Firefox will have an option to disable all AI features

> Faster code, higher quality code, overall smaller.

I'll have to take your word for it, I have yet to see a PR that used AI that wasn't slop.

> AI is not a hammer, it's a Lathe

I would liken it more to dynamite.

> money (which they desperately need)

True. But crypto is bad publicity and everyone knows it. At that point it's no better than going out wearing a swastika sign (sorry, Poe's law triggered) and saying it's an ancient Buddhist symbol.

> No, what FF is doing is implementing features like Translate (an ALREADY opt-in feature[0]) and semantic search

Did you read my comment? The problem is that this takes focus away from the browser core. Why did they kill Servo? Were are XUL API replacements that were promised? The AI fluff could have been an extension - and that would keep everyone happy.

> It feels off-mission.

Than he doesn't need to talk about it at all. Unless that's a vibe check that's it. Somebody already posted an xkcd of it, I'm just doubling: https://xkcd.com/463/

> We're eating our cake and what, complaining that the baker's hands aren't made of gold?

Unfortunately it's pretty hard to define where "hand aren't made of gold" stops and "gotta call a HAZMAT decontamination team" starts.

> Meanwhile we're just attacking the last line of defense against Google (Chromium) taking over the internet?

The thing is: Google started as "don't be evil" as well. It didn't lasted because of inherit incentives issue. And so if Mozilla is the last line of defense it'd better have some distinguishing features other than "we are not google". Because if they keep focusing on "average user" (btw it's my firm belief that the said user doesn't exist outside management's heads) their incentives wouldn't be any different.

> So what do we privacy maximalists care? The forks give us exactly what we want.

That's what I'm doing personally. But the forks barely have resources to remove the crap, yet alone implement new features.

AFAIR Mozilla is firmly against introducing new stuff that could be used for fingerprinting and that was their (and Apple's) rationale for not implementing it. That's a noble goal for sure, but peripheral access is a genuinely useful feature now that the Web had become the de-facto standard application platform. You don't like JS having access to everything - fine, but than we need some other way to do this (without porting everything to native).

I agree that the forks are the pressure release valves here. Would strongly consider switching to a fork myself.

But still I'm just wrenched by the dissonance in what new-CEO-guy said. 5 years ago or so I reported a serious bug in pointer events. If you move the mouse less than 1px the browser 5-10% of the time Firefox reports to JS that the you moved the cursor ~400pixels up and to the right or left.

Honestly this bug isn't super high impact for the web as a whole, but anyone who uses pointer events needs to work around it by smoothing the input stream. They confirmed the bug in their tracker and there it has sat for five years with no activity while the browser behaves in violation of the contract between the user and the web platform, putting an extra stumbling block in the way of every web application that allows drawing on screen with the mouse cursor.

To me, an issue like that is the canary in the coal mine, and the canary is dead. There's only a few reasons I can think of to leave a perfectly-reproduceable issue like that sitting for five years: 1) you don't have the energy for it, probably because so many other things are on fire 2) you don't see any value in having the trust of your users. or 3) your code is so fucked up inside that there's just no hope of figuring out why a half-pixel movement triggers a mouse would do something insane like trigger a mouse event 400 pixels away.

So now this new CEO guy comes along and says "we've lost people's trust." Wow, I think to myself, he really gets it!" Then he says: "to get trust back, our top priority will be working on AI features." WHAT THE FUCK WHYYYYY!?!?

Did you not literally just say you recognized that you had lost people's trust? Did you think that people didn't trust you because you hadn't tasked every engineer that wants to be able to get a promotion to work on AI!?

I think the core of the issue is that Mozilla is thinking big. They're not happy to service a niche well (which the majority of the comments on Mozilla related posts is generally asking them to), they want to get back to their glory days, capture the mainstream.

And that is tough. Chrome won because it was an, at the time, superior product, AND because it had an insane marketing push. I remember how it was just everywhere. Every other installer pushed Chrome on you, as well as all the Google properties, it was all over the (tech) news, shaping new standards aggressively etc. Not something Mozilla can match.

But they just won't give up. I don't know if I should applaud that or not, but I think it's probably the core of the disconnect between Mozilla and the tech community. They desperately want to break into the mainstream again, their most vocal supporters want them to get a reality check on their ambitions.

If I was running Mozilla, I'd probably go for the niche. It's less glamorous, but servicing a niche is relatively easy, all you have to do is listen to users and focus on stuff they want and/or need. You generally get enough loyalty to be able to move a bit behind the curve, see what works for others first, then do your own version once it's clear how it'll be valuable to the user base. I'd give this strategy the highest chance of long term survival and impact.

Mainstream is way tougher. You kinda need to make all kinds of people with different needs happy enough, and get ahead of where those wants and needs are going.

One could argue they could do both: Serve a niche well with Firefox and try to reach the mainstream with other products. I think to some degree they've tried it, with mixed results.