11 ms·

Mozilla's open source AI strategy

192 points by nalinidash 9mo ago

drnick1 9mo ago
Mozilla has stopped being relevant to open source long ago. It's are every bit as corporate as Google these days.
- cubefox 9mo ago
  That's completely false!
- pacman1337 9mo ago
  You probably like watching ads because Firefox is only browser you will have a true ad free experience. Unfortunately Firefox is slower than chrome has less support for audio, copy pasting is broken etc. So I use both depending what I am doing.
oidar 9mo ago
That sounds admirable. But it doesn't sound like a fast browser.
- everyday7732 9mo ago
  That's because the article isn't about a browser - it's a tech stack for running ai.
- fooqux 9mo ago
  Well it does say that compute is a current bottleneck, but I doubt that'll stay that way forever. There's a ton of resources going into making AI run locally, quickly. It's already gotten loads better just last year.
- striking 9mo ago
  Maybe, but I would argue that some of these features are genuinely useful and important. Take translation, for example. It's not great to have to send off a page that potentially contains identifying content to Google, but it is the easiest way to handle the matter. Firefox uses local AI to perform a decent translation relatively quickly, and I'd like them to work on improving that capability.
  - bondarchuk 9mo ago
    Many things that are not browsers are genuinely useful and important, this alone doesn't mean Mozilla should be doing them.
    - striking 9mo ago
      Translation is a necessary part of the web browsing experience for many people.
  - bluebarbet 9mo ago
    Agreed on all counts. Right now there's not even a keyboard shortcut implemented (fiddly context menu only), and the translations are sometimes dodgy too, but I still use it. It's such peace of mind to know that the translation is happening entirely locally.
LunaSea 9mo ago
I'm really not optimistic about this initiative. - Mozilla.ai agent platform: No link with the browser. Just a closed-source SaaS competitor to the many existing agentic platforms like LangChain / LangGraph. - Mozilla Data Collective: It's been made clear now that sadly data licensing doesn't matter and if you use less data than your competitor, your model will be inferior. - Real deployments: Basically getting into the public contracts and consulting grift with no priori experience. Probably banking on EU open source funding & co. - Mozilla Ventures: Redistributing a token amount of the money they are already not making (gift from Google) to fund Open Source research. - Newsletter
- everyday7732 9mo ago
  Looks like the Mozilla.ai platform is Saas but the tools themselves are open source, so you could just use them elsewhere.
  - LunaSea 9mo ago
    Indeed, but LangChain / LangGraph tools are also Open Source so its not really Mozilla bringing their Open Source culture as a differentiating factor from their competitors.
    - everyday7732 9mo ago
      Ah. I had assumed that these were tools built or contributed to by Mozilla.
      - LunaSea 9mo ago
        Mozilla is indeed developing some Open Source AI tools which will then be used in their proprietary and paying SaaS AI agent platform. What I meant to say is that existing competing solutions like LangGraph and LangChain are already Open Source themselves. So releasing Open Source AI libraries is not a new twist that Mozilla is bringing.
marczellm 9mo ago
What's a hyperscn/laller?
- realberkeaslan 9mo ago
  Hyperscalers (e.g., Azure, Google Cloud, AWS)
Lariscus 9mo ago
[flagged]
- bluGill 9mo ago
  Mozilla is not and never has been a browser company. They have always been a charity with a for profit arm that does a browser. However never has a browser been more than an after thought to any of the leadership. Of course what the world really needs is a browser company and so we try to pretend Mozilla is that, but they are not. Support an alternative browser (I'm not aware of any though. There are browser skin companies but nobody making the hard parts of a browser)
  - angoragoats 9mo ago
    I’m aware of at least two honest-to-goodness new browser projects: There’s Servo, which used to be from Mozilla, but then they abandoned it. Now I believe it’s independent after a long period of dormancy. There is also Ladybird, whose founder is a prolific and technically brilliant person but who is also, at minimum, a fascist sympathizer, in addition to being a supporter of white replacement theory and other racist ideas. Neither project, last I checked, is really close to being a “daily driver.” But they’re both in active development, so maybe in the future they’ll become legit alternatives to the Google/Apple duopoly.
    - freedomben 9mo ago
      > There is also Ladybird, whose founder is a prolific and technically brilliant person but who is also, at minimum, a fascist sympathizer, in addition to being a supporter of white replacement theory and other racist ideas. I know nothing about Ladybird or their founder, so I'm taking your word for it that they are "at minimum, a fascist sympathizer, in addition to being a supporter of white replacement theory and other racist ideas." Accepting the premise, this leads to an interesting philosophical discussion. I'm utterly repulsed by all those things, but I'm also repulsed by viewpoints and even personalities of some actors and musicians and such. In my younger days I couldn't even enjoy their art. There would be songs or shows I loved but couldn't listen to or watch once I knew about the musicians/actors views. However as I've gotten older, I've gotten more to a place where I'm able to separate the art from the artist and appreciate it more (still not perfectly, but I hope to get there someday). I'm now asking myself if I could use and/or support a browser like Ladybird (assuming it's a good product, again I know nothing about it) even despite the founder's reprehensible views. I'm not sure, but I feel like I want to be able to.
nusl 9mo ago
I guess replies on this thread are evident that Mozilla has lost much of the trust and goodwill it once enjoyed. Admittedly I am also very skeptical that Mozilla has the ability or genuine interest to make this work.
- rzmmm 9mo ago
  I'm hopeful. The open source AI ecosystem could benefit from large players like Mozilla making moves.
  - wolvoleo 9mo ago
    In what world is Mozilla large?
    - rzmmm 9mo ago
      Maybe influential would be a better word choice. Firefox has 100M+ users.
- Larrikin 9mo ago
  There is always a pile on on Firebox for not being perfect. Sometimes with valid complaints. But if you dig deeper nearly always the commenter is using a version of Chrome and justifies it over Firefox for a very shallow or outdated reason. Firefox would do well to listen to some of the criticism about the browser and ignore the noise about anything else There's also the cohort of bad web developers that only test on Chrome
  - pjmlp 9mo ago
    Including everyone that ships Chrome with their application as "native" app. VSCode gets a pass, because apparently it is the only programmer's editor that many only care about providing plugins nowadays.
    - no_wizard 9mo ago
philipallstar 9mo ago
> Mozilla was born to change this, and Firefox succeeded beyond what most people thought possible — dropping Internet Explorer’s market share to 55% in just a few years and ushering in the Web 2.0 era. Is this true? I can see from here[0] that its peak was 32%, as IE was really on the back burner but before Chrome had fully risen to dominance, but I wouldn't claim that it was responsible for IE's market share drop. [0] https://mspoweruser.com/firefox-statistics https://mspoweruser.com/firefox-statistics
