In the real world, in the same line as the article suggests, there was a brief time when the "puts you back in control" browser needed you to change the following about:config settings to disable the force-pushed ai:

browser.ml.enable, browser.ml.chat.enabled, browser.ml.chat.sidebar, browser.ml.chat.menu, browser.ml.chat.page, extensions.ml.enabled, browser.ml.linkPreview.enabled, browser.ml.pageAssist.enabled, browser.ml.smartAssist.enabled, browser.tabs.groups.smart.enabled, browser.tabs.groups.smart.userEnabled, pdfjs.enableAltTextModelDownload, pdfjs.enableGuessAltText

A bit of community feedback later, and we've got one big "off" button, and me wondering which footgun the executives will shoot themselves with next.

I'm telling you this to highlight that volunteers where a huge part of Mozilla.

But on the last day they announced that they were moving the day-to-day conversations from IRC (an open protocol) to Yahoo Messenger (a closed protocol). I felt sort of betrayed in that moment: the company that was all about openness and to which I dedicated countless hours doing unpaid work for and even more years evangelizing for was imposing its volunteers and employees used a proprietary app to coordinate. That didn't sit well with me. At all. I basically lost interest.

This was in 2015. Last I heard MDN introduced ads (I wouldn't know, uBlock is pretty effective) and is not showing contributors to a page on the page itself anymore.

So yeah, the part of OP saying how Mozilla managed to piss volunteers resonated pretty hard with me.

Firefox usage has been declining for a decade. Doing nothing, or just doing the exact same as before, is popular with its fans (including me). But wouldn't it perhaps just have lead to an even more rapid decline?

https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html

"Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people:

First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers, launch technicians, and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.

Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers' union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.

The Iron Law states that, in every case, the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules and control promotions within the organization."

There was once a time where IE was only ever used to download Firefox... Mozilla squandered that.

    - Kept Rust and sold best-in-class tooling like IDEs to enterprises.
    - Polished Firefox OS and distributed apps in their store for a 1% commission.
    - Kept Servo and made the most secure and fast browser that no one else had made.
    - Partnered with OEMs to offer Firefox as the default browser.

I don't know how well it worked in practice but it sounded like it was a cool way to engage the community.

This is just a path to irrelevance. Firefox had the ambition to be the default browser, what Chrome is now! It's a shame if they're going to spiral off into their niche.

I believe that the people who want Firefox want it because it's different, just like the people who want Linux want it because it is different. And similarly in Linux, many people keep explaining how Linux should look more like Windows if it wants the year of the Linux Desktop.

But I wouldn't be on Linux if I wanted Windows. I am not on Linux because I want everybody to be on Linux, on the contrary. Same applies for Firefox.

Exactly this. Mozilla/Firefox lost their way when they stopped listening to the community.

Which is not to say you shouldn't try to build new cool things that the community hasn't thought of yet - but you should listen to them when they tell you it is terrible garbage that they do not want and there is no way to opt out.

I've been a loyal Firefox user since forever - reading, writing, web dev I do is always in Firefox. It's a first app I always install. I'm grateful Firefox exists, and the world (at least mine) would be much worse if it wasn't around.

I don't like Mozilla is taking money from Google - I'd prefer if it was all community driven, to the point of a community owned co-operative, but I'm probably delusional.

Yet, I'm hopeful for the future.

That's why Firefox continues to be a niche browser. Its actual goal, never outright stated by Mozilla leadership, is to occupy just enough market share to prop up their behemoth benefactor.

One of the first betrayals was putting ads in their new tab page, the forced AI comes as a Mozilla tradition now of user respect as marketing only.

At the same time it simply may not be a viable business. Firefox was popular originally because Chrome didn’t exist and Internet Explorer especially 6 back was awful.

The browser is now an OS on top of an OS, it requires massive resources to maintain. So Mozilla has a cursed mission now and related or unrelated in any case they’re full of it and have lost my respect. Open source and user respect still means something to me even if it doesn’t to Mozilla.

since then it has been downhill since.

Interesting language with a passionate community / cult, but the value to Mozilla was vanishingly close to zero.

This is a bit ironic, because... there's a bunch of low hanging fruit that are lacking and that keeps driving the nerds off of Firefox. Take Meshcore/Meshtastic or, frankly, the entire ESP32 world for example - in the Chromium ecosystem, you can use WebUSB and WebSerial to flash and communicate with these things from the browser. It does not get more convenient. Meanwhile, WebUSB still isn't supported in Firefox at all and only two weeks ago Firefox at least gained WebSerial [1].

[1] https://www.heise.de/news/Firefox-151-Endlich-Web-Serial-fue...

Now - we really need a viable alternative to the Evil Google Empire. For a while I had hope that ladybird would be that competitor, but that died after I was banned from github, as well as Kling making some really strange decisions in the last year or so, with weird explanations; most recent one the "we don't need external contributors so we close that down" (in part also due to the rise of AI slop spam, which is indeed annoying, but Kling is a strange guy really). I gave up on Mozilla many years ago already, though. The key insight I had was when one mozilla dev explaind that all linux guys use systemd + pulseaudio. So, using youtube (which annoys me because the evil Google empire controls it as well), I had no audio on firefox. Chrome on the other hand played fine (I only used alsa). So, the same machine, almost the same software stack (excluding pulseaudio; I did use system back then though), means that one browser plays audio fine, the other does not. Now, I could recompile firefox and enable non-pulseaudio audio ... but look at this:

https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/view/svn/xsoft/firefox...

mozconfig? In 2026? Seriously?

There is allegedly a python-only alternative. I tried it. It did not compile.

This is not the only issue I had. Many more problems existed with Mozilla and I also think that becoming addicted to Google money killed Mozilla. It is a dying shadow and has been for a long time. Yes, we need alternatives, but Mozilla failed us many years ago already.

I don't have a real solution against the evil Google empire. It's not even only Google; many companies are part of the evilness. I am almost beginning to sound like Richard Stallman, though I don't feed off of my feet - but the main point here is more to have real alternatives. Firefox is useable, no doubt, but it's not going to change the control Google has over the world wide web. We need something much more fundamental - control by the people. Everyone sees what Google and co are doing. Something has to change fundamentally, to stop Google parasitizing on the rest of the world. But for this you also need to have software alternatives that work.

The only thing I can come up with is to make all components of the browser/www stack as modular as possible and to also come up with alternatives. W3C also betrayed us when they demanded DRM into everything. I don't want that. Next in line will be mandatory age sniffing. This is currently ongoing. It will be extended. Systemd already added support for it; Poettering tried to do damage control but clearly failed: and reddit censoring like crazy - https://old.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/1rzykul/the_system... as is typical.

I would like to see Mozilla's entire board leave Mozilla... in a PERP WALK.

Whom you're working for.

If you're burned out, no longer fun, we all get it. But don't leave your investment into a product just because some new direction took over unless you plan to kick their backside.