Addressing the usual few complaints folks always bring up:
* This is from the separate independent team that works on Thunderbird, not Firefox, so there isn't any resource contention happening there
* Thunderbird is revenue positive, and this potentially gives that team another revenue stream to be even more self-sustaining through charging companies
* Businesses definitely want to control the AI they're using (especially with RAGs of their own data) instead of just throwing it at their LLM vendor and hoping for the best
People on HN are fond of asserting that their own POV is the only one. Imagine that there is such a thing as a person in charge of choosing technologies for organizations, and that you're such a person. That's who this is for.
1. Potential donors get upset that they can't make directed donations to specifically support Firefox or Thunderbird rather than the whole kit-and-kaboodle
2. Separate entity spun up to focus on Thunderbird only. Now you can support Thunderbird development directly.
3. New separate entity is now in the business of extensible AI clients?
EDIT: I went back and read the launch announcement [1]. I'll concede it does say "will also allow us to explore offering our users products and services that were not possible under the Mozilla Foundation" which could mean anything, really. And this development was funded by a Mozilla grant, importantly not by Thunderbird donors. I'm still struggling to not see this as a distraction from the core mission. I wish they'd spun up a new entity instead.
It's a crazy crowded space. Any entry into this field looks like a "me too" product driven by FOMO instead of being motivated by (a) serving customer needs, (b) serving social needs, or (c) making money. (All of which are fine with me) It will get 0.5% market share -- and I'm supposed to get excited?
If you lived in New York City you might think there are Duane Reades coast-to-coast but there are not. If you are based in the Bay Area you see billboards that are very different from anywhere else. I'd say the viewpoint is a lot like this famous artwork
but maybe instead of the rest of the US being 1/5 of the vertical space it is 1/25 of the vertical space. Problem is most customers do not live in the bay area and most web browser users do not live in the bay area and most web developers do not live in the bay area. Based in the Bay Area they can hop in their cars and drive the longest 40 miles in America to get to Google and Facebook's headquarters so Mozilla is talking to those people all the time and not talking to the rest of us.
We don't get costly signalling to show they care about the rest of us, we don't even get cheap talk.
They probably think René Girard is deep because they are surrounded by people who think René Girard is deep. If Mozilla wants to be relevant and not just an also-ran it needs to "think different" like the other 99.9% -- it's not that hard if you change your location.
Really the EU needs to apologize for those damned cookie popups and invest in a privacy-first browser. Whether that is "fully fund Firefox" or "fully a fund a Firefox fork" or pick up another browser engine or start a new one.
I see the warning lights flashing: a few years back web sites that didn't work with Firefox were few and far between, this weekend I bought tickets for a comic book convention and they took my money but didn't give me a ticket because the site didn't work with Firefox. I use Firefox as my daily driver so all the projects that I work on work with Firefox; the rest of my team doesn't give a damn and if you lose me another site will become Chrome-only.
> Really the EU needs to apologize for those damned cookie popups and invest in a privacy-first browser.
I love them. They are not mandatory, only shady websites that rather sell users information than providing a barely functional homepage. Yes the popups suck, but I'm very happy that this exposes the behavior and priorities of the industry.
It is insane to see very ordinary web sites that have 100 trackers but part of that is that the advertising economy gives everyone the incentive to screw each other with the backdrop that of course the metrics do not match across the funnel because people fall out as you go down the funnel —- but if you have 100 trackers they can’t all be lying in a coordinated way.
> the EU needs to apologize for those damned cookie popups
The EU didn’t make these mandatory. They’re a form of malicious compliance, executed so that the common perception is that these laws are there to get in the way of regular folks.
Most websites shouldn’t require cookie pop-up. They do because they’re spying on you in some way and need to notify you of that.
> Really the EU needs to apologize for those damned cookie popups and invest in a privacy-first browser.
You clearly misunderstand when they are required and how they are legally required to work, the key points (as I take them) that are often misunderstood are:
* They are not about cookies, but any persistent identifier
* If a identifier is needed for your core functionality (ads/tracking is not a core functionality) and not misused for other purposes you do not need consent
* It is required to be as easy to decline as it is to consent
* Not consenting is not allowed to degrade or gate the content
* Even if you consent to tracking/cookies you should be allowed to withdraw that consent
Frankly I feel having to clear modal dialogs is like getting a lobotomy. I don’t ever want to see one. I don’t want to ever be asked “click on the traffic lights”. I don’t want to have to clear 1, 2, 3 or 4 more modals asking for my email address on a blog.
I want “respect DNT or go to jail”
GDPR normalized enshittification, turned it from something that was unambiguously evil to something that was required, virtuous even.
I could care less personally if you track me or not but if you pop up a meaningless distraction in my face there is no limit on how much I want to hurt you and blowing our your kpis and wrecking your analytics by disabling your tracking it is the least I can do. We need to resist the Google Economy that wants to divert 99% of your attention to worthless trash.
It also made people realize that they are tracked like crazy (there are regularly memes about this for example) - before people reacted to this fact like you were sharing a conspiracy theory.
> Businesses definitely want to control the AI they're using (especially with RAGs of their own data) instead of just throwing it at their LLM vendor and hoping for the best
Yes, agreed on that. I'm not sure I'm clear how this really helps that; I suppose it's a frontend that they don't have, but there are a bunch of those already.
It doesn't seem to help them control the _actual_ AI, i.e. the model, which still has to come from somewhere.
> Imagine that there is such a thing as a person in charge of choosing technologies for organizations, and that you're such a person. That's who this is for.
The "Announcing Thunderbolt" page actually makes this clear, the submitted URL does not. Maybe the submission should be changed to this URL instead:
I see no reason this product should exist even under the Thunderbird umbrella, especially if ANY resources under ANY Mozilla org were employed in this. This product is a distraction from their core mission in either case.
> Thunderbolt is funded through a dedicated investment from Mozilla and is being developed by a separate team focused on enterprise AI products, distinct from Thunderbird’s donation-supported consumer product work.
it is a patreon style thing, they are donation funded. I think the poster is saying that they arent being frivolous with their money like some people have a bad taste about firefox
And they're taking money donated towards Thunderbird development and spending it on random unrelated AI slop ideas that nobody asked for. You really don't see anything wrong with that?
Surely you can agree that when you open Thunderbird and are met with requests for donations, if you chose to donate, you'd expect that money to be invested in Thunderbird development, and not 10M Claude tokens to vibe code Mozilla's latest groundbreaking AI B2B SaaS idea?
It's certainly a feel good idea but the math doesn't math. Even a best case scenario donation drive would never be able to compete with search licensing revenue.
Right now if you want to look at the best case scenario, it's probably wikipedia. Wikipedia is the biggest online donation drive that exists and they get 18% of the revenue that Mozilla gets from search licensing on approximately 4,400% more global traffic. And it's a mature campaign that's been an annual tradition for decades.
I'd rather have the donation option than not have it but it has to be understood primarily as something that's just there to make users feel good. The reason they're structured the way they are is to access the search licensing revenue that gets them income they would never be able to get from just donation drives.
I agree that switching over to an exclusively grassroots sponsorship level would be impossible.
But there may be hybrid options available.
Purely conjecture. Does the Google money come with some kind of funding non-compete? If not, why not open up other funding streams. If it does, that's worrying.
The argument has always been "the org structure doesn't support donations" but the org structure is just a proxy for the intentions of the org.
Hmm, I thought the for-profit Thunderbird pro hadn't launched yet?
I know Thunderbird is for profit, but what are they profitting from without the paid service, and how much of that profit is going into this unrelated Thunderbolt AI platform, exactly?
Thunderbird currently runs entirely on donations, even though they have paid products in the pipeline.
I think a piece of software running on donations is not running off "charity". It's just a business model to not charge every user. Similar to how Twitch streamers operate, or my local theater group.
Thanks, that's helpful. This says about ~70% of the money was paid to employees, ~10% infra costs, the other ~20% various other fees and smaller expenses.
It would be interesting to have a breakdown of what part of the Thunderbird team is working on Thunderbird, Thunderbolt, or other forms of thunder.
Thunderbird (the email client) was spun off from Mozilla Corporation into a new for-profit company called MZLA Technologies. Both corps are still subsidiaries of the Mozilla Foundation. Thunderbolt is a new product from the MZLA Technologies team.
> spun off from Mozilla Corporation into a new for-profit company called MZLA Technologies. Both corps are still subsidiaries of the Mozilla Foundation
I am a happy Thunderbird user. But when I see such reorganizing and deliberately confusing naming, I assume that there is somewhere intent to deceive.
The Get Started button links to a contact form. That's unexpected.
I looked for the source code repository and thanks to somebody here that hinted at it as a Thunderbird project, I found [1]. That's a better Get Started page.
What's with the odd name? Apple already has a 15 year-old product called Thunderbolt. Mozilla already has a similarly-named but totally-different product called Thunderbird.
Not sure about the US but in France there’s absolutely no way this would be confused with Apple Thunderbolt. No one talks about it, and I don’t even know it it’s even a thing anymore since USB-C.
As for Thunderbird, it’s not the same name? Idk what to say
My first thought was "why would Mozilla support a proposal to expose Thunderbolt to the Web after rejecting similar proposals for USB and Bluetooth?"
So yeah, especially in light of the lightning bolt logo and "thunderbolt.io" domain name, I think it's confusing enough that I'm honestly surprised there's no "Thunderbolt is a registered trademark of Intel Corporation used under license" notice on the site.
Wow HN really does have a problem with commenting on anything to do with Mozilla.
Anyway, awesome to see this from the team inside Mozilla — hope this can become a new revenue stream over the long term.
Really excited to see some tight integration with Firefox and Thunderbird in the future.
People are going to hate this, but if someday Mozilla expands to being a productivity suite I’d be pretty happy to give them my money. ProtonMail is doing it and I trust them as well.
Mozilla has shown again and again that they care more about their politics than they do about what their customers want.
They resently released an updated Mascot that is "non-binary and goes by they/them". They'd rather just keep shoving their politics down their customers throats than actually provide them what they want.
I immediately thought "oh, the email client? It's AI now?" Then I realized this is Thunderbolt, not Thunderbird. Kind of an odd choice by Mozilla to have two products with such similar names.
It seems like all the model inference is external APIs? So why is the marketing claiming "Self-host on your infrastructure or let us help you deploy. Your data never leaves your control."
For anyone reading this that has worked on the launch of this new product (or the many others of their ilk throughout the years) under the various Mozilla orgs, I mean no disrespect, however I feel it's important to not mince words these days..
I implore ANYONE at Mozilla org to please, please stop working on projects distracting from the complex and necessary work of browser and web standards stewardship. That alone should be the very reason for your continued existence if you have any. Focus on anything outside that purview will lead to the furthering of the, already painful and readily apparent, stagnation of your browser and our standards bodies as entities distinct from corporations.
Ditching any direct financial ties to Google or any other browser vendor is both important and necessary at this point, as this clearly represents a conflict of interest in your overall mission.
The web as a platform should belong to us all, not just the few corporate leaders of the day. I've watched in real time, saddened by the persistent errosion of our commons that is the web. I see it becoming nothing more than a corporate playground should trends continue, if it's not already too late. There may have been a time when your mission took precident over product launches of seemingly unrelated domains, but that is not what Ii observing today.
I think I speak for many in the community in these regards (please correct me if not the case.)
> ... please stop working on projects distracting from the complex and necessary work of browser and web standards stewardship.
> Ditching any direct financial ties to Google or any other browser vendor is both important and necessary...
are inherently contradictory. If you do not want Mozilla to have revenue from search vendors that also have browsers, it has to come from somewhere else. Or are you suggesting they switch the default search engine back to Yahoo [0]?
I am not trying to defend the projects they have chosen to work on, but you have to understand that reducing dependence on Google is exactly why they are working on them [1].
[0] Even when they did that, it was for the US only, and Google was still the default for most of the world.
[1] Although in this case, this appears to come from the Thunderbird organization, so unrelated to the browser. Money is fungible, though.
Right. Firefox stands alone as the most successful self financed full stack browser that's ever been made without being subsidized by outside revenue streams. I like to use the example of Opera. If "make a better browser" won market share and business creativity won stable revenue, we'd all be using Opera right now because (sorry Mozilla), no browser company was ever better than Opera in my opinion.
In 2026 the rules to making a good browser are (1) already be a trillion dollar company, (2) use Chromium, (3) have some form of distribution lock-in over billions of devices. Otherwise you're cooked. Mozilla swims against the stream better than anyone.
There's a strong desire to keep the web an open platform, if the alternative to WebKit isn't going to be Firefox, it'll simply have to be something else. I'd gladly contribute to the cause, beit ladybird or something else. For now it would be monetarily until my impending retirement when I can contribute hours without impacting my family.
I wouldn't discount ladybird or others simply because they haven't shipped their mvp just yet. They're closing in on a usable product. Maybe they never make it, but servo and others may. Saying they'll be dead in a few years isn't contributing much besides pessimism for anything but the status quo.
The EU says it cares about privacy. although it's actions have normalized enshittification; the EU could fully fund Firefox or a Firefox fork or another browser in a second and stop all the trackers right in their tracks.
Besides, the one thing Mozilla could do to be relevant to 99.9% of web users is to move somewhere other San Francisco and turn their office their into a homeless shelter. They should go to Dublin or Frankfurt or Barcelona, anywhere.
I'd argue these are not _contradictory_, just incentivized financially to continue since that's how they've operated. What i'm suggesting is a change. There's plenty of counter examples where diverse funding models for community projects can work without taking vast sums from a single, direct competitor. Linux is one. Imagine if MSFT was the sole contributor to Linux and how that would have shaped its development. In recent years MSFT may infact directly contribute developers and funding to linux, but they have a vested interest in doing so, as they run more Linux VMs in Azure than Windows VMs these days...
Because Windows doesn't go open-source and others can't build their OS from windows like chromium. With OS, there are no open source kernels that are actively maintained and security-fix bump every month by full time staff of giant corporation. With browsers, devs already have an open source engine with most of the work and build are from full-time staff of a giant corporation, and then they just lazily build "their own" browsers upon that and brag on social media.
Build your own browser engine and see how you can pay the devs to make them work on it.
I'm not sure the counter argument you're making tbh.
The license or patch cycles of either project is irrelevant in this example. The money changing hands between the original product and it's competitor is the issue at stake here.
I'll spell it out in Mozilla's case:
If money is provided by a direct competitor, and that same money is _critical to the continued existence of the original project_ as it is in Mozilla's case, that project and it's staff now have a vested interest in avoiding _anything_ that could endanger that flow, as it now poses a very real existential risk. This is the game they play and the conflict of interest I'm merely pointing out.
