Fully agree with this.

- Mozilla SSL Certs - for corporations that don't want Let's Encrypt

- Mozilla Mail - a reliable Exchange/Google Mail alternative (desperately needed imo)

- Thunderbird for iOS - why is this not a thing yet?

- Mozilla Search - metasearch that isn't based on Bing/DDG/Google

- Mozilla HTTPS DNS - although Cloudflare will probably always do this better

All seemingly low-hanging fruit with brand alignment.

I'm still sad they shelved Mozilla Persona due to low adoption. There is a hole in the market around privacy and identity, and Mozilla would be a natural choice to fill it, but it's going to be an uphill battle to get major sites and end users on board. Not a job to be envious about indeed.

> What Mozilla is good at ...

Firefox - the one thing they do not want to work on is the only thing that makes them special.

The job was always very easy, fire all of the pure managers and sock the google money into an endowment before it runs out. Then focus on privacy as you mentioned.

They’ve taken in several billion dollars by now. Let that sink in. They're supposedly a non-profit, so this plan is the well-trodden playbook.

But of course no Manager instance could imagine such a thing. Cue Upton Sinclair quote.

FWIW, I remember when Mozilla started experimenting with AI, and that was way ahead of the curve (around 2015, iirc?)

But yeah, I agree that buying a great email provider would be a very interesting step. And perhaps partnering with Matrix.

You're assuming Mozilla would be successful at a privacy play because they are a trusted organization. I can't stress this enough: they are not.

The best that Mozilla can do for AI is to make Firefox more headless and scriptable.

Firemail should be the name of a free and privacy oriented email client wholly owned by Mozilla with a web and mobile app. I would sign up instantly and gradually migrate from gmail, while being assured for its sustainability.

I would pay 20 euros per month forever if I could just have firefox, as a product, without all the tracking and tracing and dark patterns.

Let me be the customer.

> I'd focus on privacy.

I would love that. that said, right now firefox unstoppably and constantly phones home

Adding my 2 cents worth to this: why is there not a Mozilla family internet suite of privacy browser, VPN, relay, tracker blocker, etc for one price? I already pay for family plans for other services, so this is a no brainer if it exists.

Right now, all of Mozilla's products are not even available in a standardised form in key countries. For example, I pay for Mozilla relay and VPN, and these are not available in the same countries!

Mind you, I'm lucky to have actual access to several countries, and so I can work around this. But really, why can't this team just put everything in one place for me?

Besides relay and Mozilla VPN, I am also paying for Bit warden password manager.

I'm also willing to pay for a privacy-first email(though I haven't done so yet), and please have a family plan that bundles all of this together!

If Norton can have an Internet Suite, why can't Mozilla?

This. I want a password/passkey/auth and bookmark manager that work across platforms and devices.

> And anything done to make that profit will annoy the community.

I don't keep close track of this, but as far as I remember they haven't tried donations that go only to Firefox/Thunderbird/etc of the person's choice, instead of Mozilla as a whole. That's what people always claim they want in these threads. I doubt donations would be enough, but I think doing it like that would at least be a step in a direction people like instead of are annoyed by, as long as they don't go nagging like Wikipedia.

Super well stated and interesting point regarding (general) privacy.

I miss the days where Mozilla (Firefox) was known to be the "fastest browser." It worked and such an easy transition for users (including myself) who were tired of the bloated browser experience.

I’m sorry but Mozilla is out of their league now.

Firefox is all they have. They know the web, but that’s where it ends. They haven’t been relevant outside of web standards for more than a decade.

> that needs to make a big profit in a short amount of time

Why? might be I'm just missing something, but I don't understand why this needs to be a goal of theirs?

Why cant Mozilla go the same route with Firefox as Thunderbird where its community supported, I wonder?

I wouldn’t mind privacy-focused AI tools, either (as long as they don’t cram it in our faces). On its AI search assist, DDG has a button to open up a private session with GPT, which I use on occasion.

