[rafterydj]

I'll be contrarian to the thread sentiment and say: Mozilla has misstepped in the past, and will continue to do so, and they're partially funded by competitors for antitrust reasons, etc.

That said, I can't really disagree with anything in this. As a developer (and socially conscious human) I want to move in the direction of openness.

[giancarlostoro]

I think the problem many of us have is it feels like Mozilla invests more effort into everything other than its browser, we see the things they do outside of Mozilla, I mean it was so bad Thunderbird had to become its own foundation due to lack of funding!

I would love for there to be a world where Mozilla maintains Firefox and can make for product projects that provide higher value. I also have a pipe dream of one day someone like (and if they read this, and anyone who reads this will think I'm crazy) CloudFlare just buys Firefox itself from Mozilla so it can finally be funded correctly. CloudFlare has an interesting talent pool and I'm sure there's people who work with Rust / have worked with Rust who can help fund something like Firefox. Then I would like to see them create a true open foundation whose entire bottom line goes towards Firefox, not to anything else.

Free the fox from corporate shennanigans. By my own corporate shennanigans. And CF could be swapped out with any company bold enough to free the fox.

[glenstein]

>I think the problem many of us have is it feels like Mozilla invests more effort into everything other than its browser,

Unfortunately the side bets are disproportionately visible relative to the vast majority of what they actually do, which is ship millions of lines of code in browser improvements every quarter, keeping pace with Google despite a fraction of Google's resources.

I certainly think a better strategic partner than Google would be ideal. Yahoo had a strategically promising moment that slipped through its fingers that I think will always be a what-if. Cloudflare is interesting because they're very much a create-a-blue-ocean kind of company, and the problem with browsers has always been that the browser space simply isn't a revenue driver, it's something you subsidize from other businesses.

Firefox is, remarkably, the most successful self funded browser engine in the history of the world, but many great companies have come and gone in this space (e.g. Opera) and still fell behind. They invest more in the browser now than they ever have, they have shipped more production Rust code than anybody. But that's not louder than the noise in the modern internet.

I think you're right that someone like Cloudflare would be an interesting partner and I can't think of a better one off the top of my head. And if AI is eclipsing search, that threatens search licensing they're currently relying on. I don't know what AI in the browser is, what new norms, what new expectations, what core concepts are going to matter the most. But something is going to change and you have to get out ahead of that now, to be relevant tomorrow.

[steveklabnik]

I’m not sure Mozilla has shipped more Rust code than anybody, FWIW. The obviously have a lot, but so have other companies as well.

[giancarlostoro]

CloudFlare relies on it in key projects, which is why I feel like if I had to pick any tech company to consider taking a hold of Firefox, they'd be my top pick. I know some people are skeptical of them, but they have not goofed yet. Maybe if the CEO ever steps down I'll change my views on CF.

[wolvoleo]

Cloudflare hates Firefox though. I get a lot more captchas on Cloudflare sites with Firefox.

[spartanatreyu]

Yeah, but if they controlled firefox, there'd probably be less captchas to complete

[glenstein]

In the browser space they have. Google has been a lot more tentative about working it into their various toolkits.

[steveklabnik]

Yeah if you’re going to scope it to browsers alone, sure but Google is catching up. They just implemented JPEG-XL as a rust library for Firefox to use too, for example. Nothing at the scale of Stylo but it seems to be accelerating.

[Vinnl]

At the same time, Firefox last year gained tab groups, vertical tabs, a user-friendly profile switcher. Split view and tab notes are under development. It sometimes feels like it's moving faster than ever, and that's disregarding all AI features.

(Disclosure: I work at Mozilla, but not on Firefox.)

[giancarlostoro]

I kept up with it a lot during the Oxidation years and it felt like Firefox was getting a LOT then, while I'm sure its still getting attention (I was testing Firefox Quantum the second it come out), and I still use it daily, I'm just expressing the overall of how I and others feel, I dont feel they're ALWAYS messing up with Firefox, but it definitely feels like Mozilla does too many moonshot things that fail and it leaves anyone wondering if the money was better spent invested in Firefox itself.

[7bit]

You must be joking! The user profile switcher is NOT user friendly. It's lacking in every aspect of UX compared to Chromes profile switcher. And it has ads in it. Of all places, why the heck did they put ads into the user profile switcher.

[Vinnl]

Are you talking about the new one, or the old one? The old one was indeed horrible, but the new one is pretty nice IMO. I have no idea what you're talking about when it comes to ads though, I don't think either has that.

[7bit]

The old one doesn't have ads. I'm talking about the new one.

The ad I'm talking about is for a different Firefox service. I think it asks to you try your VPN or something. I'm not at home so I can't exactly tell you. But I just want to switch profile not getting bugged or judged to a different service.

Chrome makes this right. You click on the profile icon and instantly switch to a different profile.