Google gets to keep slowly eating the entire browser pie. Should regulators come calling, they can even point at Firefox and say "see, we're not monopolizing this space! there's Firefox over there" To me it appears as a sick form of puppetry.
The Linux Foundation has many, diverse corporate donors, and Linux enables software like ChromeOS, yes. These are all true, but doesn't change the argument that it's a bad call to take the vast majority of your income from a single, direct competitor.
I truly don't grok the point you're trying to make, but that's likely a me problem. Your points appear to all be asides to the core issue at hand.
It is very cool! I'd go as far to say it's a great browser in fact. I simply want it to exist and be such in perpetuity and lead by example like it has in the past. I see it as a follower instead of a leader these days, largely to Google, but also Safari and to some degree Edge (by simply stealing the blink renderer)
The Mozilla org continues to produce a very capable browser, but it's now 3rd or fourth fiddle on a stage their misteps helped orchestrate in their demotion.
What are the other competing browsers? There's chrome(and the derivatives), safari, firefox? safari exists only because of ios lockin. Aren't most other browsers an increasingly smaller share? Genuine question.
It's a problem. I use Firefox as my daily driver -- it used to be I ran into incompatible sites once a month or less except for YouTube which intermittently punishes users for browsing with Firefox. Now I have a serious problem every week like an online vendor or bank or something that doesn't work with Firefox.
Firefox is a little slow for an internal application we have that loads 40,000 rows of data into a grid but otherwise all our stuff works with it because I develop Firefox first and I think a few of us are all that really stands between Firefox and oblivion and probably are doing more work than a lot of the people they have on the payroll.
If you have specific sites that aren't working, please let us know and we can investigate and try to fix them.
The usual reporting channels are using https://webcompat.com or the "Report Broken Site" tool in the Firefox menu. Of course I"m also happy to take bug reports here if you (or anyone else) have them.
One difference I've seen with FF vs Chrome is when finding the events to bind to each element. In FF, the event tag on the element is clickable and gives you the name and the line number in the JS file. It makes finding the code very easy. I have not seen that in Chrome. I rarely use Chrome, so this one thing leads me to saying FF's DevTools are better, at least for me and how I use them.
In contrast, the Multi-Account Containers system is the primary reason I avoid Firefox.
While it is meant to be an alternative to Chrome's profile switching, it is more a workaround than a complete replacement. I need entirely different sets of extensions for personal, work, and school environments, something containers can't do.
Firefox's actual profile support is beyond terrible. To launch a separate instance, Firefox requires many more clicks than Chrome, all within a Windows-2000-style UI. Not to mention that there are weird glitches in their implementation.
Firefox is not usable for me until they actually spend time improving their multiple profile support.
Myself the profile support is the absolute worst thing about Chrome. I just want to log into some web site, I don't want to fight with the profiles to get things done.
For those few applications where I really would need profiles I will just open a different browser, so I still keep Edge/Chrome/Opera around for that rare situation. I don't need something that complicates my life every single click but it is the whole ideology of the Google Economy that they want you to spend 1% of attention on things that matter to you and 99% on things that don't.
1. The inability to set a specific page for new tabs to open on. That is ridiculous.
2. The mobile version sucks, specifically because bookmarks are buried under an absurd number of menu levels. And they're also broken up (without user approval or any way to stop it) into "mobile" and "desktop" bookmarks. WHY? The entire point of syncing is to have them all the same.
I want to like Firefox. I went back to Firefox for the first time in decades last year and gave it up after a couple months because #2 was that annoying. So brain-dead.
Oh yeah, and another one was that "never remember history" does, in fact, remember history. What Firefox really does is "stop adding to history." And the bug report on it resulted in several YEARS of debate over how to "fix" it. The latest I saw is that they're actually NOT going to fix it, but rather add more text (somewhere) to say basically, "This doesn't do what you think it's going to do."
If fixing a defect like that requires years of committee back-and-forth, the product is finished.
> The inability to set a specific page for new tabs to open on. That is ridiculous.
I've been using the "New Tab Override" extension for almost a decade at this point. Sure, it would probably make sense to have as a baseline feature, but I installed it so long ago and it's continued working the whole time that it's not really something I think about anymore.
> already painful and readily apparent, stagnation of your browser
What's wrong with Firefox? There are several things Firefox does that it's annoying to live without in other browsers (video pop-outs, competent ad blocking, etc). Is there some core feature that's missing? I'm subjected to Edge at work and I couldn't tell you a single thing it does that I'd want FF to do.
> and our standards bodies as entities distinct from corporations
Web usb and serial are not just missing, last I checked Mozilla is opting to not implement based on their moral stance. It just puts them behind for some stuff.
It is so frustrating how every thread about Mozilla has people getting upset about contradictory things.
Half the thread impunes Mozilla for taking so much money from Google and imply that they are controlled opposition, and the other half gets upset when Mozilla doesn't implement every standard that Google tries to steamroll through the standards bodies because of objections to how they can be used for fingerprinting, or complains that the attempts at anti-fingerprinting break websites, etc.
Sometimes it's not even different people, it's the same people punching them for contradictory reasons.
Mozilla is not perfect but they get all the downsides of being methodical and privacy focused alongside none of the benefits. Everybody hates the "side projects" unless it's Rust, Servo, LetsEncrypt, Thunderbird, contributions to Opus/AVI, etc. and you can be sure they'll be criticized if they "focus" by touching investment in any of those by the same people.
> Half the thread impunes Mozilla for taking so much money from Google and imply that they are controlled opposition, and the other half gets upset when Mozilla doesn't implement every standard that Google tries to steamroll through the standards bodies because of objections to how they can be used for fingerprinting, or complains that the attempts at anti-fingerprinting break websites, etc.
> Half the thread impunes Mozilla for taking so much money from Google and imply that they are controlled opposition, and the other half gets upset when Mozilla doesn't implement every standard that Google tries to steamroll through the standards bodies because of objections to how they can be used for fingerprinting, or complains that the attempts at anti-fingerprinting break websites, etc.
Yeah, double standards at its max. Firefox inputs every privacy concerns for these APIs that Google puts 0 Vietnam Dong to care about users' privacy. And those people cry about why Firefox doesn't implement it.
Okay, I'll give you that. Granted, I've used webUSB exactly twice, once with a Flipper zero and once with a mechanical keyboard. If that's the worst of it, the parent comment calling it "painful and immediately apparent" seems a bit dramatic to me.
Essentially all of Firefox' incompatibilities with a website reduce to Firefox not allowing the users to be tracked or fingerprinted by default. Webapps that rely on fingerprinting as a replacement for device tokens will likely not work. Because fingerprinting is bad and I don't want it to work. The people your bank pays to implement that are the same companies used for cross site tracking. It only works because tracking works. ReCaptcha can break for similar reasons, but there are better options for captcha and the need for captcha itself is possible to eliminate with various strategies depending on what it is being used to mitigate.
There's a lot of good use-cases of Web usb, you can't just cut everything which might have privacy aspects otherwise the browsers wouldn't have canvas or even gpu rendering.
What are those use cases? It seems like a giant hole punched all the way from a tab's sandbox through the process boundary and out to the kernel... Yes, gpu rendering is a great example of the same problem. Canvas at least has some intervening layers depending on implementation.
Almost all of the gui software for programming keyboards with QMK uses webusb or webhid, so you either have to use a chromium based browser or an electron app that is basically just a wrapper for chromium.
Yeah, it's a shame Qt/C++ doesn't have any way of interacting with USB devices and there's no libraries for that, otherwise there could be a native GUI app for QMK. Or failing that, because Qt is simply too difficult for programmers to figure out, maybe some day there will be a way to deal with USB devices from Java, then at least we could have an AWT app (or I guess Swing is the new hotness now?).
pianu.com used to be a website where you could learn piano by connecting your piano through usb with the browser. It seems defunct now but I found a video demonstrating it : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTBmRV02NgI
I used something similar in the past. It was a legitimate use case for web usb which changed my mind on it quite a bit.
https://www.charachorder.com/ sells ergo keyboards and allows you to update their firmware directly in the website, through web usb. No local apps at all. Also an improvement in overall security from having to download some .exe / .dmg and running it locally.
Yes there are things that Firefox does better than others, and that is one reason I use Firefox. But there are definitely things I would like to see improved, like:
- PWA support on Linux
- better performance
- devtools should be able to handle sites with large amounts of js with sourcemaps
- fix a number of bugs that have been open for a long time
- don't lag behind standards as much (I'm not talking about things where they intentionally don't implement problematic "standards" pushed by google)
- make it feasible to embed gecko in other projects similar to how chromium is used by electron and webkit is used in "webviews"
HN is a good website. Ebay is another good example where JavaScript is optional but with good functionality. Marko was mocked, but now Astro is cool because they invented ssr...
I'm building a fairly complicated browser extension [0].
Debugging the extension on Chrome, it works great. On Firefox, it is nearly impossible. There are a litany of compatibility issues that make it "different" than Chrome, despite the extension being very much standards based. It is really frustrating and makes me dread getting bug reports.
To be fair, Safari is even worse and I haven't even touched Edge yet.
As much as I'd love to have options in the marketplace, standards based compatibility between offerings should be a top line requirement.
The standards used to be there. Chrome decided they made ad blocking too easy and unilaterally changed the standard. Firefox is still on the standard. Chrome is what deviated, and while performance was improved, that was definitely not the motive.
LMFAO. Brave uses uBO's lists and filters, including trusted filters which have much more capabilities with much more risks to your sites' data and they allow that on all other lists too (even uBO only allows their own lists as trusted by default, other lists need to have permissions from users manually). That's how they can block youtube ads, and no they don't code their own filters for youtube ads either. And be assure that they can't check 100% all commits from uBO and other lists either.
If you want to play "no trust to a 3rd party dev", you should not use Brave's adblocker either. Or at least turn off all the lists inside it, and use your own lists. Your security risk is in those stock lists.
Some folks have already discussed this in sister comments to the one you're responding to, but it's a common enough hn discussion topic that searching will answer beyond that (better than I can regurgitate here.)
It seems like every thread talking about Firefox always has someone asking that question, so if you search back you should find plenty of reasons. Unfortunately, it’s been my observation that valid and polite criticisms always get downvoted. I don’t understand why. It’s not like downvotes are going to make the problems disappear.
Most of us would like Firefox to succeed, and it’s none of our faults that Mozilla is constantly neglecting it and going off on wild goose projects which get promptly abandoned.
I use Firefox on both Linux and Android for 99% of my web browsing needs. At least for me it's the best browser out there, and doesn't seem neglegted at all.
Good for you. I’m genuinely glad, you should use whatever you like, I don’t care for flame-wars. For me, it lacks several must-haves (I’m not going to waste my time repeating them, history has shown that’s a stupid waste of time and the downvotes on the original comment only prove my point). That’s why we have so many apps, everyone has different needs.
Upvotes are not going to make problems actually relevant to solve.
The question keeps getting asked because people say they have problems. Answers (if any come) tells everyone what the problem is for this one user that raised it.
In aggregate we can all see that the problems are not very real for the vast majority of users.
The biggest problem users actually face with using Firefox is that web devs don’t want to support more than one browser and they have picked Chrome now. Or IT departments have blessed one and only one browser on corporate machines and it is the one most corpoware developers build extensions for.
Chasing web standards is a second order problem and will not make the user experience better in a relevant manner for end users. If web developers want an open web, they have to work to support open browsers.
Yeah the criticism is not invalid, but it is also often half-relevant soapboxing and I would wager that is why it tends to get downvoted.
LMFAO. You web devs just want more tools to fingerprint and track users. When Firefox raises privacy concerns for your spyware tools, you play like victims and say that "Firefox doesn't want better for users". F that.
Firefox often groups tabs from the same site into one process. With large numbers of the same tabs open in both, check the total memory for all firefox processes and all firefox processes. You will likely find firefox actually uses less memory than chrome.
h264 and h265 are patent-encumbered and therefore very expensive and/or dangerous. Patent trolls would rip Mozilla apart and eat all their money. The only reason H.264 works atm is that Cisco sponsors a plugin for that.
H264 patents are finally starting to expire, all the known patents have already expired in Europe.
As for HEVC, that particular licensing trash fire continues to burn bright. VVC had an opportunity to learn from the situation, and decided what they really wanted was a trash fire that burned even brighter.
This "Mozilla is distracted" narrative is a category 5 hurricane of unsubstantiated vibes from people who have no idea what they're talking about.
Some quick hits just from reading recent release announcements from December '25 through April 26:
- Hardware acceleration for faster performance with PDFs
- Expanded WebGPU support
- Faster page loading with compression dictionaries
- Deeper hardware integration for faster video playback on AMD hardware
- Better GPU stability and performance on MacOS
- Faster local translation
And I'm only picking out bits and pieces. "Web platform" improvements are so abundant that reproducing them from any single release would be a massive wall of text, but for a few examples just from one recent release:
>Service worker support for WebGPU has been added, making it available in all worker contexts. Service workers allow WebGPU to run in the background, which is particularly useful for extensions and other pages that can meaningfully share resources across multiple tabs and time periods.
>Firefox now supports the Iterator.zip() and Iterator.zipKeyed() methods from the joint iteration proposal. This allows zipping together underlying iterators into an iterator over values grouped by position, similar to zip in many other languages.
>Firefox now supports the Trusted Types API, which is primarily aimed at preventing cross-site scripting attacks.
>Firefox now supports the Sanitizer API, which provides new methods for HTML manipulation. The element.setHTML() method enables developers to insert HTML content similarly to element.innerHTML, but without the security vulnerabilities such as cross-site scripting (XSS). A complementary method, document.parseHTML(), is also available for parsing HTML safely.
And on and on it goes with APIs, CSS and so on, and that's every release, and that's still not covering feature requests and cosmetic updates, or the constant security updates.
Guys, this is millions of lines of code and thousands of patches every quarter. While you were reading about AI features or poorly worded terms of service, they studied the blade..er.. they worked on real performance improvements. It should be a scandal that anyone in the comment section gets away with claiming they're not working on anything.
Firefox is still very much a technically excellent browser. My plea is simply to stop taking poison pills from the very companies they should be fighting against in standards body discussions. I'd argue Firefox is "behind" in both _marketshare_ and _features_ largely _because_ said features are steamrolled through community governance bodies by the likes of Google, etc. Mozilla is at the table for these discussions but their hands are tied.
Mozilla's continued existence in recent history has relied on money from their primary competitor to stay in operation. Some have argued that doing seemingly unrelated projects like the one announced today is an effort to buy their freedom as it were. I'm arguing that's a distraction and that something closer to Linux or wiki foundation model would allow them to concentrate their efforts where it makes the most sense, as their current governance model is inherently based on a conflict of interest.
Opera was also a technically excellent browser, and we've seen that that alone is not enough to justify its existence in the long term.
