alt Hacker NewsIs Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?
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It's kinda frustrating that Mozilla's CEO thinks that axing ad-blockers would be financially beneficial for them. Quite the opposite is true (I believe) since a ton of users would leave Firefox for alternatives.
Amazing how they continue not to cater to their core audience. They literally have lost 90% of their market share from their peak, I guess I can see the temptation to try to regain it by reaching out to others, but doing that at the expense of your core is a terrible business strategy. It's not like those users are all that sticky, they're leaving as Mozilla pisses them off, and likely Mozilla are going to be left with what they stand for - which these days is nothing.
It's sad, I'm sure there was a better path Mozilla could have taken, but they've had a decade or more of terrible management. I wonder if the non-profit / corp structure hasn't helped, or if it's just a later-stage company with a management layer who are disconnected from the original company's mission and strategy.
I think the sentiment of the headline statement is off. What you expect a CEO to say is "OBVIOUSLY the one thing which is completely off the table, because of it's lack of alignment with our mission and vision..."
Instead of which he inverts it "we'd get like $150m if we did this thing we won't do because well.. we haven't decided to." with the implicit "... yet"
And I agree with comments below: he discounts risk side loss of income because of people walking away.
I feel like some day, YouTube and all video streaming are likely to move to apps and just drop browser support (replace with redirect to app). It feels like the logical conclusion of the ad blocking arms race. This is just one step forward down that road.
CEO
> He says he could begin to block ad blockers in Firefox and estimates that’d bring in another $150 million, but he doesn’t want to do that. It feels off-mission.
LOL the day that Firefox stops me from running what I want is the day I'll get rid of it.
The web without ublock origin is a hellscape. Whenever I try another browser, I immediately go back to firefox.
Do these people even know their users?
For example: Fedora Silverblue default Firefox install had an issue with some Youtube videos due to codecs. So I tried watching youtube on Chromium. Ads were so annoying I stopped watching by the second time I tried to watch a video. Stopped watching youtube until I uninstalled default firefox install and added Firefox from flathub. If the option to use a good adblocker gets taken away I 'll most likely dramatically reduce my web browsing.
P.S. Maybe someone ports Vanadium to desktop Linux? If firefox goes away that 'd be my best case desktop browser. Using it on my mobile ;)
I think people are wildly overreacting. There is a new CEO and he wants to make a splash so the throws around "AI" that's it. Of course there will be AI related features in firefox, there already are! Wait and see what the actual specifics are before reacting?
Also, a small minor detail here: We're not paying for firefox! why are so many people feeling entitled? Mozilla has to do something other than beg Google to survive. Perhaps we need a fork of firefox that is sustained by donations and is backed by a non-profit explicilty chartered to make decisions based on community feedback? I don't see a problem with that wikipedia-like approach, I don't think any of the forks today have a good/viable org structure that is fully non-profit (as in it won't seek profit at all). Mozilla has bade some bad decisions recently, but they're a far cry from the world-ended outcry they're getting.
If we don't donate to Mozilla and we don't pay them money, then we have to be the product at some point. Even if they don't it to be that way, they have to placate to some other business interests.
I hope the EU also pays attention, perhaps some of their OSS funding can help setup an alternate org.
Genuinely can someone with knowledge of the business explain why they aren't simply doubling down on making Firefox better? Is there an existential problem facing them that they are trying to solve by adding AI into the browser?
The day Mozilla fired Brendan Eich for political reasons, Firefox died. It just took a while for everyone to realise that. That was when they collectively decided that other things are more important to them than the quality and usability of Firefox.
The new CEO is just the final nail in their coffin.
I'm going to repost/merge a few comments I made about this a while ago:
I dropped firefox 9 months so after they updated their privacy policy and removed "we don't sell your data" from their FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43213612
Mozilla has hired a lot of execs from Meta and bought an ad company, looking through a lot of their privacy policy at the time, a lot of it involves rewriting it to say that they can serve you sponsored suggestions when you're searching for things in their search bar and stuff and sharing out some of that data with third parties etc.
Firefox was bringing in half a billion a year for the last decade, if they would've just invested that money in low risk money market accounts (instead of paying their csuite executives millions of dollars in salary and putting the rest on non-Firefox related related social causes), the company would be able to easily survive off the interest alone.
I've been using Firefox since 2006 and have defended it for decades even when they've made questionable decisions that have gotten everybody upset with them. But this time it wasn't just making stupid decisions to try and fund the company, this time they actuality sold out their own customers.
