From the article: "AI should always be a choice — something people can easily turn off" and "Firefox will remain our anchor. It will evolve into a modern AI browser". I highly doubt you will be able to turn of the transformer tech features in an AI browser imo. And they won't make a separate browser for this.
This really feels like the beginning of the end for Mozilla, sadly.
Are there any true alternatives (not dependent on financing or any engines from third parties) to Google, if you wish to use the web in 2025?
What even is an "AI browser"? It's a browser, it's mainly supposed to render web pages / web apps. There is no obvious reason why it would need any AI features.
A browser with current definition obviously doesn't "need" AI. And we also know all too well how it's going to turn out - they will both use the AI to push ads onto us and also collect and sell our personal data.
However, a strong locally-executed AI would have potential to vastly improve our experience of web! So much work is done in browsers could be enhanced or automated with custom agents. You'd no longer need any browser extensions (which are privacy nightmare when the ownership secretly changes hands). Your agents could browse local shops for personalized gifts or discounts, you could set up very complex watches on classified ads. You could work around any lacking features of any website or a combination of several websites, to get exactly what you seek and to filter out anything that is noise to you. You would be able to seamlessly communicate with the Polish internet subculture, or with Gen Alpha, all without feeling the physical pain. With an AGI-level AI maybe even the Reddit could be made usable again.
Of course this is all assuming that the web doesn't adapt to become even more closed and hostile.
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.
Maybe? I block popups, use privacy badger to deprive the usual suspects of my data, use one extension for finer control over video playback speed and one more to make reddit redirect back to old interface. I only use 7 of them because of security nightmare they are in general.
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.
I find it very hard to believe that either every site you interact with works exactly as you want it to work, or that you have the time/capacity to adjust them all with custom extensions. I get that there are downsides but you don't see any upsides?
I have extensions for the sites that need them and everything else is fine? occasionally I guess there'll be something in another language I want translated but I just copy paste the text into google translate or similar.
what sites out there are so unusable you'd need an LLM to fix them for use?
Right now all the sites I frequent are good enough, otherwise I'd drop them. I don't interact with Discord, Bluesky, X, Instagram at all, and I feel like I'm missing out on a lot of high quality interpersonal communication because I have low tolerance for their UX and their lack of respect for users.
Again, what can an LLM possibly do to help? Summarize the page I'm already reading? I don't want a summary, that's dumb. People who think their time is so precious they have to optimize a five minute read into a ten cent API call and one minute read of possibly wrong output are just silly. You aren't "freeing up time", you are selling your reality.
Buy stuff for me? Why? Buying shit online is so easy most people do it on the toilet. I've bought things on the internet while blackout drunk. I also have a particular view of "Value" that no LLM will ever replicate, and not only do I have no interest in giving someone else access to my checkbook, I certainly do not want to give it to a third party who could make money off that relationship.
How would I no longer need browser extensions? You're saying the LLM would reliably block ads and that functionality will be managed by the single human being who has reliably done that for decades like uBlock origin? How will LLMs replace my gesture based navigation that all these hyper-productivity focused fools don't even seem to know exists? It certainly won't replace my corporate required password manager.
>You would be able to seamlessly communicate with the Polish internet subculture, or with Gen Alpha, all without feeling the physical pain
Come on, get over yourself.
> With an AGI-level AI
So Mozilla, who isn't even allowed to spend $6 million on a CEO is somehow magically going to invent super AI that runs locally? Get a grip.
I also hate concept of summaries, as well as related concept of AI text inflation.
I'm also against any third party being involved here. I'm pointing out the potential of AI in the browser, but for me it has to be locally run or it is a no go.
My point is that browser plays a central role in our digital interactions. Extensions help with smoothing out the experience. LLMs could write those extensions, or serve as an agent to further make the online interactions more pleasant. I could see myself using it to either optimize my existing experience, or to vastly broaden the communication surface in directions that currently hold too much friction.
The rest was a joke, sorry if it made your day worse.
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.
Yes, Translate is the only one I want - and we already have that!
The worst is anything that tries to suggest stuff in text fields or puts buttons etc. to try and get you to "rewrite with AI" or any nonsense like that - makes me just want to burn anything like that to the ground.
But that’s exactly my point - addons already solve these problems without baking them in natively. Adding AI just creates bloatware/privacy/security/maintenance problems that are already solved by users being able to customise the browser for their own needs.
I do get that and I'm like 60% with you, but I'm just saying that it is easy to get a bit in a bubble and Mozilla needs to cater to the average person. And let's be honest, we aren't the average user.