Mozilla fucked that completely up.

[Vinnl]

Ah, I think you're referring to the account menu, which has been there for a while (indeed with links to Relay, VPN, and Monitor), and to which the profile switcher got added. If you're signed in to your Firefox account, it also includes menu entries to send tabs to different devices, access your tabs from other devices, and update sync settings.

I guess that's true, and that the profile switcher is in a submenu of that menu, so that's one extra click. Still a lot better than the old one though. But I agree that I wouldn't mind the profiles being in the top level menu, especially if you have, say, max. three.

[criticalfault]

all this should have been developed in 2000s

different point of view: tab grouping took 20+y to develop (since opera had it in 2000s).

in 2026 firefox should have: - fast ui - fast js - fast rendering - hw acceleration for video - same look and feel on all platforms - faster adblocker

just the basics, no? didn't add more advanced features here.

and let's see what is actually here: - UI rendered via HTML/xul. an abomination. a slow abomination at that. right clicking something can show you stagers of rendering of a menu. - check any Js benchmarks, you will see how FF stands - rendering,... there was a talk in one of the conferences explaining timing requests and time-to-picture. this may be blamed on the standards, but chrome does it better - video hw acceleration on Linux? is this actually working? and I don't mean 3/100 relevant codecs - same look and feel - done - AdBlock is the only advantage you have over other platforms. it would make sense to implement this in the browser and not rely on Js and extensions

it's sad and funny that people with only a couple million are going to soon catch up to Mozilla and make it obsolete, by building a Bowser engine, not only a shell around blink/WebKit.

[glenstein]

Look at what happened to Opera. They fell apart, abandoned their Presto engine for Chromium and sold to an outside investment group and now they serve ads based on user data.

There was, in my opinion, no better browser company past or present than Opera in the 2000s and 2010s (sorry Mozilla). But their example exposes the fallacy of assuming that building out great features guarantees market share gains.

[criticalfault]

opera had a different business model. I don't think they had millions upon miliona that Mozilla gets from Google for antitrust reasons.

opera had to earn their money.

this aside, Mozilla just now implemented tab grouping. does that mean they are going to, because of the added features, follow opera's path?

my point was that someone said how they increased development speed. and I'm saying they are breaking record in how slow it is. it's not 1y, it's since the feature appeared anywhere and it's 20y ago. what the f was Mozilla doing since then? obviously they didn't work on the features. but also they didn't work on the other list of things I mentioned since only one is fully delivered (look and feel on all platforms) and those are non-features like fore mentioned tab groupings, but core capabilities for a browser.

in everything else they are so much behind it's really a wonder they still have market share as much as they do.

[glenstein]

What are you talking about? Opera and Mozilla are both in the business of trying to deliver a good browser, which means good features. Different financing doesn't change the mandate to deliver good browser features, and Opera most definitely did rely on search licensing as their primary income stream anyway, despite attempts to diversify (for years they relied on Google and Yandex and got more money from that than other forms of financing).

As I said, my opinionated hot take is that Opera was probably the best ever at delivering features and performance beloved by users, but that wasn't enough to move the needle on market share, which is why Opera perfectly exposes the fallacy of assuming better features = better market share. In this context appealing to "business structure" is a deflection.

Also, this tab grouping argument is mistaken both on its own terms but more broadly as a stand in for the argument that the Mozilla team has supposedly done nothing. Firefox had native tab grouping years before Chrome ever had it, had arguably the best tab grouping extension of any browser due to an intentional choice to invest in an extension ecosystem that made that functionality possible, and for the most part, Firefox has never not had tab grouping. What's new is that it's back as a baked-in default rather than merely present as a best in class extension.

The idea that Firefox has done nothing is an unfortunate impression that comes from looking at a serious of unfortunately critical tech headlines and losing sight of nuts and bolts development. I don't have the patience to recite everything here, but every year they push millions of lines of new code, thousands of patches, and deliver measurable improvements to major browser components like webGPU, javascript rendering, shipping production quality rust code, and more for a browser with 30 million lines of code.

[dralley]

> I think the problem many of us have is it feels like Mozilla invests more effort into everything other than its browser, we see the things they do outside of Mozilla, I mean it was so bad Thunderbird had to become its own foundation due to lack of funding!

And then people simultaneously complain that Mozilla is reliant on Google for funding. There are not many good revenue options available for a browser other than selling search defaults - and AI may start choking off that revenue as well - but Mozilla also can't touch AI without being screamed at.

I mean, even literally this one sentence is self-contradictory. Thunderbird is not their browser. You complain that they "invest more effort into everything other than their browser" and then complain that they don't invest enough in Thunderbird.

No win situation for them in terms of public opinion.

* They can't get diversify their revenue to be less dependent on Google without doing things that people view as "distractions"

* They don't get credit when the "distractions" are for the public good, like LetsEncrypt, Rust, Opus / AV1, etc.

