This seemed like a pretty solid interview, albeit short. Good questions were asked, and I found Varma's answers to be informed and realistic. Mozilla has always been in a tough spot. After...
Exemplary
This seemed like a pretty solid interview, albeit short. Good questions were asked, and I found Varma's answers to be informed and realistic.
Mozilla has always been in a tough spot. After Chrome's meteoric rise, they've only really managed to hold onto a small and rather fickle userbase. These folks will oppose almost all forms of monetization, and react poorly to any change or experimentation. See the Mr. Robot ARG that Mozilla tried in 2017.
Moz persists mostly because of their search deal with Google, but we all know it could disappear at any time. The DOJ nearly killed that particular golden goose in 2024, and the internet largely cheered as it was seen as a slight against Google. So Mozilla clearly needs to diversify. Unfortunately, previous attempts have all failed. Cliqz didn't work, and people hate sponsored shortcuts. Mozilla VPN is perhaps the closest they've come, but even that has turned off a number of users. This makes it very difficult to grow the company to a size that's able to compete with Google and Apple.
It seems like they do recognize this and understand they need to take some risks. AI is one of those risks, and Varma spoke — a bit defensively, I think — about how it can be used to benefit users. The local translations they already offer are one obvious use case, and speech synthesis is another. He hinted at more advanced capabilities though, such as the browser checking prices or product updates for you. Ironically, the kind of "user agent" that might have been originally envisioned before browsers came to dominate that definition.
It seems like they're trying to balance this by making plenty of privacy assurances, and providing an easily discoverable kill switch. Maybe that'll appease their current users enough while they try to bring in a new audience, but the word AI has become corrosive to some, despite its prevalence in software engineering. I would guess that crowd has a wide overlap with their current users. Not an easy position.
They also have another problem in Manifest V2. Not only is Mozilla maintaining an independent rendering engine — something that even Microsoft decided was too much work — but they are now forced to support two different API levels for browser extensions. That takes a lot of dev time for which they're already spread thin.
For some reason, people only seem to bring up MV3 in regard to ad blocking, but there's a lot more than that. Background pages were completely replaced with service workers, and CSP and RCE were reined in for security reasons. Malicious extensions were a huge attack vector in Chrome, which is why Google began locking them down by limiting the most commonly abused APIs in MV3.
By supporting MV2, Firefox is still vulnerable to these problems. They already went through this once with XUL extensions, and at some point, might have to do it again with MV2. Their current security approach is to restrict extension installs to their store and strictly review everything, but that doesn't scale well and is inherently less open. Even Chrome allows you to install extensions from a local file, whereas Firefox requires a ton of workarounds.
I think now that the MV3 ecosystem has been sufficiently built up, Firefox could likely work towards dropping MV2 while leaving in a few specialized APIs that were only possible under MV2. eg. Encourage declarativeNetRequest, but allow webRequest behind an extra flag or additional review scrutiny. Like the AI issue, they need to find a balance that lets them move forward without upsetting too many of their existing users.
I hope they find a way to strike that balance. Mozilla has made missteps, but they continue to spend countless hours building free and open-source software for all of us to use. They offer the strongest defense against a browser monoculture, and frankly receive far too much vitriol online over minor inconveniences.
This one doesn't entirely track for me. Because they also explicitly introduced some new API endpoints themselves. Some of which they must have known will never be implemented in Chromium. So to...
They also have another problem in Manifest V2. Not only is Mozilla maintaining an independent rendering engine — something that even Microsoft decided was too much work — but they are now forced to support two different API levels for browser extensions. That takes a lot of dev time for which they're already spread thin.
This one doesn't entirely track for me. Because they also explicitly introduced some new API endpoints themselves. Some of which they must have known will never be implemented in Chromium.
So to be clear, new APIs made specifically for Firefox that have never existed for Chromium.
Meaning they already did decide on supporting APIs in addition to just whatever Chromium is doing. Also with they MV3 implementation they explicitly decided to go down a slightly different implementation as well. For example:
For some reason, people only seem to bring up MV3 in regard to ad blocking, but there's a lot more than that. Background pages were completely replaced with service workers,
This is not true for Firefox, you can still use background pages with MV3.
Malicious extensions were a huge attack vector in Chrome, which is why Google began locking them down by limiting the most commonly abused APIs in MV3.
This is a half truth as far as I am concerned. Even with these API limitation malicious extensions can still do plenty of harm through a variety of ways. I am sure there are statistics that back up the "most commonly abused" claim, but I'd be curious to see what definition of malicious and what sort of abuse they include.
And to be really frank, the biggest abuse factor always has been the utter lack of proper review processes, even automatic ones, when submitting something to the chrome store. As someone who has extensions on both stores, the amount of shady offerings I had for my chrome store entries is insane. Things like including ad platforms, other shady data miners, etc. These "companies" only do this because they get away with it on the Chrome store.
I do think that Firefox did lock down extension side loading too much. That specifically makes them less open. But having their own extension platform tightly curated should be a default. I am not even talking reviews done by hand. The mozilla addon platform already does a lot of automated checks before you even get to list your extension. It even refuses to continue if specific dependencies (like dom purifier) are outdated. I have never seen anything of the sort when submitting an extension to the Chrome store.
