The Mozilla Cycle, Part III: Mozilla Dies in Ignominy
(taggart-tech.com)118 points by holysoles 4 hours ago
118 points by holysoles 4 hours ago
100% agree. I would happily run a dedicated enterprise browser that blocks downloads, has DLP, has watermarking (etc) if it meant I could use my own PC. Not Browser Isolation or VDI - An actual enterprise browser.
My job is pretty much 100% in browser though, so I realise this isn’t viable for everyone.
Palo Alto Networks is one of several companies pushing custom versions of Chrome as enterprise security browsers doing exactly what you're talking about: holistic DLP/anomaly detection, URL filtering and content inspection in-browser. Presumably because it's closer to the malicious behavior, and network MITM is harder to accomplish with newer TLS and with decentralized workforces.
If Firefox had a more customizable, enterprise-feature-focused browser maybe we'd be seeing it used instead of Chrome? I don't know.
I don't particularly care about mozilla so much as I care about Firefox, gecko, and the continued existence of at least ONE other browser.
I don't want to use a blink based browser. If/When mozilla finally dies I don't have high hopes that Firefox won't just die with it.
> the continued existence of at least ONE other browser.
thankfully next generation of browsers are here - ladybug and servo, so at least something will survive even in the worst of the worst cases
Why do you want to not use a blink based browser? Are there any changes to the engine you are looking for that a competing browser could help develop.
To me blink as a render engine is too closely coupled to Google. Even though technically chromium is disconnected and open source, the amount of leverage Google has is too high.
I dread the possibility that gecko and webkit browsers truly die out, and the single biggest name in web advertising has unilateral sway over the direction of web standards.
A good example of this is that through the exclusive leverage of Google, all blink based browsers are phasing out support for Manifest V2. A widely unpopular, forcing change. If I'm using a blink based browser I become vulnerable to any other profit motivated changes like that one.
Mozilla might be trying their hardest to do the same with this AI shlock, but if I have to choose between the trillion dollar market cap dictator of the internet and the little kid playing pretend evil billionaire in their sandbox? Well, Mozilla is definitely the less threatening of the two in that regard.
Participarion in web standards includes multiple different browsers even if they use the same browser engine. If we had only blink based browsers, it wouldn't be just Google at the table.
>phasing out support for Manifest V2. A widely unpopular, forcing change.
It was unpopular among a niche minority. Most of which didn't undersrand what actually changed with MV3, nor did most people understand the evolution of MV3 over time.
Brave has adblocking built into blink itself, so you no longer need to trust a 3rd party browser extention.
This is a very pessimistic post about mozilla, and a lot of it is warrented -- but also it's trivial to disable the AI stuff. dead simple. so until that day comes, I'll still be supporting mozilla (for now, using firefox relay). It looks like till then google will be propping up mozilla to avoid looking like a browser monopoly, and i'm not sure about a future where the community maintains the remains of the firefox source.
> It looks like till then google will be propping up mozilla to avoid looking like a browser monopoly
This is less and less the case each year. Historically, Google's accounted for over 95% of Mozilla's revenue. But through the recent launches of a bunch of products it's gradually knocked that number down to under 70% and seems to continue decreasing rapidly.
I often see two demands made of Mozilla: (1) focus on Firefox; (2) become financially independent from Google. IMO these two goals are going to be in conflict with each other. They started their own VPN, launched MDN Plus, etc in an effort to improve their financial independence. The AI gimmicks feel like they're in the same thread. I don't like it and don't ever wanna use it but I can't fault Mozilla for exploring that option.
Based on independent audits they are accomplishing (2) and based on their amazing performance in interop-25, interop-24, etc they are also accomplishing (1) as best they could.
It’s also trivially easy to disable ads in the Windows start menu, but the fact that they’re even there is shocking.
I use Firefox because I want to do at least something to keep the web browser market from becoming a monoculture again, but they’re making it increasingly hard to justify.
