Mozilla is trying to innovate and bring new features to Firefox, but the browser continues to lose users. Despite these concerning market trends, the company is actively...
It doesn’t matter what Firefox implements; Google can spam instant “switch to Chrome” links in front of most of the world’s eyeballs. User couldn’t care less about privacy and adblocking performance, apparently. This isn’t Microsoft, and Mozilla is literally funded by Google as a token effort, so they can’t outdevelop Chrome nor attack it.
While problematic, yeah, I’d dispute that as Firefox’s market share problem.
Users like you and me, who are even aware of projects like Waterfox, are a minuscule, vanishing minority. We aren’t switching to Chrome anyway. But we aren’t representative of the web’s user base.
And if most Chrome users were sick of the Gemini spam… they’d have already switched to Firefox, where it’s toggleable and an order of magnitude less in-your-face. But they aren’t.
Same with Manifest V3. They neutered UBlock on Chrome long ago, yet that’s clearly not dissuading most Chrome users.
In short, if in-your-face-AI was a dealbreaker for most, Chrome wouldn’t be gaining market share.
I think it’s a network problem. Most people use Chrome, therefore most people’s friends and co-workers use Chrome, so there’s a strong incentive to go with the pack. Google is obviously exploiting this to get their ecosystem claws in deeper, but I think the main thing is that Google effectively dethroned Microsoft as the default, and Mozilla has just kind of “been around” the whole time as the weird alt browser that the IT guy uses, even being propped up by Google in exchange for Firefox users’ search data.
What should Mozilla do? IDK. I don’t think “more AI” is the right answer, but I also don’t know what I would do in their position. It’s a tight spot.
I don’t think “more AI” is the right answer, but I also don’t know what I would do in their position.
Yeah.
I think “nontoxic” machine learning features are nice. You know, oldschool stuff. Firefox’s auto translation, as an example, is really cool, (AFAIK) completely local, and way better than Chrome’s equivalent.
But they poisoned that well with the yet-another-stupid-chatbot thing.
I dunno what Mozilla was thinking. It was so shitty. And now there will be a negative reaction to anything even ML-adjacent, even if it isn’t enshittified.
I mean, I’ve been messing with LLMs before Llama 1. I don’t hate chat bots in general. But I found the sidebar kind of stupid. It didn’t feel like a smart model when I tried, it didn’t have knobs to tune, and literally everything has a chatbot anyway.
There are cool Firefox forks built as “agenic browsers” to interact with LLMs in a structured way. But I think they should be just that: separate. A different program to open when you want an LLM messing with your browsing, with all the security hazards that entails.
Do a fresh install of Firefox sometime and keep track of all the places Mozilla shoves AI into your face. The notifications, the sidebar, and coming soon: even the window type. Begging to use AI to group your tabs. Begging to summarize the article you just found that was actually written by a person.
You’d figure Chrome would be the worst offender here, but they own the Google search engine, and that’s mostly enough for them. A fresh Firefox install comes across as maximalist as Microsoft Edge these days.
As long as it can be turned off, it’s not a dealbreaker for me. I prefer living in the upstream where, AFAIK, firefox gets all the vulnerabilities patched first
I think their best option at present is to push the privacy, interoperability and independence side of their product and target European governments on the basis of digital sovereignty. Yes, it’s based in the US, but the product itself is open source and independent of the big tech giants, and that can be leveraged to get more support in Europe as the only viable alternative to Google’s Chrome ecosystem and Apple’s Safari ecosystem.
It’s difficult for Mozilla, not because of what Firefox is, but because it is financially dependent on Google which makes it harder to be aggressive about calling out just how bad Google and Chrome are for users. Mozilla would ideally be lobbying the EU anti-trust apparatus to stop Google aggressively pushing Chrome, in much the same way Netscape did with Microsoft and Internet Explorer.
Mozilla is stuck, because it’s main threat is also it’s main lifeline. So it really needs to try and diversify itself away from it’s financial dependence on Google. That has been near impossible but European governments may be the way forward. It won’t replace Google, but Trump has created an opportunity in Europe that Mozilla has to aggressively follow.
Completely my opinion: I think the problem is Mozilla is beholden to the requirement that it MUST grow and make more and more money. It is a business after all.
