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#firefox#mozilla#browser#more#don#google#extensions#still#those#users
Discussion (310 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
In the real world, in the same line as the article suggests, there was a brief time when the "puts you back in control" browser needed you to change the following about:config settings to disable the force-pushed ai:
browser.ml.enable, browser.ml.chat.enabled, browser.ml.chat.sidebar, browser.ml.chat.menu, browser.ml.chat.page, extensions.ml.enabled, browser.ml.linkPreview.enabled, browser.ml.pageAssist.enabled, browser.ml.smartAssist.enabled, browser.tabs.groups.smart.enabled, browser.tabs.groups.smart.userEnabled, pdfjs.enableAltTextModelDownload, pdfjs.enableGuessAltText
A bit of community feedback later, and we've got one big "off" button, and me wondering which footgun the executives will shoot themselves with next.
At the same time, they did listen to the feedback and deliver. It now has a genuinely good interface for it where you don't have to opt out of everything, but can opt-in where you want it. It's not just a big off button, it's a general out-out including new features, but that then exposes individual opt-ins if you want for each feature. Most other browsers won't respond at all. Firefox is still by far the best browser out there for people who care about their privacy.
Especially on HN, Firefox just gets so much more hate than software that is way more user hostile for much less bad behaviour. I'm not saying we shouldn't hold it to a higher standard when that is what it's selling itself on: clearly we can't allow "not as bad" to let it slip into worse and worse, but at the same time, I don't understand how the narrative seems to trend towards "they are essentially the same as google" when that is so clearly not true (to be clear, not saying you are saying that in this post, just that's the vibe of HN's commentary as a whole).
If they had listened to their users they would have delivered what every users wants - just a browser. Not some kind of "platform" stuffed with lot of unwanted crap that makes it bloated and introduces possibly new unnecessary attack vectors in it (both malicious and / or privacy exploits). All those additional crap that every new management wants in Firefox should have been a browser extension or a plugin, instead of being bundled into the core browser. When a user installs / updates Firefox, they could be asked if they want to install any of these new feature available as an extension / plugin. That keeps the browser lean, transfers the choice completely to the user and is genuinely respectful of the user. The current way of force bundling everything into the browser, making it bloated, and then pretending that "users can opt-out" is not just arrogance but also misleading (to be polite) as it is common knowledge among software firms that most people often never change the default settings.
Think about it ... if every of these controversial features - Pocket, ads in address bar or home page, AI etc. etc. - had been made available as user opted extension or plugin, would there ever have been any controversies? The installation data itself would provide a feedback of how much the users actually care about these features, and provide unique insights to the management into the kind of user base that it has (which the article is spot-on about).
(Note that I know that some of these features are indeed implemented as an extension. But not as user controlled ones as they cannot be completely uninstalled. All the user can do is disable it (turn "off or on"). Why? It is stuff like this that makes it harder to trust claims of caring about user Privacy.)
When people are complaining about AI it seems vague and like they're complaining about something else not related to Firefox. What is it, the optional chatbot side window? I agree that's annoying, but it's pretty easy to go about your life not knowing it even exists. The new preview thing is annoying, but the complaints all happened when it was only translate and the chat box.
It seems like people are just complaining about AI but directing that to Mozilla. For translate I can say that they were much more ethical than most companies. They used volunteer work and have an open dataset. They don't seem to be out here stealing artists' work or scrapping the entire internet left and right, they seem to be using AI as directed useful features. Small and local models, not chatbots.
I'm not going to say Mozilla doesn't have lots of problems, it certainly does. But the outrage over this doesn't seem to be about those things. If those are the problems, any Geko browser is miles ahead of any chromium browser. Even if you use a degoogled chromium you're still giving Google control over the internet. If you have problems with Mozilla, then just be direct. If you have problems with AI, just be direct about it (it's not like there aren't a million problems there too!). But if we conflate the two we don't even give Mozilla the chance to respond to users because the feedback is meaningless. And if you expect them to "just know", well... how would they? They're not Google, they aren't monitoring every single little thing you do.
The reason people are pushing back against the Mozilla hate is because we're just tired of chrome winning. That's all that this hate has done. And if you're that passionate about AI, just go to a fork. There are plenty and you've already established yourself as a power user, so I know you know how to google. Fwiw, I like Zen, but it's not completely anti AI either.
People are mad because Mozilla is clearly and unashamedly trying to boil the frog and doesn't seem to even be interested in hiding that fact.
People are mad because Mozilla is speed-running SV software-shittifying strategies without even doing us the dignity of pretending they aren't.
It's a recurring pattern of not reading the room
Everyone was forced to be exposed to it. To see it. Only after that happened, did they let users disable it.
