Addressing the usual few complaints folks always bring up:
* This is from the separate independent team that works on Thunderbird, not Firefox, so there isn't any resource contention happening there
* Thunderbird is revenue positive, and this potentially gives that team another revenue stream to be even more self-sustaining through charging companies
* Businesses definitely want to control the AI they're using (especially with RAGs of their own data) instead of just throwing it at their LLM vendor and hoping for the best
People on HN are fond of asserting that their own POV is the only one. Imagine that there is such a thing as a person in charge of choosing technologies for organizations, and that you're such a person. That's who this is for.
It's a crazy crowded space. Any entry into this field looks like a "me too" product driven by FOMO instead of being motivated by (a) serving customer needs, (b) serving social needs, or (c) making money. (All of which are fine with me) It will get 0.5% market share -- and I'm supposed to get excited?
If you lived in New York City you might think there are Duane Reades coast-to-coast but there are not. If you are based in the Bay Area you see billboards that are very different from anywhere else. I'd say the viewpoint is a lot like this famous artwork
but maybe instead of the rest of the US being 1/5 of the vertical space it is 1/25 of the vertical space. Problem is most customers do not live in the bay area and most web browser users do not live in the bay area and most web developers do not live in the bay area. Based in the Bay Area they can hop in their cars and drive the longest 40 miles in America to get to Google and Facebook's headquarters so Mozilla is talking to those people all the time and not talking to the rest of us.
We don't get costly signalling to show they care about the rest of us, we don't even get cheap talk.
They probably think René Girard is deep because they are surrounded by people who think René Girard is deep. If Mozilla wants to be relevant and not just an also-ran it needs to "think different" like the other 99.9% -- it's not that hard if you change your location.
Really the EU needs to apologize for those damned cookie popups and invest in a privacy-first browser. Whether that is "fully fund Firefox" or "fully a fund a Firefox fork" or pick up another browser engine or start a new one.
I see the warning lights flashing: a few years back web sites that didn't work with Firefox were few and far between, this weekend I bought tickets for a comic book convention and they took my money but didn't give me a ticket because the site didn't work with Firefox. I use Firefox as my daily driver so all the projects that I work on work with Firefox; the rest of my team doesn't give a damn and if you lose me another site will become Chrome-only.
> Businesses definitely want to control the AI they're using (especially with RAGs of their own data) instead of just throwing it at their LLM vendor and hoping for the best
Yes, agreed on that. I'm not sure I'm clear how this really helps that; I suppose it's a frontend that they don't have, but there are a bunch of those already.
It doesn't seem to help them control the _actual_ AI, i.e. the model, which still has to come from somewhere.
I see no reason this product should exist even under the Thunderbird umbrella, especially if ANY resources under ANY Mozilla org were employed in this. This product is a distraction from their core mission in either case.
it is a patreon style thing, they are donation funded. I think the poster is saying that they arent being frivolous with their money like some people have a bad taste about firefox
And they're taking money donated towards Thunderbird development and spending it on random unrelated AI slop ideas that nobody asked for. You really don't see anything wrong with that?
Surely you can agree that when you open Thunderbird and are met with requests for donations, if you chose to donate, you'd expect that money to be invested in Thunderbird development, and not 10M Claude tokens to vibe code Mozilla's latest groundbreaking AI B2B SaaS idea?
Hmm, I thought the for-profit Thunderbird pro hadn't launched yet?
I know Thunderbird is for profit, but what are they profitting from without the paid service, and how much of that profit is going into this unrelated Thunderbolt AI platform, exactly?
Thunderbird currently runs entirely on donations, even though they have paid products in the pipeline.
I think a piece of software running on donations is not running off "charity". It's just a business model to not charge every user. Similar to how Twitch streamers operate, or my local theater group.
Thanks, that's helpful. This says about ~70% of the money was paid to employees, ~10% infra costs, the other ~20% various other fees and smaller expenses.
It would be interesting to have a breakdown of what part of the Thunderbird team is working on Thunderbird, Thunderbolt, or other forms of thunder.
So this is only for organizations and not for individuals? The Get Started button goes to a form where it wants to know how they can help your organization. I didn’t see any other link to the source code or documentation. If whoever created this site sees this comment, please clear up the above questions and observations.
For anyone reading this that has worked on the launch of this new product (or the many others of their ilk throughout the years) under the various Mozilla orgs, I mean no disrespect, however I feel it's important to not mince words these days..
I implore ANYONE at Mozilla org to please, please stop working on projects distracting from the complex and necessary work of browser and web standards stewardship. That alone should be the very reason for your continued existence if you have any. Focus on anything outside that purview will lead to the furthering of the, already painful and readily apparent, stagnation of your browser and our standards bodies as entities distinct from corporations.
Ditching any direct financial ties to Google or any other browser vendor is both important and necessary at this point, as this clearly represents a conflict of interest in your overall mission.
The web as a platform should belong to us all, not just the few corporate leaders of the day. I've watched in real time, saddened by the persistent errosion of our commons that is the web. I see it becoming nothing more than a corporate playground should trends continue, if it's not already too late. There may have been a time when your mission took precident over product launches of seemingly unrelated domains, but that is not what Ii observing today.
I think I speak for many in the community in these regards (please correct me if not the case.)
> ... please stop working on projects distracting from the complex and necessary work of browser and web standards stewardship.
> Ditching any direct financial ties to Google or any other browser vendor is both important and necessary...
are inherently contradictory. If do not want Mozilla to have revenue from search vendors that also have browsers, it has to come from somewhere else. Or are you suggesting they switch the default search engine back to Yahoo [0]?
I am not trying to defend the projects they have chosen to work on, but you have to understand that reducing dependence on Google is exactly why they are working on them [1].
[0] Even when they did that, it was for the US only, and Google was still the default for most of the world.
[1] Although in this case, this appears to come from the Thunderbird organization, so unrelated to the browser. Money is fungible, though.
It is very cool! I'd go as far to say it's a great browser in fact. I simply want it to exist and be such in perpetuity and lead by example like it has in the past. I see it as a follower instead of a leader these days, largely to Google, but also Safari and to some degree Edge (by simply stealing the blink renderer)
The Mozilla org continues to produce a very capable browser, but it's now 3rd or fourth fiddle on a stage their misteps helped orchestrate in their demotion.
What are the other competing browsers? There's chrome(and the derivatives), safari, firefox? safari exists only because of ios lockin. Aren't most other browsers an increasingly smaller share? Genuine question.
In contrast, the Multi-Account Containers system is the primary reason I avoid Firefox.
While it is meant to be an alternative to Chrome's profile switching, it is more a workaround than a complete replacement. I need entirely different sets of extensions for personal, work, and school environments, something containers can't do.
Firefox's actual profile support is beyond terrible. To launch a separate instance, Firefox requires many more clicks than Chrome, all within a Windows-2000-style UI. Not to mention that there are weird glitches in their implementation.
Firefox is not usable for me until they actually spend time improving their multiple profile support.
One difference I've seen with FF vs Chrome is when finding the events to bind to each element. In FF, the event tag on the element is clickable and gives you the name and the line number in the JS file. It makes finding the code very easy. I have not seen that in Chrome. I rarely use Chrome, so this one thing leads me to saying FF's DevTools are better, at least for me and how I use them.
1. The inability to set a specific page for new tabs to open on. That is ridiculous.
2. The mobile version sucks, specifically because bookmarks are buried under an absurd number of menu levels. And they're also broken up (without user approval or any way to stop it) into "mobile" and "desktop" bookmarks. WHY? The entire point of syncing is to have them all the same.
I want to like Firefox. I went back to Firefox for the first time in decades last year and gave it up after a couple months because #2 was that annoying. So brain-dead.
Oh yeah, and another one was that "never remember history" does, in fact, remember history. What Firefox really does is "stop adding to history." And the bug report on it resulted in several YEARS of debate over how to "fix" it. The latest I saw is that they're actually NOT going to fix it, but rather add more text (somewhere) to say basically, "This doesn't do what you think it's going to do."
