Mozilla's open source AI strategy • Hacker News Board

Re: Mozilla's open source AI strategy

#121

Post by Vinnl » Tue, Jan 13, 2026, 7:33 PM UTC

giancarlostoro wrote: post #51

rafterydj wrote: post #34

I'll be contrarian to the thread sentiment and say: Mozilla has misstepped in the past, and will continue to do so, and they're partially funded by competitors for antitrust reasons, etc. That said, I can't really disagree with anything in this. As a developer (and socially conscious human) I want to move in the direction of openness.

I think the problem many of us have is it feels like Mozilla invests more effort into everything other than its browser, we see the things they do outside of Mozilla, I mean it was so bad Thunderbird had to become its own foundation due to lack of funding! I would love for there to be a world where Mozilla maintains Firefox and can make for product projects that provide higher value. I also have a pipe dream of one d…

At the same time, Firefox last year gained tab groups, vertical tabs, a user-friendly profile switcher. Split view and tab notes are under development. It sometimes feels like it's moving faster than ever, and that's disregarding all AI features.

(Disclosure: I work at Mozilla, but not on Firefox.)

Re: Mozilla's open source AI strategy

#122

Post by sunaookami » Tue, Jan 13, 2026, 7:33 PM UTC

jampekka wrote: post #58

LunaSea wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what exactly are the complaints with Firefox? If you are a (the) leading browser like Firefox once was, the "what are the complaints?" is the right question. If you are a minor browser like Firefox currently is (~2.5% market share), the "what is it doing better?" is the correct question.

The Firefox market share was eaten largely by the enormous and legally dubious marketing campaigns by Google and Microsoft. Hard to see how Mozilla could compete with constant forced nags and defaults in the most widely used websites and operating systems.

No, Chrome was genuinely better than Firefox back then. Firefox didn't have multiprocess until many years later and Flash constantly crashed the browser.

Re: Mozilla's open source AI strategy

#123

Post by zamadatix » Tue, Jan 13, 2026, 7:35 PM UTC

Yoric wrote: post #102

zamadatix wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was a big factor, but so were things like the way they treated their mobile browser for years and years, which is the platform 2/3 of browser traffic now originates. According to statcounter's stats, Firefox never cracked 1% of monthly mobile traffic any month from when stats started in 2009. Even Opera and UC have more than double Firefox's average for the last year and they are just Chromium forks users are down…

For context, I recall that for years and years, Firefox was the highest ranked mobile browser. Mozilla invested a lot in mobile, Firefox devs had to rewrite the Android linker, invent new ways of starting binaries on Android, etc. just to make Firefox work (all of which were later used by Chrome for Android). It still didn't make a dent in mobile browser shares. Sure, Mozilla could have invested even more in Firefox…

What Firefox was doing 4 months after Android 1.0 GA'd would indeed been unlikely to have made a dent in mobile share compared to what effort was going on once Android had a billion users. Why put all of that effort in before something is even used to just then let it rot for years anyways? In the end, they ended up spending the resources to refresh it in 2019 anyways - by which time billions had already decided Firefox was just a battery hog and slow on mobile.

It's a sad story because Firefox was so good on mobile when nobody had a chance to use it then it was crap when they did. On desktop Firefox is still the #1 non-bundled browser, things went so poorly on mobile they can't even come close to that today. In a parallel universe timings were inverted and Firefox may have even had more users on mobile than it does desktop today.

Re: Mozilla's open source AI strategy

#124

Post by capitainenemo » Tue, Jan 13, 2026, 7:36 PM UTC

mkroman wrote: post #114

I don't understand how they expect offline LLM models to work in a meaningful capacity for users.. Isn't there a single multilingual person working at Mozilla? All of the small LLM models break down as soon as you try to do something that isn't written in English, because - surprise - they're just too small. There would need to be a hardware breakthrough, or they would have to somehow solve the heavy cost of switchin…

Mozilla did integrate TTS into Firefox - in fact, one of the better FOSS TTS AI models out their was their initiative. https://github.com/mozilla/TTS

Re: Mozilla's open source AI strategy

#125

Post by culi » Tue, Jan 13, 2026, 7:37 PM UTC

TomMasz wrote: post #103

As a long-time Firefox user, I don't want them to have an "AI strategy", I want them to have a browser improvement strategy.