Mozilla is doing exactly what you’re describing. They need revenue to ditch their direct financial ties to Google (and I wonder if they hire those high-salary executives solely in the hope of generating that revenue).
These AI products, along with all previous failed attempts, are just them trying to gain enough revenue to remove that dependency on Google.
And you your point, AI is probably eating search and with it the prospect of search licensing revenue. Not sure yet what paradigms will be most important to the browser experience but it's critical to get in early and make the inevitable early mistakes and work through them.
I truly hope that is the case. I feel they're going about it from all the wrong angles, but I sincerely hope it works out in their favor. Their funding model and governance seem inherently broken and have for a long time...
I implore ANYONE about to write a similar post to avail themselves of the search bar to not Groundhog Day us. Someone should do a "History of HNers railing ignorantly about Mozilla and Firefox" coffee table book; would link the buy page in my group chats.
If by "people" I mean everyone and not just direct users of their products. Something more akin to the Linux or Apache Foundations, including both private sector donations and government grants etc. A DIVERSE set of funding sources, not sharing ad revenue from a direct competitor. Having "people" directly pay to play as it were would never work, as we've seen before in other industries like news, etc.
Many companies and governments have a vested interest in the web continuing to exist as an open platform and not just a corporate playground controlled by 3 corporations. Without Firefox or something like it, the web becomes a defacto standard at best, largely controlled by Google (and to a lesser extent Apple and even lesser extent Microsoft)
I'm perfectly fine with Mozilla working on other things as long as those things are profitable or at least self-funded. As long as they are not leeching donated resources from Firefox or Thunderbird, I don't see a problem. However, I wish I had some kind of assurance that the money I donate to Mozilla would go to Firefox and not some other project like this.
The Mozilla employees are just Google plants. The web standards are now controlled by WHATWG who are all members of Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Mozilla and they are not interested in pushing standards forward or making browser improvements. They are only interested in ensuring entrenchment for their corporations. That’s why they created WHATWG. There is nothing any non-compromised Mozilla employee can do. The ship has sunk. Either someone hard forks Firefox or we continue down the current road.
It has been my daily driver off and on again across the years since the Netscape code was open sourced and Mozilla as an organization was founded. It's a fantastic browser, but Chrome now owns the lionshare of the market as Firefox plays catch-up instead of leading like it did in the past. Memory isolation, etc never got the resourcing it needed to complete until it was apparently too late.
I see Firefox now as the new Opera, a technically good browser making dubious extensions that no one asked for until it dies a slow, spiraling death. My plea is simply to not go down that road any further...
I'm going to sound crazy, and I've said this on HN before, but I wish CloudFlare or someone who would truly appreciate the effort and investment, would buy out Mozilla and have them oxidizing the browser again. Firefox was at its best when they were going through that effort, and since they put a pause on it, Firefox has been so "meh" for many years now, and embedding things nobody asked for. A faster fully oxidized browser on the other hand would be loved by many.
I'd gladly setup a recurring donation if I knew it was going to the areas in question and NOT to separate grants to the likes of this product just announced
Myself and I believe many others are willing to put money where our mouths are for an organization leading by example with regards to stewardship, much as this org has done in the past prior, instead of all these continued distractions, and ESPECIALLY if they stop swallowing this poisonous "donation" from Google. The fact that they do makes me wary of sending them a single penny. They'll just keep doing shit like they have been in recent years...
I can understand where you're coming from, but this seems a little misguided. Are you personally trying to pledge at least 1 full devs salary to Mozilla in exchange for less AI products? At the end of the day this really comes down to the money. If you want Mozilla to do the things you say you want from them, they need more than donations. Good will doesn't build a browser, that shit's expensive. It's like you're asking for a games studio to just give you an MMO out of the goodness of their heart for a few scraps from people who support their mission. The world doesn't work that way, without products like these I imagine Mozilla wouldn't be around much longer in the way you describe considering most of their salaries are paid directly by that 'poison' you describe.
The foundation never gets more than 10M / year in donations. You really think their donation rate could possibly go up by more than 50x just by cutting ties with Google?
People "want" a lot of contradictory things. People "want" them to be less financially reliant on Google, while also "focusing" on a browser in a market that is entirely commoditized and subsidized by 3 of the 10 largest companies in the world - and having a wholly implementation independent browser engine when it's so massively difficult and capital intensive that even Microsoft gave up on it.
I want them to actively seek foreign sovereign tech funding which come with stipulations that commit Mozilla to certain levels of privacy and anonymity.
I want them to go cap-in-hand to other countries and say "if you don't fund us then you are letting the US and surveillance capitalism get between your citizens and their government" and "do you really know what Chrome is doing with your data?"
I don't want to pretend they are simply part of a browser marketplace, but rather have them realize they are part of a civil rights effort, with powerful non-market forces they can ally with.
And I want those governments to commit to progressive enhancement guidelines like https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/technology/using-progressi... so new alternatives like Ladybird can start, and further require their agencies to test on a Firefox branch with no AI, no location tracking, full ad-blocking, etc. because while the market is free to ignore certain non-profitable users, a government should not be allowed to ignore some of its citizens.
I don't think these are contradictory, you're listing what many have wanted all along. There are funding models that would support exactly the above.
Microsoft stopped building their own browser engine because it didn't suit their business needs and they could still get a controlling share with significantly less effort by recycling webkit/blink for the umpteenth time. That makes total sense for them. Mozilla has, in the past, guided and pushed back on corporate interests.
Today, a large portion of the web now stands, built from the bones of the original khtml project, which was unceremoniously made by a handful of volunteers on the KDE project. Let's not pretend a rendering engine it's an entirely _impossible_ task. It is a LOT of work, and I laud the effortor of the few tireless individuals that make it their work, but in the end it's another piece of software, not unlike an OS. The history goes:
KHTML -> WebKit -> Blink
Meanwhile:
Mosaic -> Netscape -> Gecko
Maybe we find maintaining the second lineage is too great a burden and the web just becomes a defacto standard, guided entirely by 3 corporations. It's not what we want, but I guess at this point it's probably what we deserve.
I agree with you, there are 1,000 different chat apps and just one Firefox. And the world needs Firefox more than it knows.
It looks like they might want to get into hosting/selling services to users on this.
From the FAQ:
> Is there going to be a hosted version if I don't want to deploy it myself?
> Yes, we are planning to launch Thunderbolt for regular users but we do not have a release date yet.
There is "only one Firefox" but Firefox exists in a market that is not just commoditized, but subsidized to the tune of billions by 3 of the 10 largest companies in the world.
The world may need Firefox but it's funny how people complain about Mozilla's dependence on Google while also complaining about every attempt to become more financially independent from Google.
They could start getting some of that goodwill back by not paying their CEO a multi-million dollar salary and opening donations to actually help fund Firefox.
The anti-trust lawsuits with Google have Mozilla realizing they can't just be a company kept afloat by Google. Mozilla's priorities have been pretty complacent, basically just maintaining Firefox, sometimes Thunderbird, and a couple side services that have little financial incentives.
The current state of Mozilla is pretty odd since they rebranded to make it more apparent they're a non-profit, while also attempting to become more profitable pushing out new products and services.
Mozilla needs money to support the development of Firefox (and the payroll of its high-salary executives).
For now, they mainly rely on Google for that money. Google pays them to avoid antitrust cases, to show the courts that they are not a monopoly and that "alternatives" exist. For example, the DOJ once proposed that Google be forced to sell off Chrome.
However, if another entity has control over your budget, they also have control over your product. If Firefox becomes "too good" to be a true competitor in the consumer space, the funding might be reduced or even cut off.
Creating a new source of revenue allows Mozilla to improve Firefox even beyond the point Google feels "comfortable" with.
Mozilla could stop doing everything else and slow burn their existing $1B into developer salaries over the next decade. They are actively choosing not to.
Even worse, they would go bankrupt after like 2-3 years. And almost no serious non-profit has an endowment that can fund them in perpetuity. They are almost always firewalls that buy time/safety in response to crises (e.g. financial crisis or covid), meant to run in parallel with ongoing revenue that comes in regularly.
It's great if you can get your endowment so big you never have to worry about revenue but outside of, say, elite universities or middle eastern sovereign wealth funds that rarely happens.
1. It's unfair to assume that their primary funding source stops in one scenario and not in the other.
2. 1 billion dollars is a lot of money. Even the interest off it is huge.
3. 10 years is a very long time in tech.
4. I would greatly prefer the money Mozilla earned due to Firefox being a thing was put into developing Firefox, yes. The current Mozilla organization seems to be a mechanism for providing third homes for the executives, starting projects nobody wanted them to start, sullying the Firefox brand with them, and then abandoning them. There's a VC cancer infesting the supposed "free software community" called Mozilla.
>1. It's unfair to assume that their primary funding source stops in one scenario and not in the other.
Wait, what? I thought your whole premise from one comment ago was that they "stop doing everything" and exclusively slow burn away their endowment. They're dead by 2029 if they do that.
If they don't do that, then you're just talking about how they currently operate.
The money paid by Google so Chrome does not look like a monopoly is earned by Firefox and specifically for Firefox to exists as a viable-enough competitor. If anything, maintaining Firefox properly is the branch that earns that money.
Mozilla should stop doing all these side quests -- look at their track record! -- and they should get rid of the fat executive layer. They should transparently report what they're using their money, instead of saying they burn hundreds of millions of dollars in "software development" while firing the Servo developers.
Actually, it makes much more sense if Google pays Mozilla to maintain an alternative that never becomes truly competitive.
I don't think actual competition benefits Google in a commercial sense. If we considered the situation purely rationally, Google's most logical decision would be to use their budget as leverage, threatening off the books to prevent any strategy that might make Firefox "viable again", under the assumption that Google focused primarily on market share, while Mozilla focused purely on survival.
Yes, Google definitely has an incentive to keep Firefox inferior. If it became a real competition, that money flow would likely stop.
However, if Firefox drops to ~0% usage, it will definitely stop, as that ruins Google's monopoly defense, which is the motivation for it! Firefox usage is supposedly already as low as 2.33%.
To be clear, it's not from the Mozilla Corporation (which develops Firefox), it's from MZLA Technologies (which develops Thunderbird). Both bodies are under the Mozilla Foundation.
Firefox hit a peak of 32% and has fallen ever since. Effectively Firefox crashed at the same time IE did, and I can’t see in what way Mozilla ever attempted to recover.
I thought Mozilla was going to join the Thunderbolt standard and/or making some tool for it until I clicked the link haha. Very interesting name choice
So this is only for organizations and not for individuals? The Get Started button goes to a form where it wants to know how they can help your organization. I didn’t see any other link to the source code or documentation. If whoever created this site sees this comment, please clear up the above questions and observations.
For those looking for mobile support connecting to remote MCP servers, I maintain a source-available chat app that does exactly that (uses OpenRouter for inference): https://benkaiser.github.io/joey-mcp-client/
Oh that's really good. You're right, something like Riverwolf would fit their branding much more consistently. Just as long as it's not Bikepelican, I'll be happy...
> What does this one differently that the other thirteen in a dozen don't?
Mozilla's a lot more trustworthy with privacy and data, and they're unlikely to sell the project to someone who only wants to stuff it full of malware/adware/crypto stuff - or do it themselves.
I'm somewhat a fan of Mozilla, but their weak governance with regards to actual plans for the future, a couple of questionable partnerships, and the graveyard of products makes it hard to trust based on a 15+ year-old reputation. Would love to see where Mozilla has meaningfully contributed to the modern tech space (things we all actually use, not Mozilla versions of more popular apps/tools)
But despite that, Mozilla is still far more trustworthy than virtually everybody else. Who would you trust more? I imagine it's a very short list. Which is a sad state of affairs.
I worked in Mozilla previously for like 5-6 years. I think the supporter of Mozilla is a lot more trustworthy with privacy and data, but not Mozilla itself... I think they claiming that they do this and do that, but actually speak louder than action. My personal takes from the upper management is also not that good.
If you were not working with Mozilla Asian area, you know far too less. They had a browser in China that redirect to different website for profit before every connection and some affiliation. By doing so, is it privacy or not? Oh, look at Mozilla Japan volunteers, they shut everything up because things went wrong.
This Mozilla?[1] The company whose 85% of revenue depends on an adtech giant?
They're certainly doing better than others in this space, but their track record does not inspire confidence for anyone concerned about their privacy and data.
They have enough money for a legal dept. so I imagine so. But it's a confusing choice IMO. Not just because thunderbolt but also because thunderbird as someone else pointed out. But maybe they are trying to make thunder their 'thing', like apple puts an 'i' in front of everything?
Some confusion I see here is lots of people seem to not know that MZLA who makes Thunderbird and Mozilla Corporation who make firefox are separate entities in the Mozilla Foundation umbrella. This Thunderbolt is a MZLA product... so ya
Yesterday I actually read the docs on Open WebUI. It’s pretty impressive all the features it supports. I will give thunderbolt a look but I’m seriously considering doubling down on Open WebUI. The only thing I don’t like about their features are that tools and functions can’t be offloaded to external compute, it runs on the same machine.
This was the MOST confusing release I've seen in years.
Okay, it took me some time that the mail client is called "ThunderBIRD", not the BOLT. Not that I've used it much. But why the logo in github still shows TunderBIRD?
It looks like Mozilla is trying to catch the band wagon for no particular reason. They don't need it AT ALL. But they just jumped in along for a ride.
Think of it as a product similar to Thunderbird, emailing/chatting with a computer instead of a person. But I agree the name should have been sufficiently different. Thunderbolt would have been a great name for an email server.
Chrome on Linux is ~1.47 times faster than Firefox on the Jetstream 3 benchmark as recently reported by Phoronix[0]. That's how we want you to spend the money Mozilla, keeping up with your well-funded rival Google, and making it so we don't end up with a browser monoculture. These sorts of distractions just piss me off, and are not part of your core mission.
I remember that Firefox is orders of magnitude more performant in css processing, especially for complex documents with many elements. Can't comment on the javascipt interpeter, so I assume firefox is losing points somewhere else outside the screen painting engine.
Firefox has many weaknesses, but I never once thought “man, that thing is slow”. It isn’t, and chasing benchmark numbers is a waste of effort. A better security model or deeper customizability would be far more valuable.
The fact it's that for a normal usage, Firefox with uBlock Origin it's faster that Chrome without ad blocking. On Android this is especially noticeable.
And regarding (memory) performance, chromium has the "memory saver" settings for unloading tabs. I don't understand why mozilla thinks its acceptable to require users unload tabs manually. Who even does that?
I’m not sure if it’s fair to describe a "wholly owned subsidiary" as unrelated.
> Thunderbolt is funded through a dedicated investment from Mozilla and is being developed by a separate team focused on enterprise AI products, distinct from Thunderbird’s donation-supported consumer product work.
