Interview: Firefox's chief on why he hopes a redesign will help win users from Chrome

But to expand beyond the relatively small market share it now has, Firefox has to inspire users to actively select it over incumbents by actually providing a better browsing experience; most people don’t care whether Chromium dominates, and most have never heard of Gecko. In our conversation, Varma expressed hope and ambition that these modernizations will help drive more of those users to choose Firefox on its merits as a product. We also discussed the Firefox team’s competing priorities, its development resources, AI features and tooling, the general browser market, and more. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Ars Technica: It’s nice to see a bit of modernization of the design of Firefox. But what problems does this redesign solve? How does it advance browser choice and the open web beyond just being a browser that’s a little more appealing and a little easier to use? Ajit Varma: Yeah, I think there’s been a lot of questions around, “What are we doing this at the cost of?” Like should we be focused on performance? Should we be focused on compatibility? We are trying to do all of the above and work faster, and I think that’s one of the challenges that Firefox had in the past, was there was slow decision-making. There was a lot of debate, and in the last like year and a half, we’ve actually been trying to say, can we get a lot more velocity, and compete? And part of this is made possible by AI tools, to be honest with you. We are able to do a lot more. People want to feel like they’re in a modern browser—things that match the design language of the operating system. So that’s part of it. We are bringing back compact mode as well… and we also have launched more customization options. There’s a lot of functionality that’s been built to give all the modern productivity things that people wanted, and those are all very utilitarian, but it’s also the emotional connection, and do people feel like it’s a browser that feels modern as well. Ars: With that mass audience you need it to even occur to them to change. How much of Firefox’s minority position right now is platform obstruction, how much is inertia, how much is Firefox’s own product execution, and how much of it is people picking their desktop browser to match what they’re using on mobile, where you’re not as competitive? Varma: We do see that when people have a moment to decide what they use, Firefox does really well. That kind of goes into your point around, like, consideration is actually the biggest barrier. A lot of people just don’t really consider what browser they use as an important decision. The reason we know this is because in Europe, you have choice screens on mobile. This is part of the Digital Markets Act. There’s a split second when you get a new device: here’s the list of browsers, what do you want to use? We see a lot of growth in Firefox since these choice screens were implemented because I think people know Firefox, they understand privacy values, and then that resonates with them. The biggest indicator, though, of what browser someone uses is actually, what browser did they use last month? People just use what they were using before; they’re not taking this moment to consider. But the last year we’ve actually seen a lot of moments that cause people to start to consider what browser they use. So some examples—Chrome went through with their deprecation of Manifest V2. Manifest V2 is basically a much more powerful extension system. And people were like, well, why did this decrease? Why didn’t they just fix the security vulnerabilities in Manifest V2? And it’s very clearly because of ad blockers. That was the reason to deprecate it. Whereas, Mozilla, we’re not maximizing for profits, we’re maximizing for user experience and browser experience, and we want people to have powerful extensions. So we noticed when that shutoff moment happened, there was a moment where people said, do you want the power of an engine to be able to dictate how I control my experience? Because once Chromium shut it off, Edge shut it off, all the Chromium browsers then shut off Manifest V2 support. We still support it, and so we saw a big surge of actual users who started using us. Also, with AI controls, you see a lot of worries that people have with AI, and whether societal implications or my own personal experience, of whether I want to use it or not. And many browsers are pushing AI very heavily, because if you look at major browsers and they have their hierarchy of needs, they actually probably care more about AI adoption than they do about browser experience. And so there was a criticism around Edge becoming a Copilot app—Gemini is very forceful in its integration in Chrome—but neither Copilot nor Gemini are the main AI that people use. People use ChatGPT, people use Claude. And so our approach is all about choice. So we built AI controls. It’s a prominent, top-level setting. People can turn it off if they don’t want it. People can set only certain features that they want, like translations. And so we’ve noticed a lot of people actually want that from