I don’t understand Mozilla’s current strategy; their attempt to pander to the advertising industry and produce a Chrome clone has been a massive failure as demonstrated by their ever-shrinking browser market share which is now effectively a rounding error. For people that are satisfied with being part of the advertising economy, why wouldn’t you just use Chrome and the Google ecosystem? If you don’t mind your data being used for advertising purposes, Chrome is an excellent browser and their broader ecosystem gives you functionality Mozilla will never match.
Mozilla’s only way out is to go back to its roots and build a better user-agent, and provide an adversarial alternative to the current advertising-based ecosystems.
At this point I think Firefox market share stopped being in Mozilla's hand.
Just as it was during the browser war days, the critical issue went back to site compatibility: Firefox performs poorly on Google properties (Gmail is fine, YouTube, gsuite, admin consoles are pretty bad), and document based services like Notion or Figma. It kinda works, but Chrome based browser perform notably better.
The main point of course is that those sites are at fault (sometimea intentionally when it comes to Google), but that doesn't change Mozilla's position. Stop using Google services is just not a great choice, and many of us use them rely heavily on them for work.
Mozilla could make technical miracles and or bring some incredible feature from the left field, but that's a tall order for any company that size, so I'd expect most of their future effort to still end up with lower market share, whether or not they had good ideas.
That's not exactly what happened. Yes, google did some shady stuff but in parallel Firefox was also slow for everything.
Only when FF Quantum launched the performance caught up, and the same launch gave power user a push to go elsewhere, coz all their plugins either stopped working or worked worse.
And it was too little too late too. IIRC the FF market share was already hovering around 10%. There were some people going back to it after Quantum release but that didn't last and were not at the level where companies like one I work for don't even test on FF because market share is so small clients don't require it
> Mozilla could make technical miracles and or bring some incredible feature from the left field, but that's a tall order for any company that size, so I'd expect most of their future effort to still end up with lower market share, whether or not they had good ideas.
Mozilla could, years ago, not focus on everything else but making a browser (Anyone remember Firefox OS ? nobody ? thought so). Firefox was on the top of the web and the management squandered it all.
But if Mozilla makes a killer enterprise browser and a significant chunk of the enterprise jumps on it they will have an incentive to support it.
Firefox performs poorly on Google properties
(Gmail is fine, YouTube, gsuite, admin consoles
are pretty bad)
There are some caveats to mention. One, I use AdBlock, and I'm subscribed to YT Premium so I don't see ads. Two, the documents I edit with GSuite are generally pretty trivial. Three, I've always used decently spec'd (not high end, but decent) computers so perhaps I'm not feeling performance issues that are felt on low end gear.
Still, I agree that's somewhat besides the point. Comapanies can (and do) decide to stop caring about Firefox at any point. There's no guarantee that Gmail will run well on Firefox tomorrow, or two months from now.
[1] https://www.firefox.com/en-US/browsers/enterprise/
Features: [2]
- Rapid Release or Extended Support Release channels
- MSI deployment wrapper
- ADM and AMDX group policy templates
- MacOS plist file policy templates
- Linux target JSON file “policies.json” policy templates
- “Open in IE” extension for ActiveX
[2] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-enterprise-vs-n...
My job is pretty much 100% in browser though, so I realise this isn’t viable for everyone.
--
[0]: https://cyberwarzone.com/2025/11/07/mozilla-unveils-enterpri...
If Firefox had a more customizable, enterprise-feature-focused browser maybe we'd be seeing it used instead of Chrome? I don't know.
They're rolling one out in January 2026
In fact, I think there's a pretty clear-cut example of a natural experiment demonstrating what it looks like to execute in the browser space to nearly perfection and still lose. In my personal opinion, Opera at its peak with the Presto engine, represented the most impressive combination for it's time of elite level performance and stability, genuinely good innovation that benefited the user, and commitment to the core browser above all else. My favorite was whenever they rolled out Opera Unite (to this day a truly mind blowing idea), I think Opera 11 or 12.
