(Credit: Cole Kan/PCMag/Ajit Varma/Mozilla)
When Firefox launched in 2004, Ajit Varma was a web developer at eBay. He remembers dialing in to Mozilla's public meetings with excitement about the future of the web. He took over as head of Firefox in late 2025 after leading product management at Google and other companies. Varma is still passionate about the web, and he thinks Mozilla is in a unique position to deliver the best web browser experience in the years to come.
But it has been a tough decade for Mozilla, with Firefox usage steadily declining. (It ended 2025 with a global market share of just 3.5%, according to Cloudflare.) To win back users, Varma's plan is deceptively simple: "Build better features, build a better browser, and then people will use it."
Firefox Is Getting New Features, Fast
"The last year has been really good for Firefox," Varma tells me. "We've gone back to basics and said, 'What are all the features people really want in a browser?'" He pointed to recent features such as AI controls, the Firefox VPN, split view, and vertical tabs as examples. "We have started delivering features at a much faster rate.”
According to Varma, Mozilla's efforts in recent months are paying off, with power users and the technical community increasingly using Firefox. That sounds like a start, but it hasn't changed the overall downward trend I see in Cloudflare's data.
Firefox's performance has also improved in recent years, and Varma says it’s now extremely fast. "In 2023, we did a whole redesign of Firefox to make it much faster," he says. I can confirm anecdotally that Firefox seems faster than ever, even though the latest version is still behind Chrome in benchmarks like Speedometer (below).
Varma doesn’t think differences in synthetic browser benchmarks are particularly important. He says that, in the real world, he doesn’t notice any difference in performance: “I kind of equate it to a car: If a car can go 200 miles per hour or a car can go 220 miles per hour, does that actually matter?”
Mozilla Wants People to Think More About Browser Privacy
Varma says Mozilla is also focused on features other big browsers don’t offer, like the aforementioned VPN. Chrome and Edge don’t include VPNs, while Brave’s VPN is a paid feature. Firefox’s new VPN provides 50GB of free data every month. (Despite its name, this feature works only for Firefox browser traffic, which makes it more of a proxy. To protect network traffic from other applications on your device, you need a dedicated VPN service.)
Free VPNs are popular, but most of them don't respect your privacy. "A lot of the VPN products that are free are very sketchy," he says. "Like they're taking your data, they're selling your data. We're not selling data." Firefox’s VPN isn’t the only VPN that respects your privacy; our recommended free VPNs are also good choices.
Firefox also isn't the only browser with a free VPN: Opera and Vivaldi both include them (Vivaldi partners with ProtonVPN).
Varma thinks Mozilla needs to do a better job of talking about privacy in general. "We do a lot of work on the privacy side," he says. "We make sure that we can't see any of your browsing history [in Firefox Sync] and it's all end-to-end encrypted." He says people care about private messaging, but most haven't given much thought to their browser data. He wants Mozilla to talk more about privacy going forward.
Customization goes hand in hand with privacy. Varma talks about making it easier for people to share their customized versions of Firefox as one-click downloads. These custom Firefox setups could contain everything from custom wallpapers to tweaked privacy settings.
The Independent Browser Still Matters
With Chrome no longer supporting Manifest V2 extensions, Firefox has the most powerful extension ecosystem. For instance, it's the best browser for the full version of the uBlock Origin adblocker, the full version of which no longer runs in Chrome. "We're the only ones who support these extensions that have, sort of over time, been blocked by other browsers."
That's because Firefox uses Gecko, its own engine. Apple also has its own WebKit engine for Safari. Most other browsers use Chromium, which is the basis for Google Chrome. It's a technical argument, but Varma thinks you should care.
"The thing that I would ask people is: Why do they like the internet and what makes the internet special?" Varma says. "The two major engines, WebKit and Chromium, are controlled by companies that would be better off if you use the app stores." He points out that such stores have rules and charge fees. But anyone can build for the web. "So many companies exist—from Google to Facebook to even ChatGPT—because there wasn't a gatekeeper that prevented access to them," he says.
Varma says Firefox is the browser most aligned with that vision. It's from an independent company, it's fully open-source, and it ensures no big company can change the rules of the web on a whim. Incidentally, Mozilla still gets most of its revenue from Google, which puts the company in an awkward position. Google reportedly pays Mozilla more than $400 million a year to be the default search engine in Firefox, although the exact figure isn’t public. Firefox would have faced serious trouble if Google were forced to sell off Chrome as a result of an antitrust case.
Firefox Won’t Force AI on You
Mozilla is clearly sensitive to the controversies around AI. "We're not going to force it on anyone,” Varma says. Mozilla's PR team told me they want to be both the best browser for people who hate AI and the safest browser for people who love AI.
"We're starting off small," Varma says, telling me that agentic browsing experiences offered by browsers like OpenAI's Atlas and Perplexity's Comet are not a focus. "We're trying to build things that are truly valuable."
He also argues that the focus on AI at other tech companies comes at the detriment of their browsers. Google has Gemini in Chrome, and Microsoft has Copilot in Edge, for instance, but Mozilla isn’t trying to be an AI company. "I would bet if you ask that company, 'What is your priority? Do you want to be successful in the browser, or do you want to be successful in AI?,' they'd probably say they want to be successful in AI."
Why Varma Thinks You Should Make the Switch
Varma's pitch for Firefox is that it's compatible with the websites you use, lightning fast, and just an all-around excellent browser. But, in a world where browsers often seem like commodities, his bigger argument is that you should trust Mozilla more than its competitors.
"Our goal is to be the most trusted software company," Varma says. "We are building features that aren't maximizing for profit, but maximizing for user experience. We don't have a structure that forces us to maximize for shareholder value."
He thinks Firefox will stand out even more in the future. "Our motivation is to build the best browser," he tells me. "And we don't have any other competing goals other than that singular focus."