There is a specific kind of anger that only shows up with Firefox.

A recent Hacker News thread on an article called “Hang on to Your Firefox” is a decent cross-section of where the community sits. Four rough camps:

Criticize it, but keep it. The top comment argues that the complaints come specifically from power users who are frustrated by Mozilla buying an ad-tech company, collecting telemetry, and pushing personalized ads, and that this frustration exists because Firefox matters, not despite it. The same commenter makes a sharp point: it is the most technical users who disable telemetry, so complaining loudly in public is the only feedback channel they have left.

It is getting worse in daily use. Reports of pages that hang in Firefox but load instantly in Chrome, high idle CPU, memory growth, a new tab page dominated by AI suggestions. Worth noting that this is not universal. Another commenter in the same thread reports 50-plus tabs on a thirteen year old ThinkPad with no complaints. The experience genuinely varies by platform and workload.

The ad blocking argument. Full uBlock Origin still works best on Firefox, because Chromium’s Manifest V3 restricts what content blockers can do. Several people counter that Brave’s built-in Rust blocker is competitive. One reply cuts to the point: accept uBlock Lite now and you will be offered uBlock Ultra-Lite next.

The problem is Mozilla, not Firefox. Stated almost verbatim by one commenter, and echoed by another who says leadership’s actions are hard to distinguish from deliberately managed decline.

That last camp is where the “betrayal” feeling lives. So let us look at what is actually documented.

The money, with numbers

Mozilla earned about $570 million in its most recent reported year, and roughly 85 percent of it came from Google under the search default deal. This is not new. It has been in the 85 to 90 percent range for well over a decade.

Meanwhile, executive compensation went up as the product went down. Mitchell Baker was paid about $2.4 million in 2018. By 2021 it was $5,591,406, and in 2022 it was $6,903,089. Over that same period Mozilla’s revenue fell from roughly $528 million to $510 million and Firefox’s market share kept sliding toward the low single digits.

The structural picture is worse than the salary. A widely cited analysis by developer Cal Paterson, summarized by The Register, found that around 30 percent of Mozilla’s expenditure went to administration, a ratio that would score zero out of ten on Charity Navigator’s efficiency measure. Baker stepped down as CEO in February 2024 and left Mozilla entirely in 2025.

And the spending record on products speaks for itself. Pocket, acquired for roughly $30 million, shut down. Fakespot, acquired in 2023, shut down. Hubs, shut down. Firefox OS, years of engineering, dead. Mozilla VPN, marginal. Meanwhile the 2020 layoffs that cut a quarter of staff hit Servo, MDN, and the security team, and were followed within hours by the renewal of the Google search deal.

That last detail is the one that makes people reach for conspiracy. Hold that thought.

The antitrust entanglement

Here is the part that gives the darker reading its teeth.

In August 2024, Judge Amit Mehta ruled that Google had illegally maintained a monopoly in general search and search text ads. In the remedies phase, the DOJ asked for structural relief, including divesting Chrome, and for a ban on payments for default placement.

On September 2, 2025, Mehta declined both. No Chrome divestiture. Exclusive contracts banned for six years, but non-exclusive revenue sharing preserved. His stated reasoning was that cutting off the payments would cause severe downstream harm to distribution partners and consumers.

Mozilla had testified during the case that losing the payments could put Firefox out of business. Mehta cited that testimony. Mozilla then published a blog post framing the rejection of the payment ban as a win for independent browsers.

And as of August 2026, with the case on appeal and the DOJ pushing for tougher remedies, Mozilla has filed an amicus brief defending Mehta's decision on the payments question, citing its own study showing revenue would fall dramatically if it had to switch Firefox’s default to Bing.

So the uncomfortable summary is accurate: Firefox’s existence, and Firefox’s dependence, both worked in Google’s favor in that courtroom. The independent browser is simultaneously the evidence that competition exists and the reason the payments survive.

Where I think the conspiracy version breaks

The tempting conclusion is that Google quietly bought Mozilla to run a controlled opposition, keeping a deliberately degraded competitor alive as antitrust cover.

I do not think that holds, for one specific reason: it adds an unfalsifiable claim without explaining anything the simpler story does not already explain.

You do not need a secret agreement to produce this outcome. Google pays for default placement because it is commercially worth it. Mozilla accepts because it has no alternative and has built no alternative. Once both are dependent on the arrangement, both defend it. Every incentive points the same direction with nobody ever agreeing to anything. The behavior of a captured organization and the behavior of a desperate one are identical from outside, which is exactly why the conspiracy version is not testable.

The simpler story also explains more of the evidence. An organization that has known since roughly 2012 that it was fatally dependent on a direct competitor, spent a decade failing to fix it, paid its leadership like a growth company anyway, and now makes decisions that look like managed decline, because managed decline is what happens when you cannot afford to compete and will not admit it.

That is not treachery. It is institutional decay under bad incentives, with good public relations on top.

I think this distinction matters, and not just semantically. Treachery calls for punishment. Decay calls for restructuring. Those lead to opposite actions, and I will come back to that.

What a browser actually costs

How much money does a company need? They have half a billion dollars.

