In recent years, things have not been going well for Mozilla. Firefox’s market share is a rounding error, and financially, the company is effectively entirely dependent on free money from Google for making it the default search engine in Firefox. Mozilla’s tried to stem the bleeding with deeply unpopular efforts like focusing on online advertising and cramming more and more “AI” into Firefox, but so far, nothing has worked, and more and more of the remaining small group of Firefox users are moving to modded versions of Firefox without the “AI” nonsense and other anti-features.
The task of turning the tide is now up to Mozilla’s new CEO, Anthony Enzor-DeMeo, who took up the role starting today. In his first message to the public in his new role as CEO of Mozilla, he lays out his vision for the future of the company. What are his plans for Mozilla’s most important product, the Firefox web browser?
Firefox will grow from a browser into a broader ecosystem of trusted software. Firefox will remain our anchor. It will evolve into a modern AI browser and support a portfolio of new and trusted software additions.
↫ Anthony Enzor-DeMeo
So far, the “AI” additions to Firefox have not exactly been met with thunderous applause – to put it mildly – and I don’t see how increasing these efforts is going to magically turn that sentiment around. I’d hazard a guess that Firefox users, in particular, are probably quite averse to “AI” and what it stands for, further strengthening the feeling that the people leading Mozilla seem a little bit out of touch with their own users. Add to this the obvious fact that “AI” is a bubble waiting to pop, and I’m left wondering how investing in “AI” now is going to do anything but make Mozilla waste even more money.
I don’t want Firefox to fail, as it is currently the only browser that isn’t Chrome, Chrome in a trench coat, or Safari, but it seems Mozilla is trying to do everything to chase away what few users Firefox had left. In the short term, we can at least use modified versions of Firefox that have the “AI” nonsense and other anti-features removed, but for the long term, we’re going to need something else if Mozilla keeps going down the same path it’s been going in recent years. The only viable long-term alternative is Servo, but that’s still a long way off from being a usable day-to-day browser.
The browser landscape ain’t looking so hot, and this new Mozilla CEO is not making me feel any better.
I am starting to understand why CEOs push AI so much. It is useful for THEM and they can’t see how useless it is for the rest of us.
We are 8 people in a startup and the CEO uses Copilot and other AI tools all the time. Create a quick ad video with an avatar of him dancing showing the product? He can do it on his own. Create a marketing campaign based on the new product features? Dump the release notes into Copilot, ask copilot to draft an advertisement campaign, done. Rinse and repeat. Who needs a marketing department now? Or graphic artists? Or video editors?
So this new Mozilla CEO probably thinks everyone has the same needs as he does. I believe that AI chatbots make CEOs highly insecure (as they realize how mundane their work is and how replaceable they truly are) and, at the same time, even more arrogant, as they think all tasks can be chatbotted-away this way. If it is so wonderful for them, how couldn’t us, the plebs, not want AI Firefox?
I am so disheartened, have been using Firefox as my main browser since v3, which I ran even under AIX! If the Internet is public infrastructure and a basic human need to be able to operate in any modern society, then we need a browser that works like a simple bicycle: renders webpages, and done. No extra services, no extra functionality, just a dumb browser. I don’t even need favourites.
Shiunbird,
Yes, and this is one of the greatest sins of our corporate culture. People land in to higher positions, touch up their resume, leave a mess, and jump to the next job getting a “golden parachute” along the way.
Regardless of all their faults, founder / operators like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Amancio Ortega Gaona, Richard Branson “know” what their companies supposed to do. Even if they fail, it is not for making themselves richer at the expense of the company.
Someone being dropped by Wall Street has their loyalties first to themselves.
Of course there are exceptions, however here clearly the new CEO has zero understanding to why people still use Firefox. It is my primary browser on my laptop, not because it is better, but because it has less corporate control.
Fail to build for a niche, and try to be average, and see how quickly you become irrelevant.
ZERO indeed.
If he would be any good, he would stop trying to make Mozilla grow. But CEOs are probably genetically programmed to not be able to see anything besides the line going constantly and aggresively up.