- codebyaditya 9mo ago
  You’re right on the numbers....Firefox never had majority share. The stronger claim is causal influence, not dominance. I recently read somewhere that the Firefox (and later Chrome) forced standards compliance and broke IE’s de-facto monopoly mindset. IE’s decline was gradual and multi-factor, but Firefox clearly shifted developer and user expectations.
  - angoragoats 9mo ago
    No one is claiming, here or in the article, that Firefox ever had a majority share. I don’t know if the 55% number for IE is 100% correct but it sounds like the right ballpark to me. The browser market was a lot more fragmented 15+ years ago, so saying that IE had 55% market share and Firefox had 32%, leaving 13% for other browsers, sounds completely right to me.
- diffeomorphism 9mo ago
  When do you think the "web 2.0 era" was? Web 2.0 is around 2003 or so and chrome would not even exist for another few years. Giving Firefox/phoenix/Netscape the majority credit for the first fall of IE seems accurate. The rise of chrome happened afterwards and by then IE also fell much deeper than 55%.
  - freedomben 9mo ago
    Yeah, my anecdotal memories aren't worth much, but in that era it was all IE or Firefox. Even once Chrome came along it still took quite some time before I noticed it popping up on normie people's systems.
linuxftw 9mo ago
I think this is a good initiative. Having major software components be part of foundations, rather than single-vendor backed, is always a good thing. TBD if this succeeds or not, but I think they are doing a good thing here.
maxdo 9mo ago
A render css company will try to change the future of ai
brainless 9mo ago
I like the high level points but unless Mozilla finds revenue from this, are they not doing too much with mostly donation based revenue?
- conartist6 9mo ago
  Being the agent of the user isn't particularly profitable. For example: companies want the users to be shown ads, and users generally don't want to be shown ads. But profit, which is to say money you make without having to directly work for it, comes from selling the user's interests away. Like, perhaps, choosing to take a bribe to cement Google's search monopoly, a fundamentally anticompetitive behavior which, even as it makes cash for Mozilla, costs the web far, far more. They've lost their way completely as an independent entity, and a post like this that doesn't reaaally seem to grasp that weight of that conundrum comes no closer to convincing me that they can find their way back to the light.
- glenstein 9mo ago
  I think you're right but I suspect that's the point. AI may be eating into search, and that could threaten their search licensing deal. Apple just struck a deal with Google to use Gemini, though it sounds like Apple paying Google for the privilege. Ominous if you're a browser company looking to sell a license for a preferred AI tool.
whinvik 9mo ago
I will be honest. I love that post, makes me want to go see what they are doing. However, I haven't seen anything from Mozilla in recent years that makes me trust this has a future.
- kwanbix 9mo ago
  [flagged]
  - kwanbix 9mo ago
    [flagged]
- bigbadfeline 9mo ago
  I'll be honest, when I see another "Hate Firefox" fest, I ask only one question "Quo bono?" > I haven't seen anything from Mozilla in recent years that makes me trust this has a future. As opposed to what? Chrome? What's the future there? The various Firefox derivatives will die a quick death if Firefox dies. The strings attached to Chrome derivatives make them pointless. So, what's left? What are we discussing here? There's no alternative, it's that simple. On the other hand, joining the hate-fest on various forums cannot and does not help Mozilla to find a better way. One is peeved by this, another by that, go figure... I'd call it childish if it wasn't so damaging.
pjmlp 9mo ago
What I care about is the non-existent Firefox strategy, but Mozilla is making me not care to fully embrace ChromeOS Platform.
rafterydj 9mo ago
I'll be contrarian to the thread sentiment and say: Mozilla has misstepped in the past, and will continue to do so, and they're partially funded by competitors for antitrust reasons, etc. That said, I can't really disagree with anything in this. As a developer (and socially conscious human) I want to move in the direction of openness.
- giancarlostoro 9mo ago
  I think the problem many of us have is it feels like Mozilla invests more effort into everything other than its browser, we see the things they do outside of Mozilla, I mean it was so bad Thunderbird had to become its own foundation due to lack of funding! I would love for there to be a world where Mozilla maintains Firefox and can make for product projects that provide higher value. I also have a pipe dream of one day someone like (and if they read this, and anyone who reads this will think I'm crazy) CloudFlare just buys Firefox itself from Mozilla so it can finally be funded correctly. CloudFlare has an interesting talent pool and I'm sure there's people who work with Rust / have worked with Rust who can help fund something like Firefox. Then I would like to see them create a true open foundation whose entire bottom line goes towards Firefox, not to anything else. Free the fox from corporate shennanigans. By my own corporate shennanigans. And CF could be swapped out with any company bold enough to free the fox.
  - dralley 9mo ago
    > I think the problem many of us have is it feels like Mozilla invests more effort into everything other than its browser, we see the things they do outside of Mozilla, I mean it was so bad Thunderbird had to become its own foundation due to lack of funding! And then people simultaneously complain that Mozilla is reliant on Google for funding. There are not many good revenue options available for a browser other than selling search defaults - and AI may start choking off that revenue as well - but Mozilla also can't touch AI without being screamed at. I mean, even literally this one sentence is self-contradictory. Thunderbird is not their browser. You complain that they "invest more effort into everything other than their browser" and then complain that they don't invest enough in Thunderbird. No win situation for them in terms of public opinion. * They can't get diversify their revenue to be less dependent on Google without doing things that people view as "distractions" * They don't get credit when the "distractions" are for the public good, like LetsEncrypt, Rust, Opus / AV1, etc. * They get punished for de-prioritizing "distractions" like Thunderbird and Servo and Rust because those distractions are popular. * For years they were simultaneously being dragged for dropping the XUL extension ecosystem, and also dragged for low performance and lack of multiprocessing and a bunch of other things which were being kneecapped hard by the XUL extension ecosystem. It's not like I love their management or anything, certainly they've made mistakes, but the narcissism of small differences hits them with full force relative to every other competitor in the space.
pcmaffey 9mo ago
It’s an interesting choice to frame this initiative around “open AI”. That’s quite a battle to pick right out of the gate.
drnick1 9mo ago
