Some 10 years ago I was a Mozilla volunteer. I mainly worked on MDN, to the point of becoming a so-called "topic driver" for the glossary. Some of the work I did landed in the citations of a couple of papers about web technology. They flew me a whole week to Vancouver for an event where employees and volunteers worked together in the same room and they even made me (and the other volunteers ) attend a sort-of-corporate meeting where they sort-of fought about something (can't even remember what it was).
I'm telling you this to highlight that volunteers where a huge part of Mozilla.
But on the last day they announced that they were moving the day-to-day conversations from IRC (an open protocol) to Yahoo Messenger (a closed protocol). I felt sort of betrayed in that moment: the company that was all about openness and to which I dedicated countless hours doing unpaid work for and even more years evangelizing for was imposing its volunteers and employees used a proprietary app to coordinate. That didn't sit well with me. At all. I basically lost interest.
This was in 2015. Last I heard MDN introduced ads (I wouldn't know, uBlock is pretty effective) and is not showing contributors to a page on the page itself anymore.
So yeah, the part of OP saying how Mozilla managed to piss volunteers resonated pretty hard with me.
As the OP says, the point is not that they needed unpaid work, if that's what you mean. The point is that volunteers shaped what Firefox, MDN, Thunderbird, Mozilla itself were.
In the real world, in the same line as the article suggests, there was a brief time when the "puts you back in control" browser needed you to change the following about:config settings to disable the force-pushed ai:
You're complaning that the browser that "puts you back in control"
... put you back in control of which AI features you want to enable/disable? How horrible!
What? They didn't make these 10 distinct features one single all-or-nothing button? They let you switch them on or off individually?? How dare they?!?
What? They shipped new features to the browser...turned on?!? Instead of spending all those development hours and then...hiding them behind a setting by default?
I need "AI" in my browser, so I don't use the AI features. No data was sent anywhere. No 4 GB model was downloaded. Nothing happened, except for a popup saying "hey, by the way, if you want to do X, just press this button here". It's just UI elements. No AI-related code runs, no data is sent to AI companies unless you directly tell the browser to do that.
Imagine if Firefox shipped a brand new GPU-accelerated compositor, improved hardware video decoding and WebGL/WebGPU. You people cry about why they didn't add a big "disable GPU features" button? And that they dared to enable this by default?
And those are some of the better named config options. Some are pretty opaque, as are their values (and often poorly documented). You can tell there isn't an edict to make config options highly accessible
Interesting to read, but ultimately it's very easy to blame "leaders" for everything and I'm not sure it has much merit. It's popular to pile on them and their decisions. But I don't think it's as obvious as people (often here on HN) make it out to be. If Mozilla didn't try out these avenues deemed wrong, if Mozilla spent all money on the browser only, if Mozilla made the best browser ever, would that really make a difference? Would more people use it, would they be a healthier organization now? Mozilla is surviving on the mercy of Google money, it's not a viable strategy.
Firefox usage has been declining for a decade. Doing nothing, or just doing the exact same as before, is popular with its fans (including me). But wouldn't it perhaps just have lead to an even more rapid decline?
> if Mozilla spent all money on the browser only, if Mozilla made the best browser ever, would that really make a difference?
It's obviously impossible to say, but when we look at things that did happen due to Mozilla's financial decisions we have some major disruptions. Besides the already-mentioned Rust and Thunderbird examples we also have the years-long rebuild of the extension system where Firefox, once known as the leader in customization, offered less than 20 extensions for its mobile version and deprecated who-knows how many. I find it hard to believe that these actions didn't affect their market share, goodwill, or both.
I am in favor of Mozilla launching initiatives to support the browser, but right now I think they are using the browser to support their initiatives.
The leaders could, for example, have made AI opt-in. If it's popular, maybe make it the default for new installs later on. Instead we had to go a few versions from "now with AI" to "now with an AI off button" because they got enough negative user feedback.
I don't mind experiments, but if you're the "we put you back in control" browser then please build an "off" switch in from the start.
Again: Would it have made a measurable difference? Or is it just moaning from a small core? Not saying the core is not important, but I don't think Fx can survive on only us.
not at the current employee and costs. But do they need to do that? Do they need to produce new products (and pay the cost to do so)?
Why can't they be lean and mean? Focus purely on browser experience without any BS, without any upsell? And there are volunteers out there that willingly contribute code/fixes for free.
I like having containers for different parts of my life built into the browser. I liked relay for quite a while (moved on to other setups). I like syncing between devices and the ability to push something from my phone to my computer on another continent currently with two taps.
