Anthony Enzor-DeMeo is taking charge of one of the internet’s most important — and most complicated — companies.

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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      • bazzett@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        2 days ago

        I tried Ironfox for several weeks some months ago. I like the project, but it was painfully slow, mainly because it disables JIT and some other things. (Brave also has a JIT-less mode, but I found it to be faster than Ironfox.)

        Also, it comes with uBlock Origin preinstalled, which is good, but the devs enable by default a ton of lists, which contributes to the slowness. I suppose that if you have a fast device it won’t matter, but on a low to mid-range device it becomes unbearable. The best you can do is disable the preinstalled lists and use one of the modes recommended by uBlock.

        • sudoer777@lemmy.mlEnglish
          1·
          2 days ago

          I use Ironfox also mainly for the plugins. I have the personal stuff on my phone over Tor since I don’t want to pay for a VPN, and I’ve noticed that Ironfox is a lot slower than Vanadium/Cromite for that setup, which both also have JIT disabled