Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

Mozilla is more occupied this days paying multi milionary bonus to its executives and begging users for money they waste on useless projects.

Mozilla must die, so Firefox can live.

And Thunderbird?

Their reckoning day is coming when Google stops paying them $500m+ a year to be the default search engine. That payment alone account for 80% of Mozilla's budget, and has made them fat, wasteful, and directionless. It's really upsetting to me personally, I gave a lot (time, code, and money) to Mozilla in the early days when they were really struggling.

I switched to Vivaldi after 23 years of Mozilla. Could not be happier.

All my hopes are with Ladybird now

> Mozilla must die, so Firefox can live.

As someone who grew up on Netscape Navigator, the current situation gives me flashback to how Netscape had to die so Mozilla could be born...

It is the MZLA Technologies Corporation a subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation. Firefox is developed by the Mozilla Corporation a wholly owned part of the Mozilla Foundation.

My hopes are with Servo, I like the novelty of it being implemented in Rust rather than C/C++.

I follow Ladybird and appreciate their work. Especially implementing everything from standards, fixing standards and keeping it easy to follow the standards in code (and I'm proud Andreas is Swedish too).

But for something with the surface area of "everything you can do with a computer and it's uncle" a memory safe language feels like the right choice.

Just a knee-jerk opinion since I'm not a browser dev and existing sandboxing seems to work well enough, but an opinion nonetheless.

As I understand it, Google pay for the searches passed on by the browser. So as long as they have users, they’ll get paid.

I'm curious what the governance structure of Mozilla is that keeps things this way. People have been upset for quite a while at the direction Mozilla is going in, yet there seems to be no coalition to oust the current leadership. Is this impossible for some reason?

The DoJ is arguing in court that Google should be barred from paying off Mozilla because of Google's search monopoly

https://www.theverge.com/news/660548/firefox-google-search-r...

How did they even get this corporation owned by a foundation situation? That just seems like some kind of tax trick.

That's so hilariously backwards.

Google should be split into several business units [1], should be forced to give up Chrome [2], and should be forced to invest several billion of its war chest into competitors.

That's what the DOJ would do if it still had balls.

The fact that there's no money in a product like Firefox is insane. It's absolutely bonkers. There is so much value in it, yet everybody's favorite mega monopoly is pouring value into commoditizing everything to keep eyeballs and attention and dollars and a taxation regime the size of a medium-sized country in its gravitational singularity.

Google is an invasive species in every market. We need the EU/DOJ/BRICS equivalent of Chicxulub-level regulation to end its throat-grip predation on everyone.

[1] Six "Baby Bells", or "Tiny Googs": Search, Android, Deepmind, Cloud, YouTube, Ads. Shuffle everything else into another bin or spin it off independently. Waymo, etc.

[2] You could put Google with the Ads business as there is (1) no synergy between Chrome<->Android<->Search anymore, and (2) if Ads fucks it up, it doesn't kill the broader browser market or web ecosystem.

Yes. Mozilla was originally only the non profit, but it was ruled that selling the search rights violated nonprofit status. So they paid a couple million in back taxes and had to spin off a corporate entity that's fully owned by the nonprofit.

BRICS is a cancer on par with Google.

I’m not super familiar with Servo; I’d heard of the Mozilla layoffs but hadn’t followed the work. I believe I can now split my hopes between the Ladybird and Servo; thank you!

I won't argue on this as it's orthogonal.

Sovereignty of your country's smaller businesses over monopolies, and sovereignty over data and data privacy is paramount.

Every country should be trying to tear Google apart. It isn't just too big, it's a black hole that is eviscerating competition.

The US, Canada, all of the members of the EU, India, and even our geopolitical rivals should be trying to regulate and/or break up Google.

mozilla has been broken for a long time. spiritually and intellectually, brave is the successor

Sorry, but I'm not going to trust any browser based on Chrome. Even Brave.

It's not long until Brave won't be able to support Manifest V2 as Google has every interest to kill it completely.

India won't. The call of the hour is re-industrialization, and manufacturing Pixel phones is one piece of that puzzle. Give employment to millions of people is far more important in the short run. And there are other ways of enforcing sovereignty.

Ladybird is moving to Swift IIRC?