It's effectively the equivalent of a spam campaign.
A browser that puts users in control should make features like AI and advertising opt-in because there is a sizeable group of people who are concerned about those things. It's meaningless if they only put users in control who agree 100% with Mozilla's ways of thinking.
After so many times of blundering in ways that are favorable to their corporate sponsors, it's hard to believe they're not doing it on purpose.
it’ll never be an effective, scrappy organization again as long as that’s the case.
What? They didn't make these 10 distinct features one single all-or-nothing button? They let you switch them on or off individually?? How dare they?!?
What? They shipped new features to the browser...turned on?!? Instead of spending all those development hours and then...hiding them behind a setting by default?
I need "AI" in my browser, so I don't use the AI features. No data was sent anywhere. No 4 GB model was downloaded. Nothing happened, except for a popup saying "hey, by the way, if you want to do X, just press this button here". It's just UI elements. No AI-related code runs, no data is sent to AI companies unless you directly tell the browser to do that.
Imagine if Firefox shipped a brand new GPU-accelerated compositor, improved hardware video decoding and WebGL/WebGPU. You people cry about why they didn't add a big "disable GPU features" button? And that they dared to enable this by default?
I'm not convinced anyone complaining even knows what they're complaining about. The AI features Mozilla has is pretty minimal and there's a good fucking reason they didn't add a nuke button in the beginning. Because most people like translate. The chat sidebar? Most people I know that use Firefox didn't even know it existed till I showed them. The only other model that existed at the time was a 20MB tab grouper. The complaints felt reactionary to AI (rightfully) but for some reason targeted Mozilla, the company that wasn't shoving AI down your throat
The issue was they shipped AI features built into everything and the only way to switch them off was to "about:config" a bunch of settings, they shouldn't have shipped it without the off switch and "Open about:settings and then disable things manually" isn't control for the average user.
Using Firefox is a political choice. People use it because it's one of the few remaining traditional browsers which isn't a tentacle of Big Tech. Chasing the competition and adding the stuff your users are actively trying to avoid isn't going to work.
Firefox usage has been declining for a decade. Doing nothing, or just doing the exact same as before, is popular with its fans (including me). But wouldn't it perhaps just have lead to an even more rapid decline?
It's obviously impossible to say, but when we look at things that did happen due to Mozilla's financial decisions we have some major disruptions. Besides the already-mentioned Rust and Thunderbird examples we also have the years-long rebuild of the extension system where Firefox, once known as the leader in customization, offered less than 20 extensions for its mobile version and deprecated who-knows how many. I find it hard to believe that these actions didn't affect their market share, goodwill, or both.
I am in favor of Mozilla launching initiatives to support the browser, but right now I think they are using the browser to support their initiatives.
The move to WebExtensions was painful, but it also made it possible to easily port Chrome extensions to Firefox, which was a great boost for the extension ecosystem, as well as being the thing that actually made mobile extensions possible.
I do agree they should've made the transition period longer though. There were like two years in between where some of the big Chrome extensions hadn't been ported yet, but their original Firefox counterparts were already killed. That probably made a few users move ti Chrome, but that was already during the great Chrome migration, so I can't imagine this made a huge difference.
As for the effect of extensions, my feeling is that people care less about them now but used to care more about them back then. I think Firefox main selling point was always "my cousin who works in IT told me to install this instead of that", and once Firefox angered those power users away (at the same time when Chrome was trying to bring them in) the effect compounded.
I worked at Mozilla for a bit over six years and really enjoyed my time there. There were lots of brilliant people attracted by the mission and the work was technically interesting. I left in part because I came to the conclusion that the answer to these questions was no. Google's distribution advantages with Chrome and getting boxed out of mobile by the bundled Android/iOS browsers was simply too much to overcome by making a better product. People can gripe about Mozilla's management or product decisions all they want but the fundamental problem is the structure of the web browser market.
What we really need is normalised effort to provide an alternative to the systemic issues you are starting to bring up. Not just the browser market but the entrenchment of big tech in general. An organisation that can deliver on what the idealists individually want in a big, cohesive way.
Personally in our current day an age I think that's what a labor union can provide (in addition to the obvious other resources).
I don't mind experiments, but if you're the "we put you back in control" browser then please build an "off" switch in from the start.
not at the current employee and costs. But do they need to do that? Do they need to produce new products (and pay the cost to do so)?
Why can't they be lean and mean? Focus purely on browser experience without any BS, without any upsell? And there are volunteers out there that willingly contribute code/fixes for free.
AI is however a potential avenue for raising money.
I meant to use that as a recent example of the kind of decisions that Mozilla leadership repeatedly makes, that don't match up what their users want.
