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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.

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.

> 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Nitpick: "Qwant"

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"?

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.

Agreed, this is why I think they should buy.

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

> We couldn't have guessed it at the time, but as of 2025, Google is pushing developer verification and stepping closer and closer to ecosystem lockdown.

We did guess it. Google were already past their “don’t be evil” days in 2013. They were possibly better than other companies of similar scale, but the decline was already clearly beginning. People had long warned that Google could not be trusted to keep Android open in the long term, that eventually their benevolence would fade. A good chunk of the enthusiasm around Firefox OS was in breaking the duopoly and the idea of a platform that would be much harder to lock down.

I installed FirefoxOS on a phone years ago, it wasn't even bad really.

> And just to add, I kind of mourn FirefoxOS.

Today, we have Mobian, postmarketOS, PureOS and many more GNU/Linux OSes for smartphones.

What would be Mozilla's revenue model for instant messaging?

> instant messaging

Doesn't Mozilla have their own Matrix server?

You don't really seem to be trying to fairly describe the problem.

With Pocket, Mozilla forced it on everyone, then two years later they bought the service, then many years later they eventually killed it for everyone. They didn't even try the approach of making it an opt-in extension that users could install if they desired. The unoffensive strategy was obvious all along, and they just didn't choose that route. The concerns of Mozilla partnering with and promoting a proprietary service were easily anticipated, and the solution (buying Pocket) was clearly an option since they did that step eventually.

Yes, Mozilla may be in a hard place trying to diversify and find success with their other ventures. But they're clearly making plenty of unforced errors along the way.

> It's damned if you do, damned if you don't. Basically every product Mozilla releases is immediately met with extreme scourn and scepticism. While everyone else seems to get the benefit of the doubt, including the likes of Google, Mozilla seems to get the exact opposite of that.

You have any evidence for this - that is, that the same subsets of users are being hard on Mozilla and soft on Google? Because that's pretty easy to quantify if you have evidence, which I notice you haven't presented.

Right now all you have is a gut feeling disguised as an factual claim about reality - which is worse than worthless because it's biased by your feelings, as opposed to being a wild guess.

I believe that this is just the typical pattern of groupies being more toxic than band-members or crew. If you go to /r/rust, every announcement of a donation to the Rust Software Foundation is met with derision for the donor. In fact, if you go there today, you'll see it's got some extraordinary drama going on - primarily from non-programmers. If you look at the latest Arduino developments, it's the same story with non-users enacting some purity ritual and users being more sedate.

The reality of the thing is that community-oriented projects have the problem that the groupie-layer of the community are a group that are so marginally attached to the organization that the death of the organization won't affect them but are sufficiently attached to the organization that they can affect the org.

A population like that will naturally tend towards extraction of all surplus from the organization - if the org dies as a result, it doesn't matter, but if they don't do this they're "leaving money on the table" so to speak. With the rise of social media, the groupie layer of people can be extraordinarily large since forums with centralized sign-on allow for a variety of subjects to be posted and consequently being in the fandom is cheap - you don't have to seek news, it'll be there for you to have an opinion on. Hacker News, Reddit, etc. lead to a grouping point for people to have opinions on things they care so little about they would never seek it without it being thrust upon them by The Feed.

So I agree with you. It's challenging. I don't think it's because the community is special, though. I think it's just the structure of communities today because of the dynamics of social media.

I must have seen other sides of the community, since all I seen has been a consistent criticism that Mozilla neglects the two main products Firefox and Thunderbird, while focusing community money and focus on new products that does nothing to improve Firefox and Thunderbird. When new products get released it is indeed met with extreme scorn, and when they eventually fail, they will anew get criticized for wasting money.

There is a market share costs that pocket had on Firefox. Lost developer time, money and community trust mean that product pushed Firefox just that bit further into marginalization. Basically every product Mozilla releases is the same story when they fail to make their core product better.

It is not damned if you do, damned if you don't. Google could abandon Chrome, gmail or any other product like that and they would still be Google (and be profitable). Mozilla would not exist without Firefox, and the trust the community has with Mozilla is directly tied with Firefox.

