[EVENT CLOSED] Thanks for joining our AMA with the Firefox Leadership Team!

[Jon]

Nov 14 UPDATE: Thanks to everyone who has submitted questions so far—keep them coming, the event starts in a few hours. In the meantime, meet the team of Mozilla employees that will be answering them.

Clockwise starting from the top left in the image, we are:

• Mike Conca, Director of Product, Platform
• Vicky Chin, VP, Engineering, Desktop, Mobile, and Pocket 
• Raja Jacob, Senior Director, Firefox User Experience 
• Devin Sandoz, Senior Director, Product Marketing, Firefox
• Bobby Holley, CTO, Firefox
• Carolyn O’Hara, Sr. Director, New Tab & Content Discovery
• Andrew Overholt, VP, Engineering, Platform 
• Tapan Kamdar, Sr. Director, Product Management, Search & AI

See you in the comments! 

_______________________________________________

Hi everyone,

The internet has changed a lot since 2004 when Firefox began as a community project. Today, Firefox remains at the forefront of championing privacy, open innovation and choice. And while the last 20 years have been transformative, the best is yet to come.

We’re thrilled to announce that the Firefox leadership team at Mozilla is joining us to host a very special AMA here on Mozilla Connect to celebrate Firefox’s 20th anniversary, and answer any questions you may have about what’s next for Firefox. 

As part of our anniversary celebrations, we’ve created a website page reflecting on what we’ve created together so far with videos highlighting Firefox’s evolution since 2004 and your favorite features. You’ll also find fan art and a hat tip to our incredible contributor community, who support Firefox users every step of the way.

This AMA is the continuation of a conversation we started on Reddit in June. We appreciate how actively engaged this community has been in helping us improve Mozilla products. This time around, we want to hear what’s most important to you about Firefox’s future. 

In the spirit of our birthday celebrations, we’ll also be gifting select participants in this thread with anniversary swag. Keep an eye on your Connect inbox (post-AMA) for a message from Mozilla staff.      

We are opening this thread up to replies starting today, November 8, and we’ll be joining you live with the Firefox leadership team on Thursday, November 14 from 18:00 - 20:00 UTC (time converter) to answer as many of your questions as we can. 

As always, we ask that you adhere to our Community Guidelines when posting. We also encourage you to show support for others by voting up your favorite comments using the thumbs up feature. 

See you on November 14th!

Event Details

Where: Right here! Questions and answers in the comment section ⬇️ 

When: Thursday, Nov 14, 18:00 - 20:00 UTC

Topic(s): Firefox 20th anniversary - reflecting on the past and looking ahead to the future

[Kvin]

Hello, congratulations on the 20th anniversary of our favorite browser! It's great to have Firefox, and to have you Mozilla! Without Firefox, there will be nothing, it is the last hope for a safe Internet!

In reality, we are already very grateful for the grouping of tabs, for vertical tabs, and for the improvement of profiles, and for pwa tabs, which is in the works, you know we really wanted this, waiting for years, and we appreciate it, very grateful!

There are a lot of questions, but these are the main ones we want to hear answers to:

Design
When will the next browser interface redesign and add-on store redesign take place, is it planned for around 2025?

we want a new design that brings back the compact mode, icons for various menus, blur in the interface,
new browser icon, and a redesign of the following pages: history page, extensions page, and new tab page.

Features and improvements
Is a feature being developed that will allow us to set our own custom wallpaper in a new tab?
Are there any plans for such features as workspaces, a built-in dark theme for websites, a portable version of the browser for windows, auto-disable extensions on certain selected sites?

Mobile
Are there any plans to develop a feature to enable a horizontal tab bar tab strip on phones?

Optimization
Are there any major improvements and optimizations planned for the browser to speed up page loading?
Actually, we have the fact that other browsers load pages faster, and this has been tested by different users on different computers, and the speed is really slower( we need to do something about it, we need to improve the weaknesses of the browser, to keep up.

Thank you for improving the browser and for hearing us!

[cohara]

Thanks so much for these questions and input, @Kvin, and it’s great to hear that you are enjoying some of the recent updates and looking forward to other features in the works. There are some great ideas baked into these questions. We do have design refreshes planned on both desktop and mobile next year for various spaces in the browser, including new tab and the mobile homepages, both of which will include more available wallpapers (and great to hear that customizable options would be of interest!). The input on icons and specific pages you’d love to see redesigned is really helpful insight and you can be sure these preferences will be passed to the relevant teams. Across the board, we want to ensure we’re delivering the most impactful improvements. That's why it's so valuable to talk to users in forums like this, to better understand what folks want, so seeing the interest here counts for a lot.