How? By selling the position of preferred model? They can do that without implementing it in a way that means people who don't want it at all have to jump through hoops to opt-out.
Being able to turn AI summaries and such off by default was the final reason I started paying for Kagi. I know they use ML in the background no matter what, but as long as I get links to resources relevant to my search, that I can read/judge/summerise as needed, first and foremost, how they produce that list is not the issue.
Leaders are accountable for their decisions, their statements, their strategies, and their care for the organisation(s) that they lead.
Firefox is a top notch browser we all are provided with for free. And it's been great and free for longer than any other browser. Ever.
Browsers are notoriously difficult to build and maintain. I think we owe all the engineers and people behind it a lot of appreciation.
Have they made a few missteps over the years trying out the new hot thing ? Yes. And it temporarily upset a niche of technical people. And last time I checked none of these things were very hard to avoid or turn off.
A product like Firefox depends on word of mouth. There was not a *single* announcement or decision by the Mozilla leadership in the last 10 years or so which would make me recommend Firefox to others, instead every single time it pushed me away a little bit more. I have hardly ever seen such a fundamental alienation of their core audience, even for Silicon Valley standards ;)
On the other hand, part of the struggle was my fight against the web as a """platform""", with its many privacy and security issues that accumulated as W3C APIs were added like hot cakes and websites exploded in complexity. Firefox provided the control necessary through addons, thanks to its vast community of likeminded people. Nowadays, a lot of the privacy controls have landed in firefox proper, in part thanks to the tor browser upstreaming, if you know where to look.
I really don’t think it would.
One thing “Do what you did before when you were successful!” is missing is that Firefox was sleek, fast, extendable, new, and cool.
It was cool partly because of its “sleek, fast, extendable”, but also because of its “new”, and it can’t get “new” back.
Perhaps launching a completely new piece of software, like the Netscape -> Firefox change (although that was organic, not planned) - but only if it’s actually something new and cool that comes out of it. A rebadge won’t work.
I don’t think there’s a playbook that works here. I’m struggling to think of many major pieces of tech (or non-tech!) that ever got its cool back. Netscape -> Firefox? Apple and/or the Mac? IE4? Lego? Elvis? “New Nixon”?...
Alongside all of the successes there are orders of magnitude more failures, and I don’t think they’re all on merit.
* Wanting niche features that don't benefit other people than those in the enthusiast core, thus preventing the company from gaining market share and revenue.
* Ever-increasing expectations in terms of visible feature delivery (e.g. e10s was widely seen as a failure despite being foundational to move off a single thread model and increase browser responsiveness).
* General conservativeness in terms of anything that breaks workflows (famously [1], but also see the criticism of Firefox redesigns over the years, etc.)
* Most importantly, lack of proposals for monetization from said audience (donations do not cut it and smaller and more important projects such as OpenSSL, etc. have also been underfunded from time to time, so nvm funding a browser's development), while also opposing the typical monetization mechanisms, e.g. ads.
These things end up constraining a company from spending more resources to improve a growing product, as they don't have any. While more capital-intensive industries such as phone manufacturers often just choose to appeal to mass market at the cost of giving up their enthusiasts[2], Mozilla always wanted to hedge its bets, and has failed to go in either direction.
Therefore, it is not unexpected that Mozilla is failing, and only survives through whatever meager donations come through, and revshare from Google by placing them as the default search engine.
[1] https://xkcd.com/1172/
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJgTKx-rg18
What users want is a working browser that gets out of the way and them browse the web. That's what Chrom(e,ium) is. It's like air, it's everywhere but you can't see it.
Firefox is not. Every time you open Firefox, there's a new dialog announcing some change or shilling some product. It's cut from the same cloth as that car that Homer Simpson designed. Every time you open Firefox, it works a bit differently, so you have to unlearn some habit and learn a new one[1]. This is friction. This grates. You have some task to perform, which is why you opened the browser, but now you your blood pressure is up 20 points because firefox can't just let you browse, it's always telling you stuff in a dozen different channels, popups, toasts, notifications, there's always something it throws in your face, often multiple calls to action at once. So you say for fucks sake, and go back to chrome which just lets you browse with none of that nonsense.
These are all the calls to action I get when I open firefox. Which I opened yesterday as well, so it's not a clean install.
https://www.marginalia.nu/junk/firefox.png
Why is there a dialog announcing widgets, when I can see the widgets already? It's literally telling me what I see on the screen. Why do you need this exposition to inform me of something that is plain to see in front of my eyes? It's like bad fiction writing, except in the form of annoying UX.
Like is anyone working on Firefox actually using the browser, in its vanilla configuration? How can they not see how infuriating it is to be a Firefox user?