> Basically every product Mozilla releases is immediately met with extreme scourn and scepticism. While everyone else seems to get the benefit of the doubt

Literally nobody skeptical of Mozilla is giving MS and Google the benefit of the doubt. Mozilla gets skepticism from people exactly because they don't want Mozilla to become like those companies.

Pocket in particular was a breech of trust. It brought ads and surveillance to firefox, when many users had turned to firefox in the first place to avoid those same things. Of course that was going to draw criticism.

Google and MS are never going to do anything other than sell out their users for profit. Firefox users are more fiercely critical of the introduction of anti-features and enshittification because they don't really have anywhere else to turn to. Every other browser is just openly collecting your personal data, pushing ads in your face and shoving AI down your throat. The best alternatives we have to Firefox as a browser that respects its users at all are forks of Firefox. If firefox fails because it becomes a chrome clone that's also bad for privacy people will stop using Firefox and if Firefox dies off there are real questions about how many of the forks will continue to be actively maintained.

The browser ecosystem needs an alternative to chrome. Users want a browser that doesn't push ads, collect data, and allows customization. People complain about Firefox because the stakes are high.

In all of these cases, 95% of the comments are by <1% of the users and are probably less relevant goals to Mozilla than us power users would like them to be. Someone is always going to be angry, that doesn't really decide whether you're damned if you do/don't though. I honestly wonder if "internet privacy" is even something the average user is truly interested in either.

I wouldn't be surprised if 'lame' things like "videos look a lot more vivid in Chrome" (due to the years of lag getting HDR support in Mac/Windows) lost Firefox more users than they gained for maintaining support for MV3 uBO. I.e. fewer than 10% of FF installs have uBO installed, even after Chrome dropped it, but the volume of comments about MV3 would have led you to believe this is all browser makers need to consider to be successful.

It couldn't be that Mozilla keeps making bad decisions? No, it must be the community that's unreasonable.

Here is a hint: People who are OK with Google behavior don't use Firefox.

> Basically every product Mozilla releases is immediately met with extreme scourn and scepticism. While everyone else seems to get the benefit of the doubt, including the likes of Google, Mozilla seems to get the exact opposite of that.

I've been thinking about this for a while, ever since The Framework DHH incident.

Basically, framework sent DHH a free laptop and funded his ruby conference and "arch distro." DHH meanwhile has some white supremacist musings on his blog. The Framework community flips out, talks about betrayal. There's people in the forums talking about how they were about to buy a fleet of machines but now will have to go back to Dell or whoever.

I was in the thread trying to understand - ok, we're doing ethical math here, right? We liked Framework because ostensibly buying from them reduced our e waste in the long run, and maybe is long run cheaper since we can do our own repairs on easily available parts. Meanwhile, Framework turns around and gives maybe 10k to someone who is prominently pulling a shitload of people into Linux world with Omarchy, who happens to have some disgusting opinions on his blog. I feel like switching to the main companies like Dell or HP or whoever, comes with way darker ethical implications. I mean one of these companies are the ones that provision the IDF, some of them have donated to Trump's ballroom wayyy more than the Ruby conf donation, they all have horrifying supply chains, and not to mention, don't come with any of the environmental benefits of a Framework machine.

So, why is Framework examined under a more critical lense?

My takeaway was twofold: first, people seem ok to dip their toes in activist progressivism to a degree, but are basically primed to throw their hands up and say, "I knew it, default capitalism really is insurmountable, oh well, back to the devil I know, no point in trying ANYTHING!" Second, people seem deeply focused on aesthetics rather than practical outcomes. Framework's far larger contributions to Linux space are instantly nullified by one relatively small donation to a guy who himself has massive contributions to FOSS but also a couple of really gross blog posts. It's not ok to cut away the gross bits: the entire thing is polluted.