It's pretty clear opportunists displaced the software ideologues at Mozilla a long time ago, but I still find the products to be more palatable than alternatives. It would take a long time to burn off all relevance of Firefox and Thunderbird even without adequate maintenance.
Maybe it is possible to make it (and other functions) to stay disabled by the enterprise policies file.
The problem with AI integrations in Firefox is not in whether they could be disabled or not.
Given that Mozilla Foundation isn't swimming in cash, "investing" in AI (a well known money sink) makes very little sense and will definitely undermine the development of their core product (the freaking browser).
Also, the timing of their Nov. 13 announcement is pretty bad. There is already chatter that AI may be a bubble bigger than the dotcom bubble. For a company that doesn't have deep pockets, it would be prudent to take the back seat on this.
How are they using that money to stay alive though
> Also, the timing of their Nov. 13 announcement is pretty bad. There is already chatter that AI may be a bubble bigger than the dotcom bubble. For a company that doesn't have deep pockets, it would be prudent to take the back seat on this.
Unless Mozilla plans to spend millions on cloud GPUs to train their own models, there seems to be little danger of that. They're just building interfaces to existing weights somebody else developed. Their part of the work is just browser code and not in real danger from any AI bubble.
It could still be at risk as collateral damage. If the AI bubble pops, part of that would be actual costs being transmitted to users, which could lead to dramatically lower usage, which could lead to any AI integration becoming irrelevant. (Though I'd imagine the financial shocks to Mozilla would be much larger than just making some code and design irrelevant, if Mozilla is getting more financially tied to the stock price of AI-related companies?)
But yeah, Mozilla hasn't hinted at training up its own frontier model or anything ridiculous like that. I agree that it's downstream of that stuff.
The bubble if any is an investment bubble. If somebody likes using LLMs for summaries, or generating pictures or such things, that's not going anywhere. Stable Diffusion and Llama are sticking around regardless of any economical developments.
So if somebody finds Mozilla's embedded LLM summary functionality useful, they're not going to suddenly change their mind just because some stock crashed.
The main danger I guess would be long term, if things crash at the point where they're almost useful but not quite there. Then Mozilla would be left with a functionality that's not as good as it could be and with little hope of improvement because they build on others' work and don't make their own models.
I mean maybe it needs to be said again but
> Given that Mozilla Foundation isn't swimming in cash, "investing" in AI (a well known money sink) makes very little sense and will definitely undermine the development of their core product (the freaking browser).
The browser doesn't make any money (the Google search bar money would not be replaced by another entity if they stopped). That is why Microsoft abandoned theirs and why Safari is turning in to IE. Every one of these threads lambasting Mozilla for the "side projects" doesnt seem to have an answer for how does mozilla make money.
Often it will be people complaining they can't "donate directly to browser development" not realizing that it will be peanuts compared to the google money. Most people in the market wont pay for a web browser.
It would be one thing if the side projects made money. But they don't.
If they aren't making money either way, I'd prefer they focused on the core product.
Or charge for an actually useful feature like Firefox sync which is currently free.
I was surprised (and frustrated) that OpenAI’s and Perplexity’s browsers are both Chromium-based. I would have thought that they would have gone with a Firefox (or WebKit) fork given:
1. That Google is a competitor to them in the AI space.
2. That Google has such a strong stranglehold over the web, and Chromium/Chrome is a big part of that. I mean, why ultimately help your competitor here?
I don’t really care that much about the AI junk. But I’m on my very last straw with Firefox. Recent mobile versions just cannot seem to remember any default search engine setting other than Google. It drives me insane that they can do all these other things but the search engine bug has lingered for weeks.
My feelings are the same. Firefox is barely alive, and what little sustains it is goodwill and people not wanting to deal with Google more than is needed. Yet they keep on eating into their goodwill and do seemingly nothing to build it back up again (unless introducing AI features is somehow supposed to be that). Every bad feature implemented could have been a bug that got fixed instead, or effort to push back against Google. And yet they consistently opt to put their effort into features that push people away from them, and don't put that effort into things that would at least retain the people they already have. It's a lose-lose situation.
