Firefox returns to X after nearly 18 months of pretending it didn’t need X

Firefox has resumed posting on X after nearly 18 months of silence, with Mozilla saying it is returning because “the internet is changing again.”

“We took time off of X, but we’re back,” the official Firefox account wrote. “The internet is changing again, so we’re here as an independent voice for our users and the open internet.”

It is a fairly big return for an account that went quiet for close to a year and a half. Mozilla did not say much about why Firefox stopped posting in the first place, or what exactly made now the right time to come back.

That said, this is a good time, if any, to make a comeback on X.

Firefox has been unusually busy lately. Mozilla recently announced that the browser will move to a faster two-week release schedule from September, meaning updates, fixes, and new features should land more often.

There has also been a steady run of less flashy work. Mozilla recently rounded up Firefox privacy and security improvements, including clearer location-use indicators, stronger anti-fingerprinting protections and more control over sites trying to access your local network. It also finally fixed a Firefox favicon refresh bug that had been open for 18 years.

The return to X is interesting because Firefox is far from the first big name to make a lot of noise about stepping away, only to later come back. In recent years, companies, public figures, and regular users announced their exits and pointed followers toward Bluesky, Mastodon, and other platforms.

Some stuck to it. Plenty did not.

Whatever people think of X now, it remains the place where companies go when they want an announcement, product launch or public argument to travel quickly. Mark Zuckerberg also returned to X after a long hiatus to announce Meta Muse Spark 1.1, which says plenty on its own. When something is considered important enough, X is still hard to ignore.

Mozilla can frame Firefox’s return as a push for browser choice and an open internet. That is not untrue. Firefox is still the main non-Chromium browser keeping Google from having even more control over how the web works.

But an account with millions of followers is useful, and X still has a huge audience. Nearly 18 months of pretending otherwise was always going to be difficult to maintain.

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