by anildash
15 subcomments
- Addressing the usual few complaints folks always bring up:
* This is from the separate independent team that works on Thunderbird, not Firefox, so there isn't any resource contention happening there
* Thunderbird is revenue positive, and this potentially gives that team another revenue stream to be even more self-sustaining through charging companies
* Businesses definitely want to control the AI they're using (especially with RAGs of their own data) instead of just throwing it at their LLM vendor and hoping for the best
People on HN are fond of asserting that their own POV is the only one. Imagine that there is such a thing as a person in charge of choosing technologies for organizations, and that you're such a person. That's who this is for.
by hardwaresofton
1 subcomments
- Wow HN really does have a problem with commenting on anything to do with Mozilla.
Anyway, awesome to see this from the team inside Mozilla — hope this can become a new revenue stream over the long term.
Really excited to see some tight integration with Firefox and Thunderbird in the future.
People are going to hate this, but if someday Mozilla expands to being a productivity suite I’d be pretty happy to give them my money. ProtonMail is doing it and I trust them as well.
- The Get Started button links to a contact form. That's unexpected.
I looked for the source code repository and thanks to somebody here that hinted at it as a Thunderbird project, I found [1]. That's a better Get Started page.
[1] https://github.com/thunderbird/thunderbolt
by computer23
6 subcomments
- What's with the odd name? Apple already has a 15 year-old product called Thunderbolt. Mozilla already has a similarly-named but totally-different product called Thunderbird.
- I immediately thought "oh, the email client? It's AI now?" Then I realized this is Thunderbolt, not Thunderbird. Kind of an odd choice by Mozilla to have two products with such similar names.
- From the home page I have no idea what is this, what even is AI client? OpenCode competitor?
Also Thunderbolt is too similar to Thunderbird, really got me puzzled for a sec.
by drzaiusx11
17 subcomments
- For anyone reading this that has worked on the launch of this new product (or the many others of their ilk throughout the years) under the various Mozilla orgs, I mean no disrespect, however I feel it's important to not mince words these days..
I implore ANYONE at Mozilla org to please, please stop working on projects distracting from the complex and necessary work of browser and web standards stewardship. That alone should be the very reason for your continued existence if you have any. Focus on anything outside that purview will lead to the furthering of the, already painful and readily apparent, stagnation of your browser and our standards bodies as entities distinct from corporations.
Ditching any direct financial ties to Google or any other browser vendor is both important and necessary at this point, as this clearly represents a conflict of interest in your overall mission.
The web as a platform should belong to us all, not just the few corporate leaders of the day. I've watched in real time, saddened by the persistent errosion of our commons that is the web. I see it becoming nothing more than a corporate playground should trends continue, if it's not already too late. There may have been a time when your mission took precident over product launches of seemingly unrelated domains, but that is not what Ii observing today.
I think I speak for many in the community in these regards (please correct me if not the case.)
- oh mozilla, why don't you just focus on Firefox. That is all we want.
- I thought Mozilla was going to join the Thunderbolt standard and/or making some tool for it until I clicked the link haha. Very interesting name choice
- So this is only for organizations and not for individuals? The Get Started button goes to a form where it wants to know how they can help your organization. I didn’t see any other link to the source code or documentation. If whoever created this site sees this comment, please clear up the above questions and observations.
- Good thing they didn't name this Unity or Proton. We are seriously running out of names for applications and services, ar we?
- Ladybird can't release soon enough, can't wait to abandon this sinking corrupt ship. I say that as a Firefox user since beta, both on PC and mobile.
- The name is strange. They had a fox and a bird, used fire and thunder. The logical next would be Earthworm or watervole.
by crazygringo
3 subcomments
- Wow this is a confusing name.
At a glance it looks identical to Mozilla Thunderbird, but has nothing in common.
And then of course it's also the same as a well-known hardware interface.
I know it's hard to come up with names and pretty much everything is used by something else, but this seems particularly bad.
- Curious name choice, that's clearly encumbered by other trademarks.
Also, my impression is: yay another AI front-end. What does this one differently that the other thirteen in a dozen don't?
- Some confusion I see here is lots of people seem to not know that MZLA who makes Thunderbird and Mozilla Corporation who make firefox are separate entities in the Mozilla Foundation umbrella. This Thunderbolt is a MZLA product... so ya
- I swear there are like 10 different Thunderbolts. Why reuse such a common name?
- Do trademarks not matter anymore? The name and logo are lawsuits just waiting to happen.
- This was the MOST confusing release I've seen in years.
Okay, it took me some time that the mail client is called "ThunderBIRD", not the BOLT. Not that I've used it much. But why the logo in github still shows TunderBIRD?
It looks like Mozilla is trying to catch the band wagon for no particular reason. They don't need it AT ALL. But they just jumped in along for a ride.
- Mozilla Thunderbolt?
Why not "Phyrefox"?
They are so incompetent, they could not even come up with a name sufficiently different from their own product.
- If this wouldn't be under Mozilla/Thunderbird Org on Github, I would have considered this to be fake. It looks very unsubstantial ...
- I first thought "Fine, I'll stop using Thundebird(which I kinda already did, using Betterbird)." But it's Thunder_bolt_? What's with this name?
by who_is_mr_tux
0 subcomment
- I'm gonna deploy it on my machine and try it! Better option than using ChatGPT or Claude.
- Chrome on Linux is ~1.47 times faster than Firefox on the Jetstream 3 benchmark as recently reported by Phoronix[0]. That's how we want you to spend the money Mozilla, keeping up with your well-funded rival Google, and making it so we don't end up with a browser monoculture. These sorts of distractions just piss me off, and are not part of your core mission.
