Mozilla is in a tricky position. It contains both a nonprofit organization dedicated to making the internet a better place for everyone, and a for-profit arm dedicated to, you know, making money. In the best of times, these things feed each other: The company makes great products that advance its goals for the web, and the nonprofit gets to both advocate for a better web and show people what it looks like. But these are not the best of times. Mozilla has spent the last couple of years implementing layoffs and restructuring, attempting to explain how it can fight for privacy and openness when Google pays most of its bills, while trying to find its place in an increasingly frothy AI landscape.
Fun times to be the new Mozilla CEO, right? But when I put all that to Anthony Enzor-DeMeo, the company’s just-announced chief executive, he swears he sees opportunity in all the upheaval. “I think what’s actually needed now is a technology company that people can trust,” Enzor-DeMeo says. “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.”
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“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.
Is there like a petition or something we can all sign to show that literally no cunt wants this?
Uninstall it and pick a different platform. These cunts think you won’t and THATS why they don’t give a fuck. Enough people swap and oh, hey, maybe we should rethink this mistake. If not - not your problem… You already bounced.
Just like I said in another post related to this, I hope this doesn’t kill LibreWolf, IceCat, and Waterfox.
Librewolf have put a post out a few days ago that they won’t add any AI stuff.
Waterfox is on the same page. As long as the browser doesn’t outright require it to functio0n, I think the privacy-focused forks will remain. Of course, it’s extra work to maintain divergent code, but this is worth it, IMO.
Thank goodness.
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.
Man, I so wish mozilla was a worker owned cooperative. These string of useless CEOs would have already been shown the door
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
Mozilla’s new CEO is a dumbass.
It’s hard to beat the last one, but he somehow managed to pull it off.
Then again, Mitchell Baker is still on the board of directors if I’m not mistaken, so it sounds like the rot is too pervasive for just one CEO to change.
Just replace it by ai
I was having issues with Librewolf on a work computer a few weeks ago, so I decided to try Firefox to see if it was LW’s security settings.
Holy shit, what a fucking trainwreck Firefox has become! It’s so bad that I can’t honestly recommend anyone use it anymore. The first time I started it, I saw all kinds of ads and trashy “news” articles that had no relevance to me whatsoever. Plus I had to reinstall all my extensions because they weren’t signed and there’s no way to disable that requirement. I was so horrified and offended, I just dumped it immediately and tried Chrome instead. What difference is there at this point?
It’s just insulting at this point. I understand that they trying to find new revenue sources, and things are still better today than they were with Mitchell Baker as CEO, but it’s still horrific how poorly Mozilla is being run. I’m so grateful we still have usable forks from the amazing people running projects like Librewolf. Without them, the web would just be flat out unusable.
This is such a fantastic way to put it. I fuckin love the internet, people have amazing ways to say things lol
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.
The job of a CEO is to make the line go up, and that almost always comes at the expense of the consumer and the quality of the product itself.
As per usual, Google’s funding selects the music, and the music is to sink Firefox down even further.
Once I saw AI being integrated into Firefox, my trust towards the Mozilla Foundation dropped permanently. I have now switched over to Vivaldi which is an amazing European browser that kinda mimics Opera in many ways (but without the spyware ofc)
Vivaldi is Chromium based, that’s like jumping out of the frying pan into the fire.
There are plenty of Firefox forks that will be actively removing the AI crap. Waterfox, Pale Moon, Librewolf, Zen, Floorp to name a few. And these will all continue to support Manifest v2 and therefore adblockers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Web_browsers_based_on_Firefox
Do you trust Vivaldi despite it beeing closed source? I get that you mistrust Mozilla since they integrated AI but there are plenty of forks that cut the AI part and even are explicitly privacy focused.
The company seems legit. Moreover they are very transparent about their business model, or at least enough to be trustable. I am not against Proprietary software per se, I just dislike AI Slop and value when companies respect me as a user. You got a point about the Firefox Forks though
The only parts of Vivaldi that are closed is just their ui skin on top of chrome and the tweaks they added. They still provide source for the open bits they use (chromium under the hood).
It’s literally just a sidebar that lets you do queries to your LLM of choice. It’s not even in the way. If you don’t want to use it, you just don’t use it.
Can you still use uBlock origin? Full, not lite. Haven’t followed Vivaldi and how it’s handling all the manifest changes impacting chrome extensions.
This is every Mozilla CEO in the last decade:
Eh, the privacy trend was also s bandwagon. They removed a ton of power user features and touting privacy with things like enchanced tracker protection which could’ve as well be done with an addon. And they integrated pocket in at around the same time.
EU here is your chance! Fully fund Mozilla on the condition that they move to an EU country
And fire the CEO :)
This. There is so much Mozilla and EU can offer each other.
