[CuriousRose]

Fully agree with this.

- Mozilla SSL Certs - for corporations that don't want Let's Encrypt

- Mozilla Mail - a reliable Exchange/Google Mail alternative (desperately needed imo)

- Thunderbird for iOS - why is this not a thing yet?

- Mozilla Search - metasearch that isn't based on Bing/DDG/Google

- Mozilla HTTPS DNS - although Cloudflare will probably always do this better

All seemingly low-hanging fruit with brand alignment.

[MarsIronPI]

> - Mozilla Search - metasearch that isn't based on Bing/DDG/Google

As much hate as Brave gets overall, I think Mozilla should take a page from Brave's book if they're going to make a search engine. I think they should have their own index, possibly supplemented by Bing or Google. Let people opt-in to using their browsers to help crawl for the search engine index, like Brave does. Then add in some power-user features like goggles and custom ranking, and they'd have a pretty compelling search engine. They should even be able to subsidize it somewhat with advertising: DDG and Brave Search are the only two websites I allow ads on, because they're usually relevant and they're never intrusive.

[estimator7292]

They could partner with Kagi. Pretty much everyone trusts Kagi, so if Mozilla convinces them to get on board, Mozilla must be actually serious about being trustworthy.

[veqq]

Kagi is just an AI company. (That was always their stated goal...)

[mghackerlady]

I wouldn't partner with them, but if they do make a search engine they should take a page out of their book and focus on giving quality results. They can start by blacklisting any seo blogspammy site and instead try and direct you to the best results for any search first (for example, a wikipedia article or relevant docs)

[input_sh]

> Pretty much everyone trusts Kagi

...on a forum run by its investors whose goal is to push Kagi, sure. Outside of this forum, nobody knows about a fringe little search engine that is paywalled and only has 62k users.

For a brand like Mozilla, even something as dumb as Ecosia would be a better fit, as they have about 250x the number of users of Kagi.

[freehorse]

> on a forum run by its investors

They are not VC funded afaik, and esp not YC funded.

> 250x the number of users

If you offer the service for free and serve ads in "privacy respecting way" sure you get more users. But anyway this is a mozilla's states goal too, so it would fit.

[input_sh]

https://help.kagi.com/kagi/company/

Third paragraph. They didn't go down the official YC route, they just let their initial users invest in it. How many of those investors do you think are among us here pushing it at every opportunity because it's in their (undisclosed) financial interest to do so? Even when it makes no sense to do so like here?

[freehorse]

> How many of those investors do you think are among us here pushing it

Probably a bunch are users here, but

1. the amount of money (~2.5m) gathered in a 2-year period from 93 people seem peanuts in VC terms, if we are talking about YC itself rather than random users

2. their whole approach and strategy seems to aim towards a sustainable, long term development rather than quick profit (so far)

3. there does not seem to be any obvious link between them and YC itself in general

4. even if some of the 93 people are "pushing it" here, quite a few other users do the same without being investors (I have done/do it), and the former would probably do it without being investors anyway. There are bigger problems than some random people who invested in some company write once in a while supporting comments in some forum online.

I guess "forum run by its investors" can be interpreted as either the users of the forum are investors or the admins/owners are, so I tried to address both.

I think it is more like that users here are more prone to like kagi and want to pay for search (they spend more time online on a computer, they have jobs where web search is important to them etc), so you have people saying how great kagi is, but their experience does not necessarily extend to the general population as much because most people do not care as much about these things to think they are worth paying. Rather than most of them being actually kagi investors and trying to get people subscribe to kagi for their investment to grow. People can also just be satisfied with a product/service and talk about it.

[MarsIronPI]

Meh, my trust in Kagi is kinda shot, given that they seem to have forgotten that sales tax existed[0].

[0]: https://d-shoot.net/kagi.html

[vjvjvjvjghv]

Why is Brave getting hate? Their browsers are treating me very well on mobile and desktop. I am always horrified when I see how the web looks for other people with all ads.

[freehorse]

For many reasons, one being that they were injecting urls with their affiliate codes to unsuspecting users.

[armedpacifist]

This was in 2020. Brendan Eich addressed this in a blogpost iirc, with a perfectly plausible explanation. It seemed like a bad/unfortunate design decision, which happens all the time in software development and not the conspiracy theory people claimed it to be. It was fixed in a matter of days.

