Mozilla’s interim CEO Laura Chambers “says the company is reinvesting in Firefox after letting it languish in recent years,” reports Fast Company, "hoping to reestablish the browser as independent alternative to the likes of Google’s Chrome and Apple’s Safari.
“But some of those investments, which also include forays into generative AI, may further upset the community that’s been sticking with Firefox all these years…” Chambers acknowledges that Mozilla lost sight of Firefox in recent years as it chased opportunities outside the browser, such as VPN service and email masking. When she replaced Mitchell Baker as CEO in February, the company scaled back those other efforts and made Firefox a priority again. “Yes, Mozilla is refocusing on Firefox,” she says. “Obviously, it’s our core product, so it’s an important piece of the business for us, but we think it’s also really an important part of the internet.”
Some of that focus involves adding features that have become table-stakes in other browsers. In June, Mozilla added vertical tab support in Firefox’s experimental branch, echoing a feature that Microsoft’s Edge browser helped popularize three years ago. It’s also working on tab grouping features and an easier way to switch between user profiles. Mozilla is even revisiting the concept of web apps, in which users can install websites as freestanding desktop applications. Mozilla abandoned work on Progressive Web Apps in Firefox a few years ago to the dismay of many power users, but now it’s talking with community members about a potential path forward.
“We haven’t always prioritized those features as highly as we should have,” Chambers says. “That’s been a real shift that’s been very felt in the community, that the things they’re asking for . . . are really being prioritized and brought to life.”
Firefox was criticized for testing a more private alternative to tracking cookies which could make summaries of aggregated data available to advertisers. (Though it was only tested on a few sites, “Privacy-Preserving Attribution” was enabled by default.) But EFF staff technologist Lena Cohen tells Fast Company that approach was “much more privacy-preserving” than Google’s proposal for a “Privacy Sandbox.” And according to the article, “Mozilla’s system only measures the success rate of ads — it doesn’t help companies target those ads in the first place — and it’s less susceptible to abuse due to limits on how much data is stored and which parties are allowed to access it.” In June, Mozilla also announced its acquisition of Anonym, a startup led by former Meta executives that has its own privacy-focused ad measurement system. While Mozilla has no plans to integrate Anonym’s tech in Firefox, the move led to even more anxiety about the kind of company Mozilla was becoming. The tension around Firefox stems in part from Mozilla’s precarious financial position, which is heavily dependent on royalty payments from Google. In 2022, nearly 86% of Mozilla’s revenue came from Google, which paid $510 million to be Firefox’s default search engine. Its attempts to diversify, through VPN service and other subscriptions, haven’t gained much traction.
Chambers says that becoming less dependent on Google is “absolutely a priority,” and acknowledges that building an ad-tech business is one way of doing that. Mozilla is hoping that emerging privacy regulations and wider adoption of anti-tracking tools in web browsers will increase demand for services like Anonym and for systems like Firefox’s privacy-preserving ad measurements. Other revenue-generating ideas are forthcoming. Chambers says Mozilla plans to launch new products outside of Firefox under a “design sprint” model, aimed at quickly figuring out what works and what doesn’t. It’s also making forays into generative AI in Firefox, starting with a chatbot sidebar in the browser’s experimental branch.
Chambers “says to expect a bigger marketing push for Firefox in the United States soon, echoing a ‘Challenge the default’ ad campaign that was successful in Germany last summer. Mozilla’s nonprofit ownership structure, and the idea that it’s not beholden to corporate interests, figures heavily into those plans.”
Fuck me: A browser, that’s what I want. Lightweight, productive. Let there be addons for the rest if and only if people choose to install them.
And of course, we can all agree on what “the rest” is. For example, surely tabs are a function for the window manager, so ditch those. And we don’t need synchronisation across devices, there are specialised apps for that. And I’ll have my download manager handle downloads, thank you very much. And do you know how many vulnerabilities have been found in image codec support? Why not just leave that to my dedicated image viewer? So much bloat, just give me a browser, darnit. Just use an addon if you want to render bold text.
