Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

The job was always very easy, fire all of the pure managers and sock the google money into an endowment before it runs out. Then focus on privacy as you mentioned.

They’ve taken in several billion dollars by now.

But of course no Manager instance could imagine such a thing. Cue Upton Sinclair quote.

I'm still sad they shelved Mozilla Persona due to low adoption. There is a hole in the market around privacy and identity, and Mozilla would be a natural choice to fill it, but it's going to be an uphill battle to get major sites and end users on board. Not a job to be envious about indeed.

Why is so much profit needed?

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.

This is why I'm hopeful that at least one of Ladybird, Flow, and Servo emerge as a viable alternative to the current crop.

This is why I've been using Firefox forks like Zen or LibreWolf. These forks will disable/strip out the AI stuff, so I never have to see it.

> 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...

I still use Firefox, however it has been away from our browser matrix since 2019, very few customers worry with browsers under 5% market share.

> Are there any true alternatives (not dependent on financing or any engines from third parties)

Servo is still a work in progress, but their current positions give a great deal of hope.

The beginning of the end was getting rid Brendan Eich for wrongthink. This is the middle of the end.

"Anchor" is interesting. Because it could mean cornerstone or it could mean the thing weighing the company down.

> "a modern AI browser"

No thanks. Absolutely not.

>Technically.....

Since its birth, Firefox is still the only browser that manage multiple ( hundreds or in some cases, thousands! [1] ) tabs better than any browser. And in my view in the past 12 - 24 months Firefox has managed to be as fast as chrome. While Chrome also improved on its multiple Tab browsing experience.

Safari.... I dont know why this battery life argument keeps coming up because it is not the case. It hasn't been so for at least 5 - 6 years.

Mozilla could have played the trust angle when they have the good will and money. They could have invested into SaaS that provides better revenue generations other than getting it from Google. They could also have partnered with Wikipedia before they got rotten. But now I am not even sure if they still have the "trust" card anymore. Gekco is still hard to be embedded, XULRunner could have been Electron. They will need to get into survival mode and think about what is next.

[1] https://www.tomshardware.com/software/mozilla-firefox/firefo...

What does "faster JS" actually get me? Youtube is probably the most heavy site I and I think most people use, I'm certainly not trying to do heavy scientific computation in my browser, so what difference does it really make?

Anyway, Firefox's killer feature is still extensions, despite everything that's happened on that front. There's nothing like Tree Style Tabs for Chrome (not usably implemented anyway) and while I think maybe Brave has it, Firefox has uMatrix which is better than anything Brave uses (Brave may share lists or even code with that, but the uMatrix UI is where its at.)

They also have the "extensions that can do real ad blocking" angle.

I find that any performance benefits Chrome and Safari have are more than offset by the performance benefits Firefox gets by being massively better at blocking ads and the huge amount of JS and tracking garbage that comes with them.

Firefox always feels snappier to me, and I think most of that comes from less time downloading a bunch of ad shit I don't want anyway.

Looking at their strategy doc, it doesn't seem like they hear their users at all. It's riddled with AI. In fact their aspiration is "doing for AI what we did for the web." Oh boy!

https://blog.mozilla.org/wp-content/blogs.dir/278/files/2025...

They are still the only browser I know, which has actual useful chrome like changing the stylesheet, is CUA compliant and behaves and feel like a native GTK+ app (now-a-days only after restoring the OS window bar and enabling the menubar).

They also have useful keyboard behaviour and provide both a search and a URL bar, which makes it effortless to search locally and perform additional refinery searches while hunting down something, because you can change the search term without returning to the search website. Searching via the search engines portal is also often slower than via the search bar on crappy connections. Their search provider integration is also great (not sure how other browsers are in this regard) which makes opening a Wikipedia or MDN page about a specific topic a single action, without needing to look at a search result list.

There Profile Manager is also a breeze (not the new crap), it allows to open any URL in any Profile by clicking on any link in another program.

The extension system and the advanced configuration is also quite good.

Mozilla (in its previous form) has long been doomed. Mobile cemented it, I think. Browsers are part of the operating system and getting users to switch from the default is an incredible uphill climb. Especially when browsers are essentially utilities, there are so few unique compelling features.

That lack of connection to tech giants is a strength in the trust angle. And I think they’re right to be thinking about AI: people are using it and there does need to be an alternative to tech giants/VC funded monsters

Will they be successful? The odds are stacked against them. But if they’re not going to even try then what purpose will they serve any more?

> Technically, Chrome is faster on JS benchmarks.

I'm not browsing benchmarks :-/

When I do then chrome will have an advantage.

Meanwhile, in the real world, a JS engine can be half the speed of the Chrome one and the browser can still be faster, because blocking ads is what gives you the biggest speed up.

All the performance advantages in the world fail to matter if you're still loading ads.

Donations only get you so far. Take a mid-sized project, that needs $500k per year (a few devs, very modestly paid, zero expenses). It's a lot of money. It requires a huge user base. Say you have 500k users, and 5% donate $25 per year (I'm optimistic). And that's just $500k US, a few devs, zero expenses. A project that size probably has audit requirements, hosting costs, accounting, legal, trademarks, etc.

I see finances for a few free software projects, and many of them really struggle to get donations year after year, in a way that helps make the project predictable and sustainable.

