Another unasked for and fruitless side-project from Mozilla that did nothing but burn money and distract from their core product. Who could have seen it coming?
Uninformed comment. Due to a antitrust 2025 federal court ruling in United States v. Google LLC, Google is no longer allowed to continue its current search deal with Mozilla. Any replacement will be far less lucrative. So Mozilla needs to aggressively invest in alternative income sources. Otherwise there will be a strong funding shortfall and a headcount reduction. This could spell the end of Gecko and ultimately Firefox.
It wouldn't even be "ending it", really. It'd just be making it the focus of a true FOSS project.
So long as someone still has the source code for the latest build somewhere on the internet, and that code builds into a working executable, Firefox still lives. It's all of the other crap that dies, the crap that no one asked for.
FF needs to be run like the group handling the Linux kernel or the Python Software Foundation. There's a BDFL or a trusted group handling the general direction of the project, and volunteers who give their time to develop the code. Occasionally there are sponsors who throw a few bucks the way of the volunteers so more concrete efforts can occur.
> So long as someone still has the source code for the latest build somewhere on the internet, and that code builds into a working executable, Firefox still lives.
No. Without funding, the rendering engine would quickly fall behind, and the browser would become nothing more than another Chromium reskin. I hope you like a Chrome/Safari duopoly, because that's what you are effectively advocating for.
If we can develop projects on the scale of the Linux kernel and multiple programming languages, we can likely develop Gecko in a similar manner.
It won't be as easy, but the experiment of "let's drive value creation with free and open source software!", at least how Mozilla has done it, has failed.
> ...we can likely develop Gecko in a similar manner.
We won't be able to keep up with the pace of changes Google makes to the "living standard". That was one of the intended side effects of making web browser behavior into a "living standard".
Yeah. Not long after the standard for web browser behavior became "living", it became impossible for anyone other than a well-funded software company to keep up with the rate of changes. This was not accidental. Even Microsoft has given up on the endless race to keep up.
I and a lot of other people would be more than willing to donate to Firefox. But not to Mozilla, who keep throwing money out of the window. Also, the executives kept raising their own salary while market share declined, and while firing developers doing the actual work.
Mozilla will be studied in the future. It's actually a masterful act from Google on how to stifle the competition and protect your bottomline.
Really, really wish that Mozilla just shuts down, so that the FOSS community can turn their attention to an actual, intentionally competitive alternative. Would love to see Canonical or similar lead the way here.
The opposite is true. Google has been the main funding source for Mozilla. Without Google no Firefox. But a US antitrust ruling from last year says their current deal can't continue, which implies strongly reduced funding. Mozilla needs to find alternative revenue sources or they f*ed.
Given you've linked to a paywalled article from May 5 2025 that predates the relevant ruling from September 2025 it seems you've mainly been spreading your own ideas:
The article is now paywalled. The one you cute does not mention Mozilla. The court ruled that the current deal has to end by the end of 2026. After that, they likely could only do per-query deals, which would be far less lucrative for Mozilla.
> The opposite is true. Google has been the main funding source for Mozilla
I think the point is more that Google has propped up a hapless, ineffectual competitor so that it can point to “competition” when antitrust probes seek to have them spin off their Chrome division or whatever.
Exactly. US antitrust regulatoors (especially ones that don't really want to do their jobs) seem to tend to look at an industry with more than one company in it and go "Yeah, looks great to me!", regardless of the facts on the ground.
I wonder if -should we ever be so lucky as to get a complete account- we'll learn that something vaguely similar happened with the OpenAI/Anthropic situation... not that one is financially dependent on the other, but that the fact that there are two companies doing the same thing instead of one gives the appearance of competition, which tends to ward off antitrust regulators.
It's a 20+ year old codebase that they just keep patching. The foundation was built in a competative market by some very intelligent people, and today its just a shambling zombie that's on life support kept up by a company who's main goal is politics and large salaries and not the browser.
It's not just that. It's that they propped up a hapless, ineffectual competitor so that it can point free software enthusiasts to when they bring up browsers.
Every conversation about free browsers results in Firefox, which is trash. And community efforts are almost singularly focused on supporting this thing that is 90% of the way there, but never actually getting there, while Mozilla is able to sit back and do nothing but still get paid. It's the resource curse applied to tech, with the lazy teammate being the one people are hoping will one day wake up and do the work.