Firefox. And so this is another consideration moment where someone is like, my browser is getting bloated, I want a choice. A lot of our strategy over the next year is really around, how do we create more and more consideration moments where people take that second to think of what browser they should use? So we think something like customization is more of a consideration. The other thing that we’re seeing around this is there are more and more companies that care a lot about digital sovereignty, and they want tools that they have more confidence aren’t going to be under the control of any particular government that may have been viewed as antagonistic or more challenging to work with. In a lot of places in Europe, a lot of places in Asia, we’re actually seeing a lot of people reach out to us about, how do they use Firefox because of our open source nature. We’re a global company. And we don’t have some of the same ability to control us because we don’t have all these other tentacles spread out. We can really just focus on building the best browser. The needs of enterprises and schools are very different, but it’s actually probably the biggest new area of investment that we’ve had over the last 12 months. Ars: You mentioned the idea of sovereignty for these enterprises, and another consideration under that umbrella is AI model choice. I know that’s a big emphasis with what you’re doing with the AI features in Firefox, so I do want to talk about AI for a minute. What signals suggest to you that AI features are in high demand, especially among the arguably privacy-conscious, maybe even a little bit old-school users that Firefox is known for? Is there a tension in investing so much in AI when one of Firefox’s key differentiators is the ability to block or decline it? Varma: The usage of AI is still a minority compared to the overall browser usage. Like, you have billions of people who are using a browser every day; there’s definitely not anywhere close to that using AI tools in a browser every day. In the future, though, you have different paths, and I think that there is a plausible path where for a lot of the productivity kind of use cases, people want the benefits of AI, and you’re starting to see that emerge—things like translations are AI, summarization, auto-grouping of your tabs in a more organized way. The stance that we’re taking is we just want to make it easy for people to be in the state that they want to be in, but we’re not doing it in a way that is typical of VC-backed companies that are like, we’re gonna spend hundreds of millions of dollars and see what happens. We are much more thoughtful about it. We are looking at things like on-device models that are cheaper to run. We are looking at open source models. There’s this balance that we are definitely looking at in terms of investment. But the thing I’d say is, we want people to have choice. For someone who is an AI skeptic who wants to turn all AI off, that’s fine, we’re not going to push you to use AI. Once you turn AI controls off we’re never going to prompt you to use any AI tools. If you are an AI dabbler and you want really private models, we’re gonna give you that choice. But then if you’re someone who really wants to have AI on autopilot and check a price for you, or check if a new product is launching every day, and your browser goes and searches, well, that’s a convenience aspect that we think that a subset of people want for sure, that we want to provide that functionality to. But one of the things that we do hear from people is people love auto-complete and suggest and stuff, and so we spent a lot of time on the non-AI version of that, which is, here’s an address, fill an address. But it goes to, well, what if you want your job application filled out? Those things are made better with on-device ML and AI that I don’t think people are equating to the AGI world, or you know, reinforced learning of bots that might take over the world and kill humans. This is like, we’re helping you fill in a form. That technically is still AI. That’s things like performance, web compatibility, new APIs for developers, and I think some of those things are just harder for people to notice… but historically, I do think that one of the mistakes that Mozilla made 15 years ago was, it didn’t invest in mobile apps early enough. The bread and butter was desktop, and it was, let’s focus on desktop, desktop, desktop. And then mobile turned into a big opportunity that I think in retrospect was something that could have been invested in more. Now, Mozilla did try something—the Firefox OS to build HTML apps. It tried this very ambitious, can you create a competitor to Android and iOS? I think in this approach, we’re not doing that. So you could imagine that one world is: we’re going to build our own AI models, we’re going to build our own agents. And that’s where I think a lot of the expensive investment is, but we’re not doing any of that. We’re using open source models. We’re not building AI, but we’re applying AI to building tools that we think would benefit people. We’re not an AI company, we’re not pushing AI, but there are real benefits that AI can have to