I tried to point out the dangerous game being played since I can guarantee I can find a more ethically pure environmental anarchist than any supposed progressive on the forum - after all, the more environmental decision isn't to buy a Framework, it's to rescue a Thinkpad from a landfill, and by the way, anybody here still driving to work instead of taking the bus? And so on. People were, politely, shutting me down. "It's not the same, all framework has to do is apologize for the DHH thing and it'll all be ok." Sure, until it gets out that the CEO was at Trump's inauguration, or that the local Taiwanese office works with super shady parts suppliers, or... Seems to me the best thing to do is try to make a rough ethical calculation based on practicalities rather than purity testing, but nah.

So, if you're going to do something good in this society, you need to not just be much more ethical than the heteronormative capitalist participants, you need to be unimpeachable.

> You can't charge for it

They could try. I just keep hearing people who would pay for no extra features as long as it paid for actual Firefox development and not the random unrelated Mozilla projects. I would pay a subscription. But they don't let me.

Doesn't Firefox make them the lion's share of their profits just from the Google payments?

If they let Firefox atrophy to the point it will have no market share, let's see how that works out for them

> But the issue is browsers don't make money.

What?! Browsers might as well be money printers! Have you heard how much money Google pays Apple to be the default search engine in Safari?

The higher Firefox’s user numbers, the more money Mozilla can make from search engine deals. Conversely, if Mozilla keeps trying to push a bunch of other initiatives while Firefox languishes and bleeds users, Mozilla will make less money.

If you don’t like this form of revenue… well, I don’t know what to tell you, because this is how web browsers make money. And trying other stuff doesn’t seem to be working.

You can and you should. There are people that are happy to pay for email, for search, for videos, for news, for music. I don't see why there wouldn't be people happy to pay for a browser.

The idea that software is free is completely wrong and should be something that an organization like Mozilla should combat. If software is free, there can be no privacy, it's as simple as that.

They could make it so we could subsidize development like with Thunderbird.

That should not be a problem for a nonprofit which the Mozilla foundation supposedly is.

I've daily driven Thunderbird for over a decade. You have very few options for having a single program manage multiple email accounts outside of Outlook and Thunderbird anymore. Maybe Apple Mail on Mac (and whatever Microsoft is preloading on Windows these days), but that's it.

> They maintain a codebase that rivals that of Chrome and of the Linux Kernel and push the equivalent of Rust's entire codebase on a monthly basis.

Is that comparison supposed to make their management of the code base seem better or worse? Chrome, Linux and Rust are arguably colossi in their niches (Rust having the weakest claim). Firefox's niche is Chrome's and it doesn't do that well. It used to be that at least Firefox had it's own little area with more interesting extensions but obviously that was too hard for them to handle - yes I'm still grumpy about ChatZilla.

Technically the foundation could still change the direction. But they won't because leadership is essentially shared between the corp and foundation.

If they were on a sustainable trajectory they wouldn't be selling their soul for advertising money and other ill-advised revenue projects that contradict their stated mission.

Google (currently) pays Mozilla $400-500 million a year to be the default search engine in firefox.

edit: in 2023 they took in $653M in total, $555M of which was from Google. They spent $260M on software development, and $236M on other things.

Mozilla took in the money from the distant past all the way into the present. They have leaned into privacy the whole time, while not being perfect.

At some point they ease off the google money or it goes away itself. And they move forward on privacy.

Google was less demanding in the past as well; they continue to give Apple billions each year.

There are a number of privacy-oriented business models, as listed here: https://aol.codeberg.page/eci/status.html - while not as lucrative as some, combined with an endowment its a good living that many companies would envy.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

I agree with the person you're responding to. Decades of funding and they have zero savings to show for it.

Though it's questionable as to how much big players like Google would have continued to fund Mozilla if they had seen Mozilla making the financial moves that would have made it an independent and self-sufficient entity.

That's a great question, honestly, and I like your framing of trust.

I do not trust Mozilla to keep a product alive. I was frustrated by Firefox OS and more recently Pocket, but everything they've tried or acquired aside from the browser itself (and Thunderbird I guess?) has failed and been shut down. That has burned a lot of people along the way.

For this reason I can't see myself becoming a user of any future Mozilla projects.

That's a fair question. It's of course my opinion, not hard fact, but here goes:

- They have for years been trying to add stuff to Firefox that nobody wants, and were privacy violations. The "marketing studies" come to mind.