Yeah they have rolled out a lot of nonsense I don’t care for, but they have also rolled out a lot of features I regularly use and enjoy. You can’t please everybody, but ultimately I’m glad it’s not “just a lean browser.”
> But wouldn't it perhaps just have lead to an even more rapid decline?
A product like Firefox depends on word of mouth. There was not a *single* announcement or decision by the Mozilla leadership in the last 10 years or so which would make me recommend Firefox to others, instead every single time it pushed me away a little bit more. I have hardly ever seen such a fundamental alienation of their core audience, even for Silicon Valley standards ;)
This, in part. The swift deprecation of XUL extensions felt like a kick in the gonads and made me switch to Pale Moon for a while, after which I landed on Firefox ESR to avoid the inmediate impact of bad decisions, and accumulated a veritable landslide of user.js and userchrome.css tweaks I keep having to maintain.
On the other hand, part of the struggle was my fight against the web as a """platform""", with its many privacy and security issues that accumulated as W3C APIs were added like hot cakes and websites exploded in complexity. Firefox provided the control necessary through addons, thanks to its vast community of likeminded people. Nowadays, a lot of the privacy controls have landed in firefox proper, in part thanks to the tor browser upstreaming, if you know where to look.
The problem is what "enthusiasts" want is typically opposed to what is needed at the time to improve the product, such as:
* Wanting niche features that benefit other people than those in the enthusiast core, thus preventing the company from gaining market share and revenue.
* Ever-increasing expectations in terms of visible feature delivery (e.g. e10s was widely seen as a failure despite being foundational to move off a single thread model and increase browser responsiveness).
* General conservativeness in terms of anything that breaks workflows (famously [1], but also see the criticism of Firefox redesigns over the years, etc.)
* Most importantly, lack of proposals for monetization from said audience (donations do not cut it and smaller and more important projects such as OpenSSL, etc. have also been underfunded from time to time, so nvm funding a browser's development), while also opposing the typical monetization mechanisms, e.g. ads.
These things end up constraining a company from spending more resources to improve a growing product, as they don't have any. While more capital-intensive industries such as phone manufacturers often just choose to appeal to mass market at the cost of giving up their enthusiasts[2], Mozilla always wanted to hedge its bets, and has failed to go in either direction.
Therefore, it is not unexpected that Mozilla is failing, and only survives through whatever meager donations come through, and revshare from Google by placing them as the default search engine.
I didn't hear any enthusiasts complain about the new VPN integration, which helps fund the browser. A paid email service is also something many have been asking for a while. People even want to donate money for browser development, but can't due to the foundation structure.
I don't think workflow concerns can just be brushed off. Breaking changes and constant design churn is devastating for user retention.
What users want is a working browser that gets out of the way and them browse the web. That's what Chrom(e,ium) is. It's like air, it's everywhere but you can't see it.
Firefox is not. Every time you open Firefox, there's a new dialog announcing some change or shilling some product. It's cut from the same cloth as that car that Homer Simpson designed. Every time you open Firefox, it works a bit differently, so you have to unlearn some habit and learn a new one[1]. This is friction. This grates. You have some task to perform, which is why you opened the browser, but now you your blood pressure is up 20 points because firefox can't just let you browse, it's always telling you stuff in a dozen different channels, popups, toasts, notifications, there's always something it throws in your face, often multiple calls to action at once. So you say for fucks sake, and go back to chrome which just lets you browse with none of that nonsense.
Like is anyone working on Firefox actually using the browser, in its vanilla configuration? How can they not see how infuriating it is to be a Firefox user?
[1] 5 years ago we changed which kitchen drawer we keep the cutlery in, and I still reach for the wrong one every time.
It doesn't seem a coincidence that it started to go down hill after they removed an engineer from CEO (Brendan Eich), and replaced him with a marketing dude, then a lawyer lady, and now an MBA bro.
I think Firefox OS was great, and too early for its time, combined with the mistake of "let's run on extremely terrible hardware" (rather than designing for the flagships of the time, which wouldn't be flagships by the time it shipped).
First of all thanks for posting what's on your mind and everything you did at Mozilla. Sorry to hear you are burnt out, hope you get better with time.
I've been a loyal Firefox user since forever - reading, writing, web dev I do is always in Firefox. It's a first app I always install. I'm grateful Firefox exists, and the world (at least mine) would be much worse if it wasn't around.
I don't like Mozilla is taking money from Google - I'd prefer if it was all community driven, to the point of a community owned co-operative, but I'm probably delusional.