The open source community will start taking Firefox seriously again when all the AI shit is removed for good and real improvements to performance and privacy are made. Despite all the posturing about "respecting your privacy and freedom," the stock configuration of Firefox is trivially fingerprintable. At the very least, a privacy-focused browser should adopt the Tor patches and report standardized spoofed values for hardware components and disable by default all privacy invasive anti-features like WebGL. This isn't difficult to do, but illustrates the gap between empty promises and what is actually delivered.
- plagiarist 9mo ago
  I am going with the Waterfox / Librewolf forks
- freedomben 9mo ago
  I'd definitely love to see them take some steps, but at the points where a minor increase in privacy leads to a much worse UX for average people (aka, "why doesn't this site work in FF, FF sucks!" because they don't know they have to enable something). If Firefox becomes a browser that is harder to use then it will only ever be used by the extremely small niche of people that care about that. That will only further lead to more "not tested on Firefox" web development. I already have to have Chrome available on my machine because of sites like Ramp.com and Mailgun that don't work on Firefox, and that would only get worse.
  - drnick1 9mo ago
    > I'd definitely love to see them take some steps, but at the points where a minor increase in privacy leads to a much worse UX for average people Disabling Javascript or even just third party scripts does lead to major breakage, but reporting spoofed values for identifiers like Tor does not. The Arkenfox user.js does all of this and more, but these options are not enabled by default. This shows that Firefox does not care much about privacy in practice. The only "breakage" that I have encountered with such a hardened configuration is related to the spoofing of the time zone. But the fundamental issue is that Javascript/browsers should have not been designed to allow websites to extract this kind of personal information in the first place. But even that is not enough and users are still fingerprintable. In an ideal world, the only thing a website should see is the originating IP and nothing else. If anything, Brave has done more to harden Chromium than Mozilla has with Firefox, even though Brave comes with its own set of problems (scammy crypto integrations, AI, VPN and other stuff).
catapart 9mo ago
> So: Are you in? Nope! Very happy to be entirely out, thanks.
mentalgear 9mo ago
Like many here on HN, I’m skeptical, also about Mozilla, but the blog post is compelling in its plan plus there’s a new CEO in town. So I think what we can do is give them the benefit of the doubt and approach this with cautious optimism for now instead of just negativity.
- vuggamie 9mo ago
  The new CEO centered AI ("It's Time to Evolve Firefox Into an AI Browser") in his first communication to the community. Spawned at least three new forks and introduced people to LibreWolf. His first communication reduced trust: "It is a privilege to lead an organization with a long history of standing up for people and building technology that puts them first." Now let's put people first by making Firefox an AI first browser. Enzor-Demeo would have made an excellent Microsoft product manager. Too bad he didn't get the job.
- NelsonMinar 9mo ago
  New CTO too. This post is written by Raffi Krikorian who joined in September. https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/leadership/mozilla-welcomes-raffi-krikorian-chief-technology-officer/ https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/leadership/mozilla-welco...
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
tomcam 9mo ago
How about finishing Servo?
- fyrn_ 9mo ago
  They've fully disowned Servo. On the plus side that means you can donate to Servo directly, and the project actually has a decent amount of contributors now
  - tomcam 9mo ago
    Duly donated $100. Thanks.
PedroBatista 9mo ago
Good decision for a change, now looking at execution track record and ability to stick with it.. yeah, that's where the bad news start. They have a tendency to go from trend to trend and always a "me too, I'm here" player. Deliver first and stick with it, Mozilla's goodwill fund is long gone to be excited about "mission statements".
rubyfan 9mo ago
>Now AI is becoming the new intermediary. It’s what I’ve started calling “Layer 8” — the agentic layer that mediates between you and everything else on the internet. These systems will negotiate on our behalf, filter our information, shape our recommendations, and increasingly determine how we interact with the entire digital world. This is a sad statement. It reminds me of Wall-E. Big tech created the environmental ruins of today’s internet through perverse incentives. Now we need robots to go sift through the garbage and think for us so we don’t have to be exposed to the toxic internet. It feels like we have lost so much.
zb3 9mo ago
> So: Are you in? No, I just want Mozilla to focus on Firefox, the browser.
TomMasz 9mo ago
As a long-time Firefox user, I don't want them to have an "AI strategy", I want them to have a browser improvement strategy.
- luisgvv 9mo ago
  Agree, I'm not the kind of guy that has 100 tabs open (10 at the time I'm typing this), but when I came back 2 years ago I noticed that it isn't as snappy and fast as it used to be 15 years ago before I switched to Chrome.
- culi 9mo ago
  Firefox has improved significantly. It's improvement strategy is mostly focused on what developers ask them to focus on. They've had great performance on the yearly interops https://wpt.fyi/interop-2021 https://wpt.fyi/interop-2021 https://wpt.fyi/interop-2022 https://wpt.fyi/interop-2022 https://wpt.fyi/interop-2023 https://wpt.fyi/interop-2023 https://wpt.fyi/interop-2024 https://wpt.fyi/interop-2024 https://wpt.fyi/interop-2025 https://wpt.fyi/interop-2025
  - knowitnone3 9mo ago
    what developers do they still have. their dev console is so bad compared to Chrome. Mozilla abandoned their user base and the users have moved on.
    - culi 9mo ago
      I'm surprised to hear that. I was under the assumption that it was generally acknowledged that the Firefox dev tools were far and away the best of the major browsers. I always find myself missing them when having to use Chrome devtools at least. I feel like nowadays they both have basically the same featureset so maybe it's more about how well you know how to use them
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
28304283409234 9mo ago
Please let me pay for Firefox and have the proceed fund Firefox directly. This is not 1999 anymore. We are all wealthy grown ups now.
- pmontra 9mo ago
  Yes, but how large is the subset of Firefox users that are willing to pay for a browser? Take that number and multiply it either by 10 o by 100 and you get the order of magnitude. I googled this https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1mhks3h/firefoxs_weekly_active_users_fall_below_150/ https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1mhks3h/firefoxs_w... Let's say we are at 100 million users. If only 1 out of 100 pay, it's 10 to 100 million dollars per year. A lot of money or a puny amount, it depends.
  - rpastuszak 9mo ago
    a) It’s insane how little we pay for browsers given their utility. b) Many people would be happy to pay extra for a browser to support free access for others (The Guardian was a decent example of that IIRC).
  - 28304283409234 9mo ago
    And they claim to have at least 200 million users. If 1% pays a yearly fee of 10 dollars, surely that's enough to fund development.
    - glenstein 9mo ago
      I'm in favor of it, but that would raise about 4% of what Mozilla needs.
    - hurfdurf 9mo ago