In public announcement in the above link explaining why they removed "we don't sell your data" from the FAQ, the rationality was that some jurisdictions define selling data weirdly, they cited California's definition as an example but California's definition is exactly what I would consider the definition of selling my personal data.
They're justifying this by saying that they need it to stay alive since they're not going to be getting money from Google anymore, but I argue that you shouldn't sell out your customer base on the very specific reason anyone would choose you. I would rather pay a monthly fee to use Firefox to support them, but even if you gave them $500 million today they would just squander it away like they've done since forever so I really don't have any solution I can think of which frustrates me.
I switched to Orion (and use Safari if a site doesn't work in Orion), which can be a little buggy at times but I'm happy that it's not based on chrome at least.
A decent chunk of the users who bothered installing an adblock would also be bothered enough to install a FF fork with adblock, so I doubt the revenue increase would be much.
As for calling it "off-mission": yes, what's even the point of FF if that's the route it goes on?
I'm a daily Firefox user, but its to the point where I'm waiting for someone to make a serious hard fork that only has a non-profit that funds the project and nothing else.
Long-time Firefox user* here. If Mozilla weakens the ability to block ads or control content, and/or introduces intrusive AI features that I can't easily disable, then I'm done. I'll go to Waterfox or whatever. Tired of Mozilla's attitude.
* Windows and Android. I even pay for their vpn because there is apparently no way to pay for the browser, which is what I actually use.
I think it's too late for Mozilla, since it seems they already squandered most of their good will, userbase and money.
At any rate, I think their only good path of to get rid of Gecko.
The best would be to replace it with a finished version of Servo, which would give them a technically superior browser, assuming Google doesn't also drop Blink for Servo. It may be too late for this, but AI agents may perhaps make finishing Servo realistic.
The other path would be to switch to Chromium, which would free all the Gecko developers to work on differentiating a Chromium-based Firefox from Chrome, and guarantee that Firefox is always better than Chrome.
Mozilla CEO compensations
2018: $2,458,350
2020: Over $3 million
2021: $5,591,406.
2022: $6,903,089.
2023: ~$7m
Mozilla declined to detail the CEO's salaries for 2024+
Literally only reason to use Firefox is that it still blocks ads properly.
If Mozzilla brings AI or removes ad blocks then they are every way just worse Chrome and there is zero reason to use them over Chrome.
I guess I should already start porting my Firefox extensions over to Chrome since this ship is sinking stupid fast.
The Mozilla Corporation has earned around USD ~500 million in 2023.
The Mozilla Foundation has received around USD ~26 million in 2023 in donation from the Mozilla Corporation (~70%) and other sources (~30%).
There's an elephant in the room: why is maintaining a web browser costing $400M/y?
The web standards are growing faster than non-profit engines can implement them. Google & Apple are bloating the web specs in what looks like regulatory capture.
If Blink/Webkit dominate for long enough, they will lock everything down with DRMs & WEI. Maybe it's time to work on lighter protocols like Gopher & Gemini that don't need 20GB of RAM to open 20 tabs ?
I just noticed last week that Chrome was putting multiple versions of some 4GB AI model [1] on my hard disk that I'd never asked for, so when I upgraded my laptop I took the opportunity to switch to Firefox, and now this.
My image of Mozilla as a bastion for user first software just shattered.
You don't have to be very bright to figure killing adblockers in FF is a suicide.
> Mozilla believes in the value of an open and free (and thus ad-supported) web.
> and thus ad-supported
What a sad view of the web. Advertisement is a net-negative for society.
Well, is no mistery that today the best versioins of Firefox are the non official versions like waterfox and zen.
NObody trusts mozilla anymore, specially after they turned into an add company and started paying their CEOs exorbitating ammounts, considering what was being invested in their core business (supposedly making a better browser).
They have been since a decade. After tripping down on unrelated political activism they do the same with AI.
Firefox is only good for getting forked into better browser like Mullvad Browser, LibreWolf and Tor Browser.
Mozilla's problem has never been a lack of monetization ideas, it's been a lack of ideas that don't undermine why Firefox exists in the first place
I wonder where killing adblockers on Firefox will leave LibreWolf...
It's so tiring how everything around us is being engineered to make us miserable for the sake of profit. That in itself creates misery, almost seemingly for the sake of misery. A just world would punish this behavior.
