Tor browser removing various Firefox AI features
blog.torproject.org
blog.torproject.org
Mozilla have taken into consideration doing things locally, such as tab organisation and the likes (one would assume pre-GPT era and with regard to features not utilising LLMs this would’ve been branded as ML functionality) but I’m not fully convinced this still won’t open up potential security issues in the future[for users of AI browsers].
For Tor users this seems even more of an issue as one would expect nation-state actors targeting undesirables would look for any potential weak spot to exploit.
Separately I suppose this brings into light how utterly crazy it seems having AI features in the browser chrome versus limited to the website content process/sandbox. It seems like a privacy and security nightmare and now everyone and their gran are releasing “AI browsers”, even the Firefox-based ones inspired by browsers such as Arc and Dia which seem like absolute privacy nightmares.
Seems like slick branding and marketing gets you a pass today when in the past such egregiousness would receive a load of flack cough Avast “secure” browser cough…
Either way good job to the Tor team, I sympathise with how much extra load this adds to each rebase.
fr Tor did a good job
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/ai-chatbot
Seems to be unconnected to any model and off by default.
Similar to the “AI should be an assistant programmer, not an independent dev”, having Claude there and being able to ask questions about specific topics while I read is fantastic. Especially for scientific papers that are outside my specialty (i.e. all of them.)
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
I enjoy reading technical blogs from the global south and the slavic world. I've found that LLMs do a far better job at translation than Google Translate/DeepL, etc. in these niche domains, so I added a translate prompt to my context menu and that converted me over to using it.
[1] https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/advanced-configur...
Then you could change the prompts, for example, those are mine :
browser.ml.chat.prompts.0 {"id":"search", "value": "What do you know about the selected text?", "label": "Search"}
browser.ml.chat.prompts.1 {"id":"grammar", "value": "Can you fix the grammar in the selected text?", "label": "Grammar"}
browser.ml.chat.prompts.2 {"id":"summary", "value": "Can you summarize the selected text?", "label": "Summary"}
browser.ml.chat.prompts.3 {"id":"code", "value": "Can you explain the selected code?", "label": "Code"}
browser.ml.chat.prompts.4 {"id":"translate", "value": "Can you translate the selected text?", "label": "Translate"}
I have found instructions here https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/advanced-configur..., though they are a bit outdated since you have to setup prompts differently.
I have been satisfied with moving to Zen, a Firefox fork that behaves like the late Arc browser
> The easiest way to run WebKit on Windows is via Playwright.
Barring integration with a locally run LLM, AI doesn't make sense for the Tor security posture - you don't want to be routing content to unintended/insecure third parties, period.
I really wish Mozilla would focus on addressing some of the numerous user feature requests, rather than whatever the current trend is.
Vivaldi has that. (When Opera got bought out by some Chinese company, one of the original founders created Vivaldi. It's Chromium-based, so Chrome extensions work, and Chrome extensions not using Manifest V3 might end up not working soon).
Now that I'm back in my home country, I've gone back to Firefox, which I prefer from a philosophical standpoint. But there's one simple feature keeping me from using it full-time: the ability to rename windows.
My workflow relies on having one window per project. I name the windows Project1, Project2, Project3, and so on, so it is very simple to find each one.
There are a few Firefox extensions that allow renaming windows, but the names disappear every time I restart Firefox, and they don’t sync across devices.
So, unfortunately, I’m back to using Chromium.
The idea that Mozilla doesn't focus on user feature requests seems unfounded? [1]
[1] https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/idb-p/ideas/tab/most-ku...
https://windowsreport.com/hands-on-firefoxs-new-split-view-l...
It becomes popular, then a UX counter-effort declares that it should be the job of the window manager and it dies off for a while.
Nobody can tell me how MDI is a good design... what if I want to show two documents from different apps side by side?
First-party extensions are a nice way to test out ideas and features without increasing the core product's maintenance burden. I wouldn't even mind if Mozilla heavily promoted their own extensions, because it would help draw attention to the extension library as a whole.
Firefox used to be the most configurable, everything plugable browser, what happened on that?