[1] 5 years ago we changed which kitchen drawer we keep the cutlery in, and I still reach for the wrong one every time.
Also the context menus are super noisy, I tried cutting some bits out in config, but there's just so much crap in there. Obviously all the AI stuff, but also just the basics; right-clicking on a tab has a sub-menu for "Close Multiple Tabs" which hides "Close other tabs" and "Close tabs to the right" which are probably what I use the most. In Chromium they're top-level menu items.
And it went through a phase a few months ago where the context menus were sometimes offset or goofily sized; I think that's fixed now.
I guess it's easy to criticise, but it just doesn't feel like this stuff is well aligned to actually using the browser, whereas Chromium feels like a solid product.
You did not read the comments of this submission?[1]
This is common.[2][3][4][5] And those were comments which were easy to find because they said Firefox and VPN. Many other comments said they should focus on Firefox solely. Or eliminate all side projects.
> People even want to donate money for browser development, but can't due to the foundation structure.
People can give money to Mozilla Corporation by purchasing Firefox Relay, Mozilla Monitor, Mozilla VPN, or MDN Plus.
Rules for businesses to solicit donations are strict. Mozilla would have to be more careful than most because people confuse non profit Mozilla Foundation and for profit Mozilla Corporation. It is well known in fund raising most people who say they would donate will not donate. And many of the small minority of Firefox users who said they would donate implied or said plainly a condition was Mozilla would abandon other income.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48515030
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48225892
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47434873
[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47065167
[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46323661
Yes.
At this point I think it's clear his resignation was not voluntary. Maybe the other offer was sincere, or maybe it wasn't; I'm not sure how we could tell.
I'm telling you this to highlight that volunteers where a huge part of Mozilla.
But on the last day they announced that they were moving the day-to-day conversations from IRC (an open protocol) to Yahoo Messenger (a closed protocol). I felt sort of betrayed in that moment: the company that was all about openness and to which I dedicated countless hours doing unpaid work for and even more years evangelizing for was imposing its volunteers and employees used a proprietary app to coordinate. That didn't sit well with me. At all. I basically lost interest.
This was in 2015. Last I heard MDN introduced ads (I wouldn't know, uBlock is pretty effective) and is not showing contributors to a page on the page itself anymore.
So yeah, the part of OP saying how Mozilla managed to piss volunteers resonated pretty hard with me.
Makes me think in 10 years time the web will all be discord-like data silos behind infernal subscriptions and/or dark patterns with ads.
What a wonderful thing we've created.
It wasn’t because Mozilla stopped using GP’s favorite chat software. It’s because GP was a believer in the mission and the principles. Switching from an open system to a corny corporate one made the whole illusion fall apart. Mozilla was a corp all along and they took their volunteers for a ride.
Speaking as someone who hasn't run their own bouncer in 10+ years.
[1] - https://thelounge.chat/
[2] - https://convos.chat/
And IRCv3 has chat history to provide that. But https://snikket.org/ (XMPP) is more likely aligned with what you are looking for
It just works.
Who else would be likely to look at what a web page is trying to get the browser to do, e.g., trigger requests for ads using Javascript. There are a variety of places to look, it is not like this is seriously hidden from those with even the slightest curiousity
That a former MDN volunteer is apparently disappointed by ads on MDN yet satisfied with MDN anyway because of a community-sourced browser add-on. An add-on that can be rendered useless at any time by the browser vendor, including the one that puts ads on MDN
It is not unimaginable that one day uBlock Origin may cease to work on Firefox when Mozilla sells search data to Google as its primary source of income and is actively working on such things as "making ads more private"
I thank the volunteer for their past work on MDN, I'm not singling him out, nor am I holding it against anyone for thinking this way, but I wonder how many uBlock Origin users believe themselves to possess some "specialised knowledge",^1 for lack of a better term, but would be all but helpless against advertising without a solution provided by someone else, e.g., a browser extension
The point I'm making is that today it seems like "knowing which app to install and how to install it" is considered specialised knowledge instead of actually knowing how to avoid ads to an extent where if the app stopped working they could devise another solution
There are definitely some HN users who can do it, and you, dear reader may be amongst them, but it seems, based on the comments I have seen over the years, there are many, many more who cannot. In that sense the situation is a bit like the IRC comment
The more one understands about online ads, the more clear it should be that so-called "ad blockers" is only a temporary solution at best, and these only work with web browsers
IMHO it is important that more people who wish to avoid ads become more curious about how they work instead of only installing a browser extension and concluding the problem is solved for the long-term
1. Many calling themselves "engineers" for example
No wonder people don't want to join it.
(Saying that as someome who has his own bouncer.)
