Just an FYI for anyone who is interested, I’ve also been doing the same for Waterfox.
Mozilla have taken into consideration doing things locally, such as tab organisation and the likes (one would assume pre-GPT era and with regard to features not utilising LLMs this would’ve been branded as ML functionality) but I’m not fully convinced this still won’t open up potential security issues in the future[for users of AI browsers].
For Tor users this seems even more of an issue as one would expect nation-state actors targeting undesirables would look for any potential weak spot to exploit.
Separately I suppose this brings into light how utterly crazy it seems having AI features in the browser chrome versus limited to the website content process/sandbox. It seems like a privacy and security nightmare and now everyone and their gran are releasing “AI browsers”, even the Firefox-based ones inspired by browsers such as Arc and Dia which seem like absolute privacy nightmares.
Seems like slick branding and marketing gets you a pass today when in the past such egregiousness would receive a load of flack cough Avast “secure” browser cough…
Either way good job to the Tor team, I sympathise with how much extra load this adds to each rebase.
What else does Waterfox remove? Does it still support signining in with a Mozilla account to enable sync features? Would be nice to see a comprehensive list somewhere; I couldn't see anything on the Waterfox homepage or the GitHub README.
You can see here[1], I'll avoid pasting again. But yes, can still use a Mozilla account and the website is getting a refurb - I will add a third hard thing in computer science.. letting people know all the things you've actually built :')
I think it would help to put some of this on your site. When I land on the main waterfox page it looks like just firefox but reskinned. I'm not saying that's what it actually is (clearly it isn't) but it can help having some clarity about this. I mean it isn't like you're being shy about building off of firefox, so why not mention it?
Thanks for maintaining Waterfox. For me it has been working without issues, basically Firefox but with reasonable defaults, and I don’t have to constantly look for and manually disable “features” like these.
Similar to the “AI should be an assistant programmer, not an independent dev”, having Claude there and being able to ask questions about specific topics while I read is fantastic. Especially for scientific papers that are outside my specialty (i.e. all of them.)
Not mentioned is the ability to setup custom prompts. [1]
I enjoy reading technical blogs from the global south and the slavic world. I've found that LLMs do a far better job at translation than Google Translate/DeepL, etc. in these niche domains, so I added a translate prompt to my context menu and that converted me over to using it.
Thankfully they are unconnected by default. Unfortunately the sidebar can get triggered accidentally with keystrokes from muscle memory (Emacs) and then one has to deal with the side bar. It would have been nicer if by default nothing existed in the first place.
I have a Gemini sidebar, it just appeared out of nowhere one day, but I find it useful though. You can give it a URL and it can summarize it or whatever.
It's super useful for power users. You can connect any model you like through ollama (or similar services) and use your own pre-defined prompts to run against the selected text on websites simply from right click context menu.
I hope Orion (from Kagi) gains more traction and follows through w/ open-sourcing everything. Privacy-first, 0-telemetry, performant, capable... just not OSS (yet).
Orion is a WebKit fork which is nice to have but Linux support seems so far off (is there a modern project that builds WebKit on Linux or windows at all?)
I have been satisfied with moving to Zen, a Firefox fork that behaves like the late Arc browser
I use it on my iPhone because I can actually get ad blocking but it is also the glitchiest browser I've ever used. Worth it for no ads, but that's kinda Apple's issue.
I'd love to be able to open up an arbitrary web page in this sidebar. It would be super valuable for research. They can obviously do it, since the AI sidebar also loads a web page, but the functionality is locked for some reason, and vertical splitting extensions are pure jank.
I really wish Mozilla would focus on addressing some of the numerous user feature requests, rather than whatever the current trend is.
Yeah, I lived in the Netherlands for five years, so I switched to Chrome because its translation feature is much better.
Now that I'm back in my home country, I've gone back to Firefox, which I prefer from a philosophical standpoint. But there's one simple feature keeping me from using it full-time: the ability to rename windows.
My workflow relies on having one window per project. I name the windows Project1, Project2, Project3, and so on, so it is very simple to find each one.
There are a few Firefox extensions that allow renaming windows, but the names disappear every time I restart Firefox, and they don’t sync across devices.
Maybe tab groups would work for you? Windows/tabs are usually (always) named from the <title> html on the web site, and I’m surprised Chrome lets you change that in any persistent way. Firefox tab groups lets you manage things yourself at a higher level.
> I'd love to be able to open up an arbitrary web page in this sidebar.
Vivaldi has that. (When Opera got bought out by some Chinese company, one of the original founders created Vivaldi. It's Chromium-based, so Chrome extensions work, and Chrome extensions not using Manifest V3 might end up not working soon).
I was looking for something like that and haven't found a good solution. I like having Claude easily accessible in the sidebar, but I'd also like to add pages like my RSS reader, calendar, maps, etc. rather than having to open them in a new tab or window.
I think that windowing systems need to be way more flexible. I want to be able to drag fullscreens, workspaces, windows, tabs, MDI sub-windows, and other types of views from different programs into and out of each other. I think Serenity OS has this with windows and tabs.
Exactly. Firefox probably owes almost all of its remaining market share to its extension ecosystem, but it is rotting away in neglect.
First-party extensions are a nice way to test out ideas and features without increasing the core product's maintenance burden. I wouldn't even mind if Mozilla heavily promoted their own extensions, because it would help draw attention to the extension library as a whole.
Yes, however it still means that the browser is phoning home to somewhere. To be able to make use of that API key, it has to send some data out. Is that data routed over TOR? Does it even matter given that an API key can be used to deanonymize you?
My understanding (and this may have changed), is that you have to initiate the AI features each time (e.g. clicking on "Summarize This").
But yes, your point is valid. For Tor, if you enter an API key, you could be identified. Still, does the Tor Browser prevent you from installing addons which are no more secure than these AI features? It didn't years ago - not sure if that's changed.
I do not want nor need AI in every single aspect of my life. I mean, I've seen AI hygiene products out there. How does that even work? Don't answer that ... I know it's a marketing scheme, akin to the "HD" craze of five to 10 years ago.
Every microwave turns off when the timer reaches zero. It'd be better to have AI that turns it off when the timer reaches one so that I don't have to quickly stop it before the bell goes off. Better yet, a mute function would do the same thing.
Does it send the zero-time notification to a cloud LLM endpoint that will send back a 10 kB JSON that instructs the oven to turn off? (Or not, how could we predict it?)
It feels like we are going to need a lot of volunteer effort to help remove all the AI garbage out of all these projects that insist on jamming AI into themselves.
This week the GZDoom project forked into UZDoom after a maintainer force-pushed AI-generated code into the repo. Thankfully, it failed to compile and other maintainers caught it before it made it out, but the decision to fork came down pretty quickly.
The creator was allegedly a massive asshole for years and him randomly reappearing after a year, only to force push shitty code that didn't work, was the last straw. It wasn't just because it was AI code.
The only example of that I can remember was "HD sunglasses" but I don't recall that ever being a widespread fad. I only saw people ever joke about that.
HD as far as I ever saw it used generally referred to 720p and soon after 1080p. Which is a pretty objective, non-marketing definition. And the timeframe of 2015-2020 seems way off. 1080p was pretty standard by like 2010. YouTube started streaming 4K in 2010.
Agereed. Sadly, we're on the wrong planet, my friend. AI will be shoved into every available orifice and more. It's a great tool for "them" to gather even more info on you to sell to anyone with a handful of nickels.
The last thing any of these masters of the universe will do is leverage AI to make everyone's life better.
"Mozilla has reversed course on when the protocol portion (e.g. http or https) of the URL in the URL bar is hidden since Firefox 128. We used to have logic in one of our patches around Onion Services (which are always end-to-end encrypted regardless of the application-level protocol used) to follow whatever Firefox does for https. However, with the latest changes in Firefox, this patch became a bit gnarly to apply correctly so we took a step back and thought to ourselves, why are we even conditionally hiding this from the user?"
Generally, this seems an obvious and correct decision for Tor.
Barring integration with a locally run LLM, AI doesn't make sense for the Tor security posture - you don't want to be routing content to unintended/insecure third parties, period.
Tor browser's philosophy is that everyone should be fingerprinted and it's fine since they do everything they can think of to try to make that fingerprint identical to everyone else using Tor browser.
This is kind of crazy since there are new fingerprinting techniques all the time and if they miss even one data point the whole game is lost. The smarter movie would be to make sure that fingerprints are unique/randomized so that even the same person looks like different people but for some reason they're confident they can account for every possible identifying metric 100% of the time.
Tor Browser? Perhaps, but their stated justification is that they were always leaking that via JavaScript and other ways, that Cloudflare was detecting the discrepancy and blocking you a lot more, that they're still spoofing just one of three values (Windows, Mac, Linux) which now matches the JS property, and that they'd like to redo it properly in the future. Seems reasonable to me.
Regardless of what they do on the user's end, their rear end became too ugly for a tool which ostensibly provides anonymity, because it will end up on a 185.220.0.0/16 exit node way too often for any tales of decentralization to hold true.
This is a good announcement. Coming from a popular project, it helps educate people that AI is a threat to privacy. It's something that might not be obvious to some non-tech Tor users (journalists, activists, etc).
- Chrome and Edge are going to do it as well sooner or later, and Mozilla's modus operandi has been to largely copy feature sets from Chrome to stay relevant.
Pointy haired bosses heard about AI, and now you have AI everywhere.. you know, just in case, if you wanted an AI chatbot in your image resizing software or your pdf reader. Before that it was "cloud", where every app had to have a cloud-something, even if it didnd't need one.
I file a ticket with Firefox whenever an unwanted dialog pops up covering content. If you tag these as being accessibility related they get bounced back and forth between a few people before getting closed and thus pour just a little bit of sand in the gears.
I'm one of those web developers who still uses Firefox as my daily driver which means the products I work on work on Firefox. Maybe twice a year a tester uses Chrome and turns up something that's not quite right.
Developers like me are a major reason why Firefox is still a viable web browser and there is someone like me in most organizations. If it wasn't for people like us more and more web pages would work in Chrome only and you just couldn't do things with Firefox. Collectively we probably contribute as much to the success of Firefox than all the people who actually check in changes to the source code but we are not treated accordingly. If they piss all of us off Firefox will become a non-viable web browser.
So far as accessibility I am doing a round of accessibility on my site and found things have gotten way worse for multiple reasons. I used to use NVDA + Firefox but since upgrading to Win 11 NVDA is completely broken for me and I have to pull the power plug on my computer to shut down NVDA.
Narrator + Edge basically works, but Narrator + Firefox is completely spastic. I might have a navigation bar with elements like
-- Choice 1
-- Choice 2
-- Choice 3
in a <nav> and it might read something like "Choice Landmark 1 Navigation Navigation Landmark Choice 2 Landmark Choice Navigation 3 Landmark" where using any ARIA role comes across as website vandalism because it makes Narrator + Firefox blurt out "Landmark" and "Group" and similar words randomly when it is reading stuff.
When something is that broken it doesn't seem worth even putting a ticket it for it.
You can file the ticket claiming that the shiny new promoted thing is actually an antifeature and that you hate the popup. You can then hope that the PM or exec who is currently receiving adulations or making speeches in the hope of a bonus or promotion after the rollout gets assigned the ticket, rather than some lowly volunteer. Then, the next time they get asked to make something, they'll think "wait, maybe I shouldn't advertise this new thing by forcing a popup on every Firefox user?" If that happens often enough to become part of the shared zeitgeist at the organization, they may be able to enact a Mozilla-wide policy against such popups and stop building antifeatures. Good luck, I hope it works for you.
Or you can throw sand in the works. When the accessibility department complains that people keep filing tickets and wasting their time whenever a new feature includes a popup, that component of the organization can push back
Every time I inadvertently find myself at a gas station with those horrific advertisement kiosks installed at the pumps, I either look around for a nearby station that doesn't have ads playing, or I stab the "Help" button to page the cashier. I am well aware that the minimum wage employee stocking the shelves and helping people prepay does not have the phone number of the GSTV producers or the executive decision makers at ExxonMobil or whoever, and I have no animus against that person - I'm infallibly polite with the individual. But I ask them to keep the line open to mute the ads, and they usually do. My only hope for eliminating those ads is either shopping at different gas stations - but how are they ever going to distinguish that microscopic boycott from the noise - or hoping that this communication filters up through the organization.
Don't be so cynical. There are people who actually have impaired accessibility and struggle with technologies we take for granted. Those people are the target of accessibility engineering, not your popup needs.
Even if it is a "real emergency," modal dialogs still don't make sense because people are so annoyed by them, they don't read them. If you really, really want the user to read something, don't put it in a modal that pops up over the thing they actually want to do. They're pretty much horrible UX for any conceivable use case.
My favorite mis-feature of these modals are the ones that announce something on page load, but they've also implemented "click outside modal to close it" so when you have any sort of muscle memory kicking in when you go to the website, you see a modal for 0.1s before it disappears as you click where you wanted to go.
On the opposite side, I'm also unreasonable frustrated when those modals appear and I cannot close it by clicking outside of it.
End results? Modals are horrible in most situations, especially when you want people to actually ingest some information.
There's another category of things that aren't really modals but they still prevent you from accessing some important user interface element because they draw on top of it even if they don't block out all UI elements.
