In light of the new CEO's opening salvo and its salivation over AI, I would like to point out:
I wasn't involved, but it's always been my impression that Firefox was a project entirely conceived and created by developers, not a top-down mandate from management. It then found widespread success because it ⓐ appealed to weird nerds and ⓑ had a couple distinct features that weird nerds could show off to get their family members to use it.
You'd never guess this, because every new CEO comes in talking about how people trust our brand™ and we need to grow Firefox into my pet thing — when it was never business people, at any level, who had anything to do with Firefox's success or trust in Mozilla in the first place. As one of those weird nerds who championed Firefox before it was even called Firefox, it's almost insulting. I think this project is important for the web, and that trust is not currency to be spent.
Firefox took off because it did something different, yet the new CEO's direction is to chase after a trend that is exactly the sort of thing Firefox's core userbase vehemently dislikes. Mammon is Google now, not Microsoft, and I would think the obvious thing to do is fire some shots directly across Google's bow and work on features Chrome could never replicate. But instead of taking even a glance at Google's most pronounced failure — the increasing uselessness of Google results and the incoherent "AI summaries" it's pushing instead — Mozilla wants to bake the very same unreliable technology right into their flagship browser. Now you can even shake your phone to jumble an article around into something that may or may not resemble the original! How am I supposed to trust Mozilla when they're focused on pushing this: a technology whose entire purpose is to generate text that sounds trustworthy confident, whether or not it is? At a time when trust in everything is crumbling, how does it align with Mozilla's values to join in pushing for the very thing responsible for that erosion? How is it good for the web to save people from the tedium of reading websites?
The C-suite weren't responsible for Firefox's initial success, and I'm not confident they can understand what produced it in the first place. If it were left up to the MBAs, Firefox may never have existed at all. The new CEO even wants to "grow Firefox into a broader ecosystem of trusted software" — you know, like the Mozilla Suite.
But his job shouldn't be to offer the same fad-chasing Vision™ that every other company is busy grandstanding about. It should be to support the developers. Give me something Chrome cannot do, something that all the weird nerds can appreciate, something that's obviously concretely better for everyone else.
