Mozilla downsizes as it refocuses on Firefox and AI
(techcrunch.com)
from koncertejo@lemmy.ml to technology@lemmy.ml on 13 Feb 2024 22:26
https://lemmy.ml/post/11872117
from koncertejo@lemmy.ml to technology@lemmy.ml on 13 Feb 2024 22:26
https://lemmy.ml/post/11872117
#technology
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This is awful lol
This is the best summary I could come up with:
After installing a new interim CEO earlier this month, Mozilla, the organization behind the Firefox browser, is making some major changes to its product strategy, TechCrunch has learned.
Specifically, Mozilla plans to scale back its investment in a number of products, including its VPN, Relay and, somewhat remarkably, its Online Footprint Scrubber, which launched only a week ago.
Going forward, the company said in an internal memo, Mozilla will focus on bringing “trustworthy AI into Firefox.” To do so, it will bring together the teams that work on Pocket, Content and AI/Ml.
Mozilla started expanding its product portfolio in recent years, all while its flagship product, Firefox, kept losing market share.
And while the organization was often sharply criticized for this, its leadership argued that diversifying its product portfolio beyond Firefox was necessary to ensure Mozilla’s survival in the long run.
Firefox, after all, provided the vast majority of Mozilla’s income, but it also meant the organization was essentially dependent on Google to continue this deal.
The original article contains 234 words, the summary contains 166 words. Saved 29%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
I don’t need or want any of that AI crap in my browser. Hopefully there will be a compiler flag to disable it.
For what it’s worth… I think there are useful AI tools. For example the offline translation feature that doesn’t send your content to google is something they recently introduced. I’d also like to see someone compete with a decent and open text-to-speech solution that gets wide adoption… And the idea of flagging fake reviews doesn’t sound too bad (I haven’t tried it.) I mean people are complaining about SEO making google unusable and fake news only ever getting more. I can see some benefit there - if done right.
But we definitely don’t need a Clippy 2.0 or another smart assistant. And I don’t think everything has to be embedded in a browser and make it yet more complicated and bigger, or implemented in the operating system. An add-on will probably do.
(Edit: And I sometimes don’t understand Mozilla. Why not focus on their core product and make that exceptionally great? If they’re already struggling… What’s with all these side-projects and dabbling in AI anyways?)
One feature that could be neat is having a locally-generated summary of a page, as well as suggested tags when bookmarking.
Uh yeah, I’m not sure. I’ve tried summarizing with AI tools. And there is the bot here on Lemmy that summarizes stuff… I never liked any of that. It’s really a mixed bag, from pretty okay summaries to entirely missing the point of the original article to bordering on false information. I think we’re far from there yet. However, it’s a common use-case for AI. Maybe in 1-2 years I can stop being afraid of misinformation being fed to me. Currently, I think the incorrectness of the information still outweighs any potential benefit. The more complicated it gets, thus making you in need of a summary in the first place, the more biased and skewed the results get. So I don’t see that happen in the very near future. But we definitely should keep up doing the research and pushing that.
Tagging and organizing is something I’d like an AI for.
Imagine spending hours writing and editing something with care only for an LLM to “summarize“ it, completely missing any nuance or sarcasm, removing any creative bits or humor, while also making the wrong point altogether. To top it off anyone unwilling to read your story, their time is valuable after all (but not yours, apparently), will now repeat the LLM’s interpretation to anyone they’d like, whether it’s accurate or not.
It’s an abysmal direction to go for misinformation and even more abysmal for writers. Good content becomes irrelevant and people become less and less willing to pay for a writer’s time and expertise. Why not write with an LLM if a large percentage of your readers summarize the piece with an LLM anyways? Just need more eyeballs to justify our Google Ads spending.
Built into a “private” browser or not, it’s just another nail in the coffin of a web built by and for humans.
