641–650 of 970 posts
Dumb question: who’s Firefox target user? Chrome is able to capture the mass consumer market, due to Google’s dark pattern to nag you to install Chrome anytime you’re on a Google property. Edge target enterprise Fortune 500 user, who is required to use Microsoft/Office 365 at work (and its deep security permission ties to SharePoint). Safari has Mac/iOS audience via being the default on those platform (and deep platf…
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…
Firemail should be the name of a free and privacy oriented email client wholly owned by Mozilla with a web and mobile app. I would sign up instantly and gradually migrate from gmail, while being assured for its sustainability.
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But then he went on to make Yet Another Chromium Fork, so it doesn't seem like he was particularly attached to Gecko or what it stands for in the browser engine market anyway. What's to say that Mozilla wouldn't have given up the fight and pivoted to Chromium, like Opera and Edge did, if he was still in charge?
It isn't really Yet Another Chromium Fork, they're the company that does most anti-ad research / development. Stuff like Project Sugarcoat[0]. Their adblocking engine is also native and does not depend on Manifest V2, making it work better than any blocker that has to switch to MV3 when Google removes MV2. And they're the only browser that has a functional alternative for webpage-based ads. Active right now. And you…
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Why do you think a software engineer or computer scientist would be more qualified?
This site in general has a massive hate boner for any part of a corporate structure that isn't the engineering department. Sales, admin, marketing, legal, HR, etc... all get flak from the HN community for being irredeemably idiotic wastes of space.
There's a reason I put that in my profile. :^)
This AI hype is frustrating, but it's also frustrating that it dominates conversations with valid points that are identical to the last five times it was talked about.
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My point is Mozilla achieves practically nothing despite making half a billion ad dollars for free from Google. If Wikipedia's numbers are right, that's $730,000 per employee.
They're the only modern usable browser engine not developed by a multi-trillion dollar corp. I'd say that's a pretty big achievement.
Everyone is reacting negatively to the focus on AI, but does Mozilla really have a choice? This is going to be a rehash of the same dynamic that has happened in all the browser wars: Leading browser introduces new feature, websites and extensions start using that feature, runner-up browsers have no choice but to introduce that feature or further lose marketshare. Chrome and Edge have already integrated LLM capabiliti…
> Everyone is reacting negatively to the focus on AI, but does Mozilla really have a choice? Do these type of also-ran strategies actually work for a competitor the size of Mozilla? Is AI integration required for them to grow or at least maintain? My hunch is this will hurt Firefox more than help it. Even if I were to believe their was a meaningful demand for these kind of features in the browser I doubt Mozilla is c…
I don't think Mozilla should get into the game of training their own models. If they did I'd bet it's just because they want to capitalize on the hype and try to get those crazy high AI valuations.
But the rate at which even the smaller models are getting better, I think the only competitive advantage for the big AI players would be left in the hosted frontier models that will be extremely jealously guarded and too big to run on-device anyway. The local, on-device models will likely converge to the same level of capabilities, and would be comparable for any of the browsers.
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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…
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Contributors are people. Donations are dollars. People ≠ dollars. Unless you grind them up and eat them as sausages, but don't do that. The anti-theft threads will get stuck in your teeth.
The contributors are paid by Mozilla Foundation. This is not complicated.
MoFo and MoCo both have contributors, yes. Both have unpaid contributors, which apparently are not who you're talking about. Both also have paid people who work for them. Whether or not you call them "contributors" or "employees" doesn't matter much, I guess. But still, MoFo contributors, paid or not, do not work on Firefox. Firefox is not a MoFo product. Most MoCo contributors do work on Firefox. Firefox is a MoCo product. It's confusing because MoFo owns MoCo, but owning a company does not mean its products are your products, nor that you can freely assist with those products (especially in an arms-length setup involving taxes, which is the very reason for the MoFo/MoCo split in the first place.) MoFo does other things, non-Firefox things, like advocacy and pissing off HN commenters who assume that "Mozilla does X" headlines always mean MoCo is doing X.
One of us is confused. I have that uneasy sensation I get when something is going "whoosh!" over my head, so it might be me.