If Mozilla just focused on maintaining a good product that browses the internet well and just stays there. It doesent have to do cutting edge, it doesn’t have to be ultra quirky. It doesent have to focus on increasing market share. It just needs to focus on being a good product.
People are going to come and go. Opinions change and people do get tired of being taken advantage of. The Honda Civic didnt get so popular because it was the most performant car, the most spacious car, the most efficient car, etc It got popular because while it wasent the MOST of those qualities it was quite good with those qualities.
Firefox’s best bet at this point is maintaining good qualities and being as accessible and compatible as possible.
It’s a rigged game though. Mozilla’s struggling to even implement feature parity with the income they have, and being “good” isn’t going to place redirects to install Chrome over half of people’s phones and web browsing.
…Personally, I think Mozilla should dump Firefox.
And put everything they have into Ladybird, or maybe Apple’s WebKit.
Mozilla are playing a rigged game, and the only way to survive is get out of Google’s grasp. Practically, that means joining some other entity who already has dev money and a good project.
Developers can just be hired directly, and the Firefox codebase is open source.
Only brand requires partnering with mozilla, and what does the other partner gain from the Mozilla brand? They don’t even have much brand recognition anymore anyway.
I ninja edited, but basically I just don’t see Firefox surviving without “ecosystem leverage” like WebKit, which is permanently embedded in the Apple ecosystem.
Or even Ladybird, which I imagine will be a permanent fixture on Linux systems.
So… however they organize it, Mozilla should take their browser dev experience there. But maybe they could keep Firefox the brand alive, and automatically shift users to whatever the new rendering engine will be.
Alternatively I guess Firefox could stay Mozilla and just adopt WebKit or Ladybird’s engine. “Merge” development efforts across different teams, so to speak, but keep the browser frontend separate.
Its a bit early to make the call that Ladybird will be successful. They have made a lot of noise sure, but they are a small team, tackling a huge project, and they have just had 2 language changes in the last few months.
The deck is well and truely stacked against them. Maybe they pull it off, maybe not, but its very early to make the call IMO.
Servo is looking surprisingly good, but still has major rendering issues. At least it looks like a browser now.
If I was Mozilla CEO I know exactly what I would do. I would double down on the users.
Immediately put out a press release that Mozilla will not for as long as I’m in charge make one single dime selling user data. Put in our very corporate charter that we are required to collect as little data as possible to make our products work. Also make a public promise that any AI features which aren’t 100% local will require a very big opt-in and we will try to avoid shipping any such things at all.
Focus on speed. Chrome started getting market share in the first place because they advertised it could render a web page in under 100ms. So that’s what I would shoot for. Screw everything else, the main rendering parts of the browser should be fast, threaded, and stable.
Part of that would be to include some script selection processes in the browser itself. This would partially be like an ad block but more like a priority system. Right now you go to a news website and there’s a good chance you’re pulling tens of megabytes of JavaScript that tracks everything and actually runs a fucking auction in your browser where advertisers are bidding on the right to show you an ad. This does not help the user. So I would focus on developing a system that identifies what JavaScript code renders the bulk of the web page and what is for things like ads, the add code goes dead last. That way the content of the page loads very quickly.
Then I would basically license ublock origin and include that functionality in the browser itself. I would throw Dev time at optimizing the hell out of that. And that would be one of the questions asked at first run, do you want to block advertisements? If user says yes then ublock is enabled.
That alone will probably get a shit ton of users, because it will do the same thing as Chrome did years ago, just make the experience of web surfing better.
Not two months ago I was downvoted to oblivion on this community when arguing with someone who claimed that any feature being opt-out is bloat and dark patterns.
Understand that people are speaking from frustration. Users are tired. We are sick of having things we don’t want shoved down our throats and told that we want them. This is not just Firefox, this is most software.
Sure, but I’m talking about making an exception for just this one. But fine, it can be opt-in. I can’t imagine why, though; I have it on literally every device and it rocks.
Google was already doing that for years. Most of Firefox users use it because it’s leaner than Chrome and supports adblockers. None of these advantages will suddenly disappear, but Chrome will inevitably become worse all by itself, and more users will migrate away from it to Firefox.
So Firefox strategy should be to simply not screw up by adding unnecessary stuff like AI.
