Technology

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.

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:

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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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Boo.

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

good fucking god, why does it have to be this way ? do I have to program my own browser now ? is that what they want ?

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)

Ive been wary if firefox since wheneved it was they decided it was okay to shove "pocket" into the browser. These days i dont see mozilla as anything other than anti monopoly insurance for google, which they obviously dont need anymore.

Mozilla as a company has just been a decade of one poor decision after another adding more bloat and doing nothing meaningful to counter chromes near monopoly.

Vivaldi isnt perfect and brave has its baggage, but at least they actually include adblocking out of the box, a feature that just about everyone wants. Sure its easy enough to install an addon to firefox for it but the fact that you even have to do that should tell you everything you need to know about who mozilla is actually working for.

🤷‍♂️ ironfox exists

Mozilla has had decades to find a sustainable business structure that aligns with the values of its contributors and users, yet here we are...

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.

Of course, this is just what Firefox needs ~~fixing long standing issues, catching up to web standards, process isolation on mobile~~ AI!

As per usual, Google's funding selects the music, and the music is to sink Firefox down even further.