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Mozilla downsizes as it refocuses on Firefox and AI

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Re: Mozilla downsizes as it refocuses on Firefox and AI

#141

Post by DanHulton »

wkat4242 wrote: post #97
chasd00 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was on a call this morning where a team had decided to break it to their leadership that genai was not the answer they thought it was going to be. I bet there's going to be a lot of that this year.

That certainly wasn't Microsoft, they're still full on the "CoPilot" hype train, launching a confusing spectrum of different services all under the same name and all before they're actually ready

This assumes they'll ever actually be ready. I'm pretty sure at this point the "reliability problem" is just not solvable.

Re: Mozilla downsizes as it refocuses on Firefox and AI

#142

Post by breather »

sjwhevvvvvsj wrote: post #138
breather wrote: post #75

"AI" Well, the company is fucked. I wonder who will pick up the pieces of the browser tech. There are two pieces of tech that AI might apply to: 1) Semantic ad-blocking (this will fuck up their only source of reliable revenue so it won't happen) 2) content filtering for a child-friendly mode. This actually is a good idea, but it won't happen because it'll be easily repurposed to perform bullet point #1.

#2 is just a document classification task, you can do it with DistilBERT.

> #2 is just a document classification task, you can do it with DistilBERT.

I'm assuming there's still an immense amount of effort into ensuring quality and then packaging and distributing it, especially if you're selling as for children, especially if you want it to work on a phone without sending the browsing data to a third party.

Re: Mozilla downsizes as it refocuses on Firefox and AI

#143

Post by Gud »

beretguy wrote: post #10

> Mozilla will focus on bringing “trustworthy AI into Firefox.” I hope they will give us ability to turn it off. Or at least LibreWolf will turn it off / remove it. I’d rather they add optional small subscription fee to support themselves if they have to than add AI or some other questionable functionalities.

Turn it off? I don’t want it turned on to begin with!

I’m a Firefox user since it was called Phoenix and I am sick and tired of Mozilla using my computer as a staging ground for whatever software they are developing.

I just want a functional, basic browser and whatever addon I want to install, should be an extension.

Personally I have no hopes Mozilla will correct their course but I’m hoping a capable group of hacker finally manage to pull off a fork.

Re: Mozilla downsizes as it refocuses on Firefox and AI

#144

Post by pixxel »

nortonham wrote: post #134
pavon wrote: post #30

Backing off of VPN, Relay and Monitor sounds like bad news. They are the Mozilla's only source of income if the Google search deal goes away. Mozilla's financial statements never detailed how much money they were spending on their different segments, so perhaps those projects weren't generating profit, and thus weren't worth keeping even though they brought in revenue. I can certainly see how it would be hard to comp…

and here I was, getting ready to sign up to their VPN service

Their = Mullvad.net

Re: Mozilla downsizes as it refocuses on Firefox and AI

#145

Post by thayne »

xuhu wrote: post #92
__loam wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe time to fork Firefox.

Desktop linux market share is below 2% yet people aren't talking about it being on its last legs like with Firefox. How does Firefox's 3.5% market share prevent people from using it ? Is the 180,000,000 number of monthly active users simply too low ?

But desktop linux market share has never been in the double digits. Firefox once had 30%.

And the low marketshare does prevent people from using it. Because there are sites that only work if you use chrome and maybe safari, because Firefox marketshare isn't big enough to worry about. So users switch to chrome so those sites work, which decreases Firefox market share in a vicious cycle.

Re: Mozilla downsizes as it refocuses on Firefox and AI

#146

Post by pixxel »

DoItToMe81 wrote: post #3

The VPN is just an upsold Mullvad account, and the social media they run is embarrassingly knee-jerk overmoderated. If there has to be layoffs anywhere, I'm glad they're predominately there.

I follow them on twitter and they rarely tweet. What examples have you got?

Re: Mozilla downsizes as it refocuses on Firefox and AI

#147

Post by asadotzler »

breather wrote: post #107
russelg wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox is already using AI (fully local) for their new translation feature.

A) I don't think that's the type of feature to which they are referring to, B) I wouldn't call that "AI" by the current sense of the word when it can be narrowly described with "automated translation", and C) we've had high-quality translation for well over a decade now with or without Firefox.

Firefox's translation is based on LLMs not far off from the AI chatbots in the core tech. It's also nicely local to your machine.

Re: Mozilla downsizes as it refocuses on Firefox and AI

#148

Post by freilanzer »

giovannibonetti wrote: post #74
mft_ wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interested what problems you’re experiencing? I use Firefox daily on Mac and Windows and can’t think of a single problem or failing page?

I use Firefox on Android and, although I love having extensions on mobile, it bothers me that it freezes about once per day. Granted, it restarts automatically on the page I was reading before, so it isn't that annoying.

I don't have any problems on either Linux, Windows, or Android.

Re: Mozilla downsizes as it refocuses on Firefox and AI

#149

Post by xuhu »

thayne wrote: post #145
xuhu wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Desktop linux market share is below 2% yet people aren't talking about it being on its last legs like with Firefox. How does Firefox's 3.5% market share prevent people from using it ? Is the 180,000,000 number of monthly active users simply too low ?

But desktop linux market share has never been in the double digits. Firefox once had 30%. And the low marketshare does prevent people from using it. Because there are sites that only work if you use chrome and maybe safari, because Firefox marketshare isn't big enough to worry about. So users switch to chrome so those sites work, which decreases Firefox market share in a vicious cycle.

The chicken-and-egg is a valid argument. But it applies to Linux as well (no users -> no apps being ported -> no users).

Re: Mozilla downsizes as it refocuses on Firefox and AI

#150

Post by hollerith »

pcwalton wrote: post #139
hollerith wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Brave pushed back as hard as possible against Manifest v3, Google refused to budge, and ultimately Google got its way OK, thanks for that, but Brave's decision might've been informed by the fact that Manifest v2 seems to make the user too vulnerable to purveyors of shady extensions, and is not really needed except for adblocking (or at least I'm unaware of any use cases except adblocking where Manifest v3 does not s…

Brave continues to ship Manifest v2. Technically Brave is a fork of Chromium for this reason, albeit one that hews close to upstream. The reason why Brave had to fork Chromium is that, again, Google completely controls Chromium's development, so they had no choice. Google couldn't care less what Brave thinks if Brave's goals run counter to their own business motivations.

>Brave continues to ship Manifest v2

Pardon my ignorance, then. Your "ultimately Google got its way" led me to conclude that Brave must have indicated that it will stop shipping v2.

Let me summarize. Google completely controls Chrome's development, but at least 2 organizations (Microsoft and Brave) seem willing to maintain their own forks of things in Chromium even if Google abandons those things. Although it doesn't care about empowering users to avoid ads and consequently doesn't care about Manifest v2 (especially since v2 is a big source of malware and spyware) Microsoft does care a lot about Electron, and would gladly maintain its own fork of any code files necessary for Electron if Google decides it no longer wants those code files in new versions of Chromium.

Do you agree with that summary?

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