Mozilla wants you to love Firefox again

Mozilla's interim CEO Laura Chambers "says the company is reinvesting in Firefox after letting it languish in recent years," reports Fast Company, "hoping to reestablish the browser as independent alternative to the likes of Google's Chrome and Apple's Safari.

"But some of those investments, which also include forays into generative AI, may further upset the community that's been sticking with Firefox all these years..." Chambers acknowledges that Mozilla lost sight of Firefox in recent years as it chased opportunities outside the browser, such as VPN service and email masking. When she replaced Mitchell Baker as CEO in February, the company scaled back those other efforts and made Firefox a priority again. "Yes, Mozilla is refocusing on Firefox," she says. "Obviously, it's our core product, so it's an important piece of the business for us, but we think it's also really an important part of the internet."

Some of that focus involves adding features that have become table-stakes in other browsers. In June, Mozilla added vertical tab support in Firefox's experimental branch, echoing a feature that Microsoft's Edge browser helped popularize three years ago. It's also working on tab grouping features and an easier way to switch between user profiles. Mozilla is even revisiting the concept of web apps, in which users can install websites as freestanding desktop applications. Mozilla abandoned work on Progressive Web Apps in Firefox a few years ago to the dismay of many power users, but now it's talking with community members about a potential path forward.

"We haven't always prioritized those features as highly as we should have," Chambers says. "That's been a real shift that's been very felt in the community, that the things they're asking for . . . are really being prioritized and brought to life."

Firefox was criticized for testing a more private alternative to tracking cookies which could make summaries of aggregated data available to advertisers. (Though it was only tested on a few sites, "Privacy-Preserving Attribution" was enabled by default.) But EFF staff technologist Lena Cohen tells Fast Company that approach was "much more privacy-preserving" than Google's proposal for a "Privacy Sandbox." And according to the article, "Mozilla's system only measures the success rate of ads — it doesn't help companies target those ads in the first place — and it's less susceptible to abuse due to limits on how much data is stored and which parties are allowed to access it." In June, Mozilla also announced its acquisition of Anonym, a startup led by former Meta executives that has its own privacy-focused ad measurement system. While Mozilla has no plans to integrate Anonym's tech in Firefox, the move led to even more anxiety about the kind of company Mozilla was becoming. The tension around Firefox stems in part from Mozilla's precarious financial position, which is heavily dependent on royalty payments from Google. In 2022, nearly 86% of Mozilla's revenue came from Google, which paid $510 million to be Firefox's default search engine. Its attempts to diversify, through VPN service and other subscriptions, haven't gained much traction.

Chambers says that becoming less dependent on Google is "absolutely a priority," and acknowledges that building an ad-tech business is one way of doing that. Mozilla is hoping that emerging privacy regulations and wider adoption of anti-tracking tools in web browsers will increase demand for services like Anonym and for systems like Firefox's privacy-preserving ad measurements. Other revenue-generating ideas are forthcoming. Chambers says Mozilla plans to launch new products outside of Firefox under a "design sprint" model, aimed at quickly figuring out what works and what doesn't. It's also making forays into generative AI in Firefox, starting with a chatbot sidebar in the browser's experimental branch.

Chambers "says to expect a bigger marketing push for Firefox in the United States soon, echoing a 'Challenge the default' ad campaign that was successful in Germany last summer. Mozilla's nonprofit ownership structure, and the idea that it's not beholden to corporate interests, figures heavily into those plans."