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68% Positive
Analyzed from 5669 words in the discussion.
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#firefox#mozilla#thunderbird#don#browser#google#thunderbolt#more#money#chrome
Discussion (159 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
I implore ANYONE at Mozilla org to please, please stop working on projects distracting from the complex and necessary work of browser and web standards stewardship. That alone should be the very reason for your continued existence if you have any. Focus on anything outside that purview will lead to the furthering of the, already painful and readily apparent, stagnation of your browser and our standards bodies as entities distinct from corporations.
Ditching any direct financial ties to Google or any other browser vendor is both important and necessary at this point, as this clearly represents a conflict of interest in your overall mission.
The web as a platform should belong to us all, not just the few corporate leaders of the day. I've watched in real time, saddened by the persistent errosion of our commons that is the web. I see it becoming nothing more than a corporate playground should trends continue, if it's not already too late. There may have been a time when your mission took precident over product launches of seemingly unrelated domains, but that is not what Ii observing today.
I think I speak for many in the community in these regards (please correct me if not the case.)
> ... please stop working on projects distracting from the complex and necessary work of browser and web standards stewardship.
> Ditching any direct financial ties to Google or any other browser vendor is both important and necessary...
are inherently contradictory. If do not want Mozilla to have revenue from search vendors that also have browsers, it has to come from somewhere else. Or are you suggesting they switch the default search engine back to Yahoo [0]?
I am not trying to defend the projects they have chosen to work on, but you have to understand that reducing dependence on Google is exactly why they are working on them [1].
[0] Even when they did that, it was for the US only, and Google was still the default for most of the world.
[1] Although in this case, this appears to come from the Thunderbird organization, so unrelated to the browser. Money is fungible, though.
Blocks ads Multi account containers Dev tools very good
I never notice that it is in any way slow, except for those sites that need infinity cpu on any browser, like jira.
What specifically is the issue? To my mind it quietly just gets on with things.
While it is meant to be an alternative for Chrome's profile switching, it is more a workaround than a complete replacement. I need entirely different sets of extensions for personal, work, and school environments, something containers can't do.
Firefox's actual profile support is beyond terrible. It requires far too many clicks in a Windows-2000-style UI to launch a separate instance, and there are wield glitches in their implementation.
Firefox is not usable for me until they really put time to improve their multiple accounts support.
None of those have required me to install a particular extension..
Of course thats not to deny your experience!
The only time profiles ever come into it, for me, is using web driver, playwright, or whatever.
I guess maybe the usage stats dont support making the profile selector better.
But also, maybe its a thing they would accept a change for?
As you yourself mention, Firefox has actual profile support, which may not be as good as Chrome's, but at least compare like for like.
The Mozilla org continues to produce a very capable browser, but it's now 3rd or fourth fiddle on a stage their misteps helped orchestrate in their demotion.
Edit: clarification
1. The inability to set a specific page for new tabs to open on. That is ridiculous.
2. The mobile version sucks, specifically because bookmarks are buried under an absurd number of menu levels. And they're also broken up (without user approval or any way to stop it) into "mobile" and "desktop" bookmarks. WHY? The entire point of syncing is to have them all the same.
I want to like Firefox. I went back to Firefox for the first time in decades last year and gave it up after a couple months because #2 was that annoying. So brain-dead.
Oh yeah, and another one was that "never remember history" does, in fact, remember history. What Firefox really does is "stop adding to history." And the bug report on it resulted in several YEARS of debate over how to "fix" it. The latest I saw is that they're actually NOT going to fix it, but rather add more text (somewhere) to say basically, "This doesn't do what you think it's going to do."
If fixing a defect like that requires years of committee back-and-forth, the product is finished.
I've been using the "New Tab Override" extension for almost a decade at this point. Sure, it would probably make sense to have as a baseline feature, but I installed it so long ago and it's continued working the whole time that it's not really something I think about anymore.
What's wrong with Firefox? There are several things Firefox does that it's annoying to live without in other browsers (video pop-outs, competent ad blocking, etc). Is there some core feature that's missing? I'm subjected to Edge at work and I couldn't tell you a single thing it does that I'd want FF to do.
