Mozilla's New CEO Commits to "AI Browser" While Promising User Choice

In a blog post published Tuesday, Anthony Enzor-DeMeo opened his tenure as Mozilla Corporation's CEO with a sentence that contradicts itself within five lines. "AI should always be a choice," he wrote, "something people can easily turn off." Then: Firefox "will evolve into a modern AI browser."

The statement captures Mozilla's strategic confusion. For a decade, leadership has chased industry trends while the core product lost users. Now comes another commitment to whatever competitors already ship, wrapped in language about trust and transparency.

Enzor-DeMeo inherits an organization with 2.3% global browser market share as of November 2025, according to Statcounter. That figure stood above 30% in 2009. Firefox mobile grew 13% in calendar year 2024. Desktop usage, per Mozilla's own framing, "stabilized," meaning the decline rate slowed.

The company reported $653 million in revenue for fiscal 2023, with approximately 85% flowing from Google's search licensing agreement. A $1.3 billion reserve sits on the balance sheet. At the 2023 operating expense rate of roughly $450 million annually, that reserve covers approximately 34 months of operations if Google's payments stopped tomorrow. The current search agreement's expiration date remains undisclosed. Mozilla has not announced renewal terms.

The Pattern of Abandoned Products

Count the corpses. Firefox OS, 2013 to 2015, meant to win emerging markets with cheap smartphones running web apps. Carriers lost interest. Mozilla killed it. The IoT thing came next, WebThings or whatever they called it, a connected home platform nobody asked for. Gone by 2020. Mozilla VPN launched that same year and still exists on paper, but good luck finding subscriber numbers anywhere. The company doesn't publish them, which tells you what you need to know.

Each time, the pattern holds. Leadership spots something hot, diverts engineers, ships a product that works well enough, then watches it flatline. The trend right now is AI. Enzor-DeMeo's blog post mentions it nine times in 600 words.

The Competitive Math

Firefox cannot match Google, Microsoft, or Apple on AI feature volume. The resource gap is not close.

Google has over 30,000 employees working on AI. Custom TPUs. Training data measured in petabytes. The infrastructure stack runs top to bottom. Microsoft took a different route, buying its way in through OpenAI's GPT-4 integration across Office, Windows, and Edge. Copilot usage now runs in the hundreds of millions, according to the company. Apple went hardware-native. M-series chips handle local inference at speeds x86 machines cannot touch, and Cupertino controls the full software layer on top.

Mozilla's 2023 staffing, per publicly available 990 filings, totaled approximately 1,100 employees across all functions. The AI team's size is not disclosed but represents a fraction of engineering headcount.

Replicating competitors' features regardless of utility, the approach Enzor-DeMeo's announcement implies, positions Firefox as a slower, less capable version of Chrome with marginally different privacy defaults. This has been Mozilla's positioning for years. Market share data suggests users find it uncompelling.

Who Remains

Firefox's current user base selected the browser deliberately. Default browsers on Windows (Edge), macOS (Safari), iOS (Safari), and Android (Chrome) require active replacement. Users who made that effort did so for specific reasons: uBlock Origin's full Manifest V2 functionality, container tab isolation, about:config customization depth, or distrust of Google's data practices.

The Hacker News discussion accompanying Enzor-DeMeo's appointment accumulated over 400 comments by Wednesday morning. The top-voted response, from user "jmillikin," argued Mozilla should "focus on privacy" and "own identity on the internet" rather than compete on AI. A subsequent highly-ranked comment from "jll29" stated: "Nobody wants AI in Firefox."

This feedback reflects selection bias. Users who comment on Hacker News skew technical and privacy-conscious. They do not represent the median internet user. But they do represent Firefox's remaining base. Alienating them to chase users who have already chosen Chrome accelerates decline rather than reversing it.

The CEO's Background

Enzor-DeMeo came to Mozilla in December 2024 after running product and technology at Roofstock, which helps investors buy rental properties. Before that, stints at Wayfair and Better.com. You might remember Better.com. That's the mortgage startup where CEO Vishal Garg fired 900 employees on a Zoom call three days before Christmas 2021, then blamed them for "stealing" by being unproductive. Enzor-DeMeo was there, though not in that particular meeting. He has the MIT Sloan MBA, the consumer tech resume, the growth background.

