Technology

Firefox doesn't really need to make money so long as Google has to worry about being broken up by the Fed for antitrust reasons... Obviously so long as there is a national socialist/Trump regime in place that's not really something they have to worry about. Why, Goog even donated $5m to Trump's little Whitehouse evisceration/ballroom project, and will get their very own plaque in the ballroom that all the ballpeople can look at.

Google has donated over $USD 1B to Mozilla. The standard conspiracy fud is so that it can sink its claws into its open source competition, corrupting it with its omniscient googliness, but FIrefox barely blips on the radar of browser use, not even including Tor, Waterfox, Librewolf (which I'm currently using), and other forks. It's just not going to threaten any of the megas any time soon.

The actual motive for giving Mozilla so much money is simply to deflect any accusations that they're a monopoly that hurts market competition.

I used to use it exclusively, but it slowly got bloated, so when I got rid of windows, I went to tor browser and librewolf.

I feel like mozilla could switch to making all their decisions by flipping a coin and do better than they're doing in recent years

Man, I so wish mozilla was a worker owned cooperative. These string of useless CEOs would have already been shown the door

Is "must make the dumbest fucking decision possible at all times" in the Mozilla CEO job description or something?

I have no CEO experience, but I'll make stupid fucking decisions for a fifth of the salary you're paying the current guy.

"AI is untrustworthy, therefore you can use multiple AI services in our product."

“What I’ve seen with AI is an erosion of trust.”

Mozilla is not going to train its own giant LLM anytime soon. But there’s still an AI Mode coming to Firefox next year, which Enzor-DeMeo says will offer users their choice of model and product, all in a browser they can understand and from a company they can trust. “We’re not incentivized to push one model or the other,” he says. “So we’re going to try to go to market with multiple models.” Some will be open-source models available to anyone.

This is such an out of touch non-answer here.

People don’t oppose ai changes because they’re locked into a model. In fact most AI products I use for my job let you choose a fucking model.

People hate them because

A) 90% of the time they’re useless and the remaining 10 are detrimental to the product experience

B) Ethical concerns about training off of artists and authors as well as environmental impact. EDIT: or also the general trend of trying to replace humans with AI.

C) Not wanting to play into the fucking arms race the billionaire class are manufacturing

D) The time they could be useful they have a risk of being either hilariously wrong or dangerously wrong. And there’s no amount of training and GPU manufacturing that’s gonna fix that.

Absolutely none of this is addressed by the CEO. I’m sure he has to say this because of the fucking tulip crazy money is in around this but it doesn’t make it any less tone deaf or futile.

Their user base is almost exclusively tech savvy people, the same people who are most opposed to AI.

I think this move signals that they believe we have nowhere else to go, and they're daring us to go fuck ourselves, because fuck you, what are you going to do, use Chrome?

Yes, yes I will, well Chromium forks.

In general, I prefer the look and feel of chromium-based browsers, but I use Firefox and Firefox forks for the reasons that I'm sure everyone here is aware of.

If those reasons go away, I'll just switch to Vivaldi as my primary browser. I won't be happy about it, but if Firefox becomes another AI slop project. I might as well go with the browser whose UX I prefer.

Mozilla’s new CEO is a dumbass.

I've cancelled my monthly donation to Mozilla. What's the point. Every bit of feedback I've provided is to the tune of no goddamn AI, spend my money towards keeping up with the alternatives to make sure there's always an extra player in the field. Instead it's going to some overpaid dickhead who's going to introduce AI.

This is every Mozilla CEO in the last decade:

Is there like a petition or something we can all sign to show that literally no cunt wants this?

EU here is your chance! Fully fund Mozilla on the condition that they move to an EU country

Programs are like socks, once they get dirty, you change them. Do these people really not understand how this stuff works? Even giants can fall when enough people switch to other options

Any valid alternative for android phones to firefox with same add-on support? These idiots look like they are speedrunning it to become a shitty company.

Mozilla is completely detached from its user base. They think their average user is a Microsoft enthusiast when in reality it's a Debian enjoyer.

Just like I said in another post related to this, I hope this doesn't kill LibreWolf, IceCat, and Waterfox.

Some of Mozilla's AI integrations have been amazing, despite the community crying about it. Like private, offline translation (I don't care what anybody says, this is much better than sending the contents of your web page to a proprietary Google Translate server), and enhanced screen reader functionality.

But this one puzzles me. They're not being very descriptive, but it seems like it's just integrating generic LLM stuff? Not really what I'm after personally. At least it's opt-in, I guess.

Overpaid CEO has more money than actual sense.

So many people mentioning (inferior, in my opinion) Firefox alternatives in the comments and nobody's mentioned Librewolf? Really? Maybe Librewolf will have to become a hard fork someday if this continues, but for now, it's just Firefox for people who care about their data. Aside from a few justifiably aggressive default settings, I've never had even a hint of an issue with it.

That's what all CEOs do. Double down on AI.

CEO = bad

every. single. time.

I'm going to have to go Amish at this rate.

waterfox, pale moon, ironfox. there's your multiple models.

It's almost as if they are out of touch with their users. I don't get it. CEOs are just normal people like us.

/s