Yes, it's unrelated. Each one has its own resources and roadmaps. They are totally not dependent on each other. Thunderbird and its roadmaps/projects are not affected by Firefox' earnings at all. One's development doesn't affect the others.
Lots of negative posts here, who presume to speak for others. I, for one, welcome new entrants especially since they're under the Mozilla umbrella. This client could use the passwords and cookies stored in Firefox. And I'd trust it too, unlike other clients.
Hi, I'm on team that worked on this. No it's not vibe coded. We do pretty intense code review of every PR. It looks like the number you're seeing is including lock files and artifacts that are not part of the core coverage.
Fair enough if it’s not vibe coded, I’ll take your word for it. Code review seems like it’s mostly bots (Claude, Cursor, Greptile) from the PRs I looked at?
Nevertheless, AI use is not what really stood out to me. It’s that it’s SO MUCH CODE. I have no idea how you guys maintain or reason about the quality or security of something like this. Good luck, I guess.
Language Files Lines Blanks Comments Code
─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
TypeScript 760 109110 14500 7397 87213
JSON 41 22056 6 0 22050
Markdown 56 7150 2086 0 5064
YAML 33 3965 406 208 3351
... and many more with fewer than 1k lines
Regarding "loads of assumptions," it's hard to tell how much of this is vibecoded slop (definitely non-zero looking at the commit log), but I don't think it's that outrageous to claim 87k sloc is too much for a textbox and an API wrapper.
That's still an immense amount of code for a chat interface essentially consisting of a text box and a button, which any OS (mobile or desktop) can usually throw up in a few lines of code.
Someone explain to me why this product is unique. If Mozilla never came out with it, does that mean businesses are stuck with using cloud-based AI? C'mon. There's a lot of products that already offer local-AI. What am I missing?
Is it just me or is this really bad copy? The only clue as to what this is on the landing page is the background of the product image. And I also have to sign up to find out anything else about it.
Could Mozilla hand over firefox to a new team please? It is clear they are wasting time and energy on things nobody wanted - who wants Mozilla-AI please? I mean, seriously?
For people who don't think Mozilla wants to make firefox competitive
again; and for those who also don't think ladybird will become a
viable alternative one day (that's for the future, I have no crystal
ball, I am just pointing at one possibility here). Perhaps we could
get more momentum when someone else other than Mozilla handles firefox.
No. Thunderbird has its own merits and they work without Firefox. Mozilla has credibilities in e-mail because of Thunderbird. This topic has 0 relations to Firefox.
there seems to be a significant disconnect between the claims in this press release / blog post and the actual reality if you look at the GitHub repo.
starting from the very first words of the announcement:
> Open-source and self-hostable
meanwhile, the readme [0] has a caveat, added today, about how it's only kinda-sorta self-hostable:
> While we eventually plan to make Thunderbolt fully offline-first, it currently depends on authentication and search functionality (though you can disable search on the integrations screen in the app). You can deploy your own backend with Docker and sign up in order to test it locally.
and if you follow the link to the self-hosting instructions [1] there's another caveat that was added today:
> Under active development — not production ready. Thunderbolt is currently undergoing a security audit and preparing for enterprise production readiness. These deployment paths are provided for evaluation and early testing. Do not use in production environments.
don't tell me it's self-hostable if what you really mean is "you can run it locally for testing".
meanwhile, scroll a bit farther down in the announcement:
> Work seamlessly across devices with native applications for Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, and Android
which is repeated on the GitHub readme:
> Available on all major desktop and mobile platforms: web, iOS, Android, Mac, Linux, and Windows.
but as pointed out in [2] this is just flat-out incorrect - there are no release artifacts published, for any platform.
come on Mozilla, you need to be better than this. you have to know your target market is engineers and tech-savvy people who see through this sort of marketing fluff.
if you want to publish an announcement saying "we're working on a thing that will eventually do X, Y, and Z" then that's great.
if you want to release something that does X, Y, and Z, that's great too.
but don't over-promise and under-deliver. don't make an announcement that this thing can do X, Y, and Z and then "clarify" that the plan is to eventually do X, Y, and Z.
Some of us are out here still waiting for Firefox relay “premium” to launch and provide disposable mobile numbers like they do email addresses.. but product has for some reason been stuck on “join waiting list” for what feels like an absolute age.
Watefox, Librewolf have both plucked out all unnecessary stuff Mozilla added over the years. Both are good but Librewolf comes with history and cache disabled by default which may be bit surprising.
Floorp comes with additional custom interface features, workspaces (tabs grouping) and mouse gestures. And bit better profiles feature - Mozilla decided to redo it recently which lead to some problems.
Mullvad has build in VPN, DoH and proxy as an extension, and comes with uBo and NoScript.
There's Zen browser that has a quite uncommon UI, and obscure Pale Moon that IIRC still tries to provide old XUL/XPCOM extensions - which often leads to pages rendering issues.
A tip for Librewolf: you can easily toggle permanent cookie storage for a site through the "Always store cookies/data for this site" option in the shield button menu on the URL bar. This is very convenient compared to vanilla Firefox where you have to add exceptions through the settings.
What even is this? A chat frontend to arbitrary model providers on the backend - I guess that's sort of useful not to have to build yourself but it doesn't feel like the amazing thing they're trying to hype. Some of the features seem a bit weird to me too - like end-to-end encryption? There isn't a server intermediary, so you already have that with TLS to the model provider.
Yeah it seems similar to Gemini Enterprise. There you can deploy "apps" (basically front-ends) on top of the LLM that come pre-configured with plugins to access Google sheets, Databases, your Jira boards, etc.
So all this is doing is adding context for the LLM and some persistence.
I have yet to see a compelling use case for Gemini Enterprise at my company but we're still experimenting with it.
If I may, Mozilla, you shouldn't release half-ass products that looks vibe coded like this, even the website looks like it took 30min to do with Claude
Addressing the usual few complaints folks always bring up:
* This is from the separate independent team that works on Thunderbird, not Firefox, so there isn't any resource contention happening there
* Thunderbird is revenue positive, and this potentially gives that team another revenue stream to be even more self-sustaining through charging companies
* Businesses definitely want to control the AI they're using (especially with RAGs of their own data) instead of just throwing it at their LLM vendor and hoping for the best
People on HN are fond of asserting that their own POV is the only one. Imagine that there is such a thing as a person in charge of choosing technologies for organizations, and that you're such a person. That's who this is for.
1. Potential donors get upset that they can't make directed donations to specifically support Firefox or Thunderbird rather than the whole kit-and-kaboodle
2. Separate entity spun up to focus on Thunderbird only. Now you can support Thunderbird development directly.
3. New separate entity is now in the business of extensible AI clients?
EDIT: I went back and read the launch announcement [1]. I'll concede it does say "will also allow us to explore offering our users products and services that were not possible under the Mozilla Foundation" which could mean anything, really. And this development was funded by a Mozilla grant, importantly not by Thunderbird donors. I'm still struggling to not see this as a distraction from the core mission. I wish they'd spun up a new entity instead.
[1] https://blog.thunderbird.net/2020/01/thunderbirds-new-home/
It's a crazy crowded space. Any entry into this field looks like a "me too" product driven by FOMO instead of being motivated by (a) serving customer needs, (b) serving social needs, or (c) making money. (All of which are fine with me) It will get 0.5% market share -- and I'm supposed to get excited?
If you lived in New York City you might think there are Duane Reades coast-to-coast but there are not. If you are based in the Bay Area you see billboards that are very different from anywhere else. I'd say the viewpoint is a lot like this famous artwork
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/View_of_the_World_from_9th_Ave...
but maybe instead of the rest of the US being 1/5 of the vertical space it is 1/25 of the vertical space. Problem is most customers do not live in the bay area and most web browser users do not live in the bay area and most web developers do not live in the bay area. Based in the Bay Area they can hop in their cars and drive the longest 40 miles in America to get to Google and Facebook's headquarters so Mozilla is talking to those people all the time and not talking to the rest of us.
We don't get costly signalling to show they care about the rest of us, we don't even get cheap talk.
They probably think René Girard is deep because they are surrounded by people who think René Girard is deep. If Mozilla wants to be relevant and not just an also-ran it needs to "think different" like the other 99.9% -- it's not that hard if you change your location.
Really the EU needs to apologize for those damned cookie popups and invest in a privacy-first browser. Whether that is "fully fund Firefox" or "fully a fund a Firefox fork" or pick up another browser engine or start a new one.
I see the warning lights flashing: a few years back web sites that didn't work with Firefox were few and far between, this weekend I bought tickets for a comic book convention and they took my money but didn't give me a ticket because the site didn't work with Firefox. I use Firefox as my daily driver so all the projects that I work on work with Firefox; the rest of my team doesn't give a damn and if you lose me another site will become Chrome-only.
> Really the EU needs to apologize for those damned cookie popups and invest in a privacy-first browser.
I love them. They are not mandatory, only shady websites that rather sell users information than providing a barely functional homepage. Yes the popups suck, but I'm very happy that this exposes the behavior and priorities of the industry.
It is insane to see very ordinary web sites that have 100 trackers but part of that is that the advertising economy gives everyone the incentive to screw each other with the backdrop that of course the metrics do not match across the funnel because people fall out as you go down the funnel —- but if you have 100 trackers they can’t all be lying in a coordinated way.
> the EU needs to apologize for those damned cookie popups
The EU didn’t make these mandatory. They’re a form of malicious compliance, executed so that the common perception is that these laws are there to get in the way of regular folks.
Most websites shouldn’t require cookie pop-up. They do because they’re spying on you in some way and need to notify you of that.
> Really the EU needs to apologize for those damned cookie popups and invest in a privacy-first browser.
You clearly misunderstand when they are required and how they are legally required to work, the key points (as I take them) that are often misunderstood are:
* They are not about cookies, but any persistent identifier
* If a identifier is needed for your core functionality (ads/tracking is not a core functionality) and not misused for other purposes you do not need consent
* It is required to be as easy to decline as it is to consent
* Not consenting is not allowed to degrade or gate the content
* Even if you consent to tracking/cookies you should be allowed to withdraw that consent
Do you not agree with these points?
Frankly I feel having to clear modal dialogs is like getting a lobotomy. I don’t ever want to see one. I don’t want to ever be asked “click on the traffic lights”. I don’t want to have to clear 1, 2, 3 or 4 more modals asking for my email address on a blog.
I want “respect DNT or go to jail”
GDPR normalized enshittification, turned it from something that was unambiguously evil to something that was required, virtuous even.
I could care less personally if you track me or not but if you pop up a meaningless distraction in my face there is no limit on how much I want to hurt you and blowing our your kpis and wrecking your analytics by disabling your tracking it is the least I can do. We need to resist the Google Economy that wants to divert 99% of your attention to worthless trash.
It's not perfect but it was a step forward.
It also made people realize that they are tracked like crazy (there are regularly memes about this for example) - before people reacted to this fact like you were sharing a conspiracy theory.
>"Girard"
>"99.9%"
I despise "centrist-moderation" just like any other guy but maybe "entrepreneurial dignity" is not 100% of something but 65\pm1% homeownership
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mapped-europes-homeownershi...
> Businesses definitely want to control the AI they're using (especially with RAGs of their own data) instead of just throwing it at their LLM vendor and hoping for the best
Yes, agreed on that. I'm not sure I'm clear how this really helps that; I suppose it's a frontend that they don't have, but there are a bunch of those already.
It doesn't seem to help them control the _actual_ AI, i.e. the model, which still has to come from somewhere.
https://www.thunderbolt.io/announcing-thunderbolt
Can the team please use that money on making thunderbird look like the nice UI mockups that were published that don't look anything like thunderbird.
I see no reason this product should exist even under the Thunderbird umbrella, especially if ANY resources under ANY Mozilla org were employed in this. This product is a distraction from their core mission in either case.
Thunderbird was literally asking for donations just a few days ago?
This was built with money from an grant from Mozilla. See the bottom of this page: https://www.thunderbolt.io/announcing-thunderbolt
Took me a bit to find, so here's it quoted:
> Thunderbolt is funded through a dedicated investment from Mozilla and is being developed by a separate team focused on enterprise AI products, distinct from Thunderbird’s donation-supported consumer product work.
Mozilla gave Mozilla a grant, so that's all there is to it I suppose.
it is a patreon style thing, they are donation funded. I think the poster is saying that they arent being frivolous with their money like some people have a bad taste about firefox
And?
And they're taking money donated towards Thunderbird development and spending it on random unrelated AI slop ideas that nobody asked for. You really don't see anything wrong with that?
Surely you can agree that when you open Thunderbird and are met with requests for donations, if you chose to donate, you'd expect that money to be invested in Thunderbird development, and not 10M Claude tokens to vibe code Mozilla's latest groundbreaking AI B2B SaaS idea?
Why do you know that nobody asks for? Are you in the team?
Stop spreading misinformation, it's funded by grant money https://github.com/thunderbird/thunderbolt/blob/main/docs/fa...
Ah yes, a grant from Mozilla, to Mozilla.
Even more so, it is likely a grant of money earned by Firefox (the Google search engine deal).
Proof?
That is almost all the money Nozilla has. Not sure what you're expecting.
It goes to show that Mozilla(s) could, if they really wanted, restructure Mozilla Corporation / Foundation.
(edit - to allow users to fund Firefox, allowing us to better sleep at night, and to align our incentives)
It's certainly a feel good idea but the math doesn't math. Even a best case scenario donation drive would never be able to compete with search licensing revenue.
Right now if you want to look at the best case scenario, it's probably wikipedia. Wikipedia is the biggest online donation drive that exists and they get 18% of the revenue that Mozilla gets from search licensing on approximately 4,400% more global traffic. And it's a mature campaign that's been an annual tradition for decades.
I'd rather have the donation option than not have it but it has to be understood primarily as something that's just there to make users feel good. The reason they're structured the way they are is to access the search licensing revenue that gets them income they would never be able to get from just donation drives.
I agree that switching over to an exclusively grassroots sponsorship level would be impossible.
But there may be hybrid options available.
Purely conjecture. Does the Google money come with some kind of funding non-compete? If not, why not open up other funding streams. If it does, that's worrying.
The argument has always been "the org structure doesn't support donations" but the org structure is just a proxy for the intentions of the org.
>Thunderbird is revenue positive
Hmm, I thought the for-profit Thunderbird pro hadn't launched yet?
I know Thunderbird is for profit, but what are they profitting from without the paid service, and how much of that profit is going into this unrelated Thunderbolt AI platform, exactly?
Thunderbird currently runs entirely on donations, even though they have paid products in the pipeline.
I think a piece of software running on donations is not running off "charity". It's just a business model to not charge every user. Similar to how Twitch streamers operate, or my local theater group.