certain productivity use cases. And then the other side of it is a conversation that we have: What do people use browsers for in the future? We do think that there are gonna be entertainment use cases plus productivity use cases. AI will help with the productivity use cases, but the browser core is still gonna really be needed for the entertainment cases. Ninety percent of our attention is still very focused on those core fundamentals. Ars: What is the actual path to Gecko on iPhone? Apple now provides routes for alternative engines in the EU and Japan. Which remaining obstacles are Apple’s requirements, and which ones are engineering cost restrictions? Varma: The biggest challenge for us is, we’re not a big tech company, so for us, forking to build two different versions of iOS, one for markets where this is possible and then for markets where it’s not possible, would mean we would basically have to double the size of our iOS team. And so what we’ve been pushing on Apple and regulators is, can we have a single set of global rules that allows us to build Gecko across the world? I think it’s great, what’s happened in certain markets, but the reality is, it’s very challenging for us to actually invest to create this global, forked system. There are also just limitations like, well, how do you appear in the App Store? You can only have a single app. There are challenges of how you do migration and stuff that are also there. But I think the primary challenge is still that the cost goes up pretty significantly to have to build two totally different builds on iOS. Ars: Speaking of cost and revenue, Firefox is dependent on its search deal with Google. There’s the concern that if that ends, Firefox may be in a tougher spot. But also, longer term, do you worry about your dependence on Google search revenue in a time of rapid change with LLMs that could bring into question Google’s long-term search dominance? Varma: This is definitely a big question. I don’t think anyone really knows what’s gonna happen in the long term, but in the short term I’d say that I think competition is great—it’s why I work on Firefox. It would be great for there to be legitimate competitors to Google, which I think is the right outcome for consumers. I think it’s the best outcome for Firefox. But in the short term, Google is doing really well, and so when we look at it as the power of AI and LLMs, it doesn’t mean yet that people are moving from Google searches over to LLMs. It actually is growing the overall pie. Search queries and monetizable queries are actually going up. Google’s also integrating AI Mode pretty deeply into search results. And again, this goes into techies versus the average person out there. For the average person, the muscle memory of going to Google is still very strong. I don’t know how that’ll play out over the next several years. AI is going to have these kinds of questions, but also it’s helping us accomplish a lot more and become a lot more efficient than I think we ever thought was possible, and so for us being a smaller company, the bottleneck is not code creation anymore. We can create tons of code. It’s actually code review. My hope is that we can actually compete with organizations much bigger than us, which has always been a constraint. These tools are very expensive, but my hope is they get commoditized so our cost structure doesn’t go up. So I don’t know how it’ll play out, but I would also say that’s why I would encourage everyone to use Firefox. The more people use Firefox, the more power I think we have to negotiate, the more power that we have to create balance and competition and protect the web. So that goes back into something you started off with: the values-based reasons to use Firefox and Gecko. I think it’s pretty important. Given Varma’s statement that tools for enterprise deployments have been Firefox’s most significant new investment area over the past year, I also asked Harrington for his perspective on Firefox’s opportunity in the enterprise space. “I’d certainly love to see them come back with new things that expands them in the enterprise, but it’s not going to be easy, and they would have to truly wow IT decision makers,” he said. Insomuch as there is a clear opening, it’s with businesses in Europe, where “we’re seeing interesting moves in those countries where they’re looking to move away from some of the platform giants like Microsoft or Google,” according to Harrington. Whatever the scope of the enterprise opportunity, Varma is right that the more people use Firefox, the more leverage it has and the more true independence becomes plausible. This new redesign aims to make the browser more appealing in the mass market, and that’s a welcome start, but it’s not the finish line, and there’s a long way to go against competitors with more resources, albeit also with muddier incentives. Maybe engine independence creates freedom to differentiate, as Varma said, and maybe AI coding tools do give smaller teams more power to stand up to well-resourced incumbents. But even so, Mozilla will have to continue to turn that freedom and capability into improvements that give people a reason to switch.