The honest answer is uncomfortable. A browser engine is among the most expensive software artifacts on the planet. Chrome’s team runs into the thousands of engineers and Google’s spend on it is plausibly north of a billion a year. Half a billion dollars, minus 30 percent administration, minus VPN and Pocket and Fakespot and Hubs, is not an abundant browser budget. It is a thin one.

So the sharpest version of the complaint is not “$570 million is too much money.” It is “far too little of $570 million ever reached the engine.” Those are different failures, and only the second one is fixable by better management.

It also explains why nobody is coming to save this. Microsoft, a company with essentially unlimited money, gave up on its own engine and moved Edge to Chromium in 2019. That is the clearest available signal about how hard this is.

Should Mozilla just die?

Mozilla has had fifteen years to fix its dependency and has not. Every year it survives is another year a successor cannot get funded, because the niche looks occupied. Netscape’s death is literally what produced Mozilla. And a Firefox that degrades while claiming the moral high ground may damage the idea of an independent browser more than no Firefox would.

Why I think it is wrong: the money does not survive the transition.

If Mozilla dies, that $485 million does not get redistributed to Ladybird or Servo. It stops existing. It was never a fund for browser diversity. It was Google buying placement inside Firefox specifically. No Firefox, no payment. You would be killing the patient to free up a bank account that closes on death.

And Gecko would not decline slowly, it would stop. A browser engine is not a codebase you inherit, it is a few hundred people who know how the JIT and the compositor and the sandbox actually behave. On layoff day they scatter to Apple and Google and never reassemble. Every fork, LibreWolf included, follows within a year or two, because forks rebase, they do not maintain. Opera is the precedent: it killed Presto in 2013 to focus resources, and Presto never came back.

The Netscape analogy also cuts against the argument. It took roughly seven years from the 1998 source release to a competitive Firefox 1.0, back when a browser was a fraction of today’s complexity, with no HTTP/3, no WebRTC, no WebGPU, no WebAssembly, and no site-compatibility hostage situation. Ladybird is progressing genuinely well and is worth funding, but as one commenter fairly put it, it is mentioned under every Firefox thread while remaining years away from being generally useful.

What people actually want is closer to: separate Firefox from Mozilla. Spin the browser into its own entity with a hard-capped executive budget, keep the search revenue contractually attached to it, and let the other projects raise their own money.

What about forks?

Reasonable option, with three caveats.

Forks still ship Gecko, so they still count for engine diversity: web developers still have to test against them. What they do not do is fund the engine or contribute upstream. If every Firefox user forked, Gecko would die anyway. Forks are downstream of the thing actually at risk.

The real cost is security update lag. Mozilla ships fixes for exploited vulnerabilities fast; forks rebase, and the gap ranges from hours to weeks. LibreWolf and Mullvad Browser are usually quick. A single-maintainer cosmetic fork is not, and the browser is the most attacked program on your machine.

Third, unusual defaults can make you more fingerprintable, not less, unless the fork handles this deliberately. Mullvad Browser and Tor Browser solve it by making all their users look identical. Most others do not.

Practical picks: LibreWolf for Firefox with the telemetry and ads stripped by default, Mullvad Browser if privacy is the real goal, IronFox on Android where stock Firefox is weakest. Plain Firefox with ten minutes of settings changes gets you most of the way, with faster patches.

Does any of this actually matter?

Individually, almost not at all. Your one install is statistical noise.

Collectively it matters more than most consumer choices, because browser engines have a hard floor. Below a few percent share, developers stop testing against you, sites break, users leave because sites break, and the decline compounds. That threshold dynamic is what makes browser choice different from, say, search engine choice, where nothing structural happens when you switch.

But I want to be honest about proportion. Firefox users’ behavior is not what decides this. The antitrust appeal, the future of the search payments, and whether any independent funding source emerges matter far more than the aggregate of everyone’s install decisions. One commenter in the thread compared it to climate change: broad agreement that it matters, no mechanism by which individual choice fixes it. That is roughly right.

What genuinely helps:

  • Fund the alternatives directly rather than only using them. Ladybird and Servo are the only paths to a truly new engine and both need years and money.
  • Report breakage instead of silently switching. Telemetry is disabled by exactly the users who notice the most, so bug reports are the only signal that reaches anyone.
  • Push back on sites that block non-Chromium browsers. This is the mechanism that actually kills engines, and it is more socially fixable than it looks.
  • Support the regulatory pressure, including on default-placement deals, because that is the only lever with real force here.
  • Watch for EU digital sovereignty funding, which is currently the only pot of money large enough to plausibly replace Google as a browser funder.

Where I land

Firefox, configured. Telemetry and ad measurement off, uBlock Origin installed, new tab page cleaned up. LibreWolf if you would rather not re-check settings after every update.

I am transitioning from Brave to Firefox, not because Mozilla deserves it. It largely does not. But Gecko does not care why Mozilla is bad, and Gecko is the part that is not replaceable.

Keep the anger. Just aim it at the funding structure rather than the engine, because those two targets lead to opposite outcomes. “Mozilla is greedy” ends with boycotting Firefox, which kills the engine and hands Google the web. “Mozilla’s funding structure guarantees this behavior” ends with wanting separation, independent funding, and real alternatives.

Same anger. Opposite consequences.