Firefox Is Fine. The People Running It Are Not

Opinion Dominance does not equal importance, nor is dominance the same as relevance. The snag at Mozilla is a management layer that doesn’t appear to understand what works for its product nor which parts of it matter most to users.

It is very rare for an article on The Register to cause friends of mine to contact me and anxiously ask if they should change their choice of tech, but SJVN’s recent column, “Firefox is dead to me,” did it.

Firefox is dead to me – and I’m not the only one who is fed up

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I am not here to shoot the messenger. Steven’s core point is correct. Firefox is in a bit of a mess – but, seriously, not such a bad mess. You’re still better off with it – or one of its forks, because this is FOSS – than pretty much any of the alternatives.

Like many things, unfortunately, much of computing is run on feelings, tradition, and group loyalties, when it should use facts, evidence, and hard numbers. Don’t bother saying Firefox is getting slower. It’s not. It’s faster than it has been in years. Phoronix, the go-to site for benchmarks on FOSS stuff, just benchmarked 21 versions, and from late 2023 to now, Firefox has steadily got faster and faster.

GNOME Shell is built in JavaScript. As we detailed when GNOME turned 25, that JavaScript is executed by GJS, which uses the Mozilla JS runtime. Regular readers will have spotted that The Reg FOSS desk is not a big fan of GNOME, but when we looked at version 48, we commented that it felt like it was the fastest version in years.

Don’t blame the app, and don’t even blame the programmers. That is, the ones who still have jobs, after years of engineer layoffs. Don’t even blame the whole organization – blame the management. Steven himself has pointed this out before, early in 2024. So have I. In 2023, I said that Mozilla was asleep at the wheel.

Mozilla has missed so many boats that it’s not even funny to catalog them, but sadly, I must.

Last year, the Stack Overflow survey said:

Rust was developed at Mozilla. Mozilla axed it. In 2020, it laid off the whole team.

As I reported back in 2023, the Servo browser engine is doing well. Early this year, its own figures show strong continued upticks in interest since Igalia took over development. You guessed it – Mozilla also gave Servo the boot in 2020.

It sort of had to. Servo is written in Rust, and Mozilla axed the Rust team, so that meant bye-bye Servo. It adds up in a demented sort of way, if someone were trying to work out the worst possible directions to turn. As the web gets bigger than ever, as a global pandemic means everyone’s working from home and shopping remotely, obviously the oldest browser engine maker should deep-six its next-gen browser engine. Instead, it tried to sell a VPN.

2020 is the same year Cathay Capital invested $50 million into KaiOStech, saying it would help bring the next billion people online. As The Register reported in 2018, KaiOS is Boot2Gecko, Mozilla’s FirefoxOS rebranded. Mozilla killed its own version in 2015.

Most of the web runs on advertising, as it has for 20-plus years. And yes, that does include The Reg, although we try to keep them from being too brash. We writers face lots of ads, too, and that’s why more and more of us run ad-blockers, in the UK and the US. El Reg even tries to help you do it.

You might think Mozilla would, say, buy and integrate an ad-blocker. Acquiring ad-blocking companies has been a thing for a decade. Other browsers integrate ad-blocking, and you don’t even need something controversial like Brave – for instance, Vivaldi has offered it for years. Many of the team behind Vivaldi previously made Opera, and it blocked ads too. (Soon afterwards, the company sold it to a Chinese group.)

But no. Instead, Mozilla goes and buys an ad firm and then removes its promise not to sell your data. Once again, it’s as if the leadership were actively trying to work out the worst direction to turn.

Mozilla is, sadly, far from alone in having faltering leadership. Around the industry, tech execs who couldn’t tell an LLM bot from an MLM scheme if their lives depended on it are investing in AI. It’s not just cool, it’s a cult now. This isn’t hyperbole. The phenomenon has a name – it’s called TESCREAL, and it is without exaggeration on its way to becoming a religion.

All this, of course, despite the facts that AI makes PCs less productive, it doesn’t help enterprises, and it doesn’t do its job. The customers are not keen and the staffers are not keen. Service centers are giving up on it, and across the industry, adoption is stalling.

Mozilla’s leadership is directionless and flailing because it’s never had to do, or be, anything else. It’s never needed to know how to make a profit, because it never had to make a profit.

