Mozilla is in a tricky position. It contains both a nonprofit organization dedicated to making the internet a better place for everyone, and a for-profit arm dedicated to, you know, making money. In the best of times, these things feed each other: The company makes great products that advance its goals for the web, and the nonprofit gets to both advocate for a better web and show people what it looks like. But these are not the best of times. Mozilla has spent the last couple of years implementing layoffs and restructuring, attempting to explain how it can fight for privacy and openness when Google pays most of its bills, while trying to find its place in an increasingly frothy AI landscape.
Fun times to be the new Mozilla CEO, right? But when I put all that to Anthony Enzor-DeMeo, the company’s just-announced chief executive, he swears he sees opportunity in all the upheaval. “I think what’s actually needed now is a technology company that people can trust,” Enzor-DeMeo says. “What I’ve seen with AI is an erosion of trust.”
Mozilla is not going to train its own giant LLM anytime soon. But there’s still an AI Mode coming to Firefox next year, which Enzor-DeMeo says will offer users their choice of model and product, all in a browser they can understand and from a company they can trust. “We’re not incentivized to push one model or the other,” he says. “So we’re going to try to go to market with multiple models.”
-_-
That’s what all CEOs do. Double down on AI.
Of course, this is just what Firefox needs
fixing long standing issues, catching up to web standards, process isolation on mobileAI!Is it possible for the major forks to just go their own way, or is it more complicated than that? Obviously anyone building a new browser engine from the ground up now with complete HTML, CSS and JavaScript spec is so immense an undertaking as to sound far-fetched, so the open source community would need to leverage whatever it can.
You either die Old Mozilla or you live to see yourself become Current Mozilla.
AIMOZILLA, brought to you by the GOOGLE foundation, who also owns chrome
Gaaaaaaaahhhhh, please make it stop!
if only someone can make a hardfork of firefox, and not depend on it. google indirectly owns ff.
I’m not sure what prompted it, but I recently decided to try Opera. It’s not too bad, but I haven’t researched anything about it either. I’ll be spending more time looking it to it i suppose.
It’s chromium based now, and as bad as firefox’s direction is, I don’t really want to hand google based engines an even bigger portion of the internet.
Do yourself a favor and try Vivaldi, while yes, it uses Chromium under the hood, it at least is made by some of the original Opera creators
For starters they want to turn it back to a subscription browser
And here … we … go
“What I’ve seen with AI is an erosion of trust.”
Mozilla is not going to train its own giant LLM anytime soon. But there’s still an AI Mode coming to Firefox next year, which Enzor-DeMeo says will offer users their choice of model and product, all in a browser they can understand and from a company they can trust. “We’re not incentivized to push one model or the other,” he says. “So we’re going to try to go to market with multiple models.” Some will be open-source models available to anyone.
This is such an out of touch non-answer here.
People don’t oppose ai changes because they’re locked into a model. In fact most AI products I use for my job let you choose a fucking model.
People hate them because
A) 90% of the time they’re useless and the remaining 10 are detrimental to the product experience
B) Ethical concerns about training off of artists and authors as well as environmental impact. EDIT: or also the general trend of trying to replace humans with AI.
C) Not wanting to play into the fucking arms race the billionaire class are manufacturing
D) The time they could be useful they have a risk of being either hilariously wrong or dangerously wrong. And there’s no amount of training and GPU manufacturing that’s gonna fix that.
Absolutely none of this is addressed by the CEO. I’m sure he has to say this because of the fucking tulip crazy money is in around this but it doesn’t make it any less tone deaf or futile.
Is there like a petition or something we can all sign to show that literally no cunt wants this?
Uninstall it and pick a different platform. These cunts think you won’t and THATS why they don’t give a fuck. Enough people swap and oh, hey, maybe we should rethink this mistake. If not - not your problem… You already bounced.
If anyone has any suggestions for browsers hook me up, I’m running out of browsers with thier own engines to try. I don’t see much point in using, say, LibreWolf if the engine is still the same as Firefox (Gecko in this case). Maybe I’ll give NetSurf a try and pretend like it’s 1996 again.
