For anyone reading this that has worked on the launch of this new product (or the many others of their ilk throughout the years) under the various Mozilla orgs, I mean no disrespect, however I feel it's important to not mince words these days..
I implore ANYONE at Mozilla org to please, please stop working on projects distracting from the complex and necessary work of browser and web standards stewardship. That alone should be the very reason for your continued existence if you have any. Focus on anything outside that purview will lead to the furthering of the, already painful and readily apparent, stagnation of your browser and our standards bodies as entities distinct from corporations.
Ditching any direct financial ties to Google or any other browser vendor is both important and necessary at this point, as this clearly represents a conflict of interest in your overall mission.
The web as a platform should belong to us all, not just the few corporate leaders of the day. I've watched in real time, saddened by the persistent errosion of our commons that is the web. I see it becoming nothing more than a corporate playground should trends continue, if it's not already too late. There may have been a time when your mission took precident over product launches of seemingly unrelated domains, but that is not what Ii observing today.
I think I speak for many in the community in these regards (please correct me if not the case.)
> ... please stop working on projects distracting from the complex and necessary work of browser and web standards stewardship.
> Ditching any direct financial ties to Google or any other browser vendor is both important and necessary...
are inherently contradictory. If do not want Mozilla to have revenue from search vendors that also have browsers, it has to come from somewhere else. Or are you suggesting they switch the default search engine back to Yahoo [0]?
I am not trying to defend the projects they have chosen to work on, but you have to understand that reducing dependence on Google is exactly why they are working on them [1].
[0] Even when they did that, it was for the US only, and Google was still the default for most of the world.
[1] Although in this case, this appears to come from the Thunderbird organization, so unrelated to the browser. Money is fungible, though.
It is very cool! I'd go as far to say it's a great browser in fact. I simply want it to exist and be such in perpetuity and lead by example like it has in the past. I see it as a follower instead of a leader these days, largely to Google, but also Safari and to some degree Edge (by simply stealing the blink renderer)
The Mozilla org continues to produce a very capable browser, but it's now 3rd or fourth fiddle on a stage their misteps helped orchestrate in their demotion.
1. The inability to set a specific page for new tabs to open on. That is ridiculous.
2. The mobile version sucks, specifically because bookmarks are buried under an absurd number of menu levels. And they're also broken up (without user approval or any way to stop it) into "mobile" and "desktop" bookmarks. WHY? The entire point of syncing is to have them all the same.
I want to like Firefox. I went back to Firefox for the first time in decades last year and gave it up after a couple months because #2 was that annoying. So brain-dead.
Oh yeah, and another one was that "never remember history" does, in fact, remember history. What Firefox really does is "stop adding to history." And the bug report on it resulted in several YEARS of debate over how to "fix" it. The latest I saw is that they're actually NOT going to fix it, but rather add more text (somewhere) to say basically, "This doesn't do what you think it's going to do."
If fixing a defect like that requires years of committee back-and-forth, the product is finished.
> The inability to set a specific page for new tabs to open on. That is ridiculous.
I've been using the "New Tab Override" extension for almost a decade at this point. Sure, it would probably make sense to have as a baseline feature, but I installed it so long ago and it's continued working the whole time that it's not really something I think about anymore.
> already painful and readily apparent, stagnation of your browser
What's wrong with Firefox? There are several things Firefox does that it's annoying to live without in other browsers (video pop-outs, competent ad blocking, etc). Is there some core feature that's missing? I'm subjected to Edge at work and I couldn't tell you a single thing it does that I'd want FF to do.
> and our standards bodies as entities distinct from corporations
Yes there are things that Firefox does better than others, and that is one reason I use Firefox. But there are definitely things I would like to see improved, like:
- PWA support on Linux
- better performance
- devtools should be able to handle sites with large amounts of js with sourcemaps
- fix a number of bugs that have been open for a long time
- don't lag behind standards as much (I'm not talking about things where they intentionally don't implement problematic "standards" pushed by google)
- make it feasible to embed gecko in other projects similar to how chromium is used by electron and webkit is used in "webviews"
Web usb and serial are not just missing, last I checked Mozilla is opting to not implement based on their moral stance. It just puts them behind for some stuff.
Essentially all of Firefox' incompatibilities with a website reduce to Firefox not allowing the users to be tracked or fingerprinted by default. Webapps that rely on fingerprinting as a replacement for device tokens will likely not work. Because fingerprinting is bad and I don't want it to work. The people your bank pays to implement that are the same companies used for cross site tracking. It only works because tracking works. ReCaptcha can break for similar reasons, but there are better options for captcha and the need for captcha itself is possible to eliminate with various strategies depending on what it is being used to mitigate.
There's a lot of good use-cases of Web usb, you can't just cut everything which might have privacy aspects otherwise the browsers wouldn't have canvas or even gpu rendering.
What are those use cases? It seems like a giant hole punched all the way from a tab's sandbox through the process boundary and out to the kernel... Yes, gpu rendering is a great example of the same problem. Canvas at least has some intervening layers depending on implementation.
HN is a good website. Ebay is another good example where JavaScript is optional but with good functionality. Marko was mocked, but now Astro is cool because they invented ssr...