None of which is obviously wrong for Mozilla. But growth-oriented product people optimize for dashboards. Engagement curves. Conversion funnels. Privacy generates no clean metric. "Did not harvest user data" does not appear in quarterly reviews. The incentives point toward shipping features that show activity, not toward restraint.

Enzor-DeMeo's opening statement commits to measurable goals: continued mobile growth, revenue diversification, market share stabilization. Reasonable targets. Also the kind of targets that produce AI feature checklists rather than differentiated products.

What Differentiation Would Require

Mozilla's historical strength, as multiple Hacker News commenters noted, involved translating technical complexity into accessible safety. Firefox made web standards usable when Internet Explorer ignored them. The organization made browser security visible when competitors treated it as an afterthought.

The equivalent opportunity now: making AI systems transparent rather than adding more opaque AI features. Not shipping a chatbot sidebar. Building tools that show users which prompts leave their device, which data trains which models, what local processing means versus cloud API calls. Audit interfaces rather than assistant interfaces.

This positioning would be difficult to replicate. Google's advertising business model requires data collection that transparency tools would expose. Microsoft sells Copilot subscriptions that depend on proprietary model access. Apple's closed platform limits third-party auditing by design.

Firefox could occupy this space. The organization has the technical credibility and the stated values. Enzor-DeMeo's announcement does not indicate intent to pursue it.

The Revenue Problem

Mark Surman, Mozilla Foundation president, stated in interviews this week that Google's share of Mozilla revenue dropped from approximately 95% to 85% over recent years. The remaining 15% comes primarily from privacy-respecting advertising within Firefox and smaller subscription products.

This diversification rate, roughly two percentage points annually, does not outpace the threat. AI-driven search interfaces increasingly answer queries directly rather than routing users through traditional search result pages. If that behavior continues, the value of Firefox's search box placement declines proportionally. Mozilla's Google payments depend on query volume the organization does not control.

The $1.3 billion reserve provides buffer but not independence. Surman has discussed endowment strategies, similar to Wikipedia's model, for over five years. No such structure exists. The reserve earns investment returns but remains accessible for operating expenses, which Mozilla has historically spent rather than preserved.

Enterprise licensing offers an alternative revenue path Mozilla has barely explored. Organizations facing data handling compliance requirements, browser security audits, and AI governance mandates represent a market that values transparency and control. Firefox's open-source codebase and configurable architecture fit enterprise needs that Chrome and Edge do not prioritize. Enzor-DeMeo's announcement does not mention enterprise strategy.

The Constraint

Mozilla's Google search agreement governs organizational survival. The current contract's terms are confidential. Previous agreements have run three to five years. If the deal last renewed in 2020 or 2021, as industry observers have speculated, renegotiation may occur within 2025.

Google faces ongoing antitrust litigation that makes its Firefox payments strategically valuable as evidence of browser market competition. This provides Mozilla leverage but also dependency on a legal proceeding the organization does not control. A settlement or ruling that reduces Google's antitrust exposure reduces Mozilla's negotiating position correspondingly.

At current operating expenses and without Google revenue, Mozilla's reserve funds approximately 34 months of operations. That timeline assumes no increase in spending. Enzor-DeMeo's commitment to "investing in AI" suggests spending will rise, not hold steady.

The new CEO has stated a three-year horizon for demonstrating results. The financial math gives him roughly that long regardless of whether results materialize. By late 2028, either Mozilla has diversified revenue sufficiently to survive without Google, or the organization faces existential restructuring.

Enzor-DeMeo's announcement offers "trust" as a strategy and "AI browser" as a product direction. These commitments require reconciliation that his initial statement does not provide. Firefox's remaining users chose the browser because it was not Chrome. Making it more like Chrome, with AI features those users have explicitly said they do not want, accelerates the departure of the only audience that has not already left.

The next Google contract renewal will determine whether that audience matters.

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