HN Reader

> And Enzor-DeMeo is convinced Mozilla can get there, that people want what the company is selling. “There is something to be said about, when I have a Mozilla product, I always know my data is in my control. I can turn the thing off, and they’re not going to do anything sketchy.

I used to think that, but they no longer have that trust, and announcements like this are part of the reason.

> He says he could begin to block ad blockers in Firefox and estimates that’d bring in another $150 million, but he doesn’t want to do that. It feels off-mission

Eh yeah, killing the #1 reason why people still use your product is pretty much off-mission yes. I don't really understand how this would make money for them but either way it is the worst idea possible.

I understand more that he wants to be all in on AI. It's the big thing now. Billions are splashing around and Mozilla badly needs money. But everyone is doing AI browsers now. What would make Firefox so different from the rest? What is their moat? Better to focus on what makes it different rather than trying to play the same game as everyone else.

And yeah the web is in an existential crisis, but that's not really up to Mozilla to fix. I definitely won't stop adblocking that's for sure.

They’re not in a position to completely ignore some of the current AI trends. That much I can wrap my head around.

The seeming double down makes no sense to me. It won’t suddenly make Mozilla more popular. It could be useful, yes, however I doubt it’ll be radically different from other implementations of AI + Browser in such a way that it stands above the others.

What I wish they would realize in the Mozilla C-Suite is that there is real appetite browsers that get out of people’s way and focus on productivity. Given their small market share they could stand to grow by addressing that part of the market. Look at the previous success of Arc.

They keep chasing trends instead of creating them. And while it is a hard job to do that, I feel they haven’t given it an earnest attempt in some time

Firefox is still my daily browser of choice. I really want to see it do better and succeed

> At some point, though, Enzor-DeMeo will have to tend to Mozilla’s own business. “I do think we need revenue diversification away from Google,” he says, “but I don’t necessarily believe we need revenue diversification away from the browser.”

So they want to monetize the browser somehow outside of the Google deal. Future does't look good for Firefox

Unfortunately this is not unexpected because Mozilla needs to continue receiving money to survive and unfortunately nobody wants to have the tough conversation about paying for a browser so when whoever is funneling money into Mozilla (Google) says you need AI in your product you have no choice but to jump.

I think their logic is a bit wrong here. Microsoft is a "trusted" entity. Trust doing a lot of heavy lifting here, and even they had to roll back their AI ambitions after seeing the lackluster adoption rates of people using their AI features. The trust part just doesn't matter. It's the principal that we've had browsers for over 20+ years and we never needed AI in our browsers. I would quickly abandon Firefox for an alternative in a heartbeat that doesn't include AI in it.

The uncomfortable truth for all these companies though is that most people simply do not need AI in the places they are shoving it into. Like why does notepad need AI?

This makes no sense.

Their AI solution is all about trust, he says, and we can trust Mozilla because they're not incentivized to push any particular provider. But all we're trusting them with is a frontend for other AI providers, which really doesn't help much since the backend provider also needs to be trusted.

But wait! Since Mozilla is trusted, they're also going to provide their own AI backend service. And they're going to do placement deals with AI providers. Which of course incentivizes them to favor their own services and their partners, which nullifies the CEO's stated basis for trusting them, which makes the whole thing pointless.

First want to address the general hate/distrust Mozilla is getting. Based on their behavior the last many years, this is fair.

However, we've got a new CEO, and one from the Firefox side who openly talks about Firefox being the core focus for Mozilla. This is exactly what we've been asking for! I think we should give them a chance.

On the AI thing - I don't personally want AI in my browser. However, I do see some inevitability there, and I appreciate the stated approach:

> there’s still an AI Mode coming to Firefox next year, which Enzor-DeMeo says will offer users their choice of model and product, all in a browser they can understand and from a company they can trust.

If I can easily turn it off or point it at my own provider, this seems fine to me (maybe even good). I'm quite hesitant to let AI take any actions, but if there is sufficient user control/configurability then it could end up being a useful feature. If it's programmable through an API (such as with extensions) I could see some real personal use for that!

Let's not forget that Mozilla is one of the most important players in the open web. They made some big mistakes, but if they course correct and become what we need them to be, they could be one of the most important heroes of the time.

Help me, Ladybird. You’re my only hope.

Mozilla spend a lot of time telling me I trust them. I don't think that's having the effect they expect.

Multi-model or no, “AI in the browser” seems like one of those things destined to be eaten by “AI in the OS”, even more surely and to a greater degree than Dropbox was destined to be an OS feature. Having those same tools available system-wide covers the browser case while being far more useful and easier to use (because it’s one interface and set of behavior everywhere).

