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Comment by tcauduro | Hacker News Reader

Looking at their strategy doc, it doesn't seem like they hear their users at all. It's riddled with AI. In fact their aspiration is "doing for AI what we did for the web." Oh boy!

https://blog.mozilla.org/wp-content/blogs.dir/278/files/2025...

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I will eat my hat if Google had nothing to do with the demise of Mozilla, what an absolute disgrace.

How incompetent can they be, how out of touch with their core (and arguably only) product ?

Nobody wants AI in firefox.

I want a good AI integration with Firefox. The current chatgpt shim is horrible, something more refined would be nice.

Why though?

Would you pay $20 a month for it? Like Cursor but for your browser?

Do we know for a fact that 'nobody wants AI in Firefox'?

We know for a fact that whenever Mozilla solicits feedback for AI additions, it heavily leans negative.

https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/building-ai-the-f...

Yeah, but there's a selection bias present in most feedback like this, isn't there? People are more motivated to submit feedback when something annoys them. This is speaking as someone who is also annoyed by AI features.

That's a slightly different question, but an important one: the presence of a group criticizing a feature doesn't mean the absence of a different group requesting it!

When Mozilla initially made the Connect forums, it was to solicit requests for new features. I can't stress enough how few people joined the forum to request more AI in their browser.

[flagged]

Please don't fulminate or sneer like this on HN. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Nobody wants three or four corporations manipulating and controlling information (with a mix of hallucinations) all behind a subscription. The large tech companies have nearly universally lost all trust.

The models I've run recently on Ollama seem to about as good as the models I was running at work a year ago. The tech isn't there yet, but I see a path. I would be fine with that enhancing, not replacing, my usage.

>I will eat my hat if Google had nothing to do with the demise of Mozilla

One has to be truly naive to think they get half a bi a year from Google "just because." They have less than 5% of desktop market share and ZERO mobile presence.

IMHO, they wouldn't get this kind of money if they had a competent, technical C-suite that actually cared about creating a truly competitive free browser. The money is flowing because, not in spite of, the current C-suite.

Leaving XSLT in web standards and in Firefox would let it keep some comfy useful niche.

Is that right if Google don't want to keep it - then no one can have it ?!

BTW JavaScript (to replace it all) _is not_ a _web standard_ (but it is Oracle trademark).

They are looking at OperaGX and Brave selling literal spyware and still growing marketshare and correctly recognizing that the only people willing to switch browsers in the current day do not give a shit about any of that stuff and are weirdos looking for "features"

Look at all the people in this very comment section insisting that Mozilla is just the worst while using fucking chrome or chromium. Mozilla knows they will never get that market back, because that market just hates Mozilla for "reasons", usually "They fired a guy for being openly hostile"

The thing google did to cause the demise of firefox was pay to bundle chrome with tons of things users installed, and put a giant "Install Chrome for BEST EXPERIENCE" banner on every single page they control. Sane governments would have broken them up for their clear anti-competitive practices, but at the same time the vast majority of the users they "lost" never knew they had firefox in the first place and didn't notice when it got changed.

These users never even noticed when conficker changed their browsers to literal adware FFS, they certainly didn't "Choose" a browser freely.

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