Toasts in Windows are a good example -- often I am trying to use the tray but a toast pops up and I have to wait for the toast to clear or a toast pops up that makes me use the tray icons that it covers up if I want to deal with the situation. Of course on Windows there is the problem that clicking on a toast doesn't seem to ever do anything (like take you to the app that made the toast) and there is not a good mechanism to see the toast once it's past, etc.
In the case of Firefox I was particularly annoyed by little panels that floated above bookmark items on the chrome at the top of the page because, I dunno, there is something new I can do with my bookmarks, I guess. What I do know is that I wanted to click on something that was at the top of the web page and that stupid panel was in the way -- it wouldn't have stopped me from clicking on something else, but it's predictable that you're going to load a web page and frequently click on a link on a navbar at the very top.
There are certain applications that I'm frequently using to resolve a problem (say I just found out a bill is overdue) where I really feel under the gun and I find it astonishingly annoying to have to close a large number of dialogs telling me about new features.
A human being with some empathy might realize that you're initially in a state where you're not receptive to a message and later realize you are.
If I got a popup advertising a new feature after I completed a task I'd be a lot more receptive to it, particularly in that I'd be feeling the glow of having completed a task, being satisfied with the product, and not feeling so pressured, having some headspace to learn about a new feature.
So is the appearance of any modal window something that justifies filing tickets with Firefox?
It doesn't sound like that's PaulHoule's motivation anyway — he knows that these tickets are not going to be fixed, just closed — the point is to "pour just a little bit of sand in the gears".
If usability tickets are closed because the company doesn't want to bother, then maybe these gears deserve to have sand put in them.
I generally approve of subversive actions which are naturally damaging if and exactly if the accusation they are based on is true.
That is, the logic is something like "well, either it gets fixed, in which case it's a victory for good, or they're hypocrites who don't really care, in which case 1. it wastes their time and 2. they deserve to have their time wasted."
I dunno. I don't personally report many bugs in public software...
But reporting real problems because you are annoyed that problems keep appearing and don't get fixed doesn't look like a societal hurting behavior to me. It does look like personally hurting, but antagonizing the author because of this is a real societal hurting behavior.
This is a huge pet peeve of mine, and not even specifically in Firefox or even browsers. It's in applications and OS's as well. I don't know if it's actually increased recently, or I've become more sensitized, but it harkens back to the web 1.0 pop-up misery of yore..
Why would you brag about that? Honestly, to what end? If your goal is to put sand in the gears what difference is there between this and trolling, spamming or just good ol' fashioned DOS?
I can't speak for OP but I would do it to the end it demonstrates how frustrating these 'small inconveniences' actually are. Don't interrupt my workflow unnecessarily. The same reason I don't want adverts everywhere, or I use sponsor block for youtube. I didn't seek out advertisements so I can filter it out.
I am not seeking out AI features so I don't add them to my browser. Mozilla and google and everyone it seems now is forcing it everywhere down our throats. If a small grain of sand reflects any of the same frustration, I say good. Wish I could do more.
Exactly, in my case I have the hidden disability of schizotypy which makes it harder for me to ignore things. If you are blind or dyslexic or have ADHD or any kind of cognitive problem you just don't need to have your spoons wasted by having dialogs cover content and user interface elements that you need to complete your tasks.
I'd just like to say, I'm somewhat diagnosed for anxiety and some adhd in Europe so it's a bit more loose, I never consider it or even medicate much. But this has made me think about the tiny things that throw me. And just now I found the perfect example. My TV. I removed all netflix, prime Disney etc. But as I'm watching YouTube which I'm prone to do to chill out. I sit on the remote. The remote had a netflix button, TV decides I need to install in, automatically, referral cookies loaded and my TV from my video I'm watching, to sitting on the remote, has netflix in my face asking me for money. Just happened AGAIN.
Nobody at Mozilla is forced to do anything, including adding obnoxious popups and unwanted features to the browser. If you're inclined to do that, why not go work for Microsoft or Google, where you'll likely be paid more to do it?
Choices have consequences, and user-hostile choices should have developer-hostile consequences.
Some people really really hate Mozilla. But this is the first time I can recall seeing someone deliberately consuming Mozilla's resources and undermining the project, rather than arguing against it.
this would be admirable if it's done in earnest to try and increase accessibility, but you say explicitly it's done specifically to "pour sand in the gears". please don't
Could you link some? Would love to see what dialogs are meant, whether they can actually cause accessibility issues or are just "unwanted" and how the maintainers comment/decide on that front.
Been a hot minute since I last installed FF from scratch so maybe missing something, but the only popup I could remember in more recent releases was one showcasing Firefox View, which only appeared after setup. And of course the "Change to Default" message every browser shows after first opening, including the ability to never show that again. Since then, nothing.
Using a healthy mix of Chrome, Firefox and Safari depending on device and task and while I have niggles with all three, not aware of this on any, but maybe I am blind on this front.
As a long-time firefox user (since the very earliest days of phoenix), I have to say: focus on open standards and delivering a faster and more secure browser. Make runtimes like electron out of your engine. DO shit that matters. Forget pocket, AI, and all that other junk. That is not your mission!
I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Emacs is a spreadsheet, photo editor, toaster oven, or hair stylist. For the right people, it’s a desert-island app.
"Nooooo, you need to use FF no matter how much it pisses you off, since we can't let Google be a monopoly (even though it already is and it's the government's job to crack down monopolies)"
You put that in italics and quotes, presumably to mock the people saying this but...yes, you should! Google does much worse things and is effectively a monopolist, so not using Firefox necessarily means using Google, which only entrenches their monopoly further.
Why? They're actively hostile to me as a user and nor catering to my needs and desires.
>Google does much worse things and is effectively a monopolist
Monopolies are the government's job to tackle so talk to your representative about Google, but leave suers alone to use what they like. When cars polluted we had the government force them to lower emission, not shamed users for buying cars.
>Bitch at Mozilla, sure, but don't stop using it.
How is bitching more effective tool than not using a product I dislike? Not using their product is my only way of protest as that shows in their statistics and analytics while they can and do ignore bitching.
Mozilla is a major corporation not a 15 year old with cancer sewing Knick-Knacks for donations in his bedroom, so it will only improve if the user base goes elsewhere, otherwise if people keep using it out of spite, they have no reason to ever improve.
It's not about whether you should or shouldn't use Firefox, it's about whether you should or shouldn't switch from Mozilla to Google.
If you want to boycott Mozilla, cool, stop using it and go to Ladybird or at least Waterfox. But if your solution to "this thing is hostile to me" is "so I'll switch to this other thing that is more hostile to me" and you don't see the flaw in that logic, I don't know how to explain it to you...
I think you're overstating the hostility relative to what an average user might say (biased pro-firefox user myself but I don't take their browser imperfections as active hostility).
And yeah, despite your protestations to the contrary, not wanting one company to have a browser monopoly really is a legitimate reason to support alternatives. In fact it's one of the best reasons. That's the problem with ridicule detached from reasons, you're going to look down like Wile E. Coyote and see there's no ground under you.
I'd love for real conversation about, say, keeping Servo, Web Assembly, the fallacy of "privacy preserving ads", how it would be nice to have a Firefox OS now with Android forcing "verified developers", about working with EFF to keep open standards and privacy at the center of the web. There's a rich conversation to be had about the role of Mozilla in the future of the internet, but incredulity and vague generalizations should be left back in the writer's room at Warner Bros.
>I'd love for real conversation about, say, keeping Servo, Web Assembly, the fallacy of "privacy preserving ads"
What is a "real" conversation? And what do those conversations help with here? Do you think Mozilla listens or cares about your conversations when they have all those billions coming from Google and can just sit and do nothing?
>how it would be nice to have a Firefox OS now with Android forcing "verified developers"
A lot of things would be nice, like ending world poverty and wars, but I'm being pragmatic and realistic instead of dreaming about things that won't realistically happen since in our world high level changes only happen, if big money or politics get involved.
>There's a rich conversation to be had about the role of Mozilla in the future of the internet
Conversations that would be a waste of time since Mozilla won't act based on our conversations. HN is full of such conversations. I'm being pragmatic, not entertaining some shallow philosophies of "wouldn't it be nice if" that don't lead anywhere since if 'ifs' were cookies I'd be fat.
Mozilla is constantly responding to community feedback, almost to a fault, encompassing everything from user interface changes, to features requests, to rolling back undesired changes. I would recommend reading more about Mozilla Connect, which I would argue was specifically launched to get ahead of spurious accusations like these. For a big flashy example, their blog post introducing Tab Groups is titled "You Asked for it, we built it", and the first line is "What happens when 4,500 people ask for the same feature? At Firefox, we build it."
Moreover they've revised their Terms of Use following criticism (much of it here on HN), wound down Pocket and Fakespot in response to feedback about these being outside of their core mission, implemented visual search in response to community requests, made it easier to switch between different profiles again based on community requests, added a rollback option for extensions to previously approved versions in response to developer requests, brought back night mode on iOS after having removed it because the community asked for it, changed the design of the iOS toolbar to get rid of the share button, centralized developer support tools in an all-in-one add on hub. And offered extensive explanations when choosing not to implement or maintain features (e.g. Live Bookmark tool).
The trouble with the real work of responding to requests is it's often granular and unsexy, even when examples abound, and it's easy to not know what they're really doing and reach for the pitchfork.
Mozilla get >80% of its revenue from Google, by making Google Search as default search engine on Firefox.
While Mozilla pretends to be a non-profit, its CEO makes millions of dollars annually.
Mitchell Baker: Stepped down as CEO of Mozilla in February 2024. Her salary for 2023 was reported to be $6.9 million.
Laura Chambers: Became interim CEO of Mozilla in February 2024. Mozilla has not disclosed her salary for 2024 yet.
As of October 2025, the average annual salary for employees at Mozilla in the United States is ~$115k.
Not bad for a "non-profit", eh?
Yup, Mozilla and Firefox are surviving (nay, thriving) due to Google.
But Google's hand on the Mozilla tiller, is merely the top of the proverbial iceberg.
Google has a monopoly on the browser market, encouraged by Apple Safari slipping down to <14% market share amongst the leading browsers.
Google's Chrome (>71% market share) and the other Chromium forks (>9% market share: Edge ~4.5%, Samsung Internet Browser ~2%, Brave/Vivaldi/etc. ~1%) dominate the browser market. Opera (~1.75% market share) is not a Chromium fork, but it is based on Chromium Project.
through many standards today are unilaterally pushed by Google, and standardized by a committed mostly influenced by Google and often only implemented by Google until there is enough pressure for Safari to maybe implement it way later....
and while in the past the standards where mostly pushing for a open, compatible, powerful web priorities seem to have shifted to focus more on pushing Google (Ad,App Focused) then Chrome interests
and it's not uncommon that standards aren't made in a generic simple easy to implement for anyone way but in a "that works well with how Chrome currently works internal way" and if your browser works different bad luck.
to make that even worse in the cases where Chrome/FF/Safari worked together there had been enough cases where Chrome had last minute forced changes to standards, or simple implemented them differently. I.e. the whole CORS having issues in FF isn't caused by FF not complying with standards but by Chrom last minute adding an exception to the standard as they implemented it slightly different and websites testing against chrome not against web standards.
which is the other problem, most websites implement "whatever works with Chrome" not web standards
so the whole open standards things is currently kinda not working, not for FF and neither for Safari (which to be fair is the new IE in the aspect of surprisingly lacking features everyone else has or having diverging buggy impl. Like pretty much every web dev team I have worked with had to do extra testing for Safari and frequently "doesn't work in Safari" tickets where FF mostly "just worked" as long as you didn't try to use the lasted grates chrome pushed web features.)
> Forget pocket, AI, and all that other junk. That is not your mission!
for pocket and a bunch of other projects they did shut them down, pocket is gone as you might not have noticed
but the mission is a browser which provides a good usage experience, and if there are features people expect from "alternative not Chrome" browsers you have to compete. If we look at what "AI" FF has this is mostly what you are seeing and many of the things aren't any of the "bad" things people associate with AI:
- site translation, chrome had that a long time and people start expecting it to exist
- automatic alt text generation, a very based UX/accessibility feature
- some "AI" auto grouping for tab groups, unneeded but you can do it with 2015th level of "AI" (i.e. pre LLM) and it shouldn't have bound much additional dev resources. Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if it was mainly surprised to bootstrap the local AI internals needed for useful features like local AI based site translation.
- (experimental) link preview with AI summaries, that looks pretty goated if it works as advertised tbh. and might bring new people to FF.
- integration with an AI search engine, but, it's basically just another search engine choice so no issue here
- allow integration of 3rd party chat bots. No technical people (which can afford it) have started using chat bots _en mass_ (for daily life stuff like grocery lists etc.) Sure a lot of people on HN love to pretend that AI is only used by enthusiasts but that (sadly) just isn't true. ChatBot integration is becoming quite a must have for browsers, no matter how much I don't like it.
So all in all maybe except the tab group suggestions feature are all reasonable choices which make people use/stay with Firefox. Some being outright basic features commonly expected (site translate).
Lastly outside of telling you it exists when its added FF doesn't seem to try to push it onto people. And if you think that it's not okay if a software tells you about a new features less then once a month in average then IMHO that is a you problem.
Firefox used to push for open standards and not just IE6 standards coming from microsoft. This era feels worlds away from where we are now where chrome is the new ie6.