What's bonkers to me is that people are alway complaining about ads and they're not putting "delete web ads from your life" front and center of their value proposition. Go to firefox.com and look at the the "why Firefox" copy. It's could be about basically any modern browser. It's like selling a car with "it has wheels!".

I guess that might threaten their tie-up with the world's biggest adtech company which is why they keep it at arm's length, but that's just slow death by strangulation.

Another Vivaldi user here, who "grew up" with the old pre-Chinese Opera...

Sadly Vivaldi is also dependent on Chromium, and will also have to lose Manifest v2 support when that time comes.

I believe you are correct: https://x.com/awesomekling/status/1822236888188498031

That makes me very angry. I am fat, wasteful, and directionless but Google pays me nothing.

I bought a car a couple years ago. It advertised am/fm radio in the feature sheet

Do you have any info on this lawsuit? I am struggling to find it.

So in market terms, you are infinitely more efficient!

There is no way for anyone to get Mozilla to change because the current board picks new board members.

> Mozilla must die, so Firefox can live.

Ugh. This sounds so horrible, but this is probably the truest statement on this entire page.

I mean… Phoenix was the original code name for Firefox, so maybe it was just foreshadowing.

The leadership has been ousted.

> This includes major growth in our Boards, with 40% new Board members since we began our efforts to evolve and grow back in 2022. We’ve also been bringing in new executive talent, including a new MoFo Executive Director and a Managing Partner for Mozilla Ventures. By the end of the year, we hope to have new, permanent CEOs for both MoCo and Mozilla.ai... With these changes, Mitchell Baker ends her tenure as Chair and a member of Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation boards.

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-leadership-growt...

Is Google your default search engine? If so, you should send them an invoice. :)

It wasn't a lawsuit, the IRS audited them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#IRS_audit

I’ve got job alerts, and it looks like they are going all in on VPN services given how many people they want to hire… yet I don’t know a single person who would use Mozilla’s VPN service let alone pay for it.

Last time I heard, Thunderbird has zero people on it for years but eventually they manage to afford to pay someone part time to work on it :smh:

Thank you!

Surman same problematic "leadership" type.

From what I understand, Brave is a shit-show in its' own right.

It's good to know they have brought in new talents.

Note that Mozilla Corporations, Mozilla Ventures, and Mozilla.ai mentioned in the articles are all subsidiaries of Mozilla Foundation. If there are issues with the subsidaries' leadership, they could be easily removed by the foundation. If there are issue with Mozilla foundation's leadership then, according to the bylaws, it's not possible for the foundation's board to be removed unless they self remove.

Section 3.3 Election Of Directors, Term. All directors of the Foundation shall be elected annually by the Board of Directors and shall hold office until their respective successors are elected and have qualified, or until their death, resignation or removal.

Section 3.5 Removal. Any director may be removed from office, with or without cause, by the vote of a majority of the other directors then in office.

https://static.mozilla.com/foundation/documents/mf-bylaws.pd...

> The fact that there's no money in a product like Firefox is insane.

What do you mean? There's a huge amount of money, via getting paid to route people to a search engine.

Does anyone know if Mozilla has built up an endowment/trust fund type thing that will allow them to operate without further revenue from an entity like Google?

Last I checked they have some money from the Yahoo settlement. But nowhere near something they can use to operate in perpetuity.

It's a "we want to sell something, but non-profits aren't allowed to do that" trick. And it means the for-profit subsidiary has to pay normal taxes.

OpenAI is structured the same way, so they can sell access to their models. At least until it switches to being entirely for-profit, if that is allowed to happen.

That doesn't sound like she and her fattened board were ousted at all.

What's even more wild is that many users, even on HN, don't seem to pick up on the fact that the alternatives to Firefox are either Chrome or Chrome in different colored trenchcoats. Firefox is like the last bastion of user choice when it comes to deciding how we interact with the Internet, a choice that has been subtly but steadily stripped from us for years.

My question to the FOSS community is why Firefox is not used to build more independent browsers the way Chrome is? While I stand fast on the ground that Google wants to monopolize our web experience, it really seems like the community at large is just...letting it happen. The only strong contender that I've seen built from FF is Iceweasel/cat which works fine for my needs, but is definitely not winning any popularity contests despite actively knocking out those non-free parts of FF.

