Where’s Firefox going next? You tell us.

[jboscacci]

UPDATE: the AMA with Firefox Leadership is scheduled for Oct. 6th, 2025 at 10:30 PT (13:30 ET / 17:30 UTC / 19:30 CET) and will happen over on Reddit at r/firefox — check out the announcement post here for more details. 

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Hey Firefox friends! 👋

We’re trying something new and would love your help.

Features like tab groups, vertical tabs, profiles, new tab wallpapers, PWAs, and taskbar pinning weren’t just ideas – they were direct responses to what you told us you wanted. Your input has helped shape where Firefox is today, and we’re proud of what we’ve built together. We’re listening, we’ve been listening, and we’re excited to keep building a better browser together.

Starting now, we’re trying something new.

A series of quick check-ins  to hear where you’re at, what’s on your mind, and what you really want from Firefox. These surveys will help shape Firefox features and give you more direct ways to connect with the people building your favorite browser.

Just honest questions, and space for honest answers.

Help guide our next AMA with the Firefox team

We're thinking about how we engage with this community, and we’re planning a community AMA (Ask Me Anything) with Firefox product managers.

Let’s start with questions to help us plan the AMA, and a fun one at the end.

What’s one thing you’ve always wanted to ask the Firefox team?

Drop it in the comments! It might get answered during our upcoming AMA.

Which topics should we cover during the AMA?

(Some suggestions, or you can add your own below)

• New features (and why we pick them)
  
  
• Other: [tell us]

Which animal best represents your Firefox browsing style?

• 🐆 Cheetah – lightning fast
  
  
• 🦉 Owl – wise and methodical
  
  
• 🐿️ Squirrel – a total tab-hoarder
  
  
• 🐬 Dolphin – curious and always exploring
  
  
• 🧠 Other (tell us below!)
  
  

Thanks for being part of the Firefox journey 💜

[Marius95]

• Implement <adult> </adult> HTML tags for adult-only content. Hide/show content within those tags based on 1) OS support for parental controls, 2) Firefox master password, or 3) separate Firefox password for parental control.
• Cooperate with Google and Apple to make this HTML tag a standard.
• Cooperate with EFF and other organizations to promote this tag instead of various laws regarding child safety online.

[scunliffe]

Your best advocates are developers. They help spread the word.

Grouping tabs, vertical tabs etc. are all very good but the core engine and debugging tools is what counts the most.

I would take faster loading/rendering/JS execution over any other feature.

I love Firefox, been a loyal user since day one.

#CheetahOwlDolphin

[iamoeg]

Hello!

Owl 🦉 + Dolphin 🐬 here.

First of all, thank you for all the great work through the years!

## General remarks

Here's what I want from Mozilla in general: more focus on the browser + communication suite (Firefox and Thunderbird), with enhanced user choice and privacy features, and good/consistent cross-platform experience (I use Android + Linux [Wayland]).

I support the efforts to have more financial independence to make this possible, either through:

• privacy-respecting/e2e-encrypted services (I'm a paying customer of Proton but I don't mind switching, especially if said services are also self-hostable)
• periodic donation campaigns like what's in place in Thunderbird, KDE Plasma, and other FOSS projects

## My question for the team

Are there any integrations planned between Firefox and Thunderbird (e.g. syncing, feeds...)?

## Firefox feature requests (in no particular order):

• Split screen for side-by-side navigation
• Web panels on the side bar
• More comprehensive syncing (e.g. for UI customisations, search engines, extension settings, etc.)
• Customizable shortcuts
• Better bookmarks/downloads management
• Better support for PWAs on Linux (example PWA not working on Fedora: https://devdocs.io)
• Simple read-later feature
• Official support for Firefox on Android TV (directly through the Play Store, no side-loading needed)

## Outro

Again, thank you! 🙏

[scwgoire]

First things first: I've been a proud firefox (and thunderbird!) user for 18+ years 😍 It's been my default browser since then both on Windows and macOS, and it's been an amazing journey!

What’s one thing you’ve always wanted to ask the Firefox team?

The most useful thing right now would enhancing video meetings as a presenter (tab sharing, video overlay, ...).

Which topics should we cover during the AMA?

As a laptop user, here would be my 2 north stars for Firefox.

