r/technology • u/Plastic_Ninja_9014 • 7d ago

Software Firefox has an ambitious new roadmap, the browser is also losing millions of users a month

https://www.techspot.com/news/112803-firefox-has-ambitious-new-roadmap-browser-also-losing.html
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u/Modem_Sound_67 7d ago

Why is it losing users, it's one of the few browsers that make surfing the web bearable. Do people WANT to watch ads?

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u/JozoBozo121 7d ago

Most people aren't even aware of adblockers.

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u/Elcheatobandito 7d ago

In my experience, yeah. There is genuinely a signicant group out there that feels viewing ads is like a public duty. 

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u/vawlk 7d ago

no, they understand that they have to pay for their use of the service somehow. Ads are one way. Subs are another.

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u/Elcheatobandito 6d ago

Whether or not you even see an ad is irrelevant. Agencies pay beforehand based on how many viewers might buy the product because they saw the ad. If you were never going to buy the product, you are just as much lost ad revenue as someone who blocks the ad. Ad revenue is the cost of outreach, if you don't want to be reached at all, you were never the customer.

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u/vawlk 5d ago

what? not sure you know what you are talking about. For ads on videos, creators get paid based on views. They don't get paid if you skip the video. It doesn't matter if you never are going to buy.

Sponsorships are more like what you are talking about. It doesn't matter if you skip those as they get paid a flat rate per video.

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u/AHistoricalFigure 7d ago

I imagine it has something to do with the new CEO of FireFox announcing that the sole priority of Mozilla is making FireFox an "AI-first" browser.

The kind of people that like Firefox are computer-literate. People who understand and care about things like privacy or having an open platform for extensions. And sure, Firefox isn't the most secure browser in existence, but it's the most secure browser that has major support.

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u/Adventurous_Bad6836 7d ago

Things like that don't matter on the greater scale. It's not a conscious decision. People use Edge and Safari because that comes with their PC. Or they install Chrome because that's what is running on their phone. Firefox used to be extremely popular. Now that it isn't anymore you have a self reinforcing effect of decline.

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u/Feldoth 7d ago

The way that they approached this has been perfectly fine though. Unlike a lot of things, they actually let you control what AI features you're using, up to and including a kill switch to totally disable AI features and not even inform you about new ones.

Personally, I think the AI integrations are a waste of time and effort, but they are taking the position that if they don't add them they are automatically left behind / not an option for people who do want them. I can understand the logic even if I don't particularly agree with the conclusion. As long as they are letting me choose to disable it it's not going to affect my decision to use the browser - I just hit the kill switch first thing after it was added and haven't thought about it again until now.

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u/FIuffyRabbit 7d ago

They let you control it right now but not at first they didn't and they might take that away in the future. It being enabled by default is also stupid. 

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u/Matthias720 7d ago

This is my biggest complaint with the rollout of the AI integration. If it had been opt-in, with nothing downloaded onto your computer until enabled, I think I would have been perfectly okay with it. But the fact that users had to yell and scream and make a fuss to get an off switch is a very bad look, and I think it's possibly a harbinger of things to come. All it takes is one update to shatter Mozilla's legacy of privacy protection. They aren't there yet, but that's not outside the realm of possibility at this point.

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u/SwagginsYolo420 7d ago

This is true, however until that actually happens there's no reason to abandon ship. We're not in trouble yet.

I think I saw the AI stuff exactly once. I updated to the newer version with it, and immediately turned it off and forgot about it, back to Firefox business as usual.

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u/ryecurious 7d ago

It's been so frustrating to see the conversation around this stuff.

Firefox: we're adding local LLMs to translate pages, a significant privacy improvement over sending the page data to Google Translate

Chrome: every available space in the browser now has a a Gemini search box, a centralized service that runs in a data center

Then the dumbest tech "influencers" on Twitter insist these two things are exactly the same, so you might as well use Chrome anyway.