* They get punished for de-prioritizing "distractions" like Thunderbird and Servo and Rust because those distractions are popular.

* For years they were simultaneously being dragged for dropping the XUL extension ecosystem, and also dragged for low performance and lack of multiprocessing and a bunch of other things which were being kneecapped hard by the XUL extension ecosystem.

It's not like I love their management or anything, certainly they've made mistakes, but the narcissism of small differences hits them with full force relative to every other competitor in the space.

[blibble]

> There are not many good revenue options available for a browser other than selling search defaults

if they had set up an endowment instead of blowing it on unrelated pointless crap for decades they would have been self-funded indefinitely

they were pulling in over $500 MILLION a year

[glenstein]

>if they had set up an endowment

Mozilla has had an endowment for, I think, ~15 years now, and they have invested it and grown it from around $90 million to around $1.2 billion and counting. Which now is a firewall in case of emergency, as well as a resource that's helping to stand up a VC fund which is one of their most interesting pathways to diversifying revenue.

[blibble]

> that's helping to stand up a VC fund which is one of their most interesting pathways to diversifying revenue

oh for fucks sake, that's even worse than blowing it on stupid ideas

JUST USE THE MONEY FOR THE BROWSER

[glenstein]

They already spend more on developing the browser now than at any point in the entire history of Firefox, and that's after adjusting for inflation. They ship millions of lines of new code every year and apply thousands of patches. It's probably one of the biggest and most active open source projects in the entire world.

And just so we're clear, are you suggesting they shouldn't have an endowment at all, or that they shouldn't use the endowment to create any lines of long term revenue, or that they should but spending a fraction of a percent of it on a VC fund would not be successful? Whichever one you pick, there's at least one person who's exactly as upset at Mozilla for the opposite reason.

Edit: I would go so far as to say I think the VC fund is the single best idea Mozilla has ever had for long term financial independence. It builds on the success they've had thus far (such as it is) raising money from search licensing, and then using that search licensing money to stand up the endowment. Now, the VC fund leverages the endowment in a way that's the most serious path to financial independence they've ever had.

[giancarlostoro]

500 million could net you about 50 to 70 million annually if you put it all on the S&P 500... A few years of this and you're a self-funded non-profit...

[glenstein]

They're doing that. Their endowment is invested and it does grow by a non-trivial amount, though I don't know the exact numbers off the top of my head.

[drnick1]

Reminder: Ladybird is being developed by a handful of people with contributions from the community. It's far from being complete, but it clearly shows that you don't need an enormous budget to build a Web browser entirely from scratch, let alone maintain one.

[AuthAuth]

Ladybird should not be in the conversation. Its nowhere near FF or even usable as a browser.

[devsda]

It is more easier to secure revenue/funding from Google once they retain existing market share and gain more. They need to improve the product for that to happen.

With all the distractions they are abandoning their primary product and they are bleeding whatever miniscule market share they have. This means Google has more leverage over them and can eventually stop the funding once their market share drops beyond a threshold say 0.5% because we all know antitrust is not a strong reason anymore to keep FF alive based on trends of recent rulings.

[dralley]

If we're being completely honest, improving the quality of the product would not meaningfully improve their market share. That worked in the early 2000s when the competition (internet explorer) was utterly stagnant and the internet-using population was composed predominantly of techies willing to try new things. Browsers are commodities now, and most people aren't going to try a new browser when they're already using Chrome / Safari on their mobile device with all of the integrations that are available between the two.

Chrome gained marketshare not just because it was a good product but because they paid Adobe, Oracle, and legions of freeware antivirus providers lots of $$$ to put a checked-by-default box in their installers to install Google Chrome and make it the default browser for anyone not paying enough attention to uncheck the boxes, and because they targeted Firefox users visiting google.com with popups advertising how much better Chrome was. Mozilla could never do that and they would be excoriated if they tried. And as I mentioned, many of the aspects of Chrome that were indeed superior, were met with kicking and screaming when Mozilla tried to follow, e.g. choosing performance over the XUL extension ecosystem.

Sadly I think their best hope to regain marketshare is to indirectly benefit from Linux to capturing marketshare from Windows.

[glenstein]

>If we're being completely honest, improving the quality of the product would not meaningfully improve their market share.

Exactly right. They did the dang thing with Project Quantum, a massive rewrite of the browser, a massive leap forward in stability and performance. The thing everyone asked for. And they..... continued to lose market share. Because there are other factors, like monopoly power, and distribution lock-in.

You don't have to imagine what it looks like for a browser company to lap the field with an excellent development team, creative revenue raising ideas, being ahead of the curve on mobile, having best in class stability and performance, and building out features that their core user base loves and swears by. Because Opera was that company in the 2000s and 2010s.