> and our standards bodies as entities distinct from corporations
Ok, I buy that.
Yeah, it really undermines their ability to compromise user security and privacy.
- PWA support on Linux
- better performance
- devtools should be able to handle sites with large amounts of js with sourcemaps
- fix a number of bugs that have been open for a long time
- don't lag behind standards as much (I'm not talking about things where they intentionally don't implement problematic "standards" pushed by google)
- make it feasible to embed gecko in other projects similar to how chromium is used by electron and webkit is used in "webviews"
Debugging the extension on Chrome, it works great. On Firefox, it is nearly impossible. There are a litany of compatibility issues that make it "different" than Chrome, despite the extension being very much standards based. It is really frustrating and makes me dread getting bug reports.
To be fair, Safari is even worse and I haven't even touched Edge yet.
As much as I'd love to have options in the marketplace, standards based compatibility between offerings should be a top line requirement.
[0] https://oj-hn.com
That number can be down to any number of different factors on reddit itself. Having an autoplay video running, etc.
It seems like every thread talking about Firefox always has someone asking that question, so if you search back you should find plenty of reasons. Unfortunately, it’s been my observation that valid and polite criticisms always get downvoted. I don’t understand why. It’s not like downvotes are going to make the problems disappear.
Most of us would like Firefox to succeed, and it’s none of our faults that Mozilla is constantly neglecting it and going off on wild goose projects which get promptly abandoned.
The question keeps getting asked because people say they have problems. Answers (if any come) tells everyone what the problem is for this one user that raised it.
In aggregate we can all see that the problems are not very real for the vast majority of users.
The biggest problem users actually face with using Firefox is that web devs don’t want to support more than one browser and they have picked Chrome now. Or IT departments have blessed one and only one browser on corporate machines and it is the one most corpoware developers build extensions for.
Chasing web standards is a second order problem and will not make the user experience better in a relevant manner for end users. If web developers want an open web, they have to work to support open browsers.
Yeah the criticism is not invalid, but it is also often half-relevant soapboxing and I would wager that is why it tends to get downvoted.
These AI products, along with all previous failed attempts, are just them trying to gain enough revenue to remove that dependency on Google.
I see Firefox now as the new Opera, a technically good browser making dubious extensions that no one asked for until it dies a slow, spiraling death. My plea is simply to not go down that road any further...
https://github.com/thunderbird/thunderbolt/blob/main/docs/fa...
> Thunderbolt is funded through a grant from Mozilla.
Is there any way that that's not taking dollars out of the same organization that's funding Firefox or thunderbird?
This reads like a kid trying to give business advice to an adult. “You could do THIS, then THIS, it would also be cool if you did THAT but please don’t do THAT!!”
C’mon now.
The fact that is being run like one, albeit poorly is exactly the problem.
I don't think you realize the irony in calling my post childish here. "C'mon" I guess?
* This is from the separate independent team that works on Thunderbird, not Firefox, so there isn't any resource contention happening there
* Thunderbird is revenue positive, and this potentially gives that team another revenue stream to be even more self-sustaining through charging companies
* Businesses definitely want to control the AI they're using (especially with RAGs of their own data) instead of just throwing it at their LLM vendor and hoping for the best
People on HN are fond of asserting that their own POV is the only one. Imagine that there is such a thing as a person in charge of choosing technologies for organizations, and that you're such a person. That's who this is for.
If you lived in New York City you might think there are Duane Reades coast-to-coast but there are not. If you are based in the Bay Area you see billboards that are very different from anywhere else. I'd say the viewpoint is a lot like this famous artwork
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/View_of_the_World_from_9th_Ave...
but maybe instead of the rest of the US being 1/5 of the vertical space it is 1/25 of the vertical space. Problem is most customers do not live in the bay area and most web browser users do not live in the bay area and most web developers do not live in the bay area. Based in the Bay Area they can hop in their cars and drive the longest 40 miles in America to get to Google and Facebook's headquarters so Mozilla is talking to those people all the time and not talking to the rest of us.