If a 1.0 was released today, would they have a hardcoded list of search engines?
But yes, your point is valid. For Tor, if you enter an API key, you could be identified. Still, does the Tor Browser prevent you from installing addons which are no more secure than these AI features? It didn't years ago - not sure if that's changed.
I do not want nor need AI in every single aspect of my life. I mean, I've seen AI hygiene products out there. How does that even work? Don't answer that ... I know it's a marketing scheme, akin to the "HD" craze of five to 10 years ago.
The last thing any of these masters of the universe will do is leverage AI to make everyone's life better.
HD as far as I ever saw it used generally referred to 720p and soon after 1080p. Which is a pretty objective, non-marketing definition. And the timeframe of 2015-2020 seems way off. 1080p was pretty standard by like 2010. YouTube started streaming 4K in 2010.
I remember stuff like "HD" whitening toothpaste, HD flashlights, and HD radio
browser.urlbar.trimURLs false to display http:// in the address bar
browser.fixup.alternate.enabled false to enable adding www. and .com to urls
This is kind of crazy since there are new fingerprinting techniques all the time and if they miss even one data point the whole game is lost. The smarter movie would be to make sure that fingerprints are unique/randomized so that even the same person looks like different people but for some reason they're confident they can account for every possible identifying metric 100% of the time.
Tor is my daily browser btw.
Seems about time someones does the "I use Tor btw" trend.
(But I don't know what methods the Firefox translation uses. I assume it's a local model but don't even know that for sure.)
- Chrome and Edge are going to do it as well sooner or later, and Mozilla's modus operandi has been to largely copy feature sets from Chrome to stay relevant.
Mozilla needs to bring in the Bobs from Office Space: "What is it you say you do here?"
Just because a modal window exists doesn't mean it's bad for accessibility.
Unless it's a real emergency or the contents don't make sense until you do something, every modal window is an accessibility problem.
It doesn't sound like that's PaulHoule's motivation anyway — he knows that these tickets are not going to be fixed, just closed — the point is to "pour just a little bit of sand in the gears".
I generally approve of subversive actions which are naturally damaging if and exactly if the accusation they are based on is true.
That is, the logic is something like "well, either it gets fixed, in which case it's a victory for good, or they're hypocrites who don't really care, in which case 1. it wastes their time and 2. they deserve to have their time wasted."
Is the point to target Mozilla, or to actually make a difference in accessibility?
And my whole point is that a strategy can have multiple effects. As I understand it:
- Firefox care about usability => the issues get fixed or at least considered.
- Firefox don't care about usability => sand in the gears.
So it's a hybrid strategy whose purpose depends on the situation.
But reporting real problems because you are annoyed that problems keep appearing and don't get fixed doesn't look like a societal hurting behavior to me. It does look like personally hurting, but antagonizing the author because of this is a real societal hurting behavior.
On the opposite side, I'm also unreasonable frustrated when those modals appear and I cannot close it by clicking outside of it.
End results? Modals are horrible in most situations, especially when you want people to actually ingest some information.
Toasts in Windows are a good example -- often I am trying to use the tray but a toast pops up and I have to wait for the toast to clear or a toast pops up that makes me use the tray icons that it covers up if I want to deal with the situation. Of course on Windows there is the problem that clicking on a toast doesn't seem to ever do anything (like take you to the app that made the toast) and there is not a good mechanism to see the toast once it's past, etc.
In the case of Firefox I was particularly annoyed by little panels that floated above bookmark items on the chrome at the top of the page because, I dunno, there is something new I can do with my bookmarks, I guess. What I do know is that I wanted to click on something that was at the top of the web page and that stupid panel was in the way -- it wouldn't have stopped me from clicking on something else, but it's predictable that you're going to load a web page and frequently click on a link on a navbar at the very top.
A human being with some empathy might realize that you're initially in a state where you're not receptive to a message and later realize you are.
If I got a popup advertising a new feature after I completed a task I'd be a lot more receptive to it, particularly in that I'd be feeling the glow of having completed a task, being satisfied with the product, and not feeling so pressured, having some headspace to learn about a new feature.