If all of the web engines enshittify, you can always
curlthe HTML/CSS/JS and hand-parse it. Might have suboptimal performance however.lol if it ever gets to that point i’m just gonna go straight Lynx.
“Might” is doing some awfully heaving lifting there 🤣
That’s still a fork of Firefox, isn’t it? I was hoping to find a reasonably modern browser that doesn’t rely on gecko or blink. I’d be okay with a WebKit browser but I don’t have a Mac.
Servo is the one I follow in that space
Oh good, more rust! (j/k i don’t have the feverish hatred of rust that some people seem to)
You really don’t understand what a browser engine is, do you?
I do, in fact. I get that they are typically open-source, and I also understand how ridiculously difficult it is to create one from scratch. If LibreWolf or whoever want to make privacy focused browsers based on mozilla foundation or google’s work then that’s fine and I support it, but I’m personally curious if there are any mainstream browsers that don’t have any (or minimal) reliance on google and mozilla foundation. Someone else was actually helpful and pointed me towards an engine in development Servo which looks quite interesting! Hopefully there will be a browser based on it soon.
https://www.spacebar.news/servo-undercover-web-browser-engine/
At the start of the millennium, Internet Explorer used its own Trident engine on Windows and Tasman on Mac, Opera used Presto, some embedded devices used NetFront, Netscape had Gecko, and KDE made KHTML for its Konqueror browser. Those browsers eventually faded away or adopted a competing engine to simplify development. KHTML was the basis for Safari’s WebKit, which in turn became Chromium’s Blink engine, and Netscape’s Gecko engine became the foundation for Firefox. Opera ditched its custom Presto engine in 2013 and switched to Chromium, and Microsoft Edge made the same move in 2020.
This is a danger to the open web in more ways than one. If there is only one functioning implementation of a standard, the implementation becomes the standard. The web becomes to Google what Java is to Oracle. It also means the limitations and security flaws in Chromium affect most other browsers, which became a topic of conversation with Google’s recent Manifest V3 transition.
I figured you did. It’s the guy you were replying to that seems confused.
Oh shit my bad! Leaving the info up anyway, in case anyone else is wondering why only two major engines is a bad thing for the open internet.
Oh, will you look at that. I want to get scolded again for “making a big deal” out of AI in Firefox again. Where’s that jerkface who listed all the AI features at me and told me to “stop bullshitting”? Fuckwit.
Just like I said in another post related to this, I hope this doesn’t kill LibreWolf, IceCat, and Waterfox.
Librewolf have put a post out a few days ago that they won’t add any AI stuff.
Waterfox is on the same page. As long as the browser doesn’t outright require it to functio0n, I think the privacy-focused forks will remain. Of course, it’s extra work to maintain divergent code, but this is worth it, IMO.
If brave is able to have their own adblock integrated into the browser by default despite Google being behind much of Chrome I think Firefox forks should be fine. Sucks everything seems to have AI these days shoved in, so it’s hard to escape whether it is Chrome forks or chromium alternatives.
i download UBLOCK origin anyways for brave, since the brave doesnt entirely block what the ublock can do.
Thank goodness.
I’ve cancelled my monthly donation to Mozilla. What’s the point. Every bit of feedback I’ve provided is to the tune of no goddamn AI, spend my money towards keeping up with the alternatives to make sure there’s always an extra player in the field. Instead it’s going to some overpaid dickhead who’s going to introduce AI.
firefox is almostly completely dependant on google through ad revenue, hence thats why the sudden jump into AI, which google is trying to jam into all its services.
Man, I so wish mozilla was a worker owned cooperative. These string of useless CEOs would have already been shown the door
mozilla foundation is like susan comen breast cancer foundation, where the CEO takes the large chunk of donation for him/herself.
This is such a fantastic way to put it. I fuckin love the internet, people have amazing ways to say things lol
There are two things that the Internet has taught me: the incredible creativity people have about absolutely everything and the unimaginable levels of stupidity that people have about absolutely everything. Sometimes one of those things only exist because of the other, and that’s hard to process.