Yeah, I will say I don't understand the value add here. I used to be able to have a webpage in a sidebar with Opera back in like 2009. That version of Opera, imo, is still more satisfying browsing experience to me even than modern browsers.
It makes me a little sad we only ever see FF hit the front page of HN for stuff people are angry about. The FF team building useful features like tab groups that are improving UX. But I guess if it bleeds it leads.
Like `Firefox Data Collection and Use` which includes `Send technical and interaction data to Mozilla` and some other stuff is on by default. [1]
Glean data is here [2]
Historically I don't think FF would have made that decision - now I have to periodically check what else they turned on without me asking.
I generally don't like telemetry but I really don't like telemetry that is on by default - that very much should always be a "Would you like to?" question.
One person's bad thing is another person's much-anticipated feature. As long as they're optional and useful for enough users to justify the resource expenditure, I really don't see the problem.
There was a whole experiment with this "Tab Candy" thing a few years ago. And it failed and Mozilla disabled it and it got silently removed, well, almost, because a fair amount of people complained. I wouldn't be surprised if today's tab groups go the same way. Browser innovation is hard and at this point most of the innovation is in forks of Firefox, rather than Firefox itself.
I gave up on Firefox, sadly. I still use Thunderbird (which is apparently no longer part of Mozilla), but I couldn't deal with FF and Mozilla screwing around anymore.
I switched to Orion which has been working great for me. I'm happy to pay money for my browser and be confident that the money is actually being put towards maintaining and improving the browser.
I want Firefox to succeed, I just... can't justify it.
I wonder if they'd do better by charging $10 for a compiled binary and distributing it on Linux as an AppImage. I'd be happier to pay for that than send an unrestricted donation to the Mozilla foundation. Normally I frown on unrestricted donations, but something seems really off over there.
wow what an achievement. Vivaldi which has 1% of there budget had that feature for almost 10 years. Despite almost half a billion dollar budget almost all there good UI changes come years late being the last to add them for example profile management.
It is honestly embarrassing to compare Mozilla to companies like brave that actually created a private ecosystem without subsidization from there competitors.
Right, Mozilla was actually first on the block with this. And even when they removed it it was available as an extension, because their extension ecosystem was capable of UI-level changes.
Something weird I've noticed in Firefox lately -- and been wondering if it's related to these sorts of features -- is that if I leave Firefox open for a relatively long time (e.g. a few hours) NoScript will show whatever my search engine is set to as a script injection on all pages (with a "sidebar?" note). This happens even if I do not interact with the browser during that time. If I restart Firefox, then it goes away (until a long period of time elapses again).
I dont know why anyones being defensive about firefox as if they have drawn ire for no reason at all, when in my xp they have done alot of sus stuff, and I hardly know anything about well anything.
Mozilla get >80% of its revenue from Google, by making Google Search as default search engine on Firefox.
While Mozilla pretends to be a non-profit, its CEO makes millions of dollars annually.
Mitchell Baker: Stepped down as CEO of Mozilla in February 2024. Her salary for 2023 was reported to be $6.9 million.
Laura Chambers: Became interim CEO of Mozilla in February 2024. Mozilla has not disclosed her salary for 2024 yet.
As of October 2025, the average annual salary for employees at Mozilla in the United States is ~$115k.
Not bad for a "non-profit", eh?
Yup, Mozilla and Firefox are surviving (nay, thriving) due to Google.
But Google's hand on the Mozilla tiller, is merely the top of the proverbial iceberg.
Google has a monopoly on the browser market, encouraged by Apple Safari slipping down to <14% market share amongst the leading browsers.
Google's Chrome (>71% market share) and the other Chromium forks (>9% market share: Edge ~4.5%, Samsung Internet Browser ~2%, Brave/Vivaldi/etc. ~1%) dominate the browser market. Opera (~1.75% market share) is not a Chromium fork, but it is based on Chromium Project.
Lots of nonprofits have CEO comp in the millions. Firefox is a large company with lots of employees and tens of millions of users. They have to offer compensation that is somewhat close to market rates to be able to hire people capable of managing that kind of scale. Mozilla isn't funded by individual donations and doesn't charge its users for Firefox, so what does it matter what the execs get paid?
The difference is that Mozilla is directly and significantly funded by its biggest competitor, yet its venerated Firefox browser barely has a 2% market share.
(Which leads me to a ponderous question: if I had the wherewithal to pour hundreds of millions of dollars of my money into a non-Chromium FOSS browser, supported by 1700+ staff and 1000+ volunteers, would that browser have merely a ~2.17% market share? Hmmm... As a comparative analogy, Samsung Internet browser has barely had any improvements in years and it is surviving due to it being the default browser on the millions of Samsung smartphones & tablets worldwide, but its market share is ~1.86%. I don't think Samsung is spending half a billion a year keeping this browser alive, nor paying its browser departmental heads millions of dollars to keep the browsing chugging along.)
Since it is evident that Mozilla is a for-profit organisation funded by its biggest competitor, then we must wonder: do the Mozilla volunteers get their fair share of all that profit? If not, why not?
But since we all know Mozilla is always crying for more money, then where are the hundreds of millions of revenue going every year? I suspect it is neither going deep for improvements to the Firefox browser (I mean, come on! "tab groups" are relatively new feature in Firefox, but Firefox users have been demanding this feature for years, and Firefox's major rivals have had tab grouping feature for years, so what took Firefox so long to to do this bare needful?!), or to the many hardworking volunteers doing their best for a supposedly good (but losing) cause (Firefox's market share is eroding, and I assume Google is not sad about that trend).
I did but I don't see FF splitting from Mozilla (by whatever mechanism) either sadly and if you lose the name it becomes hard to get adoption for the forked one - see IceWeasel.
I mean the primary image editor in open source land is Gimp (which I had to explain to an ex many years ago when she hopped on my PC) and our main open source source control system is called `git` (funnier if you are British) so open source devs have form for picking bad names :D.
`Git can be a right git` is a valid sentence here.
Welp, here we go again. The CEO pay is slightly more than 1% of their revenue, which sure, I don't love, but they're not like secretly poisoning kittens or something which is how you're making it sound.
Those salaries actually seem pretty normal, and I don't think anything other than ordinary information literacy is necessary to understand they have a non-profit foundation side by side with the corporation, it's not a hidden conspiracy.
Also, on HN I think people are largely familiar with these data, so sharing numbers with an air of dramatic revelation seems tonally inappropriate. Though I love that, of the random accusations thrown at Mozilla, one of them is constantly pingponging back and forth between claiming they're running out of money or that they are awash in profits.
I do think there are real issues: killing Servo was a tragedy, "privacy protecting ads" I think is conceptually fallacious, it seems like with Android forcing developer certification that the world could have used a FirefoxOS right about now which they unfortunately abandoned many years ago. But the community phenomenon of reeling off ordinary pay figures like they're a conspiracy feels more like an inadvertent confession of functional illiteracy when interpreting financial data.
I wish we talked about the real stuff (pushing back on their dabbling in ads) instead of breathlessly sharing misunderstood graphs of browser market share to try and imply that side bets made from 2020-2025 retroactively caused the market share losses of 2010-2015.
Why is a company getting millions of dollars (from its biggest competitor) for doing the bare minimum (or is that a quid pro quo deal between them)? "Too little, too late" seems to be the norm at Firefox and Mozilla in past few years.
Firefox users have been demanding Tab Grouping for years (and the other major browsers have had Tab Grouping feature for years), but it was only in April 2025 that Mozilla finally gave that basic feature in Firefox:
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/tab-groups-community/
Yes, lets talk real stuff! Firefox invented tab grouping a decade before it existed in Chrome, and sustained an extension ecosystem with full access to browser UI, such that tab grouping extensions long were possible in Firefox that were not possible in Chrome. It's never been gone, and adding a new natively supported iteration is a good thing, not a bad thing.
Mozilla maintains 32 million lines of code, roughly the same amount as Chromium, with by some estimates, less than a tenth of the resources Google dedicates to Chrome. That return on investment spans everything from leading on development of major new web standards, e.g. WebAssembly, WebRTC, DNS over HTTPs, limiting cookies, profile sandboxing. It also includes Rust, key to their major "Quantum" project which by itself was a monumental achievement which rebuilt the browser on a stable, secure, memory safe foundation. Even Chrome is now starting to use Rust, Mozilla's language, for parts of its browser.
They have a rapid patch cadence for security fixes, and their browser is the heart of an ecosystem including Tor, Waterfox, LiberWolf, Mull, and others for niche, hardened or performance tuned variations that depend on Gecko. Tor, in particular, is relied on to get around censorship in parts of the world that try to control internet traffic.
And there's the monopoly issue, which is that if we lost Firefox, every active browser engine would be owned by two trillion dollar platform companies, Google and Apple, who could write the rules of the internet on their own. Which includes, among other things, trying to dismantle ad blockers and lock you into their ecosystems.
The totality of its return on investment across security, open standards and browser independence has been irreplaceable, and overlooking that because they didn't roll out a tab feature fast enough is mind-boggling lack of comprehension of the full scale of what Mozilla produces from beginning to end.
> Firefox invented tab grouping a decade before it existed in Chrome, and sustained an extension ecosystem with full access to browser UI, such that tab grouping extensions long were possible in Firefox that were not possible in Chrome. It's never been gone, and adding a new natively supported iteration is a good thing, not a bad thing.
First and foremost, Mozilla didn't invent Tab Grouping, nor did it invent or pioneer Tabs for that matter.
James Newton Gunn (1867–1927) invented Tabs (patented in 1897) as a new way to access the contents of a set of index cards, separating them with other cards distinguished by projections marked with letters of the alphabet, dates, or other information.
In 1982, Wordvision for DOS was perhaps the first commercially available product with a tabbed interface. In 1992 Borland's Quattro Pro popularized tabs for spreadsheets; Microsoft Word in 1993 used them to simplify submenus. In 1994, BookLink Technologies featured tabbed windows in its InternetWorks (most likely the first internet browser to feature tabs). That same year, the text editor UltraEdit also appeared with a modern multi-row tabbed interface. The tabbed interface approach was then followed by the Internet Explorer shell SimulBrowse in 1997, which was later renamed to NetCaptor. Opera was one of the earliest browsers with tabbed browsing and private browsing.
In fact, the company that pioneered Tabs for Internet Browser was BookLink Technologies for its browser InternetWorks in 1994 (BookLink's technology was later licensed by Microsoft to bring Internet capabilities to MS Word).
And no, neither did Mozilla nor Chrome invent or pioneer Extensions either.
Browser extensions predate even tabbed browsing! Ironically, it was Microsoft that introduced extensions with Internet Explorer 5 in 1999.
And three years before Google popularized private browsing with Incognito Mode, Safari already had a feature for temporary suspension of cookies and cache. Even Opera had private browsing long before Firefox and Chrome got the feature.
So Tabs, Extensions and Private/Incognito Browsing -- which people tend to think were pioneered by Firefox and Chrome -- were actually invented/pioneered years earlier by other companies for other browsers/editors. Firefox and Chrome simply adopted these nice ideas and made them popular because of their huge user base.
If we want to argue that Firefox's support for Tab Grouping through some extensions was a pioneering act, then that's incorrect roo. It is like saying Microsoft invented Antivirus because it allowed the first Antivirus software to run on its OSes.
Sure, Tab Groups were allowed to be created via Extensions supported by Firefox and Chrome, but the Tabbed Grouping feature was adopted in these browsers as native feature only years later.
I recall that MyIE2 (an IE shell browser in 2002) (MyIE2 later got sold and renamed as Maxthon), featured tabbed browsing, ad blocking, support for Internet Explorer plugins, skins/themes, forms autofilling, customizable toolbar, whois queries, variable keyword searching from address bar (very useful for intranet sites), translation and a highly customizable user interface.
Tab Groups and Sync Tab Groups are probably the Extensions you remember that gave the Tab Grouping feature as add-ons to Firefox. But these extensions (like thousands of other extensions) were created and maintained just by one person or a handful of volunteers.
As you can see, Mozilla Firefox (even with half a billion dollars as annual revenue (thanks to Google) and thousands of staff & volunteers) has not been giving basic features that even old browsers and one-person/one-small-team driven browser extensions have done so admirably for a long time.
Do you really think the average internet user is bothered more about WebAssembly, WebRTC, DNS over HTTPs, limiting cookies, profile sandboxing? Or would the average user be more interested in tabs, tab grouping, themes, customizations, private browsing and other user friendly features in a browser?
But you are right..
> there's the monopoly issue, which is that if we lost Firefox, every active browser engine would be owned by two trillion dollar platform companies, Google and Apple, who could write the rules of the internet on their own. Which includes, among other things, trying to dismantle ad blockers and lock you into their ecosystems.
That is precisely my point. Why is Google in total control of its third biggest rival in the browser market? How is that beneficial for end users?
Do you know why Chrome and Firefox typically ace any latest web standards tests? It's because Google will think forward on proposed web standards, and choose whichever of those ideas it likes and it will implement them in its own ways as new features in dev builds of Chrome and then release them as stable releases later. So by the time these proposed web standards (WebRTC, etc.) even come up for any solid discussions by W3C and other partners of the industry, it is already a moot point, because Google has already interpreted and implemented it in some particular way which is already in vogue (popular use) across many millions of Chrome (and Chromium forked browsers) users across the world. Invariably then, it is Google's interpretation and implemented approach that then becomes the agreed web standard specification. And sooner, rather than later, Firefox also follows suit with almost the same thing, because it is Google pulling the strings of Mozilla behind the scenes. And usually Apple & Safari are not far behind doing the same, because it is already a lost battle when Google's way of that web standard is what the industry is forced to adopt.