• Privacy first and smooth browsing: protecting Firefox users from both tracking, advertisements and (new!) AI slop should be the top focus to me. There are multiple extensions doing that but I think this should come out of the box. You are facing Google and now OpenAI, both are designed to suck every last bit of information they can from their users. Once they know it, people don't want that. Do it and show you do it well, provide indicators in plain sight (blocked trackers, loading time saved, not-shown ads, ...)
• Compatible browsing: compared to chrome, Firefox is still lagging a bit behind on heavily interactive websites. No one wants to use another browser for a few websites. They'll stick to the most compatible one.

Which animal best represents your Firefox browsing style?

• 🐆 Cheetah – lightning fast: Cmd-K, type something, Option-Enter, scroll, scroll, Cmd-W, and repeat 200 times a day 😁

[Jon]

Thanks for joining the discussion, excited to share these with the team! And 18 years, wow, thanks for being a part of our journey 🙌

[joesph66]

I am mostly interested in security and privacy. I have 32GB so memory usage isn't an issue for me. My internet connection is fast enough that repsonse time isn't an issue either. Almost all of the new features added in the last year I ignore. I don't need vertical tabs etc. I realize others might want more bells and whistles. Build away just give me an option to disable them. I want a plain secure and private web browser. 

When I go to the site https://privacytests.org/ I see that Firefox is missing many features in comparison to Mullvad and Brave. I can't comment on how accurate the site is but it is one site I can find that compares browsers.

I also update my user.js with arkenfox (https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js). I've pretty much stayed with the scripts presented and only have minor changes.

What I would like to see - and perhaps it is wildly impractical - is some kind of panel that has all manner of options that can be checked or not that would correspond to arkenfox or increase privacy as identified by the shortcomings on the privacytests site and in the about:config option. It is a nightmare to try and keep all the settings straight. I've tried to document all the odds and ends so if I have to rebuild my machine I can set them up again. I do extensive backups so I think I'm ok but still. 

I also would "buy" Firefox in an effort to support it instead of having to be reliant on Google. 

I've used Phoenix / Firefox since the beginning of time. It is my preferred browser. My other browser is Mullvad which appears to be a very private fork of Firefox - and I don't have to modify it. 

[Fraize]

I’m an Owl-Dolphin Anti-Squirrel. There are a lot of users that are asking for lower power / better battery life, and better memory management, but I am always plugged in, with tons of ram, so I’m looking for performance and want my tabs to not have to reload when I go back to them. I’d love it if you could let us tune our performance needs. A slider that could let me use more memory, GC less frequently, and keep tabs in memory longer. 

[fenio]

I'd like to stop using Chrome completely but I simply can't due to lack of WebSerial / WebUSB APIs in Firefox.

[myspace]

Thanks for starting this conversation! No questions or topics, but I will say I am part 🐿 and part 🐬

[Rood1]

I'm somewhat of an owl and a dolphin. I am interested in some views "behind the scenes". Like, how is the team dealing from day to day with community input like feature requests, suggestions and bug reports? 

Also, what does it look like to partake in Interop (like Interop 2025 or even the forming of Interop 2026) from the team's POV? 

Usually, I feel like I am just another impatient web dev that is excited to start using the latest of web API additions. But of course, there's the other side: the team that makes the actual browser. It would be interesting to hear their perspective, but might also put some things in the right perspective. 

Oh yeah, I am interested in your view on updating the outdated or limited color pickers on Windows and Android! 😉

[5y89tyb89e3r5]

The comment system just ate my comment, so here's the shorter version:

- Removing the commitment to not sell user data is not acceptable for many of us.

- Giving yourself a license for every bit of text the user enters into the browser is not acceptable for many of us either. If you really do need a license, limit it to minimal data (it should not include comment text like this text here) and explain why and what for, and do so in the terms of use in a legally binding way. No other similar desktop software asks for a license for my data to just operate, so either be precise why you need it or remove it.

- People would I think generally love to see mozilla move to a smaller org that is community funded and not google funded, e.g. via prompts for community funding in the browser like wikipedia etc. do it, and via not having a super-rich C-suite and big corporation. This may help with the previous terms of use points since I assume those are due to monetization panic.

I think given these concerns, the technical questions become secondary for many. It's why I moved to Brave which doesn't have the terms of use problems.