      Going by the 2023 financial report (getting the 2024 report requires to submit a mail address?!), Mozilla spent over 500mil in that year, 328m on salaries (page 5). https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2024/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2024/
mkroman 9mo ago
I don't understand how they expect offline LLM models to work in a meaningful capacity for users.. Isn't there a single multilingual person working at Mozilla? All of the small LLM models break down as soon as you try to do something that isn't written in English, because - surprise - they're just too small. There would need to be a hardware breakthrough, or they would have to somehow solve the heavy cost of switching the models between pages. Instead of useful AI stuff that is a clear improvement to accessibility, they're insistent on ham-fisting LLM solutions that no one have even asked for. Off the top of my head, they could instead: 1. Integrate something like whisper to add automatic captions to videos or transcribe audio 2. Integrate one of the many really great text to speech models to read articles or text out loud
- capitainenemo 9mo ago
  Mozilla did integrate TTS into Firefox - in fact, one of the better FOSS TTS AI models out their was their initiative. https://github.com/mozilla/TTS https://github.com/mozilla/TTS
  - mkroman 9mo ago
    Ah yeah, there's this: https://github.com/mozilla/TTS https://github.com/mozilla/TTS I can't seem to find anything that mentions a Firefox integration though?
    - capitainenemo 9mo ago
      Click Reader mode on a web page, then the read aloud option in the sidebar. Note that how well it works on Linux will depend on your distro and default settings, as is common for Linux world. They do try to provide setup instructions if your linux distro has issues. ... now whether that model is integrated by default, no idea. I imagine that depends on size. Oh, and mozilla's off-line translate for private translation of web pages... that's another neat AI thing they added that I've found super helpful. Chrome still requires sending the content to their servers.
      - 9mo ago
b1085436 9mo ago
I genuinely don't understand the "permissioned data" assumption. Presumably, all the current models that were trained on illegitimate scraping of vastly larger sources will always have the upper hand (in terms of raw power, obviously at the cost of regurgitating evil stuff too), because they just have absorbed way more diverse data in their training. So the models trained on ethical datasets only will not be able to compete, unless they too rely on a common base of "foundational sin" data and just add those datasets as an ethical layer to cover the rotten roots. Is it really possible to start training from scratch at this stage and compete with the existing models, using only ethical datasets? Hasn't it been established that without the stolen data, those models could not exist or compete?
- jd172 9mo ago
  Personally I would rather use a 'bad' ai that's trained ethically and runs locally than a good ai trained on stolen data that requires me to surrender my thoughts to the cloud. whether or not it's possible to compete I guess we'll see but I am hopeful and appreciative that Mozilla is trying, as I am getting tired of big tech trying to force everyone to hand over even more unhinged amounts of data than what they're already taking from us.
  - b1085436 9mo ago
    I strongly suspect that it is absolutely impossible to have an even remotely usable/useful "AI" trained on tiny datasets, and that instead of training only on ethical data, companies that want to sound ethical will use an extra post-training step for dirty foundation models to behave more ethically as if they'd only learned from ethical sources. I'd hate for this to become the norm, but I fear this is logically what annoucements like this one really mean. The difference in scale is so vast -- taking whatever you want from the entire internet -- vs hand-curated datasets with explicit authorisation and free to use. It's like trying to make a grain of sand gravitate around a marble in the playground, to mimic the moon around the Earth – won't work.
bingemaker 9mo ago
> Small models have gotten remarkably good. 1 to 8 billion parameters, tuned for specific tasks What models is Mozilla talking about?
- internet_points 9mo ago
  Firefox does offline translation and offline tts. It is quite amazing. Unfortunately half the tech crowd is like "BURN anything that has been in the same room as AI" and the other half is yoloing agentic browsers and uploading all their pron history to the datalakes
yogthos 9mo ago
In my view, this is the exact right approach. LLMs aren’t going anywhere, these tools are here to stay. The only question is how they will be developed going forward, and who controls them. Boycotting AI is a really naive idea that’s just a way for people to signal group membership. Saying I hate AI and I’m not going to use it is really trending and makes people feel like they’re doing something meaningful, but it’s just another version of trying to vote the problem away. It doesn’t work. The real solution is to roll up the sleeves and built an a version of this technology that’s open, transparent, and community driven.
josh-sematic 9mo ago
Strange to me that they don’t mention HuggingFace, which I think of as a pretty leading player in open{source|weight|data} AI.
nilshauk 9mo ago
I detest AI on the grounds that it causes an overuse of our planet's resources as well as stealing IP and exploiting underpaid data workers. However, if Mozilla can launch something capable that steals the thunder from all the closed source AI alternatives that might make the bubble pop finally. Stock markets shook when Deepseek came on the scene and proved that clever coding might make up for using older hardware. The market leaders' moat suddenly didn't seem so impenetrable. In that same vein Mozilla might make a real dent by truly commodifying AI. AI stocks are highly valued currently because there's an idea that the leaders have something no one can copy.
johnea 9mo ago
Has mozilla ever hired a CEO on the premise of "Our top priority is resolving the long standing bugs in our web and email clients"? I'm still bitching, years later, about thunderbird failing to update IMAP folder contents (i.e. sync with server) until I click on the folder. While it may still reign as the "capital of the industry", there's a certain kind of technical brain damage that comes from being located in the bay area. Let's just call it "proximity to venture capital"...
dieselgate 9mo ago
I've been using Waterfox the past month or two and it's great.
countWSS 9mo ago
This has the feeling of corporate feel-good PR release: its essentially content-less AI-generated rehashing "our models are freer/more open-source" which seems silly since they don't develop anything unlike DeepSeek/GLM/Qwen the real open-source giants. Mozilla is a middle-man that could use open-source agents, but it pretending to be the "gatekeeper" of "open AI". Their key motivation is exposed in the middle of text: "The Mozilla Data Collective is building a marketplace for data that is properly licensed, clearly sourced, and aligned with the values of the communities it comes from." This is far away from Firefox roots, whatever corporate stewards are at helm of mozilla now think exclusively in terms of marketplaces and "economics of data".. Futher reading "so we’re deepening our engagement with governments and enterprises adopting sovereign, auditable AI systems. These engagements are the feedback loops that tell us where the stack breaks and where openness needs reinforcement." Hard pass.