If this is the main reason to not use Brave then I'm genuinly interested in hearing about the other reasons. I might learn something I wasn't aware of.

I don't understand all the hate Brave gets either. It passes pretty much all privacy tests ootb and I see 0 ads, on desktop and mobile. This is what actually matters to me.

[freehorse]

I don't think the past controversies were just unfortunate, "mistakes" or conspiracy theories, but products of their business model + opportunistic execution. I just don't trust brave and think I have better options for a browser. If I had to choose between brave and chrome, I would use brave. If you like/prefer using brave, honestly good for you.

[CuriousRose]

> Let people opt-in to using their browsers to help crawl for the search engine index, like Brave does.

This is really cool.

I'd be happy with a re-branded SearX/SearXNG, with a paid cloud hosted instance from Mozilla that uses a shared base index plus your own crawled pages or optionally contribute your crawls back to the shared index.

[Tepix]

As a US corporation, Mozilla cannot compete on privacy focused services. If they want to focus on privacy (which I think is great), they should ship software that improves privacy, not offer services.

[fsflover]

Are you saying that a warrant canary isn't useful?

[hermanzegerman]

He is saying that no one outside of the US will trust them with their data, because of the US Cloud Act and similar legislation.

There is a reason Proton & Co are based in Switzerland and not in the US

[graemep]

They can compete where the alternatives are also US based services.

They can compete in the US.

There are also many people who are more concerned about privacy from businesses than from governments. There are also people who are more concerned about privacy from their own government than a foreign government.

Although the Cloud Act and similar issues with the US are much discussed here, I see no sign it loses American big tech much business.

[black_puppydog]

> There are also many people who are more concerned about privacy from businesses than from governments.

We're living in an interesting time that may (or may well not!) turn out to be a pivot point in this question. People being ICE'd based on data traces they leave in commercial products may well make this kind of question more tangible to non-technical folks.

> Although the Cloud Act and similar issues with the US are much discussed here, I see no sign it loses American big tech much business.

If that is true (which it may or may not be) then it would also mean competing on privacy isn't a winning move, whether within or outside the US.

[aydyn]

lots of people seem to trust apple

[vaylian]

Marketing can do a lot to create trust.

It's not all or nothing. Depending on your threat model, Apple's services might be fine. But I guess most people don't think enough about the implications of storing many years worth of data at a US company like Apple.

[philipallstar]

Apple has actually proven itself over a long period of time on this issue. Maybe Mozilla has as well (do they encrypt telemetry logs etc for people with a Mozilla login?) but I haven't heard so much about that.

[fsflover]

https://sneak.berlin/20231005/apple-operating-system-surveil...

[sneak]

Wrong. Apple explicitly preserves a backdoor in the e2ee of iMessage for the USG.

[rurban]

Did you really forgot about Snowden's Apple slide? Also their phones are routinely mirrored at the border. Just to support the unconstitutional government agenda of policing thoughts and speech.

[Tepix]

Yes but Apple is also avoiding collecting a huge amount of data, e.g. by doing things on-device.

[fsflover]

https://appleinsider.com/articles/24/04/10/apple-makes-it-re...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43047952

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42014588

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34299433

[reactordev]

Ok, keep telling yourself that as you can’t remove iCloud…

[binwang]

> Mozilla Mail - a reliable Exchange/Google Mail alternative (desperately needed imo)

Thunderbird Pro was announced a while back, still not GA though

[amluto]

How about: Mozilla HTTPS To My Router (or printer or any other physically present local object) in a way that does not utterly suck?

Seriously, there’s a major security and usability problem, it affects individual users and corporations, and neither Google nor Apple nor Microsoft shows the slightest inclination to do anything about it, and Mozilla controls a browser that could add a nice solution. I bet one could even find a creative solution that encourages vendors, inoffensively, to pay Mozilla a bit of money to solve this problem for them.

Also:

> Thunderbird for iOS - why is this not a thing yet?

Indeed. Apple’s mail app is so amazingly bad that there’s plenty of opportunity here.

[Affric]

Apple mail steadfastly refusing to permit me to see an email address so I can verify the source of an email.

