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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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
Yes. And? It is open source, and Vivaldi modifies it heavily.
You’re criticizing browsers based on “Shitty Browser A” while promoting browsers based on “Shitty Browser B”. Both categories are heavily modified and just as viable.
People need to stop being scared of Chromium-based browsers.
Specially, nobody needs more Chromium based browsers.
Unforunately, there is no solid alternative at the moment. Firefox used to be great, but the quality of the browser has been consistently declining for years now. In terms of features, stability, and accuracy. The various forks I tested back when I couldn’t deal with Firefox’s issues any longer had the exact same issues.
At least Vivaldi is european.
There are Firefox forks to circumvent AI. But even if there weren’t, I’d be using GNOME Web before bending to Google’s Chromium. If Vivaldi Chromium promises no AI, and LibreWolf Firefox promised the same, why on Earth would I go to Google’s camp?
If your only criterium is the presence of AI, then of course it doesn’t matter.
But Firefox has been degrading far before AI was even hyped. Mozilla basically gave up on its development as they lost their market share. Full of bugs, poor implementation of new standards, terrible optimization… That’s why I switched to a Chromium based browser. Not because of AI.
Not only that, Firefox and Firefox-Based browser are at least 2x times slower than any chromium based browser. Vivaldi is not as quick as plain Chrome, but at least it mitigateas the privacy concerns of normal Google Chrome
People keep saying that, but I don’t think there are noticeable differences in performance between both engines. Gecko is competitive, the problem, I think, comes from the web developers not bothering to optimize or test under Gecko anymore.
I say that as a web developer myself. Gecko has become problematic to work with. It’s not the web devs fault that Gecko is now full of odd quirks.
I used to dev for Firefox, then test on Chrome. The amount of times I was looking for a non-existent bug in my code just to realise it works fine on Chrome and it’s actually a Gecko bug not respecting a specification was a major factor in my choice to drop Firefox as my daily drive.
And the irony is that one of the best documentations for web specifications is made by Mozilla.
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.
I still have full uBlock origin installed and it works. Vivaldi comes with an adblocker though, but I disable it since I use uBlock Origin