Malicious extensions being so widespread has very little to do with APIs, it has much more to do with Google letting it happen by having zero safeguards on the extension publishing process for years.
Thanks for the counter points. Particularly on Fx still supporting background pages in MV3, which I wasn't aware of. I think that Google killing RCE was the biggest consequence here, since that...
Thanks for the counter points. Particularly on Fx still supporting background pages in MV3, which I wasn't aware of.
Even with these API limitation malicious extensions can still do plenty of harm through a variety of ways.
I think that Google killing RCE was the biggest consequence here, since that was the vector used by so many browser extensions to start silently injecting bad code. It was basically impossible to catch in reviews, so they could only ever be reactive, not proactive.
I do agree that Moz has likely spent more man-hours in code review, which is something that Google is allergic to. They also make efforts to prevent RCE in that process, though it's enforced via policy and not by the browser itself.
Both companies are likely upgrading their automated checks as well by incorporating newer LLM-based tools, which can reason more fully about a codebase. They shouldn't be relied on completely, but as an extra step, could really bolster existing review processes.
As someone who has extensions on both stores, the amount of shady offerings I had for my chrome store entries is insane.
Having used Mod Toolbox for roughly a decade, I appreciate that you never accepted any of their offers. Thanks for all the dev time you spent helping out other mods!
I dont think that company growth has to be their main goal. They could be just one browser company if they focus on their product instead of wasting their money for stupid stuff. Offering a more...
This makes it very difficult to grow the company to a size that's able to compete with Google and Apple.
I dont think that company growth has to be their main goal. They could be just one browser company if they focus on their product instead of wasting their money for stupid stuff.
Offering a more capable & open MV3 alternative for example, might be important! The disappointment comes from not doing such things (dunno if their main benefactors forbid them)
But, for me, the fact that they maintain the only workable engine apart from google/apple is their raison d'etre.
I don't pretend to know about their income streams or cash flow trivia. My beef is with them creating useless features vs things people need and chrome does not have (that's how you will get new...
I don't pretend to know about their income streams or cash flow trivia.
My beef is with them creating useless features vs things people need and chrome does not have (that's how you will get new users I reckon). I still use ffox everywhere, but most people don't.
Things people need don't necessarily pay the bills unfortunately. That's the main thing all these features no one needs is trying to solve. Chrome doesn't have to make money. Safari doesn't have...
Things people need don't necessarily pay the bills unfortunately. That's the main thing all these features no one needs is trying to solve.
Chrome doesn't have to make money. Safari doesn't have to make money. Edge doesn't have to make money.
Those products are ways that their manufacturers can enforce their vision of the internet and keep their users locked into their ecosystem so they can make money off of them elsewhere.
Mozilla straight up just doesn't have that option. They're a company that primarily makes a web browser. That's largely their only significant product. They need to figure out a way to actually turn that product into a sustainable income stream, independent of Google. Virtually no one is willing to pay for a web browser, so Mozilla has to get creative.
If Firefox went away, that would be the end of a true competitive 3rd party web rendering engine, which would be bad for everyone. Especially the die hard ideological open source purists who are the first to demonize and nitpick every little thing Mozilla tries to set their company up for sustainability.
The open source hobbyist community cannot solve this problem alone. A project as massive and expansive as a web rendering engine needs talented, committed, full time professional developers, and that requires funding.
I honestly wish that every single company facing this issue of “we were once really big and now we’ve lost most of our customers” would take a good long hard look at what Runescape/Jagex is doing...
I honestly wish that every single company facing this issue of “we were once really big and now we’ve lost most of our customers” would take a good long hard look at what Runescape/Jagex is doing with OldSchool RuneScape.
In multiple interviews they have recognized that they’ve only just begun to tap their previous market and literally all they have to do is cater to the people who already play or have ever played Runescape.
All Firefox needs to do is ask itself why people moved to Chrome (because at the time Firefox had become slow, buggy, plugin hell) fix that, and tell everyone you’ve fixed it. Privacy is a bonus. Chrome has become a slow buggy plugin hell with no privacy, Firefox is already better, just tell people.
Privacy is irrelevant, the overwhelming majority of people straight up don't care. Seriously, it's been decades, at some point tech geeks simply need to put their heads out of the ground and face...
Privacy is irrelevant, the overwhelming majority of people straight up don't care. Seriously, it's been decades, at some point tech geeks simply need to put their heads out of the ground and face reality: The overwhelming majority of people never have and never will care about privacy. At all.
The fact that FF continued to bark up the privacy tree as their market share was collapsing, was 100% part of the problem. It's like having a sinking ship with a bunch of holes in it, while the captain is polishing the wooden figurehead because a couple of carpenters on board are really obsessed with it.
I don't think FF can do anything to fix things now. You say chrome is "buggy plugin hell" but that's not the average person's experience at all. The average person doesn't know what a "plugin" is. They open chrome, it works fine (no bugs) and does what they want. They'll stick with it.
IMO FF fell behind due to organizational issues. I was a big fan and wanted to donate a few years back. But when I looked into how, I straight up couldn't. Turns out FF was spun off as its own company and I couldn't donate to it, and they were actually being financed by other corpos (ironically, mostly Google). While the non-profit I could donate to was doing a bunch of unrelated side-projects, including charity stuff for Africa, stuff like that. I ended up not donating, I wanted to support my browser, not solve 3rd world problems. At that point I knew FF was doomed, their interests were misaligned. By their structure, they couldn't be supported by their users and were instead funded by their competitor (Google) and a bunch of other corpos trying to sell you stuff in the browser.
