It seems a good part of Mozilla’s problems keeping users are actually being caused by Google. Besides the constant incompatibilities introduced by Google there’s this:
This is Firefox’s CPU utilization when just looking at Google’s search page in a private window since Google turned on AI by default. My laptop literally gets too hot to be used on my lap. The exact same search on Chrome takes less than 2% CPU. (Yes, I know about Duckduckgo.)
Recently disabling native AI features in Firefox significantly reduced CPU use, but a couple of days ago it shot up again only when on Google’s search page.
I find it sad that most comments here just focus on the OPTIONAL AI possibilities, which doesn’t even register as an issue for the masses. The problem is an inherently weak-toothed antitrust law framework in the US. The moment the courts did decide against splitting chrome from Alphabet, the options for Mozilla became very, very limited. They can’t out-feature Alphabet, they do not have near-unlimited reach to advertise their browser. All they currently can do is play catch-up.
Suspect one of the reasons Google continues to fund Mozilla is specifically to take some heat off anti-trust arguments
I find it sad that most comments here just focus on the OPTIONAL AI possibilities.
And Google Chrome has absolutely no leg to stand on, there.
If I was Mozilla’s CEO, I dunno what I’d do.
It doesn’t matter what Firefox implements; Google can spam instant “switch to Chrome” links in front of most of the world’s eyeballs. User couldn’t care less about privacy and adblocking performance, apparently. This isn’t Microsoft, and Mozilla is literally funded by Google as a token effort, so they can’t outdevelop Chrome nor attack it.
What are they supposed to do?
I think their best option at present is to push the privacy, interoperability and independence side of their product and target European governments on the basis of digital sovereignty. Yes, it’s based in the US, but the product itself is open source and independent of the big tech giants, and that can be leveraged to get more support in Europe as the only viable alternative to Google’s Chrome ecosystem and Apple’s Safari ecosystem.
It’s difficult for Mozilla, not because of what Firefox is, but because it is financially dependent on Google which makes it harder to be aggressive about calling out just how bad Google and Chrome are for users. Mozilla would ideally be lobbying the EU anti-trust apparatus to stop Google aggressively pushing Chrome, in much the same way Netscape did with Microsoft and Internet Explorer.
Mozilla is stuck, because it’s main threat is also it’s main lifeline. So it really needs to try and diversify itself away from it’s financial dependence on Google. That has been near impossible but European governments may be the way forward. It won’t replace Google, but Trump has created an opportunity in Europe that Mozilla has to aggressively follow.
not pay the ceo 6 millions a year would be a start
There was a blog post not too long ago, where an Ex-Mozilla engineer shared his thoughts on exactly this topic. The tldr was something like
“Don’t try to be like the other browsers, chasing daily active users. Get back in touch with your userbase and understand why they choose Firefox every day instead of just mindlessly picking one of the larger browsers like the majority of users. Then build a browser for these users, instead of pushing them away by doing what the other browsers (which they actively try to avoid) do.”
I share this sentiment, but it won’t make the money people happy, so I don’t think it’ll happen.
EDIT: Found the post: https://blog.unitedheroes.net/5751
I dispute this as well:
“Don’t try to be like the other browsers, chasing daily active users. Get back in touch with your userbase and understand why they choose Firefox every day instead of just mindlessly picking one of the larger browsers like the majority of users. Then build a browser for these users, instead of pushing them away by doing what the other browsers (which they actively try to avoid) do.”
This is a nice sentiment.
But these aren’t the Internet Explorer days.
A browser engine with less than 1% market share isn’t going to be supported by web developers, and then everything about its development becomes an uphill battle. Major sites won’t work, and they can’t afford to fixe them all on an ad hoc basis. And again, it’s not like the IE days where the “default” browser is so unbelievably dysfunctional, the OS was more open, and the user base was a bit more technical.
I’d argue one of Firefox’s most important functions (alongside Safari) is to stop Chrome from becoming the de facto web standard, instead of the HTML spec.