As it stands, without any example, I for one have no idea what is being talked about, where these popups in FF are, how they affect accessibility.
Do I dislike modals that cover the entire window, yes, absolutely, but I have never encountered such in FF as a browser.
CTA to translate between languages which the translation models don't support "yet". It's disrupting for absolutely no reason.
If only Mozilla felt the same about wasting people's time. We wouldn't be having this discussion.
You can file the ticket claiming that the shiny new promoted thing is actually an antifeature and that you hate the popup. You can then hope that the PM or exec who is currently receiving adulations or making speeches in the hope of a bonus or promotion after the rollout gets assigned the ticket, rather than some lowly volunteer. Then, the next time they get asked to make something, they'll think "wait, maybe I shouldn't advertise this new thing by forcing a popup on every Firefox user?" If that happens often enough to become part of the shared zeitgeist at the organization, they may be able to enact a Mozilla-wide policy against such popups and stop building antifeatures. Good luck, I hope it works for you.
Or you can throw sand in the works. When the accessibility department complains that people keep filing tickets and wasting their time whenever a new feature includes a popup, that component of the organization can push back
Every time I inadvertently find myself at a gas station with those horrific advertisement kiosks installed at the pumps, I either look around for a nearby station that doesn't have ads playing, or I stab the "Help" button to page the cashier. I am well aware that the minimum wage employee stocking the shelves and helping people prepay does not have the phone number of the GSTV producers or the executive decision makers at ExxonMobil or whoever, and I have no animus against that person - I'm infallibly polite with the individual. But I ask them to keep the line open to mute the ads, and they usually do. My only hope for eliminating those ads is either shopping at different gas stations - but how are they ever going to distinguish that microscopic boycott from the noise - or hoping that this communication filters up through the organization.
I'm one of those web developers who still uses Firefox as my daily driver which means the products I work on work on Firefox. Maybe twice a year a tester uses Chrome and turns up something that's not quite right.
Developers like me are a major reason why Firefox is still a viable web browser and there is someone like me in most organizations. If it wasn't for people like us more and more web pages would work in Chrome only and you just couldn't do things with Firefox. Collectively we probably contribute as much to the success of Firefox than all the people who actually check in changes to the source code but we are not treated accordingly. If they piss all of us off Firefox will become a non-viable web browser.
So far as accessibility I am doing a round of accessibility on my site and found things have gotten way worse for multiple reasons. I used to use NVDA + Firefox but since upgrading to Win 11 NVDA is completely broken for me and I have to pull the power plug on my computer to shut down NVDA.
Narrator + Edge basically works, but Narrator + Firefox is completely spastic. I might have a navigation bar with elements like
-- Choice 1
-- Choice 2
-- Choice 3
in a <nav> and it might read something like "Choice Landmark 1 Navigation Navigation Landmark Choice 2 Landmark Choice Navigation 3 Landmark" where using any ARIA role comes across as website vandalism because it makes Narrator + Firefox blurt out "Landmark" and "Group" and similar words randomly when it is reading stuff.
When something is that broken it doesn't seem worth even putting a ticket it for it.
My reading was "letting them know doing bad choices will not quitely be accepted".
But I may ofcourse read something into it that wasn't meant.
Choices have consequences, and user-hostile choices should have developer-hostile consequences.
I am not seeking out AI features so I don't add them to my browser. Mozilla and google and everyone it seems now is forcing it everywhere down our throats. If a small grain of sand reflects any of the same frustration, I say good. Wish I could do more.
Been a hot minute since I last installed FF from scratch so maybe missing something, but the only popup I could remember in more recent releases was one showcasing Firefox View, which only appeared after setup. And of course the "Change to Default" message every browser shows after first opening, including the ability to never show that again. Since then, nothing.
Using a healthy mix of Chrome, Firefox and Safari depending on device and task and while I have niggles with all three, not aware of this on any, but maybe I am blind on this front.
But it used to be that browser dialogues would start from the chrome, thus being impossible for webpages to mimic.
