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You'd think that Mozilla has an excess of funding and has covered absolutely all needs in the browser space leading them to branch out like this... but the brow
by WhyNotHugo 3y ago
You'd think that Mozilla has an excess of funding and has covered absolutely all needs in the browser space leading them to branch out like this... but the browser really needs a lot more hands and funding, I honestly can't make sense of this.
And Fakespot: they present themselves as a company that focuses on detecting AI-generated content from human-generated content. It sounds like they've set out to play Whac-A-Mole against the all the biggest AI companies in the world. Literally all the largest tech companies in the world are right now focused on making AI content indistinguishable from human-generated content.
I can't help think that this is an infinite money sink, and in no way improves Mozilla's browser.
- AtlasBarfed 3y agoIt's so much easier to be a critic than a creator I think that's an advantage that something like this has because basically you just have to function as a critic
- asldkfjaslkdj 3y agoNot to mention, improving the browser in the space of adblockers installed by default ( https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin... ftw! ) would remove most incentives for AI generated content in the first place. /inserts shrugging emoji
- majormajor 3y agoAdblockers increase the incentives for AI generated "organic" content since in the absence of the ability to push explicitly-marked ads, you're gonna get astroturfing and such instead.
- asldkfjaslkdj 3y agoYou assume an efficient market. Advertising is not about the Seller of the product and the Publisher of the content. Oh no. The money in advertisement is the hundreds of companies that prey on each other all the way connecting seller and publisher. Because nobody trust anybody in advertisement. There's traffic validate. Click validation. Sales attribution. Sales attribution validation. MRC Accreditation for the sales attribution validation. etc. etc. etc.
- mynonameaccount 3y agoGoogle would defund Mozilla in an instant
- Mistletoe 3y agohttps://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/amazon-convinced-apple-to-remove-review-detector-fakespot-from-the-app-store/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/amazon-convinced-apple-to-r... Interesting, did not know this happened.
- micromacrofoot 3y agoFrom my perspective Mozilla is doing a better job with their browser than Google and Apple are, that's why I use it (despite the market share, I prefer their implementation of most things compared to alternatives). Everything else is gravy. I'm not sure that the money Mozilla spends on other things would be better spent on the browser... would it realistically close any existing gaps between their competition? Arguably they might even be better off spending it on marketing the browser than any technical metric. I'd rather this kind of thing than marketing.
- dkural 3y agoGenuinely asking: Why do you think Firefox is outperforming Chrome / Safari in your opinion?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 3y agoNot GP, but Firefox runs on every OS I use, Safari does not. Chrome maybe does, but I doubt it.
- sebzim4500 3y agoWhat OS doesn't run chrome? BSD?
- 3y ago
- user3939382 3y agoI'm happy for them to branch out, but it is discouraging that once every 3-4 months I run into a bug or feature I need, google it, and am taken to a bug report in their tracker from 5-10 years ago that hasn't been touched.
- ncann 3y agoCase in point: network ping spikes after using Geolocation that will persist until FF is closed: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1711854 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1711854
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 3y agoI never understood what geolocation was supposed to be within the context of of a desktop browser. If a website asks for this information, and I approve, what information is transmitted that couldn't be determined serverside via geoip?
- lights0123 3y agoBSSIDs of nearby WiFi networks that are compared to lists sent by mobile devices with real GPS
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 3y agoAnd if I don't even have a wifi card?
- NavinF 3y agoThen you represent a trivially small fraction of users. My desktop doesn't have wifi either, but most modern motherboards come with a wifi card built in. Not to mention the majority of visitors to mainstream sites are on mobile and a good chunk of the rest are on a laptop. Also Firefox has 3% market share so we're talking about a tiny fraction of a tiny fraction of a tiny fraction.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- franga2000 3y ago> It sounds like they've set out to play Whac-A-Mole against the all the biggest AI companies in the world. That's exactly what they're doing with the biggest ad trackers and browser vendors. A lot of Mozilla's "side-projects" are stupid and I also agree they should focus more on Firefox, but this one is pretty in line with their general mission of "we'll fight the big guys because, if we don't, nobody else will".
- hospitalhusband 3y agoMozilla is almost entirely funded by half a billion dollars a year from Google. They are a vassal.
- pfisch 3y agoSo was apple once.