[5y89tyb89e3r5]

(removing accidental double post)

[tomjuggler]

Hello I guess I'm a squirrel dolphin. I regularly have 50+ tabs open and 12 pinned tabs. I want a better way to hoard tabs but I don't know what it is. Most of all I want Firefox to keep track of everything that I'm doing and not use any ram. mostly ff is great but I do wish I didn't still need chrome (not your fault, usb access API, some others chrome only)

On mobile I just want faster URL sharing to other ff instances eg desktop. We used to have it (android share to device)

[Jon]

Interesting, thanks! Do you regularly group your tabs? Or use multiple windows? 

[AnonymousTinCan]

The web is becoming more adversarial in terms of user tracking and privacy invasion. At the same time, users want the power to fight back and protect themselves against dark patterns.

In that vein I would like to see increased, granular control of JavaScript. Firefox used to provide some of this functionality; see the old screenshot below:

Websites should not be allowed to run roughshod across a user's browser. Users should be able to control what a website is allowed to do.

Firefox used to be the power user's champion. Understandably Mozilla chose to focus less on the power users to try and attract a larger audience with a user-friendly, dumbed-down focus. But in doing so they removed the reasons the browser became popular in the first place.

Firefox should focus on empowering the user - that is what will truly make it attractive and unique as opposed to just another Chrome clone.

[LKBM]

What’s one thing you’ve always wanted to ask the Firefox team?

Performance took me from Firefox to Chrome (frequent, random freezing; I think my profile was borked)

Performance took me back to Firefox (lazyloading of tabs on re-launch.)

Performance now has me using a mix of Chrome, Firefox, and Brave (Youtube is basically broken on Firefox)

How tractable is it to make Firefox significantly faster than Chrome (or Blink-based browsers in general)? Chrome is obviously putting a lot of effort into optimizations, and when they have the marketshare, developers will benchmark against Chrome and end up writing code optimized for Chrome. Is Firefox a lost cause at this point, or can a concerted effort allow it to be noticeably more performant?

Which topics should we cover during the AMA?

Are there non-incremental performance improvement projects underway? Servo, Stylo, and Qauntum were all very exciting. Do we have anything like that right now? How do you prioritize performance, and incrementalism vs. major, long-haul projects?

Which animal best represents your Firefox browsing style?

🐆🐿️

Attached: Me and my brother at a Mozilla 1.0 release party. (The filename suggests Mozilla, but I'm not sure.)

[Jon]

These are great, thanks! And bonus point for the photo—really cool! 

[Jzfitch]

What is something the team wants to work on but hasn’t been able to? 

If you could remove something from Firefox, what would it be?

[lucadc]

What I currently miss in firefox

- pinned tabs synchronization

- some kind of dynamic bookmarks, for online books where I could say "in this bookmark, I want the last visited link of this domain" to store where I was in online books separated

[PWD]

So regarding the new Connect topic, there's a few things I'd like to see:

1. More people passionate about Android involved in Fenix, particularly the design side. Sometimes I feel like that's missing.

2. A modern theme. Rounded corners on the address bar rather than a squircle. Adaptive theming (Monet). Kill the gradient for PBM.

3. Should've been number one to me 🎶 Tab Groups. Honestly this is a hot mess. When tab groups was greenlit, there was actual communication to say it was coming to mobile too and then nothing. Some communication would be cool, just to say it wasn't feasible until the compose tab tray or something. But pretending like no one knows anything about it is just lame.

4. Better communication, there's so much happening now. I've seen the Fenix team grow, shrink and grow again, but there's some real momentum right now and there's no showcase of anything. Even the odd Figma mockup would go a long way.

5. Text To Speech in Reader Mode. This should be done for accessibility alone.

6. Swiping between tab trays.

7. The ability to disable password integration completely, including shortcuts.

8. Mobile add-on sync

9. Tab transaction history. Allow users to see what tabs they sent and when.

10. Ability to automatically close duplicate tabs

11. Fix the terrible UX for getting a video in PIP mode. Go full screen and then swipe up/go home is unacceptable.

12. Pull To Refresh on the Sync tab tray

13. Switch long press options from a dialog to a bottom sheet.

14. UnifiedPush 🥹

15. Fix how bad the AwesomeScreen is. Whether it's the unconsolidated results or having to search three times just to get the result I want to appear. It's terrible.