Truly the most cursed.

[VanTheBrand]

It’s so stupid but what I do is click forward which reveals the email in the compose window.

[vladvasiliu]

How so? You can tap the from / to fields and it shows the addresses.

[nneonneo]

When you tap one of those fields it bounces you to a contact card. If it is an existing contact (for example, yourself), you just get the full contact card. If that contact card has multiple addresses (my contact card lists ten), you get no indication of which one it was sent to.

At some point in time the actual email address used was flagged with a little “recent” badge - by itself a confusingly-worded tag - but even that doesn’t show up consistently.

It’s stupid because there’s really no reason to play hide and seek with the email address - that’s an identifier that people should generally be familiar with (since you have to use it reasonably often), and lots of people have multiple addresses that they can receive mail at.

[internet2000]

> When you tap one of those fields it bounces you to a contact card.

They've changed that behavior a few versions ago: https://i.imgur.com/J965L1Z.png

[e2le]

> Mozilla Mail

Aren't they already moving towards this? The Thunderbird team recently announced ThunderMail which will have an optional $9/year plan.

https://www.tb.pro/en-US/thundermail/

> Thunderbird for iOS

https://blog.thunderbird.net/2025/10/state-of-the-bird-2024-...

> We’ve also seen the overwhelming demand to build a version of Thunderbird for the iOS community. Unlike the Android app, the iOS app is being built from the ground up.

[palata]

> All seemingly low-hanging fruit with brand alignment.

Genuinely interested: are you a developer? Doesn't sound like low-hanging fruit to me.

There are already many alternatives to Gmail, I don't think Mozilla would make a lot of money there. And I don't know if they are making a lot of money with their Mozilla VPN (which I understand is a wrapper around Mullvad): why would I pay Mozilla instead of Mullvad?

There are alternative search engines, like Kagi in the US and Qwant/Ecosia in Europe (though only Qwant seems to keep the servers in Europe).

What I want from Mozilla, really, is a browser. And I would love to donate to that specifically, but I don't think I can.

[kakacik]

A reliable, corporate-friendly, with advanced support model alternative of Exchange + AD is something that could sink a titan like Microsoft in 2 decades, at least its non-cloud business (but then for cloud alone they are just one of many, nothing special there).

Literally everybody is fu*king fed up with M$ arrogance. But you can't get rid of Active Directory and Exchange. Make comparable alternative (with say 80% of most used use cases, no need to die on some corner case hill) and many many corporations will come.

This won't come from some startup, it has to be a company like Mozilla.

[palata]

Are you sure of that? There have been alternatives to Microsoft Office for decades. Yet most businesses use and pay for Microsoft Office, even though their employees most likely don't need anything that doesn't exist in those alternatives.

Why would it be different with email?

[mghackerlady]

Nobody got fired for buying ~~IBM~~ Microsoft. People trust Mozilla though, they've built their brand on not sucking as bad as M$ and Google

[kakacik]

I don't think you understand what I was writing about - none of that is MS Office. Thats another topic, but without this (and say some sort of domain propagation rules) bigger corporations will never move out of MS.

[palata]

My understanding is that you say "someone could make an alternative to X and that would kill Microsoft because everybody hates Microsoft".

My answer is "there have been examples of alternatives to Microsoft products for decades, and it hasn't killed Microsoft at all, so I don't see why it would be different for another service (in your case, email)".

Did I misunderstand your point?

[MarsIronPI]

> A reliable, corporate-friendly, with advanced support model alternative of Exchange + AD is something that could sink a titan like Microsoft in 2 decades, at least its non-cloud business (but then for cloud alone they are just one of many, nothing special there).

Ooh, imagine if they also threw in some kind of Teams alternative, maybe based on XMPP or Matrix! That might get a lot of attention.

[CuriousRose]

It is certainly not low hanging fruit in the development effort space, but they can utilise open source projects in ways that MS cannot due to licensing, and therefore have much more resources overall in terms of community dev contributions.

[pmontra]

> Thunderbird for iOS - why is this not a thing yet?

They are building Thunderbird Android over K9 Mail, which is an Android app. They would have to start from scratch on iOS, which of course is feasible but it takes more time.