Get rid of the whole organization except the team actively developing Firefox (and perhaps Thunderbolt). Focus all other efforts in gathering sponsorships to keep the core development team viable. Heck, I’d pay 5 EUR per month to use a Firefox free of ads, free of AI, free of tracking, free of BS, highly portable, high compatible, and fast.
All the rest is bloat. Mozilla VPN? Bloat. AI Firefox? Bloat. Firefox Relay? Bloat.
According to Wikipedia, in 2022 81% of their revenue came from Google. The total revenue was 593 milion USD, expenses 425 million, software development expenses 220 million. I bet 90% of 425-220 million USD is bloat.
Shiunbird,
And this is his greatest risk with “growth”. He would be eating into Google’s market.
To be fair Mozilla being “hostage” to Google’s good graces is not a great thing. And Google has changed, no longer the Google of “Do No Evil” times. They are basically on welfare, which is sad.
However one does not need to be a master strategist to seek a less riskier path for independence.
Musk proved he has no idea what he’s doing with the Twitter takeover, over and over again. The worship for him needs to stop. He’s just a hypeman that would be a used car salesman if not for being born into money.
dark2,
One does not need to go to either extreme of “worship” or completely ignoring success when analyzing a situation.
And also… Twitter is not a company he built or grew, so in fact it is an example of CEO dropping in, which is not good in general. (The courts have basically forced the sale on him, even after he realized it was a mistake and wanted out)
yup, the problem here is the concept of a CEO
a CEO works for the shareholders, not for the product, not for the company, not for anybody, just money and investors
so having a CEO at Mozilla… why? You need a director with a view, not a shareholder defender, if destroying the company is good for investors, a CEO will do it, without hesitation, he’ll destroy everything as they usually do for profit.
I wouldn’t say it’s “useless” – it can be useful given some constraints, in the hands of a person with deep domain knowledge. But yeah, that’s not managers. To a manager, this stuff looks like pure magic.
I don’t have a good answer for the more important question of “How does Mozilla make money?” – but I do know, most consumers aren’t all that excited by putting “AI” in the name. I also know, people are using it. They are not using search engines and going to websites any more, and instead, are just using AI. So there’s a paradigm shift there that is real, and should not be ignored.
I remember the internet bubble. I really started my career right after that, on the slope of enlightenment. What I’m trying to look for is that – what will the slope of enlightenment look like for AI? I think there will be upside, after the crash, and it’s time to start finding it.
In my limited sample of one, working for a medium-sized non-profit that behaved like a large corporation, this is typical of executives. They have ideas but very little interest in what it takes to carry them out and their implications for the organization.
They are also unwilling to do simple work for themselves, so they turn to secretaries who translate commands into actual workable plans and just do things like schedule meetings and send e-mails.
My question is… What AI features will they do add? Because saying “AI browser” is the same as saying nothing. Will it have off-line translation of pages using AI? That would be really great. But other things…
rastersoft,
Yes, AI actually adds useful benefits. However I’m not sure their particular implementation would be good enough. (Microsoft for example famously failed in this regard)
What can AI do?
It can translate web pages, summarize them, help you jump to main content, run as an agent and help you find information quickly.
But it can also be used to give you slop, burn CPU cycles, and sell your information to highest bidder.
And that’s why I explicitly say “off-line”. I want the AI agent to run in my GPU.
rastersoft,
It is no secret I am a very enthusiastic proponent of local LLMs in general. They closely track the commercial state of the art models, and resolve most of the complaints of cloud based AI.
That being said, yes, we have yet to see what Firefox is trying to offer. Will they just bundle a quantized version of Qwen3 0.6B or Gemma3 1B and try to run locally? Or will that have “native Google Gemini API integration”?
sukru,
I agree. IMHO the media needs to do a better job distinguishing between LLMs that run locally versus those that end up making our software & services dependent upon corporate data centers. I prefer a future where AI is democratized without giving so much control & power to centralized entities and monopolistic corporations. Local models are essential to this democratization. When FOSS advocates protest LLMs without this distinction, it I am afraid it could end up harming FOSS-friendly LLMs while leaving the future more dependent on the monopolies.