- They have for decades been wasting their time and money on everything BUT Firefox, and failing at literally all of it. You can't help but notice the stellar incompetence of Mozilla leadership.

- They have for a long time been raking in hundreds of millions of dollars a year from Google, pissing it away on useless stuff, but mostly on enriching the management layer. How can somebody like Mitchell Baker be making millions of dollars a year while simultaneously seeing Firefox market share drop to damn near zero? This is a thoroughly corrupt organization.

Paying a company for something doesn't mean that the company isn't going to also sell every scrap of your data they can get their hands on. If the company is unethical you are always going to be the product. Mozilla is either going to be an ethical company or it isn't and how much money you give them won't make any difference. Mozilla has not always been an ethical company, but I don't think it's too late for them to turn that around, even if it will take time for trust to be rebuilt. I still want them to be the hero we need them to be.

I'd love to be able to modify JS at runtime on random websites. Too often there's a bug, or a "feature" that prevents me from using a service, that I could fix by removing an event or something in the JS code.

They were also supposedly working on mobile apps. I'd pay some solid money for Thunderbird mobile if it was a good product.

No passkeys, no authenticators.

I think password manager integration is pretty janky but that’s not something Mozilla can solve in general.

It's weird when someone's wish list is something you've been doing for years for free.

Do you mean they need income, or do you actually mean profit?

In a nonprofit, you don’t need layoffs unless you’re losing money (negative profit), normally.

Safari is fast and performant but once you load a heavy web app that uses a lot of memory safari will kill the tab. It’s incredibly frustrating to have a page reload with a banner simply saying the site was using too much memory and was reloaded. Especially when you’re on a maxed out MacBook with plenty of resources.

Have you compared with something else than Chrome? Otherwise it might be that Chrome is just very power hungry compared to Safari, but maybe Firefox is more efficient by now? Chrome has slowly turned into a monster on it's own, not unlike what they competed against initially when Chrome first arrived.

I suspect that the people making these claims that Safari is no longer the most battery efficient are not Apple users. It's quite easy to empirically validate which browsers are most efficient by looking at the average energy impact in Activity Monitor. Safari is the winner, Chrome/Brave are not far behind, and Firefox is the clear loser.

The wider point here is that you can only use FF as long as Mozilla can fund it and Mozilla can only fund it as long as Google funds them. At some point, it will be cheaper for Google to pay monopoly fines than funding Mozilla.

Brave is adware.

Been running it since 2021. The adblocker is simply great. A d keeps getting better.

It's good enough when some terrible lazy web designer only tested on Chrome. It does nothing to protect against the future when Google decides they are sick of people trying to get around their Ad Block ban and change the license because no one has any real alternatives anymore.

Also blocking is not as good as intentionally poisoning with something like Ad Nauseum

A few years ago. Crashed constantly and didn’t support tagging bookmarks.

I've found it a bit like "what car did you drive in to work with today" in that any typical current and working car is not going to be a stark difference to a high end car in terms of how fast you get there... but you'd definitely notice a piece of crap with a donut, broken heating, and screeching brakes causing you problems if that's what you were comparing instead.

I.e. I can count the number of times I said "wow, uBO Lite didn't make this site usable but loading up Firefox with uBO and it worked fine" on one hand. At the same time, if I ever look and compare how much is actually getting blocked, uBO is definitely blocking way more. Doing a side by side compare of dozens of sites it becomes easier to see minor differences I wouldn't otherwise have noted, but may not have mattered as much.

I commented about this a few weeks ago here about this, but essentially: v2 allows you to block things you can't see, but you still probably don't want, like folks hiding cloud analytics behind CNAME cloaking to allow it to appear as a first-party site rather than Google Analytics, for example.

You won't "feel" this in your day-to-day browsing, but if you're concerned about your data being collected, v2 matters.

Does it not still suck at blocking YouTube video ads? As in, you get a delay before videos start playing.

There are a lot more Manifest V2 only extensions than only Adblockers.

How's that work for you on Android? Firefox on Android with uBlock is the huge win.

