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- Hacker News
- At this point I want Mozilla to fail. They're actively draining resources from people who want to protect the open internet.
- How are they actively draining resources from people who want to protect the open internet?by yoavm
- Sounds like poor prior proper planning enabling piss poor performance (the 7 Ps) on Mozilla's part.
They need to figure out how to break away from Google. It's clearly an abusive relationship.
Mozilla also manages itself horribly. They need to do things differently. For one, stop paying the CEO an inappropriate amount of money. Second, stop loading up the browser with garbage features, hyperfocusing on side quests nobody cares about (VPNs, Pocket, AI garbage, etc), and get back to basics. What they were doing in the 2000s was glorious and they need to return to that.
- It may kill Mozilla, no reason to say it will kill Firefox itself. Perhaps Firefox would flourish a lot more if it is finally released from Mozilla's clutches.by dartharva
- That's extremely unlikely. Keeping up with modern browser features takes a very large amount of work.by exitheone
- Who would possibly take it over? Redhat maybe?
I don’t think Firefox survives as a community based project.
- Mozilla should start exploring a subscription business and tout its continued support for the full uBlock Origin among other extensions. I would pay a small amount annually to support its development and I bet I'm not alone.by sylens
- I think Mozilla asking people for more money is the last thing users want.
They have more than enough money to be better, and focus more on development, they just... don't.
- for all the PR that mozilla floats about them being the guardian of free internet, i would wager that, today, most non-tech folks will have hard time configuring firefox properly. it used to be simple back in the days, now they have made it so complex to tie all of them together.
also, previously on android, when apps were cleared from desktop, the browser used to quit. now you need to go to menu->quit. otherwise it will keep opening new tabs.
a non-tech friend of mine was once complaining about their phone being very slow. i looked at their chrome and -- i kid you not -- it had 800 tabs open.
non tech folks are a goldmine for the data stealers, and firefox likely implemented that 'enhancement request' to make it easy for them, not for the user.
by mirmor23 - I've given up on technical solutions to internet spying and tracking. Even with NoScript, uBlock Origin and "Enhanced Protection" in Firefox turned on I always have the feeling Google and Facebook still know everything about me and sell it to the entire internet.
I believe we need to get legislation in place to ban the selling of customer information to third-parties.
by hn_submit - Amicus brief? Wasn't that like a year ago?
Not their first foray into this case I suppose:
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/internet-policy/amicus_b... (May 2025)
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/internet-policy/defendin... (Sep 2025)
- Chrome should be split, Firefox or its forks (if Mozilla continues to mismanage) should be able to receive funds from Google but Chrome should not be allowed to be paid for Google search engine placement at least for the next 5-6 years.
I'm sure many other players will play top dollar to be the default on a browser that virtually commands all the market. That'll let us discover the real price of search engine defaults because the Mozilla payout is partly due to antitrust reasons.
In that case, I think we'll also see a visible decrease in "bugs" affecting Firefox on Google's properties.
by devsda - Judge Mehta's reasoning is obviously correct.
> US federal and state competition authorities recently asked the court of appeals to overturn the part of Mehta’s ruling that permits these payments.
You get the "competition authorities" you pay for. Decades of government-bashing, bureaucrat-bashing, sidelining and shit pay give you this level of institutional competence.
by concinds - Strong disagree. These payments are clearly massive tent pole of maintaining the monopoly and I think it was right for competition authorities to appeal them. In fact, IMO, Metha ruling was way to favorable for Google. Basically like, well, they did the crime but it's too much to disrupt so I guess we will nibble at the edges accomplishing little.by stackskipton
- Mozilla has been killing itself. $400mil a year and very little to show for it in the browser. I still rep Firefox but ladybird could not come sooner.
- Like many here, I think Mozilla has done a terrible job managing their money and they are largely to blame for the pickle they are in.
However, I don't see who picks up the reigns if Mozilla dies. Like it or not, Firefox is essential for a somewhat (increasingly less) open web, and (at least for now) Mozilla is essential to Firefox. For those who want to see Mozilla die but Firefox live on, what are the more likely outcomes in your opinion if Mozilla went down? Do you see a big corp (which it increasingly seems is the only way to keep up with the needed pace for a browser) stepping up?
by freedomben - Despite the oodles of money Mozilla receives it manages Firefox poorly. Because of that its market share has been slipping for years. Soon it may become so insignificant that Google will cut back funding to say, tens of millions a year.
And Mozilla keeps attempting to diversify its income stream by coming up with commercial services for which there are loads of alternatives, such as VPN. Why don't they just give up on that and spend all their money on Firefox? Hire someone with a deep technical background and a vision to take Firefox forward. As long as it doesn't involve A.I. I think it's worth a shot.
by hn_submit - How is firefox essential to the open web?by irishcoffee
- Lets flip the question, does it have to be at the break neck pace that nobody can catch up without spending huge money?
How many of those features were really organic, driven by actual pressing need and not driven by Google's needs.
by devsda - Firefox will continue to exist and be maintained by open source efforts.
I often wonder if the current model has been driving away contributors, since it _feels like_ contributing effort to support someone else's paychecque.
by dleslie - Not at all, the golden age of FOSS is gone.
It might appear that FOSS has won, however in reality what happened is that corporations have managed to control the message thanks to business friendly licenses.
by pjmlp - I love Firefox but feel little pity for Mozilla which receives $400+ million a year on search placement in their browser but spends only a tiny fraction on its development. The rest is wasted on greedy management and frivolous projects to give that same management an excuse to give themselves multi-million dollar payouts.
Everyone's only in it for the money. There are no good or bad people anymore, only...unfortunates. (that last line I stole from The Equalizer 2).
by hn_submit - > spends only a tiny fraction on its development
No. People imagined this for some reason.
by pseudalopex - Everyone complains about the CEO pay but it's not that significant compared to the overall budget. The actual $$ historically goes to spending on high end office space in San Francisco, Paris, and other expensive cities and paying salaries to match the CoL in those areas. Kind of rich for a nonprofit.
But I'm sure people would complain if they moved operations to Brno and Warsaw too.
by dralley - They also could have used those payments to build up an endowment that makes them not dependent on others.by SilasX
- HN is incredibly inconsistent and two-faced about which Mozilla side projects are "frivolous" and which ought to be defended to the death.
Rust was a side project, asm.js was a side project that turned into WASM, IIRC LetsEncrypt was a side project (or at least a side project of Mozilla engineers, if not official), significant parts of the initial R&D for AV1 and Opus came out of Mozilla, Servo was largely a side project at the point that it got cancelled (the parts that had been largely successful had already been merged into Firefox, the rest was either nowhere near ready or being completely rewritten or both, and the main application for it at the time was some attempts to make a browser for running web apps in VR headsets at high framerates). Thunderbird was a side project.
But you don't see people complaining about those things, which largely didn't make Mozilla any money, you see them complaining about things that do make Mozilla money, like the branded VPN service. Or projects like FirefoxOS, which ultimately failed but still resulted in a lot of improvements to Firefox and web standards. And it wasn't a bad idea either, it just put the cart (mobile OS) before the horse (the web APIs that are needed to make a browser-based mobile OS successful, like access to GPS and IMU hardware, which didn't exist at the time) without the heft to really push through the barriers while competing directly with Apple and Google.
It seems like people define "frivolous side projects" as "anything Mozilla did that didn't end up being incredibly successful" and anything that did become incredibly successful gets taken for granted. "What did Rome ever do for us" rewritten as a tech parable.
(don't tell me that "we're going to create a whole new language to fix security issues in our web browser" didn't sound a bit frivolous in 2012)
by dralley