IMO from the very start, FF should have been a non-profit financed through donations. And they should have concentrated spending every cent on improving FF instead of doing side projects.
My read is different. People do not care about digital privacy because they do not understand the harms or implications because a massive spending to pave them over and hide them. That does not...
My read is different. People do not care about digital privacy because they do not understand the harms or implications because a massive spending to pave them over and hide them. That does not mean trying to preserve online privacy is irrelevant.
All the developers I know use Chrome to develop on, and we all can see that it’s a total resource hog. Memory leaks everywhere. Firefox could market themselves as a lean performance browser...
All the developers I know use Chrome to develop on, and we all can see that it’s a total resource hog. Memory leaks everywhere.
Firefox could market themselves as a lean performance browser instead of adding a ton of useless things most people dont even know how to use like a vpn and that probably would have worked.
Its been a long sad road seeing the only browser alternative suffer and fail, I got into an argument with another dev maybe 10 years ago now because our app didnt work at all on firefox and they refused to fix it because no one uses firefox. Many websites are like this. Its to the point where I had to download Chromium just to use it on some websites where firefox doesnt work.
I find it's mostly government websites, and then occasionally places like Ticketmaster/etc (because it's impossible to get tickets from anywhere other than a reseller) I would love to just avoid...
I find it's mostly government websites, and then occasionally places like Ticketmaster/etc (because it's impossible to get tickets from anywhere other than a reseller)
I would love to just avoid websites that don't support my browser, but Chromium is the only way I can pay my vehicle taxes.
I find it extremely rare to find websites that only work on Chromium based websites. But that's largely a function of the consolidation of ownership of the internet. 😮💨
I find it extremely rare to find websites that only work on Chromium based websites. But that's largely a function of the consolidation of ownership of the internet. 😮💨
My county's DMV website, same county's unemployment website, and then I think Ticketmaster, but I had issues with every single concert ticket reseller website that day it could have been any of...
My county's DMV website, same county's unemployment website, and then I think Ticketmaster, but I had issues with every single concert ticket reseller website that day it could have been any of them.
It tends to be only websites for which I have no choice but to use.
I tend to have issues with ticket websites, but it’s not because of Firefox itself: it’s the anti-tracking, ad-blocking, and/or privacy measures that I have in place. Turning them off almost...
I tend to have issues with ticket websites, but it’s not because of Firefox itself: it’s the anti-tracking, ad-blocking, and/or privacy measures that I have in place. Turning them off almost universally makes them work again. I’d estimate that about 10-20% of the time it’s the fault of the enhanced tracking protections built into Firefox and enabled by default rather than all of my privacy extensions.
I tried turning off everything I could find, in the end I just downloaded Chromium. I really spent like 20 mins trying to troubleshoot this thing, I wish Firefox had one single button for turning...
I tried turning off everything I could find, in the end I just downloaded Chromium.
I really spent like 20 mins trying to troubleshoot this thing, I wish Firefox had one single button for turning off all privacy stuff when you need to, something that would turn it off just for the session and then reset on re-launch.
also, semi-related, I can't log in on LinkedIn and I can't change my password on Facebook because since my tracking is disabled "they can't prove it's me" I'm actually totally locked out of Linkedin since this update, cause I lost access to the email associated with it ages ago and you can't change your email on your account without having access to the one that's already on there.
Huh, usually all I have to do is click the little shield icon next to the address bar and click on the tick next to “enhanced tracking protection” or whatnot. I’m not at a computer to check at the...
Huh, usually all I have to do is click the little shield icon next to the address bar and click on the tick next to “enhanced tracking protection” or whatnot. I’m not at a computer to check at the moment for more clear directions.
Hey, it looks like Firefox got you off of LinkedIn. That’s a benefit! 😜
Maybe, the profile is still there and hackable I just cant access it. Also I have no idea how to find a job without it last time I was job hunting for real was like 2021
Maybe, the profile is still there and hackable I just cant access it. Also I have no idea how to find a job without it last time I was job hunting for real was like 2021
This is such an excellent idea, I’m surprised there isn’t an option for it! There’s already the “private/incognito” mode, but there should be an inverse one where it behaves like a brand new,...
I wish Firefox had one single button for turning off all privacy stuff when you need to, something that would turn it off just for the session and then reset on re-launch
This is such an excellent idea, I’m surprised there isn’t an option for it! There’s already the “private/incognito” mode, but there should be an inverse one where it behaves like a brand new, totally default, out-of-the-box, block nothing mode with maximum compatibility with as many websites as possible, possibly even up to and including pretending the user agent string is a chromium version or something.
The development pace of a nostalgia driven video game is completely incomparable to a browser rendering engine. They're by far the most complicated pieces of software people interact with on a...
The development pace of a nostalgia driven video game is completely incomparable to a browser rendering engine.