Doesn't work for Prime Video ads. Tbh I don't mind that too much.

Ungoogled Chromium is maintaining Manifest V2 support in the fork?

Nobody wants three or four corporations manipulating and controlling information (with a mix of hallucinations) all behind a subscription. The large tech companies have nearly universally lost all trust.

The models I've run recently on Ollama seem to about as good as the models I was running at work a year ago. The tech isn't there yet, but I see a path. I would be fine with that enhancing, not replacing, my usage.

>I will eat my hat if Google had nothing to do with the demise of Mozilla

One has to be truly naive to think they get half a bi a year from Google "just because." They have less than 5% of desktop market share and ZERO mobile presence.

IMHO, they wouldn't get this kind of money if they had a competent, technical C-suite that actually cared about creating a truly competitive free browser. The money is flowing because, not in spite of, the current C-suite.

I want a good AI integration with Firefox. The current chatgpt shim is horrible, something more refined would be nice.

Leaving XSLT in web standards and in Firefox would let it keep some comfy useful niche.

Is that right if Google don't want to keep it - then no one can have it ?!

BTW JavaScript (to replace it all) _is not_ a _web standard_ (but it is Oracle trademark).

They are looking at OperaGX and Brave selling literal spyware and still growing marketshare and correctly recognizing that the only people willing to switch browsers in the current day do not give a shit about any of that stuff and are weirdos looking for "features"

Look at all the people in this very comment section insisting that Mozilla is just the worst while using fucking chrome or chromium. Mozilla knows they will never get that market back, because that market just hates Mozilla for "reasons", usually "They fired a guy for being openly hostile"

The thing google did to cause the demise of firefox was pay to bundle chrome with tons of things users installed, and put a giant "Install Chrome for BEST EXPERIENCE" banner on every single page they control. Sane governments would have broken them up for their clear anti-competitive practices, but at the same time the vast majority of the users they "lost" never knew they had firefox in the first place and didn't notice when it got changed.

These users never even noticed when conficker changed their browsers to literal adware FFS, they certainly didn't "Choose" a browser freely.

Do we know for a fact that 'nobody wants AI in Firefox'?

> It's interesting that most people on Windows PCs switch to Chrome when Edge is the default

This is primarily because most people on Windows use Gmail and other Google services, and any time you visit a Google web property from a non-Chrome browser, there’s a prominent “Install Chrome” button that’s placed on those. Without Google’s web properties pushing Chrome even to this day, Chrome may not continue to be as big.

You said it better than me. This is the real reason Firefox has declined, and it's basically because of a monopoly.

We're implementing it though: about:keyboard in a Nightly build does what you expect, this is tracked in https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2000731 and dependencies.

> Like not being able to change the default shortcuts?

Sure, I would also love if Firefox would work like Emacs or some configurable KDE program, but at least I can access most things without needing to touch a mouse and bulk operation actually work unlike Thunderbird where they basically broke the whole UI a few years back and haven't fixed it since.

Do you know another browser that supports somewhat up-to-date non-Chrome-specific Web features and is better on the features I listed?

Not my experience. They feel similar, even with 16 tabs in Firefox and 1 in Chrome

> On my Android phone, Chrome opens web pages noticeably (and consistently) faster than Firefox.

How fast a page opens is irrelevant if that page contains ads.

You've confused them with GNOME. The witch is out, she did not last long.

What sort? Inquiring minds and all that... like a "Good Witch of the North"? Or a Hermione Granger type? Or the kind that own crystal shops that serve tea from renewed storefronts in quaint coastal towns?

I can only assume you're referring to Mitchell Baker? Mitchell Baker has gotten a /lot/ of negative comments on HN, and some for good reason, but the constant ask of "how she won the position" and the like just shows the ignorance of the commenters...

Mitchell Baker co-founded Mozilla, and was the legal mind that structured both the split from Netscape that salvaged the code and wrote the majority of the Mozilla Public License and the legal/philosophical stance of the organization. She's an attorney with a specific background in intellectual property law, and without her contributions the entire world would be poorer for it. Mozilla, long before Firefox, was instrumental in the early parts of the open-source movement helping to define what it even meant to being open-source and creating a more rigorous and legally tested framework.