You can read how they spent money in 2024 [1].
[1] https://blog.thunderbird.net/2025/10/state-of-the-bird-2024-...
Thanks, that's helpful. This says about ~70% of the money was paid to employees, ~10% infra costs, the other ~20% various other fees and smaller expenses.
It would be interesting to have a breakdown of what part of the Thunderbird team is working on Thunderbird, Thunderbolt, or other forms of thunder.
No, this was built with money from an grant from Mozilla.
No what? That doesn't contradict their comment about Thunderbird.
I think "No, this was not funded by donations".
Wait what, they took donations to pay a team to build a mail client and had them build an AI thing instead? Or have I got that wrong.
No, this was built with money from an grant from Mozilla.
I don’t know why you’re downvoting, it’s a fair question based on the above comments.
> This is from the separate independent team that works on Thunderbird, not Firefox, so there isn't any resource contention happening there
I would rather have them work on Thunderbird.
> Thunderbird is revenue positive
Is that why I'm met with a splash screen asking me to donate every time I start Thunderbird? Is this another Wikipedia situation?
I think that wasn't phrased well- it's "revenue" positive meaning donation money covers more than the expenses
That’s literally what the phrase means. Can’t help if people don’t know what words mean. It was phrased fine, it wasn’t _read_ well.
Fair point :)
You think that just because the software can be downloaded for free means the developers shouldn't get paid for their work?
Just for clarity, you do mean Thunderbird (the email client), not Thunderbolt (this new AI client)?
Thunderbird (the email client) was spun off from Mozilla Corporation into a new for-profit company called MZLA Technologies. Both corps are still subsidiaries of the Mozilla Foundation. Thunderbolt is a new product from the MZLA Technologies team.
TIL, thank you.
Hu... Revenue positive just last week that had a pretty dire sounding call for donations ala make sure thunderbird can survive...
i find it interesting that they advertise it as "trusted because european"
What does “revenue positive” even mean?
It doesn’t mean profitable, it doesn’t mean cash flow positive.
Are you just trying to say their revenue is greater than zero?
The Get Started button links to a contact form. That's unexpected. I looked for the source code repository and thanks to somebody here that hinted at it as a Thunderbird project, I found [1]. That's a better Get Started page.
[1] https://github.com/thunderbird/thunderbolt
Updated!
What's with the odd name? Apple already has a 15 year-old product called Thunderbolt. Mozilla already has a similarly-named but totally-different product called Thunderbird.
Not sure about the US but in France there’s absolutely no way this would be confused with Apple Thunderbolt. No one talks about it, and I don’t even know it it’s even a thing anymore since USB-C.
As for Thunderbird, it’s not the same name? Idk what to say
My first thought was "why would Mozilla support a proposal to expose Thunderbolt to the Web after rejecting similar proposals for USB and Bluetooth?"
So yeah, especially in light of the lightning bolt logo and "thunderbolt.io" domain name, I think it's confusing enough that I'm honestly surprised there's no "Thunderbolt is a registered trademark of Intel Corporation used under license" notice on the site.
The domain name is the most confusing part! "This is thunderbolt.io. No, not the I/O device, the AI client"...
Agreed. The name collision nowadays is horrible.
Then again, it's frustrating trying to name a product in today's era; too many names are taken.
It's clearly a fancy AI powered cable isn't it?
I suppose there is no Thunderbird for Macs then? Or someone in the team would have noticed.
It's not an Apple thing, though they may have adopted it first.
Basically every high end laptop comes with TB4 or 5 ports.
It was originally codeveloped by Apple and Intel.
Though from Thunderbolt 3 onward Intel has been the sole developer.
I came here to say that. Especially with the .io TLD instead of .ai
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Wow HN really does have a problem with commenting on anything to do with Mozilla.
Anyway, awesome to see this from the team inside Mozilla — hope this can become a new revenue stream over the long term.
Really excited to see some tight integration with Firefox and Thunderbird in the future.
People are going to hate this, but if someday Mozilla expands to being a productivity suite I’d be pretty happy to give them my money. ProtonMail is doing it and I trust them as well.
Mozilla has shown again and again that they care more about their politics than they do about what their customers want. They resently released an updated Mascot that is "non-binary and goes by they/them". They'd rather just keep shoving their politics down their customers throats than actually provide them what they want.
I think they're just taking the Sesame Street approach.
I immediately thought "oh, the email client? It's AI now?" Then I realized this is Thunderbolt, not Thunderbird. Kind of an odd choice by Mozilla to have two products with such similar names.
There's an architecture diagram here: https://github.com/thunderbird/thunderbolt/blob/main/docs/ar...
It seems like all the model inference is external APIs? So why is the marketing claiming "Self-host on your infrastructure or let us help you deploy. Your data never leaves your control."
Could those external APIs point to locally hosted models?
From the home page I have no idea what is this, what even is AI client? OpenCode competitor?
Also Thunderbolt is too similar to Thunderbird, really got me puzzled for a sec.
Web API wrapper. That's really all it is.
For anyone reading this that has worked on the launch of this new product (or the many others of their ilk throughout the years) under the various Mozilla orgs, I mean no disrespect, however I feel it's important to not mince words these days..
I implore ANYONE at Mozilla org to please, please stop working on projects distracting from the complex and necessary work of browser and web standards stewardship. That alone should be the very reason for your continued existence if you have any. Focus on anything outside that purview will lead to the furthering of the, already painful and readily apparent, stagnation of your browser and our standards bodies as entities distinct from corporations.
Ditching any direct financial ties to Google or any other browser vendor is both important and necessary at this point, as this clearly represents a conflict of interest in your overall mission.
The web as a platform should belong to us all, not just the few corporate leaders of the day. I've watched in real time, saddened by the persistent errosion of our commons that is the web. I see it becoming nothing more than a corporate playground should trends continue, if it's not already too late. There may have been a time when your mission took precident over product launches of seemingly unrelated domains, but that is not what Ii observing today.
I think I speak for many in the community in these regards (please correct me if not the case.)
These two goals:
> ... please stop working on projects distracting from the complex and necessary work of browser and web standards stewardship.
> Ditching any direct financial ties to Google or any other browser vendor is both important and necessary...
are inherently contradictory. If you do not want Mozilla to have revenue from search vendors that also have browsers, it has to come from somewhere else. Or are you suggesting they switch the default search engine back to Yahoo [0]?
I am not trying to defend the projects they have chosen to work on, but you have to understand that reducing dependence on Google is exactly why they are working on them [1].
[0] Even when they did that, it was for the US only, and Google was still the default for most of the world.
[1] Although in this case, this appears to come from the Thunderbird organization, so unrelated to the browser. Money is fungible, though.
There are plenty ways to fund digital commons, including people volunteering their time.
A leading web browser can not be built and maintained by volunteers.
Right. Firefox stands alone as the most successful self financed full stack browser that's ever been made without being subsidized by outside revenue streams. I like to use the example of Opera. If "make a better browser" won market share and business creativity won stable revenue, we'd all be using Opera right now because (sorry Mozilla), no browser company was ever better than Opera in my opinion.
In 2026 the rules to making a good browser are (1) already be a trillion dollar company, (2) use Chromium, (3) have some form of distribution lock-in over billions of devices. Otherwise you're cooked. Mozilla swims against the stream better than anyone.
I don’t know, but there are other ways of funding besides -completely- volunteer run.
Take look at Ladybird
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ladybird_(web_browser)?wprov=s...
You can't seriously compare ladybird, a mostly broken browser nowhere ready or even remotely close to it, to Firefox.
Ladybird will be dead in a few years.
There's a strong desire to keep the web an open platform, if the alternative to WebKit isn't going to be Firefox, it'll simply have to be something else. I'd gladly contribute to the cause, beit ladybird or something else. For now it would be monetarily until my impending retirement when I can contribute hours without impacting my family.
I wouldn't discount ladybird or others simply because they haven't shipped their mvp just yet. They're closing in on a usable product. Maybe they never make it, but servo and others may. Saying they'll be dead in a few years isn't contributing much besides pessimism for anything but the status quo.
But several entire operating systems can an do operate entirely by the volunteer model? I don't follow...
The EU says it cares about privacy. although it's actions have normalized enshittification; the EU could fully fund Firefox or a Firefox fork or another browser in a second and stop all the trackers right in their tracks.
It's American company... unlikely.
Then fork it.
Besides, the one thing Mozilla could do to be relevant to 99.9% of web users is to move somewhere other San Francisco and turn their office their into a homeless shelter. They should go to Dublin or Frankfurt or Barcelona, anywhere.
Monetary contributions via government grants have happened in the past. Iirc that's how VLC got their start.
I don't think volunteering is going to cut it. Big orgs have big money and public commons are just targets to be controlled exploited.
mozilla employs 750 people and has a 1/2Bn dollar deal with Google and still their browser is absolute hot garbage. i think volunteering won't cut it.
I'd argue these are not _contradictory_, just incentivized financially to continue since that's how they've operated. What i'm suggesting is a change. There's plenty of counter examples where diverse funding models for community projects can work without taking vast sums from a single, direct competitor. Linux is one. Imagine if MSFT was the sole contributor to Linux and how that would have shaped its development. In recent years MSFT may infact directly contribute developers and funding to linux, but they have a vested interest in doing so, as they run more Linux VMs in Azure than Windows VMs these days...
Because Windows doesn't go open-source and others can't build their OS from windows like chromium. With OS, there are no open source kernels that are actively maintained and security-fix bump every month by full time staff of giant corporation. With browsers, devs already have an open source engine with most of the work and build are from full-time staff of a giant corporation, and then they just lazily build "their own" browsers upon that and brag on social media.
Build your own browser engine and see how you can pay the devs to make them work on it.
I'm not sure the counter argument you're making tbh.
The license or patch cycles of either project is irrelevant in this example. The money changing hands between the original product and it's competitor is the issue at stake here.
I'll spell it out in Mozilla's case:
If money is provided by a direct competitor, and that same money is _critical to the continued existence of the original project_ as it is in Mozilla's case, that project and it's staff now have a vested interest in avoiding _anything_ that could endanger that flow, as it now poses a very real existential risk. This is the game they play and the conflict of interest I'm merely pointing out.
Google gets to keep slowly eating the entire browser pie. Should regulators come calling, they can even point at Firefox and say "see, we're not monopolizing this space! there's Firefox over there" To me it appears as a sick form of puppetry.
The argument is you are using OS as a counter example when it's not the counter example.
What is the chromium of OS world but Linux doesn't depend on them?
The Linux Foundation has many, diverse corporate donors, and Linux enables software like ChromeOS, yes. These are all true, but doesn't change the argument that it's a bad call to take the vast majority of your income from a single, direct competitor.
I truly don't grok the point you're trying to make, but that's likely a me problem. Your points appear to all be asides to the core issue at hand.
Firefox is pretty cool. Use it every day.
Blocks ads Multi account containers Dev tools very good
I never notice that it is in any way slow, except for those sites that need infinity cpu on any browser, like jira.
What specifically is the issue? To my mind it quietly just gets on with things.
It is very cool! I'd go as far to say it's a great browser in fact. I simply want it to exist and be such in perpetuity and lead by example like it has in the past. I see it as a follower instead of a leader these days, largely to Google, but also Safari and to some degree Edge (by simply stealing the blink renderer)
The Mozilla org continues to produce a very capable browser, but it's now 3rd or fourth fiddle on a stage their misteps helped orchestrate in their demotion.
Edit: clarification
What are the other competing browsers? There's chrome(and the derivatives), safari, firefox? safari exists only because of ios lockin. Aren't most other browsers an increasingly smaller share? Genuine question.
It's a problem. I use Firefox as my daily driver -- it used to be I ran into incompatible sites once a month or less except for YouTube which intermittently punishes users for browsing with Firefox. Now I have a serious problem every week like an online vendor or bank or something that doesn't work with Firefox.
Firefox is a little slow for an internal application we have that loads 40,000 rows of data into a grid but otherwise all our stuff works with it because I develop Firefox first and I think a few of us are all that really stands between Firefox and oblivion and probably are doing more work than a lot of the people they have on the payroll.
(I work on Firefox Web Compatibility)
If you have specific sites that aren't working, please let us know and we can investigate and try to fix them.
The usual reporting channels are using https://webcompat.com or the "Report Broken Site" tool in the Firefox menu. Of course I"m also happy to take bug reports here if you (or anyone else) have them.
I use it daily, but Chromes dev tools are better. I always wind up back in Chrome to debug things.
One difference I've seen with FF vs Chrome is when finding the events to bind to each element. In FF, the event tag on the element is clickable and gives you the name and the line number in the JS file. It makes finding the code very easy. I have not seen that in Chrome. I rarely use Chrome, so this one thing leads me to saying FF's DevTools are better, at least for me and how I use them.
Funny, I have it exactly the other way around!
In contrast, the Multi-Account Containers system is the primary reason I avoid Firefox.
While it is meant to be an alternative to Chrome's profile switching, it is more a workaround than a complete replacement. I need entirely different sets of extensions for personal, work, and school environments, something containers can't do.
Firefox's actual profile support is beyond terrible. To launch a separate instance, Firefox requires many more clicks than Chrome, all within a Windows-2000-style UI. Not to mention that there are weird glitches in their implementation.
Firefox is not usable for me until they actually spend time improving their multiple profile support.
I definitely have not had that experience, although use FF for personal, various work, and various educational places.
None of those have required me to install a particular extension..
Of course thats not to deny your experience!
The only time profiles ever come into it, for me, is using web driver, playwright, or whatever.
I guess maybe the usage stats dont support making the profile selector better.
But also, maybe its a thing they would accept a change for?
This is not meant to be an alternative for Chrome's profile switching. It's a different use case entirely.
As you yourself mention, Firefox has actual profile support, which may not be as good as Chrome's, but at least compare like for like.
Myself the profile support is the absolute worst thing about Chrome. I just want to log into some web site, I don't want to fight with the profiles to get things done.
For those few applications where I really would need profiles I will just open a different browser, so I still keep Edge/Chrome/Opera around for that rare situation. I don't need something that complicates my life every single click but it is the whole ideology of the Google Economy that they want you to spend 1% of attention on things that matter to you and 99% on things that don't.
Firefox has a new Chrome-like profiles support as of v149.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-management
LMFAO. Containers are not for profiles-purpose. Everyone who needs profiles know this.
And Firefox now needs 2 click to switch profiles.
Here are a couple:
1. The inability to set a specific page for new tabs to open on. That is ridiculous.
2. The mobile version sucks, specifically because bookmarks are buried under an absurd number of menu levels. And they're also broken up (without user approval or any way to stop it) into "mobile" and "desktop" bookmarks. WHY? The entire point of syncing is to have them all the same.
