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Tor browser removing various Firefox AI features

blog.torproject.org

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Re: Tor browser removing various Firefox AI features

#171

Post by rchaud »

vee-kay wrote: post #158

Did you know.. Mozilla get >80% of its revenue from Google, by making Google Search as default search engine on Firefox. While Mozilla pretends to be a non-profit, its CEO makes millions of dollars annually. Mitchell Baker: Stepped down as CEO of Mozilla in February 2024. Her salary for 2023 was reported to be $6.9 million. Laura Chambers: Became interim CEO of Mozilla in February 2024. Mozilla has not disclosed her…

Lots of nonprofits have CEO comp in the millions. Firefox is a large company with lots of employees and tens of millions of users. They have to offer compensation that is somewhat close to market rates to be able to hire people capable of managing that kind of scale. Mozilla isn't funded by individual donations and doesn't charge its users for Firefox, so what does it matter what the execs get paid?

Re: Tor browser removing various Firefox AI features

#172

Post by noir_lord »

bstsb wrote: post #168
noir_lord wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did but I don't see FF splitting from Mozilla (by whatever mechanism) either sadly and if you lose the name it becomes hard to get adoption for the forked one - see IceWeasel.

that being said IceWeasel is a particularly bad name

I mean the primary image editor in open source land is Gimp (which I had to explain to an ex many years ago when she hopped on my PC) and our main open source source control system is called `git` (funnier if you are British) so open source devs have form for picking bad names :D.

`Git can be a right git` is a valid sentence here.

Re: Tor browser removing various Firefox AI features

#173

Post by nerdponx »

Seattle3503 wrote: post #138

It makes me a little sad we only ever see FF hit the front page of HN for stuff people are angry about. The FF team building useful features like tab groups that are improving UX. But I guess if it bleeds it leads.

I gave up on Firefox, sadly. I still use Thunderbird (which is apparently no longer part of Mozilla), but I couldn't deal with FF and Mozilla screwing around anymore.

I switched to Orion which has been working great for me. I'm happy to pay money for my browser and be confident that the money is actually being put towards maintaining and improving the browser.

I want Firefox to succeed, I just... can't justify it.

I wonder if they'd do better by charging $10 for a compiled binary and distributing it on Linux as an AppImage. I'd be happier to pay for that than send an unrestricted donation to the Mozilla foundation. Normally I frown on unrestricted donations, but something seems really off over there.

Re: Tor browser removing various Firefox AI features

#174

Post by kwanbix »

orev wrote: post #142
kwanbix wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I lived in the Netherlands for five years, so I switched to Chrome because its translation feature is much better. Now that I'm back in my home country, I've gone back to Firefox, which I prefer from a philosophical standpoint. But there's one simple feature keeping me from using it full-time: the ability to rename windows. My workflow relies on having one window per project. I name the windows Project1, Projec…

Maybe tab groups would work for you? Windows/tabs are usually (always) named from the html on the web site, and I’m surprised Chrome lets you change that in any persistent way. Firefox tab groups lets you manage things yourself at a higher level.

Thanks. No, I use tab groups also within the windows.

Re: Tor browser removing various Firefox AI features

#175

Post by akimbostrawman »

Seattle3503 wrote: post #138

It makes me a little sad we only ever see FF hit the front page of HN for stuff people are angry about. The FF team building useful features like tab groups that are improving UX. But I guess if it bleeds it leads.

>building useful features like tab groups

wow what an achievement. Vivaldi which has 1% of there budget had that feature for almost 10 years. Despite almost half a billion dollar budget almost all there good UI changes come years late being the last to add them for example profile management.

It is honestly embarrassing to compare Mozilla to companies like brave that actually created a private ecosystem without subsidization from there competitors.

Re: Tor browser removing various Firefox AI features

#176

Post by sunaookami »

radarsat1 wrote: post #164
pluto_modadic wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

translation is moreso machine learning, not generative hallucinations or a chatbot

it's literally the same technology as LLMs. Transformers were proposed for translation. (But I don't know what methods the Firefox translation uses. I assume it's a local model but don't even know that for sure.)

It is a local model: https://mozilla.github.io/translations/

Re: Tor browser removing various Firefox AI features

#177

Post by anjel »

vee-kay wrote: post #158

Did you know.. Mozilla get >80% of its revenue from Google, by making Google Search as default search engine on Firefox. While Mozilla pretends to be a non-profit, its CEO makes millions of dollars annually. Mitchell Baker: Stepped down as CEO of Mozilla in February 2024. Her salary for 2023 was reported to be $6.9 million. Laura Chambers: Became interim CEO of Mozilla in February 2024. Mozilla has not disclosed her…

Non-profits are headed but also staffed with the same ambititious types as for-profit businesses. If you think only Mozilla pays its CEO attractively, you are misinformed. Managerial talent costs, and non-profit CEOs, in my direct experience, use the same lateral pay package comparisons to other non-profit CEOs to justify their comp packages.

The whole point of carving out an alternate rules space for non-profits in a capitalistic economy is that some business functions are both necessary and very unlikely to be profitable.

The assumption that employees would work in non-profits at an uncompetitve wage is a widespread fallacy. In the end a non-profit is either:

1. unprofitable but so necessary it finds subsidies to continue unprofitable operations

2. breaks even

3. runs well enough to generate an operating surplus which by NP tax regs must be either distributed to employees as a bonus or put forward to organisational growth.

In any of these three revenue scenarios, underpaying critical staff is an org death spiral by loss of requisite talent.

CEOs in the US often make much more in the US than other countries, and US non-profit are not nearly immune to the larger forces responsible for that trend.

Re: Tor browser removing various Firefox AI features

#180

Post by astrobe_ »

pessimizer wrote: post #128
lenerdenator wrote: post #116

Mozilla's beginning to lose its way. There are far too many "luminaries" in the tech industry who've had the last 20 years of "must create value!" go to their heads, even in the FLOSS space. When profit motive does not exist (and it shouldn't in FLOSS) then you need to stick to things like the UNIX philosophy and KISS (keep it simple, stupid) in order to create good software. Trends mean nothing when you're in this m…

> Mozilla's beginning to lose its way. Beginning? > If the group's leadership cannot comprehend this, then they need to be removed immediately and blacklisted from leadership at future organizations in the future. You have no power to do this. They would have to remove themselves, or Google would have to make a phone call.

Or just watch its market share erode until it vanishes from the charts. You picked "beginning" too, and indeed it started when they betrayed the power-users userbase they had (the one that installed FF on their mum's computer and actively promoted it) to be more like the oh-so-successful Chrome (which was pushed with dark patterns like being bundled with AV updates). Personally, it made me go to the "old" Opera (Opera 12) until it got "Chromified" and sold to China.

They have consistently been doing the opposite of what the majority of their userbase expect from them (Pocket, paid sites forced to the "Speedial" page,...). To me, the only remaining value of FF is being up-to-date with web shena^H^H^H^H^H standards.

A FOSS project shouldn't be focused on succeeding; they should be focused on doing the right thing. No little compromises or play-on-words on your values. And if that means less funding, too bad, but so be it.

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