They're by far the most complicated pieces of software people interact with on a daily basis, and the fact that http is an open protocol with God knows how many extensions, and the RuneScape protocol is not, means that developers do not get to dictate the speed of development. They have to adapt to externalities completely out of their control. Keeping a web rendering engine up to date is one of the most gargantuan tasks there is in the production of software.
A browser tool is a bit different from a game. no game can ever be "exactly Runescape". But you can have all your needs satisfied in a tool and stop looking. Besides: They don't do that because...
All Firefox needs to do is ask itself why people moved to Chrome (because at the time Firefox had become slow, buggy, plugin hell) fix that, and tell everyone you’ve fixed it.
A browser tool is a bit different from a game. no game can ever be "exactly Runescape". But you can have all your needs satisfied in a tool and stop looking.
Besides:
They don't do that because they are a publicly traded company and catering to existing users is simple a way to slow the decline, not prevent it. Eventually users move on or even die out, so you got to make sure new users are coming in to prevent that natural attrition.
Moats are hard to dig out of. Not many people are necessarily itching to switch browsers, so as long as they are fine with Chrome, they will keep using it. Even if all the reasons they fixed FF are addressed. You can't really do much there outside of making a shiny new feature or waiting for Google to screw up and capitalize on the outrage.
Mozilla isn’t a publicly traded company. Their corporate structure is janky but it’s a private for profit c corp entirely owned by a nonprofit (Mozilla foundation). So for all intents and purposes...
Mozilla isn’t a publicly traded company. Their corporate structure is janky but it’s a private for profit c corp entirely owned by a nonprofit (Mozilla foundation).
So for all intents and purposes it’s a non-profit, in terms of decision making.
While important, public vs private does not change the point that catering to existing users will slow the bleeding, not stop it, and that Mozilla needs to continually (if slowly) gain new users...
While important, public vs private does not change the point that catering to existing users will slow the bleeding, not stop it, and that Mozilla needs to continually (if slowly) gain new users to counter-act natural attrition
If only the design was novel or even good. Hell, their sidebar is still massively under featured after all these years and customizing the UI continues to be incredibly antagonistic of the...
If only the design was novel or even good. Hell, their sidebar is still massively under featured after all these years and customizing the UI continues to be incredibly antagonistic of the community. I maintain a fairly popular sidebar theme (using Sidebery) for tree style tabs, and the amount of hacks, and their constant weird HTML-like XML/CSS UI that is constantly changing is incredibly annoying.
Someone seriously needs to fork Firefox, ditch all UI, all of the internal networking stack, just rely on cURL (like LadyBird) and use gecko for the rendering, nd you could have a shot at doing something interesting - but they (as a company) work so hard to make embedding gecko so incredibly convoluted and impossible to keep market cap, that no wonder no one can iterate on their engine beyond small UI changes every few years that were obviously not thoughtfully designed.
Additionally, it's not the UI design that keeps people from using it - it's the fact that they hide all their best features in never ending menus and they can't seem to focus on one thing and make it understandably good. Container tabs is one of those, it's brilliant! Wonderful! And yet it's usage, understanding, setup, is so horribly complicated that no one who is a lay person would even know what it is.
Their mobile apps (because of the failure to allow easily embedded gecko) are absolutely lacking. The design gets worse every year, they have support for extensions but they don't market that, and they are terrified of bringing anything useful to the mobile web.
Mozilla is the only thing that is holding mozilla back.
Thank you very much for posting that. It put into words how I feel about this dramatically better than I ever could've, and the fact that it's coming from an insider (with fifteen years of...
Thank you very much for posting that. It put into words how I feel about this dramatically better than I ever could've, and the fact that it's coming from an insider (with fifteen years of hindsight!) helps preemptively defuse a lot of arguments that I typically see w.r.t. critique of execs in Mozilla Corporation.
I considered myself a core firefox user for decade/s but they entirely lost me in recent years. I still mainly use forks of firefox though due mainly to manifest v2. It is not as bad as chrome but...
I considered myself a core firefox user for decade/s but they entirely lost me in recent years. I still mainly use forks of firefox though due mainly to manifest v2.
It is not as bad as chrome but it is maybe five years behind it at best. I wish they would focus on making solid browser as a tool instead of chasing after chrome and being perpetually behind.
If it gets them more users I will consider this a good thing simply on the strength of google having less of a monopoly.
Why is it not enough to create a solid software and instead everyone has to throw garbage at the wall regularly to see what sticks? I know why, it was a rhetorical question.
Chrome memory leaking and crashing on my PC was initially why i switched to Firefox. Chromium getting fucked with nuked Manifest v2 support was why I stuck. Is there genuinely a good ad blocking...
Chrome memory leaking and crashing on my PC was initially why i switched to Firefox. Chromium getting fucked with nuked Manifest v2 support was why I stuck.
Is there genuinely a good ad blocking browser in 2026?
FYI, there's this study that shows that adblocker effectiveness didn't have any significant impact since the jump to MV3. The abstract even mentions that in some cases in MV3 the adblockers were...
FYI, there's this study that shows that adblocker effectiveness didn't have any significant impact since the jump to MV3. The abstract even mentions that in some cases in MV3 the adblockers were more effective at blocking trackers.
Speaking from my own experience - sometimes I try out different browsers just because - I do not feel any difference between Firefox (with ublock) VS Vivaldi/Brave, or even between today's Vivaldi/Brave VS themselves 2-3 years ago. I'm sure there are differences, but in my day to day usage I didn't feel any. Youtube ads still get blocked, general ads in websites get blocked, etc.
