Mozilla appoints new CEO, unveils new AI focus

Vowing to make it the “world’s most trusted software company,” Mozilla’s board of directors announced Tuesday it was appointing Anthony Enzor-DeMeo as the new CEO, whose mandate will be to achieve that lofty goal.

Enzor-DeMeo, former GM of Firefox, wrote in a blog that becoming trusted “is not a slogan, but a direction involving three strategies, key among them being that privacy, data use, and AI must be clear and understandable. Controls must be simple. AI should always be a choice — something people can easily turn off.”

In addition, he wrote, the firm’s business model must align with trust, and Firefox “will evolve into a modern AI browser.”

The new CEO, who replaces interim CEO Laura Chambers, who is returning to the Mozilla board, stated in a release, “the browser is AI’s next battleground. It’s where people live their online lives and where the next era’s questions of trust, data use, and transparency will be decided.”

Describing Mozilla’s strategy announcement as an “interesting development,” Sanchit Vir Gogia, the chief analyst at Greyhound Research, said that the debate around browser-based AI has been framed far too narrowly and often presented as a choice between two extremes.

The power of the browser has risen.

On one hand, he said, “Chrome and Edge are racing ahead, turning the browser into an always on AI surface optimized for consumer productivity, cloud integration, and ecosystem scale.”

On the other, Gogia pointed out, “Mozilla is deliberately slowing things down, keeping AI optional, bounded, and subordinate to user and enterprise consent. Enterprises recognize the logic in both positions. But in practice, they are choosing a third path.”

The core issue, he added, “is not whether AI belongs in the browser. It already does. The issue is what happens when the browser stops being a passive interface and becomes an active participant inside the enterprise trust boundary. Once AI is embedded at the browser layer, it can read across tabs, infer user intent, summarise internal systems, and, in some cases, act autonomously.”

At that point, said Gogia,” the browser is no longer just a tool. It is an actor. And that is where enterprise governance begins to fracture.”

He predicted that the next phase of this market will be defined not by who ships the most AI features, but by who solves browser level accountability first. “The browser has become too powerful to be treated as a commodity endpoint,” he said. “Enterprises are no longer asking which browser is best. They are asking which browser belongs where.”

Mozilla, said Gogia, “has helped surface the risk. Big Tech has accelerated it. Island browsers are where enterprises are quietly resolving it. Whoever manages to combine intelligence, control, and trust at the access layer will not just win CIO confidence, they will define what safe, enterprise grade AI actually looks like in the real world.”

Brian Jackson, principal research director at Info-Tech Research Group, said, “while we don’t yet know Mozilla’s AI strategy or how it will go about delivering it to users, we do know that it has an entirely different set of incentives than its competitors. Google and Microsoft are heavily invested in AI and therefore want to increase the number of users and engagement in these products.”

Mozilla, he said, doesn’t have those incentives to push users towards AI consumption, so it can continue to focus on its core mission of a privacy-first browser that prioritizes trust.

Many users, Jackson pointed out, “will like the personalized services and time-saving productivity features that come from an AI-first browser experience. But others may wonder if the data they are exposing to these AI models, and by proxy big tech giants, is worth more than having an AI agent suggest how to write an email reply for you.”

One perspective, he said, “would say that Mozilla is just behind its competitors in terms of building out an AI-enhanced web experience for its users, and that may end up costing it market share. Another point of view is that it’s not rushing to extract as much user data as it can to feed an AI algorithm as part of a competition to improve an AI algorithm.”

Jackson predicted, “if users start to feel like Chrome or Edge is pushing AI too aggressively, or worse yet, they are creeped out when AI rehashes their personal information and presents recommendations around it, they might actually look for alternatives like Mozilla.”

In addition, Gogia added, enterprises “are under real pressure to extract productivity gains from AI. They will not permanently trade capability for comfort. If Chrome and Edge succeed in stabilizing governance, improving auditability, and avoiding a major enterprise failure, tolerance for AI-first defaults will rise. Mozilla’s challenge is execution. It must prove that governance first does not mean capability last.”