And it’s been repeatedly demonstrated that “these users” the quote describes is an exceedingly small base. It’s reasonable for Firefox to want to expand that, instead of catering to an ever shrinking pie.
I do partially agree: Mozilla needs to touch some grass. They need to get sane. But there is no “option to pick” presented to most of the world. And if Mozilla caters to the same oldschool Internet users like they always have, Firefox will die.
I don’t have a good solution. I’m just arguing that sentiment is applicable to an era we are no longer in.
but it won’t make the money people happy
Aka pay the Firefox devs.
I understand Mozilla wastes a lot of income, but still. This isn’t a hobbyist piece of software, it’s an expensive, labor intense project that needs constant professional attention.
The income part isn’t trivial, unless they find some alternative source of funding (like the Ladybird project apparently has).
You basically see it with some sites now, where you’re just told “use chrome if you have any issues”, and then it reflects badly on firefox, because a casual user might just think it’s the fault of the browser that it’s poorly made and doesn’t work properly.
For the websites, it’s not worth writing around browser-specific quirks, when the vast majority use a chrome-based browser.
Firefox is a well known browser. People just don’t use it because Chrome offers something else. Firefox has always been a “Chrome lite”, following in their footsteps instead of standing on it’s own terms.
They abandoned their privacy direction, only coming back when it’s beneficial for them to market it. While Chrome sucks for adding features that aren’t standard, Firefox needs to just be quick with it too. It took Firefox forever to add tab groups, something people were asking for all the time.
They are absolutely out of touch with their user base and have no direction. Opera GX targeted the gaming niche and now they have similar market share to Firefox, which is insane. It’s a shit browser, but at least they went for something. Firefox just idles and adds whatever is popular way too late. Nobody wanted AI shit added, why was any development time wasted on it? The engineer is right.
Always? Firefox existed before Chrome
You know what I mean. It was around for 4 years before Chrome, now they have both existed together for 18 years. Firefox was steady for a few years, then Chrome came along and blew it out of the water. Obviously Google pushing it on their main page was the biggest reason for it’s insane adoption, but it was also just the better browser at that point, Mozilla have been doing catch-up ever since and constantly tripping up.
I do agree Chrome was the better browser, hell I switched to it primarily after a few years because of how much faster it was.
I don’t really think that’s the case anymore though, Chrome has been enshittifying for years now, and in my experience, they’re pretty on-par, except of course I can use extensions without the impending doom spectre on Firefox and on mobile.
Exactly. I also swapped, it was just so much better back then.
I use Firefox now, but they don’t seem to know what they want to do with it. Speed wise it’s fast, it’s more private, it has good extension support. I think they could have leaned into features like Firefox Send, added a P2P mode, people would have used a built-in file sharing thing with good support to it. Pocket was nice, maybe they could have evolved it some way.
They just never really tried to give the browser an identity I feel like.
“Why would I swap to Firefox?” All I can say is, it’s more private (after toggling settings off, ugh). Most don’t care about consolidation of the web to one engine.
Most of us caring more about FOSS and privacy, use forks like Librewolf and we will probably all end up on a Servo browser.
…four? what reality are you from?
They are correct, yes? Firefox 1.0 in 2004, Chrome in 2008. I remember I was in highschool when Firefox came out, in uni when Chrome came out. Seems about right.
“The income part isn’t trivial, unless they find some alternative source of funding”
Addressed within the article by the insider:
For what it’s worth, I’m not concerned for Mozilla isn’t it running out of money. So long as Google or another large search engine exists, it can get cash. There are also a few other financial stability angles it can do which (frankly) would be better.
Google can easily afford to fund Mozilla, and it can’t afford to stop. They still need to act like they aren’t a monopoly.
…Do they?
I feel like we are very close to a cyberpunk future where Alphabet doesn’t have to pretend.
And I feel that’s quite dismissive. Mozilla doesn’t have enough development resources as-is, hence the whole original article. And abandoning Servo. And a bunch of other things. If money was a non-concern, they wouldn’t be here.