I think you’re completely right with that assessment. Journalist used to be a reputable profession. And explaining things and processing raw information into something that can be consumed by the reader, deemed important. Especially getting it right. There is a whole process to it if you do it professionally. And curating content and deciding what is significant and gets an audience is equally as important.
Doing away with all of that is like replacing your New York Times with your 5-year-old and whatever she took from watching the news.
I am very skeptical when it comes to machine learning and all the hype surrounding it, but it’s not all bad. For example an improved firefox translate would be a nice feature to have. There might also be some usecases for accessibility or adblocking.
In general, I agree, but it seems Mozilla is trying to do the right thing by AI. Offline translation is neat. And the Review Checker they just introduced uses AI to spot fake Amazon reviews. I think that’s pretty cool.
I'm sure there'll be some little forked version of Firefox without the features you can't abide simply turning off in the settings.
@FaceDeer @koncertejo @cmnybo There's been a fork for years minus any tracking etc, called #IceCat. I don't see anything to suggest they're looking at #AI any time soon.
https://icecatbrowser.org/about.html
@FaceDeer @koncertejo @cmnybo ... not to be confused with #IceCatNV the Product Content company, who are definitely looking into #AI
https://icecat.com/generative-ai-for-product-content/
I shall answer this call. Thanks!
How’s it compare to “hardened Firefox”? Just something I’ve seen referenced.
The article says nothing about incorporating AI into the browser.
Firefox is diversifying it’s offerings, and focusing on two discrete projects.
From the article:
Seems like they’re planning to incorporate AI into the browser.
Sigh, and here I was, thinking Microsoft trying to shove its useless (to me) AI down my throat at every opportunity was annoying… Quo vadis Mozilla, what are you guys doing… :(
Ai is coming either way. It’s not really avoidable, and if Mozilla were to divest from that area too they would set themselves up for failure. A few years down the road all browsers will have some sort of ai integration, perhaps large parts of the web too. If Mozilla doesn’t keep up it will just become entirely irrelevant and the internet will be fully controlled by google and its chromium bs.
Besides, what they did so far is really neat and how I would like to see ai integrated: offline translation features on your local device, not somewhere under control of some corporation. More of that please
Focusing on the core business (the browser) and dropping products (that are already done better by others) seems like a very good idea. I have seen zero people on Mastodon on a mozilla.social account and I’ve never seen their VPN appear in a list of top/recommended VPNs. I just want a world class browser that pounds the competition and regains browser market share. If Firefox dies, we are f’kd.
Can they just focus on the browser? I really don’t need the AI stuff.
If AI stays, Mozilla would be better off to still have some irons in the fire.
The issue is that Firefox alone doesn’t pay the bills and I’d imagine they really want to get away from being dependent on the Google deal they have.
We don’t need AI stuff but if they can get some good funding from it, they can put more into the browser
Arguably the issue here is that Firefox pays too many of the bills, directly from its main competitor
Yeah, fair I could have worded that better. Finding better ways of funding is the goal
And sometimes, those searches will end in failure. Resulting in what we’re seeing today.
how will putting AI in Firefox get them funding?
That’s not what they’re doing. They’re going to focus on two separate products: Firefox and AI.
And maybe merge the two, like adding a tldr feature to reader mode, instead of an obnoxious sidebar like a lot of browsers right now
This is from the Mozilla release. The second quote does say "Firefox Organization" and not "Firefox", but it seems clear they are planning on integrating AI into Firefox.
But, I've reread @NotSteve_'s comment and they were saying the funding earned from AI could be put into Firefox, not AI itself. NotSteve wasn't claiming that putting AI into Firefox would bring in more funding, only that AI could be a separate source of revenue. So my question is moot.
so they build the thing that pretty much everyone is running at a loss…
I wish they’d do both but separately
🤩
😩
I thought they switched CEOs to focus on privacy a week or so ago?
The data privacy angle was just editorialized headlines, the CEO statement did not mention it.