Email really could have been great, but html and bad actors have made it so much worse than it needs to be.
I consider it a feature that acts as a filter.
Since 2007 in my case which is when I started using Linux at home. The distributions I use come with Firefox as the Web browser (Ubuntu, Debian and latterly Slackware).
I do find myself turning things off more now than I used to.
Also apparently they are non-tracking ads, and so provide only a small fraction of income that tracking ads would bring, but that would go against the ideals of Mozilla.
So I'm seeing the ads as a net positive. (And am surprised that the people visiting MDN don't use an ad blocker anyhow).
I feel the same way after seeing what they've done with AI chatbots in the sidebar. Five cloud providers. No local AI option. I don't see a reason to use Firefox today and it's been my main browser since it was called Phoenix. I use it only because it's what I've been using for a long time. There's no relationship between Mozilla of today and the group that placed the ad in the NY Times in 2004.
The AI chatbot thing was just the latest happening, but it shows how devoid of meaning that organization has become when you have a technology like AI and nobody even looks to Mozilla to provide leadership on an issue like that. Sure, send all your data to a large cloud outfit, that's the corporate world of Mozilla in 2026. It would actually be shocking to see Mozilla promote AI data privacy. Ironically, the local model I run the most is provided by Google, and it's not the least bit surprising that they're making it possible.
IIRC they had a partnership with Yahoo around that time. Interesting to hear it went that deep. Notable: Yahoo Messenger was shutdown in 2018.
Also, I'm afraid that's not sustainable in the long run. How long before Mozilla makes a change so big to introduce some nasty feature that it becomes impossible for forks to stay up to date with upstream? Do they really have the resources necessary to maintain an actual fork and not just a customized version?
Many of Mozillas product decisions prove that the Mozilla corporation is not aligned with the interests of FLOSS. I can't donate to Firefox or Thunderbird specifically, neither at the feature or product level. There is no way to ensure my donations go to enriching these products, instead of profit generating features that benefit the Mozilla corporation. One example is the container VPN proxy, which only allows you to implement a VPN per container if you pay for Mozilla VPN. This is a feature that should be universally available to all users, and all VPN providers, but they locked it behind a paywall for profit.
The is the same (logically analogous) reason I no longer use Reddit after the API changes in 2023, after using the platform for 15 years, and has become common among newer FOSS startups like OpenAI, minio, and bambu; using the philosophy of open source &/or unpaid community labor to achieve a certain level of trust, growth, users, funding, and market saturation, only to screw them all over in the name of profit. This for-profit parasitic greed and corruption in FLOSS is the antithesis to the philosophy of the FLOSS community.
In a sane world this type of community exploitation would be criminally prosecutable. Reddit decision makers would see the inside of a prison cell; the moderators and commenters – as well as the developers who built the 3rd party apps that grew the company from nothing for over a decade – would be given shares/ownership, and paid from the company for their time and labor; same for every other scammer that exploits these "bait-and-switch" deceptive tactics to succeed in businesss. Unfortunately for us all, we live in a world ruled by parasites.
https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html
"Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people:
First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers, launch technicians, and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.
Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers' union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.
The Iron Law states that, in every case, the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules and control promotions within the organization."
Those who recognize this will be at peace since they understand the soul of bureaucracy.
[0] _ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-licking_ice_cream_cone
>In political jargon, a self-licking ice cream cone is a self-perpetuating system that has no purpose other than to sustain itself.
>History
>The phrase appeared to have been first used in 1991–1992, in a book about Gulf War weapons systems by Norman Friedman, and On Self-Licking Ice Cream Cones, a paper by Pete Worden about NASA's bureaucracy, to describe the relationship between the Space Shuttle and Space Station.
[...]
So are there any exceptions?
* People who understand that the existence of the organization is necessary for the goals of the organization
On the contrary, the existence of a mismanaged organization nominally dedicated to a given purpose often prevents its nominal goal from being achieved, because people assume giving time or money to that organization will be the best way to further the goal. Then the organization squanders them when those resources would otherwise have gone to some other organization or people with greater effectiveness towards the goal.
This gives rise to another type of person within an organisation. Someone opposed to the goals of the organisation, and who understands this all too well.
I would totally be pissed as someone in an “organizational” role of someone reduced me to someone “not interested in the goals of the organization”, but magpi3 didn’t do that. They correctly stated a pattern. If you are around organizational/administrative people, ask yourself honestly if the pattern isn’t the least bit accurate…
The essential problem is that if one person spends their time e.g. fixing bugs in the code and another person spends their time weaseling their way onto the budget committee because they want to divert resources to their cronies, it's the second person who ends up on the budget committee. Then the first person gets laid off so their salary can be redirected to the cronies.