Personally I'm fine as long as it continues to be easy to disable and remove. Yeah, I'd rather it be opt-in instead of opt-out but it's not a big price to pay to avoid giving Chrome more power over the internet. At the end of the day these issues are pretty small fish in comparison.
I mean, Chrome/Google have already won the browser wars and it isn't even close. 'Average' persons don't use Firefox, period - they use Chrome. I dunno when you last looked at browser market share, but Firefox is already extremely niche. Trying to cater to the 'average user' when your entire userbase consists of power users is asinine but Mozilla clearly doesn't understand this. They think it's still 2008 or something.
I've successfully migrated my girlfriend, parents, and several friends. Half those friends don't even know how to program. So yes, normal people can use Firefox and they really don't notice the difference.
> Chrome/Google have already won the browser wars
It isn't over till its over. It's trivial to make a stand in this fight. It is beyond me why a large portion of HN users aren't using FF or one of its derivatives. Of all people they should be more likely to understand what's at stake here...
Yes I use FF. You’ve completely misunderstood my point.
Your comment about how YOU had to get the people close to you to use FF was exactly my point. Techies are the only people who use FF now without it being foisted onto them by their techie friends.
You personally wouldn't use live captions and dubbing, so there's no point building it for the millions of people who need it as an accessibility feature?
Couldn’t care less about any of that. English is the world’s dominant language and will remain so for the foreseeable future. There’s nothing wrong with that. And subtitles exist already or can be generated by addons. Most people don’t use them. So, once again, maybe don’t inconvenience the vast majority of users for some small subset of the population.
> English is the world’s dominant language and will remain so for the foreseeable future.
Based on the fact that you said this I'm going to assume you can't read/write Mandarin, apologies if that's incorrect because that leads to my second assumption which is that you're unaware of the astonishingly vast amount of content and conversation related to open source and AI/ML you're missing out on as a result of not being able to read/write Mandarin.
What does what you wrote have to do with what I wrote, or the comment I was replying to? Literally every reasonably educated Chinese person speaks English as a 2nd language.
I'm missing out on all sorts of shit I'd find interesting by virtue of not being a prodigious polyglot. That fact has nothing to do with English being the global language for literally everything in every domain, nor with the fact that in-browser language translation doesn't require baked-in AI.
I mean, sure. I don’t generally give a shit about other people. That’s also not really relevant here. There will always be a dominant language. Currently, it happens to be English and it will remain English into the near future (250+ years). If you attend even a shitty school in a third world country today you are taught English as a second language. Look at the Philippines or sub-Saharan African countries. Everybody speaks English + their native language.
Crying about English’s global penetration is super weird while also being pointless, since it’s a fait accompli at this point.
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.
>"at least 900 W" when sorting through a list of microwave ovens on Walmart.
Newegg has that as a built in filter.
Why do you people keep insisting I "need" an LLM to do things that are standard features?
I find shopping online for clothes to suck, but there's nothing an LLM can do to fix that because it's not a magic machine and I cannot try on clothes at home. So instead, I just sucked it up and went to Old Navy.
Like, these things are still lying to my face every single day. I only use them when there's no alternative, like quickly porting code from python to Java for an emergency project. Was the code correctly ported? Nope, it silently dropped things of course, but "it doesn't need to be perfect" was the spec.
>Or searching for text in images with OCR.
That thing that was a mainline feature of Microsoft OneNote in 2007 and worked just fine and I STILL never used? I thought it was the neatest feature but even my friend who runs everything out of OneNote doesn't use it much. Back in middle school we had a very similar Digital Notebook application that predates OneNote with a similar feature set, including the teachers being able to distribute Master copies of notes for their students, and I also did not use OCR there.
The ONE actual good use case of LLMs that anyone has offered me did not come from techbros who think "Tesla has good software" is not only an accurate statement but an important point for a car, it came from my mom. Turns out, the text generation machine is pretty good at generating text in French to make tests! Her moronic (really rich of course, one of the richest in the state) school district refused to buy her any materials at all for her French classes, so she's been using ChatGPT. It does a great job, because that's what these machines are actually built for, and she only has to fix up the output occasionally, but that task is ACTUALLY easy to verify, unlike most of the things people use these LLMs for.
She STILL wouldn't pay $20 monthly for it. That shouldn't be surprising, because "Test generator" for a high school class is a one time payment of $300 historically, and came with your textbook purchase. If she wasn't planning on retiring she would probably just do it the long way. A course like that is a durable good.
