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I think people screaming "but AI is the future" doesn't recognize what the problem is. The problem is not AI. The problem is that Mozilla keeps jumping on fads

I think people screaming "but AI is the future" doesn't recognize what the problem is. The problem is not AI. The problem is that Mozilla keeps jumping on fads instead of focusing on their browser core. There are a tons of "we bundled all the latest crap" Chrome forks out there. Nobody needs more those. Stop pushing bells and whistles. Give us more extensibility instead. Keep supporting v2 manifest and add more. There were genuine technical reasons for why XUL and NPAPI had to die, but we need an equally powerful alternative. And yea, having a faint through about removing adblock support, yet alone speaking it aloud is a really bad sign for Mozilla's future.

echelon 10mo ago
> people screaming "but AI is the future" I witnes far more people screaming against AI. The media started kicking this off in 2021, 2022. It blossomed into a fully distributed, organic, memetic device from there. It has a life of its own now. Children and young people are practically indoctrinated if you look at social media comments. I was invited to give lectures to several art schools about using Blender, Unreal Engine, and mocap software with diffusion models. The students weren't very polite. Most of the "questions" I got at each of the campuses were simply statements of affirmation about how much they hate AI. Good looking and well-reviewed indie games that incorporate AI elements or tools are dumped on by these folks. It's like butting into conversations to say something bad about AI scores points or something. > Mozilla keeps jumping on fads Agreed on this point, though. They're rudderless. And Google is probably quite happy about the fact that their antitrust litigation sponge can't steal away their users.
- epgui 10mo ago
  > simply statements of affirmation about how much they hate AI I wonder what that might mean!
- tliltocatl 10mo ago
  If you keep shoveling a thing to people who don't care, you'll get tons of irrational pushback no matter how the good this thing is. And AI isn't even particularly good.
- ehnto 10mo ago
  There is a clear substance behind the pushback on AI in creative work, and it would be foolish to dismiss it as irrational. You might be missing the forest for the trees if you focus too much in implementation details, the dislike for is AI is a bit deeper than that.
  - tliltocatl 10mo ago
    On the other hand, it also sometimes feels as if some "old media" journalists see AI as a convenient target to avenge the tech sector for disrupting them. Not that it makes AI slop any less sloppy.
  - Nasrudith 10mo ago
    Nothing prevents the prevailing trends from being utterly stupid. Just the opposite, really.
- PunchyHamster 10mo ago
  > I witnes far more people screaming against AI. If you shove it into people's faces, they will have knee jerk reaction and hate it. If the AI industry didn't desperately try to push it in every possible way in desperate bid to be profitable and it was just a thing that slowly gets better and is value added, not a nagging push, there would be far less of that. But companies like MS have idea of consent of average rapist and will not even give option "no, I don't want copilot in teams", there is only "add it now" or "remind later"
  - pjc50 10mo ago
    "AI" is the technology that makes your computers and electricity more expensive, while slowly ruining the authenticity of everything you come across on the internet. I saw a sad post on bsky today about how the joy of animal behavior videos has been destroyed for that poster, because they can no longer be sure if it's real or just a fake.
  - m4rtink 10mo ago
    Add to that various hardware shortages caused by the AI mania or more examples of AI missuse and I wonder where we might end up eventually if people will get even angrier.
    - ruszki 10mo ago
      I’m quite sure that these shortages aren’t caused by mania, but oligopolies, and unpredictable countries. In undistorted markets, these should be way shorter. A year, or two maximum. At least that what supply side told us in 2020, and early 2021. It seems and predictions also say, that the shortages are with us long term. It’s even more telling that some companies leave markets where these “shortages” are, ie huge profit margins.
  - tim333 10mo ago
    People tend to complain about stuff that's annoying and broken and just ignore things that work well. Like Chrome uses AI to translate language and everyone just takes it for granted.
- diputsmonro 10mo ago
  I wonder why nobody wants to use my pretty theft machine? I mean, it steals all their work and spits out copies that are almost as good, and almost for free! Why aren't these artists stoked about not having to do art anymore? Well, I guess it does use more energy than every existing data center, driving up costs for basic electronic components and thereby making every electronic device more expensive. And I guess the results aren't quite as good, but if you squint and don't really care about art on a human level and just want to clap like a seal at the pretty pictures then it's enough. And I guess economic forces will mean that some of them will lose their jobs when their bosses realize that they can get away with only needing half as many prompt artists. But hey, at least we don't have to pay humans to make art anymore. How glorious that our Silicon Valley gods have delivered us from the hell of creating economic incentives for humans to express themselves to other humans. Yeah, those screaming, "indoctrinated" artists are so impolite and crazy, aren't they? Don't they realize what we've done for them? We made the automatic art machine! They'll never get to make art again!