Just give people options to disable things. I believe certain things are better as addons but others acrually benefit from deeper integration.
Wouldn’t it be lovely if a minimal browser was installed and on first-run it showed a checklist of modular features you could choose to install? It could be default addons made by mozilla, or something else, IDC. I’ll have to look at Librewolf, I keep seeing people bring it up.
Exactly. On first setup I want to walk through a form that asks me whether I want to enable tabs, downloads, image rendering, bold fonts, etc. Of course, they should all be off by default.
Don’t “exactly” me and then suggest incredibly hostile UX 😂 that sounds horrible and would scare off lost users.
It might be a horrible UX and scare off users, but that’s a price I’m willing to pay for a lightweight, productive browser that isn’t weighed down by needless features like bolded text.
Well I’m not willing to pay that price.
Just because of Poe’s Law: I’ve been sarcastic this entire thread, for exactly that reason. “Focusing on ‘browsing’” or “just add it as an option” sound like easy solutions, but in practice whatever you ship by default needs to work well for many users, and thus will never be perfectly tailored to any individual user.
Obviously I don’t actually think bold text is bloat.
The more options and configuration the more to support by the developers and more likely for problems to arise due to odd side effects of various options combinations.
We aren’t being asked to “agree” on anything, so the point you’re making doesn’t actually come up. New and invasive and unecessary and privacy-breaking and resource-intensive “features” are being added to firefox all the goddamned time and we don’t get to agree to it. Great point, though, in a falling-into-it-backasswards sort of way: maybe there should be some sort of democratization of features.
But unironically. Make them first party plugins. Enabled by default sure, because they’re not insane, but optional
So Arch, the browser?
“But some of those investments, which also include forays into generative AI, may further upset the community that’s been sticking with Firefox all these years…” Chambers acknowledges that Mozilla lost sight of Firefox in recent years
…
Chambers says Mozilla plans to launch new products outside of Firefox under a “design sprint” model, aimed at quickly figuring out what works and what doesn’t. It’s also making forays into generative AI in Firefox, starting with a chatbot sidebar in the browser’s experimental branch.
👎 I’d love Firefox more if they’d actually focus on it like they said they were going to.
Do people genuinely find that helpful? I actually don’t get it. I have never thought “if only there was a chatbot in my browser, right now!” The thought literally never even enters my mind.
i have never even had the desire to use a chatbot, the only AI thing i’ve really found actually useful is DDG’s thing where it will just pull directly from sources like wikipedia to answer a question, like “what is the combined population of NYC and boston?”.
that the things they’re asking for . . . are really being prioritized and brought to life.
All right then, bring back always ask cookies. I’ve been increasingly bitter over them deprecating useful features as they continue to add and maintain all sorts of frivolous shit.
Unless Mozilla can show a clear focus on developing Firefox features for the user I’m gonna stick with Librewolf while looking for other alternatives
Edit:
just as I hit submit I remembered that Falkon developed by KDE existsFalcon looks nice, but a quick search tells me that it’s based on QtWebEngine, which in turn is based on Chromium, so that’s unfortunate.
you’re right
rip, we need someone to make a better FOSS copyleft alternative
Some of that focus involves adding features that have become table-stakes in other browsers.
Speaking of this, does anyone else feel like Firefox’s lack of ability to wirelessly screencast is a major problem when it comes to convincing others to switch away from chromium browsers? I know chromecast and airplay themselves are both proprietary, and therefore counter to firefox’s open source philosophy, but they could at least implement first party support for miracast (or DLNA?) A surprising number of smart TVs work well with those protocols. They just tend not to advertise it because most people don’t know what they are.
I admit that I haven’t looked much into this since some years ago when I first switched over to firefox as my main browser, but at the time I found that there weren’t even any decent addons for screen casting functionality. I’ve learned to live without it, but I know a lot of people who use that functionality on a daily basis and could (quite justifiably) never be convinced to switch without an equivalent.