If Mozilla believed in the values it espoused, Librewolf wouldn’t exist. It would just be called Firefox.
One of the first betrayals was putting ads in their new tab page, the forced AI comes as a Mozilla tradition now of user respect as marketing only.
At the same time it simply may not be a viable business. Firefox was popular originally because Chrome didn’t exist and Internet Explorer especially 6 back was awful.
The browser is now an OS on top of an OS, it requires massive resources to maintain.
So Mozilla has a cursed mission now and related or unrelated in any case they’re full of it and have lost my respect. Open source and user respect still means something to me even if it doesn’t to Mozilla.
That would be JR Conlin, national treasure. Worked with him on YDN in 2007 and Netflix in 2009; veterans of the Netflix API team will never forget his hack day entry, which was "Mac and Me" playing on a toaster oven.
They still have not fixed their build system. Meson/ninja or cmake would be alternatives. Nothing to have them abandon mozconfig ... this is legacy code. The rest of the world moved on. Mozilla lives in the past.
> We're a niche browser that is lucky enough to get well funded.
Now - we really need a viable alternative to the Evil Google Empire. For a while I had hope that ladybird would be that competitor, but that died after I was banned from github, as well as Kling making some really strange decisions in the last year or so, with weird explanations; most recent one the "we don't need external contributors so we close that down" (in part also due to the rise of AI slop spam, which is indeed annoying, but Kling is a strange guy really). I gave up on Mozilla many years ago already, though. The key insight I had was when one mozilla dev explaind that all linux guys use systemd + pulseaudio. So, using youtube (which annoys me because the evil Google empire controls it as well), I had no audio on firefox. Chrome on the other hand played fine (I only used alsa). So, the same machine, almost the same software stack (excluding pulseaudio; I did use system back then though), means that one browser plays audio fine, the other does not. Now, I could recompile firefox and enable non-pulseaudio audio ... but look at this:
There is allegedly a python-only alternative. I tried it. It did not compile.
This is not the only issue I had. Many more problems existed with Mozilla and I also think that becoming addicted to Google money killed Mozilla. It is a dying shadow and has been for a long time. Yes, we need alternatives, but Mozilla failed us many years ago already.
I don't have a real solution against the evil Google empire. It's not even only Google; many companies are part of the evilness. I am almost beginning to sound like Richard Stallman, though I don't feed off of my feet - but the main point here is more to have real alternatives. Firefox is useable, no doubt, but it's not going to change the control Google has over the world wide web. We need something much more fundamental - control by the people. Everyone sees what Google and co are doing. Something has to change fundamentally, to stop Google parasitizing on the rest of the world. But for this you also need to have software alternatives that work.
The only thing I can come up with is to make all components of the browser/www stack as modular as possible and to also come up with alternatives. W3C also betrayed us when they demanded DRM into everything. I don't want that. Next in line will be mandatory age sniffing. This is currently ongoing. It will be extended. Systemd already added support for it; Poettering tried to do damage control but clearly failed: and reddit censoring like crazy - https://old.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/1rzykul/the_system... as is typical.
Hey, we have the evil Microsoft empire :) Or the Apple alternative.
Maintaining a browser engine including patching the latest vulnerabilities when someone points Mythos at your code is a really hard problem, my feeling is you need a certain size of organization and funding as your table stakes.
Someone should convince the EU to look into funding a new browser, maybe.
I don't know, but maybe spending 15 years working on something that you felt was not only a job but also in part a mission shapes a lot of you as a person and you want to express your feelings about that huge part of your life.
I'm telling you this to highlight that volunteers where a huge part of Mozilla.
But on the last day they announced that they were moving the day-to-day conversations from IRC (an open protocol) to Yahoo Messenger (a closed protocol). I felt sort of betrayed in that moment: the company that was all about openness and to which I dedicated countless hours doing unpaid work for and even more years evangelizing for was imposing its volunteers and employees used a proprietary app to coordinate. That didn't sit well with me. At all. I basically lost interest.
This was in 2015. Last I heard MDN introduced ads (I wouldn't know, uBlock is pretty effective) and is not showing contributors to a page on the page itself anymore.
So yeah, the part of OP saying how Mozilla managed to piss volunteers resonated pretty hard with me.
