TL;DR: Mozilla’s translation bot on Support Mozilla (that is currently overwriting user contributions is based on the closed source, copyright infringing LLM, Google Gemini. This is in spite of Mozilla claiming that they are at the forefront of open source AI, and belies their exhortations to choose to build open source AI and data sets. Although Mozilla has experience in attracting open contributions for data sets in projects like Common Voice, Mozilla is using a closed data set to overwrite open contributions. Since (paid) Gemini queries do not train the model, Mozillians can expect to correct errors every time the bot automatically updates an article.
Google puts up a major chunk of the funding Mozzia gets in a year. If you don’t want them being the default choice in search or having your queries fed to their bots then start putting up the money to make their support no longer required.
Voting with your wallet doesn’t work when you are the product. They don’t care about your money when google’s will dwarf any amount individuals could hope to raise, even collectively. Nothing prevents them from just taking both your money and google’s and changing absolutely nothing.
There’s no way individual donations from ordinary people could match Google’s. They’re also likely to be less reliable.
Mozilla doesn’t even ask for donations from users a whole lot, and the money they receive mostly doesn’t go into development of the browser:
These funds directly support advocacy campaigns (i.e. asking big tech companies to protect your privacy), research and publications like the *Privacy Not Included buyer’s guide and Internet Health Report, and covers a portion of our annual MozFest gathering.
https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/donate/help/#frequently-asked-questions
What’s the amount they get donated or funded? So we know how much to raise yearly.
Something around $500M and $600M yearly. And it’s around 90% of all Mozilla revenue
That’s a lot of donations!
Not really conductive as long as most funds are siphoned by the C-suite ranks. Get rid of the C-fat first, maybe even turn Mozilla into a co-op, then have the People fund it.
Their support isn’t required though, it’s desired.
Mozilla have millions of $, they are actively investing in various money making schemes (sorry, financial investment vehicles) well outwith the original scope of Mozilla.
They take the money because they want the money, they could refuse it any time they want. But they won’t, because they don’t want to. They’re not a poor FOSS project with an independent developer that needs donations to survive, stop treating them like they are.
Mozilla has created some brilliant software, but they’re leaving their original mission behind, burning goodwill with many people around the world, and setting themselves up to be shunned by the open source community the second a viable alternative pops up.
I just hope the alternative doesn’t take too long to materialize
Librewolf is my stopgap atm. We’ll see that the future holds.
I didn’t hear anything bad about Servo.org
Everyone is invited to help the NetSurf project.
It’s too late to give (life) support. Web browsers are a dying ecosystem as it’s too complex to create competition. Why not abandon them and instead support software that does a seperatable part of what modern browsers do?
I don’t necessarily disagree on the complexity point, but I don’t think breaking up the functionality of a web browser fixes the issue.
Web browsers are one of those basic tools everyone who uses a computer relies upon. Breaking that up would not only lead to user frustration, I think it’d introduce brand new territories bad actors like Google could monopolize. Now that unified “web browsers” exist it’s incredibly difficult to ask users to stop using them. It turns from “download this program” to “download these four or five separate programs and follow this guide to learn how to daisy chain them together into a browser equivalent.”. That’s a reasonable ask for some people. Hell, it’s a reasonable ask for me frankly. But your average user isn’t going to have the time nor the patience to attempt to make that solution work.
Hopefully interoperability of seperate apps as ‘part of a web browser experince’ can be improved to help all users. However, the less technologically inclinded will have to step up and do something if they want to avoid growing frustrations from an endlessly, enshitifying browser experience.
Having a “do one thing” software design doesn’t avoid all issues of anti-competition practices, nor does it prevent anti-features. For that I’d look towards software freedom licenses (as opposed to proprietary software).
We already have software that does some seprate parts of web browsers and comes with the OS; video players, text readers and protocol specific apps. The question is, are advanced users using alternatives like Gemini protocal? Hopefully activity will lead to others entering the new communities.
HTML is old and weird and its browsers have a bad ecosystem. The way to go would be to ignore xkcd 927 and make a new standard and a pilot browser for it. The hard part would be getting people to use it.
Lets all go back to Gopher.
I am 100% ready to replace my browser with a blend of Usenet/RSS subscriptions, maybe sprinkle some Gemini (not the G*gle AI) atop of it. Fuck it, I might even get a library card for shits and giggles.
Man I collect library cards. At this point I’m a member of three different library systems. No joke, libraries are amazing and one of the best resources we’ve got left in this country. Go get a card man!
I agree but:
https://lithub.com/public-libraries-in-tx-la-and-ms-are-no-longer-protected-by-the-first-amendment/
I thought Mozilla lost the google funding in the monopoly ruling?
Looks like it’d still a thing
https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2025/09/google-antitrust-ruling-firefox-search-deal