Mozilla's New CEO Confirms Firefox Will Become an "AI Browser"
64 comments
·December 18, 2025al_borland
taurath
If they go in this direction they're going full bore.
I love how with tech, now the only future that anyone can imagine is one that nobody but tech executives want.
al_borland
We can only hope the market lets their preferences known. Also, that the executives don’t assume it’s a victory because people begrudgingly use the stuff, because there are no other options.
asdff
How? Everyone is doing this crap. There is no alternative.
skywal_l
The only fact that there is a "CEO" of Firefox is in itself asinine.
popalchemist
Mozilla is a large organization that produces many products.
nickf
...which is arguably the problem. Firefox. Thunderbird. That should be it. According to their own site, beyond that they have the browser app for mobile devices. A VPN service, an email-forwarding service, and MDN. Hardly 'many products'.
bruce511
>> I’m not sure he knows the type of person that actually uses Firefox
I'm sure he does, but he is trying to get different users.
The problem Firefox has is that it has accumulated "problem" users who are only there because they've left everywhere else.
In other words, people didn't choose Firefox cause its better, they chose it because it "wasn't x". They were offended by some action of their last browser, and left.
This is the worst user demographic to have. They'll only hang around till you do something that offends them. Which will inevitably happen.
With 2% market share the goal of the new CEO is not to pander to existing users. It's to convince new users to switch because Firefox is better.
qbrass
They didn't accumulate "problem" users, they drove off everyone else.
Throwing their fans under the bus to try and get new users has been Mozilla's tactic for the last 15 years. Which is why they're down to 2% market share.
Doing it harder isn't going to help them.
jval43
I'm still here. But it hurts to see Mozilla shoot themselves in the foot again and again. They just don't get it, and they won't survive.
I was even a Pocket user when they acquired it, immediately stopped using it at that point because it was clear as day how stupid that integration was.
It's death by a thousand cuts, all to get some "other users" while alienating all the existing ones.
I'm even for all the AI features, but please let me add my own self-hosted LLM. Currently you can only set one via about:config, and as soon as you use any other LLM, the settings are lost. If I wanted everything locked down I could just use Chrome instead.
7bit
I think you're wrong and people choose Firefox because they believe it's better.
intothemild
You're both arguing the same thing.
It's not X is the same as it's better than X. Just because someone chooses something because it isn't the other thing isn't saying both suck.
Squeeze2664
I was going to switch to Waterfox in light of this news, but a cursory search revealed that it, too, was sold to an advertising company not long ago. While they have published a blog post opposing Mozilla's AI stance, I'm really past the point of giving ad companies any benefit of the doubt. I'm looking into Librewolf now.
The browser situation grows more grim by the day.
elashri
And after the acquisition it seems they abandoned the browser and it is independent again since 2023 [1]
[1] https://www.waterfox.com/blog/a-new-chapter-for-waterfox/
gudzpoz
Your cursory search likely provided outdated info. [0] Quoting from it's maintainer: [1]
Waterfox is independent again: [0]
And System1 are an “ad-tech” company but the term should be used loosely. The ownership made sense as they are a search engine aggregator and they own a bunch of old school search engines like DogPile, InfoSpace etc. Nothing to do with what people associate ad-tech with, i.e. tracking you across the web or collecting personal data.
nickthegreek
I recommend you check out Zen.
nirui
Ideally, you don't need a "turn off" button. If you find the need to add a Disable button, the feature you're adding maybe already too on-the-nose.
How about if I need an AI to read the page, I could just right-click and select? It's the same way how the screenshot feature currently works.
(Wait, I just right-clicked and discovered there's a AI item on the menu. Maybe it's already how it works? If so, then it's not very on-the-nose and I can accept it existing)
> The bulk of Mozilla’s revenue coming from its Google search deal.
Just show a donation message already. If Wikipedia can collect that much donations just for hosting a set of websites, Mozilla, who's doing some really important work for the Internet and maybe humanity at this point, can only collect more.
cowboylowrez
The thing is, market share reports don't show evidence that Mozilla is doing really important work. From reading the comments here, firefox's literal reason for existing is ad blocking and "not chrome". Compatibility with websites is on the decline, websites breaking on firefox are on the increase. Rust is one of the few positives that I can see yet Mozilla has transferred trademarks and "infrastructure assets" to a new rust foundation of some sort that seems to mean that they're now independent of Mozilla.
