Mozilla’s new message: We’re the only browser not backed by billionaires

As frustration with corporate power grows under the oligarch-friendly Trump administration, Mozilla Firefox stands out more than ever for at least one defining trait: It isn’t owned by a giant tech company.

“We’re independent and nonprofit,” Mozilla CEO Laura Chambers told Fast Company in an interview at Web Summit Qatar. “We’re the only browser not backed by billionaires.”

But the nonprofit organization that broke Internet Explorer’s monopoly in Windows browsers 20 years ago isn’t counting only on “storytelling that we can do,” she added. “We’re also doing a lot of work on the product.”

Features getting filled out

The first of a set of new features that Chambers describes as intended to “help people navigate the Web more easily” should ship in March.

One cribs from a clever feature that Microsoft’s Edge added almost four years ago: an option to display open browser tabs in a column running down the left side of the browser window instead of in a row spanning the top. Neither Apple’s Safari nor Google’s Chrome have seen fit to copy that since.

A second sounds like the helpful quick-change tool Firefox offers to route a web search to the search engine of your choice: a sidebar tool that will let you switch between AI chatbots for quick queries that they can answer, hopefully without hallucination.

Later in spring or summer, Mozilla plans to address a longstanding user request by shipping support for tab groups (for example, “recipes” or “shopping”) that you can create and then open or close as you need them. Safari in particular does this well, while Firefox users have had to install an extension to get a version of it.

Another tab-management feature aimed at tab-overload victims like me (I had 76 open tabs open in this laptop’s copy of Firefox as I was writing this) will employ what sounds like on-device AI to organize tabs.

Maybe more so than competitors like Google and Microsoft, Mozilla has been enlisting offline AI to avoid having to send any user data to the cloud. But it’s not always obvious when its new features work in that privacy-preserving way: I didn’t know that Firefox’s page-translation feature worked on-device until I saw Chambers bring that up in a panel at Web Summit’s Doha conference.

“We should probably market that more,” Chambers admits.

A role for regulation

But Mozilla says it’s already seeing increased adoption of its browser—in Europe, where the EU’s Digital Markets Act requires designated gatekeeper platforms to open mobile-device app stores and system defaults to potential competitors.

“In Europe, we grew Firefox share last year, which is the first time we’ve done it in a long time,” Chambers said.

Mozilla credits the DMA’s “choice screen,” in which users pick a browser instead of having a system default waiting on their home screens, with goosing Firefox adoption in Android and iOS—by 29% in Germany and France since the DMA went into effect last March.

The underlying numbers remain low in third-party estimates, however. Cloudflare’s automated tracking puts Firefox’s mobile share at 1.3% in France and 2.7% in Germany, although Mozilla argues that Firefox’s tracking-prevention measures suppress those user counts. In the U.S., Cloudflare has Firefox at just .8%.

Firefox has historically had higher share on Windows and Mac computers, where Cloudflare credits that browser with a 7.6% share worldwide, 21.5% in Germany, 14.6% in France, and 7.1% in the U.S.

But it’s in the U.S. where government antitrust action may threaten Mozilla directly. The antitrust case that the federal government and almost every state attorney general successfully bought against Google over its search business practices could lead to a ban on Google paying other browsers to keep its search engine the default.

Chambers would rather not see things come to that.

“The part that’s at risk is the U.S. revenue,” she said. “If our revenues were to be hurt through that, it would be much harder to sustain Gecko as an independent browser engine.”

A little engine that could

Gecko, the open-source software framework inside Firefox that displays and animates pages, is the only major rendering engine that both runs on Windows and macOS and is not a Google project like the Blink open-source engine inside Chrome (employed by such indie, non-billionaire browser developers as Brave and the Browser Co).

But Gecko’s third-place standing after Blink and Apple’s WebKit can lead to sites blocking the browser—for example, Formula 1’s F1 TV brushes Firefox-using racing fans aside, telling them “please switch to an alternative browser.”

Asked if life wouldn’t be easier for Mozilla if it adopted WebKit, also open-source, Chambers said Mozilla has considered it but passed.

“It’s a lot of money and a lot of work to sustain an independent browser engine,” she said. “It also means we have a seat at the table with regulators,” allowing Mozilla to advocate for causes like privacy.

In iOS and iPadOS, Apple requires all U.S. third-party browsers to use the WebKit framework included in those mobile operating systems, which limits how third-party developers can differentiate their browsers from Apple’s Safari.

Where Chambers points to Firefox’s speed relative to Chrome and Edge on Windows and to Safari on Macs (she did not mention how Apple’s browser also regularly lets individual pages devour system memory), her sales pitch for Firefox on an iPhone or iMac gets more evanescent: “You’re supporting independent technology.”

New ventures

In the past, Mozilla has tried to diversify its revenue by selling such add-on subscription products as a VPN service and Relay, a tool to create relay phone numbers and email addresses that mask your real ones.

It’s now reconsidering parts of that strategy, having already dumped some free-to-use services as Mozilla Social, its attempt to host a Mastodon instance.

“We’re not dialing it back, we’re working on different ways,” said Chambers, adding that the company “pulled back spend a little bit” on promoting VPN, Relay and the Monitor data-breach-warning service.

But last June, Mozilla also spent an unannounced sum to buy Anonym, an ad-tech firm founded to develop privacy-preserving online advertising systems that still let advertisers gauge what sales or other results came from their marketing efforts without snooping on individual shoppers.

Chambers defends what might seem an unlikely alignment of a privacy-first browser with an adtech firm founded by former Meta executives as a way to keep online advertising alive in a way that web readers won’t resent.

“The big technology that they use is differential privacy, which creates enough noise into the system so that it’s anonymous,” she said, mentioning both “some of the really big ad platforms” and companies in health and financial services (both sectors already subject to privacy regulation) are expressing interest.

(Another Google antitrust case, the lawsuit brought the U.S. and most states against Google over its display-ads business, may help crack open that market for Mozilla.)

This openness to new business models led Mozilla to write the terms-of-service document that Firefox had never had. The company posted those terms on Wednesday and then faced enough blowback that it posted a follow-up addressing user anxiety in a few areas, such as the removal of a pledge never to “sell” data that Mozilla apparently felt could not be made without risking conflict with some of the vaguer privacy statutes around the world.

Getting people to accept online advertising systems that make enough money to allow subscription-free reading across the web remains complicated, even for a company with a solid track record on privacy.

But for Mozilla to keep working on that, Chambers has a simpler request of regulators.

“All that we ask for is that people are given a choice,” she said. “We don’t need it to be a preferential choice, they just need a choice.

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