mrweasel 10mo ago
It might open up for a terrifying level of abuse, but if you can have Dtrace and eBPF implemented in the Linux kernel, you can surely design an API for allowing AIs to be plug-able within Firefox. Firefox is already a really good browser, Mozilla really should be focusing on that. They can design and implement an AI plugin system to go into that core. People who want AI can install an agent and enable the AI sub-system. If the AI companies won't implement it, Mozilla can do it and charge a fee for the plugin.
PurpleRamen 10mo ago
> The problem is that Mozilla keeps jumping on fads instead of focusing on their browser core. They always did, everyone does. This is not really new, and not really that harmful in itself. The deeper problem is that you need developers who are also understanding what they are doing, what people want and need, developers who are nerdy about some topic and very deep into their understanding of it. But Mozilla seems to lack this, which is also why they have to follow every fad blindly, because they just don't know it better, have no real vision and understanding which enables them to build something really worthful. Mozilla seems to be the embodiment of what happens when you have a task and your solution is to just throw money at it until something works. And let's be fair, it is easy to be good at something, but really hard to master it and dominate the world. It's not really their fault, they are probably doing their best, they just don't know it better, and so does everyone, including fans if we are honest. Everyone has their own preferences and goals, and often they are conflicting with each other. Mozilla has to find a common ground to server as much people as possible, and IMHO they are still good at this. Firefox used to be so much worse on some aspects, Chrome and other Browser are still worse on other aspects. Getting the perfect Browser is just not realistic. > Give us more extensibility instead. True, it's really a joke how many of their promised APIs never were finished after they killed XUL. > Keep supporting v2 manifest and add more. Didn't they say they will continue with Manifest v2? > There were genuine technical reasons for why XUL and NPAPI had to die, but we need an equally powerful alternative. Wasn't NPAPI mostly replaced with HTML5? Most stuff done with Flash or Java-Applets is now possible out of the box. Or is something missing?
- tliltocatl 10mo ago
  > Didn't they say they will continue with Manifest v2? Yes and that's a good thing > Wasn't NPAPI mostly replaced with HTML5? It's true that what NPAPI was used for 99% of the time is better served by HTML5. But it's not like NPAPI was limited to Flash and applets. Afair NPAPI plugins can access all native resources (which is the reason why the security sucked so much), HTML5 obviously can't. E. g. runtime code generation isn't particularly usable in WASM, so no JIT other than browser JIT for you. Then there are stuff like WebUSB/WebNFC/WebSerial that Mozilla killed. Not that they didn't have good reasons to do so, but having a native-exposing plugin system (with some friction, don't just install anything with a click) would have covered most of the use cases without being that much of a privacy problem.
godelski 10mo ago
> The problem is not AI. The problem is that Mozilla keeps jumping on fads instead of focusing on their browser core Nah, the problem is people just want to hate on Mozilla. I mean even that Mastadon thread they bring up people hating on Mozilla for accepting crypto donations and are equating it to putting a miner in the browser. Like what a fucking joke. It's such a crazy exaggeration of what actually happened. Company just adds new way for people to give them money (which they desperately need) and then everyone gets upset. How is this not laughable? Now we're seeing a similar thing. Everyone is talking about fucking LLMs. What, do you think FF is going to start shipping a 100GB browser? Even Llama-8B is >15GB. That would be ridiculous! No, what FF is doing is implementing features like Translate (an ALREADY opt-in feature[0]) and semantic search. Seriously, go to their Labs tab! They let you opt in to try a feature to semantically search your browser history. That's not an LLM, that's a vector embedding model! What are they going to do next? Semantic search of a webpage? Regex search?! Even in their announcement the other day they mention the iOS "shake to summarize" and that's not even an AI they're shipping it's just a shortcut to Apple Intelligence. The only other thing they've announced is what already exists, a shortcut to use your chatbot of choice. That's not AI in the browser it is literally a split window. | Mozilla is not going to train its own giant LLM anytime soon.