For Add-Ons, the team is focused right now on iterative improvements to listing and search results pages to help customers find and install the most relevant add-ons for them. We're also considering ways to modernize mobile tab management in the months ahead, so look forward to improvements there.

Page load speed is something the team cares deeply about and is always working to improve, because we know it’s critical for user satisfaction with the browser. There’s no silver bullet here but teams are continuously finding small things that add up for real impact. This will continue to be a key focus area. And if there are specific areas of performance improvements that you'd like to see, please let us know!

[cohara]

On that last point, to be even more specific - if you run into performance problems, we'd love more detail in a bug report including a profile. Here are instructions: https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/performance/reporting_a_performance_problem.html - Thank you!

[firefly1]

What's preventing Firefox from implementing a 'Force Dark Mode' similiar to what Chromium uses?  I know there is an extension that we can use but it slows the browser down considerably and uses a lot of CPU.

[mconca]

Hi @firefly1. Dark mode is an exciting and potentially valuable feature, although we've seen it can cause compatibility issues when it manipulates web page content. It can take significant effort to get the engineering and UX right in order to deliver a high-quality, fast user experience. For the moment, this has gone down the prioritization list within our roadmap to ensure we’re delivering the most impactful improvements for our users. That said, we're always listening to feedback like yours, and we’ll keep this request in mind as we continue developing Firefox’s features. Seeing the interest here means a lot to us.

[November]

The overwhelming majority of your users do not want AI crammed into Firefox. Why are you ignoring them?

[BGAK24]

I am actually just regaining access back to my accounts that have apparently been just sitting due to lost logins etc I do apologize for how long it has taken me and I am trying to catch up with everything

[tkamdar]

Hey @November - I totally get where you're coming from. Not everyone wants AI in their browser, and we’ve heard this loud and clear from others on Moz Connect, too. Personally, I’ve been using an AI chatbot in Firefox, and it’s been great having it right at my fingertips. But we know that AI isn't for everyone, and we’re being careful about that.

AI features in Firefox are optional —if you’re not interested, you don’t have to use them at all. We’re also giving you a choice over which language model you use (if any) because that control matters to us, too.

AI is evolving quickly, and while it may not be for everyone, there are tech enthusiasts and early adopters who are interested in these capabilities. We also expect that some AI-powered features could eventually feel as essential as spellcheck or auto-complete is today. We’re not exactly sure which those will be yet, but if we wait until it’s all figured out, we might miss the chance to be ready when our users expect them.

So, our plan is to experiment, test new ideas, and most importantly, keep it simple for you to opt out entirely if that’s what you prefer.

Thanks for helping keep us in check, and keep the feedback coming!

[ThePillenwerfer]

What's important for me in the future is Firefox remaining broadly as it is.  I use it because I like it; change it and I may not.  In an ideal world all updates would be restricted to security and support for new protocols and formats.

Most additions over the years have been useless bloat as far as I am concerned — Pocket, Firefox View, Reader Mode, junk on the Home screen &c.  Providing it can be switched off or simply ignored it isn't a great problem though.

The main thing I like about Firefox is that its annoyances can usually be mitigated with custom CSS, a feature that sets it apart from the competition.

Of course you can't please everybody — for instance I do not want Dark Mode/Themes full stop as I saw quite enough white (or green or amber) text on a black background back in the 1980s thank you very much — so choice and configurability are key.  Things like being able to increase the size and colours of the UI or elements on it isn't just about making it look to a user's taste but could be important for those with vision problems.

[BGAK24]

Let's go navy blue with bright orange or green front that's easy in the eyes of you suffer from cross eyed vision from hours looking

[vchin]

Thanks for sharing this feedback. Giving our users the ability to choose and customize their experience is important to us and it's great to hear that you utilize custom CSS. One thing we've learned is that our users want different features and that it's hard to build a default experience that everyone's happy with. This is why we're so committed to customizability and user control. We try to balance between ease of use, accessibility, and performance when we ship new features while continuing to give our users choice to customize their experience where needed.

[dginovker]

I have no question, but only a hope you answer these questions the same way you would when talking to all your friends outside of a corporate environment.

[overholt]

We'll try! <insert joke here about not having friends outside a corporate environment>

[tilwiti]

The most important thing is to delve into solving this problem o.o

[bkidane]

Speak for yourself

[tilwiti]

😨

[ffffff]

Mozilla Connect woke up today and chose violence, I see.

