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I don't think Mozilla has always made the right decisions, but they are in a difficult position, and the anti-Mozilla arguments are typically much more vague and directionless. Some common demands:

- Mozilla should develop revenue independent of Google - Mozilla should not monetize Firefox - Mozilla should only focus on Firefox - Mozilla should develop cool research projects - Mozilla should be run like a competitive and professional business - Mozilla should have a salary cap and expect executives to treat it like a passion project

Some of these goals are opposite ends of the same slider, so it's not possible to maximize both. Typically, Mozilla seems to pick a middle-ground. For example, my understanding is that while salaries are quite decent, they tend to be below what Apple and Google will offer for similar roles.

Maybe it's seen as waffling whenever they shift these sliders, and maybe that's a fair criticism. But nobody else seems to be able to put together a clear and realistic alternative plan. Most of them pick and choose contradictory goals, other plans like Zawinski's are at least clear, but too radical for those who still want revenue to pay developers or to be able to watch Netflix in their browser.

Compared to the people running Chrome, the people running Firefox are merely annoying.

My main issue with the people running Mozilla is that they have wasted vast sums of money on executive salaries and their half baked notions of new initiatives the company should take up (and later abandon) that don't involve building web browsers, email clients, or supporting development tools.

I think the primary thing I've learned about open vs closed source products this last decade, is that the difference in marketing is huge.

Both Firefox and Chrome are great browsers, end stop.

But most articles on HN about Chrome start with glowing praise.

And most articles on HN about Firefox start with "What's wrong with FF" and condescention.

I'm past the point of thinking that this is actually reflective about the browsers and their organizations.

Chrome is actively ending ad block support in its plugins. Its CEO is actively engaging in the political process. Firefox has always had a messy relationship with advertising, in which it generally tries to walk the line between reality and ideology. There are pros and cons to both products, depending on what you care about. The fact that articles on each browser so consistently fall into the same pattern does not seem reflective of the actual products themselves.

I think the difference is down to marketing.

> In mid-2024, he pointed out its "Original Sin" of adopting digital rights management.

I disagree on that one. Maybe it could have been an option 15-20 years ago, when Firefox was a significant force. But now, if it didn't have DRM, platforms that use DRM would just tell people to use another browser, or a specialized app. And people who are not activists would just switch to "the browser that runs $service", and then you give free reign to whoever controls these browsers, including making the DRM more restrictive and more invading.

DRM is an addon, it lets you do thing that you can't do without (i.e. watching protected content), but it won't affect non-DRM content. You can turn it off if you want, you just won't be able to watch Netflix (or whatever), making it a worse user experience.

If you refuse to support DRM (and therefore denying your users of some content), hoping that it will discourage adoption of DRM by platforms, you have to keep your users captive so that they won't just switch. And considering that Firefox doesn't rely on lock-in: they don't have the means to do so, and it is against the spirit in the first place, they have to offset that by offering something else. And unfortunately, they don't have much to offer besides ideology.

The original sin, if we can call it that, is that Firefox technically lagged behind Chrome: slower, more bugs, less secure,... Having to accept DRM, as well as anything Google decided was standard is a consequence of that.

That's why I had high hopes with Servo. It had the potential to make Firefox a "better browser", giving them some weight when deciding not to support some anti-feature, but they lost it.

They also lost an opportunity on mobile by not supporting extensions for too long, and generally, for not being taken seriously. Why did it take them so long to support DNS-over-HTTPS for instance?

Now, they have an opportunity regarding ad-blocking, I don't know how they are going to waste that one, but knowing them, they are probably going to manage it.

After each Firefox install, I do:

- Right click context menu cleanup - I don't need Inspect Accessibility Properties, Email image, Set image as desktop background etc. - Disable telemetry - Minimal theme - Clean up search engines - Disable pocket, top sites, ads, what's new, search suggest - Disable tab groups, container, hover preview - Disable recommended extensions

These can all be done through config or userChrome.css.

After that, I install three extensions - uBlock, skip redirect, I don't care about cookies.

I have never cared about signing into browser or syncing bookmarks. All I want is a minimal browser that doesn't bother me on each run.

Great article, i missed the original that spawned this article: https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/17/opinion_column_firefo...

I've been done with firefox for many years.

Librewolf, firefox fork, is the way to go; available on flathub. Obviously Brave still being main browser.

Mozilla went wrong long ago. They publicly went political and followed through with the firings. They have blogs from the ceo straight up calling for political censorship.

Even more odd, it was mostly just US politics which stands out to non-americans. They are focused on everything except the browser and so it was inevitable to decline.

Firefox code is not fine. It is 25 years old code, with many stuff bolted on top (multithreading). It does not even have a proper security sandboxing for renderer!

This codebase was underfunded for a very long time! And all rewrites and major refactorings were cancelled!

Nobody embeds Gecko engine anymore. There are good reasons for that!

like most successful, supposedly focused non-profits, eventually the parasitical professional management class infiltrate it

they do whatever is needed to increase their own compensation, eventually killing the host, at which point they move on

the nominet drama a few years back ([1]) is one of the few cases where they were forcibly removed (due to its unique structure)

[1]: https://openuk.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/The-Stack_Openi...