I'm building a fairly complicated browser extension [0].
Debugging the extension on Chrome, it works great. On Firefox, it is nearly impossible. There are a litany of compatibility issues that make it "different" than Chrome, despite the extension being very much standards based. It is really frustrating and makes me dread getting bug reports.
To be fair, Safari is even worse and I haven't even touched Edge yet.
As much as I'd love to have options in the marketplace, standards based compatibility between offerings should be a top line requirement.
The standards used to be there. Chrome decided they made ad blocking too easy and unilaterally changed the standard. Firefox is still on the standard. Chrome is what deviated, and while performance was improved, that was definitely not the motive.
Some folks have already discussed this in sister comments to the one you're responding to, but it's a common enough hn discussion topic that searching will answer beyond that (better than I can regurgitate here.)
Firefox often groups tabs from the same site into one process. With large numbers of the same tabs open in both, check the total memory for all firefox processes and all firefox processes. You will likely find firefox actually uses less memory than chrome.
h264 and h265 are patent-encumbered and therefore very expensive and/or dangerous. Patent trolls would rip Mozilla apart and eat all their money. The only reason H.264 works atm is that Cisco sponsors a plugin for that.
H264 patents are finally starting to expire, all the known patents have already expired in Europe.
As for HEVC, that particular licensing trash fire continues to burn bright. VVC had an opportunity to learn from the situation, and decided what they really wanted was a trash fire that burned even brighter.
It seems like every thread talking about Firefox always has someone asking that question, so if you search back you should find plenty of reasons. Unfortunately, it’s been my observation that valid and polite criticisms always get downvoted. I don’t understand why. It’s not like downvotes are going to make the problems disappear.
Most of us would like Firefox to succeed, and it’s none of our faults that Mozilla is constantly neglecting it and going off on wild goose projects which get promptly abandoned.
I use Firefox on both Linux and Android for 99% of my web browsing needs. At least for me it's the best browser out there, and doesn't seem neglegted at all.
Upvotes are not going to make problems actually relevant to solve.
The question keeps getting asked because people say they have problems. Answers (if any come) tells everyone what the problem is for this one user that raised it.
In aggregate we can all see that the problems are not very real for the vast majority of users.
The biggest problem users actually face with using Firefox is that web devs don’t want to support more than one browser and they have picked Chrome now. Or IT departments have blessed one and only one browser on corporate machines and it is the one most corpoware developers build extensions for.
Chasing web standards is a second order problem and will not make the user experience better in a relevant manner for end users. If web developers want an open web, they have to work to support open browsers.
Yeah the criticism is not invalid, but it is also often half-relevant soapboxing and I would wager that is why it tends to get downvoted.
Mozilla is doing exactly what you’re describing. They need revenue to ditch their direct financial ties to Google (and I wonder if they hire those high-salary executives solely in the hope of generating that revenue).
These AI products, along with all previous failed attempts, are just them trying to gain enough revenue to remove that dependency on Google.
I'm going to sound crazy, and I've said this on HN before, but I wish CloudFlare or someone who would truly appreciate the effort and investment, would buy out Mozilla and have them oxidizing the browser again. Firefox was at its best when they were going through that effort, and since they put a pause on it, Firefox has been so "meh" for many years now, and embedding things nobody asked for. A faster fully oxidized browser on the other hand would be loved by many.
The Mozilla employees are just Google plants. The web standards are now controlled by WHATWG who are all members of Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Mozilla and they are not interested in pushing standards forward or making browser improvements. They are only interested in ensuring entrenchment for their corporations. That’s why they created WHATWG. There is nothing any non-compromised Mozilla employee can do. The ship has sunk. Either someone hard forks Firefox or we continue down the current road.
It has been my daily driver off and on again across the years since the Netscape code was open sourced and Mozilla as an organization was founded. It's a fantastic browser, but Chrome now owns the lionshare of the market as Firefox plays catch-up instead of leading like it did in the past. Memory isolation, etc never got the resourcing it needed to complete until it was apparently too late.
I see Firefox now as the new Opera, a technically good browser making dubious extensions that no one asked for until it dies a slow, spiraling death. My plea is simply to not go down that road any further...
I'm perfectly fine with Mozilla working on other things as long as those things are profitable or at least self-funded. As long as they are not leeching donated resources from Firefox or Thunderbird, I don't see a problem. However, I wish I had some kind of assurance that the money I donate to Mozilla would go to Firefox and not some other project like this.
I agree with the sentiment, but it’s hard to agree fully with anyone seeming desperate.
This reads like a kid trying to give business advice to an adult. “You could do THIS, then THIS, it would also be cool if you did THAT but please don’t do THAT!!”
Myself and I believe many others are willing to put money where our mouths are for an organization leading by example with regards to stewardship, much as this org has done in the past prior, instead of all these continued distractions, and ESPECIALLY if they stop swallowing this poisonous "donation" from Google. The fact that they do makes me wary of sending them a single penny. They'll just keep doing shit like they have been in recent years...