[bkidane]

😂 violence may or may not be my love language

[tilwiti]

Sometimes foxes need to be more proactive to defend themselves in the woods...

[kinmfer]

I am very happy to see Firefox's 20th birthday, and I am also very happy about Firefox's contribution to the fight against Chrome. I hope to see Firefox working hard in the direction of web compatibility and performance in the future, especially web compatibility. And of course the tab group

[mconca]

@kinmfer  Thanks for the well wishes and support. Web compatibility and performance are two of the most important product areas that we continually work on.

For web compatibility, Firefox has participated in the Interop project with Chrome, Edge and Safari for each of the past four years (here is the 2024 dashboard) with plans to participate again in 2025. This initiative has proven to be extremely effective at eliminating gaps between browser implementations, raising the level of interoperability for everyone across the web. In addition, we have many people on the team working on compatibiity problems specific to Firefox. You can help us by submitting a broken site report when you find one -- this feeds into our triage pipeline and helps us find and fix issues faster.

For performance, the Firefox team played a major role in defining the Speedometer 3 benchmark, the most respresentative benchmark for browser responsiveness to date. In parallel to that effort, though, we invested heavily in the real-world performance of Firefox, making significant improvements over the past 1-2 years.

Looking ahead, web compatibiity and performance will continue to be major areas of focus for Firefox as we work to ship a world-class, non-Chromium browser for another 20 years!

[Skywind]

I'm generally satisfied with FF on PC, but not the same with the mobile version.

I don't understand why mobile version lacks all the UI customizability that we enjoy on PC, this makes mobile FF not as handy as its competitors like Edge. For example, no fully-customizable homepage website, complicated access of bookmarks (please DON'T HIDE the bookmark button in a second-level menu).

FF could be much better, but now it's not and making slow progress. Seeing that FF is losing more and more users makes me sad, as I really like this browser and has been using it for over 10 years. I really hope the 20th anniversary update can change it from head to toe and bring fresh vitality to this browser.

[BGAK24]

Let's talk about how to make your experience worth it..sky is the limit

[SRMozilla]

Thank you for raising this; we know that there is so much more we can and should be doing to make Firefox a first-class mobile experience. We made some solid progress this year - better address and password autofill and dozens of iterative UX changes on iOS, as well as a password generator, better local translation capabilities, and UX improvements on Android. Coming soon, both platforms will have redesigned toolbars and navigation menus.But we know we need to be doing a lot more, so improving Firefox on Android and iOS is going to be a big focus for us next year. We will continue investing in speed, reliability and essential features like tab management, privacy tools, and auto-fill, and we’ll be refreshing the mobile homepages to offer new customization and layout options. We will also be improving cross-device experiences to make syncing and accounts truly useful. Hope that helps - and really appreciate you for writing in!

[tilwiti]

The Firefox mobile app would be 1000% better if it opened links to Microsoft Teams conferences (it does not redirect to the app); this bug seems a couple of years old, and keeping Brave for that feels frustrating.
Thanks a lot for what you're doing 🙂

[ffffff]

Syncing and accounts *are* truly useful already! Glad to hear it's something you folks will be working on, though.

A while back, someone at Mozilla (hopefully I'm not misremembering) commented on the idea of being able to remotely close tabs on another device, or broader remote device tab management in general, if you will.

Personally, I'd love to be able to discover and open articles on my phone—commute and bathroom breaks are the death of my plan to read list, I tell you—then do something like transfering them in from the desktop.

Anyway, just wanted to throw that out here. Whatever you do, I'll be eagerly watching development as always.

[tilwiti]

Is it just me, or is it already possible to close tabs remotely? I think it's already possible, I don't know how much on mobile.

[ffffff]

You're right, thanks. That's surprising. I barely touched the synced tabs menu because it felt uncomfortable to use, and since I didn't see a close tab option in about:firefoxview I assumed it simply wasn't possible.

[HidratedHomie]

Hi.
1.- Future features like profiles and tab grouping are going to come to Firefox Android?
2.- Is text to speech ever going to the available on Android?
3.- Why on Android I can't easily remove headers and footers from a page I want to print or safe as a PDF? I know is possible, but not without messing with advance settings. Not very user friend.
4.- In Android, Why everytime I put bookmarks on the background, it returns to the beginning of the tree of folders? And why I can't
rearrange bookmarks inside a folder? It's annoying.
5.- If tab grouping is ever available on Android, When I open an hyperlink, like in Wikipedia for example, that hyperlink is going to automatically create and open in a tab group (just like in chrome)? I would like it to be that way, simple but effective.
6.- In the near future, the Firefox AI feature will be capable of summarize entire web pages (articles) and answer questions? Like Copilot does? Is that AI going to ever be available on Android?
As you can see, my main pet peeves with firefox is that a lot of features on PC are not available on Android.