Weird mix of complaints, attacking Mozilla both from the ultra purity of non-profit web standards side via JWZ while simultaneously complaining they don't run it like a business.

> All the functionality attached to Firefox's "Browser tools" sub-menu should be unceremoniously ripped out, banished to the developer's edition.

I hope this is some kind of sarcastic take I am not getting. What a weird thing to stand for.

Related from last month:

Firefox is dead to me – and I'm not the only one who is fed up

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44298286

People here should be much more angry at the collection of parasites running Mozilla, draining the foundation of money until Firefox finally dies with Mozilla going down right after them.

They are extracting millions while consistently fucking up any hopes of a future for Firefox. Fuck Mozilla, Fuck those Parasites and fuck all the Bootlickers here making excuses for them.

> Mozilla's leadership is directionless and flailing because it's never had to do, or be, anything else. It's never needed to know how to make a profit, because it never had to make a profit. It's no wonder it has no real direction or vision or clue: it never needed them. It's role-playing being a business.

I'm a bit of a tinkerer with software and will occasionally "wander" over the fence to see if it really is greener on the other side; I always come back to Firefox. I've tried:

Brave: love the mission/execution, don't care for Chrome

Arc: interesting idea, but ultimately removed too much of the things I need in exchange for things I might use, but don't need

Orion: Firefox extensions (even on iOS!) + native performance? Love it, but it crashes all the time and the extensions' compatibility comes and goes

Safari: I don't mind paying for software, but paying for extensions that will probably disappear in 6 months is a pass

I've recently settled on the Zen Firefox flavor: It brings a lot of what Arc, custom Firefox themes aim for in a stable package, while maintaining full compatibility with all the Firefox extensions I use. The only issue I still experience is the occasional "this site only works on Chrome".

The article praises Jamie Zawinksi, for calling out Mozilla on its failings. My take is that listening to him is the quickest way to irrelevance.

He calls out Mozilla for accepting crypto donations, so they stop it. Now they get less donations but there's no actual reduction in harm. Crypto still exists and has only grown.

He calls out Mozilla for digging into AI. As a very generic anti-AI take. According to him, Mozilla should not invest in mitigating the risks of Big Tech AI, it should simply not play at all. And this way magically AI harm will be eliminated.

He calls out the "original sin", DRM video. People that invest hundreds of millions into making a movie, aren't going to allow you to "right-click, save" on paid content. There's nothing morally wrong with paid content.

I could go on but all of these takes are performative and useless. If you want to make the internet a better place you need to engage with the real world and not maneuver yourself into a tiny corner of irrelevance where you self-congratulate your theoretical moral purity to your 3 Mastodon friends that are equally obnoxious and out of touch.

This entire thread seems like generative AI. Nobody normal thinks Mozilla is doing fine, or behaving rationally. Nobody thinks they've made any good decisions for a long time, but they see that the decisions they've made coincidentally benefit the source of 90% of their revenue, one of the most powerful corporations on the planet.

This article is actually very complimentary. They haven't managed to totally destroy the browser itself yet. Some people working there must still love it.

Wild that this thread got sunk with almost as many comments as upvotes. It's almost like we think that flooding an article with comments gets it pushed off the front page.

I have a far more different gripe than this.

Firefox seems to needlessly introduce features I barely need. Check their new release, 140.0

They introduced a toggle in the address bar to show the window title. Who tf is asking for this?

This browser just needs to be as simple as it can, without all this feature bloat.

Can they get Brendan Eich back?

The thing that keeps me on Firefox/Librewolf is the Holy Trinity of features:

- Profiles (with selector in-browser since 139 AFAIR)

- Container tabs

- Temporary containers

When some of the other browsers will have all these features, maybe I'll make the switch.

Mitchell Baker ran it into the ground and made a fortune doing so. Almost to the point that one might wonder if there may have been some sort of undisclosed quid pro quo with Google.

> We can point at what we'd like to see, sure. Did you know there's already a special developer's edition? No web designer is building on Firefox first any more. We're lucky if they even test on it. All the functionality attached to Firefox's "Browser tools" sub-menu should be unceremoniously ripped out, banished to the developer's edition.

If they're still developing the dev tools (which I'd argue they need to if they want any companies to support the browser), then what's there to gain by removing it from the regular build? I don't get it.

The suggestion for browsers to integrate an ad blocker always worries me. uBlock Origin benefits from being shielded from monetary incentives, as they don't even allow small donations to the maintainers.

That being said, Firefox frequently endorses the existing ecosystem of ad blockers in their featured extensions. They even featured AdNauseum, an ad blocker that attempts to DoS ad servers by sending fake clicks on every single ad. Google on the other hand labelled it malware and swiftly took it down. So right now, Mozilla is not at all an the enemy of arbitrary web content blocking.

Mozilla and Firefox is a great example of having too many advocates and not enough engineers. It's easy to find plenty of people committed to spreading the good word of Firefox or willing to answer Reddit threads with "just use Firefox". But there just isn't enough engineering effort to keep up with Chrome or Chromium.