In the real world, in the same line as the article suggests, there was a brief time when the "puts you back in control" browser needed you to change the following about:config settings to disable the force-pushed ai:
browser.ml.enable, browser.ml.chat.enabled, browser.ml.chat.sidebar, browser.ml.chat.menu, browser.ml.chat.page, extensions.ml.enabled, browser.ml.linkPreview.enabled, browser.ml.pageAssist.enabled, browser.ml.smartAssist.enabled, browser.tabs.groups.smart.enabled, browser.tabs.groups.smart.userEnabled, pdfjs.enableAltTextModelDownload, pdfjs.enableGuessAltText
A bit of community feedback later, and we've got one big "off" button, and me wondering which footgun the executives will shoot themselves with next.
What? They didn't make these 10 distinct features one single all-or-nothing button? They let you switch them on or off individually?? How dare they?!?
What? They shipped new features to the browser...turned on?!? Instead of spending all those development hours and then...hiding them behind a setting by default?
I need "AI" in my browser, so I don't use the AI features. No data was sent anywhere. No 4 GB model was downloaded. Nothing happened, except for a popup saying "hey, by the way, if you want to do X, just press this button here". It's just UI elements. No AI-related code runs, no data is sent to AI companies unless you directly tell the browser to do that.
Imagine if Firefox shipped a brand new GPU-accelerated compositor, improved hardware video decoding and WebGL/WebGPU. You people cry about why they didn't add a big "disable GPU features" button? And that they dared to enable this by default?
Firefox usage has been declining for a decade. Doing nothing, or just doing the exact same as before, is popular with its fans (including me). But wouldn't it perhaps just have lead to an even more rapid decline?
It's obviously impossible to say, but when we look at things that did happen due to Mozilla's financial decisions we have some major disruptions. Besides the already-mentioned Rust and Thunderbird examples we also have the years-long rebuild of the extension system where Firefox, once known as the leader in customization, offered less than 20 extensions for its mobile version and deprecated who-knows how many. I find it hard to believe that these actions didn't affect their market share, goodwill, or both.
I am in favor of Mozilla launching initiatives to support the browser, but right now I think they are using the browser to support their initiatives.
I don't mind experiments, but if you're the "we put you back in control" browser then please build an "off" switch in from the start.
AI is however a potential avenue for raising money.
I meant to use that as a recent example of the kind of decisions that Mozilla leadership repeatedly makes, that don't match up what their users want.
not at the current employee and costs. But do they need to do that? Do they need to produce new products (and pay the cost to do so)?
Why can't they be lean and mean? Focus purely on browser experience without any BS, without any upsell? And there are volunteers out there that willingly contribute code/fixes for free.
Yeah they have rolled out a lot of nonsense I don’t care for, but they have also rolled out a lot of features I regularly use and enjoy. You can’t please everybody, but ultimately I’m glad it’s not “just a lean browser.”
A product like Firefox depends on word of mouth. There was not a *single* announcement or decision by the Mozilla leadership in the last 10 years or so which would make me recommend Firefox to others, instead every single time it pushed me away a little bit more. I have hardly ever seen such a fundamental alienation of their core audience, even for Silicon Valley standards ;)
On the other hand, part of the struggle was my fight against the web as a """platform""", with its many privacy and security issues that accumulated as W3C APIs were added like hot cakes and websites exploded in complexity. Firefox provided the control necessary through addons, thanks to its vast community of likeminded people. Nowadays, a lot of the privacy controls have landed in firefox proper, in part thanks to the tor browser upstreaming, if you know where to look.
* Wanting niche features that benefit other people than those in the enthusiast core, thus preventing the company from gaining market share and revenue.
* Ever-increasing expectations in terms of visible feature delivery (e.g. e10s was widely seen as a failure despite being foundational to move off a single thread model and increase browser responsiveness).
* General conservativeness in terms of anything that breaks workflows (famously [1], but also see the criticism of Firefox redesigns over the years, etc.)
* Most importantly, lack of proposals for monetization from said audience (donations do not cut it and smaller and more important projects such as OpenSSL, etc. have also been underfunded from time to time, so nvm funding a browser's development), while also opposing the typical monetization mechanisms, e.g. ads.
These things end up constraining a company from spending more resources to improve a growing product, as they don't have any. While more capital-intensive industries such as phone manufacturers often just choose to appeal to mass market at the cost of giving up their enthusiasts[2], Mozilla always wanted to hedge its bets, and has failed to go in either direction.
Therefore, it is not unexpected that Mozilla is failing, and only survives through whatever meager donations come through, and revshare from Google by placing them as the default search engine.
[1] https://xkcd.com/1172/
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJgTKx-rg18
What users want is a working browser that gets out of the way and them browse the web. That's what Chrom(e,ium) is. It's like air, it's everywhere but you can't see it.