[Gabb]

Gosh.

[SRMozilla]

We love hearing how you are using Firefox on desktop! Thank you for using Firefox mobile and for the great feedback on the features that are most important to you. These are all great ideas and things we are exploring for next year. For future ideas or feedback please share with us. You can submit these requests in Mozilla Connect. We want to deliver a great mobile experience and we know we have work to do.

[LogicalTech]

Congrats on 20 years!

My question can be summarized with:

What went wrong?

As in:

Why did we (Mozilla) lose the Internet? Why are we just an paid pet for Google they keep for convenience of being able to avoid monopoly claims? Why not focus on core mission of making a great browser? Why AI? Something during these past 20 years went clearly, very, horribly wrong at Mozilla. With the ability to reflect back over these years, I'd like to know what it was.

[ThePillenwerfer]

The rot set in with problems with Firefox 4 roughly coinciding with Google releasing Chrome.  I went from Firefox 3.x to an early version of Chrome and only switched back about a year ago.

Google had the money to promote Chrome whereas the people behind other browsers, not just Firefox, don't.  If one of them ran TV advertising, billboard campaigns &c Chrome may not be so far ahead.

The ignorance of the public has to be allowed for as well.  A lot of people will stick to Edge or Chrome because they've heard of MicroSoft and Google and therefore think their products are Good and Safe whereas others they haven't heard of are likely to poor or some sort of con, whatever the truth may be.

[bholley]

I started as an intern about 16.5 years ago, and I certainly agree things were rosier back then. Firefox was leading a long-overdue renaissance of browsers for both users (tabbed browsing, extensions, UX) and developers (standards compliance and new capabilities). All the tech enthusiasts knew that the first thing to do with a new computer was to install Firefox, and it spread like wildfire. It was a fun time.

Shortly after I joined, Google released Chrome, which was much more challenging to compete with:
* It arrived with some significant architectural advantages (process separation, less Flash-driven instability, better JIT)
* It had an open-source engine and a pro-web-developer focus
* It was heavily staffed and funded
* Google leveraged its massive reach to promote and distribute it

On top of this, Mozilla made a big bet on building a mobile operating system, which diverted engineers away from the browser right when the competition was heating up.

We eventually caught back up with major efforts like Electrolysis, Quantum, and Fission. I'm extremely proud of that work and the fact that we still manage to build a world-class browser that can go head-to-head with Google and Apple. But building a great browser isn't enough to win anymore — it's just enough to stay in the game.

That said, I wouldn't say we've lost the Internet. Fewer users means we have less hard power than we used to, but as the last independent engine we still have outsized influence on standards and policy around the world. I'm still here after all these years because I believe in the mission and think the world needs Firefox. My focus, along with many others here, is on building a great browser and using it to advance the mission.

[Globule]

Happy birthday Firefox!

My question: how do you explain this graph?

Thanks in advance for the responses!

[lackey]

That chart only goes up to 2019 - here's an extended version:

[Cerulean]

As someone who loves the foundational aims of Mozilla and Firefox, this is exceptionally concerning to me as well. Particularly given that layoffs are continuing - this time in the Foundation's advocacy division.

As a Firefox account user, it feels hard to trust Firefox and Mozilla when extremely significant concerns about their business and funding practices that have allegedly been raised in good faith - remain unaddressed and unanswered.

Yet Mozilla continues to solicit donations. Something doesn't feel right about this, all the way back through the Mitchell Baker era (both pre-COVID and the post-COVID layoffs).

Some transparency on the above post and how executive pay relates to product/corporation performance would be welcome. As opposed to alleged censorship when people post their concerns about the imbalance between executive pay and product performance.

More context on the graph that Globule posted above

[Gav]

Why is feedback regularly ignored about basic interface and feature choices? Something is clearly wrong, take a look at the market share, are you willing to admit you might be doing things wrong?

[vchin]

One thing we've learned is that our users want different features and that it's hard to build a default experience that everyone's happy with. User interface preferences are personal and that is why we are committed to giving our users control over their experiences. That said, we don't always get it right the first time and we are committed to sharing more of our in progress work on Connect to get early feedback on our features.