Again, this isn’t Microsoft, whom you can rely on for prompt footgunning. Chrome is still very fast, reasonably lean, and developed with more resources than Mozilla.
Hence Firefox could die before Alphabet starts to really tighten the screws. That’s what I’m most afraid of, as the next step for Alphabet would be “depreciating” Chromium, closing the source, and killing all the forks.
I don’t want a world where the only viable browser is a Chrome binary.
They need to build their own privacy-oriented services, and offer different tiers. Also important is that if they do launch a product, make sure they plan on keeping it alive or people won’t trust it and migrate to it (like how Google kills products). Make it a safe-haven for those who cares about privacy.
And I’m not talking about using third-parties and rebranding them as their own…
Ddg, proton, mulvad and Mozilla would actually be a solid force that could make something great. But 1St party support for products is against the ethos of firefox and open source.
They could continue Firefox as normal and then from a working group to make a new browser designed specifically for a new internet or a new group of sites on the current internet walled off from big tech by having their own dns. That would be interesting. An internet that actually follows w3c guidelines and adhears to open principles. It must provide a good experience it can’t be all HTML and CSS blogs like all other alternatives. It should try to do the current web better instead of 1999.
There used to be significant differences in performance that drove browser choices. The top dog browser always had a way of getting fat and slow and then something else would come along. This is how Chrome got its start. But today’s much more powerful hardware hides a lot of poor performance, and most web bottlenecks are in the content (ads and shitty site design) where the browser can only make a small difference.
If I was Mozilla’s CEO, I dunno what I’d do.
It doesn’t matter what Firefox implements; Google can spam instant “switch to Chrome” links in front of most of the world’s eyeballs. User couldn’t care less about privacy and adblocking performance, apparently. This isn’t Microsoft, and Mozilla is literally funded by Google as a token effort, so they can’t outdevelop Chrome nor attack it.
What are they supposed to do?
Avoid forcing AI to its users? I switched to WaterFox just to avoid it.
While problematic, yeah, I’d dispute that as Firefox’s market share problem.
Users like you and me, who are even aware of projects like Waterfox, are a minuscule, vanishing minority. We aren’t switching to Chrome anyway. But we aren’t representative of the web’s user base.
And if most Chrome users were sick of the Gemini spam… they’d have already switched to Firefox, where it’s toggleable and an order of magnitude less in-your-face. But they aren’t.
Same with Manifest V3. They neutered UBlock on Chrome long ago, yet that’s clearly not dissuading most Chrome users.
In short, if in-your-face-AI was a dealbreaker for most, Chrome wouldn’t be gaining market share.
I think it’s a network problem. Most people use Chrome, therefore most people’s friends and co-workers use Chrome, so there’s a strong incentive to go with the pack. Google is obviously exploiting this to get their ecosystem claws in deeper, but I think the main thing is that Google effectively dethroned Microsoft as the default, and Mozilla has just kind of “been around” the whole time as the weird alt browser that the IT guy uses, even being propped up by Google in exchange for Firefox users’ search data.
What should Mozilla do? IDK. I don’t think “more AI” is the right answer, but I also don’t know what I would do in their position. It’s a tight spot.
Yeah.
I think “nontoxic” machine learning features are nice. You know, oldschool stuff. Firefox’s auto translation, as an example, is really cool, (AFAIK) completely local, and way better than Chrome’s equivalent.
But they poisoned that well with the yet-another-stupid-chatbot thing.
I dunno what Mozilla was thinking. It was so shitty. And now there will be a negative reaction to anything even ML-adjacent, even if it isn’t enshittified.
Personally I use the chatbot side panel once in a while, it doesn’t get too much in the way while doing something else.
But all the other features using a small trained model are legit nice (translation, image captioning) and thankfully all optional.
I mean, I’ve been messing with LLMs before Llama 1. I don’t hate chat bots in general. But I found the sidebar kind of stupid. It didn’t feel like a smart model when I tried, it didn’t have knobs to tune, and literally everything has a chatbot anyway.
There are cool Firefox forks built as “agenic browsers” to interact with LLMs in a structured way. But I think they should be just that: separate. A different program to open when you want an LLM messing with your browsing, with all the security hazards that entails.
Yeah it is. My friends think I’m 90 years old because I use “that old 90s browser, what a weirdo!”