And, at a time when it truly mattered, was light on resources and bandwidth and even shipped a portable executable that could be run from any Windows PC from a USB stick. Not only that, but it was consistently ahead of the competition with embedded and device adapted versions. Is business partnerships were creative and cutting edge too. They were early to mobile, struck deals with oems, and even got on the Nintendo Wii. They offered paid and subscription options. IIRC they sold "speed dial" placement for ads and got into the search licensing game. So in everything from performance to speed to stability to innovation that actually benefited users, to intelligent business partnerships and experimenting to find revenue, Opera executed at perhaps the best level anyone could, the perfect moneyball browser. And I was never originally an Opera fanboy, I preferred Firefox 1 and 2 at the start, but pivoted to Opera because, as a college kid with no money, it delivered an impressively modern experience on lightweight hardware.
Despite executing at the highest level both in software and business decision making, it didn't matter, because distribution power trumps product quality. Sustaining a fully independent rendering engine became financially unsustainable, and with the maturity of Android, carriers favored bundled stock browsers.
With no options left Opera then made what I consider a difficult and very unfortunate decision, but perhaps having no other choice, sold to a new ownership team, pivoted to Chromium, and lost much of its team to Vivaldi which is also based on Chromium. But at no point in the story was their loss of financial visibility or market share due the loss of vision that people think explains Firefox's loss of market share. If the world actually worked that way we'd all be using Opera 25 right now.
Edit: If someone more knowledgeable could chime in, I would be fascinated to know if choosing a browser on Android could be a potential monopoly remedy. There's already precedent for that on Windows, iOS and on Android in EU for search.
I don't want to use a blink based browser. If/When mozilla finally dies I don't have high hopes that Firefox won't just die with it.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/aws-sso-conta...
thankfully next generation of browsers are here - ladybug and servo, so at least something will survive even in the worst of the worst cases
This is less and less the case each year. Historically, Google's accounted for over 95% of Mozilla's revenue. But through the recent launches of a bunch of products it's gradually knocked that number down to under 70% and seems to continue decreasing rapidly.
I often see two demands made of Mozilla: (1) focus on Firefox; (2) become financially independent from Google. IMO these two goals are going to be in conflict with each other. They started their own VPN, launched MDN Plus, etc in an effort to improve their financial independence. The AI gimmicks feel like they're in the same thread. I don't like it and don't ever wanna use it but I can't fault Mozilla for exploring that option.
Based on independent audits they are accomplishing (2) and based on their amazing performance in interop-25, interop-24, etc they are also accomplishing (1) as best they could.
Yes.
> Historically, Google's accounted for over 95% of Mozilla's revenue. But through the recent launches of a bunch of products it's gradually knocked that number down to under 70% and seems to continue decreasing rapidly.
Someone who read this might infer other products were 30% of Mozilla's revenue. But they were 10% in 2023. And this was lower than 2022. Royalties were 76%. Google could be under 70%. But interest, dividends, and investment gains contributed more than products.[1] Did you see more recent information?
> They started their own VPN
The servers were Mullvad's.
[1] https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2024/mozilla-fdn-202...
We could have chosen Firefox (most devs seemed to prefer it), but as the market share numbers bear out, most people are familiar with Chrome; most are not with Firefox.
If Firefox had specific features that made it easier for enterprises, or even internal teams at startups, then companies would happily pay $10/user/mo for something as critical as a browser.
There isn’t any such reason afaik.
Edit:
Some examples off the top of my head include
- VPNs
- user and permission management (identity)
- ad- and tracker-blocking
- internal auto-updating and easily managed/deployed extensions
I use Firefox because I want to do at least something to keep the web browser market from becoming a monoculture again, but they’re making it increasingly hard to justify.
I also use because I care, but at 3% hardly any business does any longer.
That's the problem: the number of things you have to disable to stop Firefox--a browser that sold itself on protecting user's privacy--from spying on you, or facilitating the spying of third parties, keeps growing with successive versions, to the point that you now need a running checklist of what to about:config (thanks to the "simplified" Privacy & Security window) and extensions to add.
I still use it only because Chrome is worse, and even with Chromium, certain extensions either aren't available or are a bitch to use.