For the US, people want you to be a 501c3, and then you need a EU equivalent. Canadians are unlikely to give to a US org (especially these days), but the market is too small to setup a local charity. So you need partners. All that has many compliance requirements and paperwork, so you need non-tech employees for the fundraising and accounting.

Eventually your big donors start blackmailing the project if you don't do what they want, and often their interests are not aligned with most users. You need various income sources.

Frankly, looking at the shape of Firefox I don't think that Mozilla cares for it at all - they just hold the brand because it's really well-established.

What would be the best solution today is to convince all these Firefox spinoff projects into combining forces and fully forking Firefox away from Mozilla, and don't look back. But seeing what happens around, how various projects - even the smallest ones are being lead, the moods in communities, I highly doubt that's actually possible.

To expand on Firefox mobile: if you haven’t tried it, give it a shot. uBlock Origin works just like on desktop. I have seen maybe five ads on my phone browser (including Youtube!) since buying it in 2019.

Kagi already has their own WebKit based browser, not sure they'd be interested in that partnership.

I don't know that a partnership with Kagi is the move, as great as the two work for me. The last thing you want users to see when starting up a new browser is a paywall. It would be rad to see Firefox treat Kagi as a first-class citizen, but I think a true partnership would be detrimental to both.

Agree with you on everything else, though.

I'm reading HN on my laptop outside, and a ladybug landed on my screen right as I was reading this comment. It's sitting there as I write this. I know this doesn't contribute to the discussion in any way but it's so neat I just needed to share.

Is this usable day to day yet? I built it a few months ago and there were showstopper bugs on any nontrivial website.

Exciting project nonetheless.

> it is

You must be meaning "will be". Because the first alpha release is promised some time in 2026. So hopefully by 2028 it will be solid enough.

And we can at least donate directly to Ladybird's development [0]

Unlike Mozilla which Firefox is completely funded with Google's money.

[0] https://donorbox.org/ladybird

> Dumb question: who’s Firefox target user?

These days, it seems to be people who:

* Don't want to be using a browser owned by an ethically dubious corporation

* Want a fully functional ad blocker

* Prefer vertical tabs

> What’s Firefox target user?

It seems as if you ask Mozilla, the answer would be "Not current Firefox users."

I really don't know the answer to this question, and I don't know if Mozilla has defined it internally, which probably leads to a lot of the problems that the browser is facing. Is it the privacy focused individual? They seem to be working very hard against that. Is it the ad-sensitive user? Maybe, but they're not doing a lot to win that crowd over.

It kind of feels like Firefox is not targeted at anyone in particular. But long gone are the days when you can just be an alternative browser.

Maybe the target user is someone who wants to use Firefox, regardless of what that means.

I use Firefox because I don't want to use a browser provided by an advertising company e.g. Chrome.

Ostensibly nerds. Linux users and maybe Mac users. Technical people who understand more about the software industry than all Mozilla Corp management since Brendan.

It's difficult to monetize us when the product is a zero dollar intangible, especially when trust has been eroded such that we've all fled to Librewolf like you said.

It's difficult to monetize normies when they don't use the software due to years of continuous mismanagement.

I think giving Mozilla a new CEO is like assigning a new captain to the Titanic. I will be surprised if this company still exists by 2030.

Me! I want the best thing that's not Google or Chromium. Right now that's Firefox. Maybe someday it will be Ladybird.

> Dumb question: who’s Firefox target user?

Partly me. It's the only browser where I can disable AV1 support to work around broken HW acceleration on Steam Deck.

Also tab hoarders. (I migrated to Chrome 3 years ago to try and get rid of my tab hoarding)

Firefox users are people who would use LibreWolf, but installed it, tried it, saw it doesn't have dark mode, and figured that Firefox was good enough after all.

They had one. Until he made a fatal mistake of giving a tenner to the wrong people.

I'm afraid they're delegated to coding nowadays and even open source projects are run like corporations with attached "foundations" parasites where funneling out money on unrelated stuff occurs.

This piece linked is a dry marketing and nothing else, and I don't believe in a single bit this guy is saying or will ever say.

The line about AI being always a choice that user can simply turn it off: I need to go to about:config registry to turn every occurrence of it in Firefox. So there's that.

They need to build a great product as well as somehow fund the project. Seem like those credentials match the requirements.

Wouldn't it make more sense to have them program and let a product person handle big picture ideas

Why do you think a software engineer or computer scientist would be more qualified?

Just to clarify how outrageous the Mozilla CEO compensation is, consider that Tim Cook makes 0.019% of Apple's revenue in compensation ($75M on $391BN of revenue). For Sundar Pichai (Google), it's 0.003%; Samsung is 0.0001%; Nadella at Microsoft is 0.032%.

For Mozilla? 1.18%! That's almost FORTY TIMES these other companies. Apple revolutionized mobile computing; Google revolutionized search, Microsoft owns enterprise software, and Samsung is one of the largest hardware manufacturers in the world. Mozilla makes a second-rate web browser whose sole distinguishing feature is supporting a community-built addon that does a great job blocking Youtube ads.

I could give $100k per year to Mozilla for the rest of my life, and my lifetime donation would cover less than half of the CEO's salary.