If fixing a defect like that requires years of committee back-and-forth, the product is finished.
> The inability to set a specific page for new tabs to open on. That is ridiculous.
I've been using the "New Tab Override" extension for almost a decade at this point. Sure, it would probably make sense to have as a baseline feature, but I installed it so long ago and it's continued working the whole time that it's not really something I think about anymore.
> already painful and readily apparent, stagnation of your browser
What's wrong with Firefox? There are several things Firefox does that it's annoying to live without in other browsers (video pop-outs, competent ad blocking, etc). Is there some core feature that's missing? I'm subjected to Edge at work and I couldn't tell you a single thing it does that I'd want FF to do.
> and our standards bodies as entities distinct from corporations
Yes there are things that Firefox does better than others, and that is one reason I use Firefox. But there are definitely things I would like to see improved, like:
- PWA support on Linux
- better performance
- devtools should be able to handle sites with large amounts of js with sourcemaps
- fix a number of bugs that have been open for a long time
- don't lag behind standards as much (I'm not talking about things where they intentionally don't implement problematic "standards" pushed by google)
- make it feasible to embed gecko in other projects similar to how chromium is used by electron and webkit is used in "webviews"
Web usb and serial are not just missing, last I checked Mozilla is opting to not implement based on their moral stance. It just puts them behind for some stuff.
It is so frustrating how every thread about Mozilla has people getting upset about contradictory things.
Half the thread impunes Mozilla for taking so much money from Google and imply that they are controlled opposition, and the other half gets upset when Mozilla doesn't implement every standard that Google tries to steamroll through the standards bodies because of objections to how they can be used for fingerprinting, etc.
They get all the downsides of being methodical and privacy focused alongside none of the benefits. Everybody hates the "side projects" unless it's Rust, Servo, LetsEncrypt, Thunderbird, contributions to Opus/AVI, etc. etc.
Essentially all of Firefox' incompatibilities with a website reduce to Firefox not allowing the users to be tracked or fingerprinted by default. Webapps that rely on fingerprinting as a replacement for device tokens will likely not work. Because fingerprinting is bad and I don't want it to work. The people your bank pays to implement that are the same companies used for cross site tracking. It only works because tracking works. ReCaptcha can break for similar reasons, but there are better options for captcha and the need for captcha itself is possible to eliminate with various strategies depending on what it is being used to mitigate.
There's a lot of good use-cases of Web usb, you can't just cut everything which might have privacy aspects otherwise the browsers wouldn't have canvas or even gpu rendering.
What are those use cases? It seems like a giant hole punched all the way from a tab's sandbox through the process boundary and out to the kernel... Yes, gpu rendering is a great example of the same problem. Canvas at least has some intervening layers depending on implementation.
pianu.com used to be a website where you could learn piano by connecting your piano through usb with the browser. It seems defunct now but I found a video demonstrating it : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTBmRV02NgI
I used something similar in the past. It was a legitimate use case for web usb which changed my mind on it quite a bit.
https://www.charachorder.com/ sells ergo keyboards and allows you to update their firmware directly in the website, through web usb. No local apps at all. Also an improvement in overall security from having to download some .exe / .dmg and running it locally.
Almost all of the gui software for programming keyboards with QMK uses webusb or webhid, so you either have to use a chromium based browser or an electron app that is basically just a wrapper for chromium.
HN is a good website. Ebay is another good example where JavaScript is optional but with good functionality. Marko was mocked, but now Astro is cool because they invented ssr...
I'm building a fairly complicated browser extension [0].
Debugging the extension on Chrome, it works great. On Firefox, it is nearly impossible. There are a litany of compatibility issues that make it "different" than Chrome, despite the extension being very much standards based. It is really frustrating and makes me dread getting bug reports.
To be fair, Safari is even worse and I haven't even touched Edge yet.
As much as I'd love to have options in the marketplace, standards based compatibility between offerings should be a top line requirement.
The standards used to be there. Chrome decided they made ad blocking too easy and unilaterally changed the standard. Firefox is still on the standard. Chrome is what deviated, and while performance was improved, that was definitely not the motive.
Some folks have already discussed this in sister comments to the one you're responding to, but it's a common enough hn discussion topic that searching will answer beyond that (better than I can regurgitate here.)
Firefox often groups tabs from the same site into one process. With large numbers of the same tabs open in both, check the total memory for all firefox processes and all firefox processes. You will likely find firefox actually uses less memory than chrome.
It seems like every thread talking about Firefox always has someone asking that question, so if you search back you should find plenty of reasons. Unfortunately, it’s been my observation that valid and polite criticisms always get downvoted. I don’t understand why. It’s not like downvotes are going to make the problems disappear.
Most of us would like Firefox to succeed, and it’s none of our faults that Mozilla is constantly neglecting it and going off on wild goose projects which get promptly abandoned.
I use Firefox on both Linux and Android for 99% of my web browsing needs. At least for me it's the best browser out there, and doesn't seem neglegted at all.
Upvotes are not going to make problems actually relevant to solve.
The question keeps getting asked because people say they have problems. Answers (if any come) tells everyone what the problem is for this one user that raised it.
In aggregate we can all see that the problems are not very real for the vast majority of users.
The biggest problem users actually face with using Firefox is that web devs don’t want to support more than one browser and they have picked Chrome now. Or IT departments have blessed one and only one browser on corporate machines and it is the one most corpoware developers build extensions for.
Chasing web standards is a second order problem and will not make the user experience better in a relevant manner for end users. If web developers want an open web, they have to work to support open browsers.
Yeah the criticism is not invalid, but it is also often half-relevant soapboxing and I would wager that is why it tends to get downvoted.
h264 and h265 are patent-encumbered and therefore very expensive and/or dangerous. Patent trolls would rip Mozilla apart and eat all their money. The only reason H.264 works atm is that Cisco sponsors a plugin for that.
H264 patents are finally starting to expire, all the known patents have already expired in Europe.
As for HEVC, that particular licensing trash fire continues to burn bright. VVC had an opportunity to learn from the situation, and decided what they really wanted was a trash fire that burned even brighter.
Mozilla is doing exactly what you’re describing. They need revenue to ditch their direct financial ties to Google (and I wonder if they hire those high-salary executives solely in the hope of generating that revenue).
These AI products, along with all previous failed attempts, are just them trying to gain enough revenue to remove that dependency on Google.
I'm going to sound crazy, and I've said this on HN before, but I wish CloudFlare or someone who would truly appreciate the effort and investment, would buy out Mozilla and have them oxidizing the browser again. Firefox was at its best when they were going through that effort, and since they put a pause on it, Firefox has been so "meh" for many years now, and embedding things nobody asked for. A faster fully oxidized browser on the other hand would be loved by many.
The Mozilla employees are just Google plants. The web standards are now controlled by WHATWG who are all members of Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Mozilla and they are not interested in pushing standards forward or making browser improvements. They are only interested in ensuring entrenchment for their corporations. That’s why they created WHATWG. There is nothing any non-compromised Mozilla employee can do. The ship has sunk. Either someone hard forks Firefox or we continue down the current road.
I'm perfectly fine with Mozilla working on other things as long as those things are profitable or at least self-funded. As long as they are not leeching donated resources from Firefox or Thunderbird, I don't see a problem. However, I wish I had some kind of assurance that the money I donate to Mozilla would go to Firefox and not some other project like this.
It has been my daily driver off and on again across the years since the Netscape code was open sourced and Mozilla as an organization was founded. It's a fantastic browser, but Chrome now owns the lionshare of the market as Firefox plays catch-up instead of leading like it did in the past. Memory isolation, etc never got the resourcing it needed to complete until it was apparently too late.
I see Firefox now as the new Opera, a technically good browser making dubious extensions that no one asked for until it dies a slow, spiraling death. My plea is simply to not go down that road any further...
I agree with the sentiment, but it’s hard to agree fully with anyone seeming desperate.
This reads like a kid trying to give business advice to an adult. “You could do THIS, then THIS, it would also be cool if you did THAT but please don’t do THAT!!”
