Firefox wants to be the anti-Chrome browser for the AI era

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. That many former users still remember it fondly may be a point of pride for the San Francisco-based nonprofit foundation behind the browser that broke Internet Explorer’s mediocre monopoly. But nostalgia alone doesn’t pay for the continued development of Firefox’s in-house Gecko rendering engine, along with versions of the browser for every major desktop and mobile operating system. “Anyone who was using the internet 15 years ago was probably using Firefox at some point,” says Ajit Varma, head of Firefox at Mozilla, speaking on the sidelines of Web Summit Vancouver. 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 Interne