192 points by nalinidash 9mo ago

drnick1 9mo ago

Mozilla has stopped being relevant to open source long ago. It's are every bit as corporate as Google these days.

cubefox 9mo ago
That's completely false!
pacman1337 9mo ago
You probably like watching ads because Firefox is only browser you will have a true ad free experience. Unfortunately Firefox is slower than chrome has less support for audio, copy pasting is broken etc. So I use both depending what I am doing.

oidar 9mo ago

That sounds admirable. But it doesn't sound like a fast browser.

everyday7732 9mo ago
That's because the article isn't about a browser - it's a tech stack for running ai.
fooqux 9mo ago
Well it does say that compute is a current bottleneck, but I doubt that'll stay that way forever. There's a ton of resources going into making AI run locally, quickly. It's already gotten loads better just last year.
striking 9mo ago
Maybe, but I would argue that some of these features are genuinely useful and important. Take translation, for example. It's not great to have to send off a page that potentially contains identifying content to Google, but it is the easiest way to handle the matter. Firefox uses local AI to perform a decent translation relatively quickly, and I'd like them to work on improving that capability.
- bondarchuk 9mo ago
  Many things that are not browsers are genuinely useful and important, this alone doesn't mean Mozilla should be doing them.
  - striking 9mo ago
    Translation is a necessary part of the web browsing experience for many people.
- bluebarbet 9mo ago
  Agreed on all counts. Right now there's not even a keyboard shortcut implemented (fiddly context menu only), and the translations are sometimes dodgy too, but I still use it. It's such peace of mind to know that the translation is happening entirely locally.

LunaSea 9mo ago

I'm really not optimistic about this initiative. - Mozilla.ai agent platform: No link with the browser. Just a closed-source SaaS competitor to the many existing agentic platforms like LangChain / LangGraph. - Mozilla Data Collective: It's been made clear now that sadly data licensing doesn't matter and if you use less data than your competitor, your model will be inferior. - Real deployments: Basically getting into the public contracts and consulting grift with no priori experience. Probably banking on EU open source funding & co. - Mozilla Ventures: Redistributing a token amount of the money they are already not making (gift from Google) to fund Open Source research. - Newsletter

everyday7732 9mo ago
Looks like the Mozilla.ai platform is Saas but the tools themselves are open source, so you could just use them elsewhere.
- LunaSea 9mo ago
  Indeed, but LangChain / LangGraph tools are also Open Source so its not really Mozilla bringing their Open Source culture as a differentiating factor from their competitors.
  - everyday7732 9mo ago
    Ah. I had assumed that these were tools built or contributed to by Mozilla.
    - LunaSea 9mo ago
      Mozilla is indeed developing some Open Source AI tools which will then be used in their proprietary and paying SaaS AI agent platform. What I meant to say is that existing competing solutions like LangGraph and LangChain are already Open Source themselves. So releasing Open Source AI libraries is not a new twist that Mozilla is bringing.

marczellm 9mo ago

What's a hyperscn/laller?

realberkeaslan 9mo ago
Hyperscalers (e.g., Azure, Google Cloud, AWS)

Lariscus 9mo ago

[flagged]

bluGill 9mo ago
Mozilla is not and never has been a browser company. They have always been a charity with a for profit arm that does a browser. However never has a browser been more than an after thought to any of the leadership. Of course what the world really needs is a browser company and so we try to pretend Mozilla is that, but they are not. Support an alternative browser (I'm not aware of any though. There are browser skin companies but nobody making the hard parts of a browser)
- angoragoats 9mo ago
  I’m aware of at least two honest-to-goodness new browser projects: There’s Servo, which used to be from Mozilla, but then they abandoned it. Now I believe it’s independent after a long period of dormancy. There is also Ladybird, whose founder is a prolific and technically brilliant person but who is also, at minimum, a fascist sympathizer, in addition to being a supporter of white replacement theory and other racist ideas. Neither project, last I checked, is really close to being a “daily driver.” But they’re both in active development, so maybe in the future they’ll become legit alternatives to the Google/Apple duopoly.
  - freedomben 9mo ago
    > There is also Ladybird, whose founder is a prolific and technically brilliant person but who is also, at minimum, a fascist sympathizer, in addition to being a supporter of white replacement theory and other racist ideas. I know nothing about Ladybird or their founder, so I'm taking your word for it that they are "at minimum, a fascist sympathizer, in addition to being a supporter of white replacement theory and other racist ideas." Accepting the premise, this leads to an interesting philosophical discussion. I'm utterly repulsed by all those things, but I'm also repulsed by viewpoints and even personalities of some actors and musicians and such. In my younger days I couldn't even enjoy their art. There would be songs or shows I loved but couldn't listen to or watch once I knew about the musicians/actors views. However as I've gotten older, I've gotten more to a place where I'm able to separate the art from the artist and appreciate it more (still not perfectly, but I hope to get there someday). I'm now asking myself if I could use and/or support a browser like Ladybird (assuming it's a good product, again I know nothing about it) even despite the founder's reprehensible views. I'm not sure, but I feel like I want to be able to.

nusl 9mo ago

I guess replies on this thread are evident that Mozilla has lost much of the trust and goodwill it once enjoyed. Admittedly I am also very skeptical that Mozilla has the ability or genuine interest to make this work.

rzmmm 9mo ago
I'm hopeful. The open source AI ecosystem could benefit from large players like Mozilla making moves.
- wolvoleo 9mo ago
  In what world is Mozilla large?
  - rzmmm 9mo ago
    Maybe influential would be a better word choice. Firefox has 100M+ users.
Larrikin 9mo ago
There is always a pile on on Firebox for not being perfect. Sometimes with valid complaints. But if you dig deeper nearly always the commenter is using a version of Chrome and justifies it over Firefox for a very shallow or outdated reason. Firefox would do well to listen to some of the criticism about the browser and ignore the noise about anything else There's also the cohort of bad web developers that only test on Chrome
- pjmlp 9mo ago
  Including everyone that ships Chrome with their application as "native" app. VSCode gets a pass, because apparently it is the only programmer's editor that many only care about providing plugins nowadays.
  - no_wizard 9mo ago