But even Opera had to sell to a new ownership group and abandon their Presto engine for Chromium. Because, like Spock said, you can make every decision correctly and still lose. Which is kind of depressing, but it at least helpfully bursts the bubble of people claiming changes in market share are a one-to-one relationship to specific decisions about which features to build in a browser.

[devsda]

End users are easily influenced but they could have targeted developers.

I think they should have pushed for a gecko based electron alternative. End user dont really care if their favourite markdown editor or notes software is based on electron or gecko but it would have made sure that developers do not target, develop and test for only chromium based browsers.

[WorldMaker]

That would probably also be considered a "distraction" by HN. Electron isn't built by the Chrome team.

It also wouldn't be directly revenue diversification. You can't beat Electron by selling an alternative.

Firefox has somewhat tried to target developers. There's Developer Edition with a "direct to the dev tools" focus. Firefox's Dev Tools still generally are somewhat ahead of Safari's and Chrome's (though not always Edge's, even in the Edgmium era one of the few teams that still exists that doesn't upstream everything immediately is Edge's Dev Tools work). Firefox was directly ahead on Flexbox and CSS Grid debugging tools, though now everyone else has copied them. (Not to mention that the history of Dev Tools in the first place all points back to Firebug and other Firefox extensions that went mainstream and then made sense to prioritize as out-of-the-box tools.)

Firefox probably can't do much more to target developers on its own, from a browser perspective. Targeting developers doesn't seem to move the needle enough in marketshare, either.

It's not just Electron that developers are stuck in "develop and test for only chromium based browsers" modes. There's also all the top-down pressure in corporate environments to standardize on only one browser to "cut down" on "testing costs". There are the board room-driven development cycles of "I only care if it looks good on the CEO's iPhone" or "the CEO is into Android this year, that's the focus, everything else is garbage". There's also the hard to avoid spiral of "Firefox marketshare is low, don't worry about it" to more sites not working as well in Firefox to Firefox marketshare getting lower to more "don't worry about it" websites and so on.

[jcranmer]

> I think they should have pushed for a gecko based electron alternative.

They did! At least three different versions of it!

[dralley]

Developers are no longer a significant fraction of the pie, and a significant fraction of those are web developers or do web development, and those users will in all likelihood primarily use what their users are using, which isn't Firefox.

[pdpi]

> And then people simultaneously complain that Mozilla is reliant on Google for funding. There are not many good revenue options available for a browser other than selling search defaults - and AI may start choking off that revenue as well - but Mozilla also can't touch AI without being screamed at.

Proton Mail, Google Workspace, iCloud, Dropbox are all viable money-making products that line up well with Mozilla's core mission if they made their own alternatives. Persona could've been really good, if one of these products existed and had enough traction to build a user base that made third parties want to depend on Persona.

There is a world where Mozilla built services people actually want instead of focusing on trust-eroding gimmicks like Pocket, and they'd be thriving right now.

[glenstein]

>And then people simultaneously complain that Mozilla is reliant on Google for funding. There are not many good revenue options available for a browser other than selling search defaults - and AI may start choking off that revenue as well - but Mozilla also can't touch AI without being screamed at.

Wish I read this before posting my comment, I wholeheartedly agree at every level. The criticisms are a mile wide, an inch deep, and sometimes legitimate, but often deeply contradictory, and there's no attitude of accountability or self awareness when someone jumps in for the millionth time saying "don't get distracted" but also "offer something new to generate revenue".

And the factual literacy of the drive-by critics is, unfortunately, sometimes brutally off the mark and even veering into conspiratorial. Some unfortunate threads appear to be young adults reading a Mozilla 990 filing for the first time and misreading a conspiracy into every single line, very casual attitudes about accusing them of falsifying financial statements or accusations of controlled opposition, or ridiculous suggestions that they spend down their endowment on "engineering" to no particular end, and sometimes completely misrepresenting how much of a time suck and energy suck certain projects were (e.g. blockchain is sometimes on the Rap Sheet of Bad Things, but they basically wrote a white paper or two).

Which, as you note, isn't to say there's no legitimate concerns: "privacy preserving ads" is a contradiction in terms, the strategic reliance on Google is precarious, and side bets like Pocket were left to languish. In normal times I might consider myself a critic. But unfortunately too often the comment section is an out of control orgy of completely uninformed cheap shots, with an ounce of truth to every pound of confidently incorrect accusation. And that phenomenon, to my mind, is as big as any misstep Mozilla is or isn't making.

[shafyy]

Sure, it's not like CloudFare centralizes enough of the internet infrastructure, let's also give them one of the few (more or less) independent browsers.

[giancarlostoro]

I think it is an interesting fit that makes sense. CloudFlare works on the web, and they aren't out here bubbling up how you view the web or altering it in any way, unlike Google or Bing which curate what results you get.

[AlecSchueler]

Give it time.