which isn't at all sustainable.
I can see Thunderbird is planning to do a pro plan, but it is behind a waitlist so the total sum of revenue Thunderbird is making relative to Google's $500M deal is close to zero.
That means people can self host (for privacy and incase the private relays are unstable) and not give money to Mozilla.
Besides 1€/month is not going to cover anything of the costs to run the service.
the question is more "how to replace the free money from google by real clients,and still get the same margin as google free money"
I know most HN users are on Firefox, but they should get used to an alternative now, not when its inevitable death happens.
Firefox is a unique browser that is, in many ways, positioned to be the best browser. It's fast, fairly privacy preserving, and not built on chromium.
Our family is already super happy with Kagi as a web search engine, and it sounds like they're doing good things on the browser side too.
Instead I thought screw it and just went nuts deep into chrome, atleast it was more functional.
ps - ( apparently mozilla took it out sometime later , but to me the damage to its reputation was done)
Moving to Blink or Webkit, keeping MV2 and XUL, was where the effort should have been placed. Also, I never understood Pocket or any of their other decisions. Now it's being floated to ban adblockers. Poorly run organization that given its direction and decisions, deserves to die.
Grow a pair already. And stop calling normal average "typical"
Remember when Kodak ignored digital cameras and became irrelevant? That was bad because it decreased shareholder value. That will not be allowed to happen again.
Capital extraction is fundamentally opposed to user freedom. If we want an open web, we, the people need to be maintaining it and not rely on MBA types to do it for us.
If I could use something similar on Brave, I would go back in an instant.
My main issues with FF are that it is a battery hog on MacOS, doesn't have AV1 playing capabilities (or it has, but I would need to go through some configuring that I don't need to do in other browsers) and sometimes it stalls in certain pages (that's probably not FF fault, but that the web developers don't optimize for it... but still, it's not a problem on Brave, so, I don't really care for apologising for it).
Half a billion, they are both milking and lying to you
I'm not sure to what extent Mozilla actually functions as a nonprofit. All the bits one cares about (i.e. FireFox) are developed by the for-profit subsidiary, which is at least somewhat beholden to Google/Microsoft for revenue...
... they said. Not against users.
I will one day just add "Remove all ads on the page I am browsing" into my BROWSER_AI.md file.
