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It's a crazy crowded space. Any entry into this field looks like a "me too" product driven by FOMO instead of being motivated by (a) serving customer needs, (b) serving social needs, or (c) making money. (All of which are fine with me) It will get 0.5% market share -- and I'm supposed to get excited?

If you lived in New York City you might think there are Duane Reades coast-to-coast but there are not. If you are based in the Bay Area you see billboards that are very different from anywhere else. I'd say the viewpoint is a lot like this famous artwork

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/View_of_the_World_from_9th_Ave...

but maybe instead of the rest of the US being 1/5 of the vertical space it is 1/25 of the vertical space. Problem is most customers do not live in the bay area and most web browser users do not live in the bay area and most web developers do not live in the bay area. Based in the Bay Area they can hop in their cars and drive the longest 40 miles in America to get to Google and Facebook's headquarters so Mozilla is talking to those people all the time and not talking to the rest of us.

We don't get costly signalling to show they care about the rest of us, we don't even get cheap talk.

They probably think René Girard is deep because they are surrounded by people who think René Girard is deep. If Mozilla wants to be relevant and not just an also-ran it needs to "think different" like the other 99.9% -- it's not that hard if you change your location.

Really the EU needs to apologize for those damned cookie popups and invest in a privacy-first browser. Whether that is "fully fund Firefox" or "fully a fund a Firefox fork" or pick up another browser engine or start a new one.

I see the warning lights flashing: a few years back web sites that didn't work with Firefox were few and far between, this weekend I bought tickets for a comic book convention and they took my money but didn't give me a ticket because the site didn't work with Firefox. I use Firefox as my daily driver so all the projects that I work on work with Firefox; the rest of my team doesn't give a damn and if you lose me another site will become Chrome-only.

> Businesses definitely want to control the AI they're using (especially with RAGs of their own data) instead of just throwing it at their LLM vendor and hoping for the best

Yes, agreed on that. I'm not sure I'm clear how this really helps that; I suppose it's a frontend that they don't have, but there are a bunch of those already.

It doesn't seem to help them control the _actual_ AI, i.e. the model, which still has to come from somewhere.

> This is from the separate independent team that works on Thunderbird, not Firefox, so there isn't any resource contention happening there

I would rather have them work on Thunderbird.

  > Imagine that there is such a thing as a person in charge of choosing technologies for organizations, and that you're such a person. That's who this is for.

https://www.thunderbolt.io/announcing-thunderbolt

I see no reason this product should exist even under the Thunderbird umbrella, especially if ANY resources under ANY Mozilla org were employed in this. This product is a distraction from their core mission in either case.

Can the team please use that money on making thunderbird look like the nice UI mockups that were published that don't look anything like thunderbird.

It goes to show that Mozilla(s) could, if they really wanted, restructure Mozilla Corporation / Foundation.

(edit - to allow users to fund Firefox, allowing us to better sleep at night, and to align our incentives)

Thunderbird was literally asking for donations just a few days ago?

>Thunderbird is revenue positive

Hmm, I thought the for-profit Thunderbird pro hadn't launched yet?

I know Thunderbird is for profit, but what are they profitting from without the paid service, and how much of that profit is going into this unrelated Thunderbolt AI platform, exactly?

Hu... Revenue positive just last week that had a pretty dire sounding call for donations ala make sure thunderbird can survive...

Just for clarity, you do mean Thunderbird (the email client), not Thunderbolt (this new AI client)?

i find it interesting that they advertise it as "trusted because european"

> Thunderbird is revenue positive

Is that why I'm met with a splash screen asking me to donate every time I start Thunderbird? Is this another Wikipedia situation?

What does “revenue positive” even mean?

It doesn’t mean profitable, it doesn’t mean cash flow positive.

Are you just trying to say their revenue is greater than zero?

Not sure about the US but in France there’s absolutely no way this would be confused with Apple Thunderbolt. No one talks about it, and I don’t even know it it’s even a thing anymore since USB-C.

As for Thunderbird, it’s not the same name? Idk what to say

It's clearly a fancy AI powered cable isn't it?

I suppose there is no Thunderbird for Macs then? Or someone in the team would have noticed.

Agreed. The name collision nowadays is horrible.

Then again, it's frustrating trying to name a product in today's era; too many names are taken.

I came here to say that. Especially with the .io TLD instead of .ai

These two goals:

> ... please stop working on projects distracting from the complex and necessary work of browser and web standards stewardship.

> Ditching any direct financial ties to Google or any other browser vendor is both important and necessary...

are inherently contradictory. If you do not want Mozilla to have revenue from search vendors that also have browsers, it has to come from somewhere else. Or are you suggesting they switch the default search engine back to Yahoo [0]?

I am not trying to defend the projects they have chosen to work on, but you have to understand that reducing dependence on Google is exactly why they are working on them [1].

[0] Even when they did that, it was for the US only, and Google was still the default for most of the world.