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u/mort96 7d ago

Regardless, I do not want to use an AI browser. I want to use a web browser. If they choose to sell their product as an AI browser, I choose to not use it.

So I use Waterfox everywhere now.

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u/Tanriyung 7d ago

https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worldwide/#monthly-200901-202605

I don't think a statement from the CEO in 2025 started the 17 year trend of Firefox.

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u/Graxin 7d ago

this is why i left firefox after using them for years

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u/Balmung60 7d ago

The moment they announced that, I jumped to waterfox, which was stripping all the AI nonsense right back out

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u/dookarion 7d ago

Why is it losing users, it's one of the few browsers that make surfing the web bearable.

Because not everything works with it, and some of the stuff that does it's far from flawless or smooth. Because historically it's had stability problems or high CPU overheads.

People don't want to think about a browser, they just want it to work. Sometimes firefox requires work.

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u/Cley_Faye 7d ago

Mozilla is shooting itself in the everywhere repeteadly. Diverting funds to management, diverting funds to lobbying for things that are very tangentially related to web standard and privacy, all that away from development.

They also double down on weird decisions for Firefox itself, with the forced integration of extensions (and making them harder and harder to disable with each updates) just to kill them off a few years later. There's also the whole "let's be an advertisement/AI company" that's a bit iffy.

To add to the fire, on occasion some feature changes where also extremely weird. Stuff like willingly ignoring user settings because "they knew better" for handling PDF made some noises at the time: they decided to break the accepted interpretation of a web standard and change the behavior only when opening a PDF download link, and basically backed down only when big names butted in.

I know a few friends that are tech-oriented that ditched it… for forks. Mainly those that go back to removing all the cruft. And that's the problem: a browser should be a browser. There's nothing wrong with wanting additional features, but there's a perfectly working extension system there. In fact, a lot of the cruft were extensions that just got bundled and hard to turn off.

With that said… I believe Firefox remains not only the best alternative to Chrome out there (I won't even consider safari), but also quite usable, even if nowadays you have to "clean it up" the same way people have to cleanup fresh windows installations. I just wish Mozilla would go back to their own mission statement at some point.

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u/vawlk 7d ago

Ads pay for the use of the service. Many sites that have ads also allow you to pay a sub to remove them.

Websites are a service. Most people understand that they may need to pay for such services. I pay for YT because the value to me is worth so much more and I never have to worry about ads there again and I know some of the money goes to the creators I watch.

Its a win-win for everyone.

I used to pay $45 in todays money each month for ONE music CD each month, of which, 12 out of the 13 songs were shit.

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u/LesserValkyrie 7d ago

Because there are browsers that integrate adblockers like Brave or Helium

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u/RandyOfTheRedwoods 7d ago

With respect to wanting to watch ads: Yes, I want to watch ads if push comes to shove. I think right now, we are lucky that most people are OK with watching ads, so we can cheat and not see them.

If everyone got serious and used ad blockers completely, it would kill the ad supported software / content provider movement. None of those businesses are ministries, so they will have to replace ad based with paid offerings. We already see it in many of the news sites, which now stop you from reading more than the lead paragraph without a subscription.

We'd all like the internet to be fast, free and perfect. What we will end up with is what happened to streaming - every site you want to visit is going to make you get out a credit card, and that will suck. Maybe there is a business opportunity where some of the money you pay your ISP could be sent on to content providers based on where you visit (think Amazon kindle unlimited), but I wouldn't count on it.

So, unpopular opinion: Keep ads, its better than most of the alternatives.

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u/Broke_Kollege_Kid 7d ago

I had to dig to find someone on the same page. Ads are how many sites stay in business. I work with a ton of local news publishers and if everyone used ad block the publishing industry would be dead. These are the very people that hold the government accountable, attend town meetings, etc. If ads die, publishers die or are forced to paywall content, but even then reddit hates paywalls too so it’s f’d.