So yeah, the internet is already monopoly, thanks to Google, and its far-reaching, far-thinking clout and sheer tenacity to do whatever it wants.
Case in point? Google and Apple have been hit with antitrust lawsuits in EU and USA, accused of monopoly of their products (especially all store) and advertising services on the internet and Android & iOS ecosystem. Google and Apple have been fined several millions or few billions in several such lawsuits, but that's merely a slap on the revenue wrist of these tech giants.
And that arrogance can have profound impacts, as Google can use its clout for more sinister reasons:
Non-profits are headed but also staffed with the same ambititious types as for-profit businesses. If you think only Mozilla pays its CEO attractively, you are misinformed. Managerial talent costs, and non-profit CEOs, in my direct experience, use the same lateral pay package comparisons to other non-profit CEOs to justify their comp packages.
The whole point of carving out an alternate rules space for non-profits in a capitalistic economy is that some business functions are both necessary and very unlikely to be profitable.
The assumption that employees would work in non-profits at an uncompetitve wage is a widespread fallacy. In the end a non-profit is either:
1. unprofitable but so necessary it finds subsidies to continue unprofitable operations
2. breaks even
3. runs well enough to generate an operating surplus which by NP tax regs must be either distributed to employees as a bonus or put forward to organisational growth.
In any of these three revenue scenarios, underpaying critical staff is an org death spiral by loss of requisite talent.
CEOs in the US often make much more in the US than other countries, and US non-profit are not nearly immune to the larger forces responsible for that trend.
So where are those millions of dollars to Mozilla from Google really going?
Mozilla has a staff of around 1700 employees in USA, but it has 1000+ volunteers. Are those volunteers getting a fair share of the profits of this non-profit company? If not, why not?
And even with all that half a billion dollars of revenue every year, why is Mozilla Firefox have a barely ~2% market share?
OK, Let's talk basics and real stuff..
Why has Firefox failed or deliberately delayed to give basic features for years that its major competitors have had for years?
Why is a company getting millions of dollars (from its biggest competitor) for doing the bare minimum (or is that a quid pro quo deal between them)? "Too little, too late" seems to be the norm at Firefox and Mozilla in past few years.
e.g., Firefox users have been demanding Tab Grouping for years (and the other major browsers have had Tab Grouping feature for years), but it was only in April 2025 that Mozilla finally gave that basic feature in Firefox:
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/tab-groups-community/
Or is that the implicit deal between Google and Mozilla. "Hey puppet, if you want the carrot, then just keep your head down, and just tick along doing barely anything new, and let me control the world as I see fit."
I'm genuinely wondering: if any other decent non-Chromium FOSS browser got half a billion dollars every year, would it give some tough competition to Chrome and Safari?
Since we're all here to complain about Firefox, I want to add that at this point I'm a firefox user out of principle, but I swear I get so many weird performance issues with firefox on ubuntu that it feels like self-flagellation in service of the gods of the free and open Internet.
Unfortunately they're the kinds of problems that are really hard to submit tickets for: gradual degradation of performance over the course of a week until I kill the process and start it again, the occasional crash that I can't seem to associate with anything in particular, a bizarre bug where every once in a while firefox slows down and typing letters into any input field has a ~30 second delay...
I've never cared about AI or Pocket or anything like that, I just want firefox to be reliably snappy. And I really, really don't want a browser ecosystem dominated by two for-profit companies.
I've been a Firefox user since it launched (and a Netscape Navigator user before that). In addition to Desktop, I use Firefox on iOS with my 3-year old iPad Pro, which of late exhibits the same sluggishness that you describe after a while. It goes away if I force restart, but not if I just close tabs.
I speculate that it has to do with keeping alive closed pages. Something related that I first started noticing a few months ago is that if I mistime the closing of a YouTube tab, the sound will keep playing and the only way to stop it is to force quit the app.
I haven't noticed the issue on Firefox Desktop, but my MacBook Pro is reasonably beefy and maybe that helps.
I've definitely noticed this on desktop. Discarding all tabs doesn't really fix the issue, I have to go to `about:profiles` every couple of days and restart firefox to get the navigation sluggishness to go away.
I've become increasingly aggravated with a browser that has propagandized since its creation that it is meant to give its users control over their web experience that the processes/workers that tabs and extensions start are almost completely opaque, or only accessible through bizarre about:pages that are themselves inaccessible by extensions, and only give you often unintelligible information about random unidentified groups of processes at the thread level.
There is no technical reason that I can figure out that there can't be a commandline top-like for Firefox that keeps up with every worker started up by a tab or extension; or for that matter logs every use of a granted permission by an extension; or of course to manage cookies, local storage, and memory allocations, and allows you to set alerts for them, block them, kill them, etc..
I've been bullying AI into constructing a minimal architecture that would do just that, and not touch much in order to keep it easy to maintain the fork. If anybody else has or knows of an existing solution, I'm all ears. If the browser is supposed to be an OS now, why is the one that claims to be free also a monolith with no process control?
Firefox just decided around the time they got rid of the ability to easily disable js that they wanted the web to be impenetrable magic. I decided that their motive is that they didn't want you touching their bosses' ads, or their strange experiments.
I'm selfish. If firefox has been pinning a core at 100% for the last hour, I'm greedy enough to want to know what tab is doing it (especially if it is a long-closed tab that left behind a little gift, could it be?) I know it's not my place.
That last delay bit might not be a Firefox bug but rather something in the Debian/Ubuntu stack. I get that same type of freeze up about once a week. I typically have FF open but it can happen while I’m working in something else.
In my case I’ve chalked it up to running Debian on a MS Surface device. I’m using the standard kernel though since the Surface kernel only adds touchscreen for my device and I don’t really want it.
There are far too many "luminaries" in the tech industry who've had the last 20 years of "must create value!" go to their heads, even in the FLOSS space.
When profit motive does not exist (and it shouldn't in FLOSS) then you need to stick to things like the UNIX philosophy and KISS (keep it simple, stupid) in order to create good software. Trends mean nothing when you're in this mindset.
It's Firefox. It's a browser. It does browser things; namely, it sends HTTP requests, possibly executes JavaScript, and renders the resulting computed data on a screen as HTML. It does not need to have AI integrated. At best, AI should be a downloadable extension.
If the group's leadership cannot comprehend this, then they need to be removed immediately and blacklisted from leadership at future organizations in the future.
This is an opinion, yet you state it like fact. While I'm hesitant to want any AI features in my browser, what a "browser" does isn't necessarily a settled debate.
No, the market states it like fact. 15 years ago FF was the belle of the ball. Now it has minuscule market share and is looking at an uncertain future.
> While I'm hesitant to want any AI features in my browser, what a "browser" does isn't necessarily a settled debate.
That's a fairly concise definition I gave, unless I'm responding to Diogenes.
> If the group's leadership cannot comprehend this, then they need to be removed immediately and blacklisted from leadership at future organizations in the future.
You have no power to do this. They would have to remove themselves, or Google would have to make a phone call.
Or just watch its market share erode until it vanishes from the charts. You picked "beginning" too, and indeed it started when they betrayed the power-users userbase they had (the one that installed FF on their mum's computer and actively promoted it) to be more like the oh-so-successful Chrome (which was pushed with dark patterns like being bundled with AV updates). Personally, it made me go to the "old" Opera (Opera 12) until it got "Chromified" and sold to China.
They have consistently been doing the opposite of what the majority of their userbase expect from them (Pocket, paid sites forced to the "Speedial" page,...). To me, the only remaining value of FF is being up-to-date with web shena^H^H^H^H^H standards.
A FOSS project shouldn't be focused on succeeding; they should be focused on doing the right thing. No little compromises or play-on-words on your values. And if that means less funding, too bad, but so be it.
Just an FYI for anyone who is interested, I’ve also been doing the same for Waterfox.
Mozilla have taken into consideration doing things locally, such as tab organisation and the likes (one would assume pre-GPT era and with regard to features not utilising LLMs this would’ve been branded as ML functionality) but I’m not fully convinced this still won’t open up potential security issues in the future[for users of AI browsers].
For Tor users this seems even more of an issue as one would expect nation-state actors targeting undesirables would look for any potential weak spot to exploit.
Separately I suppose this brings into light how utterly crazy it seems having AI features in the browser chrome versus limited to the website content process/sandbox. It seems like a privacy and security nightmare and now everyone and their gran are releasing “AI browsers”, even the Firefox-based ones inspired by browsers such as Arc and Dia which seem like absolute privacy nightmares.
Seems like slick branding and marketing gets you a pass today when in the past such egregiousness would receive a load of flack cough Avast “secure” browser cough…
Either way good job to the Tor team, I sympathise with how much extra load this adds to each rebase.
What else does Waterfox remove? Does it still support signining in with a Mozilla account to enable sync features? Would be nice to see a comprehensive list somewhere; I couldn't see anything on the Waterfox homepage or the GitHub README.
You can see here[1], I'll avoid pasting again. But yes, can still use a Mozilla account and the website is getting a refurb - I will add a third hard thing in computer science.. letting people know all the things you've actually built :')
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=43206110
I think it would help to put some of this on your site. When I land on the main waterfox page it looks like just firefox but reskinned. I'm not saying that's what it actually is (clearly it isn't) but it can help having some clarity about this. I mean it isn't like you're being shy about building off of firefox, so why not mention it?
Thank you! Downloading Waterfox now and spreading the word! This AI jamming its way into everything needs to end.
Thanks for maintaining Waterfox. For me it has been working without issues, basically Firefox but with reasonable defaults, and I don’t have to constantly look for and manually disable “features” like these.
cough Avast "secure" cough dies of cringe
fr Tor did a good job
Didn’t know Firefox had an “AI sidebar”
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/ai-chatbot
Seems to be unconnected to any model and off by default.
I’ve found it super nice.
Similar to the “AI should be an assistant programmer, not an independent dev”, having Claude there and being able to ask questions about specific topics while I read is fantastic. Especially for scientific papers that are outside my specialty (i.e. all of them.)
Have you heard of tabs?
Have you heard of the HN guidelines?
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Not mentioned is the ability to setup custom prompts. [1]
I enjoy reading technical blogs from the global south and the slavic world. I've found that LLMs do a far better job at translation than Google Translate/DeepL, etc. in these niche domains, so I added a translate prompt to my context menu and that converted me over to using it.
[1] https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/advanced-configur...
Thankfully they are unconnected by default. Unfortunately the sidebar can get triggered accidentally with keystrokes from muscle memory (Emacs) and then one has to deal with the side bar. It would have been nicer if by default nothing existed in the first place.
Didn't know about it either, until it got pushed in my face a few days ago, for whatever reason. Didn't leave a great taste in my mouth.
I’m used to all browsers adding features that I don’t want every few months. I just disable them and forget about them.
I have a Gemini sidebar, it just appeared out of nowhere one day, but I find it useful though. You can give it a URL and it can summarize it or whatever.
It was weird when it just showed up one day, but after using it a bit, I like it.
It's super useful for power users. You can connect any model you like through ollama (or similar services) and use your own pre-defined prompts to run against the selected text on websites simply from right click context menu.
I hope Orion (from Kagi) gains more traction and follows through w/ open-sourcing everything. Privacy-first, 0-telemetry, performant, capable... just not OSS (yet).
Any info about planned open sourcing? I have not heard about it.
https://kagi.com/orion/faq.html#oss
[flagged]
Orion is a WebKit fork which is nice to have but Linux support seems so far off (is there a modern project that builds WebKit on Linux or windows at all?)
I have been satisfied with moving to Zen, a Firefox fork that behaves like the late Arc browser
When I linked the nightly Windows WebKit builds last week, λigrunert (who works on it) said:
> The easiest way to run WebKit on Windows is via Playwright.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45366867#45487157
Gnome web is based off of webkit-gtk
I use it on my iPhone because I can actually get ad blocking but it is also the glitchiest browser I've ever used. Worth it for no ads, but that's kinda Apple's issue.
An AI sidebar doesn't bother me. But it should be an extension, not an inescapable part of the browser.
I'd love to be able to open up an arbitrary web page in this sidebar. It would be super valuable for research. They can obviously do it, since the AI sidebar also loads a web page, but the functionality is locked for some reason, and vertical splitting extensions are pure jank.
I really wish Mozilla would focus on addressing some of the numerous user feature requests, rather than whatever the current trend is.
The tab group work Firefox has done has been mostly great.
The idea that Mozilla doesn't focus on user feature requests seems unfounded? [1]
[1] https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/idb-p/ideas/tab/most-ku...
The way they handled JPEG XL support has, in my opinion, provided a solid foundation for said idea.
Yeah, I lived in the Netherlands for five years, so I switched to Chrome because its translation feature is much better.
Now that I'm back in my home country, I've gone back to Firefox, which I prefer from a philosophical standpoint. But there's one simple feature keeping me from using it full-time: the ability to rename windows.
My workflow relies on having one window per project. I name the windows Project1, Project2, Project3, and so on, so it is very simple to find each one.