And what's increasingly annoying is that many web sites (for example, banking and utilities) don't even bother properly testing for Firefox support, given how obscure a browser it has become. Your traffic is also much more likely to be flagged as "suspicious" as a FF user, so expect to spend much more time playing "spot the traffic light/bicycle/bus/stairs" games.
Given that Mozilla Foundation isn't swimming in cash, "investing" in AI (a well known money sink) makes very little sense and will definitely undermine the development of their core product (the freaking browser).
Also, the timing of their Nov. 13 announcement is pretty bad. There is already chatter that AI may be a bubble bigger than the dotcom bubble. For a company that doesn't have deep pockets, it would be prudent to take the back seat on this.
Unless Mozilla plans to spend millions on cloud GPUs to train their own models, there seems to be little danger of that. They're just building interfaces to existing weights somebody else developed. Their part of the work is just browser code and not in real danger from any AI bubble.
> Given that Mozilla Foundation isn't swimming in cash, "investing" in AI (a well known money sink) makes very little sense and will definitely undermine the development of their core product (the freaking browser).
The browser doesn't make any money (the Google search bar money would not be replaced by another entity if they stopped). That is why Microsoft abandoned theirs and why Safari is turning in to IE. Every one of these threads lambasting Mozilla for the "side projects" doesnt seem to have an answer for how does mozilla make money.
Often it will be people complaining they can't "donate directly to browser development" not realizing that it will be peanuts compared to the google money. Most people in the market wont pay for a web browser.
The US government (via the courts) has sent a very clear message to Google that they can be as monopolistic as they want without consequences. I cannot imagine Google will continue supporting Mozilla for much longer.
Certain aspects of human nature, as they apply to the corporate world, can be acknowledged and understood, even if they're not excuses when they lead to the downfall of a prominent organization. When you give someone a big title, a dump truck full of cash, and a mandate to innovate, human nature dictates that most people will internalize the idea that "because I was given all this, I must be competent", even if they very obviously are not. Typically the outcome is a "bold plan forward" which is notable for lacking any actual clear solution to the company's main problems. In one example I know of, the CEO decided to pivot from an unrelated field towards launching a cryptocurrency, and cooked up a cartoonishly-dangerous marketing scheme to support the idea. One person ended up dying as a result, and the company then purged every mention of crypto from its website. (And yes, the company collapsed soon afterwards.)
While it's easy to blame the CEO with their oversized salary, the blame for such disasters doesn't just lie with them. After all, arguably the most important roles of the board are to hire a good CEO, ensure the CEO is actually performing as they should, and fire them if they're not. When politics, cronyism, or again, simple incompetence, lead the board to also fail at its job, you end up with the long, slow decline into obscurity we've seen so often in the tech world.
But Mozilla had a good run.
I don’t think Mozilla is over.
I also don’t think people should equate their history with their current state. They lied to their users and told them they’d never sell their data, and then they did. That is much worse than never having made the promise. I don’t trust them.
But, they have far too much support and are far too embedded to disappear anytime soon.
Firefox probably won't suddenly have the best AI, but they could have the only browser that does this.
Insofar as I count as part of the Firefox community as a long-time user and infrequent bug reporter: I want useful, non-creepy AI features in my main browser, or it's probably not going to remain my main browser for too long.
Of course I also want them to be fully optional, but I have no reason to believe that they would be anything but.
I cannot imagine why one would want AI in a browser at all, but I am open to the possibility that there are applications I have not considered.
Sure, both are possible by copy-pasting to any LLM, but being able to do it without leaving the page is great.
This applies to ebook readers at least as much as it does to browsers, fwiw – I find it mind-boggling that Kindles still doesn't have an "ask $LLM about this highlighted sentence" feature.
To find such a thing I basically have to open loads of product pages cross-reference retailers' websites with manufacturers' product pages.
If I could automate that process, it'd be pretty neat.
Had this issue the other day that I wanted to try to find a remembered example of using Ground Penetrating Radar to find hidden roads in Northern Spain and Southern France, yet for everything tried I could not get Google to actually return results that would ever focus on what it was I actually wanted.