The problem is a bit circular. Mozilla is flippant with money because they get it from Google and they act like it will be eternal. Assuming an absolute worst case scenario: just based on 2024 finances, Mozilla has enough money to keep running for about three years with no funding if expenses remain stable (123/41=3).
It’s worth noting that Servo and competing engine Ladybird are still in development, and they do not get Mozilla money…
Avoid forcing AI to its users? I switched to WaterFox just to avoid it.
While problematic, yeah, I’d dispute that as Firefox’s market share problem.
Users like you and me, who are even aware of projects like Waterfox, are a minuscule, vanishing minority. We aren’t switching to Chrome anyway. But we aren’t representative of the web’s user base.
And if most Chrome users were sick of the Gemini spam… they’d have already switched to Firefox, where it’s toggleable and an order of magnitude less in-your-face. But they aren’t.
Same with Manifest V3. They neutered UBlock on Chrome long ago, yet that’s clearly not dissuading most Chrome users.
In short, if in-your-face-AI was a dealbreaker for most, Chrome wouldn’t be gaining market share.
Do a fresh install of Firefox sometime and keep track of all the places Mozilla shoves AI into your face. The notifications, the sidebar, and coming soon: even the window type. Begging to use AI to group your tabs. Begging to summarize the article you just found that was actually written by a person.
You’d figure Chrome would be the worst offender here, but they own the Google search engine, and that’s mostly enough for them. A fresh Firefox install comes across as maximalist as Microsoft Edge these days.
I think it’s a network problem. Most people use Chrome, therefore most people’s friends and co-workers use Chrome, so there’s a strong incentive to go with the pack. Google is obviously exploiting this to get their ecosystem claws in deeper, but I think the main thing is that Google effectively dethroned Microsoft as the default, and Mozilla has just kind of “been around” the whole time as the weird alt browser that the IT guy uses, even being propped up by Google in exchange for Firefox users’ search data.
What should Mozilla do? IDK. I don’t think “more AI” is the right answer, but I also don’t know what I would do in their position. It’s a tight spot.
Yeah it is. My friends think I’m 90 years old because I use “that old 90s browser, what a weirdo!”
I actually doubt the majority of people nowadays know what a browser is and how it differs from the OS or other applications
I don’t think “more AI” is the right answer, but I also don’t know what I would do in their position.
Yeah.
I think “nontoxic” machine learning features are nice. You know, oldschool stuff. Firefox’s auto translation, as an example, is really cool, (AFAIK) completely local, and way better than Chrome’s equivalent.
But they poisoned that well with the yet-another-stupid-chatbot thing.
I dunno what Mozilla was thinking. It was so shitty. And now there will be a negative reaction to anything even ML-adjacent, even if it isn’t enshittified.
Personally I use the chatbot side panel once in a while, it doesn’t get too much in the way while doing something else.
But all the other features using a small trained model are legit nice (translation, image captioning) and thankfully all optional.
I mean, I’ve been messing with LLMs before Llama 1. I don’t hate chat bots in general. But I found the sidebar kind of stupid. It didn’t feel like a smart model when I tried, it didn’t have knobs to tune, and literally everything has a chatbot anyway.
There are cool Firefox forks built as “agenic browsers” to interact with LLMs in a structured way. But I think they should be just that: separate. A different program to open when you want an LLM messing with your browsing, with all the security hazards that entails.
🥺
At least Firefox lets you turn that shit off
As long as it can be turned off, it’s not a dealbreaker for me. I prefer living in the upstream where, AFAIK, firefox gets all the vulnerabilities patched first
Completely my opinion: I think the problem is Mozilla is beholden to the requirement that it MUST grow and make more and more money. It is a business after all.
If Mozilla just focused on maintaining a good product that browses the internet well and just stays there. It doesent have to do cutting edge, it doesn’t have to be ultra quirky. It doesent have to focus on increasing market share. It just needs to focus on being a good product.
People are going to come and go. Opinions change and people do get tired of being taken advantage of. The Honda Civic didnt get so popular because it was the most performant car, the most spacious car, the most efficient car, etc It got popular because while it wasent the MOST of those qualities it was quite good with those qualities.