There are a few Firefox extensions that allow renaming windows, but the names disappear every time I restart Firefox, and they don’t sync across devices.
So, unfortunately, I’m back to using Chromium.
Maybe tab groups would work for you? Windows/tabs are usually (always) named from the <title> html on the web site, and I’m surprised Chrome lets you change that in any persistent way. Firefox tab groups lets you manage things yourself at a higher level.
Thanks. No, I use tab groups also within the windows.
> I'd love to be able to open up an arbitrary web page in this sidebar.
Vivaldi has that. (When Opera got bought out by some Chinese company, one of the original founders created Vivaldi. It's Chromium-based, so Chrome extensions work, and Chrome extensions not using Manifest V3 might end up not working soon).
If you want to stick with Firefox, then I'd recommend Zen[0]. It has the tiling feature much like Vivaldi, among many other enhancements on Firefox.
[0]: https://zen-browser.app/
I was looking for something like that and haven't found a good solution. I like having Claude easily accessible in the sidebar, but I'd also like to add pages like my RSS reader, calendar, maps, etc. rather than having to open them in a new tab or window.
Amazing how MDI is rediscovered every couple of decades.
It becomes popular, then a UX counter-effort declares that it should be the job of the window manager and it dies off for a while.
I think that windowing systems need to be way more flexible. I want to be able to drag fullscreens, workspaces, windows, tabs, MDI sub-windows, and other types of views from different programs into and out of each other. I think Serenity OS has this with windows and tabs.
Related: You can already do this on any platform that has a window manager.
Nobody can tell me how MDI is a good design... what if I want to show two documents from different apps side by side?
Would the split tabs feature that they are currently rolling out work for your use case?
https://windowsreport.com/hands-on-firefoxs-new-split-view-l...
Absolutely, 100%. I'm glad they're finally implementing it!
If you're not fan of vertical splitting sidebar check out Jetwriter AI. It opens up as an overlay modal and you can use your own API Key as well.
You can define a custom "AI" provider via about:config. It takes every webpage.
Uhh, why not open two windows?
You can put two windows on screen at the same time, you know.
Bugzilla: Fuck you, closed as wontfix.
Not only that, AI providers shouldn't be a hardcoded list.
Firefox used to be the most configurable, everything plugable browser, what happened on that?
If a 1.0 was released today, would they have a hardcoded list of search engines?
Exactly. Firefox probably owes almost all of its remaining market share to its extension ecosystem, but it is rotting away in neglect.
First-party extensions are a nice way to test out ideas and features without increasing the core product's maintenance burden. I wouldn't even mind if Mozilla heavily promoted their own extensions, because it would help draw attention to the extension library as a whole.
It should if you try to fly off the radar. Not that Tor browser isn't a fucken emmentaler.
Very good news, this would have raised a major red flag for me if I went to use their browser and saw any AI integrations.
The AI integrations, AFAIK, work only if you provide an API key.
Yes, however it still means that the browser is phoning home to somewhere. To be able to make use of that API key, it has to send some data out. Is that data routed over TOR? Does it even matter given that an API key can be used to deanonymize you?
My understanding (and this may have changed), is that you have to initiate the AI features each time (e.g. clicking on "Summarize This").
But yes, your point is valid. For Tor, if you enter an API key, you could be identified. Still, does the Tor Browser prevent you from installing addons which are no more secure than these AI features? It didn't years ago - not sure if that's changed.
If you don't put in an API key, does it try to connect?
I don't want to have to ask questions like this when using a browser that is intended to anonymize me
Good!
I do not want nor need AI in every single aspect of my life. I mean, I've seen AI hygiene products out there. How does that even work? Don't answer that ... I know it's a marketing scheme, akin to the "HD" craze of five to 10 years ago.
Reminds me of the story of the ice tea company that changed their name to include "Blockchain" and saw their value shoot up a few years ago
Long Blockchain Corp, formerly Long Island Iced Tea Corp
I thought you were joking: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Blockchain_Corp.
Why on earth did I waste my life working of clearly the path to success is based on plastering buzzwords in irrelevant places.
I'm waiting for the day we get microwaves with an AI that turns them off once the timer reaches zero.
Every microwave turns off when the timer reaches zero. It'd be better to have AI that turns it off when the timer reaches one so that I don't have to quickly stop it before the bell goes off. Better yet, a mute function would do the same thing.
Actually it already exists. My microwave have a button labeled “AI” which suppose to run the microwave until it determines the food is ready.
If it has a humidity sensor it'll likely work, but doesn't need "AI"
Any logic where you could use an if condition will be marketed (probably already is) as "AI".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UiS27feX8o0 (it's Technology Connections about a really old microwave that does this well)
We have had this function for dozens of years in Japan already
The world has had it, you just have to buy it.
Mine have had that for as long as they've existed.
Does it send the zero-time notification to a cloud LLM endpoint that will send back a 10 kB JSON that instructs the oven to turn off? (Or not, how could we predict it?)
It feels like we are going to need a lot of volunteer effort to help remove all the AI garbage out of all these projects that insist on jamming AI into themselves.
This week the GZDoom project forked into UZDoom after a maintainer force-pushed AI-generated code into the repo. Thankfully, it failed to compile and other maintainers caught it before it made it out, but the decision to fork came down pretty quickly.
The creator was allegedly a massive asshole for years and him randomly reappearing after a year, only to force push shitty code that didn't work, was the last straw. It wasn't just because it was AI code.
Who can afford to volunteer as fork maintainer for a monolithic browser codebase, though?
What "HD craze" was there from 2015-2020?
"HD" as a marketing buzzterm for products where "High Definition" technically doesn't make sense. Like adding 2.0 everywhere.
The only example of that I can remember was "HD sunglasses" but I don't recall that ever being a widespread fad. I only saw people ever joke about that.
HD as far as I ever saw it used generally referred to 720p and soon after 1080p. Which is a pretty objective, non-marketing definition. And the timeframe of 2015-2020 seems way off. 1080p was pretty standard by like 2010. YouTube started streaming 4K in 2010.
> HD as far as I ever saw it used generally referred to 720p and soon after 1080p.
I remember stuff like "HD" whitening toothpaste, HD flashlights, and HD radio
HD GIFs, most likely.
The HD craze was more like 20 years ago, you're getting old :)
Before that was the prefixing everything with a lower-case i craze.
Agereed. Sadly, we're on the wrong planet, my friend. AI will be shoved into every available orifice and more. It's a great tool for "them" to gather even more info on you to sell to anyone with a handful of nickels.
The last thing any of these masters of the universe will do is leverage AI to make everyone's life better.
I don't think switching planets will help much, either. Mars will get AI before it gets humans.
Bruh, I think everyone knows that already but ChatGPT records your camera and audio and sends them to the US.
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"Mozilla has reversed course on when the protocol portion (e.g. http or https) of the URL in the URL bar is hidden since Firefox 128. We used to have logic in one of our patches around Onion Services (which are always end-to-end encrypted regardless of the application-level protocol used) to follow whatever Firefox does for https. However, with the latest changes in Firefox, this patch became a bit gnarly to apply correctly so we took a step back and thought to ourselves, why are we even conditionally hiding this from the user?"
What are the defaults
True is the default. False is what I set these to. I have these documented.
Generally, this seems an obvious and correct decision for Tor.
Barring integration with a locally run LLM, AI doesn't make sense for the Tor security posture - you don't want to be routing content to unintended/insecure third parties, period.
and for any malicious mfs, you dont want AI in your browser.
This is the right call for security, privacy, and anonymity tools like Tor Browser.
They removed privacy.resistFingerprinting.spoofOsInUserAgentHeader a while back as well. I find that suspicious.
Tor browser's philosophy is that everyone should be fingerprinted and it's fine since they do everything they can think of to try to make that fingerprint identical to everyone else using Tor browser.
This is kind of crazy since there are new fingerprinting techniques all the time and if they miss even one data point the whole game is lost. The smarter movie would be to make sure that fingerprints are unique/randomized so that even the same person looks like different people but for some reason they're confident they can account for every possible identifying metric 100% of the time.
Tor Browser? Perhaps, but their stated justification is that they were always leaking that via JavaScript and other ways, that Cloudflare was detecting the discrepancy and blocking you a lot more, that they're still spoofing just one of three values (Windows, Mac, Linux) which now matches the JS property, and that they'd like to redo it properly in the future. Seems reasonable to me.
Regardless of what they do on the user's end, their rear end became too ugly for a tool which ostensibly provides anonymity, because it will end up on a 185.220.0.0/16 exit node way too often for any tales of decentralization to hold true.
This is a good announcement. Coming from a popular project, it helps educate people that AI is a threat to privacy. It's something that might not be obvious to some non-tech Tor users (journalists, activists, etc).
It seems like AI is the new way to lose individual control on operating systems and fundamental apps.
I like the Firefox AI features- they seem integrated rather than wanting to replace everything with it.
goood job tor
Tor is my daily browser btw.
Seems about time someones does the "I use Tor btw" trend.
I mean, I wouldn't trust them if they didn't.
Why is Firefox adding AI features?
The one "AI" feature that genuinely helps the user and preserves privacy is the Translation feature. (Yes, machine translation is in fact AI)
translation is moreso machine learning, not generative hallucinations or a chatbot
it's literally the same technology as LLMs. Transformers were proposed for translation.
(But I don't know what methods the Firefox translation uses. I assume it's a local model but don't even know that for sure.)
It is a local model: https://mozilla.github.io/translations/
- Creating alternate sources of revenue.
- Chrome and Edge are going to do it as well sooner or later, and Mozilla's modus operandi has been to largely copy feature sets from Chrome to stay relevant.
Pointy haired bosses heard about AI, and now you have AI everywhere.. you know, just in case, if you wanted an AI chatbot in your image resizing software or your pdf reader. Before that it was "cloud", where every app had to have a cloud-something, even if it didnd't need one.
Don't forget when everyone was adding "blockchain" to their apps, regardless of what that did or meant.
In theory, there shouldn't be pointy-haired bosses doing anything with Firefox. That's the entire point. Cathedral vs. bazaar and whatnot.
I file a ticket with Firefox whenever an unwanted dialog pops up covering content. If you tag these as being accessibility related they get bounced back and forth between a few people before getting closed and thus pour just a little bit of sand in the gears.
This is wasting the time of accessibility engineers who are doing very important work. Please don't.
Not very well.
I'm one of those web developers who still uses Firefox as my daily driver which means the products I work on work on Firefox. Maybe twice a year a tester uses Chrome and turns up something that's not quite right.
Developers like me are a major reason why Firefox is still a viable web browser and there is someone like me in most organizations. If it wasn't for people like us more and more web pages would work in Chrome only and you just couldn't do things with Firefox. Collectively we probably contribute as much to the success of Firefox than all the people who actually check in changes to the source code but we are not treated accordingly. If they piss all of us off Firefox will become a non-viable web browser.
So far as accessibility I am doing a round of accessibility on my site and found things have gotten way worse for multiple reasons. I used to use NVDA + Firefox but since upgrading to Win 11 NVDA is completely broken for me and I have to pull the power plug on my computer to shut down NVDA.
Narrator + Edge basically works, but Narrator + Firefox is completely spastic. I might have a navigation bar with elements like
-- Choice 1
-- Choice 2
-- Choice 3
in a <nav> and it might read something like "Choice Landmark 1 Navigation Navigation Landmark Choice 2 Landmark Choice Navigation 3 Landmark" where using any ARIA role comes across as website vandalism because it makes Narrator + Firefox blurt out "Landmark" and "Group" and similar words randomly when it is reading stuff.
When something is that broken it doesn't seem worth even putting a ticket it for it.
> This is wasting the time of accessibility engineers
If only Mozilla felt the same about wasting people's time. We wouldn't be having this discussion.
It's the same as you screaming at a McDonalds worker for not serving all day breakfast.
That's at least a worthy cause.
Falling down...
There are only a few options here.
You can file the ticket claiming that the shiny new promoted thing is actually an antifeature and that you hate the popup. You can then hope that the PM or exec who is currently receiving adulations or making speeches in the hope of a bonus or promotion after the rollout gets assigned the ticket, rather than some lowly volunteer. Then, the next time they get asked to make something, they'll think "wait, maybe I shouldn't advertise this new thing by forcing a popup on every Firefox user?" If that happens often enough to become part of the shared zeitgeist at the organization, they may be able to enact a Mozilla-wide policy against such popups and stop building antifeatures. Good luck, I hope it works for you.
Or you can throw sand in the works. When the accessibility department complains that people keep filing tickets and wasting their time whenever a new feature includes a popup, that component of the organization can push back
Every time I inadvertently find myself at a gas station with those horrific advertisement kiosks installed at the pumps, I either look around for a nearby station that doesn't have ads playing, or I stab the "Help" button to page the cashier. I am well aware that the minimum wage employee stocking the shelves and helping people prepay does not have the phone number of the GSTV producers or the executive decision makers at ExxonMobil or whoever, and I have no animus against that person - I'm infallibly polite with the individual. But I ask them to keep the line open to mute the ads, and they usually do. My only hope for eliminating those ads is either shopping at different gas stations - but how are they ever going to distinguish that microscopic boycott from the noise - or hoping that this communication filters up through the organization.
Clearly they aren't doing any/good work, if they allow popups to cover content. It's literally their job to prevent stuff like this.