[1] Although in this case, this appears to come from the Thunderbird organization, so unrelated to the browser. Money is fungible, though.

Firefox is pretty cool. Use it every day.

Blocks ads Multi account containers Dev tools very good

I never notice that it is in any way slow, except for those sites that need infinity cpu on any browser, like jira.

What specifically is the issue? To my mind it quietly just gets on with things.

> already painful and readily apparent, stagnation of your browser

What's wrong with Firefox? There are several things Firefox does that it's annoying to live without in other browsers (video pop-outs, competent ad blocking, etc). Is there some core feature that's missing? I'm subjected to Edge at work and I couldn't tell you a single thing it does that I'd want FF to do.

> and our standards bodies as entities distinct from corporations

Ok, I buy that.

Mozilla is doing exactly what you’re describing. They need revenue to ditch their direct financial ties to Google (and I wonder if they hire those high-salary executives solely in the hope of generating that revenue).

These AI products, along with all previous failed attempts, are just them trying to gain enough revenue to remove that dependency on Google.

This "Mozilla is distracted" narrative is a category 5 hurricane of unsubstantiated vibes from people who have no idea what they're talking about.

Some quick hits just from reading recent release announcements from December '25 through April 26:

- Hardware acceleration for faster performance with PDFs - Expanded WebGPU support - Faster page loading with compression dictionaries - Deeper hardware integration for faster video playback on AMD hardware - Better GPU stability and performance on MacOS - Faster local translation

And I'm only picking out bits and pieces. "Web platform" improvements are so abundant that reproducing them from any single release would be a massive wall of text, but for a few examples just from one recent release:

>Service worker support for WebGPU has been added, making it available in all worker contexts. Service workers allow WebGPU to run in the background, which is particularly useful for extensions and other pages that can meaningfully share resources across multiple tabs and time periods.

>Firefox now supports the Iterator.zip() and Iterator.zipKeyed() methods from the joint iteration proposal. This allows zipping together underlying iterators into an iterator over values grouped by position, similar to zip in many other languages.

>Firefox now supports the Trusted Types API, which is primarily aimed at preventing cross-site scripting attacks.

>Firefox now supports the Sanitizer API, which provides new methods for HTML manipulation. The element.setHTML() method enables developers to insert HTML content similarly to element.innerHTML, but without the security vulnerabilities such as cross-site scripting (XSS). A complementary method, document.parseHTML(), is also available for parsing HTML safely.

And on and on it goes with APIs, CSS and so on, and that's every release, and that's still not covering feature requests and cosmetic updates, or the constant security updates.

Guys, this is millions of lines of code and thousands of patches every quarter. While you were reading about AI features or poorly worded terms of service, they studied the blade..er.. they worked on real performance improvements. It should be a scandal that anyone in the comment section gets away with claiming they're not working on anything.

I agree that Mozilla is a breath of fresh air, and I am happy to see this extending to AI.

They (like many) are afraid to become svn as the world is apparently taken over by git. Well-maintained but irrelevant.

Where exactly do you expect Mozilla to gain revenue from other than non browser projects?

Do you want people to pay to use Firefox?

I'm perfectly fine with Mozilla working on other things as long as those things are profitable or at least self-funded. As long as they are not leeching donated resources from Firefox or Thunderbird, I don't see a problem. However, I wish I had some kind of assurance that the money I donate to Mozilla would go to Firefox and not some other project like this.

Have you donated to the Mozilla Foundation so they can ditch financial ties with Google?

I'm going to sound crazy, and I've said this on HN before, but I wish CloudFlare or someone who would truly appreciate the effort and investment, would buy out Mozilla and have them oxidizing the browser again. Firefox was at its best when they were going through that effort, and since they put a pause on it, Firefox has been so "meh" for many years now, and embedding things nobody asked for. A faster fully oxidized browser on the other hand would be loved by many.

The Mozilla employees are just Google plants. The web standards are now controlled by WHATWG who are all members of Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Mozilla and they are not interested in pushing standards forward or making browser improvements. They are only interested in ensuring entrenchment for their corporations. That’s why they created WHATWG. There is nothing any non-compromised Mozilla employee can do. The ship has sunk. Either someone hard forks Firefox or we continue down the current road.

I agreed with these posts a couple years ago but for the past year there have been a lot of meaningful improvements in Firefox.

I agree with the sentiment, but it’s hard to agree fully with anyone seeming desperate.

This reads like a kid trying to give business advice to an adult. “You could do THIS, then THIS, it would also be cool if you did THAT but please don’t do THAT!!”

C’mon now.

Yeah, you don't speak for me.

I believe they're anticipating self-hosters to deploy directly from their Github documentation.

The FAQs in Github also imply that a hosted deployment for single users is on their roadmap, but not prioritized. - https://github.com/thunderbird/thunderbolt/blob/main/docs/fa...