I just purchased an annual plan for Monitor, partially to help Mozilla. I guess this is my thanks
Same. Wth Mozilla?
Monitor is something different than mentioned. Based on this article, that product is still good. See the correction at the bottom
Not sure what to think about this.
I love firefox. Hate the managment
At the very least I don’t feel like I need more out of Firefox than it has today. If it all goes to shit, then a free Firefox Ala chromium would do fine.
I remember what happened last time. Gradually the web will become unusable if you’re not using Chrome. That’s how it worked back in the day with Internet Explorer. Microsoft even began hooking things into IE that can only work on windows (activex controls) and then getting websites to support them.
When I first started using Linux I had to switch to Netscape 4.7 because it was the only browser available and the web barely worked. I remember thinking “well, the web sucks on Linux but I guess I can live without it.”
Sings “it’s the end of Mozilla as we know it”.
Jamie Zawinski would probably be laughing very hard at this statement
We dont want AI or pocket you assholes. We want a secure browser. Stop wasting your money on this shit
That interim CEO seems like they suck; I hope they don’t stay.
Focusing on FF: Yay!
Adding AI to FF: NOOOOOOOOOOOooooooooo!
A browser AI to detect AI shenanigans on websites would be awesome. Let the AI wars begin!
I mean, a local-only AI would be really cool to have, especially if they need to be competitive against Google and Microsoft with Edge who are investing significant ressources in AI and are trying various ways to integrate it into their products
Ollama.ai
thanks ollama
I love Firefox. Don’t screw it up, Mozilla.
Bet
Oh for Fox’s sake!!!
Let’s skip the AI and give thunderbird some love instead. Then again, it’s pretty feature complete as is. Just keep it up to date to keep running and secure.
I’m not sure where people are getting the idea that they’re talking about putting AI in Firefox.
emphasis mine
How do you interpret that?
How many people do you need to administer a Mastodon instance? I’m pretty sure infosec.exchange is like one dude.
Didn’t they have acustom ui though? Also their moderation is pretty strict
A reminder that there are many firefox forks that exist if base firefox is adding unwanted things or you might have different wants, but sites will still “see” firefox in terms of compatibility. I’m using Librewolf with some annoyances (it doesn’t let things fingerprint to the point that it can’t even get your current time), but overall I like it.
According to the Librewolf documentation, fingerprinting can be turned off, but they recommend adding the Canvas Blocker extension in its place. That is my current setup, as I didn’t like that websites in Librewolf couldn’t get the correct time and time zone for me.
Here’s the direct quote from the Librewolf documentation:
I didn’t realize Lemmy hated AI so much. Pretty much every post in this thread is bashing the idea. I’ve found AI to be very useful personally, I use it almost every day. It helped me code a VBA macro from scratch with 0 experience. This tool is saving me and my team hundreds of hours per year. It’s also great just as an improved search engine.
I like how Kagis search AI works. It gives a link to all of the sources it scraped from.
I think the focus is more on how it’s the new buzzword that companies are chasing and that most have a solution looking for a problem.
AI is useful, we’re just tired of seeing it stuffed everywhere
Especially since AI is already in Firefox, the offline translation feature uses local NMT models.
github.com/mozilla/firefox-translations-models
Can an expert explain this - aussie.zone/post/6869951
Comparing brave and base Firefox is unfair IMO. Brave is security hardened out of the box, where as Firefox is a general purpose browser and has telemetry in the form of crash reports and the like (which can be turned off). It can be hardend well through arkenfox, or using a fork like Librewolf. Comparing Firefox and chrome is better imho.