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.
Make the fucking old and ugly browser interface customizable. And expose this to webpages, so banks could force you to use the default view.
Telemetry is on by default in FF.
Edit: Ah, it seems Mozilla remembers: https://web.archive.org/web/20151112023150/https://support.m... (linking archive.org in case they take it down, this is the first copy I can find)
Like `Firefox Data Collection and Use` which includes `Send technical and interaction data to Mozilla` and some other stuff is on by default. [1]
Glean data is here [2]
Historically I don't think FF would have made that decision - now I have to periodically check what else they turned on without me asking.
I generally don't like telemetry but I really don't like telemetry that is on by default - that very much should always be a "Would you like to?" question.
[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/technical-and-interacti...
[2] https://dictionary.telemetry.mozilla.org/apps/firefox_deskto...
I switched to Orion which has been working great for me. I'm happy to pay money for my browser and be confident that the money is actually being put towards maintaining and improving the browser.
I want Firefox to succeed, I just... can't justify it.
I wonder if they'd do better by charging $10 for a compiled binary and distributing it on Linux as an AppImage. I'd be happier to pay for that than send an unrestricted donation to the Mozilla foundation. Normally I frown on unrestricted donations, but something seems really off over there.
wow what an achievement. Vivaldi which has 1% of there budget had that feature for almost 10 years. Despite almost half a billion dollar budget almost all there good UI changes come years late being the last to add them for example profile management.
It is honestly embarrassing to compare Mozilla to companies like brave that actually created a private ecosystem without subsidization from there competitors.
Unfortunately they're the kinds of problems that are really hard to submit tickets for: gradual degradation of performance over the course of a week until I kill the process and start it again, the occasional crash that I can't seem to associate with anything in particular, a bizarre bug where every once in a while firefox slows down and typing letters into any input field has a ~30 second delay...
I've never cared about AI or Pocket or anything like that, I just want firefox to be reliably snappy. And I really, really don't want a browser ecosystem dominated by two for-profit companies.
In my case I’ve chalked it up to running Debian on a MS Surface device. I’m using the standard kernel though since the Surface kernel only adds touchscreen for my device and I don’t really want it.
I speculate that it has to do with keeping alive closed pages. Something related that I first started noticing a few months ago is that if I mistime the closing of a YouTube tab, the sound will keep playing and the only way to stop it is to force quit the app.
I haven't noticed the issue on Firefox Desktop, but my MacBook Pro is reasonably beefy and maybe that helps.
There is no technical reason that I can figure out that there can't be a commandline top-like for Firefox that keeps up with every worker started up by a tab or extension; or for that matter logs every use of a granted permission by an extension; or of course to manage cookies, local storage, and memory allocations, and allows you to set alerts for them, block them, kill them, etc..
I've been bullying AI into constructing a minimal architecture that would do just that, and not touch much in order to keep it easy to maintain the fork. If anybody else has or knows of an existing solution, I'm all ears. If the browser is supposed to be an OS now, why is the one that claims to be free also a monolith with no process control?
Firefox just decided around the time they got rid of the ability to easily disable js that they wanted the web to be impenetrable magic. I decided that their motive is that they didn't want you touching their bosses' ads, or their strange experiments.
I'm selfish. If firefox has been pinning a core at 100% for the last hour, I'm greedy enough to want to know what tab is doing it (especially if it is a long-closed tab that left behind a little gift, could it be?) I know it's not my place.
There are far too many "luminaries" in the tech industry who've had the last 20 years of "must create value!" go to their heads, even in the FLOSS space.
When profit motive does not exist (and it shouldn't in FLOSS) then you need to stick to things like the UNIX philosophy and KISS (keep it simple, stupid) in order to create good software. Trends mean nothing when you're in this mindset.
It's Firefox. It's a browser. It does browser things; namely, it sends HTTP requests, possibly executes JavaScript, and renders the resulting computed data on a screen as HTML. It does not need to have AI integrated. At best, AI should be a downloadable extension.
If the group's leadership cannot comprehend this, then they need to be removed immediately and blacklisted from leadership at future organizations in the future.
