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Firefox has an ambitious new roadmap, the browser is also losing millions of users a month
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this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2026
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There was a blog post not too long ago, where an Ex-Mozilla engineer shared his thoughts on exactly this topic. The tldr was something like
"Don't try to be like the other browsers, chasing daily active users. Get back in touch with your userbase and understand why they choose Firefox every day instead of just mindlessly picking one of the larger browsers like the majority of users. Then build a browser for these users, instead of pushing them away by doing what the other browsers (which they actively try to avoid) do."
I share this sentiment, but it won't make the money people happy, so I don't think it'll happen.
EDIT: Found the post: https://blog.unitedheroes.net/5751
I dispute this as well:
This is a nice sentiment.
But these aren’t the Internet Explorer days.
A browser engine with less than 1% market share isn’t going to be supported by web developers, and then everything about its development becomes an uphill battle. Major sites won’t work, and they can’t afford to fixe them all on an ad hoc basis. And again, it’s not like the IE days where the “default” browser is so unbelievably dysfunctional, the OS was more open, and the user base was a bit more technical.
I’d argue one of Firefox’s most important functions (alongside Safari) is to stop Chrome from becoming the de facto web standard, instead of the HTML spec.
And it’s been repeatedly demonstrated that “these users” the quote describes is an exceedingly small base. It’s reasonable for Firefox to want to expand that, instead of catering to an ever shrinking pie.
I do partially agree: Mozilla needs to touch some grass. They need to get sane. But there is no “option to pick” presented to most of the world. And if Mozilla caters to the same oldschool Internet users like they always have, Firefox will die.
I don’t have a good solution. I’m just arguing that sentiment is applicable to an era we are no longer in.
Aka pay the Firefox devs.
I understand Mozilla wastes a lot of income, but still. This isn’t a hobbyist piece of software, it’s an expensive, labor intense project that needs constant professional attention.
The income part isn’t trivial, unless they find some alternative source of funding (like the Ladybird project apparently has).
Firefox is a well known browser. People just don't use it because Chrome offers something else. Firefox has always been a "Chrome lite", following in their footsteps instead of standing on it's own terms.
They abandoned their privacy direction, only coming back when it's beneficial for them to market it. While Chrome sucks for adding features that aren't standard, Firefox needs to just be quick with it too. It took Firefox forever to add tab groups, something people were asking for all the time.
They are absolutely out of touch with their user base and have no direction. Opera GX targeted the gaming niche and now they have similar market share to Firefox, which is insane. It's a shit browser, but at least they went for something. Firefox just idles and adds whatever is popular way too late. Nobody wanted AI shit added, why was any development time wasted on it? The engineer is right.
Always? Firefox existed before Chrome
You know what I mean. It was around for 4 years before Chrome, now they have both existed together for 18 years. Firefox was steady for a few years, then Chrome came along and blew it out of the water. Obviously Google pushing it on their main page was the biggest reason for it's insane adoption, but it was also just the better browser at that point, Mozilla have been doing catch-up ever since and constantly tripping up.
I do agree Chrome was the better browser, hell I switched to it primarily after a few years because of how much faster it was.
I don't really think that's the case anymore though, Chrome has been enshittifying for years now, and in my experience, they're pretty on-par, except of course I can use extensions without the impending doom spectre on Firefox and on mobile.
Exactly. I also swapped, it was just so much better back then.
I use Firefox now, but they don't seem to know what they want to do with it. Speed wise it's fast, it's more private, it has good extension support. I think they could have leaned into features like Firefox Send, added a P2P mode, people would have used a built-in file sharing thing with good support to it. Pocket was nice, maybe they could have evolved it some way.
They just never really tried to give the browser an identity I feel like.
"Why would I swap to Firefox?" All I can say is, it's more private (after toggling settings off, ugh). Most don't care about consolidation of the web to one engine.
Most of us caring more about FOSS and privacy, use forks like Librewolf and we will probably all end up on a Servo browser.
...four? what reality are you from?
They are correct, yes? Firefox 1.0 in 2004, Chrome in 2008. I remember I was in highschool when Firefox came out, in uni when Chrome came out. Seems about right.
firefox was originally phoenix, which was originally the mozilla suite, which was originally netscape. the experience was there from 1999, with the same people behind it.
I am aware, I was using Phoenix back in the day. But Firefox version 1.0 came out 4 years before Chrome. They are not loving in an alternate reality.
And Chromium was around since 2006? It's all semantics and not the main point anyway.
could also go back to khtml if we want, but the chromium beta was pretty rough.
You basically see it with some sites now, where you're just told "use chrome if you have any issues", and then it reflects badly on firefox, because a casual user might just think it's the fault of the browser that it's poorly made and doesn't work properly.
For the websites, it's not worth writing around browser-specific quirks, when the vast majority use a chrome-based browser.
Linux has always had that problem. "Linux doesn't support any games!" or "Linux can't run Photoshop". That's the way it is always phrased and seen (and was much worse before Proton came along). Not "The devs didn't bother supporting Linux" or "Adobe sucks".
"The income part isn’t trivial, unless they find some alternative source of funding"
Addressed within the article by the insider:
Google can easily afford to fund Mozilla, and it can't afford to stop. They still need to act like they aren't a monopoly.
…Do they?
I feel like we are very close to a cyberpunk future where Alphabet doesn’t have to pretend.
And I feel that’s quite dismissive. Mozilla doesn’t have enough development resources as-is, hence the whole original article. And abandoning Servo. And a bunch of other things. If money was a non-concern, they wouldn’t be here.
The problem is a bit circular. Mozilla is flippant with money because they get it from Google and they act like it will be eternal. Assuming an absolute worst case scenario: just based on 2024 finances, Mozilla has enough money to keep running for about three years with no funding if expenses remain stable (123/41=3).
It's worth noting that Servo and competing engine Ladybird are still in development, and they do not get Mozilla money...
I am longtime Firefox user and i diagree. Firefox will never be big or profitable and should double down on its fanbase. Being divergent from the norm is a feature not a bug. It is the reason people are still using it. Being non-profit and open source is the strength that will always keep it alive because its funders are its fans.
If a website stops working on Firefox I won't use the website. If i really have to use the website I will switch to Vivaldi temporarily. If i have to use it regularly I'll complain about it to the website support. Every time I use it.
It is worth being loyal to me for Firefox, because I am loyal to them. I won't switch to chromium based browsers out of principle.
Lol you are so wrong yet many people upvoted you. How come
It’s an almost universal problem. Everything wants to grow so it starts doing things their existing users don’t like, because they’re trying to appeal to people they don’t already have.
"The money people" is Google which is bankrolling Firefox so that it won't have to divest Chrome under monopoly laws.