I can understand where you're coming from, but this seems a little misguided. Are you personally trying to pledge at least 1 full devs salary to Mozilla in exchange for less AI products? At the end of the day this really comes down to the money. If you want Mozilla to do the things you say you want from them, they need more than donations. Good will doesn't build a browser, that shit's expensive. It's like you're asking for a games studio to just give you an MMO out of the goodness of their heart for a few scraps from people who support their mission. The world doesn't work that way, without products like these I imagine Mozilla wouldn't be around much longer in the way you describe considering most of their salaries are paid directly by that 'poison' you describe.
The foundation never gets more than 10M / year in donations. You really think their donation rate could possibly go up by more than 50x just by cutting ties with Google?
Addressing the usual few complaints folks always bring up:
* This is from the separate independent team that works on Thunderbird, not Firefox, so there isn't any resource contention happening there
* Thunderbird is revenue positive, and this potentially gives that team another revenue stream to be even more self-sustaining through charging companies
* Businesses definitely want to control the AI they're using (especially with RAGs of their own data) instead of just throwing it at their LLM vendor and hoping for the best
People on HN are fond of asserting that their own POV is the only one. Imagine that there is such a thing as a person in charge of choosing technologies for organizations, and that you're such a person. That's who this is for.
It's a crazy crowded space. Any entry into this field looks like a "me too" product driven by FOMO instead of being motivated by (a) serving customer needs, (b) serving social needs, or (c) making money. (All of which are fine with me) It will get 0.5% market share -- and I'm supposed to get excited?
If you lived in New York City you might think there are Duane Reades coast-to-coast but there are not. If you are based in the Bay Area you see billboards that are very different from anywhere else. I'd say the viewpoint is a lot like this famous artwork
but maybe instead of the rest of the US being 1/5 of the vertical space it is 1/25 of the vertical space. Problem is most customers do not live in the bay area and most web browser users do not live in the bay area and most web developers do not live in the bay area. Based in the Bay Area they can hop in their cars and drive the longest 40 miles in America to get to Google and Facebook's headquarters so Mozilla is talking to those people all the time and not talking to the rest of us.
We don't get costly signalling to show they care about the rest of us, we don't even get cheap talk.
They probably think René Girard is deep because they are surrounded by people who think René Girard is deep. If Mozilla wants to be relevant and not just an also-ran it needs to "think different" like the other 99.9% -- it's not that hard if you change your location.
Really the EU needs to apologize for those damned cookie popups and invest in a privacy-first browser. Whether that is "fully fund Firefox" or "fully a fund a Firefox fork" or pick up another browser engine or start a new one.
I see the warning lights flashing: a few years back web sites that didn't work with Firefox were few and far between, this weekend I bought tickets for a comic book convention and they took my money but didn't give me a ticket because the site didn't work with Firefox. I use Firefox as my daily driver so all the projects that I work on work with Firefox; the rest of my team doesn't give a damn and if you lose me another site will become Chrome-only.
> Businesses definitely want to control the AI they're using (especially with RAGs of their own data) instead of just throwing it at their LLM vendor and hoping for the best
Yes, agreed on that. I'm not sure I'm clear how this really helps that; I suppose it's a frontend that they don't have, but there are a bunch of those already.
It doesn't seem to help them control the _actual_ AI, i.e. the model, which still has to come from somewhere.
I see no reason this product should exist even under the Thunderbird umbrella, especially if ANY resources under ANY Mozilla org were employed in this. This product is a distraction from their core mission in either case.
Hmm, I thought the for-profit Thunderbird pro hadn't launched yet?
I know Thunderbird is for profit, but what are they profitting from without the paid service, and how much of that profit is going into this unrelated Thunderbolt AI platform, exactly?
Thunderbird currently runs entirely on donations, even though they have paid products in the pipeline.
I think a piece of software running on donations is not running off "charity". It's just a business model to not charge every user. Similar to how Twitch streamers operate, or my local theater group.
Thanks, that's helpful. This says about ~70% of the money was paid to employees, ~10% infra costs, the other ~20% various other fees and smaller expenses.
It would be interesting to have a breakdown of what part of the Thunderbird team is working on Thunderbird, Thunderbolt, or other forms of thunder.
it is a patreon style thing, they are donation funded. I think the poster is saying that they arent being frivolous with their money like some people have a bad taste about firefox
And they're taking money donated towards Thunderbird development and spending it on random unrelated AI slop ideas that nobody asked for. You really don't see anything wrong with that?
Surely you can agree that when you open Thunderbird and are met with requests for donations, if you chose to donate, you'd expect that money to be invested in Thunderbird development, and not 10M Claude tokens to vibe code Mozilla's latest groundbreaking AI B2B SaaS idea?
Chrome on Linux is ~1.47 times faster than Firefox on the Jetstream 3 benchmark as recently reported by Phoronix[0]. That's how we want you to spend the money Mozilla, keeping up with your well-funded rival Google, and making it so we don't end up with a browser monoculture. These sorts of distractions just piss me off, and are not part of your core mission.
I remember that Firefox is orders of magnitude more performant in css processing, especially for complex documents with many elements. Can't comment on the javascipt interpeter, so I assume firefox is losing points somewhere else outside the screen painting engine.