Myself and I believe many others are willing to put money where our mouths are for an organization leading by example with regards to stewardship, much as this org has done in the past prior, instead of all these continued distractions, and ESPECIALLY if they stop swallowing this poisonous "donation" from Google. The fact that they do makes me wary of sending them a single penny. They'll just keep doing shit like they have been in recent years...
I can understand where you're coming from, but this seems a little misguided. Are you personally trying to pledge at least 1 full devs salary to Mozilla in exchange for less AI products? At the end of the day this really comes down to the money. If you want Mozilla to do the things you say you want from them, they need more than donations. Good will doesn't build a browser, that shit's expensive. It's like you're asking for a games studio to just give you an MMO out of the goodness of their heart for a few scraps from people who support their mission. The world doesn't work that way, without products like these I imagine Mozilla wouldn't be around much longer in the way you describe considering most of their salaries are paid directly by that 'poison' you describe.
The foundation never gets more than 10M / year in donations. You really think their donation rate could possibly go up by more than 50x just by cutting ties with Google?
The Get Started button links to a contact form. That's unexpected.
I looked for the source code repository and thanks to somebody here that hinted at it as a Thunderbird project, I found [1]. That's a better Get Started page.
I immediately thought "oh, the email client? It's AI now?" Then I realized this is Thunderbolt, not Thunderbird. Kind of an odd choice by Mozilla to have two products with such similar names.
People "want" a lot of contradictory things. People "want" them to be less financially reliant on Google, while also "focusing" on a browser in a market that is entirely commoditized and subsidized by 3 of the 10 largest companies in the world - and having a wholly implementation independent browser engine when it's so massively difficult and capital intensive that even Microsoft gave up on it.
I want them to actively seek foreign sovereign tech funding which come with stipulations that commit Mozilla to certain levels of privacy and anonymity.
I want them to go cap-in-hand to other countries and say "if you don't fund us then you are letting the US and surveillance capitalism get between your citizens and their government" and "do you really know what Chrome is doing with your data?"
I don't want to pretend they are simply part of a browser marketplace, but rather have them realize they are part of a civil rights effort, with powerful non-market forces they can ally with.
And I want those governments to commit to progressive enhancement guidelines like https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/technology/using-progressi... so new alternatives like Ladybird can start, and further require their agencies to test on a Firefox branch with no AI, no location tracking, full ad-blocking, etc. because while the market is free to ignore certain non-profitable users, a government should not be allowed to ignore some of its citizens.
Mozilla needs money to support the development of Firefox (and the payroll of its high-salary executives).
For now, they mainly rely on Google for that money. Google pays them to avoid antitrust cases, to show the courts that they are not a monopoly and that "alternatives" exist. For example, the DOJ once proposed that Google be forced to sell off Chrome.
However, if another entity has control over your budget, they also have control over your product. If Firefox becomes "too good" to be a true competitor in the consumer space, the funding might be reduced or even cut off.
Creating a new source of revenue allows Mozilla to improve Firefox even beyond the point Google feels "comfortable" with.
I agree with you, there are 1,000 different chat apps and just one Firefox. And the world needs Firefox more than it knows.
It looks like they might want to get into hosting/selling services to users on this.
From the FAQ:
> Is there going to be a hosted version if I don't want to deploy it myself?
> Yes, we are planning to launch Thunderbolt for regular users but we do not have a release date yet.
There is "only one Firefox" but Firefox exists in a market that is not just commoditized, but subsidized to the tune of billions by 3 of the 10 largest companies in the world.
The world may need Firefox but it's funny how people complain about Mozilla's dependence on Google while also complaining about every attempt to become more financially independent from Google.
They could start getting some of that goodwill back by not paying their CEO a multi-million dollar salary and opening donations to actually help fund Firefox.
The anti-trust lawsuits with Google have Mozilla realizing they can't just be a company kept afloat by Google. Mozilla's priorities have been pretty complacent, basically just maintaining Firefox, sometimes Thunderbird, and a couple side services that have little financial incentives.
The current state of Mozilla is pretty odd since they rebranded to make it more apparent they're a non-profit, while also attempting to become more profitable pushing out new products and services.
This was the MOST confusing release I've seen in years.
Okay, it took me some time that the mail client is called "ThunderBIRD", not the BOLT. Not that I've used it much. But why the logo in github still shows TunderBIRD?
It looks like Mozilla is trying to catch the band wagon for no particular reason. They don't need it AT ALL. But they just jumped in along for a ride.
I thought Mozilla was going to join the Thunderbolt standard and/or making some tool for it until I clicked the link haha. Very interesting name choice
> What does this one differently that the other thirteen in a dozen don't?
Mozilla's a lot more trustworthy with privacy and data, and they're unlikely to sell the project to someone who only wants to stuff it full of malware/adware/crypto stuff - or do it themselves.
I'm somewhat a fan of Mozilla, but their weak governance with regards to actual plans for the future, a couple of questionable partnerships, and the graveyard of products makes it hard to trust based on a 15+ year-old reputation. Would love to see where Mozilla has meaningfully contributed to the modern tech space (things we all actually use, not Mozilla versions of more popular apps/tools)
But despite that, Mozilla is still far more trustworthy than virtually everybody else. Who would you trust more? I imagine it's a very short list. Which is a sad state of affairs.
I worked in Mozilla previously for like 5-6 years. I think the supporter of Mozilla is a lot more trustworthy with privacy and data, but not Mozilla itself... I think they claiming that they do this and do that, but actually speak louder than action. My personal takes from the upper management is also not that good.
If you were not working with Mozilla Asian area, you know far too less. They had a browser in China that redirect to different website for profit before every connection and some affiliation. By doing so, is it privacy or not? Oh, look at Mozilla Japan volunteers, they shut everything up because things went wrong.
This Mozilla?[1] The company whose 85% of revenue depends on an adtech giant?
They're certainly doing better than others in this space, but their track record does not inspire confidence for anyone concerned about their privacy and data.
Some confusion I see here is lots of people seem to not know that MZLA who makes Thunderbird and Mozilla Corporation who make firefox are separate entities in the Mozilla Foundation umbrella. This Thunderbolt is a MZLA product... so ya
Chrome on Linux is ~1.47 times faster than Firefox on the Jetstream 3 benchmark as recently reported by Phoronix[0]. That's how we want you to spend the money Mozilla, keeping up with your well-funded rival Google, and making it so we don't end up with a browser monoculture. These sorts of distractions just piss me off, and are not part of your core mission.
I remember that Firefox is orders of magnitude more performant in css processing, especially for complex documents with many elements. Can't comment on the javascipt interpeter, so I assume firefox is losing points somewhere else outside the screen painting engine.
I’m not sure if it’s fair to describe a "wholly owned subsidiary" as unrelated.
> Thunderbolt is funded through a dedicated investment from Mozilla and is being developed by a separate team focused on enterprise AI products, distinct from Thunderbird’s donation-supported consumer product work.
Firefox has many weaknesses, but I never once thought “man, that thing is slow”. It isn’t, and chasing benchmark numbers is a waste of effort. A better security model or deeper customizability would be far more valuable.
The fact it's that for a normal usage, Firefox with uBlock Origin it's faster that Chrome without ad blocking. On Android this is especially noticeable.
And regarding (memory) performance, chromium has the "memory saver" settings for unloading tabs. I don't understand why mozilla thinks its acceptable to require users unload tabs manually. Who even does that?
Is it just me or is this really bad copy? The only clue as to what this is on the landing page is the background of the product image. And I also have to sign up to find out anything else about it.
Hi, I'm on team that worked on this. No it's not vibe coded. We do pretty intense code review of every PR. It looks like the number you're seeing is including lock files and artifacts that are not part of the core coverage.
Fair enough if it’s not vibe coded, I’ll take your word for it. Code review seems like it’s mostly bots (Claude, Cursor, Greptile) from the PRs I looked at?
Nevertheless, AI use is not what really stood out to me. It’s that it’s SO MUCH CODE. I have no idea how you guys maintain or reason about the quality or security of something like this. Good luck, I guess.