Firefox has improved significantly. It's improvement strategy is mostly focused on what developers ask them to focus on. They've had great performance on the yearly interops

https://wpt.fyi/interop-2021

https://wpt.fyi/interop-2022

https://wpt.fyi/interop-2023

https://wpt.fyi/interop-2024

https://wpt.fyi/interop-2025

Re: Mozilla's open source AI strategy

#126

Post by fyrn_ » Tue, Jan 13, 2026, 7:40 PM UTC

tomcam wrote: post #63

How about finishing Servo?

They've fully disowned Servo. On the plus side that means you can donate to Servo directly, and the project actually has a decent amount of contributors now

Re: Mozilla's open source AI strategy

#127

Post by pmontra » Tue, Jan 13, 2026, 7:41 PM UTC

28304283409234 wrote: post #109

Please let me pay for Firefox and have the proceed fund Firefox directly. This is not 1999 anymore. We are all wealthy grown ups now.

Yes, but how large is the subset of Firefox users that are willing to pay for a browser? Take that number and multiply it either by 10 o by 100 and you get the order of magnitude.

I googled this https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1mhks3h/firefoxs_w...

Let's say we are at 100 million users. If only 1 out of 100 pay, it's 10 to 100 million dollars per year. A lot of money or a puny amount, it depends.

Re: Mozilla's open source AI strategy

#128

Post by kbelder » Tue, Jan 13, 2026, 7:42 PM UTC

LamaOfRuin wrote: post #77

diffeomorphism wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When do you think the "web 2.0 era" was? Web 2.0 is around 2003 or so and chrome would not even exist for another few years. Giving Firefox/phoenix/Netscape the majority credit for the first fall of IE seems accurate. The rise of chrome happened afterwards and by then IE also fell much deeper than 55%.

Opera was also essential at this point, not in terms of market share, but of innovation in the browser space with features that would eventually spread to everything else.

That shouldn't be forgotten. There was a time when the 1% or so of users that ran Opera were getting a much better experience than any other browser. It was far superior for several years, until all of its innovations were copied by other vendors.

Re: Mozilla's open source AI strategy

#129

Post by mkroman » Tue, Jan 13, 2026, 7:42 PM UTC

capitainenemo wrote: post #124

mkroman wrote: post #114

I don't understand how they expect offline LLM models to work in a meaningful capacity for users.. Isn't there a single multilingual person working at Mozilla? All of the small LLM models break down as soon as you try to do something that isn't written in English, because - surprise - they're just too small. There would need to be a hardware breakthrough, or they would have to somehow solve the heavy cost of switchin…

Mozilla did integrate TTS into Firefox - in fact, one of the better FOSS TTS AI models out their was their initiative. https://github.com/mozilla/TTS

Ah yeah, there's this: https://github.com/mozilla/TTS

I can't seem to find anything that mentions a Firefox integration though?

Re: Mozilla's open source AI strategy

#130

Post by giancarlostoro » Tue, Jan 13, 2026, 7:43 PM UTC

Vinnl wrote: post #121

giancarlostoro wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the problem many of us have is it feels like Mozilla invests more effort into everything other than its browser, we see the things they do outside of Mozilla, I mean it was so bad Thunderbird had to become its own foundation due to lack of funding! I would love for there to be a world where Mozilla maintains Firefox and can make for product projects that provide higher value. I also have a pipe dream of one d…

At the same time, Firefox last year gained tab groups, vertical tabs, a user-friendly profile switcher. Split view and tab notes are under development. It sometimes feels like it's moving faster than ever, and that's disregarding all AI features. (Disclosure: I work at Mozilla, but not on Firefox.)

I kept up with it a lot during the Oxidation years and it felt like Firefox was getting a LOT then, while I'm sure its still getting attention (I was testing Firefox Quantum the second it come out), and I still use it daily, I'm just expressing the overall of how I and others feel, I dont feel they're ALWAYS messing up with Firefox, but it definitely feels like Mozilla does too many moonshot things that fail and it leaves anyone wondering if the money was better spent invested in Firefox itself.