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Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

blog.mozilla.org

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Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What even is an "AI browser"? It's a browser, it's mainly supposed to render web pages / web apps. There is no obvious reason why it would need any AI features.

Translation? Image search? Live captions? Dubbing? Summary? Rewrite text better?

Safari does most of this by leveraging system-level AI features, some of which are entirely local (and in turn, can be and do get used elsewhere throughout the system and native apps). This model makes a lot more sense to me than building the browser around an LLM.

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What even is an "AI browser"? It's a browser, it's mainly supposed to render web pages / web apps. There is no obvious reason why it would need any AI features.

Translation? Image search? Live captions? Dubbing? Summary? Rewrite text better?

All those things we had before AI?

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#203
post #150
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Technically..... Since its birth, Firefox is still the only browser that manage multiple ( hundreds or in some cases, thousands! [1] ) tabs better than any browser. And in my view in the past 12 - 24 months Firefox has managed to be as fast as chrome. While Chrome also improved on its multiple Tab browsing experience. Safari.... I dont know why this battery life argument keeps coming up because it is not the case. I…

> Safari.... I dont know why this battery life argument keeps coming up because it is not the case. It hasn't been so for at least 5 - 6 years. I can assure you, this is still true. I use Chrome when plugged in at my desk and Safari for everything else on the go. Chrome still isn't great on memory or battery life.

Have you compared with something else than Chrome? Otherwise it might be that Chrome is just very power hungry compared to Safari, but maybe Firefox is more efficient by now? Chrome has slowly turned into a monster on it's own, not unlike what they competed against initially when Chrome first arrived.

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#204
post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's so fundamental about marriage? I don't think childless couples (of any gender) should get any societal advantages yet I have no problem working with people that disagree. Why has everything to be black-or-white, left-or-right, with us or against us? That's not a productive way to think about others.

For one, being childless is a choice (mostly, especially since adoption is a possibility). It's indeed OK to have different opinions for what how laws apply differently to people based on their choices. Being gay is not a choice, it is rather similar to race/ethnic background, and it's generally not OK to have laws that treat people differently based on something like that. I'm sure there are more nuances to add, but…

I don't think everyone agrees that being gay is not a choice. There are no outward physical indicators of a person's sexual orientation. It's entirely behavorial and therefore plausibly under the conscious control of the person. Now, I would agree that a person doesn't choose which gender he is attracted to, but it not something than anyone else can see and immediately understand as an inborn characteristic.

Clearly being black, or hispanic, or asian, or white are physical characteristics. Far fewer people would argue that there is any element of choice in that.

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#205
post #173

Well Ladybird [0] it is [0]: https://ladybird.org/

> it is You must be meaning "will be". Because the first alpha release is promised some time in 2026. So hopefully by 2028 it will be solid enough.

You can use it right now if you build it from source, in fact I am writing this HN comment from it.

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#206
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not sucking at blocking thats YouTube intentionally adding a delay to make it seem like their experience is degraded when it isn't. If you turn the slider up to full it only happens very rarely. I'm sure this will all change eventually though and YouTube has a loophole planned so ad blocking on manifest 2.0 is impossible.

I'm not really sure of the actual mechanism, but on Firefox with a fully updated block list the delay doesn't seem to happen for me. Whereas I could never quite get rid of it on Chrome. This was a while ago, though, when they first introduced it.

I use uBlock Origin with Firefox on Linux, and it seems like that delay happens maybe on 30% of the YouTube videos for me, with no rhyme or reason to which ones. And reloading the same video multiple times show consistent behavior if it loads fast/slow, not sure what's going on.

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's so fundamental about marriage? I don't think childless couples (of any gender) should get any societal advantages yet I have no problem working with people that disagree. Why has everything to be black-or-white, left-or-right, with us or against us? That's not a productive way to think about others.

What unjust "advantages" do you think childless couples get that you would want to get rid? Pretty much all of the legal benefits of marriage are contractual, not financial, and come at no cost to the public. Things like spousal medical rights, a joint estate, etc don't come at the expense of anybody else.

Taxes would be a big one. There are substantial tax benefits to being married.