> Instead, if I were CEO, I'd go the opposite way: I'd focus on privacy.

Where it comes to AI in that regard, I would also focus on direct human connection. Where AI encapsulates people in bubbles of tech isolation and social indirection.

Why is so much profit needed?

Privacy, identity, and more importantly, anonymity are one of those things I keep thinking about. A few months back I had this idea of comparing the need to that of credit reporting agencies. You have the big 3 - Equifax, Experian, TransUnion. They provide credit information to companies that want it. You request the info, they provide it. There's a fee for retrieving it. I think our personal identities should be treated similarly. We sign up for various online services and provide some PII, but not much. Why should the website be able to store that information? Maybe they shouldn't be able to. Instead, lets permit these identity brokers to control our private information. Name, address, email, etc. Then whenever a companies needs that info, for whatever reason, they query the identity broker, get select info they need and be done. Token based access could permit the site to certain data, for certain periods of time. You can review the tokens at a later date and make sure only the ones you care about get the info. Large companies that already participate in this space (Google, Microsoft, etc.) can separate out this business function and have it be isolated from their core products. I was thinking it'd require an act of congress to get implemented, and that may be possible. But instead of having that as a hard requirement, maybe just a branding/badge/logo on services. Say your product respects your privacy and uses data brokers for your privacy.

Going a step further, how do we encourage use? Aside from personal privacy, what if social media sites allowed us to use our identities to validate comments or attachments? Similar to the idea of a token, we upload a photo of our cat. We permit FB access to that cat pic, generate the token, say it's good until we revoke it. We revoke it, and now that picture will fail to load. We can also restrict access to our cat picture. By requesting access to the cat pic, another user provides their identity as well. If their identity is allowed to view it, then it can render. Similar to comments. It's just a string, but we can invalidate a token and make access to it no longer possible.

What about digital hoarding? Can't we screenshot everything or scrape the website and store it for later? Yes. But that's no longer a trusted source. Everything can be faked, especially as AI tools advance. Instead, by using the identity broker, you can verify if a statement was actually said. This will be a mindshift. Similar to how wikipedia isn't a credible source in a term paper, a screenshot is not proof of anything.

Identity brokers can also facilitate anonymous streams. Similar to a crypto wallet, separate personas can be generated by an identity. An anonymous comment can be produced and associated with that randomized persona. The identity broker can store the private key for the persona, possibly encrypted by the identity in some manner, or it can be stored elsewhere, free for the identity to resume using should they want to.

It's an interesting problem to think about.

Just ask for money. 10 USD a year in the app store. I’d pay it.

i work for a for-profit owned by a non-profit. This is a weird take. You can shape a product, sure you need to bring in a profit, but there are options of working with your owner (the non-profit) that you just don't have in a publicly traded company.

I am sure people would queue up for the job, fully aware of what it entails.

Merge Mozilla (including Firefox Relay, Mozilla VPN, etc ) with FastMail or Proton, price it reasonably and I’d be on board. If it worked well I’d recommend it to anyone I could.

I understand email isn’t easy but it difficult to imagine why Mozilla didn’t seize the opportunity.

Every time Mozilla CEO changes HN gets a set of "its so difficult" propaganda

Those CEOs get 6M per year and cannot figure out to focus on core product: Mozilla, keep a war chest, dont spend on politics.

Also cut all bullshit projects that are made for self promotion and dont help Mozilla as a browser.

When will real extensions return? Never?

Now they want to kill adblocks too

Anil Dash wrote something relevant recently: https://www.anildash.com/2025/11/14/wanting-not-to-want-ai/

His point (which I agree with - softly) is that Mozilla could approach this from a more nuanced perspective that others cannot, like not anti-AI but anti "Big AI". Facilitate what people are already doing (and outside of the HN bubble everyone is using AI all the time, even if it's just what we think is "dumb" stuff) throught the FF lens. Like a local LLM that runs entirely in an extension or similar. THere's no shortage of hard, valuable things that big tech won't do because of $$$.