I want to like Firefox. I went back to Firefox for the first time in decades last year and gave it up after a couple months because #2 was that annoying. So brain-dead.
Oh yeah, and another one was that "never remember history" does, in fact, remember history. What Firefox really does is "stop adding to history." And the bug report on it resulted in several YEARS of debate over how to "fix" it. The latest I saw is that they're actually NOT going to fix it, but rather add more text (somewhere) to say basically, "This doesn't do what you think it's going to do."
If fixing a defect like that requires years of committee back-and-forth, the product is finished.
> The inability to set a specific page for new tabs to open on. That is ridiculous.
I've been using the "New Tab Override" extension for almost a decade at this point. Sure, it would probably make sense to have as a baseline feature, but I installed it so long ago and it's continued working the whole time that it's not really something I think about anymore.
New Tab Homepage is another alternative
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> already painful and readily apparent, stagnation of your browser
What's wrong with Firefox? There are several things Firefox does that it's annoying to live without in other browsers (video pop-outs, competent ad blocking, etc). Is there some core feature that's missing? I'm subjected to Edge at work and I couldn't tell you a single thing it does that I'd want FF to do.
> and our standards bodies as entities distinct from corporations
Ok, I buy that.
Web usb and serial are not just missing, last I checked Mozilla is opting to not implement based on their moral stance. It just puts them behind for some stuff.
WebSerial just landed in Firefox nightly! https://bsky.app/profile/paulusschoutsen.nl/post/3mjfdx3ujta...
It is so frustrating how every thread about Mozilla has people getting upset about contradictory things.
Half the thread impunes Mozilla for taking so much money from Google and imply that they are controlled opposition, and the other half gets upset when Mozilla doesn't implement every standard that Google tries to steamroll through the standards bodies because of objections to how they can be used for fingerprinting, or complains that the attempts at anti-fingerprinting break websites, etc.
Sometimes it's not even different people, it's the same people punching them for contradictory reasons.
Mozilla is not perfect but they get all the downsides of being methodical and privacy focused alongside none of the benefits. Everybody hates the "side projects" unless it's Rust, Servo, LetsEncrypt, Thunderbird, contributions to Opus/AVI, etc. and you can be sure they'll be criticized if they "focus" by touching investment in any of those by the same people.
> Half the thread impunes Mozilla for taking so much money from Google and imply that they are controlled opposition, and the other half gets upset when Mozilla doesn't implement every standard that Google tries to steamroll through the standards bodies because of objections to how they can be used for fingerprinting, or complains that the attempts at anti-fingerprinting break websites, etc.
> Half the thread impunes Mozilla for taking so much money from Google and imply that they are controlled opposition, and the other half gets upset when Mozilla doesn't implement every standard that Google tries to steamroll through the standards bodies because of objections to how they can be used for fingerprinting, or complains that the attempts at anti-fingerprinting break websites, etc.
Yeah, double standards at its max. Firefox inputs every privacy concerns for these APIs that Google puts 0 Vietnam Dong to care about users' privacy. And those people cry about why Firefox doesn't implement it.
Okay, I'll give you that. Granted, I've used webUSB exactly twice, once with a Flipper zero and once with a mechanical keyboard. If that's the worst of it, the parent comment calling it "painful and immediately apparent" seems a bit dramatic to me.
> It just puts them behind for some stuff.
Yeah, it really undermines their ability to compromise user security and privacy.
Essentially all of Firefox' incompatibilities with a website reduce to Firefox not allowing the users to be tracked or fingerprinted by default. Webapps that rely on fingerprinting as a replacement for device tokens will likely not work. Because fingerprinting is bad and I don't want it to work. The people your bank pays to implement that are the same companies used for cross site tracking. It only works because tracking works. ReCaptcha can break for similar reasons, but there are better options for captcha and the need for captcha itself is possible to eliminate with various strategies depending on what it is being used to mitigate.
There's a lot of good use-cases of Web usb, you can't just cut everything which might have privacy aspects otherwise the browsers wouldn't have canvas or even gpu rendering.
What are those use cases? It seems like a giant hole punched all the way from a tab's sandbox through the process boundary and out to the kernel... Yes, gpu rendering is a great example of the same problem. Canvas at least has some intervening layers depending on implementation.
GrapheneOS for example can install with web usb, I think it makes it much easier for people who aren't too tech savvy to switch.
Somebody also recently shared an awesome project which let's you use an usb printer regardless of your OS driver.
Almost all of the gui software for programming keyboards with QMK uses webusb or webhid, so you either have to use a chromium based browser or an electron app that is basically just a wrapper for chromium.
Yeah, it's a shame Qt/C++ doesn't have any way of interacting with USB devices and there's no libraries for that, otherwise there could be a native GUI app for QMK. Or failing that, because Qt is simply too difficult for programmers to figure out, maybe some day there will be a way to deal with USB devices from Java, then at least we could have an AWT app (or I guess Swing is the new hotness now?).
Yeah the fundamental problem is there isn't a good way to write cross platform applications that interface directly with a usb device
pianu.com used to be a website where you could learn piano by connecting your piano through usb with the browser. It seems defunct now but I found a video demonstrating it : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTBmRV02NgI
I used something similar in the past. It was a legitimate use case for web usb which changed my mind on it quite a bit.
https://www.charachorder.com/ sells ergo keyboards and allows you to update their firmware directly in the website, through web usb. No local apps at all. Also an improvement in overall security from having to download some .exe / .dmg and running it locally.
There's a reason that https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/canvasblocker... exists, though; a reasonable person could argue that firefox should be restricting canvas/gpu more than it does.
Yes there are things that Firefox does better than others, and that is one reason I use Firefox. But there are definitely things I would like to see improved, like:
- PWA support on Linux
- better performance
- devtools should be able to handle sites with large amounts of js with sourcemaps
- fix a number of bugs that have been open for a long time
- don't lag behind standards as much (I'm not talking about things where they intentionally don't implement problematic "standards" pushed by google)
- make it feasible to embed gecko in other projects similar to how chromium is used by electron and webkit is used in "webviews"
It's slow. It almost always trails Safari and Chrome on most benchmarks.
See e.g.
https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1ljns9o/freshly_re...
How many milliseconds do you think this page took to render? I usually click and it's already done.
HN is not the most complex website rendering wise by any imaginable metric. I presume HN renders equally as fast on lynx or Mosaic from 1994...
HN is a fast site (comparatively; most websites are unnecessarily slow). It’s a bad measurement.
HN is a good website. Ebay is another good example where JavaScript is optional but with good functionality. Marko was mocked, but now Astro is cool because they invented ssr...
I don't care about benchmarks.
I'm building a fairly complicated browser extension [0].
Debugging the extension on Chrome, it works great. On Firefox, it is nearly impossible. There are a litany of compatibility issues that make it "different" than Chrome, despite the extension being very much standards based. It is really frustrating and makes me dread getting bug reports.
To be fair, Safari is even worse and I haven't even touched Edge yet.
As much as I'd love to have options in the marketplace, standards based compatibility between offerings should be a top line requirement.
[0] https://oj-hn.com
The standards used to be there. Chrome decided they made ad blocking too easy and unilaterally changed the standard. Firefox is still on the standard. Chrome is what deviated, and while performance was improved, that was definitely not the motive.
Nope.
https://github.com/OrangeJuiceExtension/OrangeJuice/blob/5be...
Firefox on iOS still doesn't support extensions or adblocking - something Safari (and other browsers as well) do.
Firefox on iOS isn't really a Firefox because Apple doesn't allow alternative browsers. It's a Safari skin.
Orion on iOS is also a Safari skin and supports extensions
And Brave on iOS has blocking built in to the browser itself instead of like Firefox on Android where you have to trust a 3rd party dev.
To be quite clear, I trust gorhill more than I trust mozilla.
LMFAO. Brave uses uBO's lists and filters, including trusted filters which have much more capabilities with much more risks to your sites' data and they allow that on all other lists too (even uBO only allows their own lists as trusted by default, other lists need to have permissions from users manually). That's how they can block youtube ads, and no they don't code their own filters for youtube ads either. And be assure that they can't check 100% all commits from uBO and other lists either.
If you want to play "no trust to a 3rd party dev", you should not use Brave's adblocker either. Or at least turn off all the lists inside it, and use your own lists. Your security risk is in those stock lists.
It doesn't support WebNFC or WebUSB.
Some folks have already discussed this in sister comments to the one you're responding to, but it's a common enough hn discussion topic that searching will answer beyond that (better than I can regurgitate here.)
> What's wrong with Firefox?
It seems like every thread talking about Firefox always has someone asking that question, so if you search back you should find plenty of reasons. Unfortunately, it’s been my observation that valid and polite criticisms always get downvoted. I don’t understand why. It’s not like downvotes are going to make the problems disappear.
Most of us would like Firefox to succeed, and it’s none of our faults that Mozilla is constantly neglecting it and going off on wild goose projects which get promptly abandoned.
I use Firefox on both Linux and Android for 99% of my web browsing needs. At least for me it's the best browser out there, and doesn't seem neglegted at all.
Good for you. I’m genuinely glad, you should use whatever you like, I don’t care for flame-wars. For me, it lacks several must-haves (I’m not going to waste my time repeating them, history has shown that’s a stupid waste of time and the downvotes on the original comment only prove my point). That’s why we have so many apps, everyone has different needs.
Upvotes are not going to make problems actually relevant to solve.
The question keeps getting asked because people say they have problems. Answers (if any come) tells everyone what the problem is for this one user that raised it.
In aggregate we can all see that the problems are not very real for the vast majority of users.
The biggest problem users actually face with using Firefox is that web devs don’t want to support more than one browser and they have picked Chrome now. Or IT departments have blessed one and only one browser on corporate machines and it is the one most corpoware developers build extensions for.
Chasing web standards is a second order problem and will not make the user experience better in a relevant manner for end users. If web developers want an open web, they have to work to support open browsers.
Yeah the criticism is not invalid, but it is also often half-relevant soapboxing and I would wager that is why it tends to get downvoted.
LMFAO. You web devs just want more tools to fingerprint and track users. When Firefox raises privacy concerns for your spyware tools, you play like victims and say that "Firefox doesn't want better for users". F that.
reddit tab, firefox: 428mb. same tab, chrome: 78mb.
I get 80mb for reddit on firefox.
That number can be down to any number of different factors on reddit itself. Having an autoplay video running, etc.
Firefox often groups tabs from the same site into one process. With large numbers of the same tabs open in both, check the total memory for all firefox processes and all firefox processes. You will likely find firefox actually uses less memory than chrome.
The endless excuses and lies.
It was the same page, both on old.
I will eat the RAM penalty to resist the Chromium hegemon. Grateful to have any alternative!
Memory measurements reported in browsers come with substantial caveats, as measuring "how much memory is this tab using" is fairly nontrivial.
Not saying there isn't a difference, but you'd need to measure (e.g.) a fresh install viewing only one tab with no extensions, etc.
It doesn’t support a lot of video formats that Chrome and Safari have supported for years (h265 is one I think. I’m no expert)
h264 and h265 are patent-encumbered and therefore very expensive and/or dangerous. Patent trolls would rip Mozilla apart and eat all their money. The only reason H.264 works atm is that Cisco sponsors a plugin for that.
H264 patents are finally starting to expire, all the known patents have already expired in Europe.
As for HEVC, that particular licensing trash fire continues to burn bright. VVC had an opportunity to learn from the situation, and decided what they really wanted was a trash fire that burned even brighter.
So, we might be stuck with H264 for a little bit.
I don't event think h265 is widely supported. On Windows you have to pay separately for it
Firefox has had support for h265 for a few months by now, they finally relented.
This "Mozilla is distracted" narrative is a category 5 hurricane of unsubstantiated vibes from people who have no idea what they're talking about.
Some quick hits just from reading recent release announcements from December '25 through April 26:
- Hardware acceleration for faster performance with PDFs - Expanded WebGPU support - Faster page loading with compression dictionaries - Deeper hardware integration for faster video playback on AMD hardware - Better GPU stability and performance on MacOS - Faster local translation
And I'm only picking out bits and pieces. "Web platform" improvements are so abundant that reproducing them from any single release would be a massive wall of text, but for a few examples just from one recent release:
>Service worker support for WebGPU has been added, making it available in all worker contexts. Service workers allow WebGPU to run in the background, which is particularly useful for extensions and other pages that can meaningfully share resources across multiple tabs and time periods.
>Firefox now supports the Iterator.zip() and Iterator.zipKeyed() methods from the joint iteration proposal. This allows zipping together underlying iterators into an iterator over values grouped by position, similar to zip in many other languages.
>Firefox now supports the Trusted Types API, which is primarily aimed at preventing cross-site scripting attacks.
>Firefox now supports the Sanitizer API, which provides new methods for HTML manipulation. The element.setHTML() method enables developers to insert HTML content similarly to element.innerHTML, but without the security vulnerabilities such as cross-site scripting (XSS). A complementary method, document.parseHTML(), is also available for parsing HTML safely.
And on and on it goes with APIs, CSS and so on, and that's every release, and that's still not covering feature requests and cosmetic updates, or the constant security updates.
Guys, this is millions of lines of code and thousands of patches every quarter. While you were reading about AI features or poorly worded terms of service, they studied the blade..er.. they worked on real performance improvements. It should be a scandal that anyone in the comment section gets away with claiming they're not working on anything.
Firefox is still very much a technically excellent browser. My plea is simply to stop taking poison pills from the very companies they should be fighting against in standards body discussions. I'd argue Firefox is "behind" in both _marketshare_ and _features_ largely _because_ said features are steamrolled through community governance bodies by the likes of Google, etc. Mozilla is at the table for these discussions but their hands are tied.
Mozilla's continued existence in recent history has relied on money from their primary competitor to stay in operation. Some have argued that doing seemingly unrelated projects like the one announced today is an effort to buy their freedom as it were. I'm arguing that's a distraction and that something closer to Linux or wiki foundation model would allow them to concentrate their efforts where it makes the most sense, as their current governance model is inherently based on a conflict of interest.
Opera was also a technically excellent browser, and we've seen that that alone is not enough to justify its existence in the long term.
Mozilla is doing exactly what you’re describing. They need revenue to ditch their direct financial ties to Google (and I wonder if they hire those high-salary executives solely in the hope of generating that revenue).
These AI products, along with all previous failed attempts, are just them trying to gain enough revenue to remove that dependency on Google.
And you your point, AI is probably eating search and with it the prospect of search licensing revenue. Not sure yet what paradigms will be most important to the browser experience but it's critical to get in early and make the inevitable early mistakes and work through them.
I truly hope that is the case. I feel they're going about it from all the wrong angles, but I sincerely hope it works out in their favor. Their funding model and governance seem inherently broken and have for a long time...
