Update was from 3 days ago, I’m really hopeful ladybird could be a future browser option to help break the stranglehold chrome has over the market, while Mozilla is struggling to find meaningful direction.
It seems like an exciting project with monthly progress updates :) they keep chipping away at compatibility.
I hope they can do it. Mozilla hasn’t fundamentally changed from where they were at least a year ago (re: their inability to clearly communicate policy “changes”), but the fact that they don’t seem to know what concerns their users and how to communicate in a way that doesn’t stoke their fears—it just makes them harder to work with and recommend.
Hopefully Ladybird can inject some much-needed competition into browsers.
I definitely agree. They feel deeply confused about their audience and like they perpetually flounder trying to find a sustainable direction or future :/
Ootl, what happened with Mozilla ? I use Firefox and very happy with it so this sounds surprising
They recently announced terms of service that they (I think?) Partially walked back. But honestly it’s a longer term issue-
Mozilla is dependent on Google giving them lots of money to be the default Firefox search engine, and anti-monopoly rulings in Europe may mean Google has to stop doing that, which would really jeopardize Mozilla’s financial sustainability
The gecko engine is way behind on web standards, and while it generally gets the job done for average users, I’ve learned recently lots of devs don’t test their sites with it or support it not just because it’s a minority browser, but because it doesn’t support a lot of stuff and is hard to work with.
Mozilla seems to believe their path forward financially is AI features. Which are very unpopular with a lot of the folks who follow Mozilla, even if implemented thoughtful, and seems like a dubious financial future given even huge companies like openai are struggling to make ai financially self sustaining.
Add to it the privacy preserving ad tracking stuff they wanted as an alternative to cookies a while back, and the picture doesn’t really get better
All of these are small things. The compatibility with web standards isn’t the end of the world for most users. A big bug was/is that firefox rendered gradients horrendously for like 12 years or something with the bug reports just sitting there, but most Foss nerds who use firefox don’t super care if a website’s gradient looks crappy. The features that chrome has but Firefox doesn’t aren’t dealbreakers for most users. The privacy preserving trackers or whatever they were called seemed at least relatively thoughtfully implemented from a privacy standpoint. AI could hypothetically be done in a way that isn’t totally shitty, and maybe possibly they could build a financial future out of it. The terms of service debacle could stop here and not devolve into actual enshitification.
But it all culminates together in feeling like mozilla is out of touch with their core audience and has no real viable plan for staying afloat, sans google paying them shitloads of money to be the default browser engine. :/
In short, they’re trying to make much more money to pay the executives’ 7 figure salaries, and are giving up browser privacy to do so.
7 figure salary ? for an oss project ? that doesn’t sound good or sustainable at all
And remember that Mozilla is supposed to be a non-profit.
I don’t understand how it makes sense for a nonprofit to make it so profitable to their executives to manage it… why is that not regulated?
https://tilvids.com/w/fAvzwwK2abKCGUea6FT9va
There’s also bs like this:
https://www.maketecheasier.com/firefox-testing-new-privacy-feature-with-meta/
The browser is cool but Mozilla as a company is an absolute trainwreck of borked public communication (again and again and again) and bullshit products that noone asked for (Pocket, AI etc).
Wouldn’t forking Mozilla provide a stronger base than an entirely new browser?
Not if it ties the fork into specific licenses. The other issue is that the internet should not be dominated by two and a half engines (Safari’s being the half). It creates an environment where they can collude to force the direction of the internet, where they are potential single points of failure, or where they can force users into bad terms of service.
Take this hypothetical: I make Super Browser (SB), but I fork it from Firefox (FF). SB looks and functions completely differently from FF, but it still uses FF’s Gecko engine to render the web. No matter what changes I make, I’m still at the mercy of Mozilla and their priorities.
This leaves few choices for developers and users alike, and it doesn’t encourage the companies at the top to innovate. Because, what are people gonna do? Leave? For what alternative?
Oh, I think they’re communicating just fine. They’re signalling the direction they plan to take and it’s not a good one.
I disagree, but I understand why you think that.
The pro-FOSS stance would be to get your communications off of being exclusively proprietary platforms. Developer & early adopter freedom & privacy matters—but instead they are choosing Discord & Microsoft GitHub as their only platforms.
True, but I’m not one to let perfect be the enemy of good.
It so annoying they use those platforms ONLY tho 🙁
We can & should demand at least gateways & mirrors if not at least a single alternative. Considering they have funding, they can self-host to actually control a forum or chat room as well as a code mirror (even if just HTTP with no forge). Folks are also undervaluing how some users are banned from access to these US-based platforms under US sanctions.
I mean, we gotta draw the line somewhere. Seems reasonable to not want official community discussions to happen in a proprietary platform. We got where we are with the internet because of complacency.
I didn’t know they’d be able to tap into the Firefox profiling tools, that’s neat! Probably great data to have as they get into debugging of more complex websites.
i imagine that it’s only the UI - they’d have to implement all the profiling etc themselves… but it does mean they have a framework to build the tools into, and not having to build the UI rather than starting from scratch which is a huge help
Thanks for the share! Pretty encouraging to see so much progress. Alpha in 2026!
Is that in the video or just your hope? If that’s the case I missed it, and that would be super exciting!
I’ve not seen the video but that’s what’s on the website.
Aw, fuck yeah! I’m glad you mentioned it :)
It’s in the video too! With this level of coverage and functionality it seems like a reasonable goal IMO
The part with the progress graph compared to other browsers over time is especially cool!
