Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

blog.mozilla.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

861–870 of 970 posts

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#861

Post by mrguyorama »

jmiskovic wrote: post #774
NothingAboutAny wrote: post #649

Earlier quoted context omitted.

man not a single one of those examples sounds like something I'd need, or even need an AI agent to do. I keep seeing the ads for AI browsers and the only thing I can think about is the complete and utter lack of a use case, and your post only solidifies that further. not that I'm disagreeing with you per se, I'm sure some people have a workflow they can't automate easily and they need a more complicated and expensive…

I find it very hard to believe that either every site you interact with works exactly as you want it to work, or that you have the time/capacity to adjust them all with custom extensions. I get that there are downsides but you don't see any upsides?

No. No upsides.

Again, what can an LLM possibly do to help? Summarize the page I'm already reading? I don't want a summary, that's dumb. People who think their time is so precious they have to optimize a five minute read into a ten cent API call and one minute read of possibly wrong output are just silly. You aren't "freeing up time", you are selling your reality.

Buy stuff for me? Why? Buying shit online is so easy most people do it on the toilet. I've bought things on the internet while blackout drunk. I also have a particular view of "Value" that no LLM will ever replicate, and not only do I have no interest in giving someone else access to my checkbook, I certainly do not want to give it to a third party who could make money off that relationship.

How would I no longer need browser extensions? You're saying the LLM would reliably block ads and that functionality will be managed by the single human being who has reliably done that for decades like uBlock origin? How will LLMs replace my gesture based navigation that all these hyper-productivity focused fools don't even seem to know exists? It certainly won't replace my corporate required password manager.

>You would be able to seamlessly communicate with the Polish internet subculture, or with Gen Alpha, all without feeling the physical pain

Come on, get over yourself.

> With an AGI-level AI

So Mozilla, who isn't even allowed to spend $6 million on a CEO is somehow magically going to invent super AI that runs locally? Get a grip.

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#862

Post by CamperBob2 »

account42 wrote: post #820
CamperBob2 wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's a lot nicer to exercise your brain and maybe learn something.

If Luddism is your idea of "learning something," well... other sites beckon.

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#863

Post by godelski »

avazhi wrote: post #769
godelski wrote: post #741

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do get that and I'm like 60% with you, but I'm just saying that it is easy to get a bit in a bubble and Mozilla needs to cater to the average person. And let's be honest, we aren't the average user. Personally I'm fine as long as it continues to be easy to disable and remove. Yeah, I'd rather it be opt-in instead of opt-out but it's not a big price to pay to avoid giving Chrome more power over the internet. At the…

I mean, Chrome/Google have already won the browser wars and it isn't even close. 'Average' persons don't use Firefox, period - they use Chrome. I dunno when you last looked at browser market share, but Firefox is already extremely niche. Trying to cater to the 'average user' when your entire userbase consists of power users is asinine but Mozilla clearly doesn't understand this. They think it's still 2008 or somethin…

Do you use Firefox?

If not, why not?

Do normal people use Firefox?

I've successfully migrated my girlfriend, parents, and several friends. Half those friends don't even know how to program. So yes, normal people can use Firefox and they really don't notice the difference.

  > Chrome/Google have already won the browser wars
It isn't over till its over. It's trivial to make a stand in this fight. It is beyond me why a large portion of HN users aren't using FF or one of its derivatives. Of all people they should be more likely to understand what's at stake here...

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#864

Post by e2le »

Izkata wrote: post #666
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…

> And anything done to make that profit will annoy the community. I don't keep close track of this, but as far as I remember they haven't tried donations that go only to Firefox/Thunderbird/etc of the person's choice, instead of Mozilla as a whole. That's what people always claim they want in these threads. I doubt donations would be enough, but I think doing it like that would at least be a step in a direction peopl…

Thunderbird is entirely funded by donations for some years now and is more than enough. In 2024, Thunderbird received $10.3M (19% increase over the previous year) in donations which was used to employ 43 people.

https://blog.thunderbird.net/2025/10/state-of-the-bird-2024-...

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#865

Post by JumpCrisscross »

rurban wrote: post #834
philipallstar wrote: post #791

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple has actually proven itself over a long period of time on this issue. Maybe Mozilla has as well (do they encrypt telemetry logs etc for people with a Mozilla login?) but I haven't heard so much about that.

Did you really forgot about Snowden's Apple slide? Also their phones are routinely mirrored at the border. Just to support the unconstitutional government agenda of policing thoughts and speech.

> Did you really forgot about Snowden's Apple slide?

Was Apple coöperating or were they hacked? (I remember the smiley face for Gmail. Google, in that case, was hacked.)