> I implore ANYONE
I implore ANYONE about to write a similar post to avail themselves of the search bar to not Groundhog Day us. Someone should do a "History of HNers railing ignorantly about Mozilla and Firefox" coffee table book; would link the buy page in my group chats.
I agree that Mozilla is a breath of fresh air, and I am happy to see this extending to AI.
Where exactly do you expect Mozilla to gain revenue from other than non browser projects?
Do you want people to pay to use Firefox?
If by "people" I mean everyone and not just direct users of their products. Something more akin to the Linux or Apache Foundations, including both private sector donations and government grants etc. A DIVERSE set of funding sources, not sharing ad revenue from a direct competitor. Having "people" directly pay to play as it were would never work, as we've seen before in other industries like news, etc.
The private sector has no need for Firefox. Government grants are better spent elsewhere.
Many companies and governments have a vested interest in the web continuing to exist as an open platform and not just a corporate playground controlled by 3 corporations. Without Firefox or something like it, the web becomes a defacto standard at best, largely controlled by Google (and to a lesser extent Apple and even lesser extent Microsoft)
I'm perfectly fine with Mozilla working on other things as long as those things are profitable or at least self-funded. As long as they are not leeching donated resources from Firefox or Thunderbird, I don't see a problem. However, I wish I had some kind of assurance that the money I donate to Mozilla would go to Firefox and not some other project like this.
Thunderbolt was funded from a grant, not donations.
https://github.com/thunderbird/thunderbolt/blob/main/docs/fa...
I think the rest of that line is really kind of important:
> Thunderbolt is funded through a grant from Mozilla.
Is there any way that that's not taking dollars out of the same organization that's funding Firefox or thunderbird?
No
They (like many) are afraid to become svn as the world is apparently taken over by git. Well-maintained but irrelevant.
The Mozilla employees are just Google plants. The web standards are now controlled by WHATWG who are all members of Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Mozilla and they are not interested in pushing standards forward or making browser improvements. They are only interested in ensuring entrenchment for their corporations. That’s why they created WHATWG. There is nothing any non-compromised Mozilla employee can do. The ship has sunk. Either someone hard forks Firefox or we continue down the current road.
I agreed with these posts a couple years ago but for the past year there have been a lot of meaningful improvements in Firefox.
It has been my daily driver off and on again across the years since the Netscape code was open sourced and Mozilla as an organization was founded. It's a fantastic browser, but Chrome now owns the lionshare of the market as Firefox plays catch-up instead of leading like it did in the past. Memory isolation, etc never got the resourcing it needed to complete until it was apparently too late.
I see Firefox now as the new Opera, a technically good browser making dubious extensions that no one asked for until it dies a slow, spiraling death. My plea is simply to not go down that road any further...
I'm going to sound crazy, and I've said this on HN before, but I wish CloudFlare or someone who would truly appreciate the effort and investment, would buy out Mozilla and have them oxidizing the browser again. Firefox was at its best when they were going through that effort, and since they put a pause on it, Firefox has been so "meh" for many years now, and embedding things nobody asked for. A faster fully oxidized browser on the other hand would be loved by many.
I feel dumb, but what does oxidized mean in this context?
migrate to rust.
Have you donated to the Mozilla Foundation so they can ditch financial ties with Google?
I'd gladly setup a recurring donation if I knew it was going to the areas in question and NOT to separate grants to the likes of this product just announced
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Mozilla should not be a business, full stop.
The fact that is being run like one, albeit poorly is exactly the problem.
I don't think you realize the irony in calling my post childish here. "C'mon" I guess?
Maybe they shouldn't be, but they are. As a for profit corporation with employees they are very much a business not just "run like one"
How would Mozilla replace the $500M a year from Google to not be a business?
Myself and I believe many others are willing to put money where our mouths are for an organization leading by example with regards to stewardship, much as this org has done in the past prior, instead of all these continued distractions, and ESPECIALLY if they stop swallowing this poisonous "donation" from Google. The fact that they do makes me wary of sending them a single penny. They'll just keep doing shit like they have been in recent years...
I can understand where you're coming from, but this seems a little misguided. Are you personally trying to pledge at least 1 full devs salary to Mozilla in exchange for less AI products? At the end of the day this really comes down to the money. If you want Mozilla to do the things you say you want from them, they need more than donations. Good will doesn't build a browser, that shit's expensive. It's like you're asking for a games studio to just give you an MMO out of the goodness of their heart for a few scraps from people who support their mission. The world doesn't work that way, without products like these I imagine Mozilla wouldn't be around much longer in the way you describe considering most of their salaries are paid directly by that 'poison' you describe.
The foundation never gets more than 10M / year in donations. You really think their donation rate could possibly go up by more than 50x just by cutting ties with Google?
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Yeah, you don't speak for me.
Fair enough.
oh mozilla, why don't you just focus on Firefox. That is all we want.
People "want" a lot of contradictory things. People "want" them to be less financially reliant on Google, while also "focusing" on a browser in a market that is entirely commoditized and subsidized by 3 of the 10 largest companies in the world - and having a wholly implementation independent browser engine when it's so massively difficult and capital intensive that even Microsoft gave up on it.
I want them to actively seek foreign sovereign tech funding which come with stipulations that commit Mozilla to certain levels of privacy and anonymity.
I want them to go cap-in-hand to other countries and say "if you don't fund us then you are letting the US and surveillance capitalism get between your citizens and their government" and "do you really know what Chrome is doing with your data?"
I don't want to pretend they are simply part of a browser marketplace, but rather have them realize they are part of a civil rights effort, with powerful non-market forces they can ally with.
And I want those governments to commit to progressive enhancement guidelines like https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/technology/using-progressi... so new alternatives like Ladybird can start, and further require their agencies to test on a Firefox branch with no AI, no location tracking, full ad-blocking, etc. because while the market is free to ignore certain non-profitable users, a government should not be allowed to ignore some of its citizens.
I don't see a contradiction there.
I don't think these are contradictory, you're listing what many have wanted all along. There are funding models that would support exactly the above.
Microsoft stopped building their own browser engine because it didn't suit their business needs and they could still get a controlling share with significantly less effort by recycling webkit/blink for the umpteenth time. That makes total sense for them. Mozilla has, in the past, guided and pushed back on corporate interests.
Today, a large portion of the web now stands, built from the bones of the original khtml project, which was unceremoniously made by a handful of volunteers on the KDE project. Let's not pretend a rendering engine it's an entirely _impossible_ task. It is a LOT of work, and I laud the effortor of the few tireless individuals that make it their work, but in the end it's another piece of software, not unlike an OS. The history goes:
KHTML -> WebKit -> Blink
Meanwhile:
Mosaic -> Netscape -> Gecko
Maybe we find maintaining the second lineage is too great a burden and the web just becomes a defacto standard, guided entirely by 3 corporations. It's not what we want, but I guess at this point it's probably what we deserve.
Having the best browser should be Mozilla's first priority.
Investing on AI is not going to make them less financially reliant on Google.
This is from MZLA Technologies, so is a sister product to Thunderbird rather than Firefox.
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I agree with you, there are 1,000 different chat apps and just one Firefox. And the world needs Firefox more than it knows.
It looks like they might want to get into hosting/selling services to users on this.
From the FAQ:
> Is there going to be a hosted version if I don't want to deploy it myself? > Yes, we are planning to launch Thunderbolt for regular users but we do not have a release date yet.
There is "only one Firefox" but Firefox exists in a market that is not just commoditized, but subsidized to the tune of billions by 3 of the 10 largest companies in the world.
The world may need Firefox but it's funny how people complain about Mozilla's dependence on Google while also complaining about every attempt to become more financially independent from Google.
They could start getting some of that goodwill back by not paying their CEO a multi-million dollar salary and opening donations to actually help fund Firefox.
Frankly, https://opencollective.com/servo is a better place to donate by now.
The anti-trust lawsuits with Google have Mozilla realizing they can't just be a company kept afloat by Google. Mozilla's priorities have been pretty complacent, basically just maintaining Firefox, sometimes Thunderbird, and a couple side services that have little financial incentives.
The current state of Mozilla is pretty odd since they rebranded to make it more apparent they're a non-profit, while also attempting to become more profitable pushing out new products and services.
For a lot of things, I'm glad they don't. A strict focus on just a web browser years ago would mean we never get rust for instance.
No, email that supports open standards/protocols is really important right now where many email services are trying force IMAP to retire.
Mozilla needs money to support the development of Firefox (and the payroll of its high-salary executives).
For now, they mainly rely on Google for that money. Google pays them to avoid antitrust cases, to show the courts that they are not a monopoly and that "alternatives" exist. For example, the DOJ once proposed that Google be forced to sell off Chrome.
However, if another entity has control over your budget, they also have control over your product. If Firefox becomes "too good" to be a true competitor in the consumer space, the funding might be reduced or even cut off.
Creating a new source of revenue allows Mozilla to improve Firefox even beyond the point Google feels "comfortable" with.
Mozilla could stop doing everything else and slow burn their existing $1B into developer salaries over the next decade. They are actively choosing not to.
And then what? Just go bankrupt after a decade? That's entirely unsustainable.
Even worse, they would go bankrupt after like 2-3 years. And almost no serious non-profit has an endowment that can fund them in perpetuity. They are almost always firewalls that buy time/safety in response to crises (e.g. financial crisis or covid), meant to run in parallel with ongoing revenue that comes in regularly.
It's great if you can get your endowment so big you never have to worry about revenue but outside of, say, elite universities or middle eastern sovereign wealth funds that rarely happens.
1. It's unfair to assume that their primary funding source stops in one scenario and not in the other.
2. 1 billion dollars is a lot of money. Even the interest off it is huge.
3. 10 years is a very long time in tech.
4. I would greatly prefer the money Mozilla earned due to Firefox being a thing was put into developing Firefox, yes. The current Mozilla organization seems to be a mechanism for providing third homes for the executives, starting projects nobody wanted them to start, sullying the Firefox brand with them, and then abandoning them. There's a VC cancer infesting the supposed "free software community" called Mozilla.
>1. It's unfair to assume that their primary funding source stops in one scenario and not in the other.
Wait, what? I thought your whole premise from one comment ago was that they "stop doing everything" and exclusively slow burn away their endowment. They're dead by 2029 if they do that.
If they don't do that, then you're just talking about how they currently operate.
The money paid by Google so Chrome does not look like a monopoly is earned by Firefox and specifically for Firefox to exists as a viable-enough competitor. If anything, maintaining Firefox properly is the branch that earns that money.
Mozilla should stop doing all these side quests -- look at their track record! -- and they should get rid of the fat executive layer. They should transparently report what they're using their money, instead of saying they burn hundreds of millions of dollars in "software development" while firing the Servo developers.
Actually, it makes much more sense if Google pays Mozilla to maintain an alternative that never becomes truly competitive.
I don't think actual competition benefits Google in a commercial sense. If we considered the situation purely rationally, Google's most logical decision would be to use their budget as leverage, threatening off the books to prevent any strategy that might make Firefox "viable again", under the assumption that Google focused primarily on market share, while Mozilla focused purely on survival.
Yes, Google definitely has an incentive to keep Firefox inferior. If it became a real competition, that money flow would likely stop.
However, if Firefox drops to ~0% usage, it will definitely stop, as that ruins Google's monopoly defense, which is the motivation for it! Firefox usage is supposedly already as low as 2.33%.
Why is this related to Firefox?
It's not. Mozilla has been more than Firefox for a long time.
To be clear, it's not from the Mozilla Corporation (which develops Firefox), it's from MZLA Technologies (which develops Thunderbird). Both bodies are under the Mozilla Foundation.
RIP Firefox OS
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By that logic wouldn’t it be pretty much over for Mac OS as well?
https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share
Firefox started at 0% when IE was more dominant than Chrome is today. Nothing is certain.
Firefox hit a peak of 32% and has fallen ever since. Effectively Firefox crashed at the same time IE did, and I can’t see in what way Mozilla ever attempted to recover.
Now correlate that with when the organization was hijacked by its management into no longer being interested in making a good browser.
What the heck are you talking about? This is from the Thunderbird group not the firefox group...
I thought Mozilla was going to join the Thunderbolt standard and/or making some tool for it until I clicked the link haha. Very interesting name choice
Well, see, one is Thunderbolt io, and the other is Thunderbolt.io.
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I also love that it's a .io domain. Just to maximize the chance that you'll confuse Thunderbolt dot io with Thunderbolt the I/O standard.
Good thing they didn't name this Unity or Proton. We are seriously running out of names for applications and services, ar we?
We're not, but companies are not courageous enough to explore new names.
I've already used up "cum" btw, so you're not allowed to name your product that.
So this is only for organizations and not for individuals? The Get Started button goes to a form where it wants to know how they can help your organization. I didn’t see any other link to the source code or documentation. If whoever created this site sees this comment, please clear up the above questions and observations.
I believe they're anticipating self-hosters to deploy directly from their Github documentation.
The FAQs in Github also imply that a hosted deployment for single users is on their roadmap, but not prioritized. - https://github.com/thunderbird/thunderbolt/blob/main/docs/fa...
For those looking for mobile support connecting to remote MCP servers, I maintain a source-available chat app that does exactly that (uses OpenRouter for inference): https://benkaiser.github.io/joey-mcp-client/
Wow this is a confusing name.
At a glance it looks identical to Mozilla Thunderbird, but has nothing in common.
And then of course it's also the same as a well-known hardware interface.
I know it's hard to come up with names and pretty much everything is used by something else, but this seems particularly bad.
>And then of course it's also the same as a well-known hardware interface.
The cherry on top is that the domain is thunderbolt.IO. No other TLDs to pick from?
I mean there's already an established theme... how hard can it be?
Fire-fox
Thunder-bird
River-wolf
Stone-raven
....
Oh that's really good. You're right, something like Riverwolf would fit their branding much more consistently. Just as long as it's not Bikepelican, I'll be happy...
Curious name choice, that's clearly encumbered by other trademarks.
Also, my impression is: yay another AI front-end. What does this one differently that the other thirteen in a dozen don't?
> What does this one differently that the other thirteen in a dozen don't?
Mozilla's a lot more trustworthy with privacy and data, and they're unlikely to sell the project to someone who only wants to stuff it full of malware/adware/crypto stuff - or do it themselves.
I'm somewhat a fan of Mozilla, but their weak governance with regards to actual plans for the future, a couple of questionable partnerships, and the graveyard of products makes it hard to trust based on a 15+ year-old reputation. Would love to see where Mozilla has meaningfully contributed to the modern tech space (things we all actually use, not Mozilla versions of more popular apps/tools)
But despite that, Mozilla is still far more trustworthy than virtually everybody else. Who would you trust more? I imagine it's a very short list. Which is a sad state of affairs.