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#208
post #72
post #7

Does anyone else feel like the "Trust" angle is the only card they have left to play? Technically, Chrome is faster on JS benchmarks. Edge has better OS integration on Windows and comes by default. Safari wins on battery life on Mac. Firefox's only unique selling point is "We aren't a massive data vampire." If they clutter the browser with AI which inherently requires data processing, often in the cloud, they dilute…

>Technically..... Since its birth, Firefox is still the only browser that manage multiple ( hundreds or in some cases, thousands! [1] ) tabs better than any browser. And in my view in the past 12 - 24 months Firefox has managed to be as fast as chrome. While Chrome also improved on its multiple Tab browsing experience. Safari.... I dont know why this battery life argument keeps coming up because it is not the case. I…

I remember people saying that chromium is better at sandboxing than firefox, so more secure.

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#209
post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the risk of becoming the infamous iPod and Dropbox posters, I really don't think so. My browser having an LLM directly integrated adds nothing for my use cases that couldn't be accomplished with a web service or dedicated tool/app. For me, an integrated LLM running concurrently with my browser just represents a whole lot of compute and/or network calls with little added value and I don't think that this is unusual…

Having something that read everything I read and could talk with me about it, help remember things and synthesize? That’s awesome. Follow links and check references.

This use case feels better served by a dedicated utility with a specialized UI rather than shoehorned into a browser. It'd fit the macOS services model (which adds items to context and application menus, e.g. "Research this…" when right-clicking a link or text selection) and could optionally also be summoned by the system app launcher (like Spotlight).

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#210
post #154

I love Mozilla but this feels like marketing imo. From the article: "AI should always be a choice — something people can easily turn off" and "Firefox will remain our anchor. It will evolve into a modern AI browser". I highly doubt you will be able to turn of the transformer tech features in an AI browser imo. And they won't make a separate browser for this. This really feels like the beginning of the end for Mozilla…

> This really feels like the beginning of the end for Mozilla, sadly. The moment Mozilla failed to stop being dependent on Google's money whilst being true to their own mission in being a 'privacy first browser' it already was the end and the damage in trust was done. In 2007, the CEO at the time said they could live without Google's money - Now, their entire survival was tied to Google funding them [0] and got rewar…

> The moment Mozilla failed to stop being dependent on Google's money whilst being true to their own mission in being a 'privacy first browser' it already was the end and the damage in trust was done.

I understand your position but what is the alternative funding source that could keep a company making a free browser running?

Apple funds Safari's development but it's basically a side project for them, Google funds Chrome's development as side project to their ad business, Edge is the same for Microsoft.

Obviously we don't want Firefox to become ad-supported so that leaves either donations which to be honest does not work (see all the OS projects that ask for donations when you install NPM packages for reference) or they need to start charging money (we know how well that worked out for Netscape) or finally find another corporate sponsor willing to shove billions of dollars each year into a product that will not improve their bottom line.

I am all for alternatives and I agree with you that something needs to change but the real question is how?

Maybe I am presumptuous in this assumption but I am pretty sure that if Mozilla had another palatable solution on the table, they would have probably implemented it by now.

> After thinking about it, the only viable browser that is not funded by Google (Firefox 75%, Safari (>20%) and Chrome) is Ladybird.

Ladybird is sponsored by many big companies as well. What makes you think that somehow their fate will be any different than Firefox? Do you believe that Shopify for example is more altruistic than Google and therefore should be trusted more?

I personally don't.

In my opinion the problem is the expectation that things should be free always on the internet and we can thank Google and Facebook for that. Most people these days who are not in the tech world simply have no idea how many hours and how much money it takes to create something, having it used by people and iterating on it day in day out until it is in a good shape and can be used by the general public.

Therefore besides a small cohort of users in tech (like Kagi's customers for example who understand that a good search engine is not free), the vast majority of people will not accept to have to pay for a browser. Which brings us back to the question I asked above.

Who will fund this supposedly free for all browser that does not track you, that does not show you any ads, that does not incorporate AI features, that does not try to up-sell you or scam you? From my vantage point it's not like there are 100s of solutions to get out of this conundrum.

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