alt Hacker NewsFully 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.
Replies
As a US corporation, Mozilla cannot compete on privacy focused services. If they want to focus on privacy (which I think is great), they should ship software that improves privacy, not offer services.
> Mozilla Mail - a reliable Exchange/Google Mail alternative (desperately needed imo)
Thunderbird Pro was announced a while back, still not GA though
> Mozilla Mail
Aren't they already moving towards this? The Thunderbird team recently announced ThunderMail which will have an optional $9/year plan.
https://www.tb.pro/en-US/thundermail/
> Thunderbird for iOS
https://blog.thunderbird.net/2025/10/state-of-the-bird-2024-...
> We’ve also seen the overwhelming demand to build a version of Thunderbird for the iOS community. Unlike the Android app, the iOS app is being built from the ground up.
> All seemingly low-hanging fruit with brand alignment.
Genuinely interested: are you a developer? Doesn't sound like low-hanging fruit to me.
There are already many alternatives to Gmail, I don't think Mozilla would make a lot of money there. And I don't know if they are making a lot of money with their Mozilla VPN (which I understand is a wrapper around Mullvad): why would I pay Mozilla instead of Mullvad?
There are alternative search engines, like Kagi in the US and Qwant/Ecosia in Europe (though only Qwant seems to keep the servers in Europe).
What I want from Mozilla, really, is a browser. And I would love to donate to that specifically, but I don't think I can.
Re-launch FirefoxOS -- not for smartphones, but as a privacy-focused ChromeOS competitor. Give students Mozilla/Firefox brand awareness while prying them out of Google's clutches.
How about: Mozilla HTTPS To My Router (or printer or any other physically present local object) in a way that does not utterly suck?
Seriously, there’s a major security and usability problem, it affects individual users and corporations, and neither Google nor Apple nor Microsoft shows the slightest inclination to do anything about it, and Mozilla controls a browser that could add a nice solution. I bet one could even find a creative solution that encourages vendors, inoffensively, to pay Mozilla a bit of money to solve this problem for them.
Also:
> Thunderbird for iOS - why is this not a thing yet?
Indeed. Apple’s mail app is so amazingly bad that there’s plenty of opportunity here.
> Thunderbird for iOS - why is this not a thing yet?
They are building Thunderbird Android over K9 Mail, which is an Android app. They would have to start from scratch on iOS, which of course is feasible but it takes more time.
Quant and Ecosia are already building their own (European) index in a joint venture. Mozilla Search is totally uninteresting (to me).
> Thunderbird for iOS - why is this not a thing yet?
There's no release yet, but it's being worked on. https://github.com/thunderbird/thunderbird-ios
> Mozilla Mail - a reliable Exchange/Google Mail alternative (desperately needed imo)
I think the privacy industry is oversaturated we already have: ProtonMail, Tuta and Mailbox Mail
Agree with a lot of this except Mozilla Search. Search is already or very soon going to be an entirely LLM driven space.
> - Mozilla Search - metasearch that isn't based on Bing/DDG/Google
As much hate as Brave gets overall, I think Mozilla should take a page from Brave's book if they're going to make a search engine. I think they should have their own index, possibly supplemented by Bing or Google. Let people opt-in to using their browsers to help crawl for the search engine index, like Brave does. Then add in some power-user features like goggles and custom ranking, and they'd have a pretty compelling search engine. They should even be able to subsidize it somewhat with advertising: DDG and Brave Search are the only two websites I allow ads on, because they're usually relevant and they're never intrusive.