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Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

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Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#351

Post by maxrmk »

YetAnotherNick wrote: post #348
mixmastamyk wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The job was always very easy, fire all of the pure managers and sock the google money into an endowment before it runs out. Then focus on privacy as you mentioned. They’ve taken in several billion dollars by now. Let that sink in. They're supposedly a non-profit, so this plan is the well-trodden playbook. But of course no Manager instance could imagine such a thing. Cue Upton Sinclair quote.

Care to explain how would they get the money in the process you described? Selling privacy to Google or someone is the only money maker they have. There is no reason to believe manager pay is even 10% of the total expense.

Google (currently) pays Mozilla $400-500 million a year to be the default search engine in firefox.

edit: in 2023 they took in $653M in total, $555M of which was from Google. They spent $260M on software development, and $236M on other things.

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#352

Post by CamperBob2 »

this_user wrote: post #141
netdevphoenix wrote: post #118

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…

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.

It is really incredibly nice to be able to highlight a passage, right click on it, and select "Summarize" or "Explain this." That's all FireFox does at the moment. It's an option on the right-click menu. You can ignore it. If nobody told you the evil AI thingy was there, you would probably never notice it.

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#353

Post by marky1991 »

hamdingers wrote: post #333
Y_Y wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd donate to a campaign to ban child marraige, is that disordered?

If you think adults marrying other adults and adults marrying children are in any way equivalent, as you imply, then yes your thinking is deeply disordered.

That's not what he said or implied, he's merely responding to your argument 'Donating any amount of money to prevent people you don't know from marrying each other'. I think you might have a justifiable argument here, but it's not clear at all to me what it is.

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#354

Post by zug_zug »

gkoberger wrote: post #346
Teever wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." I agree with the person you're responding to. Decades of funding and they have zero savings to show for it. Though it's questionable as to how much big players like Google would have continued to fund Mozilla if they had seen Mozilla making the financial moves that would have made it an independent and self-s…

Well, they have over a billion in the bank. Which is both a ton of money, but also goes away quickly when you're a large company paying lots of money to salaries.

So if you have a billion in the bank, you can collect 5% return and never touch the money. So you get $50m a year to pay enough engineers to make a browser.

That's plenty of money if they recognize they need a super lean company with 0 bloat and a few highly paid experts who focus on correctness and not bullshit features.

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#355

Post by [deleted] »

jmiskovic wrote: post #330
this_user wrote: post #141

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.

A browser with current definition obviously doesn't "need" AI. And we also know all too well how it's going to turn out - they will both use the AI to push ads onto us and also collect and sell our personal data. However, a strong locally-executed AI would have potential to vastly improve our experience of web! So much work is done in browsers could be enhanced or automated with custom agents. You'd no longer need an…

[deleted]

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#356

Post by thesuitonym »

cpburns2009 wrote: post #307
thesuitonym wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know, Brave says it's every third new tab. https://brave.com/brave-ads/browser/

The new tab ads can be disabled with 2 clicks.

I love how quickly the goalpost moves from "No ads" to "Only opt in ads" to "Ads can be disabled with two clicks."

Quit coping and just admit it, Brave is adware. If you like it, that's cool, totally your choice. It's fast, performant adware. But it's adware all the same.

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#357

Post by dig1 »

perlgeek wrote: post #18
Fiveplus wrote: 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…

They also have the "extensions that can do real ad blocking" angle.

chromium-ungoogled works perfectly fine with "extensions that can do real ad blocking" ;)

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#358

Post by thesuitonym »

lkbm wrote: post #289
thesuitonym wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know, Brave says it's every third new tab. https://brave.com/brave-ads/browser/

Looks like I'm getting a ProtonMail ad every few new tabs. I never noticed because I've never looked at the new tab page. Doesn't noticeably slow it down to have the ad there, luckily.

So, to reiterate: Brave is adware.

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#359

Post by Jolter »

gkoberger wrote: post #316
nightski wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is so much profit needed?

Depends on how you look at it. They made $653 million in 2023, most coming from their biggest competitor, Google. They don't need this much money, but it means more layoffs and cutting scope drastically. It's expensive to run a modern browser.

Do you mean they need income, or do you actually mean profit?

In a nonprofit, you don’t need layoffs unless you’re losing money (negative profit), normally.

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#360

Post by the_biot »

gkoberger wrote: post #275

Having worked at Mozilla a while ago, the CEO role is one I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy. Success is oddly defined: it's a non-profit (well, a for-profit owned by a non-profit) that needs to make a big profit in a short amount of time. And anything done to make that profit will annoy the community. I hope Anthony leans into what makes Mozilla special. The past few years, Mozilla's business model has been to just m…

You're assuming Mozilla would be successful at a privacy play because they are a trusted organization. I can't stress this enough: they are not.
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