I actually doubt the majority of people nowadays know what a browser is and how it differs from the OS or other applications
Do a fresh install of Firefox sometime and keep track of all the places Mozilla shoves AI into your face. The notifications, the sidebar, and coming soon: even the window type. Begging to use AI to group your tabs. Begging to summarize the article you just found that was actually written by a person.
You’d figure Chrome would be the worst offender here, but they own the Google search engine, and that’s mostly enough for them. A fresh Firefox install comes across as maximalist as Microsoft Edge these days.
🥺
At least Firefox lets you turn that shit off
As long as it can be turned off, it’s not a dealbreaker for me. I prefer living in the upstream where, AFAIK, firefox gets all the vulnerabilities patched first
not pay the ceo 6 millions a year would be a start
I think their best option at present is to push the privacy, interoperability and independence side of their product and target European governments on the basis of digital sovereignty. Yes, it’s based in the US, but the product itself is open source and independent of the big tech giants, and that can be leveraged to get more support in Europe as the only viable alternative to Google’s Chrome ecosystem and Apple’s Safari ecosystem.
It’s difficult for Mozilla, not because of what Firefox is, but because it is financially dependent on Google which makes it harder to be aggressive about calling out just how bad Google and Chrome are for users. Mozilla would ideally be lobbying the EU anti-trust apparatus to stop Google aggressively pushing Chrome, in much the same way Netscape did with Microsoft and Internet Explorer.
Mozilla is stuck, because it’s main threat is also it’s main lifeline. So it really needs to try and diversify itself away from it’s financial dependence on Google. That has been near impossible but European governments may be the way forward. It won’t replace Google, but Trump has created an opportunity in Europe that Mozilla has to aggressively follow.
Completely my opinion: I think the problem is Mozilla is beholden to the requirement that it MUST grow and make more and more money. It is a business after all.
If Mozilla just focused on maintaining a good product that browses the internet well and just stays there. It doesent have to do cutting edge, it doesn’t have to be ultra quirky. It doesent have to focus on increasing market share. It just needs to focus on being a good product.
People are going to come and go. Opinions change and people do get tired of being taken advantage of. The Honda Civic didnt get so popular because it was the most performant car, the most spacious car, the most efficient car, etc It got popular because while it wasent the MOST of those qualities it was quite good with those qualities.
Firefox’s best bet at this point is maintaining good qualities and being as accessible and compatible as possible.
It’s a rigged game though. Mozilla’s struggling to even implement feature parity with the income they have, and being “good” isn’t going to place redirects to install Chrome over half of people’s phones and web browsing.
…Personally, I think Mozilla should dump Firefox.
And put everything they have into Ladybird, or maybe Apple’s WebKit.
Mozilla are playing a rigged game, and the only way to survive is get out of Google’s grasp. Practically, that means joining some other entity who already has dev money and a good project.
Because they waste the income they have on crap like adding AI, and CEO bonuses/raises.
Mozilla might as well just close up shop. If they were to abandon Firefox, what exactly are they bring to the table for anyone else?
The brand, development power, and bits from the Firefox codebase they could re-use.
More importantly, Firefox’s devs get to work on something that already has leverage in an ecosystem, eg WebKit for Apple or Ladybird for Linux.
Developers can just be hired directly, and the Firefox codebase is open source.
Only brand requires partnering with mozilla, and what does the other partner gain from the Mozilla brand? They don’t even have much brand recognition anymore anyway.
I ninja edited, but basically I just don’t see Firefox surviving without “ecosystem leverage” like WebKit, which is permanently embedded in the Apple ecosystem.
Or even Ladybird, which I imagine will be a permanent fixture on Linux systems.
So… however they organize it, Mozilla should take their browser dev experience there. But maybe they could keep Firefox the brand alive, and automatically shift users to whatever the new rendering engine will be.
Alternatively I guess Firefox could stay Mozilla and just adopt WebKit or Ladybird’s engine. “Merge” development efforts across different teams, so to speak, but keep the browser frontend separate.
Its a bit early to make the call that Ladybird will be successful. They have made a lot of noise sure, but they are a small team, tackling a huge project, and they have just had 2 language changes in the last few months.
The deck is well and truely stacked against them. Maybe they pull it off, maybe not, but its very early to make the call IMO.
