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.”
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but its closed source…
that wasn’t the question lol.
true, but thats a no-go for me. Who knows what that browser secretly does or what they could put in, well never know for sure…
I get the resentment for closed source and the love for FOSS, but just because it’s closed doesn’t mean it’s bad.
I’ve been a Slackware user since 1994 and if you’ve ever used sg3_utils or lsscsi, you’ve used my code lol.
I just cannot commit to fanboing like that as there’s reasons even today not to gnu everything. Vivaldi has a descent reason too https://vivaldi.com/blog/technology/why-isnt-vivaldi-browser-open-source/
Vivaldi’s core reason can be summarised as
They put their brand before user security and sustainability. And still have the gall to claim to be ethical. Sorry but that’s absurd. If imagined how it looks from outside their firm, they might wake up. Instead, they’ll probably putter along for a while, then get bought or fail or change direction or something, and their browser will be lost like the Presto Opera before them.
None are so cursed as those who fail to learn from history.
Wait wait wait. Where does Vivaldi say that in any way? On the contrary, they’re pretty damned clear about
Their brand https://vivaldi.com/for-a-better-web/
Vivaldi is headquartered In Norway, proudly employee-owned, with no external investors pulling the strings. This means we make decisions that are best for you, not for shareholders’ profit. We build the browser we want to use, listening to our users to create a web experience that’s free, powerful, and uniquely yours.
Their user security https://vivaldi.com/privacy/browser/
We strictly protect the security of any and all personal information you provide to us while using Vivaldi products and services. We do not share or sell information to any third party and we proactively protect all user data from disclosure, with the only exception being if requested by legitimate law agencies with a court order.
and their sustainability https://umatechnology.org/why-vivaldis-anti-ai-browser-is-great-news-for-humanity/
So I’m sorry, but your own comment sounds absurd because it lacks any proof thereof.
No disagreement there, but Vivaldi isn’t repeating anything that’s been tried before. Vivaldi is an employee owned company that wants to succeed, wants to offer the best interface, security and features to the general public it can whilst simultaneously keeping itself uniquely true to its values and survival. Gee, so horrible of it to want to scrape a living for its employee owners. Ridiculousness indeed.