People "want" a lot of contradictory things. People "want" them to be less financially reliant on Google, while also "focusing" on a browser in a market that is entirely commoditized and subsidized by 3 of the 10 largest companies in the world - and having a wholly implementation independent browser engine when it's so massively difficult and capital intensive that even Microsoft gave up on it.

This is from MZLA Technologies, so is a sister product to Thunderbird rather than Firefox.

I agree with you, there are 1,000 different chat apps and just one Firefox. And the world needs Firefox more than it knows.

It looks like they might want to get into hosting/selling services to users on this.

From the FAQ:

> Is there going to be a hosted version if I don't want to deploy it myself? > Yes, we are planning to launch Thunderbolt for regular users but we do not have a release date yet.

Mozilla needs money to support the development of Firefox (and the payroll of its high-salary executives).

For now, they mainly rely on Google for that money. Google pays them to avoid antitrust cases, to show the courts that they are not a monopoly and that "alternatives" exist. For example, the DOJ once proposed that Google be forced to sell off Chrome.

However, if another entity has control over your budget, they also have control over your product. If Firefox becomes "too good" to be a true competitor in the consumer space, the funding might be reduced or even cut off.

Creating a new source of revenue allows Mozilla to improve Firefox even beyond the point Google feels "comfortable" with.

The anti-trust lawsuits with Google have Mozilla realizing they can't just be a company kept afloat by Google. Mozilla's priorities have been pretty complacent, basically just maintaining Firefox, sometimes Thunderbird, and a couple side services that have little financial incentives.

The current state of Mozilla is pretty odd since they rebranded to make it more apparent they're a non-profit, while also attempting to become more profitable pushing out new products and services.

No, email that supports open standards/protocols is really important right now where many email services are trying force IMAP to retire.

Why is this related to Firefox?

RIP Firefox OS

We're not, but companies are not courageous enough to explore new names.

I've already used up "cum" btw, so you're not allowed to name your product that.

>And then of course it's also the same as a well-known hardware interface.

The cherry on top is that the domain is thunderbolt.IO. No other TLDs to pick from?

I mean there's already an established theme... how hard can it be?

Fire-fox

Thunder-bird

River-wolf

Stone-raven

....

Well, see, one is Thunderbolt io, and the other is Thunderbolt.io.

> What does this one differently that the other thirteen in a dozen don't?

Mozilla's a lot more trustworthy with privacy and data, and they're unlikely to sell the project to someone who only wants to stuff it full of malware/adware/crypto stuff - or do it themselves.

Are they allowed to reuse Thunderbolt when it's already taken in the same industry?

...and also differs in just three characters from another Mozilla product.

"I'm using Mozilla Thunderbolt."

"Huh, do you mean Thunderbird?"

"No, Thunderbolt!"

Think of it as a product similar to Thunderbird, emailing/chatting with a computer instead of a person. But I agree the name should have been sufficiently different. Thunderbolt would have been a great name for an email server.

I remember that Firefox is orders of magnitude more performant in css processing, especially for complex documents with many elements. Can't comment on the javascipt interpeter, so I assume firefox is losing points somewhere else outside the screen painting engine.

Why is this related to Firefox?

Ladybird soon™

Firefox has many weaknesses, but I never once thought “man, that thing is slow”. It isn’t, and chasing benchmark numbers is a waste of effort. A better security model or deeper customizability would be far more valuable.

And regarding (memory) performance, chromium has the "memory saver" settings for unloading tabs. I don't understand why mozilla thinks its acceptable to require users unload tabs manually. Who even does that?

Hi, I'm on team that worked on this. No it's not vibe coded. We do pretty intense code review of every PR. It looks like the number you're seeing is including lock files and artifacts that are not part of the core coverage.

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

"Please don't fulminate."

"Don't be curmudgeonly. Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

>120k LoC of probably largely vibecoded nonsense for a window with a text box and a button that lets you send and receive some data over a HTTP API.

"I will make loads of assumptions without checking so that I can invent reasons to get mad"

Note that about 30,000 of those lines are JSON files for localization and testing, as one example.

Maybe you wouldn't be so tired if you didn't make assumptions of things to be mad about

On the bright side - it doesn't load without javascript ...in Firefox...

What fatigues you about this observation?

Would recommend exercise

Wait what ? Did you include libraries imported by NPM in this count ?

Could those external APIs point to locally hosted models?

Vibe-named

Some of us are out here still waiting for Firefox relay “premium” to launch and provide disposable mobile numbers like they do email addresses.. but product has for some reason been stuck on “join waiting list” for what feels like an absolute age.

Yeah it seems similar to Gemini Enterprise. There you can deploy "apps" (basically front-ends) on top of the LLM that come pre-configured with plugins to access Google sheets, Databases, your Jira boards, etc.

So all this is doing is adding context for the LLM and some persistence.

I have yet to see a compelling use case for Gemini Enterprise at my company but we're still experimenting with it.

that is in beta

Why is this related to Firefox?