Firefox has many weaknesses, but I never once thought “man, that thing is slow”. It isn’t, and chasing benchmark numbers is a waste of effort. A better security model or deeper customizability would be far more valuable.
The fact it's that for a normal usage, Firefox with uBlock Origin it's faster that Chrome without ad blocking. On Android this is especially noticeable.
And regarding (memory) performance, chromium has the "memory saver" settings for unloading tabs. I don't understand why mozilla thinks its acceptable to require users unload tabs manually. Who even does that?
Language Files Lines Blanks Comments Code
─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
TypeScript 760 109110 14500 7397 87213
JSON 41 22056 6 0 22050
Markdown 56 7150 2086 0 5064
YAML 33 3965 406 208 3351
... and many more with fewer than 1k lines
Regarding "loads of assumptions," it's hard to tell how much of this is vibecoded slop (definitely non-zero looking at the commit log), but I don't think it's that outrageous to claim 87k sloc is too much for a textbox and an API wrapper.
That's still an immense amount of code for a chat interface essentially consisting of a text box and a button, which any OS (mobile or desktop) can usually throw up in a few lines of code.
Hi, I'm on team that worked on this. No it's not vibe coded. We do pretty intense code review of every PR. It looks like the number you're seeing is including lock files and artifacts that are not part of the core coverage.
Fair enough if it’s not vibe coded, I’ll take your word for it. Code review seems like it’s mostly bots (Claude, Cursor, Greptile) from the PRs I looked at?
Nevertheless, AI use is not what really stood out to me. It’s that it’s SO MUCH CODE. I have no idea how you guys maintain or reason about the quality or security of something like this. Good luck, I guess.
> What does this one differently that the other thirteen in a dozen don't?
Mozilla's a lot more trustworthy with privacy and data, and they're unlikely to sell the project to someone who only wants to stuff it full of malware/adware/crypto stuff - or do it themselves.
I'm somewhat a fan of Mozilla, but their weak governance with regards to actual plans for the future, a couple of questionable partnerships, and the graveyard of products makes it hard to trust based on a 15+ year-old reputation. Would love to see where Mozilla has meaningfully contributed to the modern tech space (things we all actually use, not Mozilla versions of more popular apps/tools)
But despite that, Mozilla is still far more trustworthy than virtually everybody else. Who would you trust more? I imagine it's a very short list. Which is a sad state of affairs.
I worked in Mozilla previously for like 5-6 years. I think the supporter of Mozilla is a lot more trustworthy with privacy and data, but not Mozilla itself... I think they claiming that they do this and do that, but actually speak louder than action. My personal takes from the upper management is also not that good.
If you were not working with Mozilla Asian area, you know far too less. They had a browser in China that redirect to different website for profit before every connection and some affiliation. By doing so, is it privacy or not? Oh, look at Mozilla Japan volunteers, they shut everything up because things went wrong.
This Mozilla?[1] The company whose 85% of revenue depends on an adtech giant?
They're certainly doing better than others in this space, but their track record does not inspire confidence for anyone concerned about their privacy and data.
What even is this? A chat frontend to arbitrary model providers on the backend - I guess that's sort of useful not to have to build yourself but it doesn't feel like the amazing thing they're trying to hype. Some of the features seem a bit weird to me too - like end-to-end encryption? There isn't a server intermediary, so you already have that with TLS to the model provider.
Yeah it seems similar to Gemini Enterprise. There you can deploy "apps" (basically front-ends) on top of the LLM that come pre-configured with plugins to access Google sheets, Databases, your Jira boards, etc.
So all this is doing is adding context for the LLM and some persistence.
I have yet to see a compelling use case for Gemini Enterprise at my company but we're still experimenting with it.
The Get Started button links to a contact form. That's unexpected.
I looked for the source code repository and thanks to somebody here that hinted at it as a Thunderbird project, I found [1]. That's a better Get Started page.
This was the MOST confusing release I've seen in years.
Okay, it took me some time that the mail client is called "ThunderBIRD", not the BOLT. Not that I've used it much. But why the logo in github still shows TunderBIRD?
It looks like Mozilla is trying to catch the band wagon for no particular reason. They don't need it AT ALL. But they just jumped in along for a ride.
I immediately thought "oh, the email client? It's AI now?" Then I realized this is Thunderbolt, not Thunderbird. Kind of an odd choice by Mozilla to have two products with such similar names.
People "want" a lot of contradictory things. People "want" them to be less financially reliant on Google, while also "focusing" on a browser in a market that is entirely commoditized and subsidized by 3 of the 10 largest companies in the world - and having a wholly implementation independent browser engine when it's so massively difficult and capital intensive that even Microsoft gave up on it.
I want them to actively seek foreign sovereign tech funding which come with stipulations that commit Mozilla to certain levels of privacy and anonymity.
I want them to go cap-in-hand to other countries and say "if you don't fund us then you are letting the US and surveillance capitalism get between your citizens and their government" and "do you really know what Chrome is doing with your data?"
I don't want to pretend they are simply part of a browser marketplace, but rather have them realize they are part of a civil rights effort, with powerful non-market forces they can ally with.