Not at all. If you want or need a feature it's not some "my browser has to support it or my OS does" dichotomy.
As a couple parents up stated, there's no technical reason a browser has to have a transformer embedded into it. There might be a business reason like "we made a dumb choice and don't have the manpower to fix it", but I doubt this is something they will accept, at least with a mission statement like they have.
I much prefer every individual piece of software and website I interact with implement their own proprietary AI features that compete for my attention and interfer with each other.
Cool, and some DEs make it possible to start implementing this for most applications today. But Mozilla is not KDE or Gnome, so the most they can do is to make this on their software, and make it easy to copy for the entire system.
> Sounds like a web site, not a browser feature.
Sounds like a bit of lack of imagination on your part. Do you think the same for text search?
Exactly. Would be nicer if they did their own features somewhat right (including interfaces for configuration and disabling approachable for non-engineers) before they scope-creep the entire desktop.
No, even when they switched to machine learning their translations still made mistakes that would have made you look goofy. And even today their models still make mistakes that are just weird.
It is especially baffling because Google has much better data sets and much more compute than their competitors.
What tech CEO says is "a text box with magic" Google translate fulfills that and there are ways to integrate with LLM if technology marketing is important.
Unless it is nVidia's CEO, who wants to sell specific hardware, they mostly care about the buzz of the term, not a specific technology, though.
It has everything to do with it. Mozilla explicitly talked about AI in the context of their relatively new translation feature a year or two back. Live captions also uses "AI". The term AI includes machine learning in marketing speech.
If that was the case that means Firefox is already an AI browser. But he wouldn’t be talking about AI browsers if he planned on maintaining the current features and approach, would he?
They just existed before the GenAI craze and no one cared because AI wasn't a buzzword at the time. Google Translate absolutely was based on ML before OpenAI made it a big deal to have things "based on AI".
But just putting stuff in your browser that hooks into third-party services that use ML isn't enough anymore. It has to be front and center otherwise, you're losing the interest of... well, someone. I'm not sure who at this point. I don't care, personally.
Many of these things were "AI" but the marketing hype hadn't gotten there yet. E.g. the local translation in FF is a transformer model, as was Google translate in the cloud since 2018 (and still "AI" looong before that, just not transformer based).
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.
Firefox uses local models for translation, summarisation and possibly other stuff. As it is not restricted on one platform, I guess that it has to use its own tools, while apple (or macos/ios focused software in general) can use system level APIs. But the logic I guess is the same.
It is really incredibly nice to be able to highlight a passage, right click on it, and select "Summarize" or "Explain this." That's all FireFox does at the moment. It's an option on the right-click menu. You can ignore it. If nobody told you the evil AI thingy was there, you would probably never notice it.
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.
Better yet, if an LLM does add value to the use cases why is it that I have one "integrated" LLM when editing a document in the webpage, another "integrated" LLM in the browser, and then an "integrated" LLM in the OS. If there is value to be had I want it to integrate with the different things on the system as they exist just like I do, not be shoehorned into whatever company abc decided to bundle with just their product(s) too.
Yep. I mention this in my other reply, but having the LLM be system-level (and preferably, user replaceable) and leveraged as needed by applications (and thus, not redundant) is clearly the best model. Apple is currently the closest to this, offering system level third party LLM integrations, but a Linux distribution would be the best positioned to achieve that goal to its fullest extent.
Having something that read everything I read and could talk with me about it, help remember things and synthesize? That’s awesome. Follow links and check references.
This use case feels better served by a dedicated utility with a specialized UI rather than shoehorned into a browser. It'd fit the macOS services model (which adds items to context and application menus, e.g. "Research this…" when right-clicking a link or text selection) and could optionally also be summoned by the system app launcher (like Spotlight).
I recently learned of Flow, and I don't understand why people group it together with Ladybird and Servo, which are both developing the browser engine from scratch mostly, while Flow seems to be based on Chromium. Is Flow doing anything different compared to the numerous other Chromium-based browsers? Genuinely curious.
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.
LibreWolf ftw, I switched to it, installed my extensions and am not looking back. Would be nice to have a mobile Firefox(LibreWolf) with all extensions, I should go look around F Droid again.
in ff if you're reading this go to about:config and type privacy - why these aren't immediately obvious in the Settings is beyond me
> This really feels like the beginning of the end for Mozilla, sadly.
The moment Mozilla failed to stop being dependent on Google's money whilst being true to their own mission in being a 'privacy first browser' it already was the end and the damage in trust was done.
