I'm telling you this to highlight that volunteers where a huge part of Mozilla.
But on the last day they announced that they were moving the day-to-day conversations from IRC (an open protocol) to Yahoo Messenger (a closed protocol). I felt sort of betrayed in that moment: the company that was all about openness and to which I dedicated countless hours doing unpaid work for and even more years evangelizing for was imposing its volunteers and employees used a proprietary app to coordinate. That didn't sit well with me. At all. I basically lost interest.
This was in 2015. Last I heard MDN introduced ads (I wouldn't know, uBlock is pretty effective) and is not showing contributors to a page on the page itself anymore.
So yeah, the part of OP saying how Mozilla managed to piss volunteers resonated pretty hard with me.
Firefox usage has been declining for a decade. Doing nothing, or just doing the exact same as before, is popular with its fans (including me). But wouldn't it perhaps just have lead to an even more rapid decline?
I don't mind experiments, but if you're the "we put you back in control" browser then please build an "off" switch in from the start.
AI is however a potential avenue for raising money.
* Wanting niche features that benefit other people than those in the enthusiast core, thus preventing the company from gaining market share and revenue.
* Ever-increasing expectations in terms of visible feature delivery (e.g. e10s was widely seen as a failure despite being foundational to move off a single thread model and increase browser responsiveness).
* General conservativeness in terms of anything that breaks workflows (famously [1], but also see the criticism of Firefox redesigns over the years, etc.)
* Most importantly, lack of proposals for monetization from said audience (donations do not cut it and smaller and more important projects such as OpenSSL, etc. have also been underfunded from time to time, so nvm funding a browser's development), while also opposing the typical monetization mechanisms, e.g. ads.
These things end up constraining a company from spending more resources to improve a growing product, as they don't have any. While more capital-intensive industries such as phone manufacturers often just choose to appeal to mass market at the cost of giving up their enthusiasts[2], Mozilla always wanted to hedge its bets, and has failed to go in either direction.
Therefore, it is not unexpected that Mozilla is failing, and only survives through whatever meager donations come through, and revshare from Google by placing them as the default search engine.
A product like Firefox depends on word of mouth. There was not a *single* announcement or decision by the Mozilla leadership in the last 10 years or so which would make me recommend Firefox to others, instead every single time it pushed me away a little bit more. I have hardly ever seen such a fundamental alienation of their core audience, even for Silicon Valley standards ;)
In the real world, in the same line as the article suggests, there was a brief time when the "puts you back in control" browser needed you to change the following about:config settings to disable the force-pushed ai:
browser.ml.enable, browser.ml.chat.enabled, browser.ml.chat.sidebar, browser.ml.chat.menu, browser.ml.chat.page, extensions.ml.enabled, browser.ml.linkPreview.enabled, browser.ml.pageAssist.enabled, browser.ml.smartAssist.enabled, browser.tabs.groups.smart.enabled, browser.tabs.groups.smart.userEnabled, pdfjs.enableAltTextModelDownload, pdfjs.enableGuessAltText
A bit of community feedback later, and we've got one big "off" button, and me wondering which footgun the executives will shoot themselves with next.
They still have not fixed their build system. Meson/ninja or cmake would be alternatives. Nothing to have them abandon mozconfig ... this is legacy code. The rest of the world moved on. Mozilla lives in the past.
FWIW the Firefox build instructions [1] look a lot saner to me than the Chromium build instructions [2].
[1] https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/setup/linux_build.ht...
[2] https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/main/docs/l...
Now - we really need a viable alternative to the Evil Google Empire. For a while I had hope that ladybird would be that competitor, but that died after I was banned from github, as well as Kling making some really strange decisions in the last year or so, with weird explanations; most recent one the "we don't need external contributors so we close that down" (in part also due to the rise of AI slop spam, which is indeed annoying, but Kling is a strange guy really). I gave up on Mozilla many years ago already, though. The key insight I had was when one mozilla dev explaind that all linux guys use systemd + pulseaudio. So, using youtube (which annoys me because the evil Google empire controls it as well), I had no audio on firefox. Chrome on the other hand played fine (I only used alsa). So, the same machine, almost the same software stack (excluding pulseaudio; I did use system back then though), means that one browser plays audio fine, the other does not. Now, I could recompile firefox and enable non-pulseaudio audio ... but look at this:
https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/view/svn/xsoft/firefox...
mozconfig? In 2026? Seriously?
There is allegedly a python-only alternative. I tried it. It did not compile.
This is not the only issue I had. Many more problems existed with Mozilla and I also think that becoming addicted to Google money killed Mozilla. It is a dying shadow and has been for a long time. Yes, we need alternatives, but Mozilla failed us many years ago already.
I don't have a real solution against the evil Google empire. It's not even only Google; many companies are part of the evilness. I am almost beginning to sound like Richard Stallman, though I don't feed off of my feet - but the main point here is more to have real alternatives. Firefox is useable, no doubt, but it's not going to change the control Google has over the world wide web. We need something much more fundamental - control by the people. Everyone sees what Google and co are doing. Something has to change fundamentally, to stop Google parasitizing on the rest of the world. But for this you also need to have software alternatives that work.
The only thing I can come up with is to make all components of the browser/www stack as modular as possible and to also come up with alternatives. W3C also betrayed us when they demanded DRM into everything. I don't want that. Next in line will be mandatory age sniffing. This is currently ongoing. It will be extended. Systemd already added support for it; Poettering tried to do damage control but clearly failed: and reddit censoring like crazy - https://old.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/1rzykul/the_system... as is typical.
Maintaining a browser engine including patching the latest vulnerabilities when someone points Mythos at your code is a really hard problem, my feeling is you need a certain size of organization and funding as your table stakes.
Someone should convince the EU to look into funding a new browser, maybe.