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Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

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Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#711

Post by Zak »

cyberrock wrote: post #670
Zak wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to me Android users who want to block ads are a strong target market. Desktop Chrome has extensions and despite the nerf, it has adblockers that mostly work; Android Chrome doesn't have extensions. A built in adblocker would probably help Firefox attract those users, but might destroy their Google revenue stream.

I think the problem with that is that Firefox Android with uBO still feels like it has worse First Contentful Paint than Chrome Android. Even on a high-end phone the difference can feel ridiculous; sites render after 1-2s on Chrome but sometimes I can count up to 5 with FF. The benefits of having uBO might matter more to you and me, but let's not forget that faster rendering was arguably the main reason Chrome Deskto…

Maybe I'm less sensitive to that, but I hadn't really noticed on a phone that wasn't high-end in 2020 and certainly isn't now. I'll have to pay attention to sites being slow and compare a Chromium-based browser next time I notice one.

I switched from Firefox desktop to Chrome when Chrome was new because it was multi-process and one janky page couldn't hang or crash the whole browser. I vaguely remember the renderer being a little faster, but multi-process was transformative. Firefox took years to catch up with that.

I'm very sensitive to ads though. If a browser doesn't have a decent adblocker, I'm not using it. Perhaps surprisingly, the Chromium browser with good extension support on Android is Edge.

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#712

Post by Dylan16807 »

smaudet wrote: post #610
mcpar-land wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally try to do what better? Run Mozilla? Make a browser?

Personally not support monopolies? If firefox is not working, do you have a solution/alternative?

Are you trying to say that complaining about Mozilla's mistakes supports monopolies?

If yes then that's an unreasonable standard to hold people to.

If no then I can't figure out what your comment means.

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#713

Post by AnonC »

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.

Technically, a browser is a “user agent”, and it could be argued that some AI features (with privacy) can help in being a better user agent.

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#714

Post by AnonC »

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…

> This really feels like the beginning of the end for Mozilla, sadly.

This has been said numerous times over the decades anytime Mozilla has done something. Thankfully (at least for me), it hasn’t come true so far.

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#715

Post by AnonC »

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…

> If they clutter the browser with AI which inherently requires data processing, often in the cloud

Where are you getting the “often in the cloud” from? So far Firefox has some local models for certain features. Using a specific cloud based AI is a conscious decision by the user within the sidebar.

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#716

Post by Dylan16807 »

dabockster wrote: post #632
LexiMax wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair enough. I'd still be very hesitant to use it on account of it being a chrome fork. Moreover, I don't really understand how Brave expects to be a viable business without deeply betraying their userbase at some point. It admittedly is a gut feeling, but Brave started out with a browser and some handwavy crypto magic beans and seemed like it careened from idea to idea looking for a business model, occasionally step…

Your points are valid. But what made me finally switch was that it is open source, that it has been out for roughly a decade now, and that Brendan Eich's opinions from 2014 are mostly based on his Catholic faith at the time (which obviously is likely to have changed/evolved now that we're a decade later). > Moreover, I don't really understand how Brave expects to be a viable business without deeply betraying their us…

> which obviously is likely to have changed/evolved now that we're a decade later

I refuse to make any assumptions there. Either he says he changed, or I treat him like he hasn't changed.

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#717

Post by mmooss »

miki_oomiri wrote: post #680
mmooss wrote: post #551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Mozilla will be fine without all the non-sense people, just put engineers in charge. That's always said by the engineers and never seems more than the obvious egocentric bias: What I do is important, everyone and everythying else is pointless.

Yep. I’ll die on the hill. Engineer and designers. That’s all we really need. We started with a very very small team and did all the heavy lifting. Then they started adding PM, marketing, market people, HR, … We were striving when we were not drowning in meetings, KPIs, management, emails, …

Who provides resources to the Es and Ds? Who hires new ones? Who raises money from investors and banks, and ensures you have cash flow and ROI? How do you manage 100 Es and Ds without a PM?

Small teams are more efficient but (obviously) can't produce at scale. When you scale up, there's enough HR or finance or marketing, or PM, etc. work for full-time specialists. And larger orgs need bureaucracy - if you have a way around that, the world is yours.

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#718

Post by mmooss »

dabockster wrote: post #627
mmooss wrote: post #590

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That makes much more sense. I wonder what the non-HN public thinks - most of those products, like Firefox OS, were essentially unknown outside HN-like populations. Pocket was better known. But yes, that is part of trust and I'd like to see them address it.

Firefox is still heavily used by Linux OSes as the default browser. But I think that's mostly momentum at this point. If more people knew about Mozilla's organizational challenges, then I think Firefox would get ditched.

If they like the browser, why would they care about organizational challenges? Do Google's organization challenges cost them Chrome users?

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#719

Post by Dylan16807 »

thesuitonym wrote: post #416
cpburns2009 wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox has ads in the same places. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/sponsor-privacy

whataboutism gets you nowhere. Brave is still adware.

When we're talking about reasons to switch browsers, then saying they both have the same behavior is not whataboutism. It's extremely important context to the complaint.

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#720

Post by mmooss »

the_biot wrote: post #659
mmooss wrote: post #548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is that based on? You can trust your doctor much more about your knee and much less about their billing. Trust isn't binary and isn't per person/organization/object, but varies by person and (activity?). And anything will be trusted more or less by different people. Is there evidence of who trusts Mozilla with what, and how much? The the fact that you don't trust them or that some on HN don't trust them isn't ev…

That's a fair question. It's of course my opinion, not hard fact, but here goes: - They have for years been trying to add stuff to Firefox that nobody wants, and were privacy violations. The "marketing studies" come to mind. - They have for decades been wasting their time and money on everything BUT Firefox, and failing at literally all of it. You can't help but notice the stellar incompetence of Mozilla leadership.…

> They have for decades been wasting their time and money on everything BUT Firefox

They invest the vast majority of their resources in Firefox. And they have had some incredible successes: Rust, Let's Encrypt ...

> How can somebody like Mitchell Baker be making millions of dollars a year while simultaneously seeing Firefox market share drop to damn near zero?

Maybe there was no realistic way to do better. Maybe thanks to Baker, Mozilla still exists.

With Firefox market share plummeting, and little prospect for competing with Google on a free commodity product, Mozilla needed and needs to find other products and not just watch the ship go down.

What's your solution? Do you really think they could make Firefox so good that the non-technical public would go through the effort of dropping Chrome, despite Google's enormous marketing advantage?

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