Alfman,
That is true, and we unfortunately already see the results in vision models area. After the pretty much demise of stability ai, stable diffusion became the last ever “good” image generation models, and our open source progressed stalled for more than a year (there is some progress though)
https://www.labellerr.com/blog/top-open-source-vision-language-models/
“Why is it impotrant? Who needs to build more artificial uniform pictures slop?”
Well…
Vision goes both ways. It is also for understanding. I can upload my receipts to Gemini, and ask for analysis, or upload a picture of my bookshelf and get recommendations. That will not be easily done locally.
(These are also immensely useful for accessibiliy, especially more so when sloppy devs build everything with electron, which is very difficult to parse with older methods)
We need to enhance local AI ecosytem, not shun it.
Take a look at the app store for browsers and they all have AI in the name and description. It means nothing at this point.
AI is all hype and it is sold as the ultimate productivity tool. My employer is going all in with the AI slop machine hype too. Sold as an assistant that can analyze and write texts for you. Except it can’t analyze and doesn’t really do anything more complex than spit out boilerplate. If you really want it to do something that might be valuable, you have to write an elaborate and complex prompt that tells the artificial dolt step by step what to do. In which case you could have done the job better and quicker yourself.
But it is the hot new thing and if you have been circling the drain of irrelevance for about a decade as Mozilla has done, it might seem the obvious tool to drum up some publicity and seem relevant again. Since Mozilla exists by grace of others paying them to advertise for them, maybe the new CEO is betting on a big AI player to fling some of that tasty AI money towards them for “integrating” their AI offering into Mozilla software. Firefox AI (TM) – powered by ChatGPT. Or whomever feels like they need their name mentioned.
It’s clear that the fight is over. Blink won. Pick the incarnation that irks you the least or that still can be beat into submission. Mozilla doesn’t see Firefox as a core product anymore.
Doesn’t look good for Firefox. This is really sad. I’ve been a firefox user almost from day one.
Let’s hope the free alternatives do reach a level where they become viable options for daily browsing. My bet would be on the open source browser that OSNews chooses to ignore, but of course I wish Servo all the best as well.
In the meantime I’m considering to switch to Vivaldi, even though it’s closed source. Or I’ll cling to Firefox until it becomes really bad 😉
You left out the other points the new CEO made:
—
First: Every product we build must give people agency in how it works. Privacy, data use, and AI must be clear and understandable. Controls must be simple. AI should always be a choice — something people can easily turn off. People should know why a feature works the way it does and what value they get from it.
Second: our business model must align with trust. We will grow through transparent monetization that people recognize and value.
—
Now that doesn’t sound too bad, even if I could care less for integration of cloud LLM interfaces in my browser.
But even if we might not like it, and even if the hype will eventually die down, LLMs will not go away anymore.
That might be true now, but going full bore AI, with a target audience that doesn’t want it, won’t bring in the projected benefits for Mozilla. What will the tune become when AI isn’t bringing in the expected dough or user-numbers? Expensive write off? Or doubling down and not giving users the opt out anymore? Even for a “non-profit”, to keep the lights on, you need money coming in.
I’m using Brave, which is Chrome in a trenchcoat, but at least has good performance and a very good ad blocker.
Mozilla has lost its purpose a long time ago
Brave is a crypto scheme disguised as a Chromium fork, and it had “AI” baked in before it was cool (not that it was ever cool). Its “ad blocker” replaces original ads with its own monetized ads and sells your browser history to those advertisers as well as to “AI” data brokers, so there is no actual privacy and you’re still seeing ads, they are just more subtle.
https://stackdiary.com/brave-selling-copyrighted-data-for-ai-training/
https://factually.co/fact-checks/technology/brave-search-data-sharing-advertisers-third-parties-833996
“Brave ads” and “Brave shields” are two different things.
Exactly.
I just want a web browser, man.
Update: I looked at what they are actually doing.