16. The general understanding that mobile isn't just here to stay, it's a massive player in the browser space and that mobile should have parity with desktop. There's so many good things about Fenix and it feels like it plays second fiddle to desktop while others use mobile to assert their dominance or at least presence in the browser space.

[Xacky]

I just want bug 1813919 fixed. I've brought it up multiple times on Mozilla social media but it's still not fixed.

[Cyberfox]

I'm between an owl and a squirrel.

One topic that really interesting me is how to follow news and actualities without the social media platforms.

Today, a lot of people get news from the mains social media platforms, like X/Twitter, Facebook, etc.
And this solution have a lot of problems:
- Massive surveillance
- Manipulation through algorithm
- Peer pressure about what is shared or not and what image this will give of oneself

People need an easy way to follow news in private, with no algorithm and no surveillance.

One way to achieve that could be to add a feed reader into Firefox, with no algorithm that select the feeds or the feed items, no account needed and include an anti-tracking feature.
Something who is simple and intuitive to use for the users. The feed reader could use the RSS and Atom feeds and users only see the items from the feeds they have selected. No suggestion.

Of course, this solution can't prevent a user to select only the news sources that confirm his or her point of view.
But their is no magic solution that can prevent that. It was already existing at the age where the news was only writer on paper.
But with this solution, users can read news without the problems of the mains social media platforms.

Also, this feed reader could provide a guide that explain the importance of checking the sources, having a critical mind and how create a safe place where people could think without peer pressure.
Education is an important part and it would be nice if Firefox could help user find guides and suggestions.

So, this solution could help people read news, but they will also need a way to express themselves. Away from the social media platforms. For that, a simple static blog/website is a good way.
But, today, it's complicated to make one. The static site generators are usually in command line, require some technical knowledge and each host provider could have their way to upload the website.

It would be nice to have an application (independent from Firefox) that provide an easy and intuitive UX to let people create their own static website.
Like:
1) Select the theme and domain name
2) Write your blog post(s)
3) Select a host provider
4) Click on upload

And voilà. Nothing more complicated.

The website would only have a blog section, with it's RSS feed, some custom pages, a navigation menu and a welcome page that list the latest blog posts.
Just the minimum to let the people express themselves. And no comments to avoid peer pressure.

This application could also have plugins. Like a language packs for spellchecking, new host providers, on new kind of pages like a photo gallery.
This way peoples could customize their way of using it, to have something that correspond to their needs.
And, of course, the application could also provide a guide that help people to write good and sourced blog posts. Because education is important.

My message is already very long, so I will stop there. But their are other topics that I find very interesting too about the web and Firefox.

[tilwiti]

Something like Soloist?

[tilwiti]

@jboscacci @Jon please tell me it will survive

[Cyberfox]

No AI and only libre software.

And for the static website generator, I think more about a local application that generate the website, show a preview in your web browser and let you upload to any host provider.

[tilwiti]

That's a really interesting idea. Or even hosting on a simple temporary HTTP server.

However, it (hosting) may suffer the same fate as Firefox Send, as it was used for purposes other than intended, but it's still cool.

What really annoys me is that I can't open local HTML files on Android, but I can through Chrome. This is critical for any SingleFile and websites created using such a hypothetical tool.

[chr15m]

Users don't want "simple temporary HTTP server". They just want to save and load their files like they do in a normal app. I think it is fine for the actual page to be online somewhere, it's the user's *files* I am talking about.

[JoshFarrant]

🐆🐬

The ability to copy your current tab with a keyboard shortcut would be so useful; it’s my most missed Arc feature after coming back to FF.

[wutongtaiwan]

Firefox 应该支持更广泛的协议的加密 dns。例如，基于 Quic 的 DNS 和 DNSCRYPT 协议

[wutongtaiwan]

I recommend adding the tor network to Firefox, the brave browser can open the tor window. So it's safer.

[MacHammerFan]

I can't use www.Weebly.com to edit my websites. Problems with text and links.

[Ecstrema]

Live syncing of tabs between devices is still the biggest missing piece to me. 

and I’m definitely a dolphin, I like to know my tools. 

