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Firefox 148 introduces the promised AI kill switch for people who aren't into LLMs
(www.xda-developers.com)
this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2026
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Yeah it's a catch 22.
They either fail to get a big enough use base because their core users are not enough and they fail from a lack of funding.
Or they try to follow trends to increase their appeal and user base, and annoy their core users.
Most users don't realize that Mozilla is doing what Google is doing with Chrome with an engineering team 1/4 the size of the chrome team. And that the grand majority of their costs are engineering related.
Browsers are expensive, and Mozilla needs to find revenue streams to pay for it.
I believe Firefox could raise a lot of money through donations. If they make it clear that Firefox donations will be solely used for Firefox development. Also ideally add a quick survey to donations to see what the "donating" userbases values are. My issue with donating to Mozilla is that it is too broad and they have many products I don't care for.
I use Thunderbird and donate to it because I feel it's more focused. I believe Mozilla still can use the funds for other stuff but at least I am donating for a clear project.
This might be a stupid question.... but how much developing does a browser actually need? I get security updates and such but how much resources does that stuff really need? Full disclosure: I'm a dumb lorry driver I have no idea how these things work. Some years ago I realized I hadn't updated my browser in at least a year, maybe two and I had no issues lol
A conservative guess would be around 60 people.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/describecomponents.cgi
You can click around and see the bug reports they're working on. There are a few, to say the least.
https://www.firefox.com/en-US/releases/
This is a way to see what's in each release. The ones on the left are major releases and tend to have bigger features, and the others tend to be bug fixes.
Web browsers start with core functionality that's very complex. Then you tack on that they're being used for things like banking, and managing the critical details of people's lives. That means security galore, which is hard and constant. Then you have ad people, who are also something that's hard to defend against.
Then there's the constant flood of new features you have to implement to keep up with Google.
Chrome has 1,000 to 4,000 people working on it. Mozzila employs about 700 to work on firefox, with maybe 1,000 additional open source developers.
My initial guess was very wrong.
It is really difficult to implement in the first place, and the standards evolve constantly.
Some argue it may not be possible to build new browsers anymore
Infinite money Google keeps trying to push shit to the standard so all other browsers end up needing significant dedicated resources to keep up or risk getting blamed for broken sites.