philipallstar 9mo ago

> Mozilla was born to change this, and Firefox succeeded beyond what most people thought possible — dropping Internet Explorer’s market share to 55% in just a few years and ushering in the Web 2.0 era. Is this true? I can see from here[0] that its peak was 32%, as IE was really on the back burner but before Chrome had fully risen to dominance, but I wouldn't claim that it was responsible for IE's market share drop. [0] https://mspoweruser.com/firefox-statistics https://mspoweruser.com/firefox-statistics

codebyaditya 9mo ago
You’re right on the numbers....Firefox never had majority share. The stronger claim is causal influence, not dominance. I recently read somewhere that the Firefox (and later Chrome) forced standards compliance and broke IE’s de-facto monopoly mindset. IE’s decline was gradual and multi-factor, but Firefox clearly shifted developer and user expectations.
- angoragoats 9mo ago
  No one is claiming, here or in the article, that Firefox ever had a majority share. I don’t know if the 55% number for IE is 100% correct but it sounds like the right ballpark to me. The browser market was a lot more fragmented 15+ years ago, so saying that IE had 55% market share and Firefox had 32%, leaving 13% for other browsers, sounds completely right to me.
diffeomorphism 9mo ago
When do you think the "web 2.0 era" was? Web 2.0 is around 2003 or so and chrome would not even exist for another few years. Giving Firefox/phoenix/Netscape the majority credit for the first fall of IE seems accurate. The rise of chrome happened afterwards and by then IE also fell much deeper than 55%.
- freedomben 9mo ago
  Yeah, my anecdotal memories aren't worth much, but in that era it was all IE or Firefox. Even once Chrome came along it still took quite some time before I noticed it popping up on normie people's systems.

linuxftw 9mo ago

I think this is a good initiative. Having major software components be part of foundations, rather than single-vendor backed, is always a good thing. TBD if this succeeds or not, but I think they are doing a good thing here.

maxdo 9mo ago

A render css company will try to change the future of ai

brainless 9mo ago

I like the high level points but unless Mozilla finds revenue from this, are they not doing too much with mostly donation based revenue?

conartist6 9mo ago
Being the agent of the user isn't particularly profitable. For example: companies want the users to be shown ads, and users generally don't want to be shown ads. But profit, which is to say money you make without having to directly work for it, comes from selling the user's interests away. Like, perhaps, choosing to take a bribe to cement Google's search monopoly, a fundamentally anticompetitive behavior which, even as it makes cash for Mozilla, costs the web far, far more. They've lost their way completely as an independent entity, and a post like this that doesn't reaaally seem to grasp that weight of that conundrum comes no closer to convincing me that they can find their way back to the light.
glenstein 9mo ago
I think you're right but I suspect that's the point. AI may be eating into search, and that could threaten their search licensing deal. Apple just struck a deal with Google to use Gemini, though it sounds like Apple paying Google for the privilege. Ominous if you're a browser company looking to sell a license for a preferred AI tool.

whinvik 9mo ago

I will be honest. I love that post, makes me want to go see what they are doing. However, I haven't seen anything from Mozilla in recent years that makes me trust this has a future.

kwanbix 9mo ago
[flagged]
- kwanbix 9mo ago
  [flagged]
bigbadfeline 9mo ago
I'll be honest, when I see another "Hate Firefox" fest, I ask only one question "Quo bono?" > I haven't seen anything from Mozilla in recent years that makes me trust this has a future. As opposed to what? Chrome? What's the future there? The various Firefox derivatives will die a quick death if Firefox dies. The strings attached to Chrome derivatives make them pointless. So, what's left? What are we discussing here? There's no alternative, it's that simple. On the other hand, joining the hate-fest on various forums cannot and does not help Mozilla to find a better way. One is peeved by this, another by that, go figure... I'd call it childish if it wasn't so damaging.

pjmlp 9mo ago

What I care about is the non-existent Firefox strategy, but Mozilla is making me not care to fully embrace ChromeOS Platform.

rafterydj 9mo ago

I'll be contrarian to the thread sentiment and say: Mozilla has misstepped in the past, and will continue to do so, and they're partially funded by competitors for antitrust reasons, etc. That said, I can't really disagree with anything in this. As a developer (and socially conscious human) I want to move in the direction of openness.

giancarlostoro 9mo ago
I think the problem many of us have is it feels like Mozilla invests more effort into everything other than its browser, we see the things they do outside of Mozilla, I mean it was so bad Thunderbird had to become its own foundation due to lack of funding! I would love for there to be a world where Mozilla maintains Firefox and can make for product projects that provide higher value. I also have a pipe dream of one day someone like (and if they read this, and anyone who reads this will think I'm crazy) CloudFlare just buys Firefox itself from Mozilla so it can finally be funded correctly. CloudFlare has an interesting talent pool and I'm sure there's people who work with Rust / have worked with Rust who can help fund something like Firefox. Then I would like to see them create a true open foundation whose entire bottom line goes towards Firefox, not to anything else. Free the fox from corporate shennanigans. By my own corporate shennanigans. And CF could be swapped out with any company bold enough to free the fox.
- dralley 9mo ago
  > I think the problem many of us have is it feels like Mozilla invests more effort into everything other than its browser, we see the things they do outside of Mozilla, I mean it was so bad Thunderbird had to become its own foundation due to lack of funding! And then people simultaneously complain that Mozilla is reliant on Google for funding. There are not many good revenue options available for a browser other than selling search defaults - and AI may start choking off that revenue as well - but Mozilla also can't touch AI without being screamed at. I mean, even literally this one sentence is self-contradictory. Thunderbird is not their browser. You complain that they "invest more effort into everything other than their browser" and then complain that they don't invest enough in Thunderbird. No win situation for them in terms of public opinion. * They can't get diversify their revenue to be less dependent on Google without doing things that people view as "distractions" * They don't get credit when the "distractions" are for the public good, like LetsEncrypt, Rust, Opus / AV1, etc. * They get punished for de-prioritizing "distractions" like Thunderbird and Servo and Rust because those distractions are popular. * For years they were simultaneously being dragged for dropping the XUL extension ecosystem, and also dragged for low performance and lack of multiprocessing and a bunch of other things which were being kneecapped hard by the XUL extension ecosystem. It's not like I love their management or anything, certainly they've made mistakes, but the narcissism of small differences hits them with full force relative to every other competitor in the space.

pcmaffey 9mo ago

It’s an interesting choice to frame this initiative around “open AI”. That’s quite a battle to pick right out of the gate.