[WilliamRS]

There's 2 different issues with the new tab button in vertical tabs mode but this one is far more urgent https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1921959  Basically, when the window is maximized, the new tab button's click target isn't at the very edge of the screen (apparently this is called Fitts' Law). This is harming the vertical tabs experience so much! I run into this issue every single time I click the new tab button!  When you're in "normal" horizontal tabs mode, the new tab button does follow Fitts' Law, so there's a huge regression and inconsistency here because the user rightly expects the same in vertical tabs mode.

And the other is the option to put the new tab button at the top instead of underneath the tabs, there's already a popular Mozilla Connect for this here https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/in-vertical-tabs-add-an-option-to-open-new-tabs-at-the-top-of/i...

[Vel]

I would be part Dolphin (I run the Firefox Labs) and part Owl (Security is very important to me and I run NoScript and monitor which sites are loading scripts).

I would like to see improvements to subtitles in Firefox PIP (Picture-in-Picture) where subtitles appear in full screen mode but not always in PIP mode when streaming content from different websites.  The issue seems to be dependent on the player used by the website.  The pain point is full screen mode does not usable with desktops and big monitors.

[k776]

The Firefox UI itself is fine. But the main things for me, which ultimately pushed me back to Chromium, are that Firefox lags behind in API support and performance.

APIs: https://webstatus.dev/?q=available_on%3Achrome+-available_on%3Afirefox+available_on%3Asafari&sort=na... - Nearly 50 things Chrome/Safari supports that Firefox doesn't, and 130 more things Chrome supports that neither Safari/Firefox do. These include cross document view transitions, anchor positioning, container style queries, video PIP, and Web App Manifest. (on the flip side, well done on being the first to support Temporal)

Performance: On my machine, Speedometer3.1 in Chrome scores a 39.6, Firefox scores a 24, quite a bit slower. And it's noticable. Gmail, Youtube, and many other sites load snd function quite a bit slower. I don't subscribe to the theory that Google is deliberately slowing things down. I think there are performance gains that need to be made within the rendering and JS engines Firefox uses.

[LKBM]

@k776 wrote:

...

I don't subscribe to the theory that Google is deliberately slowing things down. I think there are performance gains that need to be made within the rendering and JS engines Firefox uses.

It needs to be deliberate for it to naturally happen, even if Firefox is overall faster.

To use a contrived example, if `myArray.join("")` is faster in Firefox, and myArray.toString() is faster in Chrome, anyone benchmarking using Chrome will optimize using the latter, and you end up with code that's much more performant in Chrome, even if it was faster on Firefox preoptimization.

Having negligible marketshare, especially among developers, hurts performance.

[cnfczn]

Hello, I’ve been a loyal Firefox user since the Firefox 3x . Later, Firefox accelerated its efforts to catch up with Chrome, abandoning XUL in favor of the WebExtensions API. I wouldn’t call this the wrong decision, but in my view, some excellent extensions were lost forever from my Firefox experience.

Yes, I’m talking about Pentadactyl.

It was an outstanding plugin that allowed vim-like control over Firefox. While there are now extensions attempting to revive it (like Tridactyl), the current API limitations have made a true revival impossible. Sure, there are WebExtensions alternatives with similar functionality today, but none come close to Pentadactyl’s brilliance. Back then, Pentadactyl could fully take over Firefox’s UI—including the status bar, extension bar, and more—and even allowed configuration using native vimscript syntax.

I’m not saying this in hopes that Mozilla will bring back Pentadactyl or XUL; those days are over. Firefox’s evolution shouldn’t just be about chasing Chrome. Google’s corporate scale gives it the resources and manpower to maintain dominance. Recently, Google announced its Manifest V3 rules, and I’m certain this isn’t what browser users actually want.

The reason Firefox exists isn’t merely to be faster or more secure than Chrome. It’s so that when companies controlling industry standards pull stunts like this, we can say, "Screw that—we’ve got Firefox."

[brglng]

• Continue with the effort on privacy and internet freedom.
• More APIs for extensions, more possible customizations, just like what we could do with XUL.
• Faster Javascript engine.

[luizmarelo]

Split View (like Zen Browser, but better).

[petrix]

Hi, 

🐬 Dolphin here. 
I really want to have PWAs (on Linux). Proper apps, with all features to make them distinguishable from any other apps.

In any case, thanks for all your work 🙂