[1] > having a faint through about removing adblock support Don't be so fucking disingenuous. They said literally the opposite[1] | At some point, though, Enzor-DeMeo will have to tend to Mozilla’s own business. “I do think we need revenue diversification away from Google,” he says, “but I don’t necessarily believe we need revenue diversification away from the browser.” It seems he thinks a combination of subscription revenue, advertising, and maybe a few search and AI placement deals can get that done. He’s also bullish that things like built-in VPN and a privacy service called Monitor can get more people to pay for their browser. He says he could begin to block ad blockers in Firefox and estimates that’d bring in another $150 million, but he doesn’t want to do that. It feels off-mission. That's not even a quote from him, that's a summarization of their conversation and it literally says that removing ad blockers is against their mission. Literally the opposite of what you're suggestion. Sorry, people just want to hate on Firefox. Look, if anyone wants to be a power user there's nothing Firefox is doing from stopping them from using a fork like Mullvad or Waterfox. Those are going to keep all these AI features out. So what do we privacy maximalists care? The forks give us exactly what we want. Meanwhile we're just attacking the last line of defense against Google (Chromium) taking over the internet? How fucking stupid are we? We're eating our cake and what, complaining that the baker's hands aren't made of gold? It's just laughable at how much we love shooting ourselves in the foot here. We've been playing this same stupid fucking game for years and watching Chrome take more and more market share. Let FF be the browser for the masses and use a fucking fork if you care about true Scottsmen. It takes literally no technical skill to click download on a different webpage. Seriously, this is so fucking dumb. I'm just going to link this from further down the main post. The two toots summarize it well[2] [0] You literally have to download the translation models! [1] https://www.theverge.com/tech/845216/mozilla-ceo-anthony-enzor-demeo https://www.theverge.com/tech/845216/mozilla-ceo-anthony-enz... (https://archive.is/20251217170357/https://www.theverge.com/tech/845216/mozilla-ceo-anthony-enzor-demeo#selection-1619.0-1619.61 https://archive.is/20251217170357/https://www.theverge.com/t...) [2] https://mastodon.social/@nical@mastodon.gamedev.place/115741276288490611 https://mastodon.social/@nical@mastodon.gamedev.place/115741...
forephought4 10mo ago
5 step plan for Mozilla to succeed against the Behemoth Googzilla and the leviathans of MAWS. 1. build a team in Europe to create an email service comparable to gmail/protonmail - domains: mozmail.com, mmail.com, godmail.com, pmail.com, dogmail.com, meowmail.com - promoted as a simple everyday email – no overly complicated/advanced federati features in order to increase inter-operability, reduce spam and dealing with federalism - for more advanced features, integration links with something like signal, or a hosted comms platform 2. invest heavily in Firefox core development and service features - push for system resource and performance optimizations, even if it requires extensive architectural changes - focus on perfecting a core browser experience then developing an extension API that allows a level of UI customisations that XUL did, have unsafe/hackers warning for any extension that uses this API, even official ones - invest in KeePassXC ux and integrate it as a first class and core feature in Firefox that is useable by hackers, consumers and enterprises – offer paid services for simple database sync/backup, as well as a decent managed solution for enterprise. 3. Expand further with a suite of other services that have both self-hosted and paid management extras - calendar and email client, universally usable between providers, but first class with Firefox and mmail. - integrate something like libreoffice into a desktop client that can also be embedded into a Firefox tab. - straight forward self-hostable teams communication platform, managed cloud versions also availabe - self-hosted / managed file storage platform with web UI with integration links to other services - all of the above require a unified web, desktop and mobile ux - offer further software and hardware integrations to completely streamline personal digital management 4. Extensive marketing and brand exposure over TV and social media, while staying charitably non-profit and recognizing the digital roots - Use the firefox, gecko and other digital animals as icons - Themes and scapes from origins such as mosaic/netscape 5. In this scene Mozilla continues knocking down the buildings of the titans.
- jasonlotito 10mo ago
  It's funny how you post this comment under a comment that says no to all but 2.1 and 2.2. > The problem is that Mozilla keeps jumping on fads instead of focusing on their browser core.
  - 10mo ago
braiamp 10mo ago
> The problem is that Mozilla keeps jumping on fads instead of focusing on their browser core No, the problem is that Mozilla needs money if they want to stop leaning off Google, and people are simply too blind by their hatred of AI that doesn't figure out that Mozilla needs money. What is giving shit loads of money right now? A-fucking-I. If their investors portfolio doesn't include AI on their products, nobody will give them even a second look, much less the funds they need. Mozilla isn't jumping on fads, it's jumping towards were money is. You want Mozilla to stop doing that? Guarantee their moneis flow. Otherwise, you are a consumer of a free product and you don't get to decide how the free product gets financed. Luckily for you, they haven't decided to make _you_ the product.
- zdragnar 10mo ago
  A-fucking-I doesn't make the product better. Mozilla constantly runs in every direction other than what their core users want or need. > You want Mozilla to stop doing that? Guarantee their moneis flow. Sure, just as soon as they sell something a privacy focused user of a browser wants. Privacy focused password management built into Firefox with paid sync or enterprise integration. Privacy focused paid email hosting, works great with Thunderbird. Had they done any of this back in the day, I'd gladly have paid for it and trusted them over smaller names or Google. I'm sure they're getting lots of money to throw around playing with the new shiny, but that's not going to keep their users, or keep them happy. They lost a ton of market share when the browser was slow as an old dog and chrome came on the scene, but they didn't do nearly enough to make up for it.
