Mozilla Corporation is toast (?)

Caveat

I’m a nobody having an uneducated opinion on matters exceeding by far the reach of my comprehension skills. Because we’re on the Internet (c), I’m therefore more than fully qualified to express it!

So what’s happening?

The Mozilla Corporation has just hired a new CEO who immediately expressed his vision for a bold and bright future where Firefox development effort will be refocused on building a AI platform supporting an ecosystem of AI products.

Of course, Firefox marketshare has dwindled in recent years, and its remaining users are a militant group of free software afficionados, privacy activists, and worse of all, Linux users. Let’s just say this “new direction” is not warmly received. And it’s also quite uninnovative and lazy: that’s just what everyone and their dog are doing. How to gain back marketshare be being an also ran? And why the hell does marketshare matter so much?

Even believing that Generative AI is indeed unavoidable (or let’s be crazy: that it can be a useful new tool when implemented responsibly), and if privacy and trust were indeed core values of Mozilla Corporation, then they should clearly take that direction in their engineering: research and build small models that can be run on-device, integrate them into local agents executing inside the browser sandbox to perform specialized tasks in an efficient manner, and all in a private way by construction. But of course, that’s not what is announced. Instead we are served a mumbo-jumbo of corporate speak about trust and choice.

It’s about Google (of course)

Fundamentally, there is a strong disconnect between Mozilla Corporation users and customers (the ones actually paying the bills), or should I say customer (singular): Google.

85% of Mozilla Corporation revenue comes from their Google Search partnership, which for Google acts as an insurance against antitrust procedures. Eventually, by ballbootlicking enough the current US administration, this threat for Google will definitely go away, and Mozilla Corporation will soon lose their sole income source. So they must do something to ensure their survival.

It’s also the explanation behind all past failed attempts at deversifying revenues: Firefox OS or Pocket to name a few. And they all failed because of a fundamental misalignment of the interests of users and customers (which are the OEM integrating Firefox OS in their TV or their phones). The Google Search deal is the exception, because everyone needs a search engine, and Google is the obvious/default choice.

So the plan is simple in the current AI-fueled economy, replace Google Search revenue with ChatGPT/Perplexity/Gemini revenue, by giving them a direct access to the data they crave and can’t access today with their crawling bots: everything that happens behind a login box. Local model execution is out of the picture.

And of course, this plan is bound to fail for the same fundamental reason.

OK, what to do now?

The Fediverse is now chokeful of strongly worded vows to uninstall Firefox immediately and burn any device having remotely touched some Mozilla software at the stake, along with passionate calls to switch to LibreWolf, Waterfox, Seamonkey, Zen or Floorp (and I’m probably forgotting a dozen more).

Except that even with the best intentions of the world, those light Firefox forks only add a couple of privacy-related patches on top of upstream Firefox, and most of the time by removing code. There are no organizations behind with sufficient funding and manpower to do the heavy-lifting: the actual maintenance (let alone evolution) of such a complex piece of software as a browser engine. If the Mozilla Corporation folds, all those forks immediately become useless. So long for “punishing” them … and don’t get me started with Vivaldi or any other Chromium/Blink based browsers.

There is also a belief that browsers are a solved problem and maintaining Firefox should be cheap and can be done in best-effort mode by a self-organizing volunteer community. Threat actors and vulnerability classes are constantly evolving. Client devices/platforms as well, and it’s already hard today to keep up with current level of funding: Firefox has only got actually working fractional scaling on Wayland in 146 release which took literally years of bug fixing efforts to get there, and it’s still based on GTK3. And because Google (with Blink) completely controls web standard evolutions, staying relevant means spending precious resources to follow their shenanigans without any way to actually influence them.

I remember reading somewhere that a ballpark cost estimate of Firefox software development is around 100M$ / year, so the real question is: how to (collectively) foot that bill? Through donations to the Mozilla Foundation? A transfer of Firefox to the Linux Foundation or Apache?

Update 18/12/2025: It appears donations to Mozilla Foundation never get invested into funding Firefox development, but nowadays seems centered around building voice & text datasets to train LLM (but no open source locally executable models though?), community building, and lobbying. I stand corrected, thank you @bohwaz@mamot.fr!