Servo is looking surprisingly good, but still has major rendering issues. At least it looks like a browser now.
Ladybird is not a serious competitor. Neither is servo and WebKit is worse than gecko imo
If I was Mozilla CEO I know exactly what I would do. I would double down on the users.
Immediately put out a press release that Mozilla will not for as long as I’m in charge make one single dime selling user data. Put in our very corporate charter that we are required to collect as little data as possible to make our products work. Also make a public promise that any AI features which aren’t 100% local will require a very big opt-in and we will try to avoid shipping any such things at all.
Focus on speed. Chrome started getting market share in the first place because they advertised it could render a web page in under 100ms. So that’s what I would shoot for. Screw everything else, the main rendering parts of the browser should be fast, threaded, and stable.
Part of that would be to include some script selection processes in the browser itself. This would partially be like an ad block but more like a priority system. Right now you go to a news website and there’s a good chance you’re pulling tens of megabytes of JavaScript that tracks everything and actually runs a fucking auction in your browser where advertisers are bidding on the right to show you an ad. This does not help the user. So I would focus on developing a system that identifies what JavaScript code renders the bulk of the web page and what is for things like ads, the add code goes dead last. That way the content of the page loads very quickly.
Then I would basically license ublock origin and include that functionality in the browser itself. I would throw Dev time at optimizing the hell out of that. And that would be one of the questions asked at first run, do you want to block advertisements? If user says yes then ublock is enabled. That alone will probably get a shit ton of users, because it will do the same thing as Chrome did years ago, just make the experience of web surfing better.
I would stop reinventing the UI every two years.
If I was its CEO, I would endorse AdNauseam as an official, built-in, opt-out ad-blocker.
Not two months ago I was downvoted to oblivion on this community when arguing with someone who claimed that any feature being opt-out is bloat and dark patterns.
Understand that people are speaking from frustration. Users are tired. We are sick of having things we don’t want shoved down our throats and told that we want them. This is not just Firefox, this is most software.
Sure, but I’m talking about making an exception for just this one. But fine, it can be opt-in. I can’t imagine why, though; I have it on literally every device and it rocks.
Google was already doing that for years. Most of Firefox users use it because it’s leaner than Chrome and supports adblockers. None of these advantages will suddenly disappear, but Chrome will inevitably become worse all by itself, and more users will migrate away from it to Firefox.
So Firefox strategy should be to simply not screw up by adding unnecessary stuff like AI.
But when?
Again, this isn’t Microsoft, whom you can rely on for prompt footgunning. Chrome is still very fast, reasonably lean, and developed with more resources than Mozilla.
Hence Firefox could die before Alphabet starts to really tighten the screws. That’s what I’m most afraid of, as the next step for Alphabet would be “depreciating” Chromium, closing the source, and killing all the forks.
I don’t want a world where the only viable browser is a Chrome binary.
They need to build their own privacy-oriented services, and offer different tiers. Also important is that if they do launch a product, make sure they plan on keeping it alive or people won’t trust it and migrate to it (like how Google kills products). Make it a safe-haven for those who cares about privacy. And I’m not talking about using third-parties and rebranding them as their own…
Yeah.
I think they tried with a few services, like the VPN, but could never afford to go whole-hog with a stack like Proton.
…In fact, it’d be interesting if Mozilla merged with Proton, DuckDuckGo or something.
Ddg, proton, mulvad and Mozilla would actually be a solid force that could make something great. But 1St party support for products is against the ethos of firefox and open source.
They could continue Firefox as normal and then from a working group to make a new browser designed specifically for a new internet or a new group of sites on the current internet walled off from big tech by having their own dns. That would be interesting. An internet that actually follows w3c guidelines and adhears to open principles. It must provide a good experience it can’t be all HTML and CSS blogs like all other alternatives. It should try to do the current web better instead of 1999.
Do not forget the VPN was rebadged from mullvad (I think) so it was not even their own stuff
There used to be significant differences in performance that drove browser choices. The top dog browser always had a way of getting fat and slow and then something else would come along. This is how Chrome got its start. But today’s much more powerful hardware hides a lot of poor performance, and most web bottlenecks are in the content (ads and shitty site design) where the browser can only make a small difference.
Mozilla is actively driving away users who care.