There are various ways to try to inhibit this with varying levels of effectiveness, essentially checks and balances. But the kleptocrats will be constantly trying to circumvent, weaken and vilify the things designed to constrain them. It's the sort of thing in the same nature as "the price of freedom is eternal vigilance".
I find it to be very true after almost 30 years in the working world, and I always keep it in mind wherever I work.
There was once a time where IE was only ever used to download Firefox... Mozilla squandered that.
But I'm not sure how much they could've done. Maybe they could've invested a ton of engineering resources into a project similar to Firefox Quantum earlier, so that Firefox didn't leave as much room for a leaner browser? But half the reason people complain about Firefox today is that they broke XUL extensions, which was an absolutely necessary step in making Firefox a competitive, fast browser. I can only imagine the backlash they would've seen if they did that before Chrome ate their lunch.
And I'm not sure how much it would've really helped, since 1) Chrome would've still been a less bloated browser simply through having been around for a shorter time and having fewer features, and 2) Google would've still had immense marketing opportunities by plastering Chrome ads all over Google Search etc.
That's when Google realized they had to do something. The market could not be allowed to be dominated by a pro-freedom, pro-privacy product.
To me, ad blocking belongs in extensions. The job of a web browser is to show web pages as intended according to the standards. It includes all the ads, tracking, etc... the page has put in. If you want to block stuff or deviate from the standards in any way, that's what extensions are for.
And extension like ad blocking are an arms race, websites will deploy countermeasures to make them less effective and to which extensions can respond. Again I dont want the core browser to participate in an arms race. Keeping it free of vulnerabilities is already hard enough not to fight against standard behavior.
As a reminder: Extensions execute with post-decryption access to the websites you view, and they update to new code silently and without asking for permission. HTTPS might as well not bother existing if you have extensions you do not have incredible trust in.
Now, that's a question of whether you trust those who write the browser more than those who write the extension.
And by the way, the argument you have is the same that justifies the much hated "manifestV3", which makes extensions less powerful for security reasons. But it also limits the blocking capabilities of browsers to a simple, less effective blacklist. That Firefox still supports the old "insecure" way is a big selling point over Chrome.
Firefox's VPN service also has its privacy-related uses (yes, I'm aware of the limitations), but I think it mostly serves as a possible source of non-google revenue for Mozilla.
All Mozilla (and Firefox) needs is to be run by developers, not the fucking MBAs.
"Nothing more," you say.
The chief focus should be Privacy... Privacy and Performance... Our two chief focuses should be Privacy and Performance... and Cross-Platform Executables with Functional Parity... Our three chief focuses should be Privacy, Performance, Cross-Platform Executables with Functional Parity, and Safety on the Web... Our four chief focuses should be Privacy, Performance, Cross-Platform Executables with Functional Parity, Safety on the Web, and ruthless Efficiency in Preserving Battery Life... Our five... no... Amongst our chief focuses... Amongst our non-trivial chief focuses that users think are easy... are such elements as Privacy, Safety on the Web, Cross-Platform Executables with Functional Parity... I'll come in again.
Software Engineering Apologies to...
[0] _ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spanish_Inquisition_(Monty...
How do you block ads and invasive trackers? DNS only?
According to 2025 filings, 86%+ of revenue came from the Google deal.
Google pays Mozilla because of the browser. How would shifting focus to the browser make that worse?
1. Could do all the stuff chrome does as well as chrome. (Eg, canvas rendering speed etc). So I can actually use web apps.
2. Just doesn't ever have anti privacy code, pro ad code, etc in it.
I use brave and a self managed lan which is just an ad hoc half assed attempt to reach the above goals. Because there is no other option.
This is just a path to irrelevance. Firefox had the ambition to be the default browser, what Chrome is now! It's a shame if they're going to spiral off into their niche.
I do not think that this was that confusing. People [1] looked around at the beginning of the 2010's and saw
1) Mobile usage was growing exponentially and desktop was... not [2].
2) Every mobile OS shipped their own browser by default, or even went so far as to prevent other browsers from being used at all (iOS) [3].
3) Because Android and iOS both had non-trivial marketshare, neither could be called a "monopoly" so there was no way to use anti-trust law to get Firefox on devices as was done with Windows (not that this would have been a compelling strategy even if it were possible).
People took that set of facts and concluded Mozilla needed its own mobile OS in order to stay relevant.
What they underestimated was the amount of investment needed to make such an OS and get it on devices and the amount of time it would have to exist in a state of not being very good before it could compete with the established players (who were not standing still... people forget how bad Android was in the beginning). But if you look at the actual world we ended up in, with no mobile OS from Mozilla and a total Firefox marketshare that is less than desktop Safari's, it is hard to say that initial conclusion was incorrect.
