I love Firefox, both as a developer and everyday user. I switched from Chromium about a year ago, as have many others here, because it's an awesome browser despite its issues, especially for developers and power users.
I read your introductory post on the Mozilla blog and wanted to respond publicly. As in other posts I've read in this subreddit, I'm already trying to reconcile what you say with what we actually see every day.
I understand that this subreddit represents only a vocal minority of Firefox users. However, we're also a useful minority, discussing usability issues that eventually affect everyone else, digging into edge cases, broken workflows, and long-standing regressions, and making recommendations to everyday users that Firefox has ignored. Importantly, we're also the ambassadors of your browser, recommending Firefox to family, friends, and colleagues.
That's why your post gave me pause when I read things like:
People want software that is fast, modern, but also honest about what it does. They want to understand what’s happening and to have real choices.
People should know why a feature works the way it does and what value they get from it.
And probably most concerning:
Firefox will grow from a browser into a broader ecosystem of trusted software. Firefox will remain our anchor. It will evolve into a modern AI browser and support a portfolio of new and trusted software additions.
Ironically, in a post announcing this new direction and highlighting "agency and choice," there was little mention of user input or feedback. This highlights a disconnect that many of us experience daily: Mozilla has a pattern of struggling to implement and support basic features, and much of the time fails to even acknowledge serious user feedback.
I could pick any number of issues to illustrate this, but I only have to go back two days. I posted a detailed breakdown of how Firefox's new profile management system is fundamentally broken. It was lengthy and technical, yes, but I also posted it directly on connect.mozilla.org before Reddit with no acknowledgment. As with many issues discussed in this subreddit, it involves core design decisions that could have easily been avoided if user input had been considered. Issues like these may not affect the everyday user yet, but they undoubtedly will.
Your statements above sound uncomfortably close to a typical Google or Microsoft announcement, one in which decisions are made for users rather than with them. I hope I'm wrong, but it also appears to indicate that the new leadership has decided to continue Mozilla's confident but tone-deaf focus on things like bloat and growth rather than first fixing existing issues surrounding the core usability of its browser.
I understand your role as CEO is much more complicated than I'm making it out to be, and that your success metrics ultimately come down to the bottom line and market share. But market share, profit, and growth don't have to be mutually exclusive with listening to users and making Firefox the best browser it can be.
Firefox doesn't need to become Google or Microsoft to succeed by both business and user standards. It's beloved precisely because it's not. I hope that distinction isn't lost as Mozilla enters its "next chapter" as part of a "broader ecosystem of trusted software."