  - rchaud 10mo ago
    Interestingly, Proton does a lot of what you're talking about: email hosting, password management, cloud storage, docs and spreadsheets. The only thing they don't have is their own browser.
    - immibis 10mo ago
      Proton started banning journalists and political dissidents, so they're a joke now.
HeckFeck 10mo ago
Every browser developer should be forced to take an annual pilgrimage to this gravestone: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flock_(web_browser) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flock_(web_browser)
- baggachipz 10mo ago
  1. Take normal browser 2. Shoehorn flavor-of-the-week web-based over-hyped thing into browser "natively" 3. ??? 4. Profit!
giancarlostoro 10mo ago
I am waiting for a serious fork of Mozilla to emerge at this point that pays the maintainers better in a bid to overtake Mozilla itself. People would donate to get a better browser, people dont donate because Mozilla wastes all their donor funds on nonsense.
- aryonoco 10mo ago
  There are those. I pay to support Floorp. But I also donate to Firefox and Thunderbird cause the forks wouldn’t exist without them.
  - mort96 10mo ago
    I may be prematurely judgemental here but I just can not take a project named "floorp" seriously. Your second paragraph is more important though: none of these let's call them Firefox distributions are proper forks. They're not developed by teams who could develop and maintain a browser independent of Mozilla. I believe that's what your parent comment means by a "serious fork". Floorp and Waterfox and LibreWolf are not that.
    - giancarlostoro 10mo ago
      Kind of agree, needs a better name. It sounds like the name of a social media platform.
    - chiffaa 10mo ago
      After using projects named like "slurp", "eww" (combined with "yuck"), "yay", "honkers railway", "jason" and many many others, I personally kind of gave up on any attempts to judge projects by their titles. Partly due to many developers being whimsical nerds, partly because even marketable names say nothing about the product half the time so what's the point anyway
    - aryonoco 10mo ago
      It’s Firefox fork being developed by a bunch of Japanese students. They do good work. I can forgive them for not being the best at naming things in English.
tim333 10mo ago
I just force quit Firefox because it was slowing the macbook with loads of memory use for nothing much running. On with Chrome... They should that sort of thing?
- galleywest200 10mo ago
  I have not really ever had this issue, and I use Firefox Developer Edition on an M2 Macbook Pro every work day.
  - tim333 10mo ago
    Ah - maybe my extensions or something.
  - x0x0 10mo ago
    I have it too. If you leave firefox running for weeks at a go, it is really bad at returning memory to the OS. m3.
rPlayer6554 10mo ago
Ok so walk me through how _only_ focusing on the browser core will make them money other than continuing to be dependent on Google. How can they diversify their revenue streams? I agree they should make the browser core good, but right now they are entirely dependent on their biggest competitor.
- tliltocatl 10mo ago
  - Start accepting small individual donations solely for the Firefox team (rather than generalized Mozilla stuff that goes on anything but Firefox). - Start crowdfunding for features. - Go RedHat route, offer an enterprise version with centrally managed profiles and DLP feature. Not exactly free-as-in-freedom stuff but still better than adtech. - Get some EU bureaucrats thru a FUD session against Chrome (does it counts as FUD if it's true?), then apply for some EU funding program. Dirty and messy, still better than adtech. None of this is particularly lucrative or clean, but I don't see how AI would bring them any __revenue__ (do not confuse with investment) at all. There are too many players there already and many of them are more established - and what Mozilla have? - Their engineering team? Maybe. - The browser engine? Completely irrelevant (and that's exactly the problem). - Their userbase? The userbase they have left seems extremely averse to value-added features in general, and the AI kind in particular. Then assume they focus on integrating AI into the browser, how do they monetize it next? Sell data? Then there is no reason to choose them over Google. Charge for interference? No chance to compete against established hyperscalers there and would go against their local-first selling point. The sad truth about platform-crucial software like a web browser is that monetizing it in any way inherently reduces it's value for users. And in case of Firefox it's a pretty small margin that keeps it competitive.
  - godshatter 10mo ago
    > - Start accepting small individual donations solely for the Firefox team (rather than generalized Mozilla stuff that goes on anything but Firefox). > > - Start crowdfunding for features. Just these two things would make me happy (assuming the crowdfunding goes to the Firefox team as well). I don't know any of the Mozilla execs but from the outside it looks an awful lot like some grifters were attracted to the free Google money and took money from the people doing the actual work. If I'm wrong, my apologies. There just seems to be a lot of high salaries and a lot of developer layoffs.
parl_match 10mo ago
> There are a tons of "we bundled all the latest crap" Chrome forks out there. Nobody needs more those. And it's fine if they want to compete in that space, but they don't even seem to have the drive or desire to excel there. To this day, I'm surprised that chromium powers electron and firefox hasn't released a compelling alternative.

