Mozilla is doing a delicate dance with AI

Several weeks ago, Mozilla Firefox dodged a bullet aimed at its business model—a potential court-ordered cutoff of the Google search-default payments that constitute its primary course of income. But that escape from one feared outcome of the US search-antitrust case against the web giant doesn’t change two other things: Firefox remains in an embattled position.

That’s bad news for users. Without Firefox, web competition itself would be in a far more dire state. To address its longstanding competition problem, Mozilla’s developers are putting AI to work—albeit, in a less pushy manner than their competitors.

A conversation with Mozilla CEO Laura Chambers at Web Summit in Lisbon in November featured many such “things-could-be-worse” moments, starting with my question about the US District Court for the District of Columbia handing down a ruling in the antitrust case that allowed Google to keep paying browser developers to make its search engine their default. “We spent a lot of time working on the case, and we wrote amicus briefs and worked with the judge,” Chambers said. “I think he really heard our perspective around the importance of keeping browser engines and browser competition safe.”

Nine months earlier, Chambers had voiced serious concerns about the prospect of that revenue stream getting dammed. The 2023 annual report of Firefox’s nonprofit corporate parent, the latest available, shows that $495 million of its $653 million in “total revenues and support” that year came from “royalties,” meaning “a certain percentage of revenues earned by its partners through their search engines incorporated in the Firefox web browser—in other words, “Google.”

The 230-page opinion by District Judge Amit Mehta opened up a little more latitude for browser developers by holding that Google could not pay for exclusive payment in every browser-usage scenario. But Mozilla has not rushed to explore possibilities created by that ruling, such as making a non-Google, privacy-optimized search site the default for private-browsing windows. “We still have Google search as the default, but we continue to add different options,” Chambers said. For example, Firefox recently added the AI ​​search tool Perplexity to the menu of search sites available in its address bar.

AI, but for whom?

Mozilla’s rollout of in-browser AI tools, unlike those of competing browser developers, has not included preset defaults. Firefox’s AI sidebar introduces itself with a choice of AI chatbots, including the big three of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and Microsoft’s Copilot, along with Anthropic’s Claude and the less-obvious option of Paris-based Mistral’s Le Chat.

Its upcoming AI Window, revealed the day I spoke to Chambers, doesn’t have a preset default either, although Mozilla has not announced which AI services will be available through this waitlist-required option. “I think there’s about 12% of the general population in the US, France, and Germany that don’t want to use AI,” she said. “My guess is it’s probably a little higher of Firefox users.”

But she said Mozilla’s efforts to make AI an option to choose rather than a default to refuse have helped. “We don’t jam it down their throats,” she said. “We do them all in a very privacy-preserving way.” In particular, Firefox relies on on-device processing for such features as language translation and automatically organizing an overwhelming array of browser tabs.

Chambers also stressed that Mozilla wants to ensure that AI doesn’t close off the open web. “It’s incredibly important that people can still discover things, that they can verify, that they can explore around,” she said. Yet, the AI ​​Overview answers of its Google default seem to be discouraging that sort of exploration all too well.

As an organization, Mozilla has not leaned too hard into AI. Saying “the code that we launch is all still written by people,” Chambers added that Mozilla’s developers have found Anthropic’s Claude Code and other tools more useful “for things like testing and for working through bugs and so forth.”

Market share matters

Mozilla’s core problem, however, is not making new AI features easy to find—it’s finding new users. The browser that singlehandedly destroyed Internet Explorer’s near monopoly and then held a quarter of the desktop-browser market in 2011 now sits in fourth place, with under 4% of the market worldwide and in the United States, per Cloudflare’s statistics.

Chambers said that this tide is slowly turning in Europe thanks to the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), which requires companies designated as “gatekeepers” to take such extra steps to avoid favoring their own products as browser-choice screens in Android and iOS. Mozilla says it’s since seen a 149% jump in daily active mobile users in France and a 130% boost in Germany.

Chambers called the DMA “a really great boost for us,” saying “people get to choose browsers, and then they’re choosing us.” She described the desktop market as tougher, offering this overall assessment: “Our market share is pretty steady, but we’re making some really good progress.”

Whatever slice of the browser market Firefox holds also matters for web compatibility—it’s the only vaguely mass-market browser that doesn’t use WebKit or the Blink engine inside Chrome and browsers written on its open-source Chromium software, such as Brave and Vivaldi.

Developing and maintaining a web-rendering framework outside of that duopoly is no easy task, but Chambers called it “incredibly important” to do. In our earlier conversation, she emphasized that Mozilla owning its own engine gives it “a seat at the table” in web-standards discussions.

business horizons

Mozilla has spent years struggling to develop lines of business beyond its Google search-default royalties, with iffy results—it shut down its read-it-later Pocket service this summer. But it continues to sell an add-on VPN based on Mullvad’s service, which Chambers said will soon be integrated into the browser.

In June of 2024, Mozilla stepped into Google’s lane by buying the ad-tech firm Anonym, which Chambers said does “a better job of still providing high-quality advertising results while keeping information more private” through such privacy-preserving techniques as differential privacy. She expressed some hope for an upcoming revision to the EU’s e-privacy rules that could help this division better compete with the likes of Google.

But zooming out, much of Mozilla’s pitch does not involve features or options as much as it centers around what Firefox and the organization behind it are not. “As people look around at the people that are shaping the future of the world and the web, a lot of them are billionaires, a lot of them don’t seem to be very aligned with values ​​that they may hold, and I think they’re looking to different leaders, right?” she said. “They’re trying to find people that are fighting for a better internet, which we’re doing.”

Chambers leaned on Star Wars in describing Mozilla’s work as “a little bit of a new version of the Rebel Alliance,” Chambers explained, calling this a return to the internet’s early days when “open-source people banded together and they created really great alternatives.”

Asked if Google or Microsoft would be the Empire in this analogy, she waved off the question. “I think it’s the traditional big tech companies.”

Mozilla’s role? “Jedis. Definitely Jedis.”

Disclosure: I moderated three panels at Web Summit, in return for which the event’s organizers paid for my hotel and are reimbursing my airfare.