Mozilla needs to bring in the Bobs from Office Space: "What is it you say you do here?"
Don't be so cynical. There are people who actually have impaired accessibility and struggle with technologies we take for granted. Those people are the target of accessibility engineering, not your popup needs.
Well, what are examples of these popups?
Just because a modal window exists doesn't mean it's bad for accessibility.
Hum... Pretty much so.
Unless it's a real emergency or the contents don't make sense until you do something, every modal window is an accessibility problem.
Even if it is a "real emergency," modal dialogs still don't make sense because people are so annoyed by them, they don't read them. If you really, really want the user to read something, don't put it in a modal that pops up over the thing they actually want to do. They're pretty much horrible UX for any conceivable use case.
My favorite mis-feature of these modals are the ones that announce something on page load, but they've also implemented "click outside modal to close it" so when you have any sort of muscle memory kicking in when you go to the website, you see a modal for 0.1s before it disappears as you click where you wanted to go.
On the opposite side, I'm also unreasonable frustrated when those modals appear and I cannot close it by clicking outside of it.
End results? Modals are horrible in most situations, especially when you want people to actually ingest some information.
There's another category of things that aren't really modals but they still prevent you from accessing some important user interface element because they draw on top of it even if they don't block out all UI elements.
Toasts in Windows are a good example -- often I am trying to use the tray but a toast pops up and I have to wait for the toast to clear or a toast pops up that makes me use the tray icons that it covers up if I want to deal with the situation. Of course on Windows there is the problem that clicking on a toast doesn't seem to ever do anything (like take you to the app that made the toast) and there is not a good mechanism to see the toast once it's past, etc.
In the case of Firefox I was particularly annoyed by little panels that floated above bookmark items on the chrome at the top of the page because, I dunno, there is something new I can do with my bookmarks, I guess. What I do know is that I wanted to click on something that was at the top of the web page and that stupid panel was in the way -- it wouldn't have stopped me from clicking on something else, but it's predictable that you're going to load a web page and frequently click on a link on a navbar at the very top.
There are certain applications that I'm frequently using to resolve a problem (say I just found out a bill is overdue) where I really feel under the gun and I find it astonishingly annoying to have to close a large number of dialogs telling me about new features.
A human being with some empathy might realize that you're initially in a state where you're not receptive to a message and later realize you are.
If I got a popup advertising a new feature after I completed a task I'd be a lot more receptive to it, particularly in that I'd be feeling the glow of having completed a task, being satisfied with the product, and not feeling so pressured, having some headspace to learn about a new feature.
So is the appearance of any modal window something that justifies filing tickets with Firefox?
It doesn't sound like that's PaulHoule's motivation anyway — he knows that these tickets are not going to be fixed, just closed — the point is to "pour just a little bit of sand in the gears".
If usability tickets are closed because the company doesn't want to bother, then maybe these gears deserve to have sand put in them.
I generally approve of subversive actions which are naturally damaging if and exactly if the accusation they are based on is true.
That is, the logic is something like "well, either it gets fixed, in which case it's a victory for good, or they're hypocrites who don't really care, in which case 1. it wastes their time and 2. they deserve to have their time wasted."
Is PaulHoule filing tickets with other browser vendors?
Is the point to target Mozilla, or to actually make a difference in accessibility?
Why would he file tickets with browsers he does not use?
And my whole point is that a strategy can have multiple effects. As I understand it:
- Firefox care about usability => the issues get fixed or at least considered.
- Firefox don't care about usability => sand in the gears.
So it's a hybrid strategy whose purpose depends on the situation.
I dunno. I don't personally report many bugs in public software...
But reporting real problems because you are annoyed that problems keep appearing and don't get fixed doesn't look like a societal hurting behavior to me. It does look like personally hurting, but antagonizing the author because of this is a real societal hurting behavior.
> Well, what are examples of these popups?
CTA to translate between languages which the translation models don't support "yet". It's disrupting for absolutely no reason.
I wish someone would answer your question.
As it stands, without any example, I for one have no idea what is being talked about, where these popups in FF are, how they affect accessibility.
Do I dislike modals that cover the entire window, yes, absolutely, but I have never encountered such in FF as a browser.
This is a huge pet peeve of mine, and not even specifically in Firefox or even browsers. It's in applications and OS's as well. I don't know if it's actually increased recently, or I've become more sensitized, but it harkens back to the web 1.0 pop-up misery of yore..
It happens because users tolerate it. Just look at the majority of comments in this very thread.
Why would you brag about that? Honestly, to what end? If your goal is to put sand in the gears what difference is there between this and trolling, spamming or just good ol' fashioned DOS?
I can't speak for OP but I would do it to the end it demonstrates how frustrating these 'small inconveniences' actually are. Don't interrupt my workflow unnecessarily. The same reason I don't want adverts everywhere, or I use sponsor block for youtube. I didn't seek out advertisements so I can filter it out.
I am not seeking out AI features so I don't add them to my browser. Mozilla and google and everyone it seems now is forcing it everywhere down our throats. If a small grain of sand reflects any of the same frustration, I say good. Wish I could do more.
Exactly, in my case I have the hidden disability of schizotypy which makes it harder for me to ignore things. If you are blind or dyslexic or have ADHD or any kind of cognitive problem you just don't need to have your spoons wasted by having dialogs cover content and user interface elements that you need to complete your tasks.
I'd just like to say, I'm somewhat diagnosed for anxiety and some adhd in Europe so it's a bit more loose, I never consider it or even medicate much. But this has made me think about the tiny things that throw me. And just now I found the perfect example. My TV. I removed all netflix, prime Disney etc. But as I'm watching YouTube which I'm prone to do to chill out. I sit on the remote. The remote had a netflix button, TV decides I need to install in, automatically, referral cookies loaded and my TV from my video I'm watching, to sitting on the remote, has netflix in my face asking me for money. Just happened AGAIN.
I didn't read malice into the post, just using a tongue-in-cheek tone.
My reading was "letting them know doing bad choices will not quitely be accepted".
But I may ofcourse read something into it that wasn't meant.
It goes beyond tongue-in-cheek if he's actually filing tickets and forcing engineers to spend their time responding.
I don't get it. Why should not tickets be submitted for when a new feature worsen the usability of the product?
Nobody at Mozilla is forced to do anything, including adding obnoxious popups and unwanted features to the browser. If you're inclined to do that, why not go work for Microsoft or Google, where you'll likely be paid more to do it?
Choices have consequences, and user-hostile choices should have developer-hostile consequences.
Some people really really hate Mozilla. But this is the first time I can recall seeing someone deliberately consuming Mozilla's resources and undermining the project, rather than arguing against it.
Though in principle he's not wrong in opening an issue.
Why does FF brag about adding yet another useless "feature"? Sure, it might be more worthwhile to fuck over google and the likes though
this would be admirable if it's done in earnest to try and increase accessibility, but you say explicitly it's done specifically to "pour sand in the gears". please don't
Maybe ff will actually fix the problem then. They certainly have the money to, they just chose not to
Could you link some? Would love to see what dialogs are meant, whether they can actually cause accessibility issues or are just "unwanted" and how the maintainers comment/decide on that front.
Been a hot minute since I last installed FF from scratch so maybe missing something, but the only popup I could remember in more recent releases was one showcasing Firefox View, which only appeared after setup. And of course the "Change to Default" message every browser shows after first opening, including the ability to never show that again. Since then, nothing.
Using a healthy mix of Chrome, Firefox and Safari depending on device and task and while I have niggles with all three, not aware of this on any, but maybe I am blind on this front.
Dialogues are supposed to pop over content. There is not enough chrome for anything else.
But it used to be that browser dialogues would start from the chrome, thus being impossible for webpages to mimic.
That's childish and sad. Don't do that please
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As a long-time firefox user (since the very earliest days of phoenix), I have to say: focus on open standards and delivering a faster and more secure browser. Make runtimes like electron out of your engine. DO shit that matters. Forget pocket, AI, and all that other junk. That is not your mission!
The Mission is to make enough money to keep existing.
GNU Emacs doesn't make money, yet it exists. And yes, it contains a web browser. You can launch it using `M-x eww RET`.
I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Emacs is a spreadsheet, photo editor, toaster oven, or hair stylist. For the right people, it’s a desert-island app.
So Do I. EMACS is multi
GNU Emacs actually self funds from the essence of the universe. You can launch that feature with the command `C-x b r r r`
If it pisses off the people who use it, its existence will be irrelevant.
"Nooooo, you need to use FF no matter how much it pisses you off, since we can't let Google be a monopoly (even though it already is and it's the government's job to crack down monopolies)"
You put that in italics and quotes, presumably to mock the people saying this but...yes, you should! Google does much worse things and is effectively a monopolist, so not using Firefox necessarily means using Google, which only entrenches their monopoly further.
Bitch at Mozilla, sure, but don't stop using it.
>...yes, you should!
Why? They're actively hostile to me as a user and nor catering to my needs and desires.
>Google does much worse things and is effectively a monopolist
Monopolies are the government's job to tackle so talk to your representative about Google, but leave suers alone to use what they like. When cars polluted we had the government force them to lower emission, not shamed users for buying cars.
>Bitch at Mozilla, sure, but don't stop using it.
How is bitching more effective tool than not using a product I dislike? Not using their product is my only way of protest as that shows in their statistics and analytics while they can and do ignore bitching.
Mozilla is a major corporation not a 15 year old with cancer sewing Knick-Knacks for donations in his bedroom, so it will only improve if the user base goes elsewhere, otherwise if people keep using it out of spite, they have no reason to ever improve.
It's not about whether you should or shouldn't use Firefox, it's about whether you should or shouldn't switch from Mozilla to Google.
If you want to boycott Mozilla, cool, stop using it and go to Ladybird or at least Waterfox. But if your solution to "this thing is hostile to me" is "so I'll switch to this other thing that is more hostile to me" and you don't see the flaw in that logic, I don't know how to explain it to you...
I think you're overstating the hostility relative to what an average user might say (biased pro-firefox user myself but I don't take their browser imperfections as active hostility).
And yeah, despite your protestations to the contrary, not wanting one company to have a browser monopoly really is a legitimate reason to support alternatives. In fact it's one of the best reasons. That's the problem with ridicule detached from reasons, you're going to look down like Wile E. Coyote and see there's no ground under you.
I'd love for real conversation about, say, keeping Servo, Web Assembly, the fallacy of "privacy preserving ads", how it would be nice to have a Firefox OS now with Android forcing "verified developers", about working with EFF to keep open standards and privacy at the center of the web. There's a rich conversation to be had about the role of Mozilla in the future of the internet, but incredulity and vague generalizations should be left back in the writer's room at Warner Bros.
>I'd love for real conversation about, say, keeping Servo, Web Assembly, the fallacy of "privacy preserving ads"
What is a "real" conversation? And what do those conversations help with here? Do you think Mozilla listens or cares about your conversations when they have all those billions coming from Google and can just sit and do nothing?
>how it would be nice to have a Firefox OS now with Android forcing "verified developers"
A lot of things would be nice, like ending world poverty and wars, but I'm being pragmatic and realistic instead of dreaming about things that won't realistically happen since in our world high level changes only happen, if big money or politics get involved.
>There's a rich conversation to be had about the role of Mozilla in the future of the internet
Conversations that would be a waste of time since Mozilla won't act based on our conversations. HN is full of such conversations. I'm being pragmatic, not entertaining some shallow philosophies of "wouldn't it be nice if" that don't lead anywhere since if 'ifs' were cookies I'd be fat.
Mozilla is constantly responding to community feedback, almost to a fault, encompassing everything from user interface changes, to features requests, to rolling back undesired changes. I would recommend reading more about Mozilla Connect, which I would argue was specifically launched to get ahead of spurious accusations like these. For a big flashy example, their blog post introducing Tab Groups is titled "You Asked for it, we built it", and the first line is "What happens when 4,500 people ask for the same feature? At Firefox, we build it."
Moreover they've revised their Terms of Use following criticism (much of it here on HN), wound down Pocket and Fakespot in response to feedback about these being outside of their core mission, implemented visual search in response to community requests, made it easier to switch between different profiles again based on community requests, added a rollback option for extensions to previously approved versions in response to developer requests, brought back night mode on iOS after having removed it because the community asked for it, changed the design of the iOS toolbar to get rid of the share button, centralized developer support tools in an all-in-one add on hub. And offered extensive explanations when choosing not to implement or maintain features (e.g. Live Bookmark tool).
The trouble with the real work of responding to requests is it's often granular and unsexy, even when examples abound, and it's easy to not know what they're really doing and reach for the pitchfork.
A good place to start is this explainer on all the community feedback they've been taking in: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/about-mozilla-connect/
Did you know..
Mozilla get >80% of its revenue from Google, by making Google Search as default search engine on Firefox.
While Mozilla pretends to be a non-profit, its CEO makes millions of dollars annually.
Mitchell Baker: Stepped down as CEO of Mozilla in February 2024. Her salary for 2023 was reported to be $6.9 million. Laura Chambers: Became interim CEO of Mozilla in February 2024. Mozilla has not disclosed her salary for 2024 yet.
As of October 2025, the average annual salary for employees at Mozilla in the United States is ~$115k.
Not bad for a "non-profit", eh?
Yup, Mozilla and Firefox are surviving (nay, thriving) due to Google.