And I want those governments to commit to progressive enhancement guidelines like https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/technology/using-progressi... so new alternatives like Ladybird can start, and further require their agencies to test on a Firefox branch with no AI, no location tracking, full ad-blocking, etc. because while the market is free to ignore certain non-profitable users, a government should not be allowed to ignore some of its citizens.
Mozilla needs money to support the development of Firefox (and the payroll of its high-salary executives).
For now, they mainly rely on Google for that money. Google pays them to avoid antitrust cases, to show the courts that they are not a monopoly and that "alternatives" exist. For example, the DOJ once proposed that Google be forced to sell off Chrome.
However, if another entity has control over your budget, they also have control over your product. If Firefox becomes "too good" to be a true competitor in the consumer space, the funding might be reduced or even cut off.
Creating a new source of revenue allows Mozilla to improve Firefox even beyond the point Google feels "comfortable" with.
OK, but does Thunderbird have flawless exchange support yet? Can I replace Outlook with Thunderbird for our 365 accounts? Does Thunderbird have UI that is welcoming and modern?
Does a dollar go from Marla to MZLA? Are those dollars not fungible?
I agree with you, there are 1,000 different chat apps and just one Firefox. And the world needs Firefox more than it knows.
It looks like they might want to get into hosting/selling services to users on this.
From the FAQ:
> Is there going to be a hosted version if I don't want to deploy it myself?
> Yes, we are planning to launch Thunderbolt for regular users but we do not have a release date yet.
There is "only one Firefox" but Firefox exists in a market that is not just commoditized, but subsidized to the tune of billions by 3 of the 10 largest companies in the world.
The world may need Firefox but it's funny how people complain about Mozilla's dependence on Google while also complaining about every attempt to become more financially independent from Google.
They could start getting some of that goodwill back by not paying their CEO a multi-million dollar salary and opening donations to actually help fund Firefox.
The anti-trust lawsuits with Google have Mozilla realizing they can't just be a company kept afloat by Google. Mozilla's priorities have been pretty complacent, basically just maintaining Firefox, sometimes Thunderbird, and a couple side services that have little financial incentives.
The current state of Mozilla is pretty odd since they rebranded to make it more apparent they're a non-profit, while also attempting to become more profitable pushing out new products and services.
As a former Netscape user… I think it’s almost masochistic to remain on Firefox as it’s rewarding a company that mismanaged its only product into the ground. And for what? What is the amazing thing Mozilla did at the expense of Firefox and donating the direction of internet technologies to Google?
The executives got to attend a bunch of fancy gallows, and Pat themselves on the back?
Firefox hit a peak of 32% and has fallen ever since. Effectively Firefox crashed at the same time IE did, and I can’t see in what way Mozilla ever attempted to recover.
I thought Mozilla was going to join the Thunderbolt standard and/or making some tool for it until I clicked the link haha. Very interesting name choice
This is a fair point. There is absolutely no way they didn’t know what Thunderbolt is, so they did this on purpose. Just rack it up to the list of obviously bad decisions that brought us here.
Some confusion I see here is lots of people seem to not know that MZLA who makes Thunderbird and Mozilla Corporation who make firefox are separate entities in the Mozilla Foundation umbrella. This Thunderbolt is a MZLA product... so ya
Some of us are out here still waiting for Firefox relay “premium” to launch and provide disposable mobile numbers like they do email addresses.. but product has for some reason been stuck on “join waiting list” for what feels like an absolute age.
Watefox, Librewolf have both plucked out all unnecessary stuff Mozilla added over the years. Both are good but Librewolf comes with history and cache disabled by default which may be bit surprising.
Floorp comes with additional custom interface features, workspaces (tabs grouping) and mouse gestures. And bit better profiles feature - Mozilla decided to redo it recently which lead to some problems.
Mullvad has build in VPN, DoH and proxy as an extension, and comes with uBo and NoScript.
There's Zen browser that has a quite uncommon UI, and obscure Pale Moon that IIRC still tries to provide old XUL/XPCOM extensions - which often leads to pages rendering issues.
A tip for Librewolf: you can easily toggle permanent cookie storage for a site through the "Always store cookies/data for this site" option in the shield button menu on the URL bar. This is very convenient compared to vanilla Firefox where you have to add exceptions through the settings.
It seems like all the model inference is external APIs? So why is the marketing claiming "Self-host on your infrastructure or let us help you deploy. Your data never leaves your control."
Lots of negative posts here, who presume to speak for others. I, for one, welcome new entrants especially since they're under the Mozilla umbrella. This client could use the passwords and cookies stored in Firefox. And I'd trust it too, unlike other clients.
Could Mozilla hand over firefox to a new team please? It is clear they are wasting time and energy on things nobody wanted - who wants Mozilla-AI please? I mean, seriously?
For people who don't think Mozilla wants to make firefox competitive
again; and for those who also don't think ladybird will become a
viable alternative one day (that's for the future, I have no crystal
ball, I am just pointing at one possibility here). Perhaps we could
get more momentum when someone else other than Mozilla handles firefox.