We don't get costly signalling to show they care about the rest of us, we don't even get cheap talk.
They probably think René Girard is deep because they are surrounded by people who think René Girard is deep. If Mozilla wants to be relevant and not just an also-ran it needs to "think different" like the other 99.9% -- it's not that hard if you change your location.
Really the EU needs to apologize for those damned cookie popups and invest in a privacy-first browser. Whether that is "fully fund Firefox" or "fully a fund a Firefox fork" or pick up another browser engine or start a new one.
I see the warning lights flashing: a few years back web sites that didn't work with Firefox were few and far between, this weekend I bought tickets for a comic book convention and they took my money but didn't give me a ticket because the site didn't work with Firefox. I use Firefox as my daily driver so all the projects that I work on work with Firefox; the rest of my team doesn't give a damn and if you lose me another site will become Chrome-only.
Yes, agreed on that. I'm not sure I'm clear how this really helps that; I suppose it's a frontend that they don't have, but there are a bunch of those already.
It doesn't seem to help them control the _actual_ AI, i.e. the model, which still has to come from somewhere.
(edit - to allow users to fund Firefox, allowing us to better sleep at night, and to align our incentives)
Hmm, I thought the for-profit Thunderbird pro hadn't launched yet?
I know Thunderbird is for profit, but what are they profitting from without the paid service, and how much of that profit is going into this unrelated Thunderbolt AI platform, exactly?
I think a piece of software running on donations is not running off "charity". It's just a business model to not charge every user. Similar to how Twitch streamers operate, or my local theater group.
You can read how they spent money in 2024 [1].
[1] https://blog.thunderbird.net/2025/10/state-of-the-bird-2024-...
It would be interesting to have a breakdown of what part of the Thunderbird team is working on Thunderbird, Thunderbolt, or other forms of thunder.
Surely you can agree that when you open Thunderbird and are met with requests for donations, if you chose to donate, you'd expect that money to be invested in Thunderbird development, and not 10M Claude tokens to vibe code Mozilla's latest groundbreaking AI B2B SaaS idea?
Is that why I'm met with a splash screen asking me to donate every time I start Thunderbird? Is this another Wikipedia situation?
[0]: https://www.phoronix.com/review/firefox-chrome-2026
At a glance it looks identical to Mozilla Thunderbird, but has nothing in common.
And then of course it's also the same as a well-known hardware interface.
I know it's hard to come up with names and pretty much everything is used by something else, but this seems particularly bad.
The cherry on top is that the domain is thunderbolt.IO. No other TLDs to pick from?
Fire-fox
Thunder-bird
River-wolf
Stone-raven
....
Okay, it took me some time that the mail client is called "ThunderBIRD", not the BOLT. Not that I've used it much. But why the logo in github still shows TunderBIRD?
It looks like Mozilla is trying to catch the band wagon for no particular reason. They don't need it AT ALL. But they just jumped in along for a ride.
"Please don't fulminate."
"Don't be curmudgeonly. Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Nevertheless, AI use is not what really stood out to me. It’s that it’s SO MUCH CODE. I have no idea how you guys maintain or reason about the quality or security of something like this. Good luck, I guess.
"I will make loads of assumptions without checking so that I can invent reasons to get mad"
Note that about 30,000 of those lines are JSON files for localization and testing, as one example.
Especially curious because I see a whole lot of hardcoded english text in there…
Would recommend exercise
https://ghloc.vercel.app/thunderbird/thunderbolt?branch=main claims 141k and most of it is Typescript.
I just checked one old take home task in Angular I did last year and the total number of lines is over five million over 35k+ files.
So all this is doing is adding context for the LLM and some persistence.
I have yet to see a compelling use case for Gemini Enterprise at my company but we're still experimenting with it.
[1] https://github.com/thunderbird/thunderbolt
Also, my impression is: yay another AI front-end. What does this one differently that the other thirteen in a dozen don't?