Language Files Lines Blanks Comments Code
─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
TypeScript 760 109110 14500 7397 87213
JSON 41 22056 6 0 22050
Markdown 56 7150 2086 0 5064
YAML 33 3965 406 208 3351
... and many more with fewer than 1k lines
Regarding "loads of assumptions," it's hard to tell how much of this is vibecoded slop (definitely non-zero looking at the commit log), but I don't think it's that outrageous to claim 87k sloc is too much for a textbox and an API wrapper.
That's still an immense amount of code for a chat interface essentially consisting of a text box and a button, which any OS (mobile or desktop) can usually throw up in a few lines of code.
It seems like all the model inference is external APIs? So why is the marketing claiming "Self-host on your infrastructure or let us help you deploy. Your data never leaves your control."
Lots of negative posts here, who presume to speak for others. I, for one, welcome new entrants especially since they're under the Mozilla umbrella. This client could use the passwords and cookies stored in Firefox. And I'd trust it too, unlike other clients.
Some of us are out here still waiting for Firefox relay “premium” to launch and provide disposable mobile numbers like they do email addresses.. but product has for some reason been stuck on “join waiting list” for what feels like an absolute age.
What even is this? A chat frontend to arbitrary model providers on the backend - I guess that's sort of useful not to have to build yourself but it doesn't feel like the amazing thing they're trying to hype. Some of the features seem a bit weird to me too - like end-to-end encryption? There isn't a server intermediary, so you already have that with TLS to the model provider.
Yeah it seems similar to Gemini Enterprise. There you can deploy "apps" (basically front-ends) on top of the LLM that come pre-configured with plugins to access Google sheets, Databases, your Jira boards, etc.
So all this is doing is adding context for the LLM and some persistence.
I have yet to see a compelling use case for Gemini Enterprise at my company but we're still experimenting with it.
Could Mozilla hand over firefox to a new team please? It is clear they are wasting time and energy on things nobody wanted - who wants Mozilla-AI please? I mean, seriously?
For people who don't think Mozilla wants to make firefox competitive
again; and for those who also don't think ladybird will become a
viable alternative one day (that's for the future, I have no crystal
ball, I am just pointing at one possibility here). Perhaps we could
get more momentum when someone else other than Mozilla handles firefox.
If I may, Mozilla, you shouldn't release half-ass products that looks vibe coded like this, even the website looks like it took 30min to do with Claude
Addressing the usual few complaints folks always bring up:
* This is from the separate independent team that works on Thunderbird, not Firefox, so there isn't any resource contention happening there
* Thunderbird is revenue positive, and this potentially gives that team another revenue stream to be even more self-sustaining through charging companies
* Businesses definitely want to control the AI they're using (especially with RAGs of their own data) instead of just throwing it at their LLM vendor and hoping for the best
People on HN are fond of asserting that their own POV is the only one. Imagine that there is such a thing as a person in charge of choosing technologies for organizations, and that you're such a person. That's who this is for.
It's a crazy crowded space. Any entry into this field looks like a "me too" product driven by FOMO instead of being motivated by (a) serving customer needs, (b) serving social needs, or (c) making money. (All of which are fine with me) It will get 0.5% market share -- and I'm supposed to get excited?
If you lived in New York City you might think there are Duane Reades coast-to-coast but there are not. If you are based in the Bay Area you see billboards that are very different from anywhere else. I'd say the viewpoint is a lot like this famous artwork
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/View_of_the_World_from_9th_Ave...
but maybe instead of the rest of the US being 1/5 of the vertical space it is 1/25 of the vertical space. Problem is most customers do not live in the bay area and most web browser users do not live in the bay area and most web developers do not live in the bay area. Based in the Bay Area they can hop in their cars and drive the longest 40 miles in America to get to Google and Facebook's headquarters so Mozilla is talking to those people all the time and not talking to the rest of us.
We don't get costly signalling to show they care about the rest of us, we don't even get cheap talk.
They probably think René Girard is deep because they are surrounded by people who think René Girard is deep. If Mozilla wants to be relevant and not just an also-ran it needs to "think different" like the other 99.9% -- it's not that hard if you change your location.
Really the EU needs to apologize for those damned cookie popups and invest in a privacy-first browser. Whether that is "fully fund Firefox" or "fully a fund a Firefox fork" or pick up another browser engine or start a new one.
I see the warning lights flashing: a few years back web sites that didn't work with Firefox were few and far between, this weekend I bought tickets for a comic book convention and they took my money but didn't give me a ticket because the site didn't work with Firefox. I use Firefox as my daily driver so all the projects that I work on work with Firefox; the rest of my team doesn't give a damn and if you lose me another site will become Chrome-only.
> Businesses definitely want to control the AI they're using (especially with RAGs of their own data) instead of just throwing it at their LLM vendor and hoping for the best
Yes, agreed on that. I'm not sure I'm clear how this really helps that; I suppose it's a frontend that they don't have, but there are a bunch of those already.
It doesn't seem to help them control the _actual_ AI, i.e. the model, which still has to come from somewhere.
I see no reason this product should exist even under the Thunderbird umbrella, especially if ANY resources under ANY Mozilla org were employed in this. This product is a distraction from their core mission in either case.
It goes to show that Mozilla(s) could, if they really wanted, restructure Mozilla Corporation / Foundation.
(edit - to allow users to fund Firefox, allowing us to better sleep at night, and to align our incentives)
Can the team please use that money on making thunderbird look like the nice UI mockups that were published that don't look anything like thunderbird.
Thunderbird was literally asking for donations just a few days ago?
This was built with money from an grant from Mozilla. See the bottom of this page: https://www.thunderbolt.io/announcing-thunderbolt
it is a patreon style thing, they are donation funded. I think the poster is saying that they arent being frivolous with their money like some people have a bad taste about firefox
And?
And they're taking money donated towards Thunderbird development and spending it on random unrelated AI slop ideas that nobody asked for. You really don't see anything wrong with that?
Surely you can agree that when you open Thunderbird and are met with requests for donations, if you chose to donate, you'd expect that money to be invested in Thunderbird development, and not 10M Claude tokens to vibe code Mozilla's latest groundbreaking AI B2B SaaS idea?
Stop spreading misinformation, it's funded by grant money https://github.com/thunderbird/thunderbolt/blob/main/docs/fa...
Ah yes, a grant from Mozilla, to Mozilla.
Why do you know that nobody asks for? Are you in the team?
>Thunderbird is revenue positive
Hmm, I thought the for-profit Thunderbird pro hadn't launched yet?
I know Thunderbird is for profit, but what are they profitting from without the paid service, and how much of that profit is going into this unrelated Thunderbolt AI platform, exactly?
Thunderbird currently runs entirely on donations, even though they have paid products in the pipeline.
I think a piece of software running on donations is not running off "charity". It's just a business model to not charge every user. Similar to how Twitch streamers operate, or my local theater group.
You can read how they spent money in 2024 [1].
[1] https://blog.thunderbird.net/2025/10/state-of-the-bird-2024-...
Thanks, that's helpful. This says about ~70% of the money was paid to employees, ~10% infra costs, the other ~20% various other fees and smaller expenses.
It would be interesting to have a breakdown of what part of the Thunderbird team is working on Thunderbird, Thunderbolt, or other forms of thunder.
No, this was built with money from an grant from Mozilla.
Wait what, they took donations to pay a team to build a mail client and had them build an AI thing instead? Or have I got that wrong.
No, this was built with money from an grant from Mozilla.
Just for clarity, you do mean Thunderbird (the email client), not Thunderbolt (this new AI client)?
> Thunderbird is revenue positive
Is that why I'm met with a splash screen asking me to donate every time I start Thunderbird? Is this another Wikipedia situation?
I think that wasn't phrased well- it's "revenue" positive meaning donation money covers more than the expenses
That’s literally what the phrase means. Can’t help if people don’t know what words mean. It was phrased fine, it wasn’t _read_ well.
You think that just because the software can be downloaded for free means the developers shouldn't get paid for their work?
Mozilla Thunderbolt?