[GuestFAUniverse]

Quant and Ecosia are already building their own (European) index in a joint venture. Mozilla Search is totally uninteresting (to me).

[palata]

Nitpick: "Qwant"

[MYEUHD]

> Thunderbird for iOS - why is this not a thing yet?

There's no release yet, but it's being worked on. https://github.com/thunderbird/thunderbird-ios

[endemic]

Re-launch FirefoxOS -- not for smartphones, but as a privacy-focused ChromeOS competitor. Give students Mozilla/Firefox brand awareness while prying them out of Google's clutches.

[SamDc73]

> Mozilla Mail - a reliable Exchange/Google Mail alternative (desperately needed imo)

I think the privacy industry is oversaturated we already have: ProtonMail, Tuta and Mailbox Mail

[CuriousRose]

I'm thinking more at an SMB level, not necessarily for secure mail, PGP and the like.

IMAP + CalDev + CardDev sat on-top of cPanel is getting a bit long in the tooth for companies that want exchange-like mail solutions outside of the big two. Unfortunately MS and Google run the "spam" filters as well, so you really need an established company that they can't afford to irritate to enter the space - see Mozilla - to reliably force acceptance of enterprise mail outside the Duopoly they have.

Zoho is trying their best also in this space - not sure how successful they have been on the trusted email provider and integration front.

[veqq]

> IMAP + CalDev + CardDev sat on-top of cPanel is getting a bit long in the tooth

Why so?

[CuriousRose]

- Very irritating to setup on mobile clients (iOS profiles are not a good solution)

- Usually hosted on shared VPSs where IP reputation is decimated (wonder how this will be affected by pure IPv6 hosts)

- Patching is often manual and forgotten about (n = 1)

- Backups are often an afterthought

[gkoberger]

Agreed, this is why I think they should buy.

[rvba]

Nobody wants this.

People want firefox.

[gwd]

That's like saying, "Nobody wants Adwords; people want Chrome." True but besides the point. Salaries have to be paid somehow.

Some options I can think of for paying salaries:

- Go the Wikipedia route, stay entirely free, and beg for donations on a regular basis

- Start charging for Firefox; or for Firefox Premium

- Use Firefox as a loss-leader to build a brand, and use that brand to sell other products (which is essentially what GP is suggesting).

How would you pay for developers' salaries while satisfying "people [who] want firefox"?

[palata]

> That's like saying, "Nobody wants Adwords; people want Chrome."

Bad comparison, but I understand your point.

> Salaries have to be paid somehow.

I would be interested in knowing how much of what Mozilla does brings money. Isn't it almost exclusively the Google contract with Firefox?

As a non-profit, Mozilla does not seem to be succeeding with Firefox. Mozilla does a lot of other things (I think?) but I can't name one off the top of my head. Is Google paying for all of that, or are the non-Firefox projects succeeding? Like would they survive if Firefox was branched off of Mozilla?

And then would enough people ever contribute to Firefox if it stopped getting life support from Google? Not clear either.

It's a difficult situation: I use Firefox but I regularly have to visit a website on Chrom(ium) because it only works there. It doesn't sound right that Google owns the web and Firefox runs behind, but if Chrome was split from Google, would it be profitable?

[gwd]

> Bad comparison, but I understand your point.

I'm not sure why you think so; it seems pretty close to me. Chrome and Firefox are exact competitors; both require a large amount of development investment. Neither one are being charged for, which means their development needs to be supported some other way.

The people using Chrome don't want Adwords, but it's Adwords that is paying for Chrome's development. People using Firefox don't want email or Mozilla certificates or what-not, but something needs to fund Firefox's development.

> ...if Chrome was split from Google, would it be profitable?

They'd have to figure out a different business model, wouldn't they?

[palata]

> They'd have to figure out a different business model, wouldn't they?

Doesn't mean that there exists a business model that would be profitable, does it?

[dyauspitr]

Agree with a lot of this except Mozilla Search. Search is already or very soon going to be an entirely LLM driven space.

[khaelenmore]

Precisely why we need a reliably working search engine without llm, ai and other nonsense

[mghackerlady]

I predict the next gen search engines will be a return to form of the early web-directory style of known good pages and having to be vetted to appear in results