Firefox has many built-in anti fingerprinting flags (such as letterboxing, RFP, font limiting, and many more} which when combined with ublock origin are unbeatable. A baked-in content blocker like that of braves loses because it isn’t extensible. This website compares on only default settings which aren’t representative of the extent each browser can be taken but useful nonetheless: privacytests.org
In what way? I use(d) Firefox since the very first Firebird days, and Netscape Navigator before it, and I’m practically married to uBO (don’t tell my wife!). That said, Brave’s ‘shields’ blocker is just skinned uBO with some tweaks. It can add custom cosmetic filtering rules, additional adblock format filter lists, disable or enable JS (globally or per-site) and has built in fingerprint resistance. Aside from the differing UI, I genuinely can’t think of anything overtly missing as such.
I’m stated that because I know baked in features must wait for browser updates to get fixes (not talking about block list updates but the core itself). I also was basing it off a comment I read (can’t find sadly) on the limitations of implementing a ublock-style blocklist into brave. And thirdly, I have seen no mention of anything like ublock’s blocking modes (block 3rd party scripts/frames). Can you quickly select an element to block in brave?
I might have considered using brave as a 2ndary browser if it werent for the ceo’s politics (spending thousands to support anti-lgbt legislation) which I feel are antithetical to privacy.
You can enter as many custom filter rules as you like, with adblock syntax support. You can select an element to block, yes.
Here is a graph the illustrates the block efficiency of ublock+Firefox compared to other browsers with/without ublock. github.com/…/uBlock-Origin-works-best-on-Firefox
Despite the URL name, it shows bare browse Brave and Firefox+ublock compare at blocking 3rd party ads/trackers. It looks like this was updated November of last year.
Brave isn’t represented anywhere on the graph? Unless I’ve misunderstood you. That’s a comparison of Firefox with various ad blockers, and uBO with and without CNAME unclocking enabled. Brave also uncloaks CNAMEs, so that’s one place they are equal. Chromium based browsers do lack some abilities compared to Firefox, however. I have daily driven Firefox since the first day, but Brave and Blink/Chromium based browsers are undeniably faster at rendering (unfortunately).
Look at the bottom of the graph. Each grouping is per browser.
Yes of course. I hadn’t slept when I replied, how embarrassing to miss that. You can enable CNAME uncloaking in Brave, which I suspect draws them to a parallel. It would be interesting to see the test repeated with the setting enabled. Since one has to (or had to) enable it in uBO also, it would only be fair to compare apples to apples. As I said, the blocker in Brave is based on uBO anyway. To be clear, and as I’ve said before, I’ve daily driven Firefox since the beginning and run uBO in medium mode. I’m not shilling for Brave here, simply pointing out that the differences are small (much of the code is shared with uBO) and it does certainly render faster.
I do understand that you aren’t shilling brave. Ublock medium mode is great and I think worth the effort. I wish Firefox had some of the native features present in chromium browsers (mostly quality of life features like native force dark mode on web contents). But I love the extent that Firefox can be taken to reduce not just fingerprinting, but also avenues of attack.
You can force Firefox to display dark mode in web content (even with privacy tweaks enabled to resist fingerprinting or tracking), by setting the two following hidden prefs in your
user.js:// PREF: enable a Dark theme for browser and webpage content // [TEST] https://9to5mac.com/ user_pref("ui.systemUsesDarkTheme", 1); // HIDDEN user_pref("browser.in-content.dark-mode", true); // HIDDENDoes this force dark mode on pages or just what. I couldn’t get it to work anywhere close to chomiums force dark mode.
The website you mentioned is created by Brave Developers
Incorrect. It is created by someone who is associated with brave, but not a directly created by Brave. I am sure the tests is accurate (at least per test), but the testing criteria could be biased. It’d just be weird to the end up with Librewolf and Mullvad as a clear winner if the intention was to favor brave browser.
Lol 🤣🤣🤣
Unfortunately Mozilla’s brand new CEO is a McKinsey ghoul: www.linkedin.com/in/chamberslaura/
She spent 2 yrs at McK 20+ yrs ago - hardly a personality-defining milestone, given how a lot of business students start their career in consulting.