drnick1 9mo ago

The open source community will start taking Firefox seriously again when all the AI shit is removed for good and real improvements to performance and privacy are made. Despite all the posturing about "respecting your privacy and freedom," the stock configuration of Firefox is trivially fingerprintable. At the very least, a privacy-focused browser should adopt the Tor patches and report standardized spoofed values for hardware components and disable by default all privacy invasive anti-features like WebGL. This isn't difficult to do, but illustrates the gap between empty promises and what is actually delivered.

plagiarist 9mo ago
I am going with the Waterfox / Librewolf forks
freedomben 9mo ago
I'd definitely love to see them take some steps, but at the points where a minor increase in privacy leads to a much worse UX for average people (aka, "why doesn't this site work in FF, FF sucks!" because they don't know they have to enable something). If Firefox becomes a browser that is harder to use then it will only ever be used by the extremely small niche of people that care about that. That will only further lead to more "not tested on Firefox" web development. I already have to have Chrome available on my machine because of sites like Ramp.com and Mailgun that don't work on Firefox, and that would only get worse.
- drnick1 9mo ago
  > I'd definitely love to see them take some steps, but at the points where a minor increase in privacy leads to a much worse UX for average people Disabling Javascript or even just third party scripts does lead to major breakage, but reporting spoofed values for identifiers like Tor does not. The Arkenfox user.js does all of this and more, but these options are not enabled by default. This shows that Firefox does not care much about privacy in practice. The only "breakage" that I have encountered with such a hardened configuration is related to the spoofing of the time zone. But the fundamental issue is that Javascript/browsers should have not been designed to allow websites to extract this kind of personal information in the first place. But even that is not enough and users are still fingerprintable. In an ideal world, the only thing a website should see is the originating IP and nothing else. If anything, Brave has done more to harden Chromium than Mozilla has with Firefox, even though Brave comes with its own set of problems (scammy crypto integrations, AI, VPN and other stuff).

catapart 9mo ago

> So: Are you in? Nope! Very happy to be entirely out, thanks.

mentalgear 9mo ago

Like many here on HN, I’m skeptical, also about Mozilla, but the blog post is compelling in its plan plus there’s a new CEO in town. So I think what we can do is give them the benefit of the doubt and approach this with cautious optimism for now instead of just negativity.

vuggamie 9mo ago
The new CEO centered AI ("It's Time to Evolve Firefox Into an AI Browser") in his first communication to the community. Spawned at least three new forks and introduced people to LibreWolf. His first communication reduced trust: "It is a privilege to lead an organization with a long history of standing up for people and building technology that puts them first." Now let's put people first by making Firefox an AI first browser. Enzor-Demeo would have made an excellent Microsoft product manager. Too bad he didn't get the job.
NelsonMinar 9mo ago
New CTO too. This post is written by Raffi Krikorian who joined in September. https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/leadership/mozilla-welcomes-raffi-krikorian-chief-technology-officer/ https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/leadership/mozilla-welco...

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]

tomcam 9mo ago

How about finishing Servo?

fyrn_ 9mo ago
They've fully disowned Servo. On the plus side that means you can donate to Servo directly, and the project actually has a decent amount of contributors now
- tomcam 9mo ago
  Duly donated $100. Thanks.

PedroBatista 9mo ago

Good decision for a change, now looking at execution track record and ability to stick with it.. yeah, that's where the bad news start. They have a tendency to go from trend to trend and always a "me too, I'm here" player. Deliver first and stick with it, Mozilla's goodwill fund is long gone to be excited about "mission statements".

rubyfan 9mo ago

>Now AI is becoming the new intermediary. It’s what I’ve started calling “Layer 8” — the agentic layer that mediates between you and everything else on the internet. These systems will negotiate on our behalf, filter our information, shape our recommendations, and increasingly determine how we interact with the entire digital world. This is a sad statement. It reminds me of Wall-E. Big tech created the environmental ruins of today’s internet through perverse incentives. Now we need robots to go sift through the garbage and think for us so we don’t have to be exposed to the toxic internet. It feels like we have lost so much.

zb3 9mo ago

> So: Are you in? No, I just want Mozilla to focus on Firefox, the browser.

TomMasz 9mo ago

As a long-time Firefox user, I don't want them to have an "AI strategy", I want them to have a browser improvement strategy.

luisgvv 9mo ago
Agree, I'm not the kind of guy that has 100 tabs open (10 at the time I'm typing this), but when I came back 2 years ago I noticed that it isn't as snappy and fast as it used to be 15 years ago before I switched to Chrome.
culi 9mo ago
Firefox has improved significantly. It's improvement strategy is mostly focused on what developers ask them to focus on. They've had great performance on the yearly interops https://wpt.fyi/interop-2021 https://wpt.fyi/interop-2021 https://wpt.fyi/interop-2022 https://wpt.fyi/interop-2022 https://wpt.fyi/interop-2023 https://wpt.fyi/interop-2023 https://wpt.fyi/interop-2024 https://wpt.fyi/interop-2024 https://wpt.fyi/interop-2025 https://wpt.fyi/interop-2025
- knowitnone3 9mo ago
  what developers do they still have. their dev console is so bad compared to Chrome. Mozilla abandoned their user base and the users have moved on.
  - culi 9mo ago
    I'm surprised to hear that. I was under the assumption that it was generally acknowledged that the Firefox dev tools were far and away the best of the major browsers. I always find myself missing them when having to use Chrome devtools at least. I feel like nowadays they both have basically the same featureset so maybe it's more about how well you know how to use them
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]

28304283409234 9mo ago

Please let me pay for Firefox and have the proceed fund Firefox directly. This is not 1999 anymore. We are all wealthy grown ups now.

