- Mozilla SSL Certs - for corporations that don't want Let's Encrypt
- Mozilla Mail - a reliable Exchange/Google Mail alternative (desperately needed imo)
- Thunderbird for iOS - why is this not a thing yet?
- Mozilla Search - metasearch that isn't based on Bing/DDG/Google
- Mozilla HTTPS DNS - although Cloudflare will probably always do this better
All seemingly low-hanging fruit with brand alignment.
As much hate as Brave gets overall, I think Mozilla should take a page from Brave's book if they're going to make a search engine. I think they should have their own index, possibly supplemented by Bing or Google. Let people opt-in to using their browsers to help crawl for the search engine index, like Brave does. Then add in some power-user features like goggles and custom ranking, and they'd have a pretty compelling search engine. They should even be able to subsidize it somewhat with advertising: DDG and Brave Search are the only two websites I allow ads on, because they're usually relevant and they're never intrusive.
...on a forum run by its investors whose goal is to push Kagi, sure. Outside of this forum, nobody knows about a fringe little search engine that is paywalled and only has 62k users.
For a brand like Mozilla, even something as dumb as Ecosia would be a better fit, as they have about 250x the number of users of Kagi.
This is really cool.
I'd be happy with a re-branded SearX/SearXNG, with a paid cloud hosted instance from Mozilla that uses a shared base index plus your own crawled pages or optionally contribute your crawls back to the shared index.
There is a reason Proton & Co are based in Switzerland and not in the US
Thunderbird Pro was announced a while back, still not GA though
Seriously, there’s a major security and usability problem, it affects individual users and corporations, and neither Google nor Apple nor Microsoft shows the slightest inclination to do anything about it, and Mozilla controls a browser that could add a nice solution. I bet one could even find a creative solution that encourages vendors, inoffensively, to pay Mozilla a bit of money to solve this problem for them.
Also:
> Thunderbird for iOS - why is this not a thing yet?
Indeed. Apple’s mail app is so amazingly bad that there’s plenty of opportunity here.
Truly the most cursed.
Aren't they already moving towards this? The Thunderbird team recently announced ThunderMail which will have an optional $9/year plan.
https://www.tb.pro/en-US/thundermail/
> Thunderbird for iOS
https://blog.thunderbird.net/2025/10/state-of-the-bird-2024-...
> We’ve also seen the overwhelming demand to build a version of Thunderbird for the iOS community. Unlike the Android app, the iOS app is being built from the ground up.
Genuinely interested: are you a developer? Doesn't sound like low-hanging fruit to me.
There are already many alternatives to Gmail, I don't think Mozilla would make a lot of money there. And I don't know if they are making a lot of money with their Mozilla VPN (which I understand is a wrapper around Mullvad): why would I pay Mozilla instead of Mullvad?
There are alternative search engines, like Kagi in the US and Qwant/Ecosia in Europe (though only Qwant seems to keep the servers in Europe).
What I want from Mozilla, really, is a browser. And I would love to donate to that specifically, but I don't think I can.
Literally everybody is fu*king fed up with M$ arrogance. But you can't get rid of Active Directory and Exchange. Make comparable alternative (with say 80% of most used use cases, no need to die on some corner case hill) and many many corporations will come.
This won't come from some startup, it has to be a company like Mozilla.
Why would it be different with email?
Ooh, imagine if they also threw in some kind of Teams alternative, maybe based on XMPP or Matrix! That might get a lot of attention.
They are building Thunderbird Android over K9 Mail, which is an Android app. They would have to start from scratch on iOS, which of course is feasible but it takes more time.
There's no release yet, but it's being worked on. https://github.com/thunderbird/thunderbird-ios
I think the privacy industry is oversaturated we already have: ProtonMail, Tuta and Mailbox Mail
IMAP + CalDev + CardDev sat on-top of cPanel is getting a bit long in the tooth for companies that want exchange-like mail solutions outside of the big two. Unfortunately MS and Google run the "spam" filters as well, so you really need an established company that they can't afford to irritate to enter the space - see Mozilla - to reliably force acceptance of enterprise mail outside the Duopoly they have.
Zoho is trying their best also in this space - not sure how successful they have been on the trusted email provider and integration front.
Why so?
People want firefox.
Some options I can think of for paying salaries:
- Go the Wikipedia route, stay entirely free, and beg for donations on a regular basis
- Start charging for Firefox; or for Firefox Premium
- Use Firefox as a loss-leader to build a brand, and use that brand to sell other products (which is essentially what GP is suggesting).
How would you pay for developers' salaries while satisfying "people [who] want firefox"?
Bad comparison, but I understand your point.
> Salaries have to be paid somehow.
I would be interested in knowing how much of what Mozilla does brings money. Isn't it almost exclusively the Google contract with Firefox?
As a non-profit, Mozilla does not seem to be succeeding with Firefox. Mozilla does a lot of other things (I think?) but I can't name one off the top of my head. Is Google paying for all of that, or are the non-Firefox projects succeeding? Like would they survive if Firefox was branched off of Mozilla?
And then would enough people ever contribute to Firefox if it stopped getting life support from Google? Not clear either.
It's a difficult situation: I use Firefox but I regularly have to visit a website on Chrom(ium) because it only works there. It doesn't sound right that Google owns the web and Firefox runs behind, but if Chrome was split from Google, would it be profitable?
