Mozilla's Firefox browser turns 20. Does it still matter?

A former exec believes in the non-profit's mission, says the battle lines have changed

Mozilla's Firefox browser clocked its second decade over the weekend, an event celebrated by Mozilla Corporation CEO Laura Chambers.

"Firefox turns 20 today!" said Chambers in a social media post. "It’s so inspiring to think of all we’ve achieved together to keep the internet open and people-first. Firefox has always been more than just a browser – it’s a movement powered by those who believe in choice, privacy, and transparency. Thank you to our community and everyone who has contributed to this impact, and helped make Firefox what it is today."

The movement – advocacy for choice, privacy, and transparency – continues. But web browsers and the battle for browser market share no longer lead that movement, according to a former Mozilla executive.

The Register spoke with an individual familiar with Mozilla and other major tech firms at a high level who asked not to be identified for reasons we consider valid. In conjunction with Firefox's 20-year celebration, our source shared some thoughts about Mozilla's once revolutionary browser and its relevance to the current technology landscape.

"There was a time where the browser space was absolutely the front line of an open, safe, equitable internet," our source said. "Mostly that was about, frankly, preventing Microsoft from taking over the internet."

That worry faded over time, and four years after the 1.0 release of Firefox, Google Chrome debuted.

It was "superior in so many ways and, initially anyway, appealing so deeply to web developers that they were able to grab tons of market share with a better product," our source said.

If you look at browser market share for almost the past ten years, what you see is Microsoft, Google, and Apple essentially ping-ponging a little bit in the margins, and then there's about 10 percent share left over.

So the big three take 90 percent share, give or take a few percentage points between the three of them. But then there's 10 percent for everybody else, and that's been stable for nearly ten years.

In other words, for the past decade, upstart browser makers like Mozilla, Brave, Vivaldi, Opera, Arc, and others have essentially been fighting for that 10 percent – the table scraps left by the tech giants. And absent any antitrust ruling that changes the way browsers get distributed and installed – something that looks less likely under the incoming Trump administration – it seems unlikely that the current market dynamics change anytime soon.

"So when you look at what I think is challenging on the web today, there really isn't a fear like, 'oh my goodness, there's someone that's going to like take over core standards or protocols, which was really the fear in the late 90s, early 2000s that all those protocols and de facto standards would tilt toward Microsoft," our source said.

"To me, when I look at the internet, I'm like, 'yeah, okay, that's still an important thing.' Like, we can't take our eye off of it. But it's a little bit of a side show when you think about how AI is being deployed, when you think about how misinformation is being deployed, when you think about how people's attention span is being both monetized and used for ill. To me, those are really the big problems."

Citing concerns about what misinformation can do to democratic elections and its impact on global socioeconomic stability, our source argues that concerns about protocol ownership have become less salient.

"The problems are about the information that travels on the internet," our source said. "It's not about the protocols that run the internet anymore. … It's not about the plumbing. It's about what's flowing through the plumbing."

Among those who have been around for a while, if not the younger generation, there's still a lingering perception that the tech industry is challenging the establishment. But perhaps now that software has eaten the world, it needs to rest a bit.

"We still have this tendency to think about tech as sort of the upstart disruptor to the status quo in various industries and in various spaces, and socially, we think about tech as a disruptor," our source said. "And one of the things I think we all have to wrap our heads around now is that tech is now the status quo. Tech is now the establishment that we all in this industry once rejected. We're now the establishment."

Pointing to Apple, Google, and Microsoft, and the platform franchises they're trying to protect, our source wondered, "What's the role of products like Firefox? Where does the browser fit when you're talking about Apple's App Store monopoly or Google's advertising business?"

The recently announced layoffs at Mozilla Foundation, following Mozilla Corporation layoffs earlier this year, suggest that the non-profit and its subsidiaries have yet to adjust to the present technology landscape.

But one controversial way the company may move forward is advertising, which could help make the biz less dependent on Google and other search deals. Mozilla believes it can help make the ad ecosystem better by supporting privacy-preserving ads.

Our source in fact endorses the move.

"I think there's a real opportunity for Mozilla, and frankly other companies," our source said, arguing that advertising in many cases can be done effectively without violating privacy.

This ecosystem is screwed up. It's violating people's privacy left and right. If you can come up with a way to do this, one that's ethical and respects privacy and maintains high integrity, to me, that's a great place for Mozilla to be.

Mozilla's exploration of AI, via mozilla.ai, gets more cautious support.

"It's been several years now since they announced Mozilla.ai and there have been various initiatives that they described launching publicly," our source said. "And the place where I hoped that they would play is in making sure that machine learning models were more ethical and more privacy respecting and were deployed for reasons of good."

But, our source said, Mozilla hasn't really delivered anything related to AI that's had much impact.

Asked what tech issue really needs to be addressed, our source pointed to social media.

"I've seen a lot of social media stuff and I think it's a solvable problem," our source said. "I think that the Mastodon and ActivityPub ecosystem comes the closest to solving this problem, which is how do you create – I hate this phrase, but I'm going to use it because it clicks when I say it – like the virtual town square?"

"How do you create this giant pub-sub of information sharing where people can not just get info but tell jokes and be funny and entertain each other?

"The thing that Twitter kind of started to be, but couldn't really grasp the ring for a lot of different reasons, I think this is a solvable problem.

"Basically, a kitten dies every time I see some good-natured entity post on X." ®