Mozilla's "State of Mozilla 2025" is AI nonsense
- all of the planned new Firefox features for 2026 are "AI"-based (except for a new paid support tier)
- they're taking our money and establishing an "AI"-focused investment arm
- all of the art appears to be slop
Remember when Mozilla was not awful?
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I learned a new word yesterday, "sloperators". Use a word 3 times and it's yours...
Added: why do you say the new paid support tier isn't AI-based too? Asking people to pay to talk to a chat bot seems par for the course.
Good word.
You’re absolutely right - it hadn’t even occurred to me that the paid support tier is probably just going to be ChatGPT in a trench coat. Ugh.
BEATLEJUICE
BEATLEJUICE
BEATLEJUICE
Michael Keaton singing Yellow Submarine in a gravely voice was not on my 2026 bingo card.
Brave to the rescue!
Mozilla, you make me sad. You defeated the monopoly of internet explorer where Netscape failed.
But now, you're just as bad as whatever M$ wants to call their browser this week.
Here's the text of the website, so you can avoid the UX disaster that they decided to hide the content behind:
Pepperidge farm remembers.
It’s been genuinely depressing watching Mozilla devolve into what it has become.
Recently migrated my browser of choice to waterfox for daily use and have been playing around with Librewolf too.
While it’s supposed to be more community focused, I’m considering dropping Thunderbird for other FOSS alternatives too because of its roots with Mozilla. Haven’t pulled that trigger yet though
Anything promising for mail? I use Thunderbird for Windows, Linux, and Android and would love a good alternative
Well, I’ll admit I haven’t looked into this too much, but I do have a few that I know of.
First is a fork of Thunderbird
ironicallycalled Betterbird. Looks like it’s multi-platform. For Linux it’s also available as a Flatpak.Another desktop alternative that I’ve known of for a while is called Evolution. This one appears to be Linux only, unless I’m mistaken.
There’s also one called geary; also Linux only. The only options I’ve found for it is an unverified Flatpak or building it yourself.
While I haven’t used it personally for Android, I’ve heard good things about K-9 mail. Can be found on F-Droid.
I started using fairmail on android. It works really well for me.
There are some optional llm integrations burried deep in the menus but nothing on by default, just a place to slap in an api key.
The backtracking when this blows up is going to be so satisfying.
They can't backtrack from this. If they even try, they shouldn't be allowed to. They've betrayed every ounce of morality Mozilla was founded with. This is what they've been since there were executives, since there was a corporation and not a non-profit community foundation. This is what they've been since they took money from the enemy they should have been fighting to destroy in order to make the internet a freer place.
Is the public interest AI in the room with us now? Wtf does democracy have to do with ai, or are you jsut slapping on nice sounding words to make the forced slopification of firefox sound better?
Okay, but what happens if the majority of your users turn it off? Are you going to be this sickeningly excited about it when it only serves a fraction of your user base? Maybe by then you'll be too brain dead to even notice...
Open source AI is still AI, with all the shitty drawbacks it comes with.
Feels like you're making the choice for us, dipshits.
Public interest AI are the open source models
But... why... Why rewrite/redo what already works, is marvelous, and is overly customizable, safe, and convenient...
Why not do something more important and valuable? Is that to just burn funding into void?
Since this "AI" events on Firefox, I reconsidered my stance for Firefox 4th time now, and installed another browser.
Likely as you, I did also donate montery, and 2 people I know did, too. I also donated to Thunderbird.
Why disturb, devalue, obliterate the history of all the contributors, too... This is... just freaking incredibly sorrowful... like someone tries to annihilate it... to darken, damage a miracle...
What are they rewriting ?
As much I love their new mascot, I moved to Waterfox for this exact reason.
It's frustrating that they are spending money and bandwidth on 'AI' at all, but it's not all bad news:
"Also, launch “AI controls” into Firefox, giving people a clear way to turn AI off entirely - current and future AI features. . "
I never remember Mozilla Corp not being awful, no. I remember them screwing up the Foundation's work. I remember the moment the execs came in, that they ruined it. I remember that they took money from DoubleClick knowingly to become the controlled opposition. I remember that they made such a crazy rewrite of the code that it made jwz leave - and then they did it again just a few years later because DoubleClick told them to. Gotta have the controlled opposition follow the madcap "release" schedule instead of being on a responsible schedule and using meaningful versioning, after all.
DoubleClick and the company it cancerously infected is also a follower of Mammon.
I'll stick with OxyContin. I'm at least aware it's destroying my brain.
Im so confused, all the AI is literally like a sidebar you can click away right???? what is the hate. Mozilla needs an alternative revenue model so AI integrations make sense to me
The problem is there's only two browser engines: Chromium and Firefox. Literally everything else is just a skin on top of one or the other, usually Chromium.
Chromium is developed and controlled by Google, an increasingly evil megacorp. Firefox is developed by a company that is notionally independent, but gets nearly all of its funding from Google.
So if the Mozilla foundation is putting all of its development efforts into AI bullshit, then what's the viable alternative?
Webkit also exists but it doesn't have the best web compatibility and it only works on MacOS(Safari) and Linux(Gnome Web)
And that's controlled by Apple aswell.
I mean read these commits, Most of the development effort for Firefox is obviously not AI related theirs so much plumbing, web standard chasing, maintenance that needs to be done instead https://github.com/mozilla-firefox/firefox/commits. A literal "Ask claude to summarize my webpage" is like an intern group project
Mozilla seems to want to put funding into infrastructure for helping build open source AI models, IMO I don't really think this is their expertise so it seems like not a very good idea. Could also be a useful revenue source.
The more interesting thing is if AI adopts an ads model, firefox can sell the default AI integration in the same way they sell the default search engine to Google. Would help their revenue problem.
And as long as you can actually turn it off, I don't mind either.
It's opt-in to begin with.
That's why I don't mind it
And this alone is a great argument to go Vivaldi instead
You'd choose proprietary software that's a wrapper for a near-monopoly technology over free and open source software because you didn't like a press release?