echelon 10mo ago

> people screaming "but AI is the future" I witnes far more people screaming against AI. The media started kicking this off in 2021, 2022. It blossomed into a fully distributed, organic, memetic device from there. It has a life of its own now. Children and young people are practically indoctrinated if you look at social media comments. I was invited to give lectures to several art schools about using Blender, Unreal Engine, and mocap software with diffusion models. The students weren't very polite. Most of the "questions" I got at each of the campuses were simply statements of affirmation about how much they hate AI. Good looking and well-reviewed indie games that incorporate AI elements or tools are dumped on by these folks. It's like butting into conversations to say something bad about AI scores points or something. > Mozilla keeps jumping on fads Agreed on this point, though. They're rudderless. And Google is probably quite happy about the fact that their antitrust litigation sponge can't steal away their users.

epgui 10mo ago
> simply statements of affirmation about how much they hate AI I wonder what that might mean!
tliltocatl 10mo ago
If you keep shoveling a thing to people who don't care, you'll get tons of irrational pushback no matter how the good this thing is. And AI isn't even particularly good.
ehnto 10mo ago
There is a clear substance behind the pushback on AI in creative work, and it would be foolish to dismiss it as irrational. You might be missing the forest for the trees if you focus too much in implementation details, the dislike for is AI is a bit deeper than that.
- tliltocatl 10mo ago
  On the other hand, it also sometimes feels as if some "old media" journalists see AI as a convenient target to avenge the tech sector for disrupting them. Not that it makes AI slop any less sloppy.
- Nasrudith 10mo ago
  Nothing prevents the prevailing trends from being utterly stupid. Just the opposite, really.
PunchyHamster 10mo ago
> I witnes far more people screaming against AI. If you shove it into people's faces, they will have knee jerk reaction and hate it. If the AI industry didn't desperately try to push it in every possible way in desperate bid to be profitable and it was just a thing that slowly gets better and is value added, not a nagging push, there would be far less of that. But companies like MS have idea of consent of average rapist and will not even give option "no, I don't want copilot in teams", there is only "add it now" or "remind later"
- pjc50 10mo ago
  "AI" is the technology that makes your computers and electricity more expensive, while slowly ruining the authenticity of everything you come across on the internet. I saw a sad post on bsky today about how the joy of animal behavior videos has been destroyed for that poster, because they can no longer be sure if it's real or just a fake.
- m4rtink 10mo ago
  Add to that various hardware shortages caused by the AI mania or more examples of AI missuse and I wonder where we might end up eventually if people will get even angrier.
  - ruszki 10mo ago
    I’m quite sure that these shortages aren’t caused by mania, but oligopolies, and unpredictable countries. In undistorted markets, these should be way shorter. A year, or two maximum. At least that what supply side told us in 2020, and early 2021. It seems and predictions also say, that the shortages are with us long term. It’s even more telling that some companies leave markets where these “shortages” are, ie huge profit margins.
- tim333 10mo ago
  People tend to complain about stuff that's annoying and broken and just ignore things that work well. Like Chrome uses AI to translate language and everyone just takes it for granted.
diputsmonro 10mo ago
I wonder why nobody wants to use my pretty theft machine? I mean, it steals all their work and spits out copies that are almost as good, and almost for free! Why aren't these artists stoked about not having to do art anymore? Well, I guess it does use more energy than every existing data center, driving up costs for basic electronic components and thereby making every electronic device more expensive. And I guess the results aren't quite as good, but if you squint and don't really care about art on a human level and just want to clap like a seal at the pretty pictures then it's enough. And I guess economic forces will mean that some of them will lose their jobs when their bosses realize that they can get away with only needing half as many prompt artists. But hey, at least we don't have to pay humans to make art anymore. How glorious that our Silicon Valley gods have delivered us from the hell of creating economic incentives for humans to express themselves to other humans. Yeah, those screaming, "indoctrinated" artists are so impolite and crazy, aren't they? Don't they realize what we've done for them? We made the automatic art machine! They'll never get to make art again!

mrweasel 10mo ago

It might open up for a terrifying level of abuse, but if you can have Dtrace and eBPF implemented in the Linux kernel, you can surely design an API for allowing AIs to be plug-able within Firefox. Firefox is already a really good browser, Mozilla really should be focusing on that. They can design and implement an AI plugin system to go into that core. People who want AI can install an agent and enable the AI sub-system. If the AI companies won't implement it, Mozilla can do it and charge a fee for the plugin.