I believe that there are a few browsers being developed on entirely new engines, but they are (obviously) years away from being comparable to Gecko or Chromium. If you want to avoid Chromium, your best bet would be firefox forks, like Waterfox. Zen browser is becoming popular recently, but there were a few red flags that kept me away (the biggest one being that they left remote debugging on by default, which from my understanding, is basically a back door for the dev)
That study is quoted a lot, but the devil is in the details. For example: Websites that try to prevent adblocking were excluded as were others. Making it a narrower cross section of ad blocking...
That study is quoted a lot, but the devil is in the details. For example:
we evaluated uBlock MV3 and MV2 on a main sample of 1,000 websites across five measurement runs beginning July 12, 2025, and obtained consistent results for 824 websites (i.e., websites with valid data across all five runs; others were excluded due to redirects, anti-automation/ad-blocking, or failed instrumentation).
Websites that try to prevent adblocking were excluded as were others. Making it a narrower cross section of ad blocking than many people realize.
There are also other aspects of uBlock Origin that such a study won't really find. The uBlock Origin wiki for example lists at least WebExtension API call on there that is Firefox only. There is more specific information about MV3 on the homepage: https://ublockorigin.com/
What Was Manifest V3?
Manifest V3 was Google's major update to the Chrome extension platform. The most significant change was replacing the webRequest API with the more limited declarativeNetRequest API. While Google cited security and performance benefits, this change removed capabilities that content blockers like uBlock Origin relied on for effective ad and tracker blocking.
How This Affected uBlock Origin
uBlock Origin used the webRequest API to intercept and block network requests in real-time. The replacement declarativeNetRequest API has hard limits on the number of filter rules (previously 30,000, now 330,000) and lacks the dynamic filtering capabilities that made uBlock Origin so effective. As a result, the full uBlock Origin extension was removed from the Chrome Web Store in late 2024. Chrome permanently disabled all remaining MV2 extensions in July 2025.
If You Use Chrome
uBlock Origin Lite is available for Chrome. This is a separate extension built specifically for Manifest V3, but it has significant limitations:
Cannot use all filter lists simultaneously (rule limits apply)
No cosmetic filtering in the default mode
No scriptlet injection by default
Limited dynamic filtering capabilities
Requires broader host permissions upfront
So yeah, adblocking is still possible in Chrome. But it clearly also has more limits compared to before. Which likely means to in regular usage for an average user there might not be a perceivable difference if all you care about are visible ads and having the majority removed.
As someone who hates chrome and chromium, I wish there were more options. I've been a long time firefox user and it's sad to see them flailing so badly. It's still better than chrome but that's...
As someone who hates chrome and chromium, I wish there were more options.
I've been a long time firefox user and it's sad to see them flailing so badly. It's still better than chrome but that's not saying much.
If anyone has suggestions for any alternatives that aren't chromium based, let me know too.
A +0.5 to Orion from me, was a solid option. I did find it a bit buggy when I used it for a few months but it’s also developed by a small team so I gave it a pass. Being able to use extensions...
A +0.5 to Orion from me, was a solid option. I did find it a bit buggy when I used it for a few months but it’s also developed by a small team so I gave it a pass. Being able to use extensions from any platform is cool though.
This seemed like a pretty solid interview, albeit short. Good questions were asked, and I found Varma's answers to be informed and realistic.
Mozilla has always been in a tough spot. After Chrome's meteoric rise, they've only really managed to hold onto a small and rather fickle userbase. These folks will oppose almost all forms of monetization, and react poorly to any change or experimentation. See the Mr. Robot ARG that Mozilla tried in 2017.
Moz persists mostly because of their search deal with Google, but we all know it could disappear at any time. The DOJ nearly killed that particular golden goose in 2024, and the internet largely cheered as it was seen as a slight against Google. So Mozilla clearly needs to diversify. Unfortunately, previous attempts have all failed. Cliqz didn't work, and people hate sponsored shortcuts. Mozilla VPN is perhaps the closest they've come, but even that has turned off a number of users. This makes it very difficult to grow the company to a size that's able to compete with Google and Apple.
It seems like they do recognize this and understand they need to take some risks. AI is one of those risks, and Varma spoke — a bit defensively, I think — about how it can be used to benefit users. The local translations they already offer are one obvious use case, and speech synthesis is another. He hinted at more advanced capabilities though, such as the browser checking prices or product updates for you. Ironically, the kind of "user agent" that might have been originally envisioned before browsers came to dominate that definition.
It seems like they're trying to balance this by making plenty of privacy assurances, and providing an easily discoverable kill switch. Maybe that'll appease their current users enough while they try to bring in a new audience, but the word AI has become corrosive to some, despite its prevalence in software engineering. I would guess that crowd has a wide overlap with their current users. Not an easy position.
They also have another problem in Manifest V2. Not only is Mozilla maintaining an independent rendering engine — something that even Microsoft decided was too much work — but they are now forced to support two different API levels for browser extensions. That takes a lot of dev time for which they're already spread thin.