Mozilla's a lot more trustworthy with privacy and data, and they're unlikely to sell the project to someone who only wants to stuff it full of malware/adware/crypto stuff - or do it themselves.
If you were not working with Mozilla Asian area, you know far too less. They had a browser in China that redirect to different website for profit before every connection and some affiliation. By doing so, is it privacy or not? Oh, look at Mozilla Japan volunteers, they shut everything up because things went wrong.
They're certainly doing better than others in this space, but their track record does not inspire confidence for anyone concerned about their privacy and data.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla#Controversies
"I'm using Mozilla Thunderbolt."
"Huh, do you mean Thunderbird?"
"No, Thunderbolt!"
Just keep making a decent browser and stop getting distracted on shit.
Investing on AI is not going to make them less financially reliant on Google.
I want them to go cap-in-hand to other countries and say "if you don't fund us then you are letting the US and surveillance capitalism get between your citizens and their government" and "do you really know what Chrome is doing with your data?"
I don't want to pretend they are simply part of a browser marketplace, but rather have them realize they are part of a civil rights effort, with powerful non-market forces they can ally with.
And I want those governments to commit to progressive enhancement guidelines like https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/technology/using-progressi... so new alternatives like Ladybird can start, and further require their agencies to test on a Firefox branch with no AI, no location tracking, full ad-blocking, etc. because while the market is free to ignore certain non-profitable users, a government should not be allowed to ignore some of its citizens.
I don't see a contradiction there.
Does a dollar go from Marla to MZLA? Are those dollars not fungible?
For now, they mainly rely on Google for that money. Google pays them to avoid antitrust cases, to show the courts that they are not a monopoly and that "alternatives" exist. For example, the DOJ once proposed that Google be forced to sell off Chrome.
However, if another entity has control over your budget, they also have control over your product. If Firefox becomes "too good" to be a true competitor in the consumer space, the funding might be reduced or even cut off.
Creating a new source of revenue allows Mozilla to improve Firefox even beyond the point Google feels "comfortable" with.
It looks like they might want to get into hosting/selling services to users on this.
From the FAQ:
> Is there going to be a hosted version if I don't want to deploy it myself? > Yes, we are planning to launch Thunderbolt for regular users but we do not have a release date yet.
The world may need Firefox but it's funny how people complain about Mozilla's dependence on Google while also complaining about every attempt to become more financially independent from Google.
The current state of Mozilla is pretty odd since they rebranded to make it more apparent they're a non-profit, while also attempting to become more profitable pushing out new products and services.
https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share#monthly-2009...
As a former Netscape user… I think it’s almost masochistic to remain on Firefox as it’s rewarding a company that mismanaged its only product into the ground. And for what? What is the amazing thing Mozilla did at the expense of Firefox and donating the direction of internet technologies to Google?
The executives got to attend a bunch of fancy gallows, and Pat themselves on the back?
https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share
I've already used up "cum" btw, so you're not allowed to name your product that.
Doesn’t this have to be done under another name to prevent massive company-killing pushback?
Is there a FF fork doing anything good out there?
Floorp comes with additional custom interface features, workspaces (tabs grouping) and mouse gestures. And bit better profiles feature - Mozilla decided to redo it recently which lead to some problems.
Mullvad has build in VPN, DoH and proxy as an extension, and comes with uBo and NoScript.
There's Zen browser that has a quite uncommon UI, and obscure Pale Moon that IIRC still tries to provide old XUL/XPCOM extensions - which often leads to pages rendering issues.
It seems like all the model inference is external APIs? So why is the marketing claiming "Self-host on your infrastructure or let us help you deploy. Your data never leaves your control."
Could Mozilla hand over firefox to a new team please? It is clear they are wasting time and energy on things nobody wanted - who wants Mozilla-AI please? I mean, seriously?
For people who don't think Mozilla wants to make firefox competitive again; and for those who also don't think ladybird will become a viable alternative one day (that's for the future, I have no crystal ball, I am just pointing at one possibility here). Perhaps we could get more momentum when someone else other than Mozilla handles firefox.