> The response from the Firefox community has not just been overwhelmingly negative, it is universally negative as far as I can tell.
Insofar as I count as part of the Firefox community as a long-time user and infrequent bug reporter: I want useful, non-creepy AI features in my main browser, or it's probably not going to remain my main browser for too long.
Of course I also want them to be fully optional, but I have no reason to believe that they would be anything but.
What features? Voice control?
If it is about chat, do we actually need Firefox adapted when you can go to gemini.google.com or some other one and write what you want there? Optionality is ensured since you actively have to go there.
What useful, non-creepy AI features are there?
I cannot imagine why one would want AI in a browser at all, but I am open to the possibility that there are applications I have not considered.
Let's say I want a 5000mAh power bank supporting 12v USB PD output and trickle charging. And it's got to be available in my country.
To find such a thing I basically have to open loads of product pages cross-reference retailers' websites with manufacturers' product pages.
If I could automate that process, it'd be pretty neat.
Thanks.
I don't think I understand why that would be implemented in the browser and not as its own service, but it does sound useful.
I just did the same thing with "very famous rock live acts performing within 500 miles of my location within the next 9 months". Whether this kind of functionality needs to be delivered via the browser I'm not sure. The LLM has to be server hosted, so may we well host the rest of it server-side, perhaps?
Yeah I think although he acknowledges how biased the Firefox forum poster sample is, I think he is vastly underestimating just how biased.
If Firefox is reduced to just nerds who post in forums it's totally dead. Maybe it's at that point already.
Tbh I still use Chrome because Firefox's performance just isn't as good. I wish it weren't so but there we go.
I also liked Pocket integration.
But the naive purists seem determined to team up with the genuinely evil in every walk of life, so Chrome monoculture seems inevitable.
And it's not like Google or Microsoft is going to do anything with AI that is worse than this, right?
Nobody would have an issue with those features being add-ons. In fact the Pocket integration is actually an add-on, silently downloaded on first run based on some online check.
If they’re gonna be bundling add-ons, I’d rather have them bundle something universally useful like uBlock Origin, but obviously they won’t do that because publishing a browser with an actually unique and useful selling point is not in their best interests.
I recall the original interface of Firefox was abandoned in favor of copying Chrome's with the rationale being that "it could be implemented as a third-party add-on" or some such.
"Why does the default interface get relegated to an extension when things like pocket and hello and AI chat are opt-out?" I ask, rhetorically.
Same here. I find it useful, and it doesn't feel like it took several engineering years to build, diluting Mozilla's focus from "just building a browser".
Actually, whenever I hear people argue that that's all Mozilla should ever be doing, I wonder if they really mean a HTML and Javascript engine? While that's important, browsers are more than that; the chrome matters too.
Someone needs to convince Firefox rather than develop its own AI (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45926779) to develop a system to pipe your html rendered browsing history in real time so external local services can process it (https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/archive-your-browser-hi...). See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45743918
Firefox probably won't suddenly have the best AI, but they could have the only browser that does this.
They'd probably reject that idea under some bullshit privacy or security excuse Wayland-like reasoning. Also why we don't have XUL extensions anymore and why they'll eventually copy chrome on that manifest crap.
This article is annoying. It's not wrong, but it also doesn't come across as terribly relevant without suggesting some vaguely plausible alternative. The closest it comes is that everyone should go back to using "regular" search engines that will return "regular" pages. and that if all the players (browser makers + search engines) did that then everything would be just fine.
That'd be great, if that pristine Web still existed to search and people were happy with today's results of searching it. But in the real world, the Web is a pile of auto-generated and auto-assembled fragments of slop, SEO-optimized to death, puddled atop and all around the surviving fragments of value. (The value is still there! I suspect the total value in the Web has never stopped increasing. Just like those monkeys are always typing out more and more Shakespeare.) Also in the real world, people are decisively choosing the AI-generated summaries and fevered imaginings. Not for everything, but web search -> URL -> page visit is becoming a declining percentage that won't always be able to support everything that it does today.