Beginning?
> If the group's leadership cannot comprehend this, then they need to be removed immediately and blacklisted from leadership at future organizations in the future.
You have no power to do this. They would have to remove themselves, or Google would have to make a phone call.
They have consistently been doing the opposite of what the majority of their userbase expect from them (Pocket, paid sites forced to the "Speedial" page,...). To me, the only remaining value of FF is being up-to-date with web shena^H^H^H^H^H standards.
A FOSS project shouldn't be focused on succeeding; they should be focused on doing the right thing. No little compromises or play-on-words on your values. And if that means less funding, too bad, but so be it.
Never said I did.
>They would have to remove themselves, or Google would have to make a phone call.
That's what happens when you have bad governance at FLOSS projects.
No, the market states it like fact. 15 years ago FF was the belle of the ball. Now it has minuscule market share and is looking at an uncertain future.
> While I'm hesitant to want any AI features in my browser, what a "browser" does isn't necessarily a settled debate.
That's a fairly concise definition I gave, unless I'm responding to Diogenes.
Anyone have insight on why that's happening?
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.
`Git can be a right git` is a valid sentence here.
(Which leads me to a ponderous question: if I had the wherewithal to pour hundreds of millions of dollars of my money into a non-Chromium FOSS browser, supported by 1700+ staff and 1000+ volunteers, would that browser have merely a ~2.17% market share? Hmmm... As a comparative analogy, Samsung Internet browser has barely had any improvements in years and it is surviving due to it being the default browser on the millions of Samsung smartphones & tablets worldwide, but its market share is ~1.86%. I don't think Samsung is spending half a billion a year keeping this browser alive, nor paying its browser departmental heads millions of dollars to keep the browsing chugging along.)
Since it is evident that Mozilla is a for-profit organisation funded by its biggest competitor, then we must wonder: do the Mozilla volunteers get their fair share of all that profit? If not, why not?
But since we all know Mozilla is always crying for more money, then where are the hundreds of millions of revenue going every year? I suspect it is neither going deep for improvements to the Firefox browser (I mean, come on! "tab groups" are relatively new feature in Firefox, but Firefox users have been demanding this feature for years, and Firefox's major rivals have had tab grouping feature for years, so what took Firefox so long to to do this bare needful?!), or to the many hardworking volunteers doing their best for a supposedly good (but losing) cause (Firefox's market share is eroding, and I assume Google is not sad about that trend).
The whole point of carving out an alternate rules space for non-profits in a capitalistic economy is that some business functions are both necessary and very unlikely to be profitable.
The assumption that employees would work in non-profits at an uncompetitve wage is a widespread fallacy. In the end a non-profit is either:
1. unprofitable but so necessary it finds subsidies to continue unprofitable operations
2. breaks even
3. runs well enough to generate an operating surplus which by NP tax regs must be either distributed to employees as a bonus or put forward to organisational growth.
In any of these three revenue scenarios, underpaying critical staff is an org death spiral by loss of requisite talent.
CEOs in the US often make much more in the US than other countries, and US non-profit are not nearly immune to the larger forces responsible for that trend.
Mozilla has a staff of around 1700 employees in USA, but it has 1000+ volunteers. Are those volunteers getting a fair share of the profits of this non-profit company? If not, why not?
And even with all that half a billion dollars of revenue every year, why is Mozilla Firefox have a barely ~2% market share?
OK, Let's talk basics and real stuff..
Why has Firefox failed or deliberately delayed to give basic features for years that its major competitors have had for years?
Why is a company getting millions of dollars (from its biggest competitor) for doing the bare minimum (or is that a quid pro quo deal between them)? "Too little, too late" seems to be the norm at Firefox and Mozilla in past few years.
e.g., Firefox users have been demanding Tab Grouping for years (and the other major browsers have had Tab Grouping feature for years), but it was only in April 2025 that Mozilla finally gave that basic feature in Firefox: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/tab-groups-community/
Or is that the implicit deal between Google and Mozilla. "Hey puppet, if you want the carrot, then just keep your head down, and just tick along doing barely anything new, and let me control the world as I see fit."
