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Comment by bityard | Hacker News Reader

It sure is nice to see that Mozilla is still doing all that they can to keep on top of current trends, except developing a decent privacy-focused web browser for developers and power users.

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Firefox's AI Chatbot feature only proposes one open model provider (Mistral) and zero local option. They're not walking the talk.

Yes, Firefox itself is a “general purpose” browser, and that’s probably for the best in terms of wide market appeal. Other developers have taken the engine and made power-user-focused browsers with it. Lately I’ve fallen in love with Zen (though after 2 months of use its pinned tabs features still confuse me a bit).

https://zen-browser.app/

This used to be my attitude, but I do feel like Firefox has made good ground in 2026.

I've also become sympathetic to their AI strategy. They don't seem delusional in their approach. They're not building models or selling slop, they're building OSS compatibility layers.

I don't want to see a world of vertically locked AI, so if Mozilla truly can dust off the old playbook for OSS AI, we'll all be better off for it.

They get paid half a billion a year to do exactly what they have been doing and keeping FF at <5% of market share on desktop and 0% on mobile.

I’ve been using Firefox on mobile (and desktop) for years. I still don’t understand all the hate thrown at them. Whatever the downsides/ shortcomings people see, they are irrelevant to me, because I hate Google more & refuse to give them my data. They are good browsers & work just a well as Chrome 99.9% of the time for me

But they supply all the source for those projects to flourish and have an ecosystem of their own: Librefox, Iceweasel, Reynard, etc, etc.

That's a very low bar, though. Chromium is open-source too and has a bunch of privacy-focused forks such as Ungoogled Chromium, Brave and Chromite.

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