PurpleRamen 10mo ago

> The problem is that Mozilla keeps jumping on fads instead of focusing on their browser core. They always did, everyone does. This is not really new, and not really that harmful in itself. The deeper problem is that you need developers who are also understanding what they are doing, what people want and need, developers who are nerdy about some topic and very deep into their understanding of it. But Mozilla seems to lack this, which is also why they have to follow every fad blindly, because they just don't know it better, have no real vision and understanding which enables them to build something really worthful. Mozilla seems to be the embodiment of what happens when you have a task and your solution is to just throw money at it until something works. And let's be fair, it is easy to be good at something, but really hard to master it and dominate the world. It's not really their fault, they are probably doing their best, they just don't know it better, and so does everyone, including fans if we are honest. Everyone has their own preferences and goals, and often they are conflicting with each other. Mozilla has to find a common ground to server as much people as possible, and IMHO they are still good at this. Firefox used to be so much worse on some aspects, Chrome and other Browser are still worse on other aspects. Getting the perfect Browser is just not realistic. > Give us more extensibility instead. True, it's really a joke how many of their promised APIs never were finished after they killed XUL. > Keep supporting v2 manifest and add more. Didn't they say they will continue with Manifest v2? > There were genuine technical reasons for why XUL and NPAPI had to die, but we need an equally powerful alternative. Wasn't NPAPI mostly replaced with HTML5? Most stuff done with Flash or Java-Applets is now possible out of the box. Or is something missing?

tliltocatl 10mo ago
> Didn't they say they will continue with Manifest v2? Yes and that's a good thing > Wasn't NPAPI mostly replaced with HTML5? It's true that what NPAPI was used for 99% of the time is better served by HTML5. But it's not like NPAPI was limited to Flash and applets. Afair NPAPI plugins can access all native resources (which is the reason why the security sucked so much), HTML5 obviously can't. E. g. runtime code generation isn't particularly usable in WASM, so no JIT other than browser JIT for you. Then there are stuff like WebUSB/WebNFC/WebSerial that Mozilla killed. Not that they didn't have good reasons to do so, but having a native-exposing plugin system (with some friction, don't just install anything with a click) would have covered most of the use cases without being that much of a privacy problem.

godelski 10mo ago

> The problem is not AI. The problem is that Mozilla keeps jumping on fads instead of focusing on their browser core Nah, the problem is people just want to hate on Mozilla. I mean even that Mastadon thread they bring up people hating on Mozilla for accepting crypto donations and are equating it to putting a miner in the browser. Like what a fucking joke. It's such a crazy exaggeration of what actually happened. Company just adds new way for people to give them money (which they desperately need) and then everyone gets upset. How is this not laughable? Now we're seeing a similar thing. Everyone is talking about fucking LLMs. What, do you think FF is going to start shipping a 100GB browser? Even Llama-8B is >15GB. That would be ridiculous! No, what FF is doing is implementing features like Translate (an ALREADY opt-in feature[0]) and semantic search. Seriously, go to their Labs tab! They let you opt in to try a feature to semantically search your browser history. That's not an LLM, that's a vector embedding model! What are they going to do next? Semantic search of a webpage? Regex search?! Even in their announcement the other day they mention the iOS "shake to summarize" and that's not even an AI they're shipping it's just a shortcut to Apple Intelligence. The only other thing they've announced is what already exists, a shortcut to use your chatbot of choice. That's not AI in the browser it is literally a split window. | Mozilla is not going to train its own giant LLM anytime soon.[1] > having a faint through about removing adblock support Don't be so fucking disingenuous. They said literally the opposite[1] | At some point, though, Enzor-DeMeo will have to tend to Mozilla’s own business. “I do think we need revenue diversification away from Google,” he says, “but I don’t necessarily believe we need revenue diversification away from the browser.” It seems he thinks a combination of subscription revenue, advertising, and maybe a few search and AI placement deals can get that done. He’s also bullish that things like built-in VPN and a privacy service called Monitor can get more people to pay for their browser. He says he could begin to block ad blockers in Firefox and estimates that’d bring in another $150 million, but he doesn’t want to do that. It feels off-mission. That's not even a quote from him, that's a summarization of their conversation and it literally says that removing ad blockers is against their mission. Literally the opposite of what you're suggestion. Sorry, people just want to hate on Firefox. Look, if anyone wants to be a power user there's nothing Firefox is doing from stopping them from using a fork like Mullvad or Waterfox. Those are going to keep all these AI features out. So what do we privacy maximalists care? The forks give us exactly what we want. Meanwhile we're just attacking the last line of defense against Google (Chromium) taking over the internet? How fucking stupid are we? We're eating our cake and what, complaining that the baker's hands aren't made of gold? It's just laughable at how much we love shooting ourselves in the foot here. We've been playing this same stupid fucking game for years and watching Chrome take more and more market share. Let FF be the browser for the masses and use a fucking fork if you care about true Scottsmen. It takes literally no technical skill to click download on a different webpage. Seriously, this is so fucking dumb. I'm just going to link this from further down the main post. The two toots summarize it well[2] [0] You literally have to download the translation models! [1] https://www.theverge.com/tech/845216/mozilla-ceo-anthony-enzor-demeo https://www.theverge.com/tech/845216/mozilla-ceo-anthony-enz... (https://archive.is/20251217170357/https://www.theverge.com/tech/845216/mozilla-ceo-anthony-enzor-demeo#selection-1619.0-1619.61 https://archive.is/20251217170357/https://www.theverge.com/t...) [2] https://mastodon.social/@nical@mastodon.gamedev.place/115741276288490611 https://mastodon.social/@nical@mastodon.gamedev.place/115741...

