Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself? • Hacker News Board

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#481

Post by rchaud » Wed, Dec 17, 2025, 5:10 PM UTC

hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #106

lxgr wrote: post #41

>> He says he could begin to block ad blockers in Firefox and estimates that’d bring in another $150 million, but he doesn’t want to do that. It feels off-mission. > It may be just me, but I read this as “I don't want to but I'll kill AdBlockers in Firefox for buckerinos ”. Yes, that does seem like a pretty uncharitable interpretation of that quote. I read it as "we won't do it, even though it would bring in $150M US…

I’d happily pay $100 a year for Firefox WITH an adblocker as long as part of the money is put towards ongoing internet freedom and preventing attestation

As with all the comments about "I'd pay X dollars to not be the product", it's been shown over and over again that paying money is not going to void corporate desire to simply double dip by raising prices while also showing ads.

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#482

Post by i80and » Wed, Dec 17, 2025, 5:11 PM UTC

miroljub wrote: post #457

The day Mozilla fired Brendan Eich for political reasons, Firefox died. It just took a while for everyone to realise that. That was when they collectively decided that other things are more important to them than the quality and usability of Firefox. The new CEO is just the final nail in their coffin.

Yeah no, (1) Mozilla was going to be in for a tough go no matter what; I don't think Eich would have fared any better. But (2) you can't donate to stop your own employees and users from having civil rights without repercussions.

People with an axe to grind always hide what Brendan Eich did behind "politics" which is a dishonest slight of hand.

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#483

Post by PaulHoule » Wed, Dec 17, 2025, 5:12 PM UTC

miroljub wrote: post #457

The day Mozilla fired Brendan Eich for political reasons, Firefox died. It just took a while for everyone to realise that. That was when they collectively decided that other things are more important to them than the quality and usability of Firefox. The new CEO is just the final nail in their coffin.

I'd say it's complicated. If you are running a company in San Francisco I think you want to be sensitive to the culture there. That cause of gay marriage that he opposed was not one of these radicalism for the sake of radicalism queer positions you see on Twitter-dervied platforms but something mainstream at the root. I think of how on The Bulwark podcasts you hear gay people with a conservative but never-Trump viewpoint describing their cozy family life and it just sounds so sweet... and mainstream making the opposition to it not seem so mainstream.

On the other hand I think San Francisco is part of the Mozilla problem because it is less than an hour on the 101 to go see people at Facebook and Google yet they are distant from the 99% of of web developers and web users that live somewhere else whose use Firefox because they don't like what Chrome stands for.

I wish Mozilla was in Boulder or Minneapolis or Cleveland or Dublin or some other second-tier but vibrant city where they might have the capacity to listen to us rather than be in the same monoculture that brings us Chrome and Instagram.

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#484

Post by zajio1am » Wed, Dec 17, 2025, 5:13 PM UTC

rchaud wrote: post #474

Disabling ad blocking goes hand in hand with an "AI Browser" strategy. Ad blocking relies on the ability to use filters to block network requests at the browser level, and visual elements at the DOM level. "AI Browsers" are designed to add bloat to the browsing experience, by offering to summarize something, or providing contextual information like say, a product recommendation that pulls data from a third party site…

On the contrary, ad blockers and 'AI browsers' goes hand in hand. On one side is naive browser that displays pages as-is, on the other is user agent that shows what is relevant to the user. Ad blockers are just more static / more deterministic variants of that.

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#485

Post by Ezhik » Wed, Dec 17, 2025, 5:14 PM UTC

KurSix wrote: post #472

CamouflagedKiwi wrote: post #42

Amazing how they continue not to cater to their core audience. They literally have lost 90% of their market share from their peak, I guess I can see the temptation to try to regain it by reaching out to others, but doing that at the expense of your core is a terrible business strategy. It's not like those users are all that sticky, they're leaving as Mozilla pisses them off, and likely Mozilla are going to be left wi…

When you've already lost most of your mass-market appeal, the only defensible strategy left is to double down on the people who still care

Every tech CEO loves to cosplay as "announcing the iPhone" 2007 Steve Jobs but nobody ever tries to cosplay as the "pulling Apple back from the brink by focusing on core competencies" 1997 Steve Jobs.

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#486

Post by mplewis » Wed, Dec 17, 2025, 5:14 PM UTC

notepad0x90 wrote: post #470

I think people are wildly overreacting. There is a new CEO and he wants to make a splash so the throws around "AI" that's it. Of course there will be AI related features in firefox, there already are! Wait and see what the actual specifics are before reacting? Also, a small minor detail here: We're not paying for firefox! why are so many people feeling entitled? Mozilla has to do something other than beg Google to su…

Why do there have to be AI features in Firefox? No one wants them. They make the browser less secure. They distract from the mission.

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#487

Post by diggyhole » Wed, Dec 17, 2025, 5:15 PM UTC

izzylan wrote: post #465

miroljub wrote: post #457

The day Mozilla fired Brendan Eich for political reasons, Firefox died. It just took a while for everyone to realise that. That was when they collectively decided that other things are more important to them than the quality and usability of Firefox. The new CEO is just the final nail in their coffin.

Firing someone for being opposed to same-sex marriage is political in the same way firing someone for robbing a bank is.

wat

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#488

Post by LexiMax » Wed, Dec 17, 2025, 5:15 PM UTC

pavel_lishin wrote: post #468

miroljub wrote: post #457

The day Mozilla fired Brendan Eich for political reasons, Firefox died. It just took a while for everyone to realise that. That was when they collectively decided that other things are more important to them than the quality and usability of Firefox. The new CEO is just the final nail in their coffin.

I don't know, if the CEO of some software I used suddenly came out as anti-miscegenation, and started donating money to the cause, I'd stop using the software until the CEO was fired too.

Exactly. It's one thing to be an idiot on Twitter, it's another for you to donate money to a cause specifically designed to deny rights to people - a cause that was actually successful for a time. That's something that speaks to a fundamental lack of empathy that I'm not sure he's ever directly addressed.

But in any case, I've heard this argument before, and the timeline doesn't make sense. At the time he resigned, Chrome was very firmly ahead of Firefox, and given his track record with Brave, the idea that Eich would have single-handedly saved Mozilla is also pretty dubious to me.

It seems like a disingenuous and lazy talking point tailor made to blame the demise of Firefox on a culture war politics, when in reality it's the fact that Google was willing to throw much more time and resources at the browser market than a non-profit, unimpeded by the same sort of anti-trust and lack of development that brought Internet Explorer low.

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#489

Post by mikkupikku » Wed, Dec 17, 2025, 5:15 PM UTC

notepad0x90 wrote: post #470

I think people are wildly overreacting. There is a new CEO and he wants to make a splash so the throws around "AI" that's it. Of course there will be AI related features in firefox, there already are! Wait and see what the actual specifics are before reacting? Also, a small minor detail here: We're not paying for firefox! why are so many people feeling entitled? Mozilla has to do something other than beg Google to su…

Waiting until the thing is done to voice your opinions on the thing is a very poor strategy if you want to have any influence over what the thing turns out to even be.

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#490

Post by TiredOfLife » Wed, Dec 17, 2025, 5:15 PM UTC

ajdude wrote: post #255

I'm going to repost/merge a few comments I made about this a while ago: I dropped firefox 9 months so after they updated their privacy policy and removed "we don't sell your data" from their FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43213612 Mozilla has hired a lot of execs from Meta and bought an ad company, looking through a lot of their privacy policy at the time, a lot of it involves rewriting it to say that they…

The funny thing about removing "we don't sell your data" is that Mozilla before that was giving your data away for free. Now they just could be compensated.