In 2007, the CEO at the time said they could live without Google's money - Now, their entire survival was tied to Google funding them [0] and got rewarded for failure whilst laying off hundreds of engineers working on Firefox.
Other than the change in leadership after 17 years of mis-direction, the financial situation has still not changed.
Do you still trust them now?
> Are there any true alternatives (not dependent on financing or any engines from third parties) to Google, if you wish to use the web in 2025?
After thinking about it, the only viable browser that is not funded by Google (Firefox 75%, Safari (>20%) and Chrome) is Ladybird. [1]
> The moment Mozilla failed to stop being dependent on Google's money whilst being true to their own mission in being a 'privacy first browser' it already was the end and the damage in trust was done.
I understand your position but what is the alternative funding source that could keep a company making a free browser running?
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.
Obviously we don't want Firefox to become ad-supported so that leaves either donations which to be honest does not work (see all the OS projects that ask for donations when you install NPM packages for reference) or they need to start charging money (we know how well that worked out for Netscape) or finally find another corporate sponsor willing to shove billions of dollars each year into a product that will not improve their bottom line.
I am all for alternatives and I agree with you that something needs to change but the real question is how?
Maybe I am presumptuous in this assumption but I am pretty sure that if Mozilla had another palatable solution on the table, they would have probably implemented it by now.
> After thinking about it, the only viable browser that is not funded by Google (Firefox 75%, Safari (>20%) and Chrome) is Ladybird.
Ladybird is sponsored by many big companies as well. What makes you think that somehow their fate will be any different than Firefox? Do you believe that Shopify for example is more altruistic than Google and therefore should be trusted more?
I personally don't.
In my opinion the problem is the expectation that things should be free always on the internet and we can thank Google and Facebook for that. Most people these days who are not in the tech world simply have no idea how many hours and how much money it takes to create something, having it used by people and iterating on it day in day out until it is in a good shape and can be used by the general public.
Therefore besides a small cohort of users in tech (like Kagi's customers for example who understand that a good search engine is not free), the vast majority of people will not accept to have to pay for a browser. Which brings us back to the question I asked above.
Who will fund this supposedly free for all browser that does not track you, that does not show you any ads, that does not incorporate AI features, that does not try to up-sell you or scam you? From my vantage point it's not like there are 100s of solutions to get out of this conundrum.
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.
> I believe you stated the problem in a way that its unsolvable.
I think you misunderstood me. I asked a question because the answer is far from obvious. If the solution to this problem was obvious, we wouldn't be having the same discussion on HN every 6 months when a new press release from Mozilla comes out.
I am very much interested by what people think the solution should be. Now, you mentioned Enterprise customers which is interesting because usually what I have read on this sort of threads was that Mozilla had made many mistakes (I agree), Mozilla should change their ways by removing this feature or adding this feature but almost everyone conveniently forgets that at the end of the day someone has to pay for all this stuff.
> Charge your customers money, so you can work for them.
Which is what I mentioned in my comment. Start charging people. The problem is how do you convince the general public to use Firefox instead of Chrome or Edge, especially is you need to pay for the software?
If privacy was a selling point, then Meta would have closed shop many years ago.
> 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.
It doesnt matter because we will never know. The reality is that people expect to browse the internet for free. Asking them for cash has never been done at this scale.
If Mozilla was to start charging money tomorrow, you would find that many people would object to that and most people would simply move to Chrome because why not?
> 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.
I understand the comparison with Red hat but I am doubtful that this model will work. Red Hat helps companies ship stuff, it makes people more productive, it increases the bottom line. What would a paid version of Firefox do that makes people more productive or makes companies money that they couldn't get from Chrome? I am genuinely asking because again, it's mot very clear to me.
> 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.
That is big assumption that has not been proven at this time. I think that making any sort of plans based on hypothetical paid version is highly speculative.
> 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.
Edge still has a ton of stuff specific to Windows in it, mostly for business/enterprise use. It is probably the most no-code configurable browser out there if you go through Group Policy, with an effective guarantee that all of those settings will work (including the settings that disable all Telemetry data collection - yes those exist).
The 100% no-code part of the config process is something I have not seen largely in competing browsers - even Chrome.
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.
I am glad I am not the only one who is asking the tough questions regarding this problem.
In reality it boils down to replacing 1 income stream provided by Google with one or more new income streams.
That means that Mozilla needs something to sell and quickly.
Or use their VC funds as you said, but we know VC funds need to deploy a lot of capital and then hope that one of their companies makes it big to recoup their investments and eventually make a profit.