For some reason, people only seem to bring up MV3 in regard to ad blocking, but there's a lot more than that. Background pages were completely replaced with service workers, and CSP and RCE were reined in for security reasons. Malicious extensions were a huge attack vector in Chrome, which is why Google began locking them down by limiting the most commonly abused APIs in MV3.
By supporting MV2, Firefox is still vulnerable to these problems. They already went through this once with XUL extensions, and at some point, might have to do it again with MV2. Their current security approach is to restrict extension installs to their store and strictly review everything, but that doesn't scale well and is inherently less open. Even Chrome allows you to install extensions from a local file, whereas Firefox requires a ton of workarounds.
I think now that the MV3 ecosystem has been sufficiently built up, Firefox could likely work towards dropping MV2 while leaving in a few specialized APIs that were only possible under MV2. eg. Encourage
declarativeNetRequest, but allowwebRequestbehind an extra flag or additional review scrutiny. Like the AI issue, they need to find a balance that lets them move forward without upsetting too many of their existing users.I hope they find a way to strike that balance. Mozilla has made missteps, but they continue to spend countless hours building free and open-source software for all of us to use. They offer the strongest defense against a browser monoculture, and frankly receive far too much vitriol online over minor inconveniences.
This one doesn't entirely track for me. Because they also explicitly introduced some new API endpoints themselves. Some of which they must have known will never be implemented in Chromium.
So to be clear, new APIs made specifically for Firefox that have never existed for Chromium.
Meaning they already did decide on supporting APIs in addition to just whatever Chromium is doing. Also with they MV3 implementation they explicitly decided to go down a slightly different implementation as well. For example:
This is not true for Firefox, you can still use background pages with MV3.
This is a half truth as far as I am concerned. Even with these API limitation malicious extensions can still do plenty of harm through a variety of ways. I am sure there are statistics that back up the "most commonly abused" claim, but I'd be curious to see what definition of malicious and what sort of abuse they include.
And to be really frank, the biggest abuse factor always has been the utter lack of proper review processes, even automatic ones, when submitting something to the chrome store. As someone who has extensions on both stores, the amount of shady offerings I had for my chrome store entries is insane. Things like including ad platforms, other shady data miners, etc. These "companies" only do this because they get away with it on the Chrome store.
I do think that Firefox did lock down extension side loading too much. That specifically makes them less open. But having their own extension platform tightly curated should be a default. I am not even talking reviews done by hand. The mozilla addon platform already does a lot of automated checks before you even get to list your extension. It even refuses to continue if specific dependencies (like dom purifier) are outdated. I have never seen anything of the sort when submitting an extension to the Chrome store.
Malicious extensions being so widespread has very little to do with APIs, it has much more to do with Google letting it happen by having zero safeguards on the extension publishing process for years.
Thanks for the counter points. Particularly on Fx still supporting background pages in MV3, which I wasn't aware of.
I think that Google killing RCE was the biggest consequence here, since that was the vector used by so many browser extensions to start silently injecting bad code. It was basically impossible to catch in reviews, so they could only ever be reactive, not proactive.
I do agree that Moz has likely spent more man-hours in code review, which is something that Google is allergic to. They also make efforts to prevent RCE in that process, though it's enforced via policy and not by the browser itself.
Both companies are likely upgrading their automated checks as well by incorporating newer LLM-based tools, which can reason more fully about a codebase. They shouldn't be relied on completely, but as an extra step, could really bolster existing review processes.
Having used Mod Toolbox for roughly a decade, I appreciate that you never accepted any of their offers. Thanks for all the dev time you spent helping out other mods!
I dont think that company growth has to be their main goal. They could be just one browser company if they focus on their product instead of wasting their money for stupid stuff.
Offering a more capable & open MV3 alternative for example, might be important! The disappointment comes from not doing such things (dunno if their main benefactors forbid them)
But, for me, the fact that they maintain the only workable engine apart from google/apple is their raison d'etre.
How do you propose they make enough money to hire good software developers and engineers and maintain enough of a market share to remain relevant?
I don't pretend to know about their income streams or cash flow trivia.
My beef is with them creating useless features vs things people need and chrome does not have (that's how you will get new users I reckon). I still use ffox everywhere, but most people don't.
Things people need don't necessarily pay the bills unfortunately. That's the main thing all these features no one needs is trying to solve.
Chrome doesn't have to make money. Safari doesn't have to make money. Edge doesn't have to make money.
Those products are ways that their manufacturers can enforce their vision of the internet and keep their users locked into their ecosystem so they can make money off of them elsewhere.
Mozilla straight up just doesn't have that option. They're a company that primarily makes a web browser. That's largely their only significant product. They need to figure out a way to actually turn that product into a sustainable income stream, independent of Google. Virtually no one is willing to pay for a web browser, so Mozilla has to get creative.
If Firefox went away, that would be the end of a true competitive 3rd party web rendering engine, which would be bad for everyone. Especially the die hard ideological open source purists who are the first to demonize and nitpick every little thing Mozilla tries to set their company up for sustainability.
The open source hobbyist community cannot solve this problem alone. A project as massive and expansive as a web rendering engine needs talented, committed, full time professional developers, and that requires funding.
I honestly wish that every single company facing this issue of “we were once really big and now we’ve lost most of our customers” would take a good long hard look at what Runescape/Jagex is doing with OldSchool RuneScape.