There was some GPR results, there was some about hidden structures, yet finding the actual scholarly articles discussing hidden roadways and searching under farm fields for features that reveal or point to their existence simply never returned positive. Rephrasing, changing the sentence, trying to prioritize search terms never really changed much.
Doing stuff too like, "image search, pixel tree, except filter out all the pay for an image stock photo websites." Really difficult to find anything these days cause there's so much chaff of stock image websites.
If it is about chat, do we actually need Firefox adapted when you can go to gemini.google.com or some other one and write what you want there? Optionality is ensured since you actively have to go there.
If Firefox is reduced to just nerds who post in forums it's totally dead. Maybe it's at that point already.
Tbh I still use Chrome because Firefox's performance just isn't as good. I wish it weren't so but there we go.
Safari still seems better on battery life on macOS, but I can't really tell a difference between Chrome and Firefox anymore.
Safari? Orion?
Actually, whenever I hear people argue that that's all Mozilla should ever be doing, I wonder if they really mean a HTML and Javascript engine? While that's important, browsers are more than that; the chrome matters too.
The average person doesn't care about an AI pane and that won't cause them to change browsers. Mozilla adding tab group support actively got non-tech people I know to switch, in addition to uBlock Origin and generally better privacy.
When I say that I mean investment into features in the browsers chrome, directly working on the website.
But the naive purists seem determined to team up with the genuinely evil in every walk of life, so Chrome monoculture seems inevitable.
And it's not like Google or Microsoft is going to do anything with AI that is worse than this, right?
If they’re gonna be bundling add-ons, I’d rather have them bundle something universally useful like uBlock Origin, but obviously they won’t do that because publishing a browser with an actually unique and useful selling point is not in their best interests.
1. That Google is a competitor to them in the AI space.
2. That Google has such a strong stranglehold over the web, and Chromium/Chrome is a big part of that. I mean, why ultimately help your competitor here?
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1445596
The other one is Firefox Sync not storing shortcut bar favicons. Every install, I have to click on every web site one by one to bring back their favicons. It's a 17 year old ticket:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=428378
Firefox adding crazy features that it may or may not cancel in a few years while ignoring these minor issues frustrates me, and keeps me away from it.
I disabled the AI summaries, but the automatic translation support is very helpful. And I'd love to have automatic subtitles and/or translation support for videos.
It's great, and I love that it works fully on-device, i.e., it's as privacy-preserving as it gets.
With an order of magnitude less money, I think they would have been more focused on improving Firefox rather than trying to diversify with projects like Firefox OS, VPN services or AI.
Even today, given their ~$1.5B in the bank, at the cost of a really painful downsizing, the interests alone could probably pay for a Firefox development focused on standard adherence, performance, quality and privacy.
Mozilla is not a company trying to reinvent itself to survive. If it becomes irrelevant because the Browser becomes irrelevant in the future, that's fine in my book, the organization would have fulfill its mission.
But it is sad to see it become irrelevant because of mismanagement and lack of focus.
Does it include dilution from mobile? China/Russia-mandated browsers?
Even with that (Chrome probably is below 50% if you count that way), 3% is lower than I’ve seen.
I know things vary site by site, but still. 3% is not coming from the planet I live on, even before you start filtering out bot traffic and click fraud (both are typically detected as Chrome).
I haven’t done this, but if you want to be fair, you should also add a weight based on likelihood to pay or be an influencer in a western market. That probably cranks the percentage up even further.
That'd be great, if that pristine Web still existed to search and people were happy with today's results of searching it. But in the real world, the Web is a pile of auto-generated and auto-assembled fragments of slop, SEO-optimized to death, puddled atop and all around the surviving fragments of value. (The value is still there! I suspect the total value in the Web has never stopped increasing. Just like those monkeys are always typing out more and more Shakespeare.) Also in the real world, people are decisively choosing the AI-generated summaries and fevered imaginings. Not for everything, but web search -> URL -> page visit is becoming a declining percentage that won't always be able to support everything that it does today.