But Google's hand on the Mozilla tiller, is merely the top of the proverbial iceberg. Google has a monopoly on the browser market, encouraged by Apple Safari slipping down to <14% market share amongst the leading browsers.
Google's Chrome (>71% market share) and the other Chromium forks (>9% market share: Edge ~4.5%, Samsung Internet Browser ~2%, Brave/Vivaldi/etc. ~1%) dominate the browser market. Opera (~1.75% market share) is not a Chromium fork, but it is based on Chromium Project.
https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/
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Firefox shouldn't try to "be chrome", people who want chrome just use that. Firefox should be /not chrome/.
> focus on open standards
through many standards today are unilaterally pushed by Google, and standardized by a committed mostly influenced by Google and often only implemented by Google until there is enough pressure for Safari to maybe implement it way later....
and while in the past the standards where mostly pushing for a open, compatible, powerful web priorities seem to have shifted to focus more on pushing Google (Ad,App Focused) then Chrome interests
and it's not uncommon that standards aren't made in a generic simple easy to implement for anyone way but in a "that works well with how Chrome currently works internal way" and if your browser works different bad luck.
to make that even worse in the cases where Chrome/FF/Safari worked together there had been enough cases where Chrome had last minute forced changes to standards, or simple implemented them differently. I.e. the whole CORS having issues in FF isn't caused by FF not complying with standards but by Chrom last minute adding an exception to the standard as they implemented it slightly different and websites testing against chrome not against web standards.
which is the other problem, most websites implement "whatever works with Chrome" not web standards
so the whole open standards things is currently kinda not working, not for FF and neither for Safari (which to be fair is the new IE in the aspect of surprisingly lacking features everyone else has or having diverging buggy impl. Like pretty much every web dev team I have worked with had to do extra testing for Safari and frequently "doesn't work in Safari" tickets where FF mostly "just worked" as long as you didn't try to use the lasted grates chrome pushed web features.)
> Forget pocket, AI, and all that other junk. That is not your mission!
for pocket and a bunch of other projects they did shut them down, pocket is gone as you might not have noticed
but the mission is a browser which provides a good usage experience, and if there are features people expect from "alternative not Chrome" browsers you have to compete. If we look at what "AI" FF has this is mostly what you are seeing and many of the things aren't any of the "bad" things people associate with AI:
- site translation, chrome had that a long time and people start expecting it to exist
- automatic alt text generation, a very based UX/accessibility feature
- some "AI" auto grouping for tab groups, unneeded but you can do it with 2015th level of "AI" (i.e. pre LLM) and it shouldn't have bound much additional dev resources. Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if it was mainly surprised to bootstrap the local AI internals needed for useful features like local AI based site translation.
- (experimental) link preview with AI summaries, that looks pretty goated if it works as advertised tbh. and might bring new people to FF.
- integration with an AI search engine, but, it's basically just another search engine choice so no issue here
- allow integration of 3rd party chat bots. No technical people (which can afford it) have started using chat bots _en mass_ (for daily life stuff like grocery lists etc.) Sure a lot of people on HN love to pretend that AI is only used by enthusiasts but that (sadly) just isn't true. ChatBot integration is becoming quite a must have for browsers, no matter how much I don't like it.
So all in all maybe except the tab group suggestions feature are all reasonable choices which make people use/stay with Firefox. Some being outright basic features commonly expected (site translate).
Lastly outside of telling you it exists when its added FF doesn't seem to try to push it onto people. And if you think that it's not okay if a software tells you about a new features less then once a month in average then IMHO that is a you problem.
Firefox used to push for open standards and not just IE6 standards coming from microsoft. This era feels worlds away from where we are now where chrome is the new ie6.
SIDEBAR! The invention straight from the 90s. Fucking browsers and their antiquated approach. NEW THING? Put it on a SIDEBAR! pffffffff
Make the fucking old and ugly browser interface customizable. And expose this to webpages, so banks could force you to use the default view.
Yeah, I will say I don't understand the value add here. I used to be able to have a webpage in a sidebar with Opera back in like 2009. That version of Opera, imo, is still more satisfying browsing experience to me even than modern browsers.
It makes me a little sad we only ever see FF hit the front page of HN for stuff people are angry about. The FF team building useful features like tab groups that are improving UX. But I guess if it bleeds it leads.
They make such strange choices though.
Like `Firefox Data Collection and Use` which includes `Send technical and interaction data to Mozilla` and some other stuff is on by default. [1]
Glean data is here [2]
Historically I don't think FF would have made that decision - now I have to periodically check what else they turned on without me asking.
I generally don't like telemetry but I really don't like telemetry that is on by default - that very much should always be a "Would you like to?" question.
[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/technical-and-interacti...
[2] https://dictionary.telemetry.mozilla.org/apps/firefox_deskto...
Maybe the Firefox team should stop doing bad things if they don’t want people saying bad things about them.
One person's bad thing is another person's much-anticipated feature. As long as they're optional and useful for enough users to justify the resource expenditure, I really don't see the problem.
Optional and off by default.
Telemetry is on by default in FF.
The most likely outcome of taking that advice is they do nothing and stagnate.
Not getting in front page is likely not better then getting on front page due to controversial thing.(AI isn't "bad", its controversial)
"The policeman wore his belt in a way I didn't enjoy, therefore I will take up residence with the drug dealer."
The point is that it's the least bad browser ecosystem and it only gets negativity whereas Chrome, Brave, etc. get mostly dickriding instead.
There was a whole experiment with this "Tab Candy" thing a few years ago. And it failed and Mozilla disabled it and it got silently removed, well, almost, because a fair amount of people complained. I wouldn't be surprised if today's tab groups go the same way. Browser innovation is hard and at this point most of the innovation is in forks of Firefox, rather than Firefox itself.
Tab groups have become incredibly popular and were subsequently copied to Chrome.
I gave up on Firefox, sadly. I still use Thunderbird (which is apparently no longer part of Mozilla), but I couldn't deal with FF and Mozilla screwing around anymore.
I switched to Orion which has been working great for me. I'm happy to pay money for my browser and be confident that the money is actually being put towards maintaining and improving the browser.
I want Firefox to succeed, I just... can't justify it.
I wonder if they'd do better by charging $10 for a compiled binary and distributing it on Linux as an AppImage. I'd be happier to pay for that than send an unrestricted donation to the Mozilla foundation. Normally I frown on unrestricted donations, but something seems really off over there.
>building useful features like tab groups
wow what an achievement. Vivaldi which has 1% of there budget had that feature for almost 10 years. Despite almost half a billion dollar budget almost all there good UI changes come years late being the last to add them for example profile management.
It is honestly embarrassing to compare Mozilla to companies like brave that actually created a private ecosystem without subsidization from there competitors.
Am I the only one who remembers the old tab groups that were removed before these new tab groups were added?
Edit: Ah, it seems Mozilla remembers: https://web.archive.org/web/20151112023150/https://support.m... (linking archive.org in case they take it down, this is the first copy I can find)
Right, Mozilla was actually first on the block with this. And even when they removed it it was available as an extension, because their extension ecosystem was capable of UI-level changes.
Something weird I've noticed in Firefox lately -- and been wondering if it's related to these sorts of features -- is that if I leave Firefox open for a relatively long time (e.g. a few hours) NoScript will show whatever my search engine is set to as a script injection on all pages (with a "sidebar?" note). This happens even if I do not interact with the browser during that time. If I restart Firefox, then it goes away (until a long period of time elapses again).
Anyone have insight on why that's happening?
I dont know why anyones being defensive about firefox as if they have drawn ire for no reason at all, when in my xp they have done alot of sus stuff, and I hardly know anything about well anything.
Did you know..
Mozilla get >80% of its revenue from Google, by making Google Search as default search engine on Firefox.
While Mozilla pretends to be a non-profit, its CEO makes millions of dollars annually.
Mitchell Baker: Stepped down as CEO of Mozilla in February 2024. Her salary for 2023 was reported to be $6.9 million. Laura Chambers: Became interim CEO of Mozilla in February 2024. Mozilla has not disclosed her salary for 2024 yet.
As of October 2025, the average annual salary for employees at Mozilla in the United States is ~$115k.
Not bad for a "non-profit", eh?
Yup, Mozilla and Firefox are surviving (nay, thriving) due to Google.
But Google's hand on the Mozilla tiller, is merely the top of the proverbial iceberg. Google has a monopoly on the browser market, encouraged by Apple Safari slipping down to <14% market share amongst the leading browsers.
Google's Chrome (>71% market share) and the other Chromium forks (>9% market share: Edge ~4.5%, Samsung Internet Browser ~2%, Brave/Vivaldi/etc. ~1%) dominate the browser market. Opera (~1.75% market share) is not a Chromium fork, but it is based on Chromium Project.
https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/
Lots of nonprofits have CEO comp in the millions. Firefox is a large company with lots of employees and tens of millions of users. They have to offer compensation that is somewhat close to market rates to be able to hire people capable of managing that kind of scale. Mozilla isn't funded by individual donations and doesn't charge its users for Firefox, so what does it matter what the execs get paid?
The difference is that Mozilla is directly and significantly funded by its biggest competitor, yet its venerated Firefox browser barely has a 2% market share.
(Which leads me to a ponderous question: if I had the wherewithal to pour hundreds of millions of dollars of my money into a non-Chromium FOSS browser, supported by 1700+ staff and 1000+ volunteers, would that browser have merely a ~2.17% market share? Hmmm... As a comparative analogy, Samsung Internet browser has barely had any improvements in years and it is surviving due to it being the default browser on the millions of Samsung smartphones & tablets worldwide, but its market share is ~1.86%. I don't think Samsung is spending half a billion a year keeping this browser alive, nor paying its browser departmental heads millions of dollars to keep the browsing chugging along.)
Since it is evident that Mozilla is a for-profit organisation funded by its biggest competitor, then we must wonder: do the Mozilla volunteers get their fair share of all that profit? If not, why not?
But since we all know Mozilla is always crying for more money, then where are the hundreds of millions of revenue going every year? I suspect it is neither going deep for improvements to the Firefox browser (I mean, come on! "tab groups" are relatively new feature in Firefox, but Firefox users have been demanding this feature for years, and Firefox's major rivals have had tab grouping feature for years, so what took Firefox so long to to do this bare needful?!), or to the many hardworking volunteers doing their best for a supposedly good (but losing) cause (Firefox's market share is eroding, and I assume Google is not sad about that trend).
I did but I don't see FF splitting from Mozilla (by whatever mechanism) either sadly and if you lose the name it becomes hard to get adoption for the forked one - see IceWeasel.
that being said IceWeasel is a particularly bad name
I mean the primary image editor in open source land is Gimp (which I had to explain to an ex many years ago when she hopped on my PC) and our main open source source control system is called `git` (funnier if you are British) so open source devs have form for picking bad names :D.
`Git can be a right git` is a valid sentence here.
Welp, here we go again. The CEO pay is slightly more than 1% of their revenue, which sure, I don't love, but they're not like secretly poisoning kittens or something which is how you're making it sound.
Those salaries actually seem pretty normal, and I don't think anything other than ordinary information literacy is necessary to understand they have a non-profit foundation side by side with the corporation, it's not a hidden conspiracy.
Also, on HN I think people are largely familiar with these data, so sharing numbers with an air of dramatic revelation seems tonally inappropriate. Though I love that, of the random accusations thrown at Mozilla, one of them is constantly pingponging back and forth between claiming they're running out of money or that they are awash in profits.
I do think there are real issues: killing Servo was a tragedy, "privacy protecting ads" I think is conceptually fallacious, it seems like with Android forcing developer certification that the world could have used a FirefoxOS right about now which they unfortunately abandoned many years ago. But the community phenomenon of reeling off ordinary pay figures like they're a conspiracy feels more like an inadvertent confession of functional illiteracy when interpreting financial data.
I wish we talked about the real stuff (pushing back on their dabbling in ads) instead of breathlessly sharing misunderstood graphs of browser market share to try and imply that side bets made from 2020-2025 retroactively caused the market share losses of 2010-2015.
OK, Let's talk basics and real stuff..
Why is a company getting millions of dollars (from its biggest competitor) for doing the bare minimum (or is that a quid pro quo deal between them)? "Too little, too late" seems to be the norm at Firefox and Mozilla in past few years.
Firefox users have been demanding Tab Grouping for years (and the other major browsers have had Tab Grouping feature for years), but it was only in April 2025 that Mozilla finally gave that basic feature in Firefox: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/tab-groups-community/
I rest my case.
Yes, lets talk real stuff! Firefox invented tab grouping a decade before it existed in Chrome, and sustained an extension ecosystem with full access to browser UI, such that tab grouping extensions long were possible in Firefox that were not possible in Chrome. It's never been gone, and adding a new natively supported iteration is a good thing, not a bad thing.
Mozilla maintains 32 million lines of code, roughly the same amount as Chromium, with by some estimates, less than a tenth of the resources Google dedicates to Chrome. That return on investment spans everything from leading on development of major new web standards, e.g. WebAssembly, WebRTC, DNS over HTTPs, limiting cookies, profile sandboxing. It also includes Rust, key to their major "Quantum" project which by itself was a monumental achievement which rebuilt the browser on a stable, secure, memory safe foundation. Even Chrome is now starting to use Rust, Mozilla's language, for parts of its browser.