I don't even know what this is, but I must say, AI features don't seem to be improving the web experience, so anything AI related is usually not worth keeping (as far as I know, maybe there is something I haven't considered).
Mozilla seems to be going down a lot of rather futile side-paths, if you know what I mean. Nobody asked for this? Just make Firefox a better browser, work on the web standards I guess, do the things people actually need.
The only AI thing Mozilla added that I thought was genuinely useful, was on device language translation. Being able to read foreign language pages without feeding your browsing history into Google Translate is pretty cool.
But that's the only thing I've liked, and they keep killing projects that were genuinely useful and worth paying for (Pocket, Firefox Send).
One other "AI" thing that I really liked came before the LLM boom. Mozilla made a speech-to-text engine called [DeepSpeech](https://github.com/mozilla/DeepSpeech) for running on-device when you use dictation in the browser. Apparently, it was discontinued last year, so I'm not sure what they use now.
Having tried using it, stuff like whisper.cpp even like 4 years ago is leaps and bounds better in terms of output quality so I imagine they didn't see any reason to continue it.
> Nobody asked for this? Just make Firefox a better browser, work on the web standards I guess, do the things people actually need.
That's what I wish they would do too. But, realistically, that stuff doesn't actually pay the bills. How many Firefox users actually pay for it? So I'm not surprised that they're thrashing around trying to find some way to make money beyond Google paying them for the search bar.
Mozilla is already Google's charity project. They squandered Firefox's marketshare and there's really no reason for Google to pay them as much as they do at the moment, other than to pretend there's competition in browser engines and it's not just Chrome + Safari.
That then begs the question: how much does Mozilla really need?
The AI push and all of their little side-projects that no one asked for are pushes to make money that they arguably wouldn't need to make if they stopped with their little side-projects.
I know that there's a bit of for-profit/non-profit mix going on with the corporate structure of Mozilla. Ultimately, if you make free software, just stick with the non-profit side of things. Make browser improvements, update documentation. That's it. That's all that Mozilla needs to do.
> Mozilla seems to be going down a lot of rather futile side-paths, if you know what I mean
This has a been a pattern for Mozilla for a long time. I think part of the reason reason is they are trying to find a way to make money that isn't dependent on a search deal with Google. But most of their attempts end up not being something people actually want and/or what they make isn't actually good enough to draw people. But even when they make something decent, like Lockwise and Send, they seem to lose interest and give it up.
>Just make Firefox a better browser, work on the web standards I guess, do the things people actually need.
This accusation seriously has to stop. They're constantly pushing performance improvements (most recently they've made their PDF viewer more efficient and found some efficiencies with images), they push millions of lines of new code every year on a rapid release cycle with an extremely rapid release cadence throughout the year in the release notes for every updated version go deep on the weeds for everything from CSS fixes to performance improvements to bug fixes and so on.
I at least understand the accusation that a bunch of their side projects didn't end up contributing to their bottom line and may have hurt user experience, but the velocity and volume of code they're pushing is not debatable. and the vast majority of it is exactly these kinds of improvements in technical fixes that people in the HN comment sections keep claiming aren't happening.
I'm not going to say everyone should read the release notes, but you definitely should if you're comfortable accusing them of not actually working on the code.
The annual reports are public. You can look up yourself how much money they are squandering each year. Mozilla is actually incredibly well funded. They are just extremely mismanged.
> AI features don't seem to be improving the web experience
Elaborate? it's done nothing but ruin the internet so far. Slop content, search engines are unusable, and now the lowest common denominator simply chatbots a half-baked website and thinks it's good when it isn't.
Mozilla has grown very fat and lazy over the past decade+ of receiving the big checks from Google, very little of what they do is actually trying to compete in the market, and most of it is "let's throw something at the wall and see if it sticks and then lets go out for a 3 hour lunch and have mimmoas on our bloated middle manager salaries"
I don’t understand why Mozilla keeps doing these odd projects. They maintain the only real alternative browser stack to Chrome and rather than keep it up to date and triage bugs, so many resources keep flowing into random AI hype crapware that no one asked for.
Honestly, good luck with that. Mozilla spent past 15 years or so creating and killing new projects over and over. Right now I'd be hard-pressed to try anything they create because they would inevitably shut it down next year.
You may be right, but I'm not sure we actually have strong evidence for that. Mozilla has run like a bigtech firm for so long that it's not really clear whether the open-source portion thereof could survive without.