> Mozilla must die, so Firefox can live.

The day that happens, the only thing we are left with is Chrome..

as I have understood there is also talk of forcing them to sell of Chrome - but

https://daringfireball.net/2025/04/is_chrome_even_a_sellable...

I read the parent post as meaning 'wheels!' being front and centre of the brochure.

Look into what the Mozilla foundation actually spends its money on and the exec salaries, developer layoffs and then compare that to Firefox development over the past 5 years.

It’s getting harder and harder to find examples of this non-profit structure in tech that actually serve the software they claim to.

I did change quite significantly in recent times, so there is certainly work done.

On the other hand it is a mail client and it does exactly what it is supposed to do for years on end. And I believe it is the best mail client too.

Thunderbird is quite healthy and received $8.6M in donations in 2023[0] which is used to employ 24 people[1].

Unlike Firefox, donations are used to fund development.

[0]: https://blog.thunderbird.net/2024/10/thunderbird-annual-repo...

[1]: https://blog.thunderbird.net/2023/05/thunderbird-is-thriving...

To be honest, I'm pleasantly surprised. Thanks for the info.

I'm not sure how you're getting that from a post that explicitly says Mitchell isn't on either board any more.

To help highlight where there are changes and where there is continuity at the top level, here's a table of who was the MoCo CEO, MoCo and MoFo Board Chairs, MoFO President, and MoFo ED over time for the last ten years.

https://imgur.com/a/OLD9EiI

> why Firefox is not used to build more independent browsers the way chromium is?

Ease of integration. It's impossible to integrate Firefox compared to chromium. Unless this is solved, Firefox will die. The hope is new engines like Servo (maybe ladybird), where they are actually putting time and resources to make it easy to integrate. I'll never switch to chromiumia, but as soon as one of those new engines is mature enough, I'm definitely dropping Firefox.

As the guy from whose line said: You don't need a million dollars to do nothing. Look at my cousin. He’s broke and he doesn’t do shit.

Mozilla ≠ firefox

>Section 3.3 Election Of Directors, Term. All directors of the Foundation shall be elected annually by the Board of Directors and shall hold office until their respective successors are elected and have qualified, or until their death, resignation or removal.

The board of directors elects themselves? That is dumb

> My question to the FOSS community is why Firefox is not used to build more independent browsers the way Chrome is?

I actually looked into this. Say you consider yourself as part of the FOSS community, and want to build a new browser, and you start to look for your options. The only things readily available as libraries are webkit (currently owned and open sourced by Apple) and webkit-gtk (based on the former). Apple is like Apple and doesn't really want you to use their open source lib, so even though webkit-gtk team made it happen anyway, good luck if you want to do it yourself. If you decide to just use webkit-gtk, you've made a decision similar to lots of other members of the FOSS community in this area (luakit, the Rust webview crate, etc.). Another option is Qt WebEngine. It's based on Chromium. It's part of the Qt ecosystem and though I think you can use it as a standalone library, carving it out still requires some engineering. So these are the options that are available as libraries. And where are the Firefox ones? Servo makes it clear at the beginning of The Servo Book that it isn't available as a library yet. And Gecko? Firefox source doesn't even include a directory named gecko. It's so tightly coupled with the other parts that you'll need a lot of engineering to carve it out. And this is in contrast to Blink, the engine of Chromium, which is nicely placed in its own directory, having its own webpage with some learning resources.

Who is going to fund Firefox if not Mozilla? Maybe a new organization can pop up or maybe a new one won't.

I think you mixed up Ryan Stiles and Diedrich Bader, though now I wonder if Diedrich ever went on Whose Line when Drew Carey was hosting.

I also hope that Google stops paying Apple $20B/yr for the same reason. The effect on the stock market due to a sudden reduction in Apple services revenue will be fun to watch.

Brave is adware, in what way is it the spiritual successor to Firefox?

Many corporations won't want to fund something that's privacy oriented when they make money on using or selling personal data. Maybe security or privacy oriented corporations will step up with money or labor.

I guess what we need is a non-profit fork of Firefox that takes donations directly and focuses only on the browser.

Novo Norodisk has a similar corporate structure, being owned majority by the Novodisk Foundation[0]

[0]: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/novo-nordisks-unique-structur...