forephought4 10mo ago

5 step plan for Mozilla to succeed against the Behemoth Googzilla and the leviathans of MAWS. 1. build a team in Europe to create an email service comparable to gmail/protonmail - domains: mozmail.com, mmail.com, godmail.com, pmail.com, dogmail.com, meowmail.com - promoted as a simple everyday email – no overly complicated/advanced federati features in order to increase inter-operability, reduce spam and dealing with federalism - for more advanced features, integration links with something like signal, or a hosted comms platform 2. invest heavily in Firefox core development and service features - push for system resource and performance optimizations, even if it requires extensive architectural changes - focus on perfecting a core browser experience then developing an extension API that allows a level of UI customisations that XUL did, have unsafe/hackers warning for any extension that uses this API, even official ones - invest in KeePassXC ux and integrate it as a first class and core feature in Firefox that is useable by hackers, consumers and enterprises – offer paid services for simple database sync/backup, as well as a decent managed solution for enterprise. 3. Expand further with a suite of other services that have both self-hosted and paid management extras - calendar and email client, universally usable between providers, but first class with Firefox and mmail. - integrate something like libreoffice into a desktop client that can also be embedded into a Firefox tab. - straight forward self-hostable teams communication platform, managed cloud versions also availabe - self-hosted / managed file storage platform with web UI with integration links to other services - all of the above require a unified web, desktop and mobile ux - offer further software and hardware integrations to completely streamline personal digital management 4. Extensive marketing and brand exposure over TV and social media, while staying charitably non-profit and recognizing the digital roots - Use the firefox, gecko and other digital animals as icons - Themes and scapes from origins such as mosaic/netscape 5. In this scene Mozilla continues knocking down the buildings of the titans.

jasonlotito 10mo ago
It's funny how you post this comment under a comment that says no to all but 2.1 and 2.2. > The problem is that Mozilla keeps jumping on fads instead of focusing on their browser core.
- 10mo ago

braiamp 10mo ago

> The problem is that Mozilla keeps jumping on fads instead of focusing on their browser core No, the problem is that Mozilla needs money if they want to stop leaning off Google, and people are simply too blind by their hatred of AI that doesn't figure out that Mozilla needs money. What is giving shit loads of money right now? A-fucking-I. If their investors portfolio doesn't include AI on their products, nobody will give them even a second look, much less the funds they need. Mozilla isn't jumping on fads, it's jumping towards were money is. You want Mozilla to stop doing that? Guarantee their moneis flow. Otherwise, you are a consumer of a free product and you don't get to decide how the free product gets financed. Luckily for you, they haven't decided to make _you_ the product.

zdragnar 10mo ago
A-fucking-I doesn't make the product better. Mozilla constantly runs in every direction other than what their core users want or need. > You want Mozilla to stop doing that? Guarantee their moneis flow. Sure, just as soon as they sell something a privacy focused user of a browser wants. Privacy focused password management built into Firefox with paid sync or enterprise integration. Privacy focused paid email hosting, works great with Thunderbird. Had they done any of this back in the day, I'd gladly have paid for it and trusted them over smaller names or Google. I'm sure they're getting lots of money to throw around playing with the new shiny, but that's not going to keep their users, or keep them happy. They lost a ton of market share when the browser was slow as an old dog and chrome came on the scene, but they didn't do nearly enough to make up for it.
- rchaud 10mo ago
  Interestingly, Proton does a lot of what you're talking about: email hosting, password management, cloud storage, docs and spreadsheets. The only thing they don't have is their own browser.
  - immibis 10mo ago
    Proton started banning journalists and political dissidents, so they're a joke now.