Firefox’s best bet at this point is maintaining good qualities and being as accessible and compatible as possible.
It’s a rigged game though. Mozilla’s struggling to even implement feature parity with the income they have, and being “good” isn’t going to place redirects to install Chrome over half of people’s phones and web browsing.
…Personally, I think Mozilla should dump Firefox.
And put everything they have into Ladybird, or maybe Apple’s WebKit.
Mozilla are playing a rigged game, and the only way to survive is get out of Google’s grasp. Practically, that means joining some other entity who already has dev money and a good project.
Because they waste the income they have on crap like adding AI, and CEO bonuses/raises.
Mozilla might as well just close up shop. If they were to abandon Firefox, what exactly are they bring to the table for anyone else?
The brand, development power, and bits from the Firefox codebase they could re-use.
More importantly, Firefox’s devs get to work on something that already has leverage in an ecosystem, eg WebKit for Apple or Ladybird for Linux.
Developers can just be hired directly, and the Firefox codebase is open source.
Only brand requires partnering with mozilla, and what does the other partner gain from the Mozilla brand? They don’t even have much brand recognition anymore anyway.
I ninja edited, but basically I just don’t see Firefox surviving without “ecosystem leverage” like WebKit, which is permanently embedded in the Apple ecosystem.
Or even Ladybird, which I imagine will be a permanent fixture on Linux systems.
So… however they organize it, Mozilla should take their browser dev experience there. But maybe they could keep Firefox the brand alive, and automatically shift users to whatever the new rendering engine will be.
Alternatively I guess Firefox could stay Mozilla and just adopt WebKit or Ladybird’s engine. “Merge” development efforts across different teams, so to speak, but keep the browser frontend separate.
Its a bit early to make the call that Ladybird will be successful. They have made a lot of noise sure, but they are a small team, tackling a huge project, and they have just had 2 language changes in the last few months.
The deck is well and truely stacked against them. Maybe they pull it off, maybe not, but its very early to make the call IMO.
Servo is looking surprisingly good, but still has major rendering issues. At least it looks like a browser now.
Google was already doing that for years. Most of Firefox users use it because it’s leaner than Chrome and supports adblockers. None of these advantages will suddenly disappear, but Chrome will inevitably become worse all by itself, and more users will migrate away from it to Firefox.
So Firefox strategy should be to simply not screw up by adding unnecessary stuff like AI.
Chrome will inevitably become worse all by itself
But when?
Again, this isn’t Microsoft, whom you can rely on for prompt footgunning. Chrome is still very fast, reasonably lean, and developed with more resources than Mozilla.
Hence Firefox could die before Alphabet starts to really tighten the screws. That’s what I’m most afraid of, as the next step for Alphabet would be “depreciating” Chromium, closing the source, and killing all the forks.
I don’t want a world where the only viable browser is a Chrome binary.
They need to build their own privacy-oriented services, and offer different tiers. Also important is that if they do launch a product, make sure they plan on keeping it alive or people won’t trust it and migrate to it (like how Google kills products). Make it a safe-haven for those who cares about privacy. And I’m not talking about using third-parties and rebranding them as their own…
Yeah.
I think they tried with a few services, like the VPN, but could never afford to go whole-hog with a stack like Proton.
…In fact, it’d be interesting if Mozilla merged with Proton, DuckDuckGo or something.
Do not forget the VPN was rebadged from mullvad (I think) so it was not even their own stuff
Only semi-related to the roadmap and release notes mentioned, but;
I hate the new what’s new page that opens after updates. What I want is the release notes, not some huge bannered colorful vast marketing ad space. Until three versions ago it was fairly simple to at least scroll down to open the link. Now it is hard to spot in the violent, pushy, irritating ad space. And it pushes mostly the same stuff every time. Very annoying.
Chrome and Edge are even worse, of course, not even linking technical/complete release notes. But doesn’t change the worsening on Firefox.
Man who has lost nine fingers: “I’ve reversed course and I will not lose another nine fingers”.
