Windows Central: “Mozilla says Firefox will evolve into an AI browser, and nobody is happy about it”

Every product we build must give people agency in how it works. Privacy, data use, and AI must be clear and understandable, says Enzor-Demeo. Controls must be simple. AI should always be a choice — something people can easily turn off … Firefox will grow from a browser into a broader ecosystem of trusted software. Firefox will remain our anchor. It will evolve into a modern AI browser and support a portfolio of new and trusted software additions.

Even with the confirmation that AI features will be optional, the internet is not pleased. Users online have expressed their disappointment in Mozilla focusing on AI features and capabilities. One post on X says This is a good example of how management doesn’t understand its own user base, which has amassed over 380K views so far.

Another post says I’ve never seen a company so astoundingly out of touch with the people who want to use its software, highlighting how a lot of people choose to use Firefox to get away from the AI obsession that other browsers such as Edge, Chrome, Opera, and Brave have endured over the last year.

Zac Bowden

I’ve been meaning to harp on Mozilla’s penchant for chasing the hype cycle of the broader tech landscape for the past decade or so, never quite managing to deliver a compelling addition to Firefox. Browsing through my posts, I was amused to rediscover the same plans for AI in Firefox from March 2024 – evidently nothing has moved forward yet, another sign of the terrible management at Mozilla. The potential silver lining I see here is that usually Mozilla joins the hype train late in the cycle when much of the enthusiasm has already drained away and people are looking for the next shiny mirage to sell to naive investors.

TechCrunch: “Mozilla downsizes as it refocuses on Firefox and AI”

Specifically, Mozilla plans to scale back its investment in a number of products, including its VPN, Relay and its Online Footprint Scrubber. Mozilla will also shut down Hubs, the 3D virtual world it launched back in 2018, and scale back its investment in its mozilla.social Mastodon instance. The layoffs will affect roughly 60 employees. Bloomberg previously reported the layoffs.

Going forward, the company said in an internal memo, Mozilla will focus on bringing “trustworthy AI into Firefox”. To do so, it will bring together the teams that work on Pocket, Content and AI/Ml.

Frederic Lardinois

It’s frankly astounding how much time and resources Mozilla has squandered over the years chasing the latest tech hype instead of investing in its one successful product. Public tech giants can easily afford various wasteful side-projects and course corrections, and examples abound: from Google’s countless aborted social media attempts and messaging products to the perpetually work-in-progress self-driving cars, to Meta’s exorbitant VR ambitions, and most recently, Apple’s failed electric car project. But a non-profit, existing at the goodwill of donors alone, should be more focused and disciplined. Who can forget the time when Mozilla attempted to build an entire mobile OS, a feat even Microsoft failed at?

Ctrl blog: “Brave and Firefox to intercept links that force-open in Microsoft Edge”

Microsoft has inadvertently re-heated the web browser wars with the company’s anti-competitive changes to Windows 11. It made it more difficult to change the default web browser and has expanded the use of links that force-opens Edge instead of the default browser.

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So, how did we get here? Until the release of iOS version 14 in September 2020, you couldn’t change the default web browser on iPhones and iPads. Google has many apps for iOS, including a shell for its Chrome browser. To tie all its apps together, Google introduced a googlechrome: URL scheme in February 2014. It could use these links to direct you from its Search or Mail app and over to Chrome instead of Apple’s Safari browser.

These vendor-specific URL schemes were introduced to combat Apple’s anti-competitive behavior on its iOS platform. Microsoft just turned the racket on its head and changed more and more links in its operating system and apps to use its vendor-specific URL scheme. The original sin was Apple’s, but Microsoft is gulping the juice of the apple with gusto.

Daniel Aleksandersen

I haven’t paid much attention to the default browser controversy in Windows 11 since I use Edge as my default browser anyway, and have no intention of upgrading from Windows 10 anytime soon. But this bit of context is certainly illuminating: the primary culprit was Apple and its relentless drive to lock down iOS and prevent competition. Funny how rarely this connection is mentioned whenever the press criticizes Microsoft…

Fast Company: “Firefox stops working on progressive web app support”

Unfortunately, Firefox is missing one key feature found in Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge, and that’s the ability to install websites as desktop apps. Over the last year, this feature has fundamentally changed the way I work by reducing browser tab clutter and providing faster access to favorite sites, and I can’t go back to Firefox without it.