[0]: https://www.phoronix.com/review/firefox-chrome-2026
- The benchmark numbers are interesting — would love to see how it performs with more realistic workloads.
by petterroea
0 subcomment
- All I see is effort that could have been spent improving the rest of Mozilla's products.
by ForHackernews
1 subcomments
- There's an architecture diagram here: https://github.com/thunderbird/thunderbolt/blob/main/docs/ar...
It seems like all the model inference is external APIs? So why is the marketing claiming "Self-host on your infrastructure or let us help you deploy. Your data never leaves your control."
- Some feedback: It would be useful to explain what you do differently on your website.
by garaetjjte
0 subcomment
- WTF is that? Wasn't MZLA supposed to be the home of Thunderbird project, and now they are mixing that with some unrelated bullshit?
by steakscience
0 subcomment
- Like any new Mozilla initiative, this will not exist in a year.
- Curious how this compares to open-webui on the web, for example.
by bjornroberg
0 subcomment
- I think this is a smart move, and if Mozilla were the same as 10 years ago, I'd have hope for something good.
- [flagged]
- Someone explain to me why this product is unique. If Mozilla never came out with it, does that mean businesses are stuck with using cloud-based AI? C'mon. There's a lot of products that already offer local-AI. What am I missing?
- Lots of negative posts here, who presume to speak for others. I, for one, welcome new entrants especially since they're under the Mozilla umbrella. This client could use the passwords and cookies stored in Firefox. And I'd trust it too, unlike other clients.
- Thought "hey this better not be AI". Yes it's AI.
Just keep making a decent browser and stop getting distracted on shit.
by estimator7292
0 subcomment
- Why does everything AI related feel the need to just take over names and words with longstanding well-established meanings already in common use?
Like, seriously, this is like calling your AI model NVME or Northbridge or something. Insanity.
by javier123454321
0 subcomment
- Is it just me or is this really bad copy? The only clue as to what this is on the landing page is the background of the product image. And I also have to sign up to find out anything else about it.
by jaredcwhite
0 subcomment
- RIP Mozilla. I can't even with this nonsense…truly a shame considering I once admired this organization and the principles it stood for.
- No thanks.
- Naming things is really not that hard
- I tried to run it on my machine, and the release artifacts are missing entirely. Not going to spend time building from source.
- Turns out chat apps are pretty easy to build I guess.
by poolnoodle
0 subcomment
- Thank god for the Ladybird project
- It's weird that they would name it like thunderbird
by evil-olive
0 subcomment
- there seems to be a significant disconnect between the claims in this press release / blog post and the actual reality if you look at the GitHub repo.
starting from the very first words of the announcement:
> Open-source and self-hostable
meanwhile, the readme [0] has a caveat, added today, about how it's only kinda-sorta self-hostable:
> While we eventually plan to make Thunderbolt fully offline-first, it currently depends on authentication and search functionality (though you can disable search on the integrations screen in the app). You can deploy your own backend with Docker and sign up in order to test it locally.
and if you follow the link to the self-hosting instructions [1] there's another caveat that was added today:
> Under active development — not production ready. Thunderbolt is currently undergoing a security audit and preparing for enterprise production readiness. These deployment paths are provided for evaluation and early testing. Do not use in production environments.
don't tell me it's self-hostable if what you really mean is "you can run it locally for testing".
meanwhile, scroll a bit farther down in the announcement:
> Work seamlessly across devices with native applications for Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, and Android
which is repeated on the GitHub readme:
> Available on all major desktop and mobile platforms: web, iOS, Android, Mac, Linux, and Windows.
but as pointed out in [2] this is just flat-out incorrect - there are no release artifacts published, for any platform.
come on Mozilla, you need to be better than this. you have to know your target market is engineers and tech-savvy people who see through this sort of marketing fluff.
if you want to publish an announcement saying "we're working on a thing that will eventually do X, Y, and Z" then that's great.
if you want to release something that does X, Y, and Z, that's great too.
but don't over-promise and under-deliver. don't make an announcement that this thing can do X, Y, and Z and then "clarify" that the plan is to eventually do X, Y, and Z.
0: https://github.com/thunderbird/thunderbolt?tab=readme-ov-fil...
1: https://github.com/thunderbird/thunderbolt/blob/main/deploy/...
2: https://github.com/thunderbird/thunderbolt/issues/611
- No way they really named it thunderbolt. I mean. Seriously? What is next Mozilla USB-C vibeslop?
- Aw, another AI thing. I was hoping this was their email service.
- "Mozilla Bubble" Building things no one wants.
by CamouflagedKiwi
1 subcomments
- What even is this? A chat frontend to arbitrary model providers on the backend - I guess that's sort of useful not to have to build yourself but it doesn't feel like the amazing thing they're trying to hype. Some of the features seem a bit weird to me too - like end-to-end encryption? There isn't a server intermediary, so you already have that with TLS to the model provider.
by shevy-java
1 subcomments
- Yikes.
Could Mozilla hand over firefox to a new team please? It is clear they are wasting time and energy on things nobody wanted - who wants Mozilla-AI please? I mean, seriously?
For people who don't think Mozilla wants to make firefox competitive
again; and for those who also don't think ladybird will become a
viable alternative one day (that's for the future, I have no crystal
ball, I am just pointing at one possibility here). Perhaps we could
get more momentum when someone else other than Mozilla handles firefox.
by catlover76
0 subcomment
- [dead]
- Did I seriously click on a Mozilla product and see AI? You guys at Mozilla read the Internet right?
Doesn’t this have to be done under another name to prevent massive company-killing pushback?
by pixel_popping
0 subcomment
- If I may, Mozilla, you shouldn't release half-ass products that looks vibe coded like this, even the website looks like it took 30min to do with Claude
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