I am not a huge fan of Mitchell, so I understand and agree with much of the criticism, but it stinks of sexism or some other ulterior motive when people "wonderingly" suppose "how she won the position". Is anyone curious how Mark Zuckerberg became CEO of Meta, even though he's mostly blown through billions of dollars on boondoggles and acted in unethical ways? No, not at all, because he's the (co-)founder. So why is a different standard applied for Mitchell? Is it only because she's a woman, or is there some other reason?

Obviously through pagan rituals

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These are all the same sort of vaporware promises that come straight from every AI booster. These features will never exist and you should feel bad for pretending they might.

You must use extensions for very different things than I do.

man not a single one of those examples sounds like something I'd need, or even need an AI agent to do. I keep seeing the ads for AI browsers and the only thing I can think about is the complete and utter lack of a use case, and your post only solidifies that further. not that I'm disagreeing with you per se, I'm sure some people have a workflow they can't automate easily and they need a more complicated and expensive puppateer.js to do it. I just dont know what the heck I'd use it for.

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Translate sure.

Image search? I have a search engine for that.

Live captions? Didn’t ask for that, wouldn’t use it.

Dubbing? Ditto.

Summary? Wouldn’t trust an AI for that, plus it’s just more tik-tokification. No fucking thanks. I don’t need to experience life as short blips of everything.

Rewrite text better? Might as well kill myself once I’m ready to let a predictive text bot write shit in my place.

So… no thanks.

I get very annoyed by generative AI, but to be fair I could imagine an AI-powered "Ctrl+F" which searches text by looser meaning-based matches, rather than strict character matches; for example Ctrl+AI+F "number of victims" in a news article, or Ctrl+AI+F "at least 900 W" when sorting through a list of microwave ovens on Walmart.

Or searching for text in images with OCR. Or searching my own browsing history for that article about that thing.

  > Translation?

  > Image search?

  > Live captions?

  > Dubbing?

  > Summary?

  > Rewrite text better?

All those things we had before AI?

Safari does most of this by leveraging system-level AI features, some of which are entirely local (and in turn, can be and do get used elsewhere throughout the system and native apps). This model makes a lot more sense to me than building the browser around an LLM.

Exactly. There’s doom and gloom in this thread but the truth is that the early adopters who are using AI-integrated browsers love them.

Mozilla having unique features is what made it popular in the first place (tabbed browsing versus IE6).

Why use a drinking bird pointed at your F5 key when data centers crammed full of GPUs (and a touch of global warming) will do?

If they can perfect that feature, then users can be done away with once and for all.

It's a lot nicer to exercise your brain and maybe learn something.

At the risk of becoming the infamous iPod and Dropbox posters, I really don't think so. My browser having an LLM directly integrated adds nothing for my use cases that couldn't be accomplished with a web service or dedicated tool/app. For me, an integrated LLM running concurrently with my browser just represents a whole lot of compute and/or network calls with little added value and I don't think that this is unusual.

Blockbuster could have bought Netflix, stifled the idea, and then lost to… whatever, Vine or YouTube or something.

These stories just look compelling and obvious in retrospect, when we can see how the dice landed.

Time will tell, but I doubt it.

Are you talking about https://flow-browser.com ? I wasn't aware of this project before, but it appears to a new chromium based browser.

The Flow people are talking about when they talk about Ladybird and Servo is https://www.ekioh.com/flow-browser/ which does have it's own engine. It has a similar level of standards compliance to Servo and Ladybird, although it's not open source which puts it in a somewhat different category.

IronFox is essentially LibreWolf for mobile: https://gitlab.com/ironfox-oss/IronFox

I believe you stated the problem in a way that its unsolvable. Charge your customers money, so you can work for them. I'm not nearly as certain as you are that Netscape failed because it was charging money. Netscape just stopped updating for multiple years at the height of the browser wars.

