In contrast, the Multi-Account Containers system is the primary reason I avoid Firefox.
While it is meant to be an alternative to Chrome's profile switching, it is more a workaround than a complete replacement. I need entirely different sets of extensions for personal, work, and school environments, something containers can't do.
Firefox's actual profile support is beyond terrible. To launch a separate instance, Firefox requires many more clicks than Chrome, all within a Windows-2000-style UI. Not to mention that there are weird glitches in their implementation.
Firefox is not usable for me until they actually spend time improving their multiple profile support.
Myself the profile support is the absolute worst thing about Chrome. I just want to log into some web site, I don't want to fight with the profiles to get things done.
For those few applications where I really would need profiles I will just open a different browser, so I still keep Edge/Chrome/Opera around for that rare situation. I don't need something that complicates my life every single click but it is the whole ideology of the Google Economy that they want you to spend 1% of attention on things that matter to you and 99% on things that don't.
Mozilla is doing exactly what you’re describing. They need revenue to ditch their direct financial ties to Google (and I wonder if they hire those high-salary executives solely in the hope of generating that revenue).
These AI products, along with all previous failed attempts, are just them trying to gain enough revenue to remove that dependency on Google.
And you your point, AI is probably eating search and with it the prospect of search licensing revenue. Not sure yet what paradigms will be most important to the browser experience but it's critical to get in early and make the inevitable early mistakes and work through them.
Mozilla needs money to support the development of Firefox (and the payroll of its high-salary executives).
For now, they mainly rely on Google for that money. Google pays them to avoid antitrust cases, to show the courts that they are not a monopoly and that "alternatives" exist. For example, the DOJ once proposed that Google be forced to sell off Chrome.
However, if another entity has control over your budget, they also have control over your product. If Firefox becomes "too good" to be a true competitor in the consumer space, the funding might be reduced or even cut off.
Creating a new source of revenue allows Mozilla to improve Firefox even beyond the point Google feels "comfortable" with.
Note that this is fundamentally different from the Astral acquisition. At the end of their announcement, they stated:
> Cirrus CI will shut down effective Monday, June 1, 2026.
And earlier in the article:
> Joining OpenAI allows us to extend the mission we started with Cirrus Labs: building new kinds of tooling and environments that make engineers more effective, for both human engineers and agentic engineers.
It isn't a product-led acquisition, but more a talent one.
This is kind-of neat too, at least in the near term:
> In the coming weeks, we will relicense all of our source-available tools, including Tart, Vetu and Orchard under a more permissive license. We have also stopped charging licensing fees for them.
Just want to note that we will continue maintaining and improving our virtualization solutions actually with even greater attention. SaaS options like Cirrus CI and Cirrus Runners will eventually wind down so we can focus on incorporating pieces internally.
You’ll be pleasantly surprised. Updates in the coming weeks.
> In the coming weeks, we will relicense all of our source-available tools, including Tart, Vetu and Orchard under a more permissive license. We have also stopped charging licensing fees for them.
If your scope includes making the Codex web app environments have additional functionality I look forward to it. More enterprise features and yaml backed pipelines.
Yeah. Much like Astral - acquiring both the product (because they need to use it internally, but don't care about trying to resell / market), and they also want the talent to keep maintaining it / add features they want.
>It isn't a product-led acquisition, but more a talent one.
I am pretty sure OAI mostly cares about their virtualization IP for MacOS. They already extensively use WSL2 for sandboxing Codex on Windows, and I imagine they want something similar for Codex on Mac.
Snap is a terrible. It's the reason why I stopped using Debian based distros after decades for desktop usage.
Lying to users and turning apt install commands into shims for a barely functional replacement was disrespectful. Flatpak was and still is better, but even then if I say I want a system package you give me a system package. If you have infrastructural reasons why you cannot continue to provide that package then remove it, Debian based systems have many ways to provide such things.
Canonical did it because they wanted to boost Snap usage and if failed while sending a clear message they don't respect their user base.
To install a JSON formatter, you need to grant the following access:
1. Access to the page DOM to read the raw JSON content.
2. Permission to modify the DOM to display the formatted results.
Unfortunately, these requirements necessitate broad host permissions, which allow an extension to inject ads or track user behaviors. There is no alternative way to define a strict security boundary that allows these specific permissions while preventing abuses.
I’m pretty sure you can setup without broad host permissions, you just probably wouldn’t like it. You’d have to click a button to trigger the behavior, which I think requires you to click another button to approve access. Or configure the extension to allow access to specific domains after install, which will also have a permission prompt.
> There is no alternative way to define a strict security boundary that allows these specific permissions while preventing abuses.
Maybe you're right, and there isn't. Does it not follow that we should probably require extensive review and open-source reproducible builds before allowing any such extension on the browser extension stores?
> We plan to discuss and plan the technical direction of Collabora Office, look at our next steps, wrangle any particularly controversial technical topics and ensure that all viewpoints are heard before reaching mature conclusions together.
While it is meant to be an alternative to Chrome's profile switching, it is more a workaround than a complete replacement. I need entirely different sets of extensions for personal, work, and school environments, something containers can't do.
Firefox's actual profile support is beyond terrible. To launch a separate instance, Firefox requires many more clicks than Chrome, all within a Windows-2000-style UI. Not to mention that there are weird glitches in their implementation.
Firefox is not usable for me until they actually spend time improving their multiple profile support.
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