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#866

Post by [deleted] »

input_sh wrote: post #781
estimator7292 wrote: post #735

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They could partner with Kagi. Pretty much everyone trusts Kagi, so if Mozilla convinces them to get on board, Mozilla must be actually serious about being trustworthy.

> Pretty much everyone trusts Kagi ...on a forum run by its investors whose goal is to push Kagi, sure. Outside of this forum, nobody knows about a fringe little search engine that is paywalled and only has 62k users. For a brand like Mozilla, even something as dumb as Ecosia would be a better fit, as they have about 250x the number of users of Kagi.

[deleted]

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#867

Post by sfink »

smt88 wrote: post #661
sfink wrote: post #650

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hm. I'm dumb so you'll need to spell it out for me. 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…

> Most MoCo contributors do work on Firefox. Firefox is a MoCo product. This is true. > But still, MoFo contributors, paid or not, do not work on Firefox. This is not true, based on what I've read about it. Do you have personal experience with these orgs that suggests otherwise? Regardless, nothing is stopping Foundation funds from being directed to Firefox development. If someone gave them, for example, $1M that cou…

> This is not true, based on what I've read about it. Do you have personal experience with these orgs that suggests otherwise?

Yes, I work for MoCo.

> Regardless, nothing is stopping Foundation funds from being directed to Firefox development. If someone gave them, for example, $1M that could only be spent on Firefox, they could pay Corporation or an external consultancy to contribute to the open-source Firefox repositories.

I don't really understand the whole setup, but I believe tax law is what is stopping this. What you are describing would be fraud (or something like it; IANAL). Money flows MoCo->MoFo (via dividends). Paying MoCo for something directly or hiring consultants to provide value would be "private inurement" [1], a phrase which here means that lawyers like scary words. It is using tax-exempt money to enrich private individuals.

But the tl;dr is that the MoFo/MoCo split was created specifically so that money could flow MoCo->MoFo and not the other way around, in order for MoCo to do business-y stuff without jeopardizing MoFo's non-profit status. Nvidia's game where it pays companies to buy their chips would not fly in the non-profit sector.

> This is already happening, either through Foundation or Corporation. One of the biggest Servo contributors works for a FOSS consultancy.

Servo was split out from Mozilla during COVID, and sadly is now completely unaffiliated. It is in the Linux Foundation Europe now. (Igalia is great, though!)

[1] https://legalclarity.org/private-inurement-definition-exampl...

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#868

Post by mghackerlady »

estimator7292 wrote: post #735
MarsIronPI wrote: post #695

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - Mozilla Search - metasearch that isn't based on Bing/DDG/Google As much hate as Brave gets overall, I think Mozilla should take a page from Brave's book if they're going to make a search engine. I think they should have their own index, possibly supplemented by Bing or Google. Let people opt-in to using their browsers to help crawl for the search engine index, like Brave does. Then add in some power-user features…

They could partner with Kagi. Pretty much everyone trusts Kagi, so if Mozilla convinces them to get on board, Mozilla must be actually serious about being trustworthy.

I wouldn't partner with them, but if they do make a search engine they should take a page out of their book and focus on giving quality results. They can start by blacklisting any seo blogspammy site and instead try and direct you to the best results for any search first (for example, a wikipedia article or relevant docs)

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#869

Post by qudat »

viraptor wrote: post #447
gkoberger wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do work on it. A lot. But the issue is browsers don't make money. You can't charge for it, you can't add ads to it, etc. You're competing with the biggest companies in the world (Google, Apple), all of whom are happy to subsidize a browser for other reasons.

> You can't charge for it They could try. I just keep hearing people who would pay for no extra features as long as it paid for actual Firefox development and not the random unrelated Mozilla projects. I would pay a subscription. But they don't let me.

They honestly should charge for it.

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#870

Post by mghackerlady »

palata wrote: post #836
kakacik wrote: post #833

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A reliable, corporate-friendly, with advanced support model alternative of Exchange + AD is something that could sink a titan like Microsoft in 2 decades, at least its non-cloud business (but then for cloud alone they are just one of many, nothing special there). Literally everybody is fu*king fed up with M$ arrogance. But you can't get rid of Active Directory and Exchange. Make comparable alternative (with say 80% o…

Are you sure of that? There have been alternatives to Microsoft Office for decades. Yet most businesses use and pay for Microsoft Office, even though their employees most likely don't need anything that doesn't exist in those alternatives. Why would it be different with email?

Nobody got fired for buying ~~IBM~~ Microsoft. People trust Mozilla though, they've built their brand on not sucking as bad as M$ and Google
Post reply on HN