Why not "Phyrefox"?
They are so incompetent, they could not even come up with a name sufficiently different from their own product.
From the home page I have no idea what is this, what even is AI client? OpenCode competitor?
Also Thunderbolt is too similar to Thunderbird, really got me puzzled for a sec.
So this is only for organizations and not for individuals? The Get Started button goes to a form where it wants to know how they can help your organization. I didn’t see any other link to the source code or documentation. If whoever created this site sees this comment, please clear up the above questions and observations.
I believe they're anticipating self-hosters to deploy directly from their Github documentation.
The FAQs in Github also imply that a hosted deployment for single users is on their roadmap, but not prioritized. - https://github.com/thunderbird/thunderbolt/blob/main/docs/fa...
For anyone reading this that has worked on the launch of this new product (or the many others of their ilk throughout the years) under the various Mozilla orgs, I mean no disrespect, however I feel it's important to not mince words these days..
I implore ANYONE at Mozilla org to please, please stop working on projects distracting from the complex and necessary work of browser and web standards stewardship. That alone should be the very reason for your continued existence if you have any. Focus on anything outside that purview will lead to the furthering of the, already painful and readily apparent, stagnation of your browser and our standards bodies as entities distinct from corporations.
Ditching any direct financial ties to Google or any other browser vendor is both important and necessary at this point, as this clearly represents a conflict of interest in your overall mission.
The web as a platform should belong to us all, not just the few corporate leaders of the day. I've watched in real time, saddened by the persistent errosion of our commons that is the web. I see it becoming nothing more than a corporate playground should trends continue, if it's not already too late. There may have been a time when your mission took precident over product launches of seemingly unrelated domains, but that is not what Ii observing today.
I think I speak for many in the community in these regards (please correct me if not the case.)
These two goals:
> ... please stop working on projects distracting from the complex and necessary work of browser and web standards stewardship.
> Ditching any direct financial ties to Google or any other browser vendor is both important and necessary...
are inherently contradictory. If do not want Mozilla to have revenue from search vendors that also have browsers, it has to come from somewhere else. Or are you suggesting they switch the default search engine back to Yahoo [0]?
I am not trying to defend the projects they have chosen to work on, but you have to understand that reducing dependence on Google is exactly why they are working on them [1].
[0] Even when they did that, it was for the US only, and Google was still the default for most of the world.
[1] Although in this case, this appears to come from the Thunderbird organization, so unrelated to the browser. Money is fungible, though.
There are plenty ways to fund digital commons, including people volunteering their time.
A leading web browser can not be built and maintained by volunteers.
I don't think volunteering is going to cut it. Big orgs have big money and public commons are just targets to be controlled exploited.
mozilla employs 750 people and has a 1/2Bn dollar deal with Google and still their browser is absolute hot garbage. i think volunteering won't cut it.
Firefox is pretty cool. Use it every day.
Blocks ads Multi account containers Dev tools very good
I never notice that it is in any way slow, except for those sites that need infinity cpu on any browser, like jira.
What specifically is the issue? To my mind it quietly just gets on with things.
It is very cool! I'd go as far to say it's a great browser in fact. I simply want it to exist and be such in perpetuity and lead by example like it has in the past. I see it as a follower instead of a leader these days, largely to Google, but also Safari and to some degree Edge (by simply stealing the blink renderer)
The Mozilla org continues to produce a very capable browser, but it's now 3rd or fourth fiddle on a stage their misteps helped orchestrate in their demotion.
Edit: clarification
What are the other competing browsers? There's chrome(and the derivatives), safari, firefox? safari exists only because of ios lockin. Aren't most other browsers an increasingly smaller share? Genuine question.
In contrast, the Multi-Account Containers system is the primary reason I avoid Firefox.
While it is meant to be an alternative to Chrome's profile switching, it is more a workaround than a complete replacement. I need entirely different sets of extensions for personal, work, and school environments, something containers can't do.
Firefox's actual profile support is beyond terrible. To launch a separate instance, Firefox requires many more clicks than Chrome, all within a Windows-2000-style UI. Not to mention that there are weird glitches in their implementation.
Firefox is not usable for me until they actually spend time improving their multiple profile support.
I definitely have not had that experience, although use FF for personal, various work, and various educational places.
None of those have required me to install a particular extension..
Of course thats not to deny your experience!
The only time profiles ever come into it, for me, is using web driver, playwright, or whatever.
I guess maybe the usage stats dont support making the profile selector better.
But also, maybe its a thing they would accept a change for?
This is not meant to be an alternative for Chrome's profile switching. It's a different use case entirely.
As you yourself mention, Firefox has actual profile support, which may not be as good as Chrome's, but at least compare like for like.
I use it daily, but Chromes dev tools are better. I always wind up back in Chrome to debug things.
One difference I've seen with FF vs Chrome is when finding the events to bind to each element. In FF, the event tag on the element is clickable and gives you the name and the line number in the JS file. It makes finding the code very easy. I have not seen that in Chrome. I rarely use Chrome, so this one thing leads me to saying FF's DevTools are better, at least for me and how I use them.
Funny, I have it exactly the other way around!
Here are a couple:
1. The inability to set a specific page for new tabs to open on. That is ridiculous.
2. The mobile version sucks, specifically because bookmarks are buried under an absurd number of menu levels. And they're also broken up (without user approval or any way to stop it) into "mobile" and "desktop" bookmarks. WHY? The entire point of syncing is to have them all the same.
I want to like Firefox. I went back to Firefox for the first time in decades last year and gave it up after a couple months because #2 was that annoying. So brain-dead.
Oh yeah, and another one was that "never remember history" does, in fact, remember history. What Firefox really does is "stop adding to history." And the bug report on it resulted in several YEARS of debate over how to "fix" it. The latest I saw is that they're actually NOT going to fix it, but rather add more text (somewhere) to say basically, "This doesn't do what you think it's going to do."
If fixing a defect like that requires years of committee back-and-forth, the product is finished.
> The inability to set a specific page for new tabs to open on. That is ridiculous.
I've been using the "New Tab Override" extension for almost a decade at this point. Sure, it would probably make sense to have as a baseline feature, but I installed it so long ago and it's continued working the whole time that it's not really something I think about anymore.
New Tab Homepage is another alternative
> already painful and readily apparent, stagnation of your browser
What's wrong with Firefox? There are several things Firefox does that it's annoying to live without in other browsers (video pop-outs, competent ad blocking, etc). Is there some core feature that's missing? I'm subjected to Edge at work and I couldn't tell you a single thing it does that I'd want FF to do.
> and our standards bodies as entities distinct from corporations
Ok, I buy that.
Yes there are things that Firefox does better than others, and that is one reason I use Firefox. But there are definitely things I would like to see improved, like:
- PWA support on Linux
- better performance
- devtools should be able to handle sites with large amounts of js with sourcemaps
- fix a number of bugs that have been open for a long time
- don't lag behind standards as much (I'm not talking about things where they intentionally don't implement problematic "standards" pushed by google)
- make it feasible to embed gecko in other projects similar to how chromium is used by electron and webkit is used in "webviews"
Web usb and serial are not just missing, last I checked Mozilla is opting to not implement based on their moral stance. It just puts them behind for some stuff.
It is so frustrating how every thread about Mozilla has people getting upset about contradictory things.
Half the thread impunes Mozilla for taking so much money from Google and imply that they are controlled opposition, and the other half gets upset when Mozilla doesn't implement every standard that Google tries to steamroll through the standards bodies because of objections to how they can be used for fingerprinting, etc.
They get all the downsides of being methodical and privacy focused alongside none of the benefits. Everybody hates the "side projects" unless it's Rust, Servo, LetsEncrypt, Thunderbird, contributions to Opus/AVI, etc. etc.
WebSerial just landed in Firefox nightly! https://bsky.app/profile/paulusschoutsen.nl/post/3mjfdx3ujta...
> It just puts them behind for some stuff.
Yeah, it really undermines their ability to compromise user security and privacy.
