Mozilla built an AI website builder around a fundamentally non-portable website model. And the hypocrisy/irony is much stronger when you use Mozilla’s own language about an open, healthy, user-controlled Internet.
Mozilla Built an AI Website Builder. Why Is It a Proprietary Trap?
Mozilla has spent decades telling us that the Internet should be open.
It built Firefox as an alternative to proprietary browser ecosystems. It helped champion open standards. It describes itself as a global community working toward a healthier Internet. And Mozilla’s own stated mission is deeply concerned with giving people more choice and control over their online lives.
So imagine my surprise when I discovered that Mozilla itself operates an AI website builder that does not let you export the website you create.
Welcome to Solo.
And yes, this is actually Mozilla.
Meet Solo: “Almost One-Click” Website Creation
Solo is Mozilla’s AI website creator for solopreneurs. Mozilla introduced it in 2023, pitching it as a way for freelancers, small-business owners and other independent operators to get online without spending their time wrestling with website-building tools. (Mozilla Blog)
The concept is genuinely good.
Tell Solo about your business. Give it information about your services. Feed it an existing website or business profile. Let AI generate the copy, layout and imagery.
Connect your domain.
Publish.
Done.
For a person who just needs a simple website for a lawn-care business, photographer, consultant, contractor or local service business, that is an extremely attractive proposition.
And I have no objection whatsoever to making website creation dramatically easier.
The problem begins after the website is created.
You Don’t Actually Get the Website
Here is the question every prospective Solo customer should ask:
“Can I take my website somewhere else?”
Mozilla’s answer is currently:
No.
Solo’s own documentation says:
“Solo does not currently allow you to export the code of the Solo website.”
It says there is no timeline for when that might change. (Solo Support)
The pricing page is even more explicit: you can export your contact and newsletter submissions, and you can copy your text and images, but you cannot export your website to HTML. (Solo – Free AI Website Creator)
That’s not portability.
That’s a platform.
And there’s an important distinction here.
You can connect your own domain to Solo. You can own the domain. You can download your leads.
But the actual website—the thing your domain points to—is still trapped inside Solo’s infrastructure.
Mozilla calls this a website creator.
I’d call it website-as-a-service.
This Is Exactly the Problem Mozilla Was Supposed to Be Fighting
Mozilla’s organizational structure makes this particularly difficult to shrug off.
The Mozilla Foundation is a nonprofit, and the Mozilla Corporation is its wholly owned subsidiary. Mozilla explicitly describes the Corporation as an organization that develops products in service of Mozilla’s public-benefit goals. (Mozilla)
Mozilla has repeatedly described its unusual structure as a way to put Internet users’ welfare ahead of ordinary shareholder interests.
In its own words, the Corporation exists to use commerce as a tool for the Mozilla mission—not as an end in itself. Mozilla has also said it wants Internet business models that “aren’t creepy” and that provide users with more choice and control. (Mozilla)
That’s a pretty high bar.
And it makes Solo’s lack of portability all the more difficult to understand.
Because what is more fundamental to user control than being able to leave?
The Golden Rule of Software Ownership
There is a simple test I use for almost every hosted software platform:
What happens if the company disappears tomorrow?
If the answer is:
“Download your files and move on.”
Great.
That’s portability.
If the answer is:
“You can download some of your content, but you’ll have to rebuild the website somewhere else.”
That’s a lock-in problem.
And if the answer is:
“You can’t export the website at all.”
You have a proprietary platform dependency.
Solo currently falls into the third category.
Mozilla’s documentation confirms that it doesn’t currently provide a way to export the site’s code. It also says that Solo won’t host websites built outside of Solo. (Solo Support)
That means Solo isn’t merely an AI authoring tool.
It is an AI authoring tool coupled to a proprietary hosting environment.
And that distinction matters enormously.
“But It’s Free!”
Yes.
Solo offers free hosting, and it allows users to connect custom domains. (Solo – Free AI Website Creator)
That’s great.
But “free” doesn’t eliminate lock-in.
Google Docs can be free. Dropbox can be free. GitHub can be free. WordPress.com can have a free tier.
The important question isn’t simply:
“How much does it cost?”
It’s:
“Who controls the thing I built?”
A free platform that allows me to export my work is enormously different from a free platform that requires me to remain inside the platform to keep using it.
Free is a pricing model.
Portability is an ownership model.
AI Makes This Problem Worse, Not Better
And here’s where the Solo model becomes particularly strange.
The entire promise of generative AI is that software can dramatically reduce the cost of creating things.
Today, AI can generate a website in minutes.
Tomorrow, it may generate an entire business application.
So why would we accept more lock-in at precisely the moment when the cost of generating software is collapsing?
If an AI can create a beautiful website from a description of my business, it should also be able to produce:
- HTML
- CSS
- JavaScript
- images
- structured content
- metadata
- forms
- configuration
- a deployable package
In other words:
Give me the damn website.
Let me put it on Netlify.
Let me put it on Cloudflare Pages.
Let me put it on my own VPS.