If I may, Mozilla, you shouldn't release half-ass products that looks vibe coded like this, even the website looks like it took 30min to do with Claude
I implore ANYONE at Mozilla org to please, please stop working on projects distracting from the complex and necessary work of browser and web standards stewardship. That alone should be the very reason for your continued existence if you have any. Focus on anything outside that purview will lead to the furthering of the, already painful and readily apparent, stagnation of your browser and our standards bodies as entities distinct from corporations.
Ditching any direct financial ties to Google or any other browser vendor is both important and necessary at this point, as this clearly represents a conflict of interest in your overall mission.
The web as a platform should belong to us all, not just the few corporate leaders of the day. I've watched in real time, saddened by the persistent errosion of our commons that is the web. I see it becoming nothing more than a corporate playground should trends continue, if it's not already too late. There may have been a time when your mission took precident over product launches of seemingly unrelated domains, but that is not what Ii observing today.
I think I speak for many in the community in these regards (please correct me if not the case.)
> ... please stop working on projects distracting from the complex and necessary work of browser and web standards stewardship.
> Ditching any direct financial ties to Google or any other browser vendor is both important and necessary...
are inherently contradictory. If do not want Mozilla to have revenue from search vendors that also have browsers, it has to come from somewhere else. Or are you suggesting they switch the default search engine back to Yahoo [0]?
I am not trying to defend the projects they have chosen to work on, but you have to understand that reducing dependence on Google is exactly why they are working on them [1].
[0] Even when they did that, it was for the US only, and Google was still the default for most of the world.
[1] Although in this case, this appears to come from the Thunderbird organization, so unrelated to the browser. Money is fungible, though.
Blocks ads Multi account containers Dev tools very good
I never notice that it is in any way slow, except for those sites that need infinity cpu on any browser, like jira.
What specifically is the issue? To my mind it quietly just gets on with things.
The Mozilla org continues to produce a very capable browser, but it's now 3rd or fourth fiddle on a stage their misteps helped orchestrate in their demotion.
Edit: clarification
1. The inability to set a specific page for new tabs to open on. That is ridiculous.
2. The mobile version sucks, specifically because bookmarks are buried under an absurd number of menu levels. And they're also broken up (without user approval or any way to stop it) into "mobile" and "desktop" bookmarks. WHY? The entire point of syncing is to have them all the same.
I want to like Firefox. I went back to Firefox for the first time in decades last year and gave it up after a couple months because #2 was that annoying. So brain-dead.
Oh yeah, and another one was that "never remember history" does, in fact, remember history. What Firefox really does is "stop adding to history." And the bug report on it resulted in several YEARS of debate over how to "fix" it. The latest I saw is that they're actually NOT going to fix it, but rather add more text (somewhere) to say basically, "This doesn't do what you think it's going to do."
If fixing a defect like that requires years of committee back-and-forth, the product is finished.
I've been using the "New Tab Override" extension for almost a decade at this point. Sure, it would probably make sense to have as a baseline feature, but I installed it so long ago and it's continued working the whole time that it's not really something I think about anymore.
What's wrong with Firefox? There are several things Firefox does that it's annoying to live without in other browsers (video pop-outs, competent ad blocking, etc). Is there some core feature that's missing? I'm subjected to Edge at work and I couldn't tell you a single thing it does that I'd want FF to do.
> and our standards bodies as entities distinct from corporations
Ok, I buy that.
- PWA support on Linux
- better performance
- devtools should be able to handle sites with large amounts of js with sourcemaps
- fix a number of bugs that have been open for a long time
- don't lag behind standards as much (I'm not talking about things where they intentionally don't implement problematic "standards" pushed by google)
- make it feasible to embed gecko in other projects similar to how chromium is used by electron and webkit is used in "webviews"
Yeah, it really undermines their ability to compromise user security and privacy.
Somebody also recently shared an awesome project which let's you use an usb printer regardless of your OS driver.
Debugging the extension on Chrome, it works great. On Firefox, it is nearly impossible. There are a litany of compatibility issues that make it "different" than Chrome, despite the extension being very much standards based. It is really frustrating and makes me dread getting bug reports.
To be fair, Safari is even worse and I haven't even touched Edge yet.
As much as I'd love to have options in the marketplace, standards based compatibility between offerings should be a top line requirement.
[0] https://oj-hn.com
That number can be down to any number of different factors on reddit itself. Having an autoplay video running, etc.
As for HEVC, that particular licensing trash fire continues to burn bright. VVC had an opportunity to learn from the situation, and decided what they really wanted was a trash fire that burned even brighter.
So, we might be stuck with H264 for a little bit.
It seems like every thread talking about Firefox always has someone asking that question, so if you search back you should find plenty of reasons. Unfortunately, it’s been my observation that valid and polite criticisms always get downvoted. I don’t understand why. It’s not like downvotes are going to make the problems disappear.
Most of us would like Firefox to succeed, and it’s none of our faults that Mozilla is constantly neglecting it and going off on wild goose projects which get promptly abandoned.
The question keeps getting asked because people say they have problems. Answers (if any come) tells everyone what the problem is for this one user that raised it.
In aggregate we can all see that the problems are not very real for the vast majority of users.
