We wonder if Firefox's decision to add a free VPN and AI can bring back lost users.

[tschigi@swiss.social]

@itsfoss Nope. Not me. I’m never going back because I‘ve switched to @Vivaldi and I it.

[mostlytato@mstdn.social]

@itsfoss
Isn't it a proxy tab rather than a VPN? If so, Vivaldi do this using Proton VPN and Opera have been doing it for years.

[heartcode_dev@mastodon.social]

@itsfoss Still waiting for Ladybird

[laurenz0071@mastodon.social]

@heartcode_dev @itsfoss https://drewdevault.com/2025/09/24/2025-09-24-Cloudflare-and-fascists.html recently stumbled over this blog post.

[heartcode_dev@mastodon.social]

@Laurenz0071 @itsfoss Sorry, but i don't care. I also don't like that everything people do and say leads to facism nowadays...
We need more engines. Everyone is just relying on Chromium or Firefox based browsers.

[laurenz0071@mastodon.social]

@heartcode_dev @itsfoss sure we need more engines, but from open, trustworthy, bottom up, democratic structures that do not depend on big techs financial support.

[oldcoder@dansu.org]

The "AI" part isn't going to help. It'll be more like an anchor dragging Firefox down to Davey Jones's Locker.

The sentiment that informed users have towards "AI" is remarkably negative. To announce that a browser is even going to have support for "AI" is an autopsy report in advance.

The part about the VPN is more nuanced. It'll probably allow Mozilla to see what sites and pages you're visiting, but not the actual content as long as "https" is used.

I'd say "no", regardless. Whatever you do in that tab is likely to go to billionaire-owned documentation systems. Possibly to #ICE and Donald #Trump as well as the billionaires are his associates. Mozilla says, certainly not, but trust needs to be maintained and the organization shows no understanding of that.

If #Firefox needed these two features, "AI" and VPN, to keep going, as the saying goes, that's all she wrote.

I recommend #LibreWolf, Ungoogled Chromium, and Tor Browser as alternatives. Yes, 2 of the 3 rely on Firefox as upstream. However, if Firefox goes under, all 3 alternatives are likely to continue in one form or another.

Personal perspective: Firefox was once the up and comer. I used it from the mid-2000s to its effective end with the release of Quantum in 2017.

Quantum was, in fact, the end of Firefox. Not so much because of the fact that XUL was removed, but because of the dismissive tone that Mozilla adopted at the time [and has since] towards developers and users.

This was the turning point where Mozilla decided that Firefox needed to be Chrome except it would be weaker. Once the decision was made, the course to the iceberg was set.

The statements that #Mozilla and its boosters offered in 2017 were similar to this: "March forward into the future. Don't be left behind. If you question what we tell you, you're a Luddite."

If developers brought up technical issues, they were washed away in a flood of market-speak. Does this sound familiar? It was very similar to the "AI" talk today.

Developers and users need to be treated as partners. Not as serfs or as krill. If a commercial or #FOSS product treats you as a serf or as krill, walk away.

[haystackstech@mastodon.social]

@itsfoss Give me TOR, then we can talk!

[forgetpassword@unredacted.social]

@itsfoss lol

[judahhansen@mastodon.social]

@itsfoss The AI is causing the decline, it certainly won't help stop it.

[ilja_tihhonov@mastodon.social]

@itsfoss I think VPN should cover all network connections, not only web-browser.

In-browser solution is better than nothing, but still...

[abstractsun@social.linux.pizza]

@itsfoss If privacy + security are high priorities, then as far as regular browsers go, Firefox is the browser to use and it's simply no contest.

I recommend μBlock Origin as a first line of defense for browser spyware/malware/etc. Firefox's browser engine is now the only one where it works properly and isn't subject to arbitrary limitations. This wasn't a feature Firefox added. It was a feature that the other browser engine altered because it made it harder to sell ads, and in turn most other browsers have less effective μBlock because they use that engine.

Firefox also now has built-in support for offline translations for dozens of languages, courtesy of Project Bergamot.

These are just recent, more user-facing developments. As far as technical enhancements go, Firefox has implemented sandboxing of third-party site data to the current host (aka "total cookie protection") and was an early adopter DNS-over-HTTPs. If you go way back, you'll find that Netscape, Firefox's progenitor, was a pioneer in the development of HTTPS.

If a regular web browser isn't good enough privacy-wise, then there is Tor, which is based on Firefox' web engine and is specifically built to minimize browser tracking at the cost of convenience.

[abstractsun@social.linux.pizza]

@itsfoss Also, browser theming in Firefox is very much alive and well via user chrome js/css. I presume that most of the Firefox UI is an HTML DOM these days, so if you're well-versed in that you can do quite a lot. See for example: https://www.reddit.com/r/FirefoxCSS/

[swissjace@mastodon.social]

This post is deleted!