alt Hacker NewsFor anyone reading this that has worked on the launch of this new product (or the many others of their ilk throughout the years) under the various Mozilla orgs, I mean no disrespect, however I feel it's important to not mince words these days..
I implore ANYONE at Mozilla org to please, please stop working on projects distracting from the complex and necessary work of browser and web standards stewardship. That alone should be the very reason for your continued existence if you have any. Focus on anything outside that purview will lead to the furthering of the, already painful and readily apparent, stagnation of your browser and our standards bodies as entities distinct from corporations.
Ditching any direct financial ties to Google or any other browser vendor is both important and necessary at this point, as this clearly represents a conflict of interest in your overall mission.
The web as a platform should belong to us all, not just the few corporate leaders of the day. I've watched in real time, saddened by the persistent errosion of our commons that is the web. I see it becoming nothing more than a corporate playground should trends continue, if it's not already too late. There may have been a time when your mission took precident over product launches of seemingly unrelated domains, but that is not what Ii observing today.
I think I speak for many in the community in these regards (please correct me if not the case.)
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Firefox is pretty cool. Use it every day.
Blocks ads Multi account containers Dev tools very good
I never notice that it is in any way slow, except for those sites that need infinity cpu on any browser, like jira.
What specifically is the issue? To my mind it quietly just gets on with things.
> already painful and readily apparent, stagnation of your browser
What's wrong with Firefox? There are several things Firefox does that it's annoying to live without in other browsers (video pop-outs, competent ad blocking, etc). Is there some core feature that's missing? I'm subjected to Edge at work and I couldn't tell you a single thing it does that I'd want FF to do.
> and our standards bodies as entities distinct from corporations
Ok, I buy that.
This "Mozilla is distracted" narrative is a category 5 hurricane of unsubstantiated vibes from people who have no idea what they're talking about.
Some quick hits just from reading recent release announcements from December '25 through April 26:
- Hardware acceleration for faster performance with PDFs - Expanded WebGPU support - Faster page loading with compression dictionaries - Deeper hardware integration for faster video playback on AMD hardware - Better GPU stability and performance on MacOS - Faster local translation
And I'm only picking out bits and pieces. "Web platform" improvements are so abundant that reproducing them from any single release would be a massive wall of text, but for a few examples just from one recent release:
>Service worker support for WebGPU has been added, making it available in all worker contexts. Service workers allow WebGPU to run in the background, which is particularly useful for extensions and other pages that can meaningfully share resources across multiple tabs and time periods.
>Firefox now supports the Iterator.zip() and Iterator.zipKeyed() methods from the joint iteration proposal. This allows zipping together underlying iterators into an iterator over values grouped by position, similar to zip in many other languages.
>Firefox now supports the Trusted Types API, which is primarily aimed at preventing cross-site scripting attacks.
>Firefox now supports the Sanitizer API, which provides new methods for HTML manipulation. The element.setHTML() method enables developers to insert HTML content similarly to element.innerHTML, but without the security vulnerabilities such as cross-site scripting (XSS). A complementary method, document.parseHTML(), is also available for parsing HTML safely.
And on and on it goes with APIs, CSS and so on, and that's every release, and that's still not covering feature requests and cosmetic updates, or the constant security updates.
Guys, this is millions of lines of code and thousands of patches every quarter. While you were reading about AI features or poorly worded terms of service, they studied the blade..er.. they worked on real performance improvements. It should be a scandal that anyone in the comment section gets away with claiming they're not working on anything.
Mozilla is doing exactly what you’re describing. They need revenue to ditch their direct financial ties to Google (and I wonder if they hire those high-salary executives solely in the hope of generating that revenue).
These AI products, along with all previous failed attempts, are just them trying to gain enough revenue to remove that dependency on Google.
I agree that Mozilla is a breath of fresh air, and I am happy to see this extending to AI.
They (like many) are afraid to become svn as the world is apparently taken over by git. Well-maintained but irrelevant.
Where exactly do you expect Mozilla to gain revenue from other than non browser projects?
Do you want people to pay to use Firefox?
I'm perfectly fine with Mozilla working on other things as long as those things are profitable or at least self-funded. As long as they are not leeching donated resources from Firefox or Thunderbird, I don't see a problem. However, I wish I had some kind of assurance that the money I donate to Mozilla would go to Firefox and not some other project like this.
Have you donated to the Mozilla Foundation so they can ditch financial ties with Google?
I'm going to sound crazy, and I've said this on HN before, but I wish CloudFlare or someone who would truly appreciate the effort and investment, would buy out Mozilla and have them oxidizing the browser again. Firefox was at its best when they were going through that effort, and since they put a pause on it, Firefox has been so "meh" for many years now, and embedding things nobody asked for. A faster fully oxidized browser on the other hand would be loved by many.
The Mozilla employees are just Google plants. The web standards are now controlled by WHATWG who are all members of Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Mozilla and they are not interested in pushing standards forward or making browser improvements. They are only interested in ensuring entrenchment for their corporations. That’s why they created WHATWG. There is nothing any non-compromised Mozilla employee can do. The ship has sunk. Either someone hard forks Firefox or we continue down the current road.
I agreed with these posts a couple years ago but for the past year there have been a lot of meaningful improvements in Firefox.
These two goals:
> ... please stop working on projects distracting from the complex and necessary work of browser and web standards stewardship.
> Ditching any direct financial ties to Google or any other browser vendor is both important and necessary...
are inherently contradictory. If you do not want Mozilla to have revenue from search vendors that also have browsers, it has to come from somewhere else. Or are you suggesting they switch the default search engine back to Yahoo [0]?
I am not trying to defend the projects they have chosen to work on, but you have to understand that reducing dependence on Google is exactly why they are working on them [1].
[0] Even when they did that, it was for the US only, and Google was still the default for most of the world.
[1] Although in this case, this appears to come from the Thunderbird organization, so unrelated to the browser. Money is fungible, though.