Bitch at Mozilla, sure, but don't stop using it.
Why? They're actively hostile to me as a user and nor catering to my needs and desires.
>Google does much worse things and is effectively a monopolist
Monopolies are the government's job to tackle so talk to your representative about Google, but leave suers alone to use what they like. When cars polluted we had the government force them to lower emission, not shamed users for buying cars.
>Bitch at Mozilla, sure, but don't stop using it.
How is bitching more effective tool than not using a product I dislike? Not using their product is my only way of protest as that shows in their statistics and analytics while they can and do ignore bitching.
Mozilla is a major corporation not a 15 year old with cancer sewing Knick-Knacks for donations in his bedroom, so it will only improve if the user base goes elsewhere, otherwise if people keep using it out of spite, they have no reason to ever improve.
And yeah, despite your protestations to the contrary, not wanting one company to have a browser monopoly really is a legitimate reason to support alternatives. In fact it's one of the best reasons. That's the problem with ridicule detached from reasons, you're going to look down like Wile E. Coyote and see there's no ground under you.
I'd love for real conversation about, say, keeping Servo, Web Assembly, the fallacy of "privacy preserving ads", how it would be nice to have a Firefox OS now with Android forcing "verified developers", about working with EFF to keep open standards and privacy at the center of the web. There's a rich conversation to be had about the role of Mozilla in the future of the internet, but incredulity and vague generalizations should be left back in the writer's room at Warner Bros.
What is a "real" conversation? And what do those conversations help with here? Do you think Mozilla listens or cares about your conversations when they have all those billions coming from Google and can just sit and do nothing?
>how it would be nice to have a Firefox OS now with Android forcing "verified developers"
A lot of things would be nice, like ending world poverty and wars, but I'm being pragmatic and realistic instead of dreaming about things that won't realistically happen since in our world high level changes only happen, if big money or politics get involved.
>There's a rich conversation to be had about the role of Mozilla in the future of the internet
Conversations that would be a waste of time since Mozilla won't act based on our conversations. HN is full of such conversations. I'm being pragmatic, not entertaining some shallow philosophies of "wouldn't it be nice if" that don't lead anywhere since if 'ifs' were cookies I'd be fat.
Moreover they've revised their Terms of Use following criticism (much of it here on HN), wound down Pocket and Fakespot in response to feedback about these being outside of their core mission, implemented visual search in response to community requests, made it easier to switch between different profiles again based on community requests, added a rollback option for extensions to previously approved versions in response to developer requests, brought back night mode on iOS after having removed it because the community asked for it, changed the design of the iOS toolbar to get rid of the share button, centralized developer support tools in an all-in-one add on hub. And offered extensive explanations when choosing not to implement or maintain features (e.g. Live Bookmark tool).
The trouble with the real work of responding to requests is it's often granular and unsexy, even when examples abound, and it's easy to not know what they're really doing and reach for the pitchfork.
A good place to start is this explainer on all the community feedback they've been taking in: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/about-mozilla-connect/
If you want to boycott Mozilla, cool, stop using it and go to Ladybird or at least Waterfox. But if your solution to "this thing is hostile to me" is "so I'll switch to this other thing that is more hostile to me" and you don't see the flaw in that logic, I don't know how to explain it to you...
Mozilla get >80% of its revenue from Google, by making Google Search as default search engine on Firefox.
While Mozilla pretends to be a non-profit, its CEO makes millions of dollars annually.
Mitchell Baker: Stepped down as CEO of Mozilla in February 2024. Her salary for 2023 was reported to be $6.9 million. Laura Chambers: Became interim CEO of Mozilla in February 2024. Mozilla has not disclosed her salary for 2024 yet.
As of October 2025, the average annual salary for employees at Mozilla in the United States is ~$115k.
Not bad for a "non-profit", eh?
Yup, Mozilla and Firefox are surviving (nay, thriving) due to Google.
But Google's hand on the Mozilla tiller, is merely the top of the proverbial iceberg. Google has a monopoly on the browser market, encouraged by Apple Safari slipping down to <14% market share amongst the leading browsers.
Google's Chrome (>71% market share) and the other Chromium forks (>9% market share: Edge ~4.5%, Samsung Internet Browser ~2%, Brave/Vivaldi/etc. ~1%) dominate the browser market. Opera (~1.75% market share) is not a Chromium fork, but it is based on Chromium Project.
through many standards today are unilaterally pushed by Google, and standardized by a committed mostly influenced by Google and often only implemented by Google until there is enough pressure for Safari to maybe implement it way later....
and while in the past the standards where mostly pushing for a open, compatible, powerful web priorities seem to have shifted to focus more on pushing Google (Ad,App Focused) then Chrome interests
and it's not uncommon that standards aren't made in a generic simple easy to implement for anyone way but in a "that works well with how Chrome currently works internal way" and if your browser works different bad luck.
to make that even worse in the cases where Chrome/FF/Safari worked together there had been enough cases where Chrome had last minute forced changes to standards, or simple implemented them differently. I.e. the whole CORS having issues in FF isn't caused by FF not complying with standards but by Chrom last minute adding an exception to the standard as they implemented it slightly different and websites testing against chrome not against web standards.
which is the other problem, most websites implement "whatever works with Chrome" not web standards
so the whole open standards things is currently kinda not working, not for FF and neither for Safari (which to be fair is the new IE in the aspect of surprisingly lacking features everyone else has or having diverging buggy impl. Like pretty much every web dev team I have worked with had to do extra testing for Safari and frequently "doesn't work in Safari" tickets where FF mostly "just worked" as long as you didn't try to use the lasted grates chrome pushed web features.)
> Forget pocket, AI, and all that other junk. That is not your mission!
for pocket and a bunch of other projects they did shut them down, pocket is gone as you might not have noticed
but the mission is a browser which provides a good usage experience, and if there are features people expect from "alternative not Chrome" browsers you have to compete. If we look at what "AI" FF has this is mostly what you are seeing and many of the things aren't any of the "bad" things people associate with AI:
- site translation, chrome had that a long time and people start expecting it to exist
- automatic alt text generation, a very based UX/accessibility feature
- some "AI" auto grouping for tab groups, unneeded but you can do it with 2015th level of "AI" (i.e. pre LLM) and it shouldn't have bound much additional dev resources. Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if it was mainly surprised to bootstrap the local AI internals needed for useful features like local AI based site translation.
- (experimental) link preview with AI summaries, that looks pretty goated if it works as advertised tbh. and might bring new people to FF.
- integration with an AI search engine, but, it's basically just another search engine choice so no issue here
- allow integration of 3rd party chat bots. No technical people (which can afford it) have started using chat bots _en mass_ (for daily life stuff like grocery lists etc.) Sure a lot of people on HN love to pretend that AI is only used by enthusiasts but that (sadly) just isn't true. ChatBot integration is becoming quite a must have for browsers, no matter how much I don't like it.
So all in all maybe except the tab group suggestions feature are all reasonable choices which make people use/stay with Firefox. Some being outright basic features commonly expected (site translate).
Lastly outside of telling you it exists when its added FF doesn't seem to try to push it onto people. And if you think that it's not okay if a software tells you about a new features less then once a month in average then IMHO that is a you problem.