Q&A with Mozilla CEO Mitchell Baker on the company's history, battling Microsoft, working with rivals, generative AI, WebKit, iOS, Chrome, Mastodon, and more
and cooperating — with Google, Apple, and the rest of Big Tech https://www.theverge.com/... @alexanderchopan : “the closed nature of mobile phones is absolutely worth looking at and being engaged in. It's what engine you can use at the technological level, where of course, we can't build our full product on iOS, but it's also system level defaults.” https://www.theverge.com/... @openwebadvocacy : Verge: Is that something you're looking at, to say, “Okay, this is our opportunity to go take share in mobile again, because we're not just going to be a wrapper around Apple's WebKit?” Mozilla's CEO Mitchell Baker: Oh, absolutely. https://www.theverge.com/... Brandon / @bborrman : The future is unwritten. Great interview with @mozilla's Mitchell Baker. Worth the listen. Erase browser history: can AI reset the browser battle? https://www.theverge.com/... via @Verge
Context & Ripple Effects
Mitchell Baker's Verge interview is Mozilla restating a grievance it has documented elsewhere: Apple's WebKit mandate on iOS means Firefox ships as a wrapper rather than a full product, and system-level defaults — not features — decide mobile share. The interview's through-line is Mozilla's awkward posture toward Big Tech: battling Microsoft historically, cooperating with Google and Apple today, and arguing the closed phone is 'absolutely worth looking at and being engaged in'.
The arc since then has validated the framing. In the Google antitrust case, Baker testified that Firefox's 2014 switch to Yahoo degraded the experience and that defaults kept Firefox from competing on mobile — the same structural complaint as this interview. Later coverage shows the squeeze: Mozilla cut products and staff in 2024 (scaling back VPN, Relay, and mozilla.social), then interim CEO Laura Chambers credited growth tied to the EU's DMA — the first crack in the default wall Baker describes.
First-order effects
- Mozilla's stated intent to 'take share in mobile again' puts it directly against Apple's control of iOS engines and defaults — the constraint that keeps Firefox a WebKit wrapper rather than a full product.
- Baker's framing of defaults as the decisive lever aligns Mozilla with the antitrust arguments it later made under oath in US v. Google, making the company both a litigant-beneficiary and a dependent of the search incumbent.
Second-order effects
- Every independent browser faces the same WebKit ceiling — The Browser Company's Josh Miller was still describing the same iOS constraints in 2024 — so Mozilla's push only pays off if regulators force Apple to open engine choice, turning Apple's platform rules into the industry's shared battleground.
- Mozilla's cooperation with Google (the search deal funding Firefox) means any remedy that unwinds Google's default payments threatens the revenue that funds Mozilla's independence — a tension the later restructuring and product cuts reflect.
Third-order effects
- If default and engine mandates keep loosening — the DMA growth Chambers cited is the early evidence — mobile browsers could compete on engine and product again, reversing a decade in which Apple and Google's platform rules, not browser quality, allocated mobile share.
- Mozilla's pattern of layoffs, product retrenchment, and leadership change suggests independent browsers are consolidating around whatever funding survives: without the default revenue and open-engine rules Baker calls for, the structural question is whether an independent engine can exist on mobile at all.
The trend: Browser competition is migrating from features to platform rules — engine mandates and system defaults — with regulators and antitrust courts, not product teams, increasingly deciding whether independent browsers can win mobile.