I don’t understand why browser “casting” is a thing, instead of regular screen cloning / expanding? Why limit it to your browser when there’s so many other applications that could benefit from it?
I don’t disagree, but Windows’ built in screen casting is hard to find and clunky to use. Linux is even worse off. Until earlier this year there was no real support from any Linux desktop environment. There’s a GNOME project that’s supposed to be putting together support. It was announced to ship with GNOME 46, but I’m not a GNOME user so I just tried to install the flatpak on my Kubuntu machine. It detects my TV but fails to connect with it. Definitely still needs work.
Different people have different needs.
Mozilla’s apparent “ooh shiny!” syndrome is a direct result of the organisation not deciding what it should be, and how to achieve it.
All that babble about compromising with the ad mafia boils down to “whoever pays the dinner chooses the dish”. Mozilla’s dinner is paid by an advertisement company called Google.
And, since Google was declared a search monopoly, Mozilla knows that that money is going to run dry.
Chambers believes that the power of the Firefox brand and what it stands for will help carry it forward.
Brands are not the omnipotent tools that some people believe to be. They might make a customer try your product, or avoid it; but they won’t retain the customer. And Mozilla’s fall boils down to their only relevant product being unable to retain the customers.
In addition to focus development on Firefox, if Mozilla genuinely cares about its users, it should be going all out against the ad mafia. If this is going to take bread off their tables, let them eat cake.
This means that it should be looking for revenue sources that are not Google, and go all out with Firefox’ “we protect you from targetted advertisement/harassment/marketing”.
About damn time re PWA support. Such a pain having to install add-ons and manually configure each device for each site.
I only moved to FF because Chrome kepr stuffing up my pinned PWA shortcuts.
Yeah, that’s the one thing I’m excited about. Though I wish they were a little more committed than “revisit”.
chatbot sidebar
Tip: Copy the direct link to the picture ( right click on the image and click “Copy Image URL” or similar ) then put that in
ALTTEXT should be describing the image you want to embed is optional, it should be displayed if the image cant get displayed.
MBA talk like that is one of the sure fire tells of upcoming enshittyfication
If they ditched the AI crap and brought back Progressive Web App support, I’d be happy. Librewolf until then.
Vertical tabs I could maybe buy someone wanting but MORE AI? Not based on what I’m reading, even in surveys.
If they want to make Firefox more popular, make it so I can close 54 of my 55 open tabs in task manager with “end task” without the whole app crashing (read:fix memory). Add in greater stack trace visibility into what parts of what add-ons are increasing load time at first launch (you can currently kinda see which add-ons, but it’s barely even bare bones info) (read: fix speed issues. Basic stuff like ad block and no script shouldn’t sesquiseptuple load times (that’s two orders of magnitude)
Do stuff the other browsers WON’T do, because their paradigm forbids proper optimization.
I loved it back when Firefox was adding features like cross site cookie protection and copying urls without trackers.
If they got back on that path instead of Ai and “privacy friendly” tracking, Then they’ll start to regain my trust.
LibreWolf is just Firefox without Mozilla’s shadiness, So it’s kinda a hard sell to get me to go back.
I’m going to have to look into LIbreWolf. It’s come up several times in the comments, so i should probably try it out and prepare to make the switch.
How about fixing the RAM optimization then? For some godforsaken reason Firefox randomly decides to open unused tabs when it has free memory to work with. Doesn’t close them ever if I need the memory for something else, though. It’s not even that many tabs, too! Only like 30.
Get rid of their integrated crap like Pocket and their weird AI fake review spotter and I’ll like them again. Librewolf works just fine until then.
These things are so quick and easy to disable that I barely remember doing it.
I am happy with the recent updates. Mobile FF 125 fixed lag on some websites, 128.0.2 fixes videos, on Nightly I have translations. On desktop we are finally getting PWAs and vertical tabs. Some websites are still laggy on FF mobile but now I can recommend it on Android.