$500 million in annual revenue and $6 million CEO compensation packages are well in excess of what other similar-scope projects get by on. Mozilla accounts for somewhere between 30-50% of all funding in open-source - if you sum up the Linux foundation, the Wikimedia foundation, the Apache foundation, KDE e.V, the Gnome foundation... it's still less than Mozilla
Well they need a new strategy for finding that. Continually creating half-baked side projects then dropping them after a few years clearly, and unsurprisingly, isn't working.
Since time has come for cutting the fat on initiatives like this website creator. I think other initiatives has gone under the ground, and companies have not answered to why they're cutting those initiatives. In job postings equality suddenly is not as prioritized, and if they are, what i hear it is not prioritized during interview rounds.
Truthfully, it was an AI slop and I don't even know how Mozilla couldn't see that, it didn't even make sense commercially speaking knowing that close to all competitors were doing better already.
It seemed like the "plan" wasn't even really thought for the next year or two, it was just some sort of experiment which is useless commercially speaking, no one expect "experiments" from major companies like Mozilla, they expect real products that is competitive and works for the years to come.
There is no "experiment" to make anymore, era of MVP is mostly dead since years, only well-thought and durable projects will succeed, getting a few thousand signup doesn't prove anything anymore, it just proves that those customers just weren't aware of the more advanced competition thus will get swallowed anytime soon.
rvz | 20 days ago
Hendrikto | 20 days ago
cubefox | 20 days ago
kdkckekciejxj | 20 days ago
lenerdenator | 20 days ago
So long as someone still has the source code for the latest build somewhere on the internet, and that code builds into a working executable, Firefox still lives. It's all of the other crap that dies, the crap that no one asked for.
FF needs to be run like the group handling the Linux kernel or the Python Software Foundation. There's a BDFL or a trusted group handling the general direction of the project, and volunteers who give their time to develop the code. Occasionally there are sponsors who throw a few bucks the way of the volunteers so more concrete efforts can occur.
cubefox | 20 days ago
No. Without funding, the rendering engine would quickly fall behind, and the browser would become nothing more than another Chromium reskin. I hope you like a Chrome/Safari duopoly, because that's what you are effectively advocating for.
lenerdenator | 20 days ago
It won't be as easy, but the experiment of "let's drive value creation with free and open source software!", at least how Mozilla has done it, has failed.
simoncion | 20 days ago
We won't be able to keep up with the pace of changes Google makes to the "living standard". That was one of the intended side effects of making web browser behavior into a "living standard".
simoncion | 20 days ago
Hendrikto | 19 days ago
Mozilla is extremely mismanaged.
someotherperson | 20 days ago
Really, really wish that Mozilla just shuts down, so that the FOSS community can turn their attention to an actual, intentionally competitive alternative. Would love to see Canonical or similar lead the way here.
cubefox | 20 days ago
staticman2 | 20 days ago
cubefox | 20 days ago
staticman2 | 20 days ago
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/economy/judge-orders-search...
cubefox | 19 days ago
cyanmagenta | 20 days ago
I think the point is more that Google has propped up a hapless, ineffectual competitor so that it can point to “competition” when antitrust probes seek to have them spin off their Chrome division or whatever.
simoncion | 20 days ago
I wonder if -should we ever be so lucky as to get a complete account- we'll learn that something vaguely similar happened with the OpenAI/Anthropic situation... not that one is financially dependent on the other, but that the fact that there are two companies doing the same thing instead of one gives the appearance of competition, which tends to ward off antitrust regulators.
Hackbraten | 20 days ago
KetoManx64 | 20 days ago
swiftcoder | 20 days ago
someotherperson | 20 days ago
Every conversation about free browsers results in Firefox, which is trash. And community efforts are almost singularly focused on supporting this thing that is 90% of the way there, but never actually getting there, while Mozilla is able to sit back and do nothing but still get paid. It's the resource curse applied to tech, with the lazy teammate being the one people are hoping will one day wake up and do the work.
It really is time for a reset.
eliasebner | 20 days ago
Mozilla seems to be going down a lot of rather futile side-paths, if you know what I mean. Nobody asked for this? Just make Firefox a better browser, work on the web standards I guess, do the things people actually need.
