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Because Firefox has to do things to try and grow itself along with their mission. If they aren’t trying things, they would also then be accused of languishing
by j45 2y ago
Because Firefox has to do things to try and grow itself along with their mission.
If they aren’t trying things, they would also then be accused of languishing in obscurity.
AI being built into browsers isn’t new. Summarization isn’t novel. It’s not early in the game where resources are crazy high.
Summarization could run with a basic low powered model privately hosted.
Market share changes based on what browsers do well.
- likeabatterycar 2y agoA car with square wheels doesn't grow itself by adding three horns and a bubble dome...
- altairprime 2y agoFirefox the browser doesn’t make any money. Doesn’t matter if the wheels are square or round if no one’s willing or able to put gas in the tank. As many prior rounds of Mozilla on HN have pointed out, it’s completely unacceptable to consider having to pay Mozilla for Firefox, and anyways a few million dollars will barely hire enough coders to keep afloat on CVEs (unlike e.g. Let’s Encrypt, who has a much simpler organization to operate!). So we’re now in the timeline where Mozilla is the liquid metal terminator in T2 trying to escape lava by shapeshifting, as you say, three horns and a bubble dome. Accurately put! And a hilarious image too. We’d best hope that the antitrust lawsuits don’t kill the Google money that’s keeping their car fueled.
- quesera 2y ago> Firefox the browser doesn’t make any money Firefox the browser is responsible for the vast majority (81%?) of the money that is injected into Mozilla annually.
- altairprime 2y agoWhat % of the money that is injected into Mozilla annually is paid by Google?
- Groxx 2y agoDoes it matter? Without it, there would be no money from Google. You're moving the goalpost rather substantially. "It makes no money" and "it costs millions to maintain" -> it pulls in hundreds of millions per year, the majority of their income. They can afford to focus on it.
- altairprime 2y agoFair enough!
- j45 2y agoComparing the Homer mobile to Firefox is a stretch.
- binkHN 2y ago> If they aren’t trying things, they would also then be accused of languishing in obscurity. They are languishing into obscurity not because they aren't trying things, but because their browser functionality is languishing behind the others.
- j45 2y agoFirefox doesn’t have a profit model to sell ads or user browsing behaviour like other browsers as far as I know. I appreciate the languishing comment, at the same time Firefox has features that seem to be a little unique to it out of the box. Spaces comes to mind. Getting really good at one thing might be beneficial. Ai summarization seems to be more and more common in a browser. Maybe they’ll add it as a local feature once a model can comfortably run.