HeckFeck 10mo ago

Every browser developer should be forced to take an annual pilgrimage to this gravestone: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flock_(web_browser) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flock_(web_browser)

baggachipz 10mo ago
1. Take normal browser 2. Shoehorn flavor-of-the-week web-based over-hyped thing into browser "natively" 3. ??? 4. Profit!

giancarlostoro 10mo ago

I am waiting for a serious fork of Mozilla to emerge at this point that pays the maintainers better in a bid to overtake Mozilla itself. People would donate to get a better browser, people dont donate because Mozilla wastes all their donor funds on nonsense.

aryonoco 10mo ago
There are those. I pay to support Floorp. But I also donate to Firefox and Thunderbird cause the forks wouldn’t exist without them.
- mort96 10mo ago
  I may be prematurely judgemental here but I just can not take a project named "floorp" seriously. Your second paragraph is more important though: none of these let's call them Firefox distributions are proper forks. They're not developed by teams who could develop and maintain a browser independent of Mozilla. I believe that's what your parent comment means by a "serious fork". Floorp and Waterfox and LibreWolf are not that.
  - giancarlostoro 10mo ago
    Kind of agree, needs a better name. It sounds like the name of a social media platform.
  - chiffaa 10mo ago
    After using projects named like "slurp", "eww" (combined with "yuck"), "yay", "honkers railway", "jason" and many many others, I personally kind of gave up on any attempts to judge projects by their titles. Partly due to many developers being whimsical nerds, partly because even marketable names say nothing about the product half the time so what's the point anyway
  - aryonoco 10mo ago
    It’s Firefox fork being developed by a bunch of Japanese students. They do good work. I can forgive them for not being the best at naming things in English.

tim333 10mo ago

I just force quit Firefox because it was slowing the macbook with loads of memory use for nothing much running. On with Chrome... They should that sort of thing?

galleywest200 10mo ago
I have not really ever had this issue, and I use Firefox Developer Edition on an M2 Macbook Pro every work day.
- tim333 10mo ago
  Ah - maybe my extensions or something.
- x0x0 10mo ago
  I have it too. If you leave firefox running for weeks at a go, it is really bad at returning memory to the OS. m3.

rPlayer6554 10mo ago

Ok so walk me through how _only_ focusing on the browser core will make them money other than continuing to be dependent on Google. How can they diversify their revenue streams? I agree they should make the browser core good, but right now they are entirely dependent on their biggest competitor.

tliltocatl 10mo ago
- Start accepting small individual donations solely for the Firefox team (rather than generalized Mozilla stuff that goes on anything but Firefox). - Start crowdfunding for features. - Go RedHat route, offer an enterprise version with centrally managed profiles and DLP feature. Not exactly free-as-in-freedom stuff but still better than adtech. - Get some EU bureaucrats thru a FUD session against Chrome (does it counts as FUD if it's true?), then apply for some EU funding program. Dirty and messy, still better than adtech. None of this is particularly lucrative or clean, but I don't see how AI would bring them any __revenue__ (do not confuse with investment) at all. There are too many players there already and many of them are more established - and what Mozilla have? - Their engineering team? Maybe. - The browser engine? Completely irrelevant (and that's exactly the problem). - Their userbase? The userbase they have left seems extremely averse to value-added features in general, and the AI kind in particular. Then assume they focus on integrating AI into the browser, how do they monetize it next? Sell data? Then there is no reason to choose them over Google. Charge for interference? No chance to compete against established hyperscalers there and would go against their local-first selling point. The sad truth about platform-crucial software like a web browser is that monetizing it in any way inherently reduces it's value for users. And in case of Firefox it's a pretty small margin that keeps it competitive.
- godshatter 10mo ago
  > - Start accepting small individual donations solely for the Firefox team (rather than generalized Mozilla stuff that goes on anything but Firefox). > > - Start crowdfunding for features. Just these two things would make me happy (assuming the crowdfunding goes to the Firefox team as well). I don't know any of the Mozilla execs but from the outside it looks an awful lot like some grifters were attracted to the free Google money and took money from the people doing the actual work. If I'm wrong, my apologies. There just seems to be a lot of high salaries and a lot of developer layoffs.

parl_match 10mo ago

> There are a tons of "we bundled all the latest crap" Chrome forks out there. Nobody needs more those. And it's fine if they want to compete in that space, but they don't even seem to have the drive or desire to excel there. To this day, I'm surprised that chromium powers electron and firefox hasn't released a compelling alternative.