It's not that I particularly want AI in my browser. I would say that I emphatically don't, except that automatic translation is really nice, and Firefox's automatic names for tab groups are pretty cool, and I'm sure here and there people will come up with other pieces. I'm actually ok with AI that targets real needs, which is 0.01% of what people are pushing it for. But I also think that we're past the point where NOT having AI in the browser is a sustainable position. (In terms of number of users and therefore financially.)
Should Mozilla be head over heels in love with AI, as it appears to be now? I'd definitely prefer if it weren't. But telling Mozilla "don't do bad thing, it'll make you irrelevant and have no users" is fine and dandy but ultimately pointless unless you have an alternative that doesn't require the entire world to cooperate in turning back the clock.
(Disclosure: Mozilla pays me a salary to write bugs.)
(And working code! I write some of that too!)
(And no, I currently don't do anything that adds AI to the browser, nor can I think of anything I'd want to work on that would add any AI.)
Recently some Ycombinator funded project got highly upvoted on HN, a Chrome based extension that used LLM capabilities to effectively do grease monkey style scripting live in response to human requests. Now that is interesting, and it's a specific application that's actually meaningful and it's not just another AI chat sidebar.
I think it's a matter of workshopping but I bet we're going to be discovering things users actually want that are not yet obvious to us. The example I keep thinking of is non-stupid agent tasking. I wouldn't mind an agent that browsed Amazon for Kindle unlimited hard sci-fi books with critical acclaim. I would be willing to be there's going to be numerous "whybdidn't I think of that" uses cooked up in the next few years.
Certainly not the insane fantasies most of the gen-AI CEOs are pushing, but, for example, it's clear beyond any shadow of a doubt that traditional search is dead. AI supported search is far superior in every way. For clarity, I'm talking about "deep research" style search where you get verifiable links to source materials along with your answers.
It's absolutely not crazy for Mozilla to get into this space, though I think if I were them I'd make an adjacent "AI search and agnentic AI first" web application adjacent to Firefox and keep Firefox as a legacy style browser. This would both give Mozilla a clean slate to do it right, while also keeping happy those who are not early adopters.
There are parts of the web like that but your assertion seems to rely on this being universally true. It clearly and obviously isn't.
> Also in the real world, people are decisively choosing the AI-generated summaries and fevered imaginings.
Are they "decisively" choosing it if it's turned on by default? If it were actually opt-in then we could measure this. As it is I don't think you have any data to rely on when making this assertion.
> Not for everything, but web search -> URL -> page visit is becoming a declining percentage
The same web search companies that own AI models they're trying to sell? Do you not suspect there could be a few confounding variables in this analysis?
> except that automatic translation is really nice
Which we already had and has nothing to do with language models masquerading as "AI".
> is fine and dandy but ultimately pointless unless you have an alternative that doesn't require the entire world to cooperate in turning back the clock.
An alternative to what? Tab renaming? Bad article summaries? Weak search engine algorithms?
I'm pretty sure chatgpt and perplexity are "opt-in" in this sense
> nothing to do with language models
how do you think translation works?
> There are parts of the web like that but your assertion seems to rely on this being universally true. It clearly and obviously isn't.
In a sense, the whole web is like that and has been for a long time. Which is not surprising, 99% of everything is shit. We've just had tools that have been astoundingly successful at separating out the wheat from the chaff. With the advent of AI, there are two significant differences: (1) the scale is shit is vastly greater, we're at something like 99.999% shit and adding 9s steadily; and (2) every way of distinguishing shit from gold is being steadily overcome by AI advances.
>> Also in the real world, people are decisively choosing the AI-generated summaries and fevered imaginings.
> Are they "decisively" choosing it if it's turned on by default? If it were actually opt-in then we could measure this. As it is I don't think you have any data to rely on when making this assertion.
I'm not referring to things embedded in browsers. I agree with your counterargument there. I'm talking about people using chat interfaces for search, and search engines presenting AI-generated results. There is hard data that shows users moving away from doing traditional searches and clicking on individual pages. From a quick (traditional!) search: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1454204/united-states-ge... https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2024-02-1... (Gartner representing a pre-AI source of made-up bullshit with questionable origins).