SyneRyder | 20 days ago
But that's the only thing I've liked, and they keep killing projects that were genuinely useful and worth paying for (Pocket, Firefox Send).
andrewl-hn | 20 days ago
pyreko | 20 days ago
jeroenhd | 20 days ago
I'd use the page summaries too if they didn't rely on some foreign server processing all the text.
munificent | 20 days ago
That's what I wish they would do too. But, realistically, that stuff doesn't actually pay the bills. How many Firefox users actually pay for it? So I'm not surprised that they're thrashing around trying to find some way to make money beyond Google paying them for the search bar.
mhurron | 20 days ago
None, since you can't.
Zanfa | 20 days ago
An absolute failure of Mozilla's leadership.
lenerdenator | 20 days ago
The AI push and all of their little side-projects that no one asked for are pushes to make money that they arguably wouldn't need to make if they stopped with their little side-projects.
I know that there's a bit of for-profit/non-profit mix going on with the corporate structure of Mozilla. Ultimately, if you make free software, just stick with the non-profit side of things. Make browser improvements, update documentation. That's it. That's all that Mozilla needs to do.
thayne | 20 days ago
This has a been a pattern for Mozilla for a long time. I think part of the reason reason is they are trying to find a way to make money that isn't dependent on a search deal with Google. But most of their attempts end up not being something people actually want and/or what they make isn't actually good enough to draw people. But even when they make something decent, like Lockwise and Send, they seem to lose interest and give it up.
glenstein | 20 days ago
This accusation seriously has to stop. They're constantly pushing performance improvements (most recently they've made their PDF viewer more efficient and found some efficiencies with images), they push millions of lines of new code every year on a rapid release cycle with an extremely rapid release cadence throughout the year in the release notes for every updated version go deep on the weeds for everything from CSS fixes to performance improvements to bug fixes and so on.
I at least understand the accusation that a bunch of their side projects didn't end up contributing to their bottom line and may have hurt user experience, but the velocity and volume of code they're pushing is not debatable. and the vast majority of it is exactly these kinds of improvements in technical fixes that people in the HN comment sections keep claiming aren't happening.
I'm not going to say everyone should read the release notes, but you definitely should if you're comfortable accusing them of not actually working on the code.
Hendrikto | 19 days ago
VCFundedGenYer | 20 days ago
Elaborate? it's done nothing but ruin the internet so far. Slop content, search engines are unusable, and now the lowest common denominator simply chatbots a half-baked website and thinks it's good when it isn't.
tosti | 20 days ago
KetoManx64 | 20 days ago
xacky | 20 days ago
kdkckekciejxj | 20 days ago
driverdan | 20 days ago
dpkirchner | 20 days ago
bel8 | 20 days ago
devmor | 20 days ago
tjwebbnorfolk | 20 days ago
devmor | 20 days ago
kdkckekciejxj | 20 days ago
That’s even before we factor in their LLM usage. LLMs are data harvesters by nature.
cubefox | 20 days ago
devmor | 20 days ago
andrewl-hn | 20 days ago
ryandrake | 20 days ago
post-it | 20 days ago
swiftcoder | 20 days ago
$500 million in annual revenue and $6 million CEO compensation packages are well in excess of what other similar-scope projects get by on. Mozilla accounts for somewhere between 30-50% of all funding in open-source - if you sum up the Linux foundation, the Wikimedia foundation, the Apache foundation, KDE e.V, the Gnome foundation... it's still less than Mozilla
thayne | 20 days ago
cubefox | 19 days ago
amelius | 20 days ago
Like a kind of super-Turing test.
seki285 | 20 days ago
martinjc | 20 days ago
Who has to answer for these expenditures?
tjwebbnorfolk | 20 days ago
hbcondo714 | 20 days ago
Please note the Reviews are auto-generated
ferfumarma | 20 days ago
progx | 20 days ago
m4rtink | 20 days ago
VCFundedGenYer | 20 days ago
Mozilla has the dumbest priorities.
pixel_popping | 19 days ago
It seemed like the "plan" wasn't even really thought for the next year or two, it was just some sort of experiment which is useless commercially speaking, no one expect "experiments" from major companies like Mozilla, they expect real products that is competitive and works for the years to come.
There is no "experiment" to make anymore, era of MVP is mostly dead since years, only well-thought and durable projects will succeed, getting a few thousand signup doesn't prove anything anymore, it just proves that those customers just weren't aware of the more advanced competition thus will get swallowed anytime soon.