- 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?
Here’s the text of the website, so you can avoid the UX disaster that they decided to hide the content behind:
State of Mozilla 2025
Where we’re going, together
We know the stakes. At a moment when a handful of companies are racing to define the future of AI, we’re choosing a future that will push the web in a better direction. And a future that lets you choose when, how and even if you use these new technologies.
Across our portfolio, our 2026 roadmap is all about delivering on this promise:
- Investing in public interest AI and charitable activities — expand the Mozilla Data Collective, launching new incubator cohorts focused on democracy and public interest AI, and convening global communities through programs like Creative Futures Residency and the Democracy x AI Incubator Cohort.
- Enhancing our core products — push Firefox on performance, privacy, and interoperability, and create a Firefox offering for enterprises. Roll out Thunderbird Pro and Thundermail.
- Building trusted AI experiences — build opt-in features into Firefox like AI Window, pushing the envelope on AI that is both useful and user respecting. Also, launch “AI controls” into Firefox, giving people a clear way to turn AI off entirely - current and future AI features. .
- Growing the open source AI ecosystem — grow Mozilla ai’s suite of choice first open source libraries, and launch a hosted AI agent platform optimized for building on open source AI. Also, search out new partners and projects to work with in making the open source AI stack easier to use.
Together, this work reflects a single vision for the future — an ambition to do for AI what we did for the web. It also reflects an acknowledgement that we can only succeed if we do this as a community As in the web era, we will need a rebel alliance of sorts if we want to push AI in a better direction.
In 2026, we will grow Mozilla’s investment in community and partnerships. This includes Mozilla Ventures investments, Mozilla Foundation events like MozFest and collaboration on open source AI projects. Whether you’re a developer, founder, investor, policymaker, teacher, philanthropist or simply someone who cares about where the internet goes next, we want to work with you.
Let’s choose a better future. And then build it, together.
Learn more about it
- Rewiring Mozilla: Doing for AI what we did for the web
- Own What You Build: Open Source and AI’s Future
- Mark Surman on Building a Double Bottom Line for Tech
Let’s Do for AI What We Did for the Web. Help us make the age of AI better, fairer, and more free.
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.
Use a word 3 times and it’s yours…
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.
Remember when Mozilla was not awful?
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.
- Investing in public interest AI and charitable activities — expand the Mozilla Data Collective, launching new incubator cohorts focused on democracy and public interest AI, and convening global communities through programs like Creative Futures Residency and the Democracy x AI Incubator Cohort.
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?
- Building trusted AI experiences — build opt-in features into Firefox like AI Window, pushing the envelope on AI that is both useful and user respecting. Also, launch “AI controls” into Firefox, giving people a clear way to turn AI off entirely - current and future AI features. .
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…
- Growing the open source AI ecosystem — grow Mozilla.ai’s suite of choice first open source libraries, and launch a hosted AI agent platform optimized for building on open source AI. Also, search out new partners and projects to work with in making the open source AI stack easier to use.
Open source AI is still AI, with all the shitty drawbacks it comes with.
Let’s choose a better future. And then build it, together.
Feels like you’re making the choice for us, dipshits.
Public interest AI are the open source models
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.
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. . "
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.
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.
And the beast shall be made legion. Its numbers shall be increased a thousand thousand fold. The din of a million keyboards like unto a great storm shall cover the earth, and the followers of Mammon shall tremble. from The Book of Mozilla, 3:31 (Red Letter Edition)
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.
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?
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.
Building trusted AI experiences — build opt-in features into Firefox like AI Window, pushing the envelope on AI that is both useful and user respecting. Also, launch “AI controls” into Firefox, giving people a clear way to turn AI off entirely - current and future AI features. .
That’s why I don’t mind it