The biggest problem users actually face with using Firefox is that web devs don’t want to support more than one browser and they have picked Chrome now. Or IT departments have blessed one and only one browser on corporate machines and it is the one most corpoware developers build extensions for.
Chasing web standards is a second order problem and will not make the user experience better in a relevant manner for end users. If web developers want an open web, they have to work to support open browsers.
Yeah the criticism is not invalid, but it is also often half-relevant soapboxing and I would wager that is why it tends to get downvoted.
These AI products, along with all previous failed attempts, are just them trying to gain enough revenue to remove that dependency on Google.
I see Firefox now as the new Opera, a technically good browser making dubious extensions that no one asked for until it dies a slow, spiraling death. My plea is simply to not go down that road any further...
https://github.com/thunderbird/thunderbolt/blob/main/docs/fa...
> Thunderbolt is funded through a grant from Mozilla.
Is there any way that that's not taking dollars out of the same organization that's funding Firefox or thunderbird?
This reads like a kid trying to give business advice to an adult. “You could do THIS, then THIS, it would also be cool if you did THAT but please don’t do THAT!!”
C’mon now.
The fact that is being run like one, albeit poorly is exactly the problem.
I don't think you realize the irony in calling my post childish here. "C'mon" I guess?
* This is from the separate independent team that works on Thunderbird, not Firefox, so there isn't any resource contention happening there
* Thunderbird is revenue positive, and this potentially gives that team another revenue stream to be even more self-sustaining through charging companies
* Businesses definitely want to control the AI they're using (especially with RAGs of their own data) instead of just throwing it at their LLM vendor and hoping for the best
People on HN are fond of asserting that their own POV is the only one. Imagine that there is such a thing as a person in charge of choosing technologies for organizations, and that you're such a person. That's who this is for.
If you lived in New York City you might think there are Duane Reades coast-to-coast but there are not. If you are based in the Bay Area you see billboards that are very different from anywhere else. I'd say the viewpoint is a lot like this famous artwork
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/View_of_the_World_from_9th_Ave...
but maybe instead of the rest of the US being 1/5 of the vertical space it is 1/25 of the vertical space. Problem is most customers do not live in the bay area and most web browser users do not live in the bay area and most web developers do not live in the bay area. Based in the Bay Area they can hop in their cars and drive the longest 40 miles in America to get to Google and Facebook's headquarters so Mozilla is talking to those people all the time and not talking to the rest of us.
We don't get costly signalling to show they care about the rest of us, we don't even get cheap talk.
They probably think René Girard is deep because they are surrounded by people who think René Girard is deep. If Mozilla wants to be relevant and not just an also-ran it needs to "think different" like the other 99.9% -- it's not that hard if you change your location.
Really the EU needs to apologize for those damned cookie popups and invest in a privacy-first browser. Whether that is "fully fund Firefox" or "fully a fund a Firefox fork" or pick up another browser engine or start a new one.
I see the warning lights flashing: a few years back web sites that didn't work with Firefox were few and far between, this weekend I bought tickets for a comic book convention and they took my money but didn't give me a ticket because the site didn't work with Firefox. I use Firefox as my daily driver so all the projects that I work on work with Firefox; the rest of my team doesn't give a damn and if you lose me another site will become Chrome-only.
Yes, agreed on that. I'm not sure I'm clear how this really helps that; I suppose it's a frontend that they don't have, but there are a bunch of those already.
It doesn't seem to help them control the _actual_ AI, i.e. the model, which still has to come from somewhere.
(edit - to allow users to fund Firefox, allowing us to better sleep at night, and to align our incentives)
Hmm, I thought the for-profit Thunderbird pro hadn't launched yet?
I know Thunderbird is for profit, but what are they profitting from without the paid service, and how much of that profit is going into this unrelated Thunderbolt AI platform, exactly?
I think a piece of software running on donations is not running off "charity". It's just a business model to not charge every user. Similar to how Twitch streamers operate, or my local theater group.
You can read how they spent money in 2024 [1].
[1] https://blog.thunderbird.net/2025/10/state-of-the-bird-2024-...
It would be interesting to have a breakdown of what part of the Thunderbird team is working on Thunderbird, Thunderbolt, or other forms of thunder.
Surely you can agree that when you open Thunderbird and are met with requests for donations, if you chose to donate, you'd expect that money to be invested in Thunderbird development, and not 10M Claude tokens to vibe code Mozilla's latest groundbreaking AI B2B SaaS idea?
Is that why I'm met with a splash screen asking me to donate every time I start Thunderbird? Is this another Wikipedia situation?
[0]: https://www.phoronix.com/review/firefox-chrome-2026
At a glance it looks identical to Mozilla Thunderbird, but has nothing in common.
And then of course it's also the same as a well-known hardware interface.
I know it's hard to come up with names and pretty much everything is used by something else, but this seems particularly bad.
The cherry on top is that the domain is thunderbolt.IO. No other TLDs to pick from?
Fire-fox
Thunder-bird
River-wolf
Stone-raven
....
Their Thunderbird for iOS repo is 34k lines.
I'm so very tired.
"I will make loads of assumptions without checking so that I can invent reasons to get mad"
Note that about 30,000 of those lines are JSON files for localization and testing, as one example.