I'm genuinely wondering: if any other decent non-Chromium FOSS browser got half a billion dollars every year, would it give some tough competition to Chrome and Safari?
Those salaries actually seem pretty normal, and I don't think anything other than ordinary information literacy is necessary to understand they have a non-profit foundation side by side with the corporation, it's not a hidden conspiracy.
Also, on HN I think people are largely familiar with these data, so sharing numbers with an air of dramatic revelation seems tonally inappropriate. Though I love that, of the random accusations thrown at Mozilla, one of them is constantly pingponging back and forth between claiming they're running out of money or that they are awash in profits.
I do think there are real issues: killing Servo was a tragedy, "privacy protecting ads" I think is conceptually fallacious, it seems like with Android forcing developer certification that the world could have used a FirefoxOS right about now which they unfortunately abandoned many years ago. But the community phenomenon of reeling off ordinary pay figures like they're a conspiracy feels more like an inadvertent confession of functional illiteracy when interpreting financial data.
I wish we talked about the real stuff (pushing back on their dabbling in ads) instead of breathlessly sharing misunderstood graphs of browser market share to try and imply that side bets made from 2020-2025 retroactively caused the market share losses of 2010-2015.
Why is a company getting millions of dollars (from its biggest competitor) for doing the bare minimum (or is that a quid pro quo deal between them)? "Too little, too late" seems to be the norm at Firefox and Mozilla in past few years.
Firefox users have been demanding Tab Grouping for years (and the other major browsers have had Tab Grouping feature for years), but it was only in April 2025 that Mozilla finally gave that basic feature in Firefox: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/tab-groups-community/
I rest my case.
Mozilla maintains 32 million lines of code, roughly the same amount as Chromium, with by some estimates, less than a tenth of the resources Google dedicates to Chrome. That return on investment spans everything from leading on development of major new web standards, e.g. WebAssembly, WebRTC, DNS over HTTPs, limiting cookies, profile sandboxing. It also includes Rust, key to their major "Quantum" project which by itself was a monumental achievement which rebuilt the browser on a stable, secure, memory safe foundation. Even Chrome is now starting to use Rust, Mozilla's language, for parts of its browser.
They have a rapid patch cadence for security fixes, and their browser is the heart of an ecosystem including Tor, Waterfox, LiberWolf, Mull, and others for niche, hardened or performance tuned variations that depend on Gecko. Tor, in particular, is relied on to get around censorship in parts of the world that try to control internet traffic.
And there's the monopoly issue, which is that if we lost Firefox, every active browser engine would be owned by two trillion dollar platform companies, Google and Apple, who could write the rules of the internet on their own. Which includes, among other things, trying to dismantle ad blockers and lock you into their ecosystems.
The totality of its return on investment across security, open standards and browser independence has been irreplaceable, and overlooking that because they didn't roll out a tab feature fast enough is mind-boggling lack of comprehension of the full scale of what Mozilla produces from beginning to end.
First and foremost, Mozilla didn't invent Tab Grouping, nor did it invent or pioneer Tabs for that matter.
James Newton Gunn (1867–1927) invented Tabs (patented in 1897) as a new way to access the contents of a set of index cards, separating them with other cards distinguished by projections marked with letters of the alphabet, dates, or other information.
In 1982, Wordvision for DOS was perhaps the first commercially available product with a tabbed interface. In 1992 Borland's Quattro Pro popularized tabs for spreadsheets; Microsoft Word in 1993 used them to simplify submenus. In 1994, BookLink Technologies featured tabbed windows in its InternetWorks (most likely the first internet browser to feature tabs). That same year, the text editor UltraEdit also appeared with a modern multi-row tabbed interface. The tabbed interface approach was then followed by the Internet Explorer shell SimulBrowse in 1997, which was later renamed to NetCaptor. Opera was one of the earliest browsers with tabbed browsing and private browsing.
