Mozilla's New CEO Wants to Turn Firefox Into a "Modern AI Browser"
"Mozilla's 4% market share is about to become 2%."
Remember when Mozilla Firefox was once seen much like Brave is seen today – a Google Chrome alternative with fewer restrictions, intrusive features, and spying?
It seems that in just a few years' time, Firefox's hard-earned "street cred" could become nothing more than a fading memory, as after removing the Do Not Track feature and rewriting its rules on selling user data, the team behind the browser continues to make unpopular choices, revealing in its most recent announcement that Firefox users can expect a wave of pointless AI features they never asked for.
In his official statement, Mozilla's newly appointed CEO Anthony Enzor-DeMeo pledged his proverbial allegiance to artificial intelligence, announcing plans to "invest in AI" and turn Firefox "into a modern AI browser," all while singing the usual praises about "AI changing software" that you'd expect from any high-level corpo executive who gets visibly excited at the mere sight of those two capitalized letters typed together.
Funnily enough, while "AI" and "trust" don't usually go together in most people's minds, Enzor-DeMeo's plan moving forward is exactly that – to "focus on becoming the trusted software company."
To achieve this, the new CEO laid out a three-step plan: giving people agency over how every Mozilla product works, growing the company through "transparent monetization" – whatever that means – and turning Firefox "from a browser into a broader ecosystem of trusted software," evoking the backlash against Microsoft's recent "agentic OS" push.
Credit where it's due, Enzor-DeMeo does mention that "AI should always be a choice — something people can easily turn off" (I'm keeping the em-dash in the quote, it's funnier that way). But judging by the community's response – which can basically be summarized with the "everyone disliked that" meme – the main issue isn't that AI features can't be disabled, but rather that they are usually turned on by default and, more importantly, mostly useless, making the overall UX worse.
And what do you think about Mozilla's new CEO's push for AI? Will it really reduce Firefox's market share? What do you think about AI features in other browsers? Share your thoughts down in the comments!
Don't forget to subscribe to our Newsletter and join our 80 Level Talent platform, follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Telegram, and Instagram, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.
