Anthony Enzor-DeMeo is the new CEO of Mozilla. He promises an AI future for Firefox in which users can choose between different models. Trust is central to this, he says. Firefox currently has 200 million active users per month.
Enzor-DeMeo’s appointment was just announced, and The Verge spoke with him at length about his new role. The new Mozilla CEO appears to be aware of the precarious situation the company finds itself in. Although Firefox is not simply going to disappear, this is mainly because Google transfers roughly half a billion dollars every year. Mozilla’s CFO Eric Muhlheim also made this clear earlier this year. It is therefore very important for Mozilla that Google is allowed to pay to be Firefox’s default search engine. This is a practice that the US Department of Justice has questioned on antitrust grounds.
Enzor-DeMeo, who will lead Mozilla Corporation (Mark Surman will remain president of the Mozilla Foundation), says he sees opportunities in all this turbulence. “I think what’s actually needed now is a technology company that people can trust,” Enzor-DeMeo said in an interview with The Verge. “What I’ve seen with AI is an erosion of trust.”
Freedom of choice in AI models
Mozilla will not be training its own LLM, it appears. That’s no surprise, given the sky-high costs involved and the deep pockets that companies such as Google, Meta, and OpenAI have (or appear to have). However, an AI Mode will be coming to Firefox next year. It will offer users a choice of models and products, all in a browser they understand and from a company they can trust. “We’re not incentivized to push one model or the other,” says Enzor-DeMeo. “So we’re going to try to go to market with multiple models.”
Some of these are open-source models that are available to everyone. Others are private options that Mozilla itself hosts in the cloud. And some come from the big players in the industry. We are just waiting for confirmation that this will also include Google’s Gemini.
The browser focus remains
Enzor-DeMeo has been working at Mozilla for almost exactly a year. Until now, he led the team that builds the Firefox browser, the product that keeps Mozilla running in all kinds of ways. Firefox is the company’s most visible product, its biggest source of revenue thanks to a deal that gives Google a default search position, and the place where Mozilla actually puts its values into practice.
Mozilla must, according to Enzor-DeMeo in a separate post on Mozilla’s own site, be the “trusted software company.” Three priorities mentioned here are agency (essentially privacy and control over it), a revenue model built on trust, and Firefox as a launch pad for an “ecosystem” of other products. “It will evolve into a modern AI browser,” says the brand-new CEO, making it clear that Opera Neon will soon have a Mozilla counterpart.
There is a good chance that this mission will not succeed. After all, Firefox’s market share has shrunk to less than 3 percent worldwide. It is slightly stronger on the desktop (4.26 percent according to Statcounter), but this is offset by a rather disastrous 0.57 percent on mobile devices.