In fact, the company that pioneered Tabs for Internet Browser was BookLink Technologies for its browser InternetWorks in 1994 (BookLink's technology was later licensed by Microsoft to bring Internet capabilities to MS Word).
And no, neither did Mozilla nor Chrome invent or pioneer Extensions either.
Browser extensions predate even tabbed browsing! Ironically, it was Microsoft that introduced extensions with Internet Explorer 5 in 1999.
And three years before Google popularized private browsing with Incognito Mode, Safari already had a feature for temporary suspension of cookies and cache. Even Opera had private browsing long before Firefox and Chrome got the feature.
So Tabs, Extensions and Private/Incognito Browsing -- which people tend to think were pioneered by Firefox and Chrome -- were actually invented/pioneered years earlier by other companies for other browsers/editors. Firefox and Chrome simply adopted these nice ideas and made them popular because of their huge user base.
If we want to argue that Firefox's support for Tab Grouping through some extensions was a pioneering act, then that's incorrect roo. It is like saying Microsoft invented Antivirus because it allowed the first Antivirus software to run on its OSes.
Sure, Tab Groups were allowed to be created via Extensions supported by Firefox and Chrome, but the Tabbed Grouping feature was adopted in these browsers as native feature only years later.
I recall that MyIE2 (an IE shell browser in 2002) (MyIE2 later got sold and renamed as Maxthon), featured tabbed browsing, ad blocking, support for Internet Explorer plugins, skins/themes, forms autofilling, customizable toolbar, whois queries, variable keyword searching from address bar (very useful for intranet sites), translation and a highly customizable user interface.
Tab Groups and Sync Tab Groups are probably the Extensions you remember that gave the Tab Grouping feature as add-ons to Firefox. But these extensions (like thousands of other extensions) were created and maintained just by one person or a handful of volunteers.
As you can see, Mozilla Firefox (even with half a billion dollars as annual revenue (thanks to Google) and thousands of staff & volunteers) has not been giving basic features that even old browsers and one-person/one-small-team driven browser extensions have done so admirably for a long time.
Do you really think the average internet user is bothered more about WebAssembly, WebRTC, DNS over HTTPs, limiting cookies, profile sandboxing? Or would the average user be more interested in tabs, tab grouping, themes, customizations, private browsing and other user friendly features in a browser?
But you are right..
> there's the monopoly issue, which is that if we lost Firefox, every active browser engine would be owned by two trillion dollar platform companies, Google and Apple, who could write the rules of the internet on their own. Which includes, among other things, trying to dismantle ad blockers and lock you into their ecosystems.
That is precisely my point. Why is Google in total control of its third biggest rival in the browser market? How is that beneficial for end users?
Do you know why Chrome and Firefox typically ace any latest web standards tests? It's because Google will think forward on proposed web standards, and choose whichever of those ideas it likes and it will implement them in its own ways as new features in dev builds of Chrome and then release them as stable releases later. So by the time these proposed web standards (WebRTC, etc.) even come up for any solid discussions by W3C and other partners of the industry, it is already a moot point, because Google has already interpreted and implemented it in some particular way which is already in vogue (popular use) across many millions of Chrome (and Chromium forked browsers) users across the world. Invariably then, it is Google's interpretation and implemented approach that then becomes the agreed web standard specification. And sooner, rather than later, Firefox also follows suit with almost the same thing, because it is Google pulling the strings of Mozilla behind the scenes. And usually Apple & Safari are not far behind doing the same, because it is already a lost battle when Google's way of that web standard is what the industry is forced to adopt.
So yeah, the internet is already monopoly, thanks to Google, and its far-reaching, far-thinking clout and sheer tenacity to do whatever it wants.
Case in point? Google and Apple have been hit with antitrust lawsuits in EU and USA, accused of monopoly of their products (especially all store) and advertising services on the internet and Android & iOS ecosystem. Google and Apple have been fined several millions or few billions in several such lawsuits, but that's merely a slap on the revenue wrist of these tech giants.
And that arrogance can have profound impacts, as Google can use its clout for more sinister reasons:
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/07/googles-web-integrit...
https://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2016-06-22/google-is...