At least there are projects like ladybird coming up to fill their shows
If Mozilla were to kill adblockers, there's basically no reason to not use Chromium. It's pretty much the only relevant difference between Chromium and Firefox these days.
It's truly impressive how they've managed to do every user-hostile trick Google Chrome also did over the years, except for no real clear reason besides contempt for their users autonomy I suppose. Right now the sole hill Mozilla really has left is adblockers, and they've talked about wanting to sacrifice that?
It truly boggles the mind to even consider this. That's not 150 million, that's the sound of losing all your users.
Disabling ad blocking goes hand in hand with an "AI Browser" strategy.
Ad blocking relies on the ability to use filters to block network requests at the browser level, and visual elements at the DOM level. "AI Browsers" are designed to add bloat to the browsing experience, by offering to summarize something, or providing contextual information like say, a product recommendation that pulls data from a third party site. Network request and DOM element blocking would instantly negate that.
I've moved to Librewolf myself.
What Firefox needs is a new steward and move out, literally. The unruly business practices aren't just normalized, they are an expectation. The blathering ceo wasn't even aware his job is to hide that. The fox will die in this toxic ecosystem.
Mozilla rebranded itself as a "crew of activists". Browser is just a side business to generate revenue!
Clearly Google have an iron hand over Mozilla. They want it to remain semi-alive for competitiveness purposes but also ad-block free in order to keep the last user's attention to ads. There might be an under the table agreement between G and the CEO that we will never find. After a while Firefox might become abandoned because nobody in power wants it any more.
When someone working for A is doing something that would clearly harm A to the benefit of B, I usually start wondering if that someone really works for A or there's something fishy going on. Mozilla is wasting a huge load of money coming from the Google agreement (another conflict of interests) to pay huge salaries to their CEO over the years. If there's something they lack it's openness about goals, not money.
Mozilla wasted probably hundreds of million dollars trying all those "features", but all we want is a stable browser.
Mozilla gets what, a billion dollars a year from Google to be the default search engine for Firefox? What do they need more money for?
Let's assume that Mozilla is not doing super hot and that's why their CEO is contemplating this topic.
Obviously we are not happy about ads, but we all understand that having money is pretty neat (if only to pay ones salary). Help the CEO fella: What great, unused options is Mozilla missing to generate revenue through their browser?
Firefox has been lagging in Web features for a long time. I have been a Zen browser user for about a year, and recently moved back to Arc just because almost all interactive websites look bad on the Firefox engine; somehow, they don't have the same level of JS API support as Chrome does, especially for WebRTC, Audio, or Video. And this is frustrating that they think the problem is the AdBlockers!
It's insane that this is right now on top of HN. Random and really childish interpretation is now worthy of top post?
> I've been using Firefox before it was called that.
Call me petty but I still can't let this one go. At the time they basically stole the Firebird name from the database project and did not hesitate to use AOL's lawyers to bully the established owners of the name. So they didn't actually become shady over night. It's in their DNA.
150M seems like such a small number for something that would have so much impact
I didn't read it that way. I read it as him acknowledging that would be a poor choice and therefore that mozilla won't do it.
Isn't it kind of telling how incredibly complicated modern web browsing is, that a web browser is seen as one of the most difficult general purpose projects a developer could imagine building, aside from an entire desktop environment or a kernel?
You know what would be neat? If the Gemini protocol were slightly expanded for video/image embeds, and then having Firefox/Ladybird support it out of the box.
Has anything positive came out from or about Mozilla in the past few months or years?
"I think no one wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45926779
User since Phoenix 0.6, now moved to Brave and haven't seen an ad in years, and it comes with a handy AI response on every search
I've been using Firefox since it was called Phoenix. Going against the users like that would make me drop it like a hot potato.
Mozilla needs some of that Brave and Opera energy. They have their issues too, but at least they try not to be just a worse chrome.
Oh no! There goes Google's antitrust insurance...
The profit model is being payed (as CEO) to dismantle Firefox into oblivion and no more.
>> He says he could begin to block ad blockers in Firefox and estimates that’d bring in another $150 million, but he doesn’t want to do that. It feels off-mission.
> It may be just me, but I read this as “I don't want to but I'll kill AdBlockers in Firefox for buckerinos ”.
Yes, that does seem like a pretty uncharitable interpretation of that quote. I read it as "we won't do it, even though it would bring in $150M USD".