I am not sure if betting the entire future of Mozilla on this VC venture would be a wise move to be honest. It's just too unpredictable.
> 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.
I'm fascinated by this concept. Us it expanded anywhere?
I agree, it's fascinating and I believe a necessary term. I just recall him using it on his tik tokk. And come to think of it it might have actually been John Green (oops).
But basically his idea was that hedonic skepticism. Was this kind of like reflexive unthinking doubt of the sincerity of any institutional effort to do any form of social good whatsoever. It seems to over correct towards skepticism and is motivated, not by factual veracity but by the kind of entertainment value of being skeptical and jaded about everything. And so the idea that the center for disease control might really sincerely want to stop the spread of measles, if you're a hedonic skeptic, you laugh at how ridiculous and naive. It is to believe that they might have your best interests at heart. Which I think overlooks the simple possibility that sometimes we stand up institutions in response to real societal needs, and that you can have an appropriate and healthy skepticism of politicians and policy makers acting in their own self-interest while also appreciating that there do exist purpose-driven organizations that roll out programs and policies based on a genuine interest in solving problems.
I think Firefox has a sizable minority of users that are aware of its importance and would donate for "a fucking browser".
Tbh I would also donate for a nagging team that publicly pressures various corporate sites into continuing to support firefox (like my cell phone provider, i can't download invoices with FF since 3 months).
What I wouldn't donate for is "me too" initiatives like "AI" and corporate bullshit. Or even charity initiatives if done by Mozilla. It's not Mozilla's job. Their job is to keep a working browser alternative up.
And as it's been stated in techie discussions time and time again, they don't need to be that large for just "a fucking browser". But that would diminish the CEO's status so we get what we have now instead.
> I think Firefox has a sizable minority of users that are aware of its importance
Agreed.
> and would donate for "a fucking browser".
Hard disagree. Especially when you consider that much of Firefox's use likely comes from countries that tend to opportunistically freeload whenever they can. Idk if your donation-only idea would even work for the US and Canada alone.
they don't? There's no company, or rather - a lot of them, Linux kernel moves forward like 80% by corporate contributors. For some of them it's critical part of their infrastructure, some of them need to get their device drivers mainlined, for some of them it's gpl magic at work.
Linux desktop experience, however, leaves a lot to be desired.
Companies aren't interested to contribute to a browser when they can just reskin chromium or build on blink directly and community cannot match the pace.
> It is a wonderful world fill of variety, choice and diversity
Desktop Linux is a dysfunctional dumpster fire that cyber bullies anyone that even suggests building code to a specific OS.
Remember that Linux is just the kernel, not the whole OS. The fact that a program written for Ubuntu, for example, can even run on another Linux based OS is a happy coincidence and should not be an expectation.
I think you are comparing apples to oranges here. Linux is made of many distros, each one with their own strong points and features. Many different maintainers matain them. There is no single point of funding for them.
Mozilla on the other hand makes basically one semi well-known product (and other even less known stuff) and gives it away for free.
If tomorrow Google pulls the plug, who will pay for the salaries of the engineers who maintain Firefox? The general public does not care if Firefox lives or dies. In my circle of friends and family, I am the only one who uses Firefox. Most people are on Chrome or Brave. That's it.
Someone in the comments above mentioned that Mozilla could release a paid version for Enterprise customers, imitating Red Hat in a way, but I am highly skeptical that Enterprise customers in times such as these will be willing to pay for something that they can get for free from Google or Microsoft.
> I am highly skeptical that Enterprise customers in times such as these will be willing to pay for something that they can get for free from Google or Microsoft.
They would have to build a better enterprise offering. Companies like Chrome because can use Google as their IDP, and when their employees log in with their company account the company can push certs and security politicies to their Chrome install.
Firefox doesn't have that level of integration with Google security services.
1) Linux is made of many distros, each one with their own strong points and features. Many different maintainers matain them. There is no single point of funding for them.
2) Mozilla on the other hand makes basically one semi well-known product.
the way i see it mozilla has one thing to do, and didnt do it very well.
the linux GNU gang has a mountain to contend with and has has moved a mountain.
so what would be the secret sauce that mozilla doesnt have.
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.
Kagi's Orion browser is 1.0 on Mac and working on the first full Linux release - it's built on WebKit.
That WebKit is a "third party" dependency but it's still a break from the browser monoculture and it doesn't seem like Mozilla has as much interest in pushing the browser engine space forward after pulling back from Servo.