> “We’re not incentivized to push one model or the other,” he says.

Bold words from a browser whose finances hinge almost entirely around pushing one search engine over others.

To be honest while I dislike most AI integration that gets pushed, I really enjoy Firefox' local translation model features. I appreciate that I can conveniently translate things with a reasonable degree of accuracy without having to send that text to god knows where.

More stuff like that would be appreciated, though I don't know if their plans for the future will fit that definition.

Ladybird can't come faster

It's the n-th iteration of "maybe this will work ... nope that didn't work either".

The core value for Firefox users using Firefox is that it's a no-nonsense browser that protects you from ads, obnoxious popups, cooky hoarding social networks looking to sell your data, etc.

AI is not a core browser feature. Nobody is waiting for a Mozilla sanctioned or hosted AI model. Some AI companies are building their own browsers. Given how OpenAI has stopped talking about theirs, you might conclude it is not that successful though. Google is vaguely threatening to add some Gemini stuff to Chrome (not Chromium). The point here is that all the AI browsers are Chromium based.

That points to a problem in Firefox: it's a monolith that is hard to use as the basis for specialized applications that use it as the application runtime. That would be the core problem to fix for Mozilla. Not just cherry picking a particular application and doing a "me too" version of that without any obvious added value whatsoever. Which is what Mozilla is doing here and why it is obviously doomed to fail. Again.

For some reason, Mozilla ceded the whole bespoke application on top of the browser market to Chromium and Electron, even though the starting point of Mozilla was actually to be a generic application platform with things like Xul. Xul kind of flopped but otherwise it was the right move.

Instead of chasing this AI stuff without a coherent plan, which is what this looks like, that would be a more coherent plan.

What happened to servo? That looked pretty promising - is it dead?

It's clear that the professional managerial class (PMC) has its own social circles and inputs. I don't see how else they could continue to lean so aggressively into positions which are alien to most normal people. I don't necessarily just mean "the elite are out of touch," although that's a fair reading of the situation as well.

Rather, we all talk about people being in a bubble. (and these days, everyone is in a bubble) The PMC is for certain in their own bubble and I really have no idea what the inputs are. They're totally alien to me.

Almost all tech CEOs think we want an AI button on every window, every app, every dialog. Always there no matter what to make workers more productive or need fewer workers or whatever.

The reality is that even the most ardent supporters of AI want it only in a single web page or in their IDE and that's about it.

I literally installed librewolf for the first time on my fresh Debian install. Couldn’t have had better timing!

They can alienate whatever users left by introducing AI or they can alienate whatever investors left by not introducing AI. Sucks to be Mozilla.

How about doubling down on your strengths? Privacy, customizability, open standards, defacto stewardship of the open web - to name but a few. What do any of them have to do with AI? Here's a hint: none of them.

I'm so tired of this bullshit. I can live with tweaking flags to remove the AI "features" in Firefox but I'm not going to use a fucking AI or "Agentic" browser. That's not what I or a significant chunk of your users want.

Nobody got fired for pivoting to AI.

Now I'm even more nervous about what Firefox is going to become.

Related:

Mozilla Appoints New CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46288491

How can they be this oblivious?

All I want is an off button. The AI results are just trash. If other people enoy the garbage data they are welcome to it.

Ugh.

EAITD: Everything AI Touches Dies

All the more reason to ditch Firefox for the only viable alternative, Chrome, which famously has a much more restrained approach to AI.

Sigh...

(And yeah, I know, Degoogled Chromium, *Fox, curl... But viable is not only doing heavy, but required lifting here...)

So that's it then. Zen is going to eat their market share for lunch.

https://zen-browser.app/

bye-bye Firefox then

1. reskin chromium, or webkit. firefox is dead tech, cannot be used for anything other than firefox, and is no longer a testing target. it is insane to continually play catch-up with companies 1000x the size of your team. V8 is now the standard JS engine, spidermonkey is an insecure time bomb and again not modular.

Brave got it right and then got it wrong with pushing crypto and its buggy.

2. Push for local AI. local tooling is going to get big when we get past the current drought. We need fast reactive systems not dependent on servers. Chatgpt is like gaming on the cloud - its still bad even when its good. Need to learn the meta and understand why people are buying 5090’s just to run agents.

3. Remove everyone that wont follow good engineering or otherwise is using your cashflow as jump. This means no diversity hiring. No h1b’s, no cultural or ethnic political warring. Ignore the fake resumes go for git history only. If its mass firing so be it theres no shortage.

4. youre going to make everyone very upset to get anything of value done.