As frustration with corporate power grows under the oligarch-friendly Trump administration, Mozilla Firefox stands out more than ever for at least one defining trait: It isn’t owned by a giant tech company. “We’re independent and nonprofit,” Mozilla CEO Laura Chambers told Fast Company in an interview at Web Summit Qatar. “We’re the only browser not backed by billionaires.” But the nonprofit organization that broke Internet Explorer’s monopoly in Windows browsers 20 years ago isn’t counting only on “storytelling that we can do,” she added. “We’re also doing a lot of work on the product.” Features getting filled out The first of a set of new features that Chambers describes as intended to “help people navigate the Web more easily” should ship in March. One cribs from a clever feature that Microsoft’s Edge added almost four years ago: an option to display open browser tabs in a column running down the left side of the browser window instead of in a row spanning the top. Neither Apple’s Safari nor Google’s Chrome have seen fit to copy that since. A second sounds like the helpful quick-change tool Firefox offers to route a web search to the search engine of your choice: a sidebar tool that will let you switch between AI chatbots for quick queries that they can answer, hopefully without hallucination. Later in spring or summer, Mozilla plans to address a longstanding user request by shipping support for tab groups (for example, “recipes” or “shopping”) that you can create and then open or close as you need them. Safari in particular does this well, while Firefox users have had to install an extension to get a version of it. Another tab-management feature aimed at tab-overload victims like me (I had 76 open tabs open in this laptop’s copy of Firefox as I was writing this) will employ what sounds like on-device AI to organize tabs. Maybe more so than competitors like Google and Microsoft, Mozilla has been enlisting offline AI to avoid having to send any user data to the cloud. But it’s not always obvious when its new features work in that privacy-preserving way: I didn’t know that Firefox’s page-translation feature worked on-device until I saw Chambers bring that up in a panel at Web Summit’s Doha conference. “We should probably market that more,” Chambers admits. A role for regulation But Mozilla says it’s already seeing increased adoption of its browser—in Europe, where the EU’s Digital Markets Act requires designated gatekeeper platforms to open mobile-device app stores and system defaults to potential competitors. “In Europe, we grew Firefox share last year, which is the first time we’ve done it in a long time,” Chambers said. Mozilla credits the DMA’s “choice screen,” in which users pick a browser instead of having a system default waiting on their home screens, with goosing Firefox adoption in Android and iOS—by 29% in Germany and France since the DMA went into effect last March. The underlying numbers remain low in third-party estimates, however. Cloudflare’s automated tracking puts Firefox’s mobile share at 1.3% in France and 2.7% in Germany, although Mozilla argues that Firefox’s tracking-prevention measures suppress those user counts. In the U.S., Cloudflare has Firefox at just .8%. Firefox has historically had higher share on Windows and Mac computers, where Cloudflare credits that browser with a 7.6% share worldwide, 21.5% in Germany, 14.6% in France, and 7.1% in the U.S. But it’s in the U.S. where government antitrust action may threaten Mozilla directly. The antitrust case that the federal government and almost every state attorney general successfully bought against Google over its search business practices could lead to a ban on Google paying other browsers to keep its search engine the default. Chambers would rather not see things come to that. “The part that’s at risk is the U.S. revenue,” she said. “If our revenues were to be hurt through that, it would be much harder to sustain Gecko as an independent browser engine.” A little engine that could Gecko, the open-source software framework inside Firefox that displays and animates pages, is the only major rendering engine that both runs on Windows and macOS and is not a Google project like the Blink open-source engine inside Chrome (employed by such indie, non-billionaire browser developers as Brave and the Browser Co). But Gecko’s third-place standing after Blink and Apple’s WebKit can lead to sites blocking the browser—for example, Formula 1’s F1 TV brushes Firefox-using racing fans aside, telling them “please switch to an alternative browser.” Asked if life wouldn’t be easier for Mozilla if it adopted WebKit, also open-source, Chambers said Mozilla has considered it but passed. “It’s a lot of money and a lot of work to sustain an independent browser engine,” she said. “It also means we have a seat at the table with regulators,” allowing Mozilla to advocate for causes like pr