The internet market makers think that ad blocking is antisocial, so in fact mozilla's firefox only reason for being is that its not the internets favorite browser which is a hell of a mission statement to offer, but thats as generous an assessment as I can make with those fellows, hell I still use firefox out of habit but I always keep a chrome install for the times firefox just doesn't work, but even then I'm just lazy and even when running firefox I've never installed an ad blocker which seems to increasingly be firefox's reason for existence.
gkhartman
Welp, I guess Firefox forks are gonna get a lot more users in the near future. Hopefully turning off the ai features will be an available option as mentioned, but hopefully they'll be off by default.
pdpi
At this point, is there any full-featured browser that is neither Blink-based nor burdened by a metric tonne of junk? With the way Firefox is going, Safari might well be the sole survivor, which is not a state of affairs I'm particularly happy with.
m4rtink
There is the Ladybird browser project:
I guess they will get a lot of interest after this new round of Mozilla bullshit.
pdpi
Yeah Ladybird is interesting, and might become the answer to my question at some point in the future. Unfortunately, it's not a good-enough answer today.
altairprime
Sponsorship tiers start at $1000/year, which is one sfbay mocha to go every weekday. For those that can afford that, perhaps it’ll help make the future you desire come true sooner.
rererereferred
Can we make it good-enough? And not by adding features to it but by making websites that don't need them? I'd rather browse the kind of web that browsers like Dillo and Ladybird can browse.
protocolture
I use firefox for work, and I am pretty cool with that. The other "approved" browser we have is edge which is fine, and edge actually replaced Chrome entirely when it was approved. I cant remember what caused Chrome to be dropped, but I imagine it was less impressive than a boatload of opt out AI features.
Now I am going to have to propose the canonisation of one of Firefox's forks, which will be difficult because we are sensitive to supply chain issues.
milliams
It bothers me that it's not even a "AI web browser", but an "AI browser". I don't want to browse "AI", I want access to the web.
rrgok
CEO's job has become easy. Just slap AI in the product and profit millions in bonus.
m4rtink
For a few quarters until it kills the product. A golden parashute I guess ?
IAmBroom
As always, incentives must be intelligently made.
I worked for a branch where the manager's bonus was tied to gross sales. So what did he do? Prioritize a product line that sold well, with low (actually negative!) profit margins.
He didn't sail blindly into icebergs; he targeted them like our factory was his personal pinball.
In this case, CEO compensation should have carefully nuanced incentives, not simply quarterly increments in stock price.
airstrike
I've been on Firefox for decades and I'm 100% ready to jump ship.
Tried Zen today and it didn't feel right—felt too much like it wanted to be Arc but ended up a bit frankenstein-y in the process.
Open to suggestions that aren't Arc or Brave, if anyone has them!
beAbU
Do you mind catching me up on what happened to Arc? It was a HN darling IIRC and now I get very "we don't talk about it anymore" vibes.
alisonatwork
What platform are you on? I use Ungoogled Chromium on desktop (uBlock Origin still works if you install it from GitHub) and Cromite on mobile (some AdBlock built-in), mainly because both of these just give you a clean and compatible browser without any frills. I noped out of Firefox back whenever it was that they started prompting me to make an account to sync every time I opened it, but I still use LibreWolf at work to test compatibility.
airstrike
I'm on macOS.
I'm kinda strictly against Chromium because I first installed Chrome to break up a browser monopoly that threatened the long term future of the web. I uninstalled it once it flipped from "the browser that's making the web better" to "the browser that's making the company Google better at the expense of the web"
It's not really a political stance, but a pragmatic one. I appreciate that makes it hard to find alternatives, but I can't logically justify using Chrome.
marcyb5st
I jumped to Vivaldi. I was drawn to it by the amount of personalization it offers and after spending a bit of time setting it up to my liking it is now my daily browser.
I don't use the integrated calendar or mail client, just the browser and you don't notice these features are even there since they don't spam you.
It is chromium based however.
mikragor
And propietary freeware.
designed
Check out Helium. I switched from Brave to try it out and works pretty great. Just no Widevine support (though possible on Linux).
ccakes
I use Firefox personally, where do people who care about privacy go? For those of you who’ve already given up on Firefox (I can understand why..), where did you go?
pilaf
I'm also still a FF user, but I'm eyeing Waterfox [1] and Floorp [2], both FF forks. Waterfox has the stronger privacy focus out of the two, but Floorp doesn't strike me as being any less private that vanilla FF.
acheong08
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned Librewolf. It had sensible defaults and just works. I barely care about the privacy aspects. I just don't want to touch the settings
taurath
Well folks, there's very few places to go now.
wuiheerfoj
I‘ve been a happy user of https://helium.computer for a few months now after a previous Mozilla faux-pas. So far I don’t miss Firefox in the slightest
aedC0fGXvjdxa
I’m a heavy user of Firefox and AI, and I believe that close collaboration between browsers and AI is a must-have feature. The only question is: can I trust Firefox to do it right?
I’m not sure he knows the type of person that actually uses Firefox.
> Enzor-DeMeo says it is important that AI features in Firefox are “something people can easily turn off”.
It seems like it should be opt-in instead of opt-out. At the very least, ask up front, and have a single switch to make it like it’s not there at all.