For Firefox in particular, I would 100% be willing to pay for it. Individuals like me who will pay are rare, but companies that will pay aren't. I think the answer for modern Mozilla is a Red Hat style model. Charge a reasonable amount of money. Accept that someone is going to immediately create a downstream fork. Don't fight that fork, just ignore it. Let the fork figure out its own future around the online services a modern browser wants to provide.

Then, lean hard into the enterprise world. Figure out what enterprise customers want. The answer to that is always for things to never, ever change and the ability to tightly control their users. That isn't fun code to write, but its profitable and doesn't run counter to Mozilla's mission. That keeps Mozilla stable and financially independent.

Mozilla will maintain lots of influence to push forward their mission, because hopefully their enterprise customer base is big, but also they are the ones actually doing the work to make the downstream fork possible.

> Apple funds Safari's development but it's basically a side project for them, Google funds Chrome's development as side project to their ad business, Edge is the same for Microsoft.

Edge is a Chromium fork so essentially they don't have that much work in keeping up.

I was going to say a similar thing. I'm still not sure I have seen an example of a browser at the scale of Firefox (hundreds of millions of users, 30 million lines of code) being successfully monetized, basically ever, unless it was entirely subsidized by a trillion dollar company that was turning its users into the product. Or alternatively, succeeding by selling off its users for telemetry or coasting off of Chromium and tying their destiny to Google.

All the "just monetize differently" comments are coming from a place of magical thinking that nobody has actually thought through. Donations are a feel good side hustle, but completely unprecedented for any but Wikipedia to raise money that's even the right order of magnitude. Any attempts at offering monetized services run into delusional and contradictory complaints from people who treat them to "focus on the browser" but also to branch out and monetize. Hank Green has used the term hedonic skepticism for the psychology of seeking to criticize for its entertainment value, which I think is a large part of what this is.

For a more serious answer on funding, I think the most interesting thing in this space is their VC fund. Mozilla has been brilliant in building up and carefully investing their nest egg from nearly two decades of search licensing, and while it's not Ycombinator, they have the beginnings of a VC fund that may be a very interesting kind of Third Way, so to speak, depending on how that goes.

> donations which to be honest does not work

It would work if I knew my donations go towards the fucking browser and not towards "AI" or whatever the craze was before it.

Since they refuse to do that, I don't donate.

>what is the alternative funding source that could keep a company making a free browser running?<

i wonder how linux does it?

linus and anthony should have a head to head.

> Google funds Chrome's development as side project to their ad business

> Obviously we don't want Firefox to become ad-supported

Firefox is currently ad-supported. They take an enormous amount of money from Google, an ad company.

I honestly think the answer is tax money. It should be clear by now, that a browser is (critical) infrastructure and it should be funded as such. Ideally by multiple, non-aligned states.

It is from an archived link which is also in my comment and the article's date is from 2007: [0]

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20120105090543/https://www.compu...

That is also easily disabled. I think there are five or six things that I need to disable in a fresh Brave installation and then it's perfect.

Perhaps not paid, but. I think even if it's natural (I myself have been known to make a disparaging remark in their direction), I still suspect some level of manipulation (why was I saying these things? Out of frustration or because I'd heard something worrying and negative news sticks better than positive?).

Sure, firefox has had some issues, and nobody is denying the market share is an issue but:

1) It has worked reliably for the past 10 years 2) Mozilla and firefox have not disappeared, in fact it has created a number of useful services worth paying for.

Meanwhile, I keep hearing these negative "the world is ending" comments regarding what amounts to a "force for good" in this world, and I have to wonder.

How many of these people making these comments recently switched to chrome, and are saying this as an excuse?

The vast majority of these people complaining are using something like Brave or just plain Chrome.

They aren't expressing genuine criticisms for the most part.

Tons of them literally work at google.

Like, there's a poster a couple threads over insisting "Brave is great, you just have to ignore the crypto shit and change a bunch of settings" and like, somehow brave doesn't get regular 600 post long threads about how it's "Dead" and "It's the end" and "I have never used Firefox in my life but I certainly wont now!"

It's absurd.

