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Mozilla's open source AI strategy

blog.mozilla.org

21–30 of 213 posts

Re: Mozilla's open source AI strategy

#21

[flagged]

Mozilla is not and never has been a browser company. They have always been a charity with a for profit arm that does a browser. However never has a browser been more than an after thought to any of the leadership.

Of course what the world really needs is a browser company and so we try to pretend Mozilla is that, but they are not. Support an alternative browser (I'm not aware of any though. There are browser skin companies but nobody making the hard parts of a browser)

Re: Mozilla's open source AI strategy

#23

I like the high level points but unless Mozilla finds revenue from this, are they not doing too much with mostly donation based revenue?

Being the agent of the user isn't particularly profitable. For example: companies want the users to be shown ads, and users generally don't want to be shown ads. But profit, which is to say money you make without having to directly work for it, comes from selling the user's interests away. Like, perhaps, choosing to take a bribe to cement Google's search monopoly, a fundamentally anticompetitive behavior which, even as it makes cash for Mozilla, costs the web far, far more.

They've lost their way completely as an independent entity, and a post like this that doesn't reaaally seem to grasp that weight of that conundrum comes no closer to convincing me that they can find their way back to the light.

Re: Mozilla's open source AI strategy

#24
post #12

I guess replies on this thread are evident that Mozilla has lost much of the trust and goodwill it once enjoyed. Admittedly I am also very skeptical that Mozilla has the ability or genuine interest to make this work.

There is always a pile on on Firebox for not being perfect. Sometimes with valid complaints. But if you dig deeper nearly always the commenter is using a version of Chrome and justifies it over Firefox for a very shallow or outdated reason. Firefox would do well to listen to some of the criticism about the browser and ignore the noise about anything else

There's also the cohort of bad web developers that only test on Chrome

Re: Mozilla's open source AI strategy

#26
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks like the Mozilla.ai platform is Saas but the tools themselves are open source, so you could just use them elsewhere.

Indeed, but LangChain / LangGraph tools are also Open Source so its not really Mozilla bringing their Open Source culture as a differentiating factor from their competitors.

Ah. I had assumed that these were tools built or contributed to by Mozilla.

Re: Mozilla's open source AI strategy

#27
post #12

I guess replies on this thread are evident that Mozilla has lost much of the trust and goodwill it once enjoyed. Admittedly I am also very skeptical that Mozilla has the ability or genuine interest to make this work.

There is always a pile on on Firebox for not being perfect. Sometimes with valid complaints. But if you dig deeper nearly always the commenter is using a version of Chrome and justifies it over Firefox for a very shallow or outdated reason. Firefox would do well to listen to some of the criticism about the browser and ignore the noise about anything else There's also the cohort of bad web developers that only test on…

Including everyone that ships Chrome with their application as "native" app.

VSCode gets a pass, because apparently it is the only programmer's editor that many only care about providing plugins nowadays.

Re: Mozilla's open source AI strategy

#28

> Mozilla was born to change this, and Firefox succeeded beyond what most people thought possible — dropping Internet Explorer’s market share to 55% in just a few years and ushering in the Web 2.0 era. Is this true? I can see from here[0] that its peak was 32%, as IE was really on the back burner but before Chrome had fully risen to dominance, but I wouldn't claim that it was responsible for IE's market share drop. […

You’re right on the numbers....Firefox never had majority share. The stronger claim is causal influence, not dominance. I recently read somewhere that the Firefox (and later Chrome) forced standards compliance and broke IE’s de-facto monopoly mindset. IE’s decline was gradual and multi-factor, but Firefox clearly shifted developer and user expectations.

Re: Mozilla's open source AI strategy

#29
post #21

[flagged]

Mozilla is not and never has been a browser company. They have always been a charity with a for profit arm that does a browser. However never has a browser been more than an after thought to any of the leadership. Of course what the world really needs is a browser company and so we try to pretend Mozilla is that, but they are not. Support an alternative browser (I'm not aware of any though. There are browser skin com…

I’m aware of at least two honest-to-goodness new browser projects:

There’s Servo, which used to be from Mozilla, but then they abandoned it. Now I believe it’s independent after a long period of dormancy.

There is also Ladybird, whose founder is a prolific and technically brilliant person but who is also, at minimum, a fascist sympathizer, in addition to being a supporter of white replacement theory and other racist ideas.

Neither project, last I checked, is really close to being a “daily driver.” But they’re both in active development, so maybe in the future they’ll become legit alternatives to the Google/Apple duopoly.

Re: Mozilla's open source AI strategy

#30
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is always a pile on on Firebox for not being perfect. Sometimes with valid complaints. But if you dig deeper nearly always the commenter is using a version of Chrome and justifies it over Firefox for a very shallow or outdated reason. Firefox would do well to listen to some of the criticism about the browser and ignore the noise about anything else There's also the cohort of bad web developers that only test on…

Including everyone that ships Chrome with their application as "native" app. VSCode gets a pass, because apparently it is the only programmer's editor that many only care about providing plugins nowadays.

The ubiquity of their plugin model is why. Near all editors have a VS code plugin compatible layer
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