I mean that’s pretty standard for a McKinsey ghoul:
Everything about her subsequent career has been going from one upper management/c-suite role in a tech company to another. This is not the resume of a person who should be running a nonprofit that controls the most important open source project on the internet. But beyond that just look at what she’s done in her one month at Mozilla:
That’s straight out of the McKinsey playbook.
IMO these were their best products. 🙁
Ugh, god damn it.
I would assume they’re taking a hard look at revenue figures. I currently do use their VPN, but my impression is that it isn’t much more than a repackaging of Mullvad VPN. No idea about the other products. Is their Relay and Scrubber offering more outstanding?
The scrubber is also a repackage, but their relay does seem useful, as a barebones SimpleLogin/Addy.io at least
fuuk this AI bubble. the browser is one place where ai is not needed
Actually I think AI in browser could potentially become a much more effective content blocker than ad blockers like ublock in the future.
I recall there being at least one content blocker that worked by heuristics instead of rulesets. Cannot remember the name, but it was clearly not as effective as conventional ones, because not all ads look the same and usually people want to block the invisible trackers as well.
You only need Bayesian filters for that IMHO.
I dunno, having a free, open model made by a trusted company would be nice. I like initiatives like Mozilla Voice, this could be something similar. Probably not great if it’s replacing focus on the other things though.
One feature that is currently using a trained model for local processing is Firefox Translations. There are good use for AI that can enhance privacy, but yeah the trend of slapping AI on everything because it is trendy to do so must end.
100% agreed. I just hope whatever this AI they are thinking isnt about what info I should consume. What the AI think is good doesnt mean its the only info I should consume.
Mozilla downsizes as it
refocuses on Firefox and AIdrops multiple products and layoff 60 so that its current budget can accomodate the stratospheric compensation of its new CEO.So… Who’s the board of mozilla hiring the ceo, again? How did this board come to be?
The worst enemy of Mozilla is: Mozilla. This hasn’t changed in many years.
Won’t donate a cent to Mozilla unless they become a Firefox only non-profit. Fuck em.
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
Why AI, no one wants AI…
Source for the no one wanting AI is me… I do not want AI
Kinda disappointing how much of the community just takes a giant 💩 on Mozilla whatever it does these days. Funding open source is super crazy hard folks. Notice that the really successful well funded projects are fueled by megacorps?
Offering constructive criticism is great but if you don’t have better ideas around how to fund an open browser without selling your soul to GOOG or MSFT then perhaps your energy might be better spent elsewhere.
Train ai to I filtrate Google and kill sundar prichai.
It won’t help anyone’s bottom line but then at least sundar prichai would be dead.
Lots of immediate hate for AI, but I’m all for local AI if they keep that direction. Small models are getting really impressive, and if they have smaller, fine-tuned, specific-purpose AI over the “general purpose” LLMs, they’d be much more efficient at their jobs. I’ve been rocking local LLMs for a while and they’ve been great as a small compliment to language processing tasks in my coding.
Good text-to-speech, page summarization, contextual content blocking, translation, bias/sentiment detection, click bait detection, article re-titling, I’m sure there’s many great use cases. And purely speculation,but many traditional non-llm techniques might be able to included here that were overlooked because nobody cared about AI features, that could be super lightweight and still helpful.
If it goes fully remote AI, it loses a lot of privacy cred, and positions itself really similarly to where everyone else is. From a financial perspective, bandwagoning on AI in the browser but “we won’t send your data anywhere” seems like a trendy, but potentially helpful and effective way to bring in a demographic interested in it without sacrificing principles.
But there’s a lot of speculation in this comment. Mozilla’s done a lot for FOSS, and I get they need monetization outside of Google, but hopefully it doesn’t lead things astray too hard.
How is Mozilla using this ai? Or is it know yet? What are they using it for? How will ai benefit the privacy of Firefox users on the private browser?
Will Mozilla’s ai be open source?
Apparently fakebot uses targeted advertising? I’m so glad i use Falcon browser as my alternative. None of this.