Firefox’s U.S. desktop market share was above a quarter in 2011, but it is now much smaller in most countries. Mozilla continues developing Firefox’s in-house Gecko rendering engine and maintaining versions across major desktop and mobile operating systems. Ajit Varma links former Firefox users to inertia and to avoiding mistakes that once pushed Internet Explorer users toward alternatives. Mozilla adds AI features without embedding a proprietary assistant throughout browsing. Varma says Mozilla is not an AI company and focuses on improving browser paths with AI. Firefox’s main AI feature is an optional sidebar that links to multiple chatbots, including Gemini, Copilot, ChatGPT, Claude, and Le Chat, with about 5% of users experimenting based on telemetry.
"Firefox is the browser that, statistically speaking, more people remember using than use today. Its market share in most countries is now just a sliver of what it once was. In 2011, it held more than a quarter of the U.S. desktop market."
"His theory for why Firefox users become former Firefox users is simple: The largest browser developers benefit from inertia, and from avoiding the kinds of mistakes that once pushed Internet Explorer users toward alternatives. "There's just never a reason to question the default because it's kind of just good enough," he suggests."
""We're not an AI company," says Varma. "That's a really great place for us to be in, where we're just trying to create the best browser and [considering] how does AI improve those browser paths.""
"Firefox's most prominent AI implementation so far is an optional sidebar that connects users to a range of chatbots: Google's Gemini, Microsoft's Copilot, OpenAI's ChatGPT, Anthropic's Claude, and the French startup Mistral's Le Chat. (Most people haven't tried it. Varma says Mozilla's telemetry shows that just 5% of users have experimented with the sidebar.)"
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