Whither Mozilla? Oh, it built a bot into its docs server in 2023, then promptly had to turn it off again. Its chief product officer was quite gung-ho about AI in early 2024. He left the company soon afterwards, and later alleged he was pushed out.

In 2024, Mozilla made more layoffs and announced it would invest in open source AI. This year, Mozilla finally integrated a vertical tab bar into Firefox and, you guessed it, built an AI chatbot into it. You can, at least, turn it off.

It’s no longer the fault of long-term CEO Mitchell Baker, she of the six-million-bucks salary. She took the cash and left in February 2024. After the February 2024 layoffs that went with the “open source AI” announcement, in November, new boss Laura Chambers laid off another third of the staff, but somehow found the money to hire new executives.

Money is the problem. Not too little, but too much. Where there’s wealth, there’s a natural human desire to make more wealth. Ever since Firefox 1.0 in 2004, Firefox has never had to compete. It’s been attached like a mosquito to an artery to the Google cash firehose. The Reg noted it in 2007, and it made more the next year. We were dubious when Firefox turned five.

And as for that money — remember back in 2018? That’s when Google dropped “Don’t be evil” as its motto.

Mozilla’s leadership is directionless and flailing because it’s never had to do, or be, anything else. It’s never needed to know how to make a profit, because it never had to make a profit. It’s no wonder it has no real direction or vision or clue: it never needed them. It’s role-playing being a business.

Like we said, don’t blame the app. You’re still better off with Firefox or a fork such as Waterfox. Chrome even snoops on you when in incognito mode, and as we warned you, Google removed the APIs ad-blocker extensions used. You still get better ad-blocking in Firefox.

We can point at what we’d like to see, sure. Did you know there’s already a special developer’s edition? No web designer is building on Firefox first any more. We’re lucky if they even test on it. All the functionality attached to Firefox’s “Browser tools” sub-menu should be unceremoniously ripped out, banished to the developer’s edition.

Stop copying Chrome. The Australis theme in 2013 is what drove the Pale Moon project to fork the code. The all-in-one Seamonkey project still exists, too. We occasionally use its WYSIWYG HTML editor – even today, there’s nothing else like it. It used to be official. Maybe it should be again.

The Pidgin cross-platform chat app is working on a major new version. Good for them, but it will probably drop all its old connectors. They work via LibPurple, which is still in active maintenance, unlike the Mozilla wrapper InstantBird. (There used to be a Mozilla music player, too, Songbird. That’s long dead, as is its fork, Nightingale.)

Mozilla can press on with independent subprojects such as Thunderbird owners MZLA Technologies Corporation. The popular Electron framework is based on Chromium. It’s too late to change that, even if maybe Servo may one day offer an alternative. But if Thunderbird sucked in Libpurple, it wouldn’t matter if Slack and Teams and so on used Electron, as Thunderbird could talk to the servers directly.

But pointing at what we’d like to see is attempting to treat the symptoms and not the disease. Is there a way to encourage Mozilla to be an organized, focused, professional business, with eyes keenly set on a clearly defined goal? Perhaps that’s the wrong question. Perhaps that shouldn’t be the goal at all. For all that the Linux business is huge, no company develops the kernel. They all cooperate on it. The Linux Foundation funds it, but doesn’t really guide it.

One observer has been spectating and commentating on Mozilla since before it was a foundation – one of its original co-developers, Jamie Zawinksi. He has been accurately cataloging Mozilla’s failings for years. In 2022, he called it out for accepting cryptocurrency donations (or Dunning-Krugerrands, as he calls them). In 2023, he attacked Mozilla’s first AI move as well as its executive remuneration. In early 2024, he criticized its formation of an investment arm. In mid-2024, he pointed out its “Original Sin” of adopting digital rights management. And in late 2024, its move to selling ads.

Zawinski has repeatedly said:

Perhaps this is the only viable resolution.

Mozilla, for all its many failings, has invented a lot of amazing tech, from Rust to Servo to the leading budget phone OS. It shouldn’t be trying to capitalize on this stuff. Maybe encourage it to have semi-independent spinoffs, such as Thunderbird, and as KaiOS ought to be, and as Rust could have been.

But Zawinski has the only clear vision and solution we’ve seen yet. Perhaps he’s right, and Mozilla should be a nonprofit, working to fund the one independent, non-vendor-driven, standards-compliant browser engine. ®

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