It's not that I particularly want AI in my browser. I would say that I emphatically don't, except that automatic translation is really nice, and Firefox's automatic names for tab groups are pretty cool, and I'm sure here and there people will come up with other pieces. I'm actually ok with AI that targets real needs, which is 0.01% of what people are pushing it for. But I also think that we're past the point where NOT having AI in the browser is a sustainable position. (In terms of number of users and therefore financially.)
Should Mozilla be head over heels in love with AI, as it appears to be now? I'd definitely prefer if it weren't. But telling Mozilla "don't do bad thing, it'll make you irrelevant and have no users" is fine and dandy but ultimately pointless unless you have an alternative that doesn't require the entire world to cooperate in turning back the clock.
(Disclosure: Mozilla pays me a salary to write bugs.)
(And working code! I write some of that too!)
(And no, I currently don't do anything that adds AI to the browser, nor can I think of anything I'd want to work on that would add any AI.)
> But in the real world, the Web is a pile of auto-generated and auto-assembled fragments of slop
There are parts of the web like that but your assertion seems to rely on this being universally true. It clearly and obviously isn't.
> Also in the real world, people are decisively choosing the AI-generated summaries and fevered imaginings.
Are they "decisively" choosing it if it's turned on by default? If it were actually opt-in then we could measure this. As it is I don't think you have any data to rely on when making this assertion.
> Not for everything, but web search -> URL -> page visit is becoming a declining percentage
The same web search companies that own AI models they're trying to sell? Do you not suspect there could be a few confounding variables in this analysis?
> except that automatic translation is really nice
Which we already had and has nothing to do with language models masquerading as "AI".
> is fine and dandy but ultimately pointless unless you have an alternative that doesn't require the entire world to cooperate in turning back the clock.
An alternative to what? Tab renaming? Bad article summaries? Weak search engine algorithms?
I've noticed that Firefox has steadily been eating up more and more of my CPU/RAM lately. It's not been significant enough to make me use Chrome, but it is a worrying trend. The main thing i want of a browser is for it to get out of my way. Edge is a little bit worse at this then chrome which is why nobody uses it. There's very little distinguishing browsers, a large part of the reason i continue to use firefox is because i used to use it. The second i find that Chrome has 0.1% less friction, i'll switch.
A comment on the article:
>Google's AI Overview continues to be an inferior provider of information than solid web search results.
I would love to hate that feature, but i don't. I kind of like it. It's useful sometimes and easy to ignore if i want. Honestly i would say it enhances my browsing. You can complain that it's often wrong and 2 dimensional and you would be right. But that would be missing the point. Maybe you can complain about secondary effects. I don't know what those would be though. Perhaps that it degrades the overall browser ecosystem and locks you into googles own, but that is moving the goalposts.
I wish Mozilla would explore the enterprise productivity space. There’s huge amount of money currently being made on dubious enterprise security products, and with the browser being at the forefront of threats (its literal purpose is to execute lots of untrusted code safely) I feel like an enterprise build with centralised management, in-browser DLP (removes the need for janky TLS interception middleboxes), built-in adblocking (since those also reduce productivity) would sell really well and give them independence from Google and the advertising industry.
I don’t understand Mozilla’s current strategy; their attempt to pander to the advertising industry and produce a Chrome clone has been a massive failure as demonstrated by their ever-shrinking browser market share which is now effectively a rounding error. For people that are satisfied with being part of the advertising economy, why wouldn’t you just use Chrome and the Google ecosystem? If you don’t mind your data being used for advertising purposes, Chrome is an excellent browser and their broader ecosystem gives you functionality Mozilla will never match.
Mozilla’s only way out is to go back to its roots and build a better user-agent, and provide an adversarial alternative to the current advertising-based ecosystems.