In multiple interviews they have recognized that they’ve only just begun to tap their previous market and literally all they have to do is cater to the people who already play or have ever played Runescape.
All Firefox needs to do is ask itself why people moved to Chrome (because at the time Firefox had become slow, buggy, plugin hell) fix that, and tell everyone you’ve fixed it. Privacy is a bonus. Chrome has become a slow buggy plugin hell with no privacy, Firefox is already better, just tell people.
Privacy is irrelevant, the overwhelming majority of people straight up don't care. Seriously, it's been decades, at some point tech geeks simply need to put their heads out of the ground and face reality: The overwhelming majority of people never have and never will care about privacy. At all.
The fact that FF continued to bark up the privacy tree as their market share was collapsing, was 100% part of the problem. It's like having a sinking ship with a bunch of holes in it, while the captain is polishing the wooden figurehead because a couple of carpenters on board are really obsessed with it.
I don't think FF can do anything to fix things now. You say chrome is "buggy plugin hell" but that's not the average person's experience at all. The average person doesn't know what a "plugin" is. They open chrome, it works fine (no bugs) and does what they want. They'll stick with it.
IMO FF fell behind due to organizational issues. I was a big fan and wanted to donate a few years back. But when I looked into how, I straight up couldn't. Turns out FF was spun off as its own company and I couldn't donate to it, and they were actually being financed by other corpos (ironically, mostly Google). While the non-profit I could donate to was doing a bunch of unrelated side-projects, including charity stuff for Africa, stuff like that. I ended up not donating, I wanted to support my browser, not solve 3rd world problems. At that point I knew FF was doomed, their interests were misaligned. By their structure, they couldn't be supported by their users and were instead funded by their competitor (Google) and a bunch of other corpos trying to sell you stuff in the browser.
IMO from the very start, FF should have been a non-profit financed through donations. And they should have concentrated spending every cent on improving FF instead of doing side projects.
My read is different. People do not care about digital privacy because they do not understand the harms or implications because a massive spending to pave them over and hide them. That does not mean trying to preserve online privacy is irrelevant.
All the developers I know use Chrome to develop on, and we all can see that it’s a total resource hog. Memory leaks everywhere.
Firefox could market themselves as a lean performance browser instead of adding a ton of useless things most people dont even know how to use like a vpn and that probably would have worked.
Its been a long sad road seeing the only browser alternative suffer and fail, I got into an argument with another dev maybe 10 years ago now because our app didnt work at all on firefox and they refused to fix it because no one uses firefox. Many websites are like this. Its to the point where I had to download Chromium just to use it on some websites where firefox doesnt work.
I just don't use websites that only work on Chromium. And I develop on Firefox too! You know one of us now :)
I find it's mostly government websites, and then occasionally places like Ticketmaster/etc (because it's impossible to get tickets from anywhere other than a reseller)
I would love to just avoid websites that don't support my browser, but Chromium is the only way I can pay my vehicle taxes.
I find it extremely rare to find websites that only work on Chromium based websites. But that's largely a function of the consolidation of ownership of the internet. 😮💨
My county's DMV website, same county's unemployment website, and then I think Ticketmaster, but I had issues with every single concert ticket reseller website that day it could have been any of them.
It tends to be only websites for which I have no choice but to use.
I tend to have issues with ticket websites, but it’s not because of Firefox itself: it’s the anti-tracking, ad-blocking, and/or privacy measures that I have in place. Turning them off almost universally makes them work again. I’d estimate that about 10-20% of the time it’s the fault of the enhanced tracking protections built into Firefox and enabled by default rather than all of my privacy extensions.
I tried turning off everything I could find, in the end I just downloaded Chromium.
I really spent like 20 mins trying to troubleshoot this thing, I wish Firefox had one single button for turning off all privacy stuff when you need to, something that would turn it off just for the session and then reset on re-launch.
also, semi-related, I can't log in on LinkedIn and I can't change my password on Facebook because since my tracking is disabled "they can't prove it's me" I'm actually totally locked out of Linkedin since this update, cause I lost access to the email associated with it ages ago and you can't change your email on your account without having access to the one that's already on there.
/rant
Huh, usually all I have to do is click the little shield icon next to the address bar and click on the tick next to “enhanced tracking protection” or whatnot. I’m not at a computer to check at the moment for more clear directions.
Hey, it looks like Firefox got you off of LinkedIn. That’s a benefit! 😜
Maybe, the profile is still there and hackable I just cant access it. Also I have no idea how to find a job without it last time I was job hunting for real was like 2021
This is such an excellent idea, I’m surprised there isn’t an option for it! There’s already the “private/incognito” mode, but there should be an inverse one where it behaves like a brand new, totally default, out-of-the-box, block nothing mode with maximum compatibility with as many websites as possible, possibly even up to and including pretending the user agent string is a chromium version or something.
The development pace of a nostalgia driven video game is completely incomparable to a browser rendering engine.
They're by far the most complicated pieces of software people interact with on a daily basis, and the fact that http is an open protocol with God knows how many extensions, and the RuneScape protocol is not, means that developers do not get to dictate the speed of development. They have to adapt to externalities completely out of their control. Keeping a web rendering engine up to date is one of the most gargantuan tasks there is in the production of software.
