Mozilla Has a Plan to Save the Internet from Big Tech ⭐️

I grew up with Star Wars, a movie about the battle between good and evil, where a small band of rebels could against all odds thwart a powerful empire. And while it’s easy to be idealistic when you’re young, before the weight of experience becomes more of a burden than an advantage, I feel like that message stuck with me through the years.

Today, Big Tech monopolies and duopolies are collectively a real-world evil empire enshittifying their products and services while they steal all the value in the market for themselves. The antidote to their voracious behavior, the rebel alliance of our era, is what I call Little Tech, a group of smaller companies that competes the old fashioned way, by actually listening to what their customers want and then delivering on it. And there is no organization more OG to Little Tech, so to speak, than Mozilla.

Mozilla has been fighting the good fight since it was first created in 1998 in a last-ditch effort by Netscape to thwart Microsoft and its plan to embrace and extend the web for its own nefarious purposes. Mozilla’s original offering was an open source and free version of the Netscape Communicator suite of Internet apps. But the suite was bloated and slow, and so Mozilla split up the apps to focus on the Thunderbird email client and what was then called Phoenix, the web browser.

I was a big fan of Phoenix. And so when Mozilla changed the name of this product to Firefox and marched forward to version 1.0 of this streamlined new app, I went along for the ride. In 2006, with Mozilla gearing up for Firefox 1.0, it placed a two-page “Spread Firefox” ad in The New York Times celebrating the release and the community of users who contributed financially to its success. My name is among the thousands on that ad, in tiny type, just to the left of the “o” in Firefox.

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE) controlled over 90 percent of the web browser market when Mozilla released Firefox 1.0 in late 2006. But the intervening history is messy. Microsoft had essentially stopped actively developing IE so that it could focus on its proprietary “Longhorn” and .NET technologies. And though it had recovered from that mistake by the time Firefox was stable, by then it was too late: IE usage share plummeted each year from then on. Briefly, it seemed that Firefox and the open web would win, but in 2008, Microsoft and IE were replaced by Google and Chrome.

Today, Google Chrome is dominant on both desktop and mobile, and there are only three main web browser efforts, each with its own rendering engine and other underlying technologies: Chrome and Blink, Apple Safari and WebKit, and Firefox and Gecko. Chrome directly controls almost 70 percent of the market and most third-party browsers–including Microsoft Edge, Brave, Opera, Vivaldi, and countless others–use the same underlying Chromium codebase. Safari sits a bit north of 15 percent, thanks largely to the success of Apple’s mobile devices. And Firefox, sadly, has fallen to roughly 3 percent, or about 5 percent if you look only at the desktop.

It is, in other words, a dark time for the rebellion.

But something interesting is happening these days. And as with the self-inflicted wounds that Microsoft caused IE when it took its eye off the web prize over 20 years ago, Big Tech today is eating itself through overreach. It’s charging onerous mobile app store fees, tracking our activities online and selling that data to advertisers, moving everyone to subscription services, and routinely raising prices everywhere. The enshittification is real, and it’s everywhere.

But there is no bigger Big Tech controversy today than AI, that great circle-jerk of spending through which the richest companies on earth hope to maintain and extend their dominance into a new era. Some AI is useful, of course, but the heavy-handed tactics that Microsoft and Google, in particular, have taken are notably anti-customer and anti-competitive. Both companies are platform makers that also, not coincidentally, make web browsers. And both companies are racing to deploy AI everywhere in their respective stacks, often contrary to the needs or wants of the people who use those products.

It’s important to remember that if Apple’s AI efforts hadn’t been so inept, it would be right there with them. This is a classic example of a strategy working until it doesn’t: Apple’s insane drive to exclude partners from its successes created an insular company with an aversion to “not created here” solutions that backfired on it in the AI era. And while there’s a version of this story in which this failure will work out for Apple–among other things, it hasn’t spent hundreds of billions of dollars in recent years building out AI infrastructure capacity it will never need–its inability to make AI work in-house wasn’t for lack of trying. For all its privacy-focused marketing, there is no Big Tech company more terrible than Apple.

So here’s tiny Mozilla, losing the battle in the web browser market at an alarming rate to companies that do not share its open, customer-focused principles. It’s been forced to scale back, drop non-essential side projects, and shift strategies. And like all other web browser makers, it’s had to confront how it will handle the introduction of AI-based functionality into Firefox in this case.

What it’s come to, I think, is both notable and admirable. Rather than rushing to an extreme–from the jam-it-down-their-throats approach taken by Microsoft and Google on one end to the maybe-if-we-ignore-it-it-will-simply-go-away efforts we see from tiny Vivaldi–Mozilla has simply decided to stay on brand, be open and transparent, and do the right thing for its customers. Which is to give them a choice of when and how to use AI while also giving them the tools within Firefox is exercise that choice.

What’s fascinating about this is the timing. Little Tech in general and Firefox specifically are having a moment. This is the right time and the right place for this kind of thinking, this rejection of Big Tech overreach and dominance, and this embrace of openness and choice. AI, ironically, may be the vehicle through which Firefox regains share and prominence and, as important, Big Tech is finally knocked down a peg, a victim of its own selfishness.

We’ll see. That history has yet to be written. But I spoke with Mozilla Head of Firefox Ajit Varma recently about web browsers, innovation, AI, app stores, and more. And while there are many takeaways from this conversation, I keep coming back to the same conclusion. As nonsensical as it may seem, AI might be the best thing that ever happened to Firefox.

More on that conversation soon.