I think Firefox is an excellent browser. Their problem is simply that they have too much revenue for too many years. They need a fraction of that. If I were the ceo, I would drastically cut back operations. Scale down the org to 10% of its current strength, keep shipping a solid and boring browser, accept donations that directly support development of the browser. No fads, no ai, just a high performance, bug free, standards compliant browser. The users and donations will come. Firefox will survive. One year of google revenue can kar them for 10 years of lean operation!

Internet economy already made a full circle with this once before: at first, ads existed to sell things online for advertisers, and make money for publishers (also as a machine for circular deals to propel stock valuations, during the dotcom boom). Then they became so pervasive and annoying that eventually they just became a method of making user experience worse, and get paid for ad-free, thus making money. Today, no one cares about performance of those ads, they are just a replacement of "nag screens" of the shareware era.

It sounds like AI will made this circle a lot faster.

I'll never understand why people feel so strongly about features like this and that they have to be opt-in.

I don't use bookmarks. Should those be opt-in? What about the other 85% of the browser's features I don't use?

I hope Zen disables this by default, or completely removes it if that’s an option.

Firefox had options for many things, until those options were removed

I'm not sure why people still believe this, especially developers. We're starting to literally just build AI into everything... you're not even going to know what's AI and what's not. The phase of labeling everything with cute little sparkles is starting to end and AI is going to be used similarly to external libraries.

If you don't like AI you need to seek legislation and pressure your local politicians. It's the only way to stop it.

I don't really care so much about that. I worry more about the CEO speaking about blocking adblockers like it's a normal business decision. Wtf

5 step plan for Mozilla to succeed against the Behemoth Googzilla and the leviathans of MAWS.

1. build a team in Europe to create an email service comparable to gmail/protonmail

- domains: mozmail.com, mmail.com, godmail.com, pmail.com, dogmail.com, meowmail.com

- promoted as a simple everyday email – no overly complicated/advanced federati features in order to increase inter-operability, reduce spam and dealing with federalism

- for more advanced features, integration links with something like signal, or a hosted comms platform

2. invest heavily in Firefox core development and service features

- push for system resource and performance optimizations, even if it requires extensive architectural changes

- focus on perfecting a core browser experience then developing an extension API that allows a level of UI customisations that XUL did, have unsafe/hackers warning for any extension that uses this API, even official ones

- invest in KeePassXC ux and integrate it as a first class and core feature in Firefox that is useable by hackers, consumers and enterprises – offer paid services for simple database sync/backup, as well as a decent managed solution for enterprise.

3. Expand further with a suite of other services that have both self-hosted and paid management extras

- calendar and email client, universally usable between providers, but first class with Firefox and mmail.

- integrate something like libreoffice into a desktop client that can also be embedded into a Firefox tab.

- straight forward self-hostable teams communication platform, managed cloud versions also availabe

- self-hosted / managed file storage platform with web UI with integration links to other services

- all of the above require a unified web, desktop and mobile ux

- offer further software and hardware integrations to completely streamline personal digital management

4. Extensive marketing and brand exposure over TV and social media, while staying charitably non-profit and recognizing the digital roots

- Use the firefox, gecko and other digital animals as icons

- Themes and scapes from origins such as mosaic/netscape

5. In this scene Mozilla continues knocking down the buildings of the titans.

I would pay $100 a year for a Firefox that just focused on privacy and was competitive speed and features (at rendering) with chrome.