Especially curious because I see a whole lot of hardcoded english text in there…
Nevertheless, AI use is not what really stood out to me. It’s that it’s SO MUCH CODE. I have no idea how you guys maintain or reason about the quality or security of something like this. Good luck, I guess.
Would recommend exercise
https://ghloc.vercel.app/thunderbird/thunderbolt?branch=main claims 141k and most of it is Typescript.
I just checked one old take home task in Angular I did last year and the total number of lines is over five million over 35k+ files.
Also, my impression is: yay another AI front-end. What does this one differently that the other thirteen in a dozen don't?
Mozilla's a lot more trustworthy with privacy and data, and they're unlikely to sell the project to someone who only wants to stuff it full of malware/adware/crypto stuff - or do it themselves.
Nobody I'd mention on Hacker News!
If you were not working with Mozilla Asian area, you know far too less. They had a browser in China that redirect to different website for profit before every connection and some affiliation. By doing so, is it privacy or not? Oh, look at Mozilla Japan volunteers, they shut everything up because things went wrong.
They're certainly doing better than others in this space, but their track record does not inspire confidence for anyone concerned about their privacy and data.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla#Controversies
"I'm using Mozilla Thunderbolt."
"Huh, do you mean Thunderbird?"
"No, Thunderbolt!"
So all this is doing is adding context for the LLM and some persistence.
I have yet to see a compelling use case for Gemini Enterprise at my company but we're still experimenting with it.
[1] https://github.com/thunderbird/thunderbolt
Okay, it took me some time that the mail client is called "ThunderBIRD", not the BOLT. Not that I've used it much. But why the logo in github still shows TunderBIRD?
It looks like Mozilla is trying to catch the band wagon for no particular reason. They don't need it AT ALL. But they just jumped in along for a ride.
Investing on AI is not going to make them less financially reliant on Google.
I want them to go cap-in-hand to other countries and say "if you don't fund us then you are letting the US and surveillance capitalism get between your citizens and their government" and "do you really know what Chrome is doing with your data?"
I don't want to pretend they are simply part of a browser marketplace, but rather have them realize they are part of a civil rights effort, with powerful non-market forces they can ally with.
And I want those governments to commit to progressive enhancement guidelines like https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/technology/using-progressi... so new alternatives like Ladybird can start, and further require their agencies to test on a Firefox branch with no AI, no location tracking, full ad-blocking, etc. because while the market is free to ignore certain non-profitable users, a government should not be allowed to ignore some of its citizens.
I don't see a contradiction there.
For now, they mainly rely on Google for that money. Google pays them to avoid antitrust cases, to show the courts that they are not a monopoly and that "alternatives" exist. For example, the DOJ once proposed that Google be forced to sell off Chrome.
However, if another entity has control over your budget, they also have control over your product. If Firefox becomes "too good" to be a true competitor in the consumer space, the funding might be reduced or even cut off.
Creating a new source of revenue allows Mozilla to improve Firefox even beyond the point Google feels "comfortable" with.
Does a dollar go from Marla to MZLA? Are those dollars not fungible?
It looks like they might want to get into hosting/selling services to users on this.
From the FAQ:
> Is there going to be a hosted version if I don't want to deploy it myself? > Yes, we are planning to launch Thunderbolt for regular users but we do not have a release date yet.
The world may need Firefox but it's funny how people complain about Mozilla's dependence on Google while also complaining about every attempt to become more financially independent from Google.
The current state of Mozilla is pretty odd since they rebranded to make it more apparent they're a non-profit, while also attempting to become more profitable pushing out new products and services.
https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share#monthly-2009...
As a former Netscape user… I think it’s almost masochistic to remain on Firefox as it’s rewarding a company that mismanaged its only product into the ground. And for what? What is the amazing thing Mozilla did at the expense of Firefox and donating the direction of internet technologies to Google?
The executives got to attend a bunch of fancy gallows, and Pat themselves on the back?
https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share
Just keep making a decent browser and stop getting distracted on shit.
I've already used up "cum" btw, so you're not allowed to name your product that.
Is there a FF fork doing anything good out there?
Floorp comes with additional custom interface features, workspaces (tabs grouping) and mouse gestures. And bit better profiles feature - Mozilla decided to redo it recently which lead to some problems.
Mullvad has build in VPN, DoH and proxy as an extension, and comes with uBo and NoScript.
There's Zen browser that has a quite uncommon UI, and obscure Pale Moon that IIRC still tries to provide old XUL/XPCOM extensions - which often leads to pages rendering issues.
Doesn’t this have to be done under another name to prevent massive company-killing pushback?
It seems like all the model inference is external APIs? So why is the marketing claiming "Self-host on your infrastructure or let us help you deploy. Your data never leaves your control."
Could Mozilla hand over firefox to a new team please? It is clear they are wasting time and energy on things nobody wanted - who wants Mozilla-AI please? I mean, seriously?
For people who don't think Mozilla wants to make firefox competitive again; and for those who also don't think ladybird will become a viable alternative one day (that's for the future, I have no crystal ball, I am just pointing at one possibility here). Perhaps we could get more momentum when someone else other than Mozilla handles firefox.