The only AI thing Mozilla added that I thought was genuinely useful, was on device language translation. Being able to read foreign language pages without feeding your browsing history into Google Translate is pretty cool.

But that's the only thing I've liked, and they keep killing projects that were genuinely useful and worth paying for (Pocket, Firefox Send).

> Mozilla seems to be going down a lot of rather futile side-paths, if you know what I mean

This has a been a pattern for Mozilla for a long time. I think part of the reason reason is they are trying to find a way to make money that isn't dependent on a search deal with Google. But most of their attempts end up not being something people actually want and/or what they make isn't actually good enough to draw people. But even when they make something decent, like Lockwise and Send, they seem to lose interest and give it up.

> Nobody asked for this? Just make Firefox a better browser, work on the web standards I guess, do the things people actually need.

That's what I wish they would do too. But, realistically, that stuff doesn't actually pay the bills. How many Firefox users actually pay for it? So I'm not surprised that they're thrashing around trying to find some way to make money beyond Google paying them for the search bar.

Mozilla has grown very fat and lazy over the past decade+ of receiving the big checks from Google, very little of what they do is actually trying to compete in the market, and most of it is "let's throw something at the wall and see if it sticks and then lets go out for a 3 hour lunch and have mimmoas on our bloated middle manager salaries"

> AI features don't seem to be improving the web experience

Elaborate? it's done nothing but ruin the internet so far. Slop content, search engines are unusable, and now the lowest common denominator simply chatbots a half-baked website and thinks it's good when it isn't.

>Just make Firefox a better browser, work on the web standards I guess, do the things people actually need.

This accusation seriously has to stop. They're constantly pushing performance improvements (most recently they've made their PDF viewer more efficient and found some efficiencies with images), they push millions of lines of new code every year on a rapid release cycle with an extremely rapid release cadence throughout the year in the release notes for every updated version go deep on the weeds for everything from CSS fixes to performance improvements to bug fixes and so on.

I at least understand the accusation that a bunch of their side projects didn't end up contributing to their bottom line and may have hurt user experience, but the velocity and volume of code they're pushing is not debatable. and the vast majority of it is exactly these kinds of improvements in technical fixes that people in the HN comment sections keep claiming aren't happening.

I'm not going to say everyone should read the release notes, but you definitely should if you're comfortable accusing them of not actually working on the code.

The opposite is true. Google has been the main funding source for Mozilla. Without Google no Firefox. But a US antitrust ruling from last year says their current deal can't continue, which implies strongly reduced funding. Mozilla needs to find alternative revenue sources or they f*ed.

Not that it excuses how long some FF bugs have been around but they can work on multiple products at the same time.

Which of the decades old bugs are currently affecting you?

Improving existing products does nothing to help fill the pockets of those higher up, so, you know, why bother?

Uninformed comment. Due to a antitrust 2025 federal court ruling in United States v. Google LLC, Google is no longer allowed to continue its current search deal with Mozilla. Any replacement will be far less lucrative. So Mozilla needs to aggressively invest in alternative income sources. Otherwise there will be a strong funding shortfall and a headcount reduction. This could spell the end of Gecko and ultimately Firefox.

They need new revenue sources. Their current Google deal was declared illegal by an antitrust ruling.

They're grasping for relevance

I would hate that.