I switched to Brave. Even with its cryptocurrency stuff bundled, it's easily disabled and not in your face at all. And their adblock tech is an amazing uBlock successor.
They also support Group Policy and JSON based configurations, depending on the OS. So you could install a config that disables a lot of that before you even install the Brave Browser.
Heck, they could probably sell that as a premium/business feature for extra funding (hint hint if anyone from Brave reads this).
> This really feels like the beginning of the end for Mozilla, sadly.
I really feel like every time Mozilla announces something, someone gets paid to leave comments like this around. I've seen many "beginning of the end" comments like this, and so far, it hasn't happened.
What I do see is a lot of bashing, and hypocrisy, and excuses for why its OK that you don't personally try to do better...
Even as someone who is still a Firefox user - the browser now has about half the browser market share as Edge... Absolutely nobody needs to be paid to write these kind of comments!
Honestly the last 5-10 years has been a disaster for Firefox...
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.
I think when there's overblown criticism (does not take into account the positive things, seeks only to paint in a negative light), that's pretty clearly FUD.
Moreover, when there's a pattern of it occurring, for at least the past 5 years...
Not saying that firefox is perfect, I have issues with its project leadership too, but its nowhere near as bad as the (most vocal) critics like to claim.
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.
Fair enough. I'd still be very hesitant to use it on account of it being a chrome fork. Moreover, I don't really understand how Brave expects to be a viable business without deeply betraying their userbase at some point.
It admittedly is a gut feeling, but Brave started out with a browser and some handwavy crypto magic beans and seemed like it careened from idea to idea looking for a business model, occasionally stepping on toes along the way. They have products like AI integration, a VPN and a firewall, but those aren't particularly stand-out products in a very crowded market.
As a point of comparison, Kagi started out with a product that people were willing to pay for, and grew other services from there. I feel comfortable giving them money, and I'd be willing to at least try their browser - if it ever releases for Windows.
Your points are valid. But what made me finally switch was that it is open source, that it has been out for roughly a decade now, and that Brendan Eich's opinions from 2014 are mostly based on his Catholic faith at the time (which obviously is likely to have changed/evolved now that we're a decade later).
> Moreover, I don't really understand how Brave expects to be a viable business without deeply betraying their userbase at some point.
They have a way better merch store than Mozilla. They should expand that.
"MERCHANDISING! Where the real money from the movie is made!"
Right to be forgotten is fine for people who aren't celebrities. If you want to be forgotten then don't have a CEO job at a huge company.
Also it generally applies to situations where people are associated with a crime and either there wasn't enough evidence or they already served their time. Neither of those is true here. He has faced nothing except people being mad at him for something he definitely did.
It would be so easy for him to say he changed. Why should I pretend it never happened if he won't do that little thing?
I tried Orion about a year ago. I tried using the profile sandboxing. Logging into my google account in one profile also logged me in in another profile.
I can definitely excuse some bugs (there were crashes for example that I didn’t overly mind; I understand I was using prerelease software). But something like account containers should be built fundamentally to disallow any data sharing. If data sharing is a bug, and not fundamentally disallowed by the architecture, then it’s going to happen again later.
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.
Well it was definitely a bug. It worked in some cases (I think it even worked in google at first, and then a few days later it manifested). And the feature was advertised, even though, again, they never claimed the software to be release quality.
But my point is that, similar to security, you don't want to build this kind of feature piece meal. Either the containers are fundamentally walled off or they aren't.
I understand what your claim is, I just disagree it's that blanket. You could e.g. absolutely build the UI for a profile switcher before your implementation of the backend changes are merged without carrying implications of how well that will handle isolation in the same way in security you could implement the null cipher in TLS to test that portion of the code without it forever implying you have bad encryption.
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.
Not sure why you're getting downvoted. Orion has matured as a browser and just hit 1.0. It's mac- and ios-only for now, but linux and windows ports are in the works. It has ad-blocking out of the box and has zero telemetry. I use it every day.
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.
Safari has like 20% market share right now. The only thing holding it back is that it's Mac only. If Apple got a Windows version going again, it'd eat Chrome for lunch.
From the article: "AI should always be a choice — something people can easily turn off" and "Firefox will remain our anchor. It will evolve into a modern AI browser". I highly doubt you will be able to turn of the transformer tech features in an AI browser imo. And they won't make a separate browser for this.
This really feels like the beginning of the end for Mozilla, sadly.
Are there any true alternatives (not dependent on financing or any engines from third parties) to Google, if you wish to use the web in 2025?