pmontra 9mo ago
Yes, but how large is the subset of Firefox users that are willing to pay for a browser? Take that number and multiply it either by 10 o by 100 and you get the order of magnitude. I googled this https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1mhks3h/firefoxs_weekly_active_users_fall_below_150/ https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1mhks3h/firefoxs_w... Let's say we are at 100 million users. If only 1 out of 100 pay, it's 10 to 100 million dollars per year. A lot of money or a puny amount, it depends.
- rpastuszak 9mo ago
  a) It’s insane how little we pay for browsers given their utility. b) Many people would be happy to pay extra for a browser to support free access for others (The Guardian was a decent example of that IIRC).
- 28304283409234 9mo ago
  And they claim to have at least 200 million users. If 1% pays a yearly fee of 10 dollars, surely that's enough to fund development.
  - glenstein 9mo ago
    I'm in favor of it, but that would raise about 4% of what Mozilla needs.
  - hurfdurf 9mo ago
    Going by the 2023 financial report (getting the 2024 report requires to submit a mail address?!), Mozilla spent over 500mil in that year, 328m on salaries (page 5). https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2024/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2024/

mkroman 9mo ago

I don't understand how they expect offline LLM models to work in a meaningful capacity for users.. Isn't there a single multilingual person working at Mozilla? All of the small LLM models break down as soon as you try to do something that isn't written in English, because - surprise - they're just too small. There would need to be a hardware breakthrough, or they would have to somehow solve the heavy cost of switching the models between pages. Instead of useful AI stuff that is a clear improvement to accessibility, they're insistent on ham-fisting LLM solutions that no one have even asked for. Off the top of my head, they could instead: 1. Integrate something like whisper to add automatic captions to videos or transcribe audio 2. Integrate one of the many really great text to speech models to read articles or text out loud

capitainenemo 9mo ago
Mozilla did integrate TTS into Firefox - in fact, one of the better FOSS TTS AI models out their was their initiative. https://github.com/mozilla/TTS https://github.com/mozilla/TTS
- mkroman 9mo ago
  Ah yeah, there's this: https://github.com/mozilla/TTS https://github.com/mozilla/TTS I can't seem to find anything that mentions a Firefox integration though?
  - capitainenemo 9mo ago
    Click Reader mode on a web page, then the read aloud option in the sidebar. Note that how well it works on Linux will depend on your distro and default settings, as is common for Linux world. They do try to provide setup instructions if your linux distro has issues. ... now whether that model is integrated by default, no idea. I imagine that depends on size. Oh, and mozilla's off-line translate for private translation of web pages... that's another neat AI thing they added that I've found super helpful. Chrome still requires sending the content to their servers.
    - 9mo ago

b1085436 9mo ago

I genuinely don't understand the "permissioned data" assumption. Presumably, all the current models that were trained on illegitimate scraping of vastly larger sources will always have the upper hand (in terms of raw power, obviously at the cost of regurgitating evil stuff too), because they just have absorbed way more diverse data in their training. So the models trained on ethical datasets only will not be able to compete, unless they too rely on a common base of "foundational sin" data and just add those datasets as an ethical layer to cover the rotten roots. Is it really possible to start training from scratch at this stage and compete with the existing models, using only ethical datasets? Hasn't it been established that without the stolen data, those models could not exist or compete?

jd172 9mo ago
Personally I would rather use a 'bad' ai that's trained ethically and runs locally than a good ai trained on stolen data that requires me to surrender my thoughts to the cloud. whether or not it's possible to compete I guess we'll see but I am hopeful and appreciative that Mozilla is trying, as I am getting tired of big tech trying to force everyone to hand over even more unhinged amounts of data than what they're already taking from us.
- b1085436 9mo ago
  I strongly suspect that it is absolutely impossible to have an even remotely usable/useful "AI" trained on tiny datasets, and that instead of training only on ethical data, companies that want to sound ethical will use an extra post-training step for dirty foundation models to behave more ethically as if they'd only learned from ethical sources. I'd hate for this to become the norm, but I fear this is logically what annoucements like this one really mean. The difference in scale is so vast -- taking whatever you want from the entire internet -- vs hand-curated datasets with explicit authorisation and free to use. It's like trying to make a grain of sand gravitate around a marble in the playground, to mimic the moon around the Earth – won't work.

bingemaker 9mo ago

> Small models have gotten remarkably good. 1 to 8 billion parameters, tuned for specific tasks What models is Mozilla talking about?

internet_points 9mo ago
Firefox does offline translation and offline tts. It is quite amazing. Unfortunately half the tech crowd is like "BURN anything that has been in the same room as AI" and the other half is yoloing agentic browsers and uploading all their pron history to the datalakes

yogthos 9mo ago

In my view, this is the exact right approach. LLMs aren’t going anywhere, these tools are here to stay. The only question is how they will be developed going forward, and who controls them. Boycotting AI is a really naive idea that’s just a way for people to signal group membership. Saying I hate AI and I’m not going to use it is really trending and makes people feel like they’re doing something meaningful, but it’s just another version of trying to vote the problem away. It doesn’t work. The real solution is to roll up the sleeves and built an a version of this technology that’s open, transparent, and community driven.

josh-sematic 9mo ago

Strange to me that they don’t mention HuggingFace, which I think of as a pretty leading player in open{source|weight|data} AI.

nilshauk 9mo ago

I detest AI on the grounds that it causes an overuse of our planet's resources as well as stealing IP and exploiting underpaid data workers. However, if Mozilla can launch something capable that steals the thunder from all the closed source AI alternatives that might make the bubble pop finally. Stock markets shook when Deepseek came on the scene and proved that clever coding might make up for using older hardware. The market leaders' moat suddenly didn't seem so impenetrable. In that same vein Mozilla might make a real dent by truly commodifying AI. AI stocks are highly valued currently because there's an idea that the leaders have something no one can copy.

johnea 9mo ago

Has mozilla ever hired a CEO on the premise of "Our top priority is resolving the long standing bugs in our web and email clients"? I'm still bitching, years later, about thunderbird failing to update IMAP folder contents (i.e. sync with server) until I click on the folder. While it may still reign as the "capital of the industry", there's a certain kind of technical brain damage that comes from being located in the bay area. Let's just call it "proximity to venture capital"...

dieselgate 9mo ago

I've been using Waterfox the past month or two and it's great.

countWSS 9mo ago

This has the feeling of corporate feel-good PR release: its essentially content-less AI-generated rehashing "our models are freer/more open-source" which seems silly since they don't develop anything unlike DeepSeek/GLM/Qwen the real open-source giants. Mozilla is a middle-man that could use open-source agents, but it pretending to be the "gatekeeper" of "open AI". Their key motivation is exposed in the middle of text: "The Mozilla Data Collective is building a marketplace for data that is properly licensed, clearly sourced, and aligned with the values of the communities it comes from." This is far away from Firefox roots, whatever corporate stewards are at helm of mozilla now think exclusively in terms of marketplaces and "economics of data".. Futher reading "so we’re deepening our engagement with governments and enterprises adopting sovereign, auditable AI systems. These engagements are the feedback loops that tell us where the stack breaks and where openness needs reinforcement." Hard pass.