Essentially all of Firefox' incompatibilities with a website reduce to Firefox not allowing the users to be tracked or fingerprinted by default. Webapps that rely on fingerprinting as a replacement for device tokens will likely not work. Because fingerprinting is bad and I don't want it to work. The people your bank pays to implement that are the same companies used for cross site tracking. It only works because tracking works. ReCaptcha can break for similar reasons, but there are better options for captcha and the need for captcha itself is possible to eliminate with various strategies depending on what it is being used to mitigate.
There's a lot of good use-cases of Web usb, you can't just cut everything which might have privacy aspects otherwise the browsers wouldn't have canvas or even gpu rendering.
What are those use cases? It seems like a giant hole punched all the way from a tab's sandbox through the process boundary and out to the kernel... Yes, gpu rendering is a great example of the same problem. Canvas at least has some intervening layers depending on implementation.
pianu.com used to be a website where you could learn piano by connecting your piano through usb with the browser. It seems defunct now but I found a video demonstrating it : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTBmRV02NgI
I used something similar in the past. It was a legitimate use case for web usb which changed my mind on it quite a bit.
https://www.charachorder.com/ sells ergo keyboards and allows you to update their firmware directly in the website, through web usb. No local apps at all. Also an improvement in overall security from having to download some .exe / .dmg and running it locally.
Almost all of the gui software for programming keyboards with QMK uses webusb or webhid, so you either have to use a chromium based browser or an electron app that is basically just a wrapper for chromium.
GrapheneOS for example can install with web usb, I think it makes it much easier for people who aren't too tech savvy to switch.
Somebody also recently shared an awesome project which let's you use an usb printer regardless of your OS driver.
Firefox on iOS still doesn't support extensions or adblocking - something Safari (and other browsers as well) do.
Firefox on iOS isn't really a Firefox because Apple doesn't allow alternative browsers. It's a Safari skin.
Orion on iOS is also a Safari skin and supports extensions
It's slow. It almost always trails Safari and Chrome on most benchmarks.
How many milliseconds do you think this page took to render? I usually click and it's already done.
HN is not the most complex website rendering wise by any imaginable metric. I presume HN renders equally as fast on lynx or Mosaic from 1994...
HN is a fast site (comparatively; most websites are unnecessarily slow). It’s a bad measurement.
HN is a good website. Ebay is another good example where JavaScript is optional but with good functionality. Marko was mocked, but now Astro is cool because they invented ssr...
I don't care about benchmarks.
I'm building a fairly complicated browser extension [0].
Debugging the extension on Chrome, it works great. On Firefox, it is nearly impossible. There are a litany of compatibility issues that make it "different" than Chrome, despite the extension being very much standards based. It is really frustrating and makes me dread getting bug reports.
To be fair, Safari is even worse and I haven't even touched Edge yet.
As much as I'd love to have options in the marketplace, standards based compatibility between offerings should be a top line requirement.
[0] https://oj-hn.com
The standards used to be there. Chrome decided they made ad blocking too easy and unilaterally changed the standard. Firefox is still on the standard. Chrome is what deviated, and while performance was improved, that was definitely not the motive.
Some folks have already discussed this in sister comments to the one you're responding to, but it's a common enough hn discussion topic that searching will answer beyond that (better than I can regurgitate here.)
reddit tab, firefox: 428mb. same tab, chrome: 78mb.
I get 80mb for reddit on firefox.
That number can be down to any number of different factors on reddit itself. Having an autoplay video running, etc.
Firefox often groups tabs from the same site into one process. With large numbers of the same tabs open in both, check the total memory for all firefox processes and all firefox processes. You will likely find firefox actually uses less memory than chrome.
I will eat the RAM penalty to resist the Chromium hegemon. Grateful to have any alternative!
> What's wrong with Firefox?
It seems like every thread talking about Firefox always has someone asking that question, so if you search back you should find plenty of reasons. Unfortunately, it’s been my observation that valid and polite criticisms always get downvoted. I don’t understand why. It’s not like downvotes are going to make the problems disappear.
Most of us would like Firefox to succeed, and it’s none of our faults that Mozilla is constantly neglecting it and going off on wild goose projects which get promptly abandoned.
I use Firefox on both Linux and Android for 99% of my web browsing needs. At least for me it's the best browser out there, and doesn't seem neglegted at all.
Upvotes are not going to make problems actually relevant to solve.
The question keeps getting asked because people say they have problems. Answers (if any come) tells everyone what the problem is for this one user that raised it.
In aggregate we can all see that the problems are not very real for the vast majority of users.
The biggest problem users actually face with using Firefox is that web devs don’t want to support more than one browser and they have picked Chrome now. Or IT departments have blessed one and only one browser on corporate machines and it is the one most corpoware developers build extensions for.
Chasing web standards is a second order problem and will not make the user experience better in a relevant manner for end users. If web developers want an open web, they have to work to support open browsers.
Yeah the criticism is not invalid, but it is also often half-relevant soapboxing and I would wager that is why it tends to get downvoted.
It doesn’t support a lot of video formats that Chrome and Safari have supported for years (h265 is one I think. I’m no expert)
h264 and h265 are patent-encumbered and therefore very expensive and/or dangerous. Patent trolls would rip Mozilla apart and eat all their money. The only reason H.264 works atm is that Cisco sponsors a plugin for that.
H264 patents are finally starting to expire, all the known patents have already expired in Europe.
As for HEVC, that particular licensing trash fire continues to burn bright. VVC had an opportunity to learn from the situation, and decided what they really wanted was a trash fire that burned even brighter.
So, we might be stuck with H264 for a little bit.
I don't event think h265 is widely supported. On Windows you have to pay separately for it
Firefox has had support for h265 for a few months by now, they finally relented.
Mozilla is doing exactly what you’re describing. They need revenue to ditch their direct financial ties to Google (and I wonder if they hire those high-salary executives solely in the hope of generating that revenue).
These AI products, along with all previous failed attempts, are just them trying to gain enough revenue to remove that dependency on Google.
I agree that Mozilla is a breath of fresh air, and I am happy to see this extending to AI.
Where exactly do you expect Mozilla to gain revenue from other than non browser projects?
Do you want people to pay to use Firefox?
I'm going to sound crazy, and I've said this on HN before, but I wish CloudFlare or someone who would truly appreciate the effort and investment, would buy out Mozilla and have them oxidizing the browser again. Firefox was at its best when they were going through that effort, and since they put a pause on it, Firefox has been so "meh" for many years now, and embedding things nobody asked for. A faster fully oxidized browser on the other hand would be loved by many.
I feel dumb, but what does oxidized mean in this context?
migrate to rust.
Have you donated to the Mozilla Foundation so they can ditch financial ties with Google?
The Mozilla employees are just Google plants. The web standards are now controlled by WHATWG who are all members of Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Mozilla and they are not interested in pushing standards forward or making browser improvements. They are only interested in ensuring entrenchment for their corporations. That’s why they created WHATWG. There is nothing any non-compromised Mozilla employee can do. The ship has sunk. Either someone hard forks Firefox or we continue down the current road.
I'm perfectly fine with Mozilla working on other things as long as those things are profitable or at least self-funded. As long as they are not leeching donated resources from Firefox or Thunderbird, I don't see a problem. However, I wish I had some kind of assurance that the money I donate to Mozilla would go to Firefox and not some other project like this.
Thunderbolt was funded from a grant, not donations.
https://github.com/thunderbird/thunderbolt/blob/main/docs/fa...
I think the rest of that line is really kind of important:
> Thunderbolt is funded through a grant from Mozilla.
Is there any way that that's not taking dollars out of the same organization that's funding Firefox or thunderbird?
I agreed with these posts a couple years ago but for the past year there have been a lot of meaningful improvements in Firefox.
It has been my daily driver off and on again across the years since the Netscape code was open sourced and Mozilla as an organization was founded. It's a fantastic browser, but Chrome now owns the lionshare of the market as Firefox plays catch-up instead of leading like it did in the past. Memory isolation, etc never got the resourcing it needed to complete until it was apparently too late.