So I was surprised to see recently that Mozilla has abandoned work on a similar feature for Firefox. Although Mozilla once championed the idea of web apps—and, to be fair, still supports them in its Android browser—it no longer has a path to enabling them on desktop computers.

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That puts Firefox at a disadvantage against Chrome and Edge, both of which are speeding ahead in making web apps an integral part of their desktop browsers. But it’s also just disappointing to see Mozilla abandon what is becoming a bastion against walled garden app stores.

Jared Newman

I have barely browsed with Firefox in years, and every time it makes headlines seemingly for the wrong reasons. Personally I have rarely used PWAs, except for the Twitter app on Windows, because I find native apps, on desktop and mobile, to be faster and more feature-rich. Nevertheless, developers are having success by building apps directly on the web platform – the most high-profile example being Google and Microsoft recently launching web versions of their cloud gaming services for iOS.

Andreas Gal: “Firefox marketshare revisited”

A lot of commenters asked why Firefox marketshare is falling off a cliff. I think that question can be best answered with a few screenshots Mozilla engineer Chris Lord posted:

and yet... pic.twitter.com/Yn471RC3Ip

— Chris Lord (@cwiiis) May 24, 2017

Google is aggressively using its monopoly position in Internet services such as Google Mail, Google Calendar and YouTube to advertise Chrome. Browsers are a mature product and its hard to compete in a mature market if your main competitor has access to billions of dollars worth of free marketing.

Andreas Gal

Google’s banners promoting Chrome throughout their apps are certainly annoying, but they are the least of Firefox’ problems (as a side-note, I find it very amusing that the screenshots from the above tweet were taken in Edge). The truth is, ever since Chrome launched (nine years ago!), Firefox was behind in almost every aspect that matters: Chrome had a faster rendering engine, regularly beating Firefox in tests; a clean, consistent interface; a better, more secure extension model, that most browsers have adopted in the mean time; better overall security thanks to sandboxing – which Firefox is still working on today; it switched to 64-bit fast and painless, while Firefox is still dragging its feet; and, of course, better integration with Google services and being the default browser on Android have helped.

MIT Technology Review: “Firefox Maker Battles to Save the Internet—and Itself”

Mozilla’s Gal contends that everything is moving along, right on course. I think we’ve successfully transformed a desktop company into a mobile company with this project, he declares. I don’t think we saw the full extent of how much Firefox OS could influence the whole mobile industry.

Market data, however, tells another story. The Firefox browser’s overall market share has sunk to about 11.6 percent lately, about half of what it was at the start of 2012. Most of that traffic comes from desktop computers, where Firefox still enjoys about a 17 percent share. Its mobile browser share is in very low single digits. Once consumers settle into the far-reaching embrace of the Android or iOS mobile experience, there’s hardly any chance of their voluntarily adding the Firefox browser to the mix. Doing so would be as pointless as bringing one’s own fork to a restaurant.

George Anders

Hate to say ‘I told you so’, but… Mozilla is trying to reinvent the wheel in a world where everyone is driving around in modern automobiles.

On top of that, the man in charge of Firefox OS, Andreas Gal, just left Mozilla a couple of days ago!

Monica at Mozilla: “Tracking Protection for Firefox”

I believe that Mozilla can make progress in privacy, but leadership needs to recognize that current advertising practices that enable “free” content are in direct conflict with security, privacy, stability, and performance concerns – and that Firefox is first and foremost a user-agent, not an industry-agent.

Advertising does not make content free. It merely externalizes the costs in a way that incentivizes malicious or incompetent players to build things like Superfish, infect 1 in 20 machines with ad injection malware, and create sites that require unsafe plugins and take twice as many resources to load, quite expensive in terms of bandwidth, power, and stability.

Monica Chew

Why is it that, when somebody makes broad, general, statements about online advertising they are praised all over the Internet, but when people take concrete actions against ads – such as using ad-blocking extensions – that’s suddenly the worst crime on the Internet?