An ad-ware reskin of chromium is the successor of Firefox?

I use Brave and it's totally fine. People love to complain about it on HN but I have never had any bad experiences.

> It's not long until Brave won't be able to support Manifest V2

That's true but not that big of a deal in their case. The built-in ad blocker works quite well and removes the need to run uBlock Origin.

Brave's adblocker won't do anything against Google's trackers if Google builds it in to the engine.

Again, I advise against trusting anything Chromium-based.

Also, you apparently haven't heard of uBlock Origin's Medium Mode. Brave can't even touch that. There's more than just advertising to worry about on the web.

You're absolutely right.

That a browser either maintain your own entire browser engine or you can't support additional types of extensions is a false dichotomy. Vivaldi chooses nto to support it just as much as the choose to integrate VPN, an email client, RSS, Atom, a completely custom UI, and probably other things I'm forgetting that Chromium doesn't ship for them.

What is changing is what Chromium will maintain, what Vivaldi decides to continue supporting is their own choice. My guess is it will be more random crap as well, but not because Chromium is/isn't supporting those things.

the one with the cryptocurrency bullshit?

The problem seen to be that they give power to activists instead of engineers. What the fuck they know about improvements to their core product? The only thing they do is create pretty slogans, borrow money from big capital to grown on top of debit, and seek "new sources of income". This is what it made Mozilla turn from a company that does a super badass browser from a company that sells shit advertisements, infringing on users rights, and claims to be a "international conglomeration of activists" or some shit like this.

My guess is that browsers like ice weasel, libre wolf, while good pieces of software, they dont have a whole company behind them.

Libre wolf "about us" page, dont even have the developers real name, only their online handle.

The closest of a "professional" port of firefox is pretty much Zen Browser.

Is what I been using, alternatin with Brave Browser.

My guess. is going to be sold to a tech giant, and probably extinct. Maybe Microsoft buy it and rename as outlook for Linux.

Guess it falls back to us, the users. To fix the crapshow Mozilla has done. There are a bunch of small different iniciatives that use Firefox codebase. We just need to wait and see who will prevail.

I use too, but is not without its problem. It does implement a lot of adds in things like the new tab page, and it did some controversial stuff (they use to replace page ads with their own, essencially stealing the page monetization, dont know if they still do).

For a while Brave is going to be my stop gap browser. Hopping that Ladybird can soon replace it.

For all its flaws, Brave still annoys me less than Mozilla assh*les.

I also tried Zen Browser... lovely, but is pretty much Mozilla with a bunch of addons. The problem is, is not clear how much of the invasive Mozilla telemetry they left on their code base. Unfourtunally, any browser that orginates from mozilla bullshit, for now, I kind consider fruit of a posionous tree.

Has anyone here ever used switf ouside the apple ecosystem? If so, how is the experience going?

I think in swift like C# and Microsoft. Yeah, you can and I do run a lot of C# code in other platforms. But if you really wanna use everything it has to offer, it needs to be in windows, at least in the development stages.

Yeah, I dont like either, but I wont support Mozilla closed mind and stupidity. They pretty much abandoned Firefox (when was the last time they really updated the browser, other than incremental small corrections?), and I refuse to give my money to fund the type of shit they expend it.

They should have through about that before going all political in their positions as an organization. It was easy with the cushion of google and federal goverment money under them (impressive how easy is to do "charity" and activism with other people money).

Now I wanna see if they will put their wallets where their mouth is, and apparently, they will not.

Every time I receive a e-mail from mozilla fundation asking for 10 bucks to fund their precious inclusivity program that have nothing to do with firefox, because they lost goverment funds, I just laught and think they should ask for a loan from their previous CEO, since she receive 7 mi in one year. I just delete the e-mail after that.

>I'm not sure how you're getting that from a post that explicitly says Mitchell isn't on either board any more.

Ousted doesn't equate to making some changes then walking away in my mind. It doesn't sound like she was in-amicably forced out over results or the like.

I remember her expanding the number of positions on the board (and the often discussed compensation) not too long (relatively) before they had some rounds of firings. I remember being confused why one or both of the ones that joined said board(it's been a while) seemed...completely unrelated to both Mozilla or it's field of expertise or so.