It's no longer the fault of long-term CEO Mitchell Baker, she of the six-million-bucks salary. She took the cash and left in February 2024. After the February 2024 layoffs that went with the "open source AI" announcement, in November, new boss Laura Chambers laid off another third of the staff, but somehow found the money to hire new executives.
Money is the problem. Not too little, but too much. Where there's wealth, there's a natural human desire to make more wealth. Ever since Firefox 1.0 in 2004, Firefox has never had to compete. It's been attached like a mosquito to an artery to the Google cash firehose. The Reg noted it in 2007, and it made more the next year. We were dubious when Firefox turned five.
...
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.
this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2025
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I dunno, Firefox of 3.0 times was the shit. It itself was the browser that should be, more welcoming to customization than Windows of the time was to porn winlockers. They also had XULRunner for alternative ideas. Gecko was the FOSS browser engine that various alternative "nice" MacOS and Linux browsers used.
Though between 2004 and 2008 only four years passed. Less than between Windows 2000 and Vista (let's ignore XP as a more glossy consumer version of 2000).
let's ignore XP as a more glossy consumer version of 2000
That feels like a dangerous argument;
- 2000 = NT 5.0
- XP = NT 5.1
- XP x64 = NT 5.2
- Vista = NT 6.0
- 7 = NT 6.1
- 8 = NT 6.2
- 8.1 = NT 6.3
- 10 = NT 6.4 (Later NT 10.0 then 1507 for July 2015 when they made the switch to ‘agile’.)
Unless you are prepared to argue that everything since has just been an updated version of Vista.
Hot take. Under semantic versioning everything after vista has been in essence a new version of vista.
Going from NT 5.x to 6.x was a major jump.
The reason why Vista had no/terrible drivers was because they went from an insecure one driver bug crashed the whole system model to more secure isolated drivers that don’t crash the whole system model. Developers had to learn how to write new drivers and none of the XP drivers worked.
They went from a single user OS with a multi user skin on top, to a full role based access control user system.
They went from global admin/non-admin permissions to scoped UAC permissions for apps.
Remember on Vista when apps constantly had that “asking for permissions” popup? That was the apps not using the 6.x UAC APIs.
Given the underlying architectural situation everything since Vista has been vista with polish added (or removed depending on how you look at it)
Things will go beyond vista when a new major release with new mandatory APIs shows up.
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What might be a valid argument in 5.x might not be an argument for 6.x.
But IMO, Windows 7, 8, 10 and 11 have more in common with vista than vista has with XP.
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This is the exact block I came to quote.
The rest of the article is good too, though.
mozilla and firefox need to learn more away from ai and more towards ethical not for profit governance. be the opposite of big tech and stand for the internet as a public utility and force or good and decency. instead of going ai bro, y'all need to stand up against racism and discrimination while pushing internet for everybody, free of profits.
y'all need to stand up against racism and discrimination
Felt kind of out of nowhere. How does a web browser stand up to racism?
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stand up against racism and discrimination
What does this mean for a browser company? I understand this being an important company value, but I don't want them filtering the internet or anything. Their primary goal should be to foster a privacy respecting web and a high performance, standards based browser.
I don't think eliminating profit from the web should be a goal. I don't care if websites make money, I just care they don't profit from my data without me agreeing to it explicitly.
I think Firefox needs to become financially independent, and that means finding a privacy respecting business model. My personal preference is a micro payment system where I can pay websites for content in exchange for no ads. That provides value to me and websites that I'd otherwise block ads on.
If AI is part of that, sure, just make it opt-in and very obvious when it's working.
y’all need to stand up against racism and discrimination
I concur, I think they should push towards a more positive internet. Though I think they are a bit wary of doing it ever since the toxic backlash to this blog post
https://blog.mozilla.org/blogarchive/blog/2021/01/08/we-need-more-than-deplatforming/
which is exactly why they need a strong positive leadership that doesn't bend the knee to bigots.
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I can't keep browser hopping. I want to stay with firefox. Please don't get worse!
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For clarity, Mozilla isn't one thing. There's Mozilla Corporation (profit) and the Mozilla Foundation (nonprofit). Firefox is a product of Mozilla Corporation. And yes, the need to make a profit is a bug not a feature.
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The fact that they are now selling our data seems like both a browser problem and a leadership problem. If the browser were fine, we wouldn't be seeing a moderate exodus to choices like Librewolf and Zen.
For those holding out for a hero: https://ladybird.org/
Ladybird is a brand-new browser & web engine. Driven by a web standards first approach, Ladybird aims to render the modern web with good performance, stability and security.
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Excuse you, I don't have a problem.
Firefox still hasn't fixed Bug 1938998 despite me reporting it multiple times. There's a reason why Firefox is almost non existent on mobile. I've been using the internet for 26 years, and have used Mozilla based browsers since 2001, I want them to survive to the next era of the internet, but they are struggling to keep up. Opera and Edge already gave up their engines, Webkit and Blink are basically the same engine with different standards enabled, and Firefox is under 2% on some days on Statcounter. I feel that soon AI based browsers using their own AI-engine will probably take over the internet soon anyway.
I use it on mobile. It's mostly OK tbh, and the addition of a working ad blocker means it's far better than Chrome for me.
In fairness that is an invalid URL in my book, but it should at least be consistent across desktop and mobile, or at least tucked behind an option.
I have never encountered that bug, seems like an issue with the duck duck go not doing proper url encoding. I daily Firefox on mobile and its the best option by far with all the available extensions and of course working adblock
Yeah, this is part of the new Reaganomics I like to call AIconomics. The goal isn't to produce a good product, the goal to make something flashy that tech billionaires want to throw cash at. It's not unlike crypto. Crypto has literally no actual value yet people are shitting money into bitcoins of every type in hopes that one will hit it big. Meanwhile tech billionaires keep minting new ones to entice new suckers every other week. The tech billionaires want you hooked on AI so you'll give up your private info that they can sell to each other so they can cash in, the software companies are investing their time and resources into making AI LLMs in order to get tech billionaires to give them money. It's a viscous capitalist circle. Only thing that will stop it is heavy regulation. But with Republicans in charge that will absolutely never happen. Trump practically made his entire cabinet out of billionaires and corporate shills. And too many Democrats gave them the thumb up, so don't count of Dems doing a whole lot to stall the big tech chokehold on everything either.
Sadly I am running into more and more things that don't work on firefox. Stuff like medical record portals, financial websites for my companies retirement plan. Stuff I have little choice about. And most fail silently. They don't say it is the browser. I don't know how they are doing it, but google is winning the fight.
When I asked a couple of developers who work on websites/webapps with a lot of moving parts, they said it was easiest to just test for chrome, since that's what most people use.
It's turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
It's so damn stupid. If your site works meaningfully differently in Firefox vs Chromium, you're already doing something very, very wrong.
Yep, this is why at least for me when I develop websites I use Firefox first for development to make sure that the website runs on Firefox.
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I just moved back to ff in November, because of ubo. I have to move again? Where to?
Did you read the article? It says Firefox is the best choice you have, and all of the criticism is directed at the organization's leadership.
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i’m running waterfox… it’s firefox, but with junk stripped out, and performance optimisations
there’s no real alternatives between chromium and firefox based engines, and chromium includes pretty much everything you’ve heard of except firefox
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