The EU should fork firefox and develop it as a public benefit

same for intel

I don't know what's going on in Mozilla. Just today on my security camera NVR, Firefox pops up a dialog in the notification area at the lower right screen of Windows 11, showing an ad for its vertical tab feature, urging me to try it out. The thing is Firefox is rarely used on the NVR and the browser is not running. The only program running is the camera video app (the popup of course obscured the video window). It must be done by the background Firefox Update process. This is a brazen abuse of the notification area that even Microsoft hasn't tried yet.

One of the most important open source projects in the world did not have a CEO who could read code since 2014?

I am not surprised they are in trouble.

I’m a diehard Firefox user since day one, but today I updated to the 140.2 iOS build, and it broke my cookie jar, logged me out of most websites, and managed to switch LinkedIn to Spanish..

> Rust was developed at Mozilla. Mozilla axed it. In 2020, it laid off the whole team.

> As I reported back in 2023, the Servo browser engine is doing well. Early this year, its own figures show strong continued upticks in interest since Igalia took over development. You guessed it – Mozilla also gave Servo the boot in 2020.

You don't need to develop a new programming language to develop a decent browser engine. Maybe it would be nice, and maybe it could be better, but do you really have the resources to go off on such a tangent? Clearly the answer was no.

> 2020 is the same year Cathay Capital invested $50 million into KaiOStech, saying it would help bring the next billion people online. As The Register reported in 2018, KaiOS is Boot2Gecko, Mozilla's FirefoxOS rebranded. Mozilla killed its own version in 2015.

Calling it "FirefoxOS" was a mistake, but the idea wasn't all too bad. The rendering in HTML/CSS was a good idea, Java after all have Java Swing/JavaFX and that worked well, but I wouldn't have forced all of the apps to also be JS. I think it will be the future equivalent of an OS where all apps must be Adobe Flash. The rendering should have all been done in HTML/CSS, with the backend being any language of choice running in a tiny container.

I think Mozilla need to make things that do one thing well, and they also need to get better at developing MVPs that test the waters before pouring in years and millions into it.

I do want to applaud the author for something that, on the internet, is one of the most difficult things, namely being able to think two things at the same time:

>Firefox is in a bit of a mess – but, seriously, not such a bad mess. You're still better off with it – or one of its forks, because this is FOSS – than pretty much any of the alternatives.

Some of the punches landed here, e.g. axing Servo, are pretty devastating. Others, "why not buy an adblocker" (huh? they allow it via extensions which has been a longstanding tradition in the browser space), seem like non sequiturs. But the point remains:

>Like we said, don't blame the app. You're still better off with Firefox or a fork such as Waterfox. Chrome even snoops on you when in incognito mode, and as we warned you, Google removed the APIs ad-blocker extensions used. You still get better ad-blocking in Firefox.

Yes, exactly! It's a Two Things Can Be True situation.

That reads dangerously close to an obituary.

Firefox is not fine. If you think it is, please tell me how to disable BASIC http auth in it. (This is a serious problem, as it will send passwords unencrypted over a non SSL connection, and my users have been trained to type their sso password into every box they see (I know.... Not my doing)).

Firefox performance is really bad in google sites like meet, calendar, docs, youtube. I wonder why they are not working on improving the situation. Everything else is already perfect, just iron out these few issues and be the undisputed leader.

Until Firefox introduce scoped CSS they are IE6 to me.

A couple years ago (~2018-9 or so) I realized that Firefox had a weird leak, I opened a lot of tabs often (heavy internet user plus dev) and I never really restart my pc unless absolutely necessary because I have too many things at once I'm working on and it's a pain to reopen everything including Windows Explorer instances (now tabs).

I talked about this leak and they kept gaslighting me like it didn't exist, Firefox at one point was taking 24 gbs of ram on my pc. (It did)

Another issue, Firefox Nighly, I 100% understand that it's an early bird preview and all that, but they would literally brick your browser whenever they wanted you to force to update it... what? I complain and they say "then don't use nighly", like brother, I understand that, I completely understand to use stable for stability, but there is no reason to FORCEFULLY brick a user's browser whenever you release an update, just have a popup and if they WANT TO they restart at the moment if not at the next restart period... and if you REALLY need for some critical issue you can have a flag with the update that forces a bricking but is only used in extremely important scenarios.

The amount of mismanagement at Mozilla is incredible really, I was a die hard Firefox user, I remember opening my youtube channel trying to right click on a background and not being able to copy the url/view image with chrome back in the day, that was when I realized that Google would force "its" web standards so I decided to go all in on Firefox, yet now I'm back on a chromium browser because Mozilla has completely destroyed the browser I loved, even worse now with all the weird privacy invasive stuff they've added in.

I truly hope ladybird browser is successful.

All my hopes are with Ladybird now.

been a firefox diehard for over a decade. moved to librewolf recently because the amount of ad-infested settings and "oopsie" default reversions to my settings that expose me yet again to ads and i yet again have to turn it off is just gross to me. i shouldnt have to fight against software and triple check my settings to not see mind polluting ads or have my information sold/shared