I see Firefox now as the new Opera, a technically good browser making dubious extensions that no one asked for until it dies a slow, spiraling death. My plea is simply to not go down that road any further...
I agree with the sentiment, but it’s hard to agree fully with anyone seeming desperate.
This reads like a kid trying to give business advice to an adult. “You could do THIS, then THIS, it would also be cool if you did THAT but please don’t do THAT!!”
C’mon now.
Mozilla should not be a business, full stop.
The fact that is being run like one, albeit poorly is exactly the problem.
I don't think you realize the irony in calling my post childish here. "C'mon" I guess?
Maybe they shouldn't be, but they are. As a for profit corporation with employees they are very much a business not just "run like one"
How would Mozilla replace the $500M a year from Google to not be a business?
Myself and I believe many others are willing to put money where our mouths are for an organization leading by example with regards to stewardship, much as this org has done in the past prior, instead of all these continued distractions, and ESPECIALLY if they stop swallowing this poisonous "donation" from Google. The fact that they do makes me wary of sending them a single penny. They'll just keep doing shit like they have been in recent years...
I can understand where you're coming from, but this seems a little misguided. Are you personally trying to pledge at least 1 full devs salary to Mozilla in exchange for less AI products? At the end of the day this really comes down to the money. If you want Mozilla to do the things you say you want from them, they need more than donations. Good will doesn't build a browser, that shit's expensive. It's like you're asking for a games studio to just give you an MMO out of the goodness of their heart for a few scraps from people who support their mission. The world doesn't work that way, without products like these I imagine Mozilla wouldn't be around much longer in the way you describe considering most of their salaries are paid directly by that 'poison' you describe.
The foundation never gets more than 10M / year in donations. You really think their donation rate could possibly go up by more than 50x just by cutting ties with Google?
Yeah, you don't speak for me.
Fair enough.
The Get Started button links to a contact form. That's unexpected. I looked for the source code repository and thanks to somebody here that hinted at it as a Thunderbird project, I found [1]. That's a better Get Started page.
[1] https://github.com/thunderbird/thunderbolt
I immediately thought "oh, the email client? It's AI now?" Then I realized this is Thunderbolt, not Thunderbird. Kind of an odd choice by Mozilla to have two products with such similar names.
Wow this is a confusing name.
At a glance it looks identical to Mozilla Thunderbird, but has nothing in common.
And then of course it's also the same as a well-known hardware interface.
I know it's hard to come up with names and pretty much everything is used by something else, but this seems particularly bad.
>And then of course it's also the same as a well-known hardware interface.
The cherry on top is that the domain is thunderbolt.IO. No other TLDs to pick from?
I mean there's already an established theme... how hard can it be?
Fire-fox
Thunder-bird
River-wolf
Stone-raven
....
I swear there are like 10 different Thunderbolts. Why reuse such a common name?
oh mozilla, why don't you just focus on Firefox. That is all we want.
People "want" a lot of contradictory things. People "want" them to be less financially reliant on Google, while also "focusing" on a browser in a market that is entirely commoditized and subsidized by 3 of the 10 largest companies in the world - and having a wholly implementation independent browser engine when it's so massively difficult and capital intensive that even Microsoft gave up on it.
Having the best browser should be Mozilla's first priority.
Investing on AI is not going to make them less financially reliant on Google.
I want them to actively seek foreign sovereign tech funding which come with stipulations that commit Mozilla to certain levels of privacy and anonymity.
I want them to go cap-in-hand to other countries and say "if you don't fund us then you are letting the US and surveillance capitalism get between your citizens and their government" and "do you really know what Chrome is doing with your data?"
I don't want to pretend they are simply part of a browser marketplace, but rather have them realize they are part of a civil rights effort, with powerful non-market forces they can ally with.
And I want those governments to commit to progressive enhancement guidelines like https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/technology/using-progressi... so new alternatives like Ladybird can start, and further require their agencies to test on a Firefox branch with no AI, no location tracking, full ad-blocking, etc. because while the market is free to ignore certain non-profitable users, a government should not be allowed to ignore some of its citizens.
I don't see a contradiction there.
This is from MZLA Technologies, so is a sister product to Thunderbird rather than Firefox.
Mozilla needs money to support the development of Firefox (and the payroll of its high-salary executives).
For now, they mainly rely on Google for that money. Google pays them to avoid antitrust cases, to show the courts that they are not a monopoly and that "alternatives" exist. For example, the DOJ once proposed that Google be forced to sell off Chrome.
However, if another entity has control over your budget, they also have control over your product. If Firefox becomes "too good" to be a true competitor in the consumer space, the funding might be reduced or even cut off.
Creating a new source of revenue allows Mozilla to improve Firefox even beyond the point Google feels "comfortable" with.
I agree with you, there are 1,000 different chat apps and just one Firefox. And the world needs Firefox more than it knows.
It looks like they might want to get into hosting/selling services to users on this.
From the FAQ:
> Is there going to be a hosted version if I don't want to deploy it myself? > Yes, we are planning to launch Thunderbolt for regular users but we do not have a release date yet.
There is "only one Firefox" but Firefox exists in a market that is not just commoditized, but subsidized to the tune of billions by 3 of the 10 largest companies in the world.
The world may need Firefox but it's funny how people complain about Mozilla's dependence on Google while also complaining about every attempt to become more financially independent from Google.
They could start getting some of that goodwill back by not paying their CEO a multi-million dollar salary and opening donations to actually help fund Firefox.
The anti-trust lawsuits with Google have Mozilla realizing they can't just be a company kept afloat by Google. Mozilla's priorities have been pretty complacent, basically just maintaining Firefox, sometimes Thunderbird, and a couple side services that have little financial incentives.
The current state of Mozilla is pretty odd since they rebranded to make it more apparent they're a non-profit, while also attempting to become more profitable pushing out new products and services.
Why is this related to Firefox?
It's not. Mozilla has been more than Firefox for a long time.
RIP Firefox OS
This was the MOST confusing release I've seen in years.
Okay, it took me some time that the mail client is called "ThunderBIRD", not the BOLT. Not that I've used it much. But why the logo in github still shows TunderBIRD?
It looks like Mozilla is trying to catch the band wagon for no particular reason. They don't need it AT ALL. But they just jumped in along for a ride.
I thought Mozilla was going to join the Thunderbolt standard and/or making some tool for it until I clicked the link haha. Very interesting name choice
Well, see, one is Thunderbolt io, and the other is Thunderbolt.io.
Do trademarks not matter anymore? The name and logo are lawsuits just waiting to happen.
Curious name choice, that's clearly encumbered by other trademarks.
Also, my impression is: yay another AI front-end. What does this one differently that the other thirteen in a dozen don't?
> What does this one differently that the other thirteen in a dozen don't?
Mozilla's a lot more trustworthy with privacy and data, and they're unlikely to sell the project to someone who only wants to stuff it full of malware/adware/crypto stuff - or do it themselves.
I'm somewhat a fan of Mozilla, but their weak governance with regards to actual plans for the future, a couple of questionable partnerships, and the graveyard of products makes it hard to trust based on a 15+ year-old reputation. Would love to see where Mozilla has meaningfully contributed to the modern tech space (things we all actually use, not Mozilla versions of more popular apps/tools)
But despite that, Mozilla is still far more trustworthy than virtually everybody else. Who would you trust more? I imagine it's a very short list. Which is a sad state of affairs.
>Who would you trust more?
Nobody I'd mention on Hacker News!
I worked in Mozilla previously for like 5-6 years. I think the supporter of Mozilla is a lot more trustworthy with privacy and data, but not Mozilla itself... I think they claiming that they do this and do that, but actually speak louder than action. My personal takes from the upper management is also not that good.
If you were not working with Mozilla Asian area, you know far too less. They had a browser in China that redirect to different website for profit before every connection and some affiliation. By doing so, is it privacy or not? Oh, look at Mozilla Japan volunteers, they shut everything up because things went wrong.
How much of that privacy matters when you're connecting it to third-party agents/models?
This Mozilla?[1] The company whose 85% of revenue depends on an adtech giant?