I think it's also telling that when asked for Mozilla's contributions, the only reply was "but everyone else is worse!".
>Who would you trust more?
Nobody I'd mention on Hacker News!
I worked in Mozilla previously for like 5-6 years. I think the supporter of Mozilla is a lot more trustworthy with privacy and data, but not Mozilla itself... I think they claiming that they do this and do that, but actually speak louder than action. My personal takes from the upper management is also not that good.
If you were not working with Mozilla Asian area, you know far too less. They had a browser in China that redirect to different website for profit before every connection and some affiliation. By doing so, is it privacy or not? Oh, look at Mozilla Japan volunteers, they shut everything up because things went wrong.
This Mozilla?[1] The company whose 85% of revenue depends on an adtech giant?
They're certainly doing better than others in this space, but their track record does not inspire confidence for anyone concerned about their privacy and data.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla#Controversies
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Coughing baby vs. atom bomb
that is the firefox groupn not thunderbird. Diff bro
Hmyeah but many others like openwebui are self-hosted and open-source so it's not really like they are untrustworthy.
How much of that privacy matters when you're connecting it to third-party agents/models?
Yeah. Mozilla openly state that they DO sell your data.
Are they allowed to reuse Thunderbolt when it's already taken in the same industry?
They have enough money for a legal dept. so I imagine so. But it's a confusing choice IMO. Not just because thunderbolt but also because thunderbird as someone else pointed out. But maybe they are trying to make thunder their 'thing', like apple puts an 'i' in front of everything?
Coming soon the browser rebrand to Thunderfox! :)
Very happy to update to Thunderfox.
...and also differs in just three characters from another Mozilla product.
"I'm using Mozilla Thunderbolt."
"Huh, do you mean Thunderbird?"
"No, Thunderbolt!"
The name is strange. They had a fox and a bird, used fire and thunder. The logical next would be Earthworm or watervole.
BrimstoneOctopus.
Spacemonkey.
Seamonkey exists.
Some confusion I see here is lots of people seem to not know that MZLA who makes Thunderbird and Mozilla Corporation who make firefox are separate entities in the Mozilla Foundation umbrella. This Thunderbolt is a MZLA product... so ya
Looked at the headline, no prior knowledge of this. "New Mozilla product, okay. Must be... something AI?"
click
"Ah, of course it is."
I swear there are like 10 different Thunderbolts. Why reuse such a common name?
Do trademarks not matter anymore? The name and logo are lawsuits just waiting to happen.
Yesterday I actually read the docs on Open WebUI. It’s pretty impressive all the features it supports. I will give thunderbolt a look but I’m seriously considering doubling down on Open WebUI. The only thing I don’t like about their features are that tools and functions can’t be offloaded to external compute, it runs on the same machine.
If this wouldn't be under Mozilla/Thunderbird Org on Github, I would have considered this to be fake. It looks very unsubstantial ...
This was the MOST confusing release I've seen in years.
Okay, it took me some time that the mail client is called "ThunderBIRD", not the BOLT. Not that I've used it much. But why the logo in github still shows TunderBIRD?
It looks like Mozilla is trying to catch the band wagon for no particular reason. They don't need it AT ALL. But they just jumped in along for a ride.
Mozilla Thunderbolt?
Why not "Phyrefox"?
They are so incompetent, they could not even come up with a name sufficiently different from their own product.
Think of it as a product similar to Thunderbird, emailing/chatting with a computer instead of a person. But I agree the name should have been sufficiently different. Thunderbolt would have been a great name for an email server.
What's next, iPads and iPods?
I'm gonna deploy it on my machine and try it! Better option than using ChatGPT or Claude.
Chrome on Linux is ~1.47 times faster than Firefox on the Jetstream 3 benchmark as recently reported by Phoronix[0]. That's how we want you to spend the money Mozilla, keeping up with your well-funded rival Google, and making it so we don't end up with a browser monoculture. These sorts of distractions just piss me off, and are not part of your core mission.
[0]: https://www.phoronix.com/review/firefox-chrome-2026
I remember that Firefox is orders of magnitude more performant in css processing, especially for complex documents with many elements. Can't comment on the javascipt interpeter, so I assume firefox is losing points somewhere else outside the screen painting engine.
Because of the Servo people that got laid off!
https://github.com/servo/stylo
Firefox has many weaknesses, but I never once thought “man, that thing is slow”. It isn’t, and chasing benchmark numbers is a waste of effort. A better security model or deeper customizability would be far more valuable.
The fact it's that for a normal usage, Firefox with uBlock Origin it's faster that Chrome without ad blocking. On Android this is especially noticeable.
I wonder how much slower Firefox would have to be to invalidate the mental health gain not imagining every single keystroke going directly to Sundar.
And regarding (memory) performance, chromium has the "memory saver" settings for unloading tabs. I don't understand why mozilla thinks its acceptable to require users unload tabs manually. Who even does that?
I use the about:memory tab whenever I need to clear some memory. However, it can't unload tabs.
Ladybird soon™
Not nearly soon enough. But yes, there is hope. Far away hope, but still.
Why is this related to Firefox?
Because Mozilla is wasting money on something other than their core product, once again.
Thunderbird is under MZLA Technologies Corporation, their money and resources are unrelated to Mozilla Corporation, who pays money for their Firefox.
I’m not sure if it’s fair to describe a "wholly owned subsidiary" as unrelated.
> Thunderbolt is funded through a dedicated investment from Mozilla and is being developed by a separate team focused on enterprise AI products, distinct from Thunderbird’s donation-supported consumer product work.
Emphasis mine.
Yes, it's unrelated. Each one has its own resources and roadmaps. They are totally not dependent on each other. Thunderbird and its roadmaps/projects are not affected by Firefox' earnings at all. One's development doesn't affect the others.
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All I see is effort that could have been spent improving the rest of Mozilla's products.
Why does everything AI related feel the need to just take over names and words with longstanding well-established meanings already in common use?
Like, seriously, this is like calling your AI model NVME or Northbridge or something. Insanity.
I first thought "Fine, I'll stop using Thundebird(which I kinda already did, using Betterbird)." But it's Thunder_bolt_? What's with this name?
Ladybird can't release soon enough, can't wait to abandon this sinking corrupt ship. I say that as a Firefox user since beta, both on PC and mobile.
Some feedback: It would be useful to explain what you do differently on your website.
Curious how this compares to open-webui on the web, for example.
The benchmark numbers are interesting — would love to see how it performs with more realistic workloads.
I tried to run it on my machine, and the release artifacts are missing entirely. Not going to spend time building from source.
I think this is a smart move, and if Mozilla were the same as 10 years ago, I'd have hope for something good.
Lots of negative posts here, who presume to speak for others. I, for one, welcome new entrants especially since they're under the Mozilla umbrella. This client could use the passwords and cookies stored in Firefox. And I'd trust it too, unlike other clients.
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Hi, I'm on team that worked on this. No it's not vibe coded. We do pretty intense code review of every PR. It looks like the number you're seeing is including lock files and artifacts that are not part of the core coverage.
Fair enough if it’s not vibe coded, I’ll take your word for it. Code review seems like it’s mostly bots (Claude, Cursor, Greptile) from the PRs I looked at?
Nevertheless, AI use is not what really stood out to me. It’s that it’s SO MUCH CODE. I have no idea how you guys maintain or reason about the quality or security of something like this. Good luck, I guess.
Ah yeah, after accusing others that they vibe-code without proofs, no apology and steering the accusations to other things?
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
"Please don't fulminate."
"Don't be curmudgeonly. Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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Please don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only makes things worse.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: you've unfortunately been breaking the site guidelines repeatedly. For example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47798555 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47672260. That last one was particularly bad! Please don't do that!
>120k LoC of probably largely vibecoded nonsense for a window with a text box and a button that lets you send and receive some data over a HTTP API.
"I will make loads of assumptions without checking so that I can invent reasons to get mad"
Note that about 30,000 of those lines are JSON files for localization and testing, as one example.
How much UI text does this thing have that it needs thousands of lines of localization? Where are these files?
Especially curious because I see a whole lot of hardcoded english text in there…
Are you arguing that 90k LoC for a window with a text box and an overengineered textarea tag is somehow more acceptable than 120k?
22,056 is not about 30,000. Per scc:
Regarding "loads of assumptions," it's hard to tell how much of this is vibecoded slop (definitely non-zero looking at the commit log), but I don't think it's that outrageous to claim 87k sloc is too much for a textbox and an API wrapper.That's still an immense amount of code for a chat interface essentially consisting of a text box and a button, which any OS (mobile or desktop) can usually throw up in a few lines of code.
Maybe you wouldn't be so tired if you didn't make assumptions of things to be mad about
On the bright side - it doesn't load without javascript ...in Firefox...
I had to check the comments here to even see what this product was for that reason.
What fatigues you about this observation?
Would recommend exercise
Wait what ? Did you include libraries imported by NPM in this count ?
I don’t think so. I just used a public GitHub LoC counting tool directly on the repo, there are a few.
https://ghloc.vercel.app/thunderbird/thunderbolt?branch=main claims 141k and most of it is Typescript.
I imagine that would bump that number to milions.
I just checked one old take home task in Angular I did last year and the total number of lines is over five million over 35k+ files.
Like any new Mozilla initiative, this will not exist in a year.
Turns out chat apps are pretty easy to build I guess.
Someone explain to me why this product is unique. If Mozilla never came out with it, does that mean businesses are stuck with using cloud-based AI? C'mon. There's a lot of products that already offer local-AI. What am I missing?
Naming things is really not that hard
Vibe-named
WTF is that? Wasn't MZLA supposed to be the home of Thunderbird project, and now they are mixing that with some unrelated bullshit?
Thought "hey this better not be AI". Yes it's AI.
Just keep making a decent browser and stop getting distracted on shit.
It's weird that they would name it like thunderbird
Is it just me or is this really bad copy? The only clue as to what this is on the landing page is the background of the product image. And I also have to sign up to find out anything else about it.
No thanks.
RIP Mozilla. I can't even with this nonsense…truly a shame considering I once admired this organization and the principles it stood for.
Thank god for the Ladybird project
Yikes.
Could Mozilla hand over firefox to a new team please? It is clear they are wasting time and energy on things nobody wanted - who wants Mozilla-AI please? I mean, seriously?
For people who don't think Mozilla wants to make firefox competitive again; and for those who also don't think ladybird will become a viable alternative one day (that's for the future, I have no crystal ball, I am just pointing at one possibility here). Perhaps we could get more momentum when someone else other than Mozilla handles firefox.
Why is this related to Firefox?
Because Firefox is the only thing that lends Mozilla any credibility.
No. Thunderbird has its own merits and they work without Firefox. Mozilla has credibilities in e-mail because of Thunderbird. This topic has 0 relations to Firefox.
>Thunderbird has its own merits and they work without Firefox.
Fair enough, I guess. I stand corrected.
No way they really named it thunderbolt. I mean. Seriously? What is next Mozilla USB-C vibeslop?
Aw, another AI thing. I was hoping this was their email service.
that is in beta
there seems to be a significant disconnect between the claims in this press release / blog post and the actual reality if you look at the GitHub repo.
starting from the very first words of the announcement:
> Open-source and self-hostable
meanwhile, the readme [0] has a caveat, added today, about how it's only kinda-sorta self-hostable:
> While we eventually plan to make Thunderbolt fully offline-first, it currently depends on authentication and search functionality (though you can disable search on the integrations screen in the app). You can deploy your own backend with Docker and sign up in order to test it locally.
and if you follow the link to the self-hosting instructions [1] there's another caveat that was added today:
> Under active development — not production ready. Thunderbolt is currently undergoing a security audit and preparing for enterprise production readiness. These deployment paths are provided for evaluation and early testing. Do not use in production environments.
don't tell me it's self-hostable if what you really mean is "you can run it locally for testing".
meanwhile, scroll a bit farther down in the announcement:
> Work seamlessly across devices with native applications for Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, and Android
which is repeated on the GitHub readme:
> Available on all major desktop and mobile platforms: web, iOS, Android, Mac, Linux, and Windows.
but as pointed out in [2] this is just flat-out incorrect - there are no release artifacts published, for any platform.
come on Mozilla, you need to be better than this. you have to know your target market is engineers and tech-savvy people who see through this sort of marketing fluff.
if you want to publish an announcement saying "we're working on a thing that will eventually do X, Y, and Z" then that's great.
if you want to release something that does X, Y, and Z, that's great too.
but don't over-promise and under-deliver. don't make an announcement that this thing can do X, Y, and Z and then "clarify" that the plan is to eventually do X, Y, and Z.
0: https://github.com/thunderbird/thunderbolt?tab=readme-ov-fil...
1: https://github.com/thunderbird/thunderbolt/blob/main/deploy/...
2: https://github.com/thunderbird/thunderbolt/issues/611
"Mozilla Bubble" Building things no one wants.
Some of us are out here still waiting for Firefox relay “premium” to launch and provide disposable mobile numbers like they do email addresses.. but product has for some reason been stuck on “join waiting list” for what feels like an absolute age.
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Watefox, Librewolf have both plucked out all unnecessary stuff Mozilla added over the years. Both are good but Librewolf comes with history and cache disabled by default which may be bit surprising.
Floorp comes with additional custom interface features, workspaces (tabs grouping) and mouse gestures. And bit better profiles feature - Mozilla decided to redo it recently which lead to some problems.
Mullvad has build in VPN, DoH and proxy as an extension, and comes with uBo and NoScript.
There's Zen browser that has a quite uncommon UI, and obscure Pale Moon that IIRC still tries to provide old XUL/XPCOM extensions - which often leads to pages rendering issues.
A tip for Librewolf: you can easily toggle permanent cookie storage for a site through the "Always store cookies/data for this site" option in the shield button menu on the URL bar. This is very convenient compared to vanilla Firefox where you have to add exceptions through the settings.
What even is this? A chat frontend to arbitrary model providers on the backend - I guess that's sort of useful not to have to build yourself but it doesn't feel like the amazing thing they're trying to hype. Some of the features seem a bit weird to me too - like end-to-end encryption? There isn't a server intermediary, so you already have that with TLS to the model provider.
Yeah it seems similar to Gemini Enterprise. There you can deploy "apps" (basically front-ends) on top of the LLM that come pre-configured with plugins to access Google sheets, Databases, your Jira boards, etc.
So all this is doing is adding context for the LLM and some persistence.
I have yet to see a compelling use case for Gemini Enterprise at my company but we're still experimenting with it.
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Did I seriously click on a Mozilla product and see AI? You guys at Mozilla read the Internet right?
Doesn’t this have to be done under another name to prevent massive company-killing pushback?
If I may, Mozilla, you shouldn't release half-ass products that looks vibe coded like this, even the website looks like it took 30min to do with Claude