[1] Full disclosure: I was a Mozilla employee at the time, though not involved in any of these decisions.
[2] I would say "desktop was shrinking", but to everyone's surprise it actually remained fairly steady in absolute numbers, although it did become a smaller slice of a much larger pie. In 2010 everyone expected it to shrink, though.
[3] Mozilla did ship a re-skin around mobile Safari to try to get some brand presence, but was still at the mercy of what web standards Safari chose to implement, and you could hardly call it a first-class experience. Eventually iOS loosened their rules, but no one could have predicted that back then.
It would be great if Mozilla as an organization tool the opposite approach of Google and if they started a project you knew it would be supported for the long run and if not internally it was handed over to the community of users and stewarded along, sort of how Apache seems to adopt projects but mostly for corporate/enterprise users.
Boot-to-Gecko is brilliant because honestly most apps today... are Web pages packaged in an "app". Most PWA with desktop shortcuts (and ideally offline responsive mode) show that. Very few "apps" genuinely need to be apps.
Consequently being "just" a phone with basic connectivity and delegating the rest to the browser made perfect sense.
I didn't work because it didn't make sense or wasn't technically feasible. It didn't work because anybody who made a mobile OS wanted THEIR own walled gardens. The fact that today we are stuck with Android an iOS shows how needed it was and still is.
Remember, the best product doesn't necessarily win
I believe that the people who want Firefox want it because it's different, just like the people who want Linux want it because it is different. And similarly in Linux, many people keep explaining how Linux should look more like Windows if it wants the year of the Linux Desktop.
But I wouldn't be on Linux if I wanted Windows. I am not on Linux because I want everybody to be on Linux, on the contrary. Same applies for Firefox.
That's why Firefox continues to be a niche browser. Its actual goal, never outright stated by Mozilla leadership, is to occupy just enough market share to prop up their behemoth benefactor.
I don't know how well it worked in practice but it sounded like it was a cool way to engage the community.
Exactly this. Mozilla/Firefox lost their way when they stopped listening to the community.
Which is not to say you shouldn't try to build new cool things that the community hasn't thought of yet - but you should listen to them when they tell you it is terrible garbage that they do not want and there is no way to opt out.
I've been a loyal Firefox user since forever - reading, writing, web dev I do is always in Firefox. It's a first app I always install. I'm grateful Firefox exists, and the world (at least mine) would be much worse if it wasn't around.
I don't like Mozilla is taking money from Google - I'd prefer if it was all community driven, to the point of a community owned co-operative, but I'm probably delusional.
Yet, I'm hopeful for the future.
They still have not fixed their build system. Meson/ninja or cmake would be alternatives. Nothing to have them abandon mozconfig ... this is legacy code. The rest of the world moved on. Mozilla lives in the past.
FWIW the Firefox build instructions [1] look a lot saner to me than the Chromium build instructions [2].
[1] https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/setup/linux_build.ht...
[2] https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/main/docs/l...
And one would hope they stay there, because all the newer stuff is far more user-hostile.
I'm not exactly sure of the reason for the overuse but the sheer amount of times it is used feels artificial. Not "artificial" in an "artificial intelligence" sense but perhaps a corporate, "inclusive" thing[1] that may have rubbed off on the author during his time at Mozilla, or a political convention (which is possible considering the large "Fump Truck" text on his Mastodon page).
[1] https://acorn.firefox.com/latest/content/inclusive-writing/o...
since then it has been downhill since.
What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane (2 years ago, 532 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39856413
One of the first betrayals was putting ads in their new tab page, the forced AI comes as a Mozilla tradition now of user respect as marketing only.
At the same time it simply may not be a viable business. Firefox was popular originally because Chrome didn’t exist and Internet Explorer especially 6 back was awful.
The browser is now an OS on top of an OS, it requires massive resources to maintain. So Mozilla has a cursed mission now and related or unrelated in any case they’re full of it and have lost my respect. Open source and user respect still means something to me even if it doesn’t to Mozilla.
Interesting language with a passionate community / cult, but the value to Mozilla was vanishingly close to zero.
This is a bit ironic, because... there's a bunch of low hanging fruit that are lacking and that keeps driving the nerds off of Firefox. Take Meshcore/Meshtastic or, frankly, the entire ESP32 world for example - in the Chromium ecosystem, you can use WebUSB and WebSerial to flash and communicate with these things from the browser. It does not get more convenient. Meanwhile, WebUSB still isn't supported in Firefox at all and only two weeks ago Firefox at least gained WebSerial [1].
[1] https://www.heise.de/news/Firefox-151-Endlich-Web-Serial-fue...
