Mozilla has a new CEO, Anthony Enzor-DeMeo, who's determined to revive trust in the organization. Oddly enough, Enzor-DeMeo plans on doing that by evolving Firefox into an AI browser.

Enzor-DeMeo says very clearly, "Every product we build must give people agency in how it works." That's great, but what does it mean? He continues with, "Privacy, data use, and AI must be clear and understandable. Controls must be simple. AI should always be a choice — something people can easily turn off. People should know why a feature works the way it does and what value they get from it."

The ability to disable AI in Firefox is a smart move, because there's a large chunk of the Linux community that does not want AI sullying the open source operating system.

Enzor-DeMeo also stated, "Firefox will grow from a browser into a broader ecosystem of trusted software. Firefox will remain our anchor. It will evolve into a modern AI browser and support a portfolio of new and trusted software additions."

The one thing that Enzor-DeMeo does not mention is whether or not Firefox will become agentic or if it will simply have an AI component that people can enable or disable. Throughout his first blog post as official CEO, Enzor-DeMeo mentions monetization. He makes this point clear when he says, "We will grow through transparent monetization that people recognize and value."

How Mozilla will monetize AI is the big question. As of now, there are no answers. I can only imagine that this new direction is being forced by Google's new AI-centric approach to searches. Given that Mozilla's primary cash flow comes from a Google search deal, it could very well be that cash flow is drying up. To that end, my guess is that they'll charge for using the AI component of the browser, similar to what Opera is doing with Neon (a $20/month charge). 

We'll see how well that goes over.