They're certainly doing better than others in this space, but their track record does not inspire confidence for anyone concerned about their privacy and data.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla#Controversies
that is the firefox groupn not thunderbird. Diff bro
Are they allowed to reuse Thunderbolt when it's already taken in the same industry?
...and also differs in just three characters from another Mozilla product.
"I'm using Mozilla Thunderbolt."
"Huh, do you mean Thunderbird?"
"No, Thunderbolt!"
Good thing they didn't name this Unity or Proton. We are seriously running out of names for applications and services, ar we?
We're not, but companies are not courageous enough to explore new names.
I've already used up "cum" btw, so you're not allowed to name your product that.
Some feedback: It would be useful to explain what you do differently on your website.
Some confusion I see here is lots of people seem to not know that MZLA who makes Thunderbird and Mozilla Corporation who make firefox are separate entities in the Mozilla Foundation umbrella. This Thunderbolt is a MZLA product... so ya
I'm gonna deploy it on my machine and try it! Better option than using ChatGPT or Claude.
Chrome on Linux is ~1.47 times faster than Firefox on the Jetstream 3 benchmark as recently reported by Phoronix[0]. That's how we want you to spend the money Mozilla, keeping up with your well-funded rival Google, and making it so we don't end up with a browser monoculture. These sorts of distractions just piss me off, and are not part of your core mission.
[0]: https://www.phoronix.com/review/firefox-chrome-2026
I remember that Firefox is orders of magnitude more performant in css processing, especially for complex documents with many elements. Can't comment on the javascipt interpeter, so I assume firefox is losing points somewhere else outside the screen painting engine.
Why is this related to Firefox?
Because Mozilla is wasting money on something other than their core product, once again.
Thunderbird is under MZLA Technologies Corporation, their money and resources are unrelated to Mozilla Corporation, who pays money for their Firefox.
I’m not sure if it’s fair to describe a "wholly owned subsidiary" as unrelated.
> Thunderbolt is funded through a dedicated investment from Mozilla and is being developed by a separate team focused on enterprise AI products, distinct from Thunderbird’s donation-supported consumer product work.
Emphasis mine.
Firefox has many weaknesses, but I never once thought “man, that thing is slow”. It isn’t, and chasing benchmark numbers is a waste of effort. A better security model or deeper customizability would be far more valuable.
The fact it's that for a normal usage, Firefox with uBlock Origin it's faster that Chrome without ad blocking. On Android this is especially noticeable.
I wonder how much slower Firefox would have to be to invalidate the mental health gain not imagining every single keystroke going directly to Sundar.
Ladybird soon™
Not nearly soon enough. But yes, there is hope. Far away hope, but still.
And regarding (memory) performance, chromium has the "memory saver" settings for unloading tabs. I don't understand why mozilla thinks its acceptable to require users unload tabs manually. Who even does that?
I use the about:memory tab whenever I need to clear some memory. However, it can't unload tabs.
All I see is effort that could have been spent improving the rest of Mozilla's products.
Is it just me or is this really bad copy? The only clue as to what this is on the landing page is the background of the product image. And I also have to sign up to find out anything else about it.
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Hi, I'm on team that worked on this. No it's not vibe coded. We do pretty intense code review of every PR. It looks like the number you're seeing is including lock files and artifacts that are not part of the core coverage.
Fair enough if it’s not vibe coded, I’ll take your word for it. Code review seems like it’s mostly bots (Claude, Cursor, Greptile) from the PRs I looked at?
Nevertheless, AI use is not what really stood out to me. It’s that it’s SO MUCH CODE. I have no idea how you guys maintain or reason about the quality or security of something like this. Good luck, I guess.
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
"Please don't fulminate."
"Don't be curmudgeonly. Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
>120k LoC of probably largely vibecoded nonsense for a window with a text box and a button that lets you send and receive some data over a HTTP API.
"I will make loads of assumptions without checking so that I can invent reasons to get mad"
Note that about 30,000 of those lines are JSON files for localization and testing, as one example.
How much UI text does this thing have that it needs thousands of lines of localization? Where are these files?
Especially curious because I see a whole lot of hardcoded english text in there…
22,056 is not about 30,000. Per scc:
Regarding "loads of assumptions," it's hard to tell how much of this is vibecoded slop (definitely non-zero looking at the commit log), but I don't think it's that outrageous to claim 87k sloc is too much for a textbox and an API wrapper.Are you arguing that 90k LoC for a window with a text box and an overengineered textarea tag is somehow more acceptable than 120k?
That's still an immense amount of code for a chat interface essentially consisting of a text box and a button, which any OS (mobile or desktop) can usually throw up in a few lines of code.
Maybe you wouldn't be so tired if you didn't make assumptions of things to be mad about
On the bright side - it doesn't load without javascript ...in Firefox...
What fatigues you about this observation?
Would recommend exercise
Wait what ? Did you include libraries imported by NPM in this count ?
I don’t think so. I just used a public GitHub LoC counting tool directly on the repo, there are a few.
https://ghloc.vercel.app/thunderbird/thunderbolt?branch=main claims 141k and most of it is Typescript.
I imagine that would bump that number to milions.
I just checked one old take home task in Angular I did last year and the total number of lines is over five million over 35k+ files.
Naming things is really not that hard
Vibe-named
If this wouldn't be under Mozilla/Thunderbird Org on Github, I would have considered this to be fake. It looks very unsubstantial ...
Thought "hey this better not be AI". Yes it's AI.
Just keep making a decent browser and stop getting distracted on shit.
I tried to run it on my machine, and the release artifacts are missing entirely. Not going to spend time building from source.
There's an architecture diagram here: https://github.com/thunderbird/thunderbolt/blob/main/docs/ar...
It seems like all the model inference is external APIs? So why is the marketing claiming "Self-host on your infrastructure or let us help you deploy. Your data never leaves your control."
Could those external APIs point to locally hosted models?
Turns out chat apps are pretty easy to build I guess.
It's weird that they would name it like thunderbird
Lots of negative posts here, who presume to speak for others. I, for one, welcome new entrants especially since they're under the Mozilla umbrella. This client could use the passwords and cookies stored in Firefox. And I'd trust it too, unlike other clients.
Thank god for the Ladybird project
"Mozilla Bubble" Building things no one wants.
Some of us are out here still waiting for Firefox relay “premium” to launch and provide disposable mobile numbers like they do email addresses.. but product has for some reason been stuck on “join waiting list” for what feels like an absolute age.
No way they really named it thunderbolt. I mean. Seriously? What is next Mozilla USB-C vibeslop?
What even is this? A chat frontend to arbitrary model providers on the backend - I guess that's sort of useful not to have to build yourself but it doesn't feel like the amazing thing they're trying to hype. Some of the features seem a bit weird to me too - like end-to-end encryption? There isn't a server intermediary, so you already have that with TLS to the model provider.
Yeah it seems similar to Gemini Enterprise. There you can deploy "apps" (basically front-ends) on top of the LLM that come pre-configured with plugins to access Google sheets, Databases, your Jira boards, etc.
So all this is doing is adding context for the LLM and some persistence.
I have yet to see a compelling use case for Gemini Enterprise at my company but we're still experimenting with it.
Aw, another AI thing. I was hoping this was their email service.
that is in beta
Yikes.
Could Mozilla hand over firefox to a new team please? It is clear they are wasting time and energy on things nobody wanted - who wants Mozilla-AI please? I mean, seriously?
For people who don't think Mozilla wants to make firefox competitive again; and for those who also don't think ladybird will become a viable alternative one day (that's for the future, I have no crystal ball, I am just pointing at one possibility here). Perhaps we could get more momentum when someone else other than Mozilla handles firefox.
Why is this related to Firefox?
Because Firefox is the only thing that lends Mozilla any credibility.
If I may, Mozilla, you shouldn't release half-ass products that looks vibe coded like this, even the website looks like it took 30min to do with Claude
Did I seriously click on a Mozilla product and see AI? You guys at Mozilla read the Internet right?
Doesn’t this have to be done under another name to prevent massive company-killing pushback?