I was floored when I discovered that Firefox rejected Web NFC because they were afraid of it being used on specific outdated Yubikeys. I could understand if they were concerned about it being used to steal credit cards, but the Yubikey scenario is just so out of touch. I can only hope that Web Serial represents a pivot away from that.
Now - we really need a viable alternative to the Evil Google Empire. For a while I had hope that ladybird would be that competitor, but that died after I was banned from github, as well as Kling making some really strange decisions in the last year or so, with weird explanations; most recent one the "we don't need external contributors so we close that down" (in part also due to the rise of AI slop spam, which is indeed annoying, but Kling is a strange guy really). I gave up on Mozilla many years ago already, though. The key insight I had was when one mozilla dev explaind that all linux guys use systemd + pulseaudio. So, using youtube (which annoys me because the evil Google empire controls it as well), I had no audio on firefox. Chrome on the other hand played fine (I only used alsa). So, the same machine, almost the same software stack (excluding pulseaudio; I did use system back then though), means that one browser plays audio fine, the other does not. Now, I could recompile firefox and enable non-pulseaudio audio ... but look at this:
https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/view/svn/xsoft/firefox...
mozconfig? In 2026? Seriously?
There is allegedly a python-only alternative. I tried it. It did not compile.
This is not the only issue I had. Many more problems existed with Mozilla and I also think that becoming addicted to Google money killed Mozilla. It is a dying shadow and has been for a long time. Yes, we need alternatives, but Mozilla failed us many years ago already.
I don't have a real solution against the evil Google empire. It's not even only Google; many companies are part of the evilness. I am almost beginning to sound like Richard Stallman, though I don't feed off of my feet - but the main point here is more to have real alternatives. Firefox is useable, no doubt, but it's not going to change the control Google has over the world wide web. We need something much more fundamental - control by the people. Everyone sees what Google and co are doing. Something has to change fundamentally, to stop Google parasitizing on the rest of the world. But for this you also need to have software alternatives that work.
The only thing I can come up with is to make all components of the browser/www stack as modular as possible and to also come up with alternatives. W3C also betrayed us when they demanded DRM into everything. I don't want that. Next in line will be mandatory age sniffing. This is currently ongoing. It will be extended. Systemd already added support for it; Poettering tried to do damage control but clearly failed: and reddit censoring like crazy - https://old.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/1rzykul/the_system... as is typical.
Maintaining a browser engine including patching the latest vulnerabilities when someone points Mythos at your code is a really hard problem, my feeling is you need a certain size of organization and funding as your table stakes.
Someone should convince the EU to look into funding a new browser, maybe.
State won't fund your bridge repair? You can always ask the Soviet Union.
[0] https://servo.org/
https://askubuntu.com/questions/1387154/using-alsa-on-firefo...
https://github.com/i-rinat/apulse
SeaMonkey may be an alternative. It's closer to what I want than Firefox.
https://www.seamonkey-project.org/
I would like to see Mozilla's entire board leave Mozilla... in a PERP WALK.
I already left Mozilla in disgust, and I completely agree that corporations should, to use in-kind language, 'get fucked', so you may have misread. Don't mistake being corrected about the legality of a corporate structure for supporting it personally.
> Corporations get up to so many rotten things, most of which are entirely legal, but shouldn't be
Once I exit the other side of the next couple degrees, I'll have the skills to work as a forensic accountant with a specialty in piercing tech worker lies to reveal real and serious corporate malfeasance, and use that skill to start dissecting and dissolving corporations for criminal acts that no one realizes are occurring. (Sadly, I possess no non-public information on instances of such, or I'd be eligible for a rather significant whistleblower payout.) Or, if I decide to pursue a doctorate, one of the thesis options I've been considering would chop down a cornerstone principle of economics as leverage into forcing corporations to pay up. That decision's a couple years away, though it is a tempting option for sure.
But, hey, it's rude to just talk about me. What are you doing that will productively combat capitalism?
Whom you're working for.
If you're burned out, no longer fun, we all get it. But don't leave your investment into a product just because some new direction took over unless you plan to kick their backside.
I wanted to stay but the strategy was wrong, to my own moral compass.
Consequently leaving in silence, without being able to express why, and maybe even what could possibly be fixed, feels like giving up.
Leaving while telling whomever might want to hear what problems were, and possibly how to fix them, helps to move on while being truthful.
1: reminding the average population that corporations are just abstract human pyramids and made up of normal people.
And
2: doing that through a very human, biased, and filtered perspective that can provide some genuine insight into the function of these opaque systems.
Now, does the average consumer of hacker news get all that? Probably not, but I do think insider perspective is still valuable.