First interview with Mozilla’s new CEO about AI, Firefox and the web

Mozilla is in a difficult position. It has a non-profit organization dedicated to making the internet a better place for everyone, and a for-profit arm dedicated to making money. In the best of times, these things feed into each other: The company makes great products that advance its goals on the web, and the nonprofit gets to advocate for a better web and show people what that looks like. But these are not the best of times. Mozilla has spent the last two years implementing it Layoffs And restructuring, trying to explain how it can fight for privacy and openness When Google pays most of its billswhile trying Find her place In an increasingly frothy AI landscape.

Exciting times to be the new CEO of Mozilla, right? But when I brought it all up to Anthony Enzor DiMeo, the company’s just-hired CEO, he swore he saw opportunity in all the turmoil. “I think what we need now is a technology company that people can trust,” Enzor-Demeo says. “What I’ve seen with AI is the erosion of trust.”

Mozilla won’t be training its own LLM giant anytime soon. But it’s still there AI Mode is coming to Firefox Next year, which Enzor-DeMeo says will offer users their choice of model and product, all in a browser they can understand and from a company they can trust. “We have no incentive to push one model or another,” he says. “So we will try to go to market with multiple models.” Some will be open source models available to anyone. Others will be private, “cloud options hosted by Mozilla,” he says. And yes, some will be big companies in the space, and Enzor-DeMeo didn’t mention Gemini, Claude, or ChatGPT, but it’s not hard to guess.

Enzor-DeMeo has been working at Mozilla for about a year. Until now, he has been leading the team building Mozilla Firefox, which, in many ways, is the thing that has kept Mozilla going. Firefox is the company’s most visible product; It’s the company’s biggest moneymaker, mostly thanks to the deal that gives Google the default search position; This is where Mozilla can put its values ​​into practice. Enzor-DeMeo spent 2025 racing to make Firefox a more compelling product, adding things like tab groups, while also trying to figure out how to integrate the browser with artificial intelligence.

As he steps into the top job, Enzor-Dimeo knows that artificial intelligence is the question. The rise of ChatGPT and its ilk has shaken up product markets everywhere, and the tech industry is betting that as AI takes hold, people will be extraordinarily willing to try new products. Even many companies are betting on that The browser wars are backafter nearly two decades of everyone using Google Chrome. Enzor-DeMeo buys the theory, and says Firefox’s numbers reflect it — 200 million people use the product every month, he says, and it’s actually growing at a decent rate on mobile in particular. This is far from it 4 billion or so Which uses Chrome, but still gives Firefox meaningful scope.

By the way, it’s no coincidence that the Firefox guy is taking over. “The first priority (for Mozilla) is still building the best browser,” he says. “I’m very pragmatic because this is our core business, and it would take a lot to prove otherwise.” Going forward, when Mozilla launches new products, they’ll likely be Firefox-related — Enzor-DeMeo mentions that Mozilla VPN is coming to Firefox next year, to name a few, and says there are other features in the works.

In our conversation, Enzor-DeMeo often comes back to two things: that Mozilla cares about the open web and wants to preserve it, and that the open web needs new business models. He says Mozilla’s advertising business is important and growing, and he’s concerned “about things falling behind the paywall, which is becoming more closed.” He says that commercial content on the Internet is not exactly Its a struggle, but Mozilla believes in the value of an open, free (and therefore ad-supported) Web.

However, at some point, Enzor-DeMeo will have to take care of Mozilla’s own business. “I think we need to diversify revenue away from Google, but I don’t necessarily think we need to diversify revenue away from the browser,” he says. He seems to think that a combination of subscription revenue, advertising, and perhaps some AI search and placement deals could achieve that. He’s also optimistic that things like a built-in VPN and a privacy service called Monitor could get more people to pay for their browser. He says he could start blocking ad blockers in Firefox, which he estimates would bring in another $150 million, but he doesn’t want to do that. It feels off task.

One way to solve many of these problems is to get more people to use Firefox. Enzor-DeMeo is convinced that Mozilla can reach this goal, and that people want what the company is selling. “There’s something to be said for, when I have a Mozilla product, I always know that my data is under my control. I can turn that off, and they won’t do anything that’s not obvious. I think there’s a need for that in the market, and that’s what I hope to do.”