"Mozilla's CEO makes $6 million" says people who get very angry if you suggest we should pay the managerial class less of the worlds money and also never seem to complain about any other CEO making that money and don't say anything about how much the CEO of Brave makes or how much money Google as a whole sucks out of reality to do whatever they want with, including subsidizing a browser to kill any competition.

Firefox got big because every young tech nerd installed it on everyone's machine and then a few years later, google literally paid tons of installers to also bundle and install Chrome and make it the default browser and everyone here always insists that people who did not choose to use firefox and did not even notice they now use chrome are somehow going to pay real money for firefox?

Meanwhile Opera is showing how nobody gives a shit about any of this "Privacy" nonsense in the market, and the important features are things like "you can install a theme your favorite youtuber made for shits and giggles" and "Advertising to children"

You want browser engine diversity? Guess what, that's Firefox right now. There is nothing else. That's why I use Firefox. There's nowhere else to go.

Personally not support monopolies? If firefox is not working, do you have a solution/alternative?

Even in a compromised state, if given the choice between Firefox and Brave, I would choose Firefox 10 out of 10 times. A closed source chromium fork put out by a business that still isn't sure what its business model is and already has a fair number of "whoopsies" under its belt is a complete non-starter for me.

That is, given the choice between Firefox and Brave. For what it's worth, my current browser is Zen, and I'm quite happy with it.

Brave is great. Takes just a few seconds to turn off the bloat. Anyone try Helium?

If that's the price to pay for having a working browser until then.

I'd be interested if the issue you ran into was actually due to poor architecture or just something not fully implemented in the pre-release. Unfortunately, it's closed source - so hard to tell from the outside.

google is what it is because they have shareholders and need to make money. Maybe Kagi gets around that by setting up as a PBC, I hope so. I am not holding my breath.

My two cents - I'm not doing the "proprietary browser" shtick again. Unless I have real assurance that the software isn't going to become a $50/month SaaS, why should I leave my perfectly good current browser?

I get the feeling this kind of product will only appeal to unconscious iOS and macOS users. Windows and Linux users have much better (and freer) options than a WebKit wrapper.

But Orion has the exact same issue that we are facing now with Chrome and Edge and Firefox. Orion is funded by Kagi, so it's a money losing venture. If Kagi folds tomorrow, who will pick the pieces and continue its' development?

Replace Orion with Chrome and Kagi with Google and you will find that we are in the same exact boat. Browsers cost money to maintain. Money has to come from somewhere. If the general public does not want to pay then who does?

Furthermore, what makes you think that Kagi will not one day do the same exact thing that Google has done with Chrome? Are you willing to bet that it won't happen?

And I am not here to bash on Kagi, I am one of their customers but I will not use Orion for the same reason I don't use Chrome.

> Not sure why you're getting downvoted

Orion browser is proprietary

That would be my guess.

That might be OK for you, but I have been burnt, as have many others, by proprietary software

If there is a choice, I make it

It would be organizational suicide to spend down their endowment just because they can. Right now it exists as a firewall to buy them some time in the event that search licensing goes away, which I think is exactly what they should have done with it.

And it's been talked to death before but the idea that the browser side bets are at some prohibitive cost is an unsubstantiated myth, conjured into existence by vibes in comment sections. It's the HN equivalent of American voters who think foreign aid is 50% of the federal budget.

This! So many times!

It doesn't work on iOS. All browsers in iOS are Safari with a different frontend. Apple doesn't allow it to be any different.

I think you might need to use Nightly version for this.

Which? I've never seen this through many years of daily use.

Who provides resources to the Es and Ds? Who hires new ones? Who raises money from investors and banks, and ensures you have cash flow and ROI? How do you manage 100 Es and Ds without a PM?

Small teams are more efficient but (obviously) can't produce at scale. When you scale up, there's enough HR or finance or marketing, or PM, etc. work for full-time specialists. And larger orgs need bureaucracy - if you have a way around that, the world is yours.

> Browsers are practically full scale operating systems these days with tens of millions of lines of code, distributed for free.

Well there's your problem! Google owns the server, the client, and the standards body, so ever-increasing complexity is inevitable if you play by their rules. Tens of thousands of lines of code could render the useful parts of the web.