That sounds like excuses
A browser tool is a bit different from a game. no game can ever be "exactly Runescape". But you can have all your needs satisfied in a tool and stop looking.
Besides:
They don't do that because they are a publicly traded company and catering to existing users is simple a way to slow the decline, not prevent it. Eventually users move on or even die out, so you got to make sure new users are coming in to prevent that natural attrition.
Moats are hard to dig out of. Not many people are necessarily itching to switch browsers, so as long as they are fine with Chrome, they will keep using it. Even if all the reasons they fixed FF are addressed. You can't really do much there outside of making a shiny new feature or waiting for Google to screw up and capitalize on the outrage.
Mozilla isn’t a publicly traded company. Their corporate structure is janky but it’s a private for profit c corp entirely owned by a nonprofit (Mozilla foundation).
So for all intents and purposes it’s a non-profit, in terms of decision making.
While important, public vs private does not change the point that catering to existing users will slow the bleeding, not stop it, and that Mozilla needs to continually (if slowly) gain new users to counter-act natural attrition
If only the design was novel or even good. Hell, their sidebar is still massively under featured after all these years and customizing the UI continues to be incredibly antagonistic of the community. I maintain a fairly popular sidebar theme (using Sidebery) for tree style tabs, and the amount of hacks, and their constant weird HTML-like XML/CSS UI that is constantly changing is incredibly annoying.
Someone seriously needs to fork Firefox, ditch all UI, all of the internal networking stack, just rely on cURL (like LadyBird) and use gecko for the rendering, nd you could have a shot at doing something interesting - but they (as a company) work so hard to make embedding gecko so incredibly convoluted and impossible to keep market cap, that no wonder no one can iterate on their engine beyond small UI changes every few years that were obviously not thoughtfully designed.
Additionally, it's not the UI design that keeps people from using it - it's the fact that they hide all their best features in never ending menus and they can't seem to focus on one thing and make it understandably good. Container tabs is one of those, it's brilliant! Wonderful! And yet it's usage, understanding, setup, is so horribly complicated that no one who is a lay person would even know what it is.
Their mobile apps (because of the failure to allow easily embedded gecko) are absolutely lacking. The design gets worse every year, they have support for extensions but they don't market that, and they are terrified of bringing anything useful to the mobile web.
Mozilla is the only thing that is holding mozilla back.
Pretty relevant: Leaving Mozilla.
Thank you very much for posting that. It put into words how I feel about this dramatically better than I ever could've, and the fact that it's coming from an insider (with fifteen years of hindsight!) helps preemptively defuse a lot of arguments that I typically see w.r.t. critique of execs in Mozilla Corporation.
I considered myself a core firefox user for decade/s but they entirely lost me in recent years. I still mainly use forks of firefox though due mainly to manifest v2.
It is not as bad as chrome but it is maybe five years behind it at best. I wish they would focus on making solid browser as a tool instead of chasing after chrome and being perpetually behind.
If it gets them more users I will consider this a good thing simply on the strength of google having less of a monopoly.
Why is it not enough to create a solid software and instead everyone has to throw garbage at the wall regularly to see what sticks? I know why, it was a rhetorical question.
Chrome memory leaking and crashing on my PC was initially why i switched to Firefox. Chromium getting fucked with nuked Manifest v2 support was why I stuck.
Is there genuinely a good ad blocking browser in 2026?
FYI, there's this study that shows that adblocker effectiveness didn't have any significant impact since the jump to MV3. The abstract even mentions that in some cases in MV3 the adblockers were more effective at blocking trackers.
Speaking from my own experience - sometimes I try out different browsers just because - I do not feel any difference between Firefox (with ublock) VS Vivaldi/Brave, or even between today's Vivaldi/Brave VS themselves 2-3 years ago. I'm sure there are differences, but in my day to day usage I didn't feel any. Youtube ads still get blocked, general ads in websites get blocked, etc.
I believe that there are a few browsers being developed on entirely new engines, but they are (obviously) years away from being comparable to Gecko or Chromium. If you want to avoid Chromium, your best bet would be firefox forks, like Waterfox. Zen browser is becoming popular recently, but there were a few red flags that kept me away (the biggest one being that they left remote debugging on by default, which from my understanding, is basically a back door for the dev)
That study is quoted a lot, but the devil is in the details. For example:
Websites that try to prevent adblocking were excluded as were others. Making it a narrower cross section of ad blocking than many people realize.
There are also other aspects of uBlock Origin that such a study won't really find. The uBlock Origin wiki for example lists at least WebExtension API call on there that is Firefox only. There is more specific information about MV3 on the homepage: https://ublockorigin.com/
So yeah, adblocking is still possible in Chrome. But it clearly also has more limits compared to before. Which likely means to in regular usage for an average user there might not be a perceivable difference if all you care about are visible ads and having the majority removed.
As someone who hates chrome and chromium, I wish there were more options.
I've been a long time firefox user and it's sad to see them flailing so badly. It's still better than chrome but that's not saying much.
If anyone has suggestions for any alternatives that aren't chromium based, let me know too.
A +0.5 to Orion from me, was a solid option. I did find it a bit buggy when I used it for a few months but it’s also developed by a small team so I gave it a pass. Being able to use extensions from any platform is cool though.