- kbd 3y agoI wonder how things would be different if Microsoft never gave them that life-line when they needed it.
- exhilaration 3y agoI imagine that Apple would have been bought by HP or IBM and you can guess how that would have turned out.
- bdcravens 3y agoMicrosoft needed an OS competitor to have any viable antitrust defense.
- Y-bar 3y ago... one which they also made a nice little profit of. $150M in the non-voting stock they bought in 1997 turned into $550M in 2003 when they sold most of it.
- amelius 3y agoI'm starting to wonder why the EU isn't Mozilla's biggest funder.
- vxNsr 3y agoBecause Mozilla the foundation has shown itself to be a very poor steward of Firefox the application. If there was a way to directly fund Firefox I’m sure many people would do that, but atm it appears you can only send money to be wasted by Mozilla.
- agilob 3y agoExactly the same feeling as when Mozilla acquired Pocket and promised to opensource it. I had the feeling that it doesn't make sense and it's not what their audience wants.
- waveBidder 3y agothey've been the one thing that actually makes Amazon remotely useful for years, so I'm glad to see them getting outside help from a nonprofit
- samstave 3y agoAt least its a small step for mankind...
- EMM_386 3y ago> but the browser really needs a lot more hands and funding I had been using Firefox since 2002, when it was called Phoenix. I switched to a Chromium-based browser because the performance difference was noticable enough, and I am in the browser often enough, to finally throw in the towel and switch. They have a huge amount of money coming in from Google. Why is this going to acquisitions like this and not towards strengthening the development so that it remains competitive? Or are they, and I am not aware? If it doesn't remain competitive on things like performance, standards compliance, etc. there are very few reasons for the average user to choose Firefox over any other browser at the moment. The privacy-focus is good, but there are other browsers that do the same on Chromium.
- Phrodo_00 3y agoHow long ago did you switch? I also switched around 2010 or so, but since a few years the performance is definitely acceptable and I’ve been using it for like 6 years now
- JenrHywy 3y agoI have a similar history, although a year or two ago I switched back to FF for everything other than development - I still find their dev tools far slower and less helpful than Chrome/Edge. For general use though, FF has been just fine and it has container tabs, which is pretty much a killer feature for me.
- rvba 3y agoFirefox now is chromium too. They switched some time ago. So firefox now is.. a worse chrome reskin. I use both daily and firefox is just not that good. Mozilla foundation is completely not interested in getting firefox fixed to have its competetive advantage back - and to be the customizable browser. I guess they are just happy to spend money on travel and side projects -> they just boost their CV to jump ship somewhere else.
- tonymet 3y agoYou're thinking like an engineer (functionality) and not like a businessman (assets). You've addressed some of the assets well: the tech, product, etc. Mozilla isn't just paying for that, they are paying for the audience. I.e. the millions of people monthly who search for authentic product information. Mozilla may be interested in selling them another product , or revising the fakespot product – who knows? I'm just calling attention to the assets that the business paid for and that they are worth the money paid.
- squeaky-clean 3y ago> And Fakespot: they present themselves as a company that focuses on detecting AI-generated content from human-generated content. It sounds like they've set out to play Whac-A-Mole against the all the biggest AI companies in the world. I use FakeSpot a lot, and it's less about finding AI written reviews and more about finding any fake reviews, human written or not. They don't need to try and tell if reviews are actually written by a human, just if they are authentic. A reviewer with only 1 review on their whole account will be flagged as suspicious. A reviewer with only reviews for the same company will be marked as definitely fake. It also does things like look for repeated sentiments across all reviews for a product. Sometimes it gets false positives, like a review for a chair might legitimately have 30% of users saying the phrase "super/very/really comfy" at some point in their review. But because it's repeated so much it's flagged as indicating fake reviews. There are lots of companies working on making convincing language models. ChatGPT is pretty much already at that level for something simple like Amazon reviews. But there aren't any large AI companies working on AI that can fake looking like an authentic group of reviewers. Those are all more shady businesses without billion dollar budgets. Sure the problem of writing a single convincing review is now solved for those shady businesses. But the really sophisticated ones were already paying humans to write the reviews before good LLM's came along. There's also the issue of sellers themselves including a card or followup email promising a small gift card in exchange for a 5 star review.