Let me put it on WordPress.
Let me host it on a Raspberry Pi in my basement if that’s what I want.
The AI has already done the difficult part.
Why does Mozilla need to retain control of the runtime?
The Irony Is Almost Comical
Mozilla’s own history makes this particularly awkward.
The organization was born from an open-source project.
The Mozilla Foundation says it was created to protect the open nature of the Internet.
Its licensing policies emphasize its commitment to free and open-source software. (Mozilla Blog)
Mozilla’s own description of its Corporation says it exists to develop software and explore technologies that give people more control over their lives online. (Mozilla)
And then Mozilla builds an AI website platform where:
You can create the website.
You can connect your domain.
You can export your leads.
You can copy your text and images.
But you cannot export the website.
That is an extraordinarily strange place for Mozilla to land.
Imagine If Firefox Worked This Way
Imagine if Mozilla said:
Download Firefox for free!
And after six months it told you:
Sorry, you can’t export your browser settings, extensions or bookmarks. You can copy some of the text manually, but the browser itself has to remain on Mozilla’s servers.
People would laugh.
Yet we have normalized precisely this kind of thinking for websites.
Wix does it.
Squarespace does it.
Shopify does it in its own way.
A growing collection of AI website builders does it.
And now Mozilla does it.
That’s the part that deserves criticism.
Mozilla Had an Opportunity to Do Something Different
This is what makes Solo frustrating rather than merely disappointing.
Mozilla could have built something revolutionary.
Imagine:
Describe your business → AI generates a complete, portable website.
Click:
Download Website
You receive a ZIP file.
Upload it anywhere.
Or:
Export to WordPress.
Or:
Deploy to GitHub Pages.
Or:
Deploy to Cloudflare Pages.
Or:
Download Docker container.
Mozilla could have created an AI website generator whose defining feature wasn’t merely convenience.
Its defining feature could have been:
You own what the AI creates.
That would have been profoundly Mozilla.
Instead, Mozilla created another hosted website ecosystem.
The “Open Web” Should Apply to AI-Generated Websites Too
There is an important philosophical issue hiding underneath all of this.
The Web succeeded partly because its fundamental publishing model was decentralized.
You could create a document.
You could put it on a server.
You could link to it.
Other people could access it.
The underlying technologies were designed around interoperability rather than permanent dependence upon one vendor.
AI is now changing how those documents are created.
That’s wonderful.
But if the result is:
AI-generated content + proprietary editor + proprietary hosting + no export
then we haven’t made the Web more open.
We’ve simply invented Wix with a chatbot.
And Mozilla should know better.
Mozilla: Please Fix This
I’m not arguing that Solo should disappear.
Quite the opposite.
Solo is a terrific idea.
The AI website generation experience is exactly the kind of technology that could help millions of small businesses get online.
But Mozilla should finish the job.
Give every customer a complete export of their website.
Not just their text.
Not just their images.
Not just their contact submissions.
The actual website.
If the website is generated by AI, then the customer should be able to take that generated artifact and run it somewhere else.
And if Mozilla is worried about maintaining its hosting business, that’s fine.
Offer hosting.
Offer premium features.
Offer managed updates.
Offer analytics.
Offer AI editing.
Offer backups.
Offer support.
Make Solo the best hosting platform on the planet.
Just don’t make leaving impossible.
Mozilla Should Be Held to a Higher Standard
I don’t actually think Mozilla should be ashamed because it built a commercial product.
Mozilla’s own history makes clear that its Corporation is deliberately intended to operate in the marketplace. (Mozilla Blog)
Nor should Mozilla be criticized simply because Solo is proprietary.
There are legitimate reasons to build proprietary software.
The problem is the combination of Mozilla’s stated mission and Solo’s lack of portability.
Mozilla tells us that it wants a healthier Internet.
Mozilla talks about user choice and control.
Mozilla’s entire institutional identity is intertwined with the open Web.
Then Mozilla creates a tool that makes it extraordinarily easy for a nontechnical person to build a website—and makes that website impossible to export.
That is exactly the kind of vendor dependency Mozilla should be helping us escape.
The irony isn’t that Mozilla built an AI website builder.
The irony is that Mozilla built one that behaves like the proprietary website builders it spent years giving us reasons not to trust.
The One Feature Solo Needs Most
Forget another AI feature.
Forget another image generator.
Forget another theme.
Forget another integration.
The next killer feature should be:
Export My Website
One button.
Everything included.
HTML.
CSS.
JavaScript.
Images.
Fonts where licensing permits.
Content.
Metadata.
Structured data.
Forms or documented replacement mechanisms.
And enough documentation that an ordinary developer can take the exported site and host it somewhere else.
Then Solo would be something genuinely different:
An AI website builder that creates websites you actually own.
That would be a Mozilla product I could get excited about.
Until then, Solo is an incredibly convenient way to create a website that you can never quite take with you.
And for an organization whose entire brand was built around the idea of a healthier, more open Internet, that is a pretty embarrassing contradiction.