Mozilla CEO Anthony Enzor-DeMeo Wants to Challenge Chrome—and Rely Less on Google

Mozilla wants businesses to pay for Firefox. Not for the browser itself, which remains free, but for something increasingly valuable to companies concerned about their dependence on Big Tech: control.

Anthony Enzor-DeMeo, CEO of Mozilla, is taking aim at Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge with Firefox Enterprise, a new subscription offering launched in early access on Oct. 13. It combines the familiar Firefox browser, built on Mozilla’s independent Gecko engine, with additional security controls and a management console that customers can run on their own infrastructure, either on-premises or in the cloud.

IT teams can centrally manage browser policies and access, govern how data moves through the browser and control which A.I. services employees can use. Mozilla is initially concentrating its sales efforts on France, Germany, Austria and Switzerland, where questions about digital sovereignty are becoming harder for businesses and governments to ignore.

Firefox Enterprise is sold as an annual subscription. According to Mozilla, pricing combines a platform license scaled to deployment complexity with a capacity charge based on the volume of managed instances. Support and updates are included, with prices negotiated individually rather than published as a standard rate.

“We’re building an enterprise business with the goal of becoming a meaningful part of Mozilla’s revenue,” Hermina Condei, vice president of Firefox Enterprise, told Observer in written comments.

But can Mozilla persuade businesses to pay for an alternative to browsers they already use?

Can Mozilla loosen Chrome’s grip?

Mozilla faces formidable competition. According to Statcounter, Chrome accounted for 66.36 percent of global browser usage in September, compared with 6.04 percent for Edge and just 2.8 percent for Firefox.

Google and Microsoft have also been expanding the presence of their respective A.I. assistants, Gemini and Copilot, throughout their browser and productivity ecosystems.

“The thing I’m trying to avoid in the market is essentially a consolidation like we had with search,” Enzor-DeMeo told Observer in a video interview. “To me it’s actually quite important that there are many different types of AI vendors supported, and that there’s actually healthy competition so you don’t end up with one predominant player in the world.”

For Enzor-DeMeo, the concern extends beyond which company makes the most popular browser. It’s about what happens when the same company controls the operating system, browser and A.I. tools people use every day.

“If you have players owning the operating system level, the browser level, and then now the A.I. level, that’s going to become very tricky in terms of just giving users choice,” he said. “It’s almost like a lock-in without even knowing it.”

He pointed to the integration of services such as Gemini and Gmail as an example of companies promoting their own products within existing ecosystems, sometimes without users actively seeking those features.

“A lot of our users didn’t want that. They wanted to be able to choose what AI they wanted to use when.”

Concerns about browser competition are hardly new. In August 2024, federal judge Amit Mehta ruled that Google had illegally maintained a monopoly in online search. The Justice Department subsequently sought to force Google to sell Chrome, although Mehta rejected that remedy in September 2025.

Microsoft has faced criticism of its own. In May, the Browser Choice Alliance sent an open letter to CEO Satya Nadella, accusing the company of using its position as the supplier of Windows to steer users toward Edge.

Mozilla argues that Firefox offers something its competitors cannot: an independent browser engine. While Chrome and Edge both use Chromium, Firefox runs on Gecko, one of the few major alternatives to browser engines controlled by Google and Apple.

That independence comes with an awkward financial reality.

Mozilla has historically relied heavily on search revenue, particularly its agreement to make Google the default search engine in Firefox. In May 2025, Mozilla chief financial officer Eric Muhlheim testified in Google’s antitrust proceedings that losing the arrangement could have severe consequences for Firefox. He said approximately 85 percent of Firefox’s revenue came from its Google agreement.

Firefox Enterprise therefore presents a possible way to diversify Mozilla’s revenue while competing more directly with the company that has helped finance its browser business.

Europe offers an opening

Mozilla sees particular promise in Europe, where governments and regulated industries are increasingly concerned about their reliance on American technology providers.

Condei pointed to Gecko and Firefox Enterprise’s customer-operated management infrastructure as important distinctions from Chrome and Edge. Organizations can determine where management data resides and how Firefox integrates with their existing identity and security systems.

The company already has early commercial interest. According to Mozilla, Firefox Enterprise has active trials in France with a major healthcare research institution and a French government ministry. In Germany, support contracts are in procurement, with three additional trials under discussion.

These are encouraging signs, although procurement discussions and trials have yet to establish a paying customer base at scale.

European concerns over technological sovereignty have also become entangled with access to frontier A.I. models. In June, U.S. export restrictions forced Anthropic to suspend access to Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5. The restrictions were lifted June 30 and access was restored beginning July 1, but the episode highlighted how quickly access to American A.I. technology could change.

Mozilla has separately expanded its consumer A.I. offerings through a September partnership with French model developer Mistral. The agreement brings Mistral Small 4 to Firefox Smart Window, an optional in-browser A.I. assistant.

Enzor-DeMeo described Mistral as a global player that was “spiritually aligned” with Mozilla on open-source and open-weight approaches.

The partnership is distinct from Firefox Enterprise, Condei emphasized. Mistral’s models are currently part of consumer Firefox’s Smart Window experience, while Firefox Enterprise concentrates on the browser and the controls organizations use to manage it.

“If there’s an AI provider they’d want to use, they should be able to use it,” Condei said. “If they have their own model, we want to support that too.”

Will choice translate into revenue?

Mozilla’s commitment to choice is also shaping its approach to A.I. adoption.

“It’s a little too early to say if AI is bringing new people to Firefox,” Condei acknowledged, noting that some users want A.I. features in their browsers while others would prefer to avoid them altogether.

Mozilla says Firefox has roughly 200 million monthly users and is deployed across thousands of organizations. It also reported more than six million Firefox selections through browser-choice screens introduced under the European Union’s Digital Markets Act as of May.

Still, users selecting a free browser are not necessarily prospective enterprise customers, and Mozilla has not disclosed a revenue target for its new subscription business.

The company is entering a market where even well-funded technology providers have struggled to persuade users to change browsers. OpenAI, for example, retired its standalone Atlas browser in August, shifting its browser-related capabilities into other products.

Enzor-DeMeo believes there is value in resisting the pressure to make A.I. unavoidable. He also argues that maintaining browser security presents a substantial challenge for companies entering the market.

“I’m not anti-AI, I just think you should have a choice around it,” he said.

That philosophy may appeal to businesses seeking greater control over their technology. But Mozilla still needs to demonstrate that independence is worth paying for.

For Enzor-DeMeo, the challenge is twofold: persuading organizations to loosen their dependence on Chrome and Edge while finding a way for Mozilla to become less dependent on Google itself.