They have a rapid patch cadence for security fixes, and their browser is the heart of an ecosystem including Tor, Waterfox, LiberWolf, Mull, and others for niche, hardened or performance tuned variations that depend on Gecko. Tor, in particular, is relied on to get around censorship in parts of the world that try to control internet traffic.
And there's the monopoly issue, which is that if we lost Firefox, every active browser engine would be owned by two trillion dollar platform companies, Google and Apple, who could write the rules of the internet on their own. Which includes, among other things, trying to dismantle ad blockers and lock you into their ecosystems.
The totality of its return on investment across security, open standards and browser independence has been irreplaceable, and overlooking that because they didn't roll out a tab feature fast enough is mind-boggling lack of comprehension of the full scale of what Mozilla produces from beginning to end.
> Firefox invented tab grouping a decade before it existed in Chrome, and sustained an extension ecosystem with full access to browser UI, such that tab grouping extensions long were possible in Firefox that were not possible in Chrome. It's never been gone, and adding a new natively supported iteration is a good thing, not a bad thing.
First and foremost, Mozilla didn't invent Tab Grouping, nor did it invent or pioneer Tabs for that matter.
James Newton Gunn (1867–1927) invented Tabs (patented in 1897) as a new way to access the contents of a set of index cards, separating them with other cards distinguished by projections marked with letters of the alphabet, dates, or other information.
In 1982, Wordvision for DOS was perhaps the first commercially available product with a tabbed interface. In 1992 Borland's Quattro Pro popularized tabs for spreadsheets; Microsoft Word in 1993 used them to simplify submenus. In 1994, BookLink Technologies featured tabbed windows in its InternetWorks (most likely the first internet browser to feature tabs). That same year, the text editor UltraEdit also appeared with a modern multi-row tabbed interface. The tabbed interface approach was then followed by the Internet Explorer shell SimulBrowse in 1997, which was later renamed to NetCaptor. Opera was one of the earliest browsers with tabbed browsing and private browsing.
In fact, the company that pioneered Tabs for Internet Browser was BookLink Technologies for its browser InternetWorks in 1994 (BookLink's technology was later licensed by Microsoft to bring Internet capabilities to MS Word).
And no, neither did Mozilla nor Chrome invent or pioneer Extensions either.
Browser extensions predate even tabbed browsing! Ironically, it was Microsoft that introduced extensions with Internet Explorer 5 in 1999.
And three years before Google popularized private browsing with Incognito Mode, Safari already had a feature for temporary suspension of cookies and cache. Even Opera had private browsing long before Firefox and Chrome got the feature.
So Tabs, Extensions and Private/Incognito Browsing -- which people tend to think were pioneered by Firefox and Chrome -- were actually invented/pioneered years earlier by other companies for other browsers/editors. Firefox and Chrome simply adopted these nice ideas and made them popular because of their huge user base.
If we want to argue that Firefox's support for Tab Grouping through some extensions was a pioneering act, then that's incorrect roo. It is like saying Microsoft invented Antivirus because it allowed the first Antivirus software to run on its OSes.
Sure, Tab Groups were allowed to be created via Extensions supported by Firefox and Chrome, but the Tabbed Grouping feature was adopted in these browsers as native feature only years later.
I recall that MyIE2 (an IE shell browser in 2002) (MyIE2 later got sold and renamed as Maxthon), featured tabbed browsing, ad blocking, support for Internet Explorer plugins, skins/themes, forms autofilling, customizable toolbar, whois queries, variable keyword searching from address bar (very useful for intranet sites), translation and a highly customizable user interface.
Tab Groups and Sync Tab Groups are probably the Extensions you remember that gave the Tab Grouping feature as add-ons to Firefox. But these extensions (like thousands of other extensions) were created and maintained just by one person or a handful of volunteers.
As you can see, Mozilla Firefox (even with half a billion dollars as annual revenue (thanks to Google) and thousands of staff & volunteers) has not been giving basic features that even old browsers and one-person/one-small-team driven browser extensions have done so admirably for a long time.
Do you really think the average internet user is bothered more about WebAssembly, WebRTC, DNS over HTTPs, limiting cookies, profile sandboxing? Or would the average user be more interested in tabs, tab grouping, themes, customizations, private browsing and other user friendly features in a browser?
But you are right..
> there's the monopoly issue, which is that if we lost Firefox, every active browser engine would be owned by two trillion dollar platform companies, Google and Apple, who could write the rules of the internet on their own. Which includes, among other things, trying to dismantle ad blockers and lock you into their ecosystems.
That is precisely my point. Why is Google in total control of its third biggest rival in the browser market? How is that beneficial for end users?
Do you know why Chrome and Firefox typically ace any latest web standards tests? It's because Google will think forward on proposed web standards, and choose whichever of those ideas it likes and it will implement them in its own ways as new features in dev builds of Chrome and then release them as stable releases later. So by the time these proposed web standards (WebRTC, etc.) even come up for any solid discussions by W3C and other partners of the industry, it is already a moot point, because Google has already interpreted and implemented it in some particular way which is already in vogue (popular use) across many millions of Chrome (and Chromium forked browsers) users across the world. Invariably then, it is Google's interpretation and implemented approach that then becomes the agreed web standard specification. And sooner, rather than later, Firefox also follows suit with almost the same thing, because it is Google pulling the strings of Mozilla behind the scenes. And usually Apple & Safari are not far behind doing the same, because it is already a lost battle when Google's way of that web standard is what the industry is forced to adopt.
So yeah, the internet is already monopoly, thanks to Google, and its far-reaching, far-thinking clout and sheer tenacity to do whatever it wants.
Case in point? Google and Apple have been hit with antitrust lawsuits in EU and USA, accused of monopoly of their products (especially all store) and advertising services on the internet and Android & iOS ecosystem. Google and Apple have been fined several millions or few billions in several such lawsuits, but that's merely a slap on the revenue wrist of these tech giants.
And that arrogance can have profound impacts, as Google can use its clout for more sinister reasons:
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/07/googles-web-integrit...
https://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2016-06-22/google-is...
Non-profits are headed but also staffed with the same ambititious types as for-profit businesses. If you think only Mozilla pays its CEO attractively, you are misinformed. Managerial talent costs, and non-profit CEOs, in my direct experience, use the same lateral pay package comparisons to other non-profit CEOs to justify their comp packages.
The whole point of carving out an alternate rules space for non-profits in a capitalistic economy is that some business functions are both necessary and very unlikely to be profitable.
The assumption that employees would work in non-profits at an uncompetitve wage is a widespread fallacy. In the end a non-profit is either:
1. unprofitable but so necessary it finds subsidies to continue unprofitable operations
2. breaks even
3. runs well enough to generate an operating surplus which by NP tax regs must be either distributed to employees as a bonus or put forward to organisational growth.
In any of these three revenue scenarios, underpaying critical staff is an org death spiral by loss of requisite talent.
CEOs in the US often make much more in the US than other countries, and US non-profit are not nearly immune to the larger forces responsible for that trend.
So where are those millions of dollars to Mozilla from Google really going?
Mozilla has a staff of around 1700 employees in USA, but it has 1000+ volunteers. Are those volunteers getting a fair share of the profits of this non-profit company? If not, why not?
And even with all that half a billion dollars of revenue every year, why is Mozilla Firefox have a barely ~2% market share?
OK, Let's talk basics and real stuff..
Why has Firefox failed or deliberately delayed to give basic features for years that its major competitors have had for years?
Why is a company getting millions of dollars (from its biggest competitor) for doing the bare minimum (or is that a quid pro quo deal between them)? "Too little, too late" seems to be the norm at Firefox and Mozilla in past few years.
e.g., Firefox users have been demanding Tab Grouping for years (and the other major browsers have had Tab Grouping feature for years), but it was only in April 2025 that Mozilla finally gave that basic feature in Firefox: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/tab-groups-community/
Or is that the implicit deal between Google and Mozilla. "Hey puppet, if you want the carrot, then just keep your head down, and just tick along doing barely anything new, and let me control the world as I see fit."
I'm genuinely wondering: if any other decent non-Chromium FOSS browser got half a billion dollars every year, would it give some tough competition to Chrome and Safari?
Since we're all here to complain about Firefox, I want to add that at this point I'm a firefox user out of principle, but I swear I get so many weird performance issues with firefox on ubuntu that it feels like self-flagellation in service of the gods of the free and open Internet.
Unfortunately they're the kinds of problems that are really hard to submit tickets for: gradual degradation of performance over the course of a week until I kill the process and start it again, the occasional crash that I can't seem to associate with anything in particular, a bizarre bug where every once in a while firefox slows down and typing letters into any input field has a ~30 second delay...
I've never cared about AI or Pocket or anything like that, I just want firefox to be reliably snappy. And I really, really don't want a browser ecosystem dominated by two for-profit companies.
I've been a Firefox user since it launched (and a Netscape Navigator user before that). In addition to Desktop, I use Firefox on iOS with my 3-year old iPad Pro, which of late exhibits the same sluggishness that you describe after a while. It goes away if I force restart, but not if I just close tabs.
I speculate that it has to do with keeping alive closed pages. Something related that I first started noticing a few months ago is that if I mistime the closing of a YouTube tab, the sound will keep playing and the only way to stop it is to force quit the app.
I haven't noticed the issue on Firefox Desktop, but my MacBook Pro is reasonably beefy and maybe that helps.
I've definitely noticed this on desktop. Discarding all tabs doesn't really fix the issue, I have to go to `about:profiles` every couple of days and restart firefox to get the navigation sluggishness to go away.
I've become increasingly aggravated with a browser that has propagandized since its creation that it is meant to give its users control over their web experience that the processes/workers that tabs and extensions start are almost completely opaque, or only accessible through bizarre about:pages that are themselves inaccessible by extensions, and only give you often unintelligible information about random unidentified groups of processes at the thread level.
There is no technical reason that I can figure out that there can't be a commandline top-like for Firefox that keeps up with every worker started up by a tab or extension; or for that matter logs every use of a granted permission by an extension; or of course to manage cookies, local storage, and memory allocations, and allows you to set alerts for them, block them, kill them, etc..
I've been bullying AI into constructing a minimal architecture that would do just that, and not touch much in order to keep it easy to maintain the fork. If anybody else has or knows of an existing solution, I'm all ears. If the browser is supposed to be an OS now, why is the one that claims to be free also a monolith with no process control?
Firefox just decided around the time they got rid of the ability to easily disable js that they wanted the web to be impenetrable magic. I decided that their motive is that they didn't want you touching their bosses' ads, or their strange experiments.
I'm selfish. If firefox has been pinning a core at 100% for the last hour, I'm greedy enough to want to know what tab is doing it (especially if it is a long-closed tab that left behind a little gift, could it be?) I know it's not my place.
That last delay bit might not be a Firefox bug but rather something in the Debian/Ubuntu stack. I get that same type of freeze up about once a week. I typically have FF open but it can happen while I’m working in something else.
In my case I’ve chalked it up to running Debian on a MS Surface device. I’m using the standard kernel though since the Surface kernel only adds touchscreen for my device and I don’t really want it.
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Mozilla's beginning to lose its way.
There are far too many "luminaries" in the tech industry who've had the last 20 years of "must create value!" go to their heads, even in the FLOSS space.
When profit motive does not exist (and it shouldn't in FLOSS) then you need to stick to things like the UNIX philosophy and KISS (keep it simple, stupid) in order to create good software. Trends mean nothing when you're in this mindset.
It's Firefox. It's a browser. It does browser things; namely, it sends HTTP requests, possibly executes JavaScript, and renders the resulting computed data on a screen as HTML. It does not need to have AI integrated. At best, AI should be a downloadable extension.
If the group's leadership cannot comprehend this, then they need to be removed immediately and blacklisted from leadership at future organizations in the future.
This is an opinion, yet you state it like fact. While I'm hesitant to want any AI features in my browser, what a "browser" does isn't necessarily a settled debate.
> This is an opinion, yet you state it like fact.
No, the market states it like fact. 15 years ago FF was the belle of the ball. Now it has minuscule market share and is looking at an uncertain future.
> While I'm hesitant to want any AI features in my browser, what a "browser" does isn't necessarily a settled debate.
That's a fairly concise definition I gave, unless I'm responding to Diogenes.
> Mozilla's beginning to lose its way.
Beginning?
> If the group's leadership cannot comprehend this, then they need to be removed immediately and blacklisted from leadership at future organizations in the future.
You have no power to do this. They would have to remove themselves, or Google would have to make a phone call.
Or just watch its market share erode until it vanishes from the charts. You picked "beginning" too, and indeed it started when they betrayed the power-users userbase they had (the one that installed FF on their mum's computer and actively promoted it) to be more like the oh-so-successful Chrome (which was pushed with dark patterns like being bundled with AV updates). Personally, it made me go to the "old" Opera (Opera 12) until it got "Chromified" and sold to China.
They have consistently been doing the opposite of what the majority of their userbase expect from them (Pocket, paid sites forced to the "Speedial" page,...). To me, the only remaining value of FF is being up-to-date with web shena^H^H^H^H^H standards.
A FOSS project shouldn't be focused on succeeding; they should be focused on doing the right thing. No little compromises or play-on-words on your values. And if that means less funding, too bad, but so be it.
> You have no power to do this.
Never said I did.
>They would have to remove themselves, or Google would have to make a phone call.
That's what happens when you have bad governance at FLOSS projects.