>> Not for everything, but web search -> URL -> page visit is becoming a declining percentage
> The same web search companies that own AI models they're trying to sell? Do you not suspect there could be a few confounding variables in this analysis?
Undoubtedly. But what are you implying -- that you could start a no-AI search engine and be wildly successful today because people will use yours over the other engines that have AI summaries? That's kind of what you're implying for the browser (and one of the most common uses of a browser is a search engine).
>> except that automatic translation is really nice
> Which we already had and has nothing to do with language models masquerading as "AI".
Er, the language models are wiping the floor with more traditional semantic machine-learning based translation. It's kind of sad, but also cool that it works so well.
Oh. I guess you're making a distinction between LLMs and the not-so-large language models used for translation. I don't see much of a difference. They're transformer-based, they're intentionally stupid but work because they're fed huge amounts of data, etc.
>> is fine and dandy but ultimately pointless unless you have an alternative that doesn't require the entire world to cooperate in turning back the clock.
> An alternative to what? Tab renaming? Bad article summaries? Weak search engine algorithms?
The article summaries may be bad, but they are very popular and widely used. The search uses are not bad or weak, the only criticism I see is that it doesn't need to be kicked off directly from the browser. But fortunes are made on eliminating a single click.
I'm not claiming that having AI in the browser is super awesome. I personally haven't seen any killer use cases yet. I'm only saying that keeping AI 100% out of the browser is going to be a losing proposition. Not because it's so amazingly useful to have it, but because it's at least a little more useful and that's enough to choose one browser over another.
People are demonstrating that they're going to use AI whether you think it makes sense or not.
A comment on the article:
>Google's AI Overview continues to be an inferior provider of information than solid web search results.
I would love to hate that feature, but i don't. I kind of like it. It's useful sometimes and easy to ignore if i want. Honestly i would say it enhances my browsing. You can complain that it's often wrong and 2 dimensional and you would be right. But that would be missing the point. Maybe you can complain about secondary effects. I don't know what those would be though. Perhaps that it degrades the overall browser ecosystem and locks you into googles own, but that is moving the goalposts.
Same with Microsoft and Windows PC power users as well.
Their leadership is often not that much different, with similar people working in similar jobs educated in the same institutions and walking in the same social circles, producing the same solutions to the existential problem of organisational survival.
Can’t say this is the same thing that happens at Mozilla but you are very right in that a lot of nonprofits seem to be lead by those bring the same operational decision making experience and solutions that you see in publicly traded companies. There are plenty of non-profits that are indistinguishable from public companies in how the board is composed of an inner circle of wealthy unsavory people.
And their board composition converges similarly as those same people are relied upon for their connections to fundraise, hire, etc. They don’t want to be seen taking an unusual strategy as it would be perceived as risky and jeopardising precious donated funds, so the same groupthink emerges.
Even if someone outside these circles was hired, they’d be knocked down with the smallest misstep, with the veiled criticism they weren’t suitable for the position (ie someone with better connections should have been chosen), so even they will fall into line.
For-profit (public) company at least have shareholders. Mozilla have zero motivation to improve aside from being retirement home for failing managers
On top of that, the whole premise that AI is just being a nothing burger. Pull your head out of your arse.
Is there an AI bubble? I tend to agree, likely yes. And yes it is very much overhyped etc. Does that mean that AI is useless and will disappear? No way! Just observe how Joe Doe's are interacting with the web. AI engines have taken over from where people used to use search. It's ironic how they say they just want search results when typing in their address bar, at a time when everyone is complaining that search has become increasingly useless (and yes we can blame AI tools at least partly, doesn't change the fact). Moreover, there are definitely use cases where an AI gives a much better answer than search (just try searching for how to do something a little niche with e.g. ffmpeg, you can either read 10s of block/stackoverflow posts try to understand the manual or ask an AI and typically immediately get a decent answer).
I tend to agree with Mozilla org here, AI does pose an existential thread to the web as we know it and if we don't get non-profit organisations to develop "open" (and I acknowledge the discussion what that entails is important) tools we will end up with a web that is much less free than it is today.