Firefox is not. Every time you open Firefox, there's a new dialog announcing some change or shilling some product. It's cut from the same cloth as that car that Homer Simpson designed. Every time you open Firefox, it works a bit differently, so you have to unlearn some habit and learn a new one[1]. This is friction. This grates. You have some task to perform, which is why you opened the browser, but now you your blood pressure is up 20 points because firefox can't just let you browse, it's always telling you stuff in a dozen different channels, popups, toasts, notifications, there's always something it throws in your face, often multiple calls to action at once. So you say for fucks sake, and go back to chrome which just lets you browse with none of that nonsense.
Like is anyone working on Firefox actually using the browser, in its vanilla configuration? How can they not see how infuriating it is to be a Firefox user?
[1] 5 years ago we changed which kitchen drawer we keep the cutlery in, and I still reach for the wrong one every time.
I've been a loyal Firefox user since forever - reading, writing, web dev I do is always in Firefox. It's a first app I always install. I'm grateful Firefox exists, and the world (at least mine) would be much worse if it wasn't around.
I don't like Mozilla is taking money from Google - I'd prefer if it was all community driven, to the point of a community owned co-operative, but I'm probably delusional.
Yet, I'm hopeful for the future.
One of the first betrayals was putting ads in their new tab page, the forced AI comes as a Mozilla tradition now of user respect as marketing only.
At the same time it simply may not be a viable business. Firefox was popular originally because Chrome didn’t exist and Internet Explorer especially 6 back was awful.
The browser is now an OS on top of an OS, it requires massive resources to maintain. So Mozilla has a cursed mission now and related or unrelated in any case they’re full of it and have lost my respect. Open source and user respect still means something to me even if it doesn’t to Mozilla.
They still have not fixed their build system. Meson/ninja or cmake would be alternatives. Nothing to have them abandon mozconfig ... this is legacy code. The rest of the world moved on. Mozilla lives in the past.
FWIW the Firefox build instructions [1] look a lot saner to me than the Chromium build instructions [2].
[1] https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/setup/linux_build.ht...
[2] https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/main/docs/l...
Now - we really need a viable alternative to the Evil Google Empire. For a while I had hope that ladybird would be that competitor, but that died after I was banned from github, as well as Kling making some really strange decisions in the last year or so, with weird explanations; most recent one the "we don't need external contributors so we close that down" (in part also due to the rise of AI slop spam, which is indeed annoying, but Kling is a strange guy really). I gave up on Mozilla many years ago already, though. The key insight I had was when one mozilla dev explaind that all linux guys use systemd + pulseaudio. So, using youtube (which annoys me because the evil Google empire controls it as well), I had no audio on firefox. Chrome on the other hand played fine (I only used alsa). So, the same machine, almost the same software stack (excluding pulseaudio; I did use system back then though), means that one browser plays audio fine, the other does not. Now, I could recompile firefox and enable non-pulseaudio audio ... but look at this:
https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/view/svn/xsoft/firefox...
mozconfig? In 2026? Seriously?
There is allegedly a python-only alternative. I tried it. It did not compile.
This is not the only issue I had. Many more problems existed with Mozilla and I also think that becoming addicted to Google money killed Mozilla. It is a dying shadow and has been for a long time. Yes, we need alternatives, but Mozilla failed us many years ago already.
I don't have a real solution against the evil Google empire. It's not even only Google; many companies are part of the evilness. I am almost beginning to sound like Richard Stallman, though I don't feed off of my feet - but the main point here is more to have real alternatives. Firefox is useable, no doubt, but it's not going to change the control Google has over the world wide web. We need something much more fundamental - control by the people. Everyone sees what Google and co are doing. Something has to change fundamentally, to stop Google parasitizing on the rest of the world. But for this you also need to have software alternatives that work.
The only thing I can come up with is to make all components of the browser/www stack as modular as possible and to also come up with alternatives. W3C also betrayed us when they demanded DRM into everything. I don't want that. Next in line will be mandatory age sniffing. This is currently ongoing. It will be extended. Systemd already added support for it; Poettering tried to do damage control but clearly failed: and reddit censoring like crazy - https://old.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/1rzykul/the_system... as is typical.
Maintaining a browser engine including patching the latest vulnerabilities when someone points Mythos at your code is a really hard problem, my feeling is you need a certain size of organization and funding as your table stakes.
Someone should convince the EU to look into funding a new browser, maybe.