Might be a bit disorganized, but…
A. “AI” Window
This reads like in addition to regular and incognito browsing, they will have AI browsing too. I think a sidebar instead of a window, but nevertheless, this is where most of the concerns are. Cloud (Gemini?) by default. Haven’t seen local AI support
B. Mozilla.AI
A new division, which took over llamafile project. It was a spinoff from llama.cpp project (which is an awesome local LLM runner). And was abandoned. This is a good sign.
C. “Bundled” local models
I’m not sure what their purpose will be, but they aim to bundle “task specific” models, like T5-efficient-tiny and MiniLM. I don’t have experience with either of these models, so this requires more research.
(CPU usage, GPU! usage, actual quality?, optional? hallucinations? … too many questions)
Overall,
Wiritng this on Firefox, and… that blog article above is just “marketing speech” and it is counter-productive for us the user base. Vague investor bait AI promises whereas Firefox users would want something more assuring.
(I also understand their frustration. I have been using Firefox on and off for decades since early releases. But paid zero cents directly.. That is not sustainable.)
The breadcrumbs I could find are a mix of that re-assurance and also more worry.
I have the distinct feeling Ladybird is going to eat Mozilla alive once it gets basic extension support and starts getting packaged for distribution. Doubly so if/when they manage to get it supporting Manifest V2 extensions. It’s literally everything Firefox used to be… The less bloated, no-nonsense, independent browser that’s just trying to be good.
I’ve actually been building/testing Servo/LadyBird on my machine. I’m actually quite shocked by how quickly LB is advancing; it even managed to render my personal blog correctly – something Servo has never managed because of some CSS witchcraft. Performance is atrocious, at least with my builds, but I think that’s more a “me” thing.
It is already being packaged in OpenMandriva.
BTW this is the side-effect of making HTML+JS a general-purpose API (basically what Java SE set out to do but failed): The browser stops being a fancy text formatter with browsing buttons and starts approaching the complexity of the higher-level components of a mainstream OS.
So far, everyone in the FOSS community has been willfully ignoring this fact because Mozilla was shouldering the burden of making a fully-featured and fully-FOSS browser, but now that Mozilla is in a bit of a panic that they’ll lose their free Google money (since their market share is a rounding error now) and has started doing all kinds of dubious moves, what happens now?
While Mozilla has been dependent on Google for a long time now, I wonder if it would be in Mozilla’s financial interest s to move to the EU and reincorporate there, or perhaps just ask EU governments for money?
Angel Blue01,
Is there any precedence for something like this?
I’m not that clear on the current financial situation for mozilla because an antitrust lawsuit recently barred google from making these kinds of deals in the future. But it’s clear that mozilla are desperate for independent revenue. I’m not sure being beholden to the government is good either. While I don’t know much about EU government, here in the US we’re seeing a lot of subsidied and non-profit organizations actively being bullied by the current political administration. There are strings attached now more so than ever: “you agree to be our political pawns or else we will pull your funding”.
FOSS funding is hard. It can come down to a project finding a sugar daddy and hoping that there isn’t too much manipulation. Of course when FOSS projects are owned by corporations like IBM or google, they will meddle for selfish reasons. Even if they’re not as bad as Oracle, it still harms FOSS when they pursue anti-consumer agendas to promote their own interests. It seems fundamentally tough to solve the disconnect between FOSS community interests and those holding the purse strings.
Alfman,
I agree. It is much more dangerous to be beholden to a government than a corporation. At least with a corporation you can “shop around”, and if things go badly, you can ask the government courts to intervene.
They have weakened the deals, but decided not to completely disallow them — it was obvious mozilla would go bankrupt otherwise. I think the new restircitons are: (a) they are not exclusive, (b) they are limited to 12 months
In other words, Google can pay Mozilla to be the first, default option of Search in Firefox. But they cannot bar them from getting money from other options. They also have to renew this every year, instead of locking Mozilla 5 – 10 years at a time.
Man Mozilla Corp really has this desire to put Firefox in the grave.