New Mozilla CEO
Anthony Enzor-Demeo (Hacker News):
Today, I step into the role of CEO of Mozilla Corporation. It is a privilege to lead an organization with a long history of standing up for people and building technology that puts them first.
[…]
- First: Every product we build must give people agency in how it works. Privacy, data use, and AI must be clear and understandable. Controls must be simple. AI should always be a choice — something people can easily turn off. People should know why a feature works the way it does and what value they get from it.
- Second: our business model must align with trust. We will grow through transparent monetization that people recognize and value.
- Third: Firefox will grow from a browser into a broader ecosystem of trusted software. Firefox will remain our anchor. It will evolve into a modern AI browser and support a portfolio of new and trusted software additions.
Mozilla is not going to train its own giant LLM anytime soon. But there’s still an AI Mode coming to Firefox next year, which Enzor-DeMeo says will offer users their choice of model and product, all in a browser they can understand and from a company they can trust. “We’re not incentivized to push one model or the other,” he says. “So we’re going to try to go to market with multiple models.” Some will be open-source models available to anyone. Others will be private, “Mozilla-hosted cloud options,” he says. And, yes, some will be from the big companies in the space — Enzor-DeMeo didn’t name Gemini, Claude, or ChatGPT, but it’s not hard to guess.
Enzor-DeMeo has been at Mozilla for almost exactly a year. Until now, he’s been leading the team building Mozilla’s Firefox browser, which, in so many ways, is the thing that makes Mozilla go.
[…]
At some point, though, Enzor-DeMeo will have to tend to Mozilla’s own business. “I do think we need revenue diversification away from Google,” he says, “but I don’t necessarily believe we need revenue diversification away from the browser.” It seems he thinks a combination of subscription revenue, advertising, and maybe a few search and AI placement deals can get that done. He’s also bullish that things like built-in VPN and a privacy service called Monitor can get more people to pay for their browser. 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.
The renewed focus on Firefox within Mozilla Corporation, Surman said, has internal and external explanations. “Internally, I think we haven’t had the leadership for the last few years to really drive us technically on what’s possible with the tech stack we have,” he said. ”The external reason is really that the market for browsers and the space for innovation over browsers is really in motion again. And people have written browsers off as a commodity. Other people are innovating, and it creates a really good context for us to do the same again and to reinvest there.”
Mozilla has a new CEO who:
- Has been at Mozilla for less than a year
- Has no prior open source experience (but well in “fintech” and “real estate”)
- Has a MBA (aka “brainworm diploma”)
- Is all-in on AI
That’s exactly the kind of bingo profile the whole community has been waiting for.
Previously:
- AI in Microsoft Edge
- ChatGPT Atlas
- AI in Chrome, Neon, and Dia
- Shutting Down Pocket
- Mozilla Also Defends Google Revenue Sharing Agreement
- Mozilla Changes Firefox Terms of Use
- The State of Mozilla
- Firefox at 20
7 Comments RSS · Twitter · Mastodon
I have 0 hope the Mozilla Foundation will ever stop being retarded. They're a one product org (Firefox) but expend resources on everything else.
To disable AI in Firefox, open "about:config" and set these to "false":
browser.ml.chat.enabled
browser.ml.chat.menu
browser.ml.chat.page
browser.ml.chat.page.footerBadge
browser.ml.chat.page.menuBadge
browser.ml.enable
browser.ml.linkPreview.enabled
browser.tabs.groups.smart.enabled
browser.tabs.groups.smart.userEnabled
extensions.ml.enabled
sidebar.notification.badge.aichat
Searching for "ml." reveals more settings, but these seem to be the critical ones.
First…ok good that sounds good…Second…alright good keep going…Third…uh oh.
I suppose it couldn’t get any worse than it has been…can it?
I feel like Vivaldi has Firefox’s previous market covered since they have consistently been droppint the ball the last decade or so. I’m not even sure there’s room for a third browser engine anymore.
Mozilla has been an absolutely atrocious steward of Firefox, and this continues that trend. It would have been better for Firefox if the government had forced Google to turn off the money spigot.
@Bart — Vivaldi is definitely doing a decent job of providing things users want, and actually give a damn about being good stewards of the internet. I've been using their browser for several years now, and even though they're using Chromium under the hood it's the only browser I can stomach nowadays.
Safari is… okay, but I'm under no illusion that it's Apple's app, not mine.
Orion is interesting but seems to fall between two stools by using WebKit (and Safari's controls) under the hood but being able to use Firefox or Chrome extensions as well — in my usage, it wasn't really any of them and I kept running into situations where things didn't quite work as expected. That's a shame, because I like what Kagi are trying to do with it, but it's definitely a v1.0 product right now.
I *really* want Firefox to survive, but I've lost all hope of that happening under Mozilla's 'management'. 🙁
Do any of the third party Chromium browsers like Vivaldi work around Google intentionally crippling its extension API used by ad blockers?
I'm using a Firefox-derivative browser right now, and the main reason is that I don't want to browse the web without the full version of uBlock Origin, which I understand no longer works in Chrome and any Chrome-derived browser that's been forced to drop support for Manifest v2 extensions.
I do worry what will happen to the web if and when Mozilla enshittifies Firefox to the point that it's not viable any longer. We're moving back into a situation like with Internet Explorer in the 2000s where there was basically one browser engine that one malevolent tech company controlled.
"Do any of the third party Chromium browsers like Vivaldi work around Google intentionally crippling its extension API used by ad blockers?"
As far as I understand, Chromium-based browsers can't continue supporting Manifest V2. Opera, Vivaldi, and Edge have all moved to V3. Brave might still support V2, but it is only committing to keeping a few specific V2 extensions running.
The best option right now is Firefox-based browsers like Zen or Waterfox.
Yes, Orion is both strong evidence that WebKit browsers don't have to suck, and that they're fundamentally feature-limited compared to Chromium browsers, which actually work, because everyone supports Chrome and *grits teeth* look, actually Chromium is a great engine, which is entirely unlike the case with Microsoft's IE6.
And Mozilla are sending Firefox to the grave far more effectively than any of its died-in-the-wool advocates. It is a terrible, terrible shame. On Windows, it's the only real refuge. There are no other modern-day, functional rendering engines, that are mature enough to be useful. We will just have to find a good fork once Firefox becomes enshittified to the point it's unusable by default and changing it requires no fewer than a thousand subtly different, but similarly named, config flags.
I pray that Stalwart Mail and Thunderbird remain relatively unmolested. Both are genuine success stories thanks in no small part to Mozilla funding.
