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Mozilla's open source AI strategy

blog.mozilla.org

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171–180 of 213 posts

Re: Mozilla's open source AI strategy

#171

Post by glenstein »

28304283409234 wrote: post #109

Please let me pay for Firefox and have the proceed fund Firefox directly. This is not 1999 anymore. We are all wealthy grown ups now.

Even the most successful online annual fundraising drive that exists, Wikipedia, raises less than half of what Mozilla gets annually from search licensing. And Mozilla in a best case scenario probably can't match Wikipedia's fundraising for a number of reasons.

It would feel good and I certainly wouldn't mind it, but it's much closer to a drop in the bucket than a panacea.

Re: Mozilla's open source AI strategy

#172

Post by glenstein »

28304283409234 wrote: post #155
pmontra wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but how large is the subset of Firefox users that are willing to pay for a browser? Take that number and multiply it either by 10 o by 100 and you get the order of magnitude. I googled this https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1mhks3h/firefoxs_w... Let's say we are at 100 million users. If only 1 out of 100 pay, it's 10 to 100 million dollars per year. A lot of money or a puny amount, it depends.

And they claim to have at least 200 million users. If 1% pays a yearly fee of 10 dollars, surely that's enough to fund development.

I'm in favor of it, but that would raise about 4% of what Mozilla needs.

Re: Mozilla's open source AI strategy

#173

Post by drnick1 »

AuthAuth wrote: post #168
drnick1 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminder: Ladybird is being developed by a handful of people with contributions from the community. It's far from being complete, but it clearly shows that you don't need an enormous budget to build a Web browser entirely from scratch, let alone maintain one.

Ladybird should not be in the conversation. Its nowhere near FF or even usable as a browser.

I posted this reply from Ladybird, its pre-alpha but works better than you might think.

Re: Mozilla's open source AI strategy

#174

Post by glenstein »

LunaSea wrote: post #71
jampekka wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Firefox market share was eaten largely by the enormous and legally dubious marketing campaigns by Google and Microsoft. Hard to see how Mozilla could compete with constant forced nags and defaults in the most widely used websites and operating systems.

The Firefox market share was eaten by being worse than Chrome, especially around the developer tools and extensions market places at the time.

It was eaten by Google flexing their search and mobile monopolies, to advertise it on one of the most visited websites in the world, and coming pre-installed on over a billion devices. Distribution lock in leading to market share dominance is a tale as old as computing to the point that we now have decades old case law specifically on the issue of software monopolies being the cause of browser market share dominance.

Interestingly the most recent anti-trust case against Google, one proposed remedy was spinning off the Chrome browser into its own company, but that option was judged to be unrealistic, because how would a browser survive on it's own without distribution advantages and all its costs subsidized by other revenue drivers? A great question.

Re: Mozilla's open source AI strategy

#175

Post by glenstein »

brainless wrote: post #19

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

I think you're right but I suspect that's the point. AI may be eating into search, and that could threaten their search licensing deal. Apple just struck a deal with Google to use Gemini, though it sounds like Apple paying Google for the privilege. Ominous if you're a browser company looking to sell a license for a preferred AI tool.

Re: Mozilla's open source AI strategy

#176

Post by hu3 »

lamontcg wrote: post #145
Larrikin wrote: post #24

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…

It really seems like all the complaints about firefox are mostly ego-deflection. People know it is wrong to stay on Chrome and empower Google to the extent that it is, but they're stuck on that workflow and don't want to change, so they find nits to pick about firefox and get very LOUD about that. Then it becomes Mozill's fault that they're still using Chrome, and you can't blame them for anything.

> all the complaints about firefox are mostly ego-deflection.

Sorry this is too handwavy for me.

According to this logic, Mozilla is likely going to die believing it did nothing wrong.

Re: Mozilla's open source AI strategy

#177

Post by jd172 »

b1085436 wrote: post #118

I genuinely don't understand the "permissioned data" assumption. Presumably, all the current models that were trained on illegitimate scraping of vastly larger sources will always have the upper hand (in terms of raw power, obviously at the cost of regurgitating evil stuff too), because they just have absorbed way more diverse data in their training. So the models trained on ethical datasets only will not be able to…

Personally I would rather use a 'bad' ai that's trained ethically and runs locally than a good ai trained on stolen data that requires me to surrender my thoughts to the cloud.

whether or not it's possible to compete I guess we'll see but I am hopeful and appreciative that Mozilla is trying, as I am getting tired of big tech trying to force everyone to hand over even more unhinged amounts of data than what they're already taking from us.

Re: Mozilla's open source AI strategy

#178

Post by knowitnone3 »

drnick1 wrote: post #173
AuthAuth wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ladybird should not be in the conversation. Its nowhere near FF or even usable as a browser.

I posted this reply from Ladybird, its pre-alpha but works better than you might think.

I won't be touching it until it has adblock and darkmode.

Re: Mozilla's open source AI strategy

#179

Post by knowitnone3 »

culi wrote: post #125
TomMasz wrote: post #103

As a long-time Firefox user, I don't want them to have an "AI strategy", I want them to have a browser improvement strategy.

Firefox has improved significantly. It's improvement strategy is mostly focused on what developers ask them to focus on. They've had great performance on the yearly interops https://wpt.fyi/interop-2021 https://wpt.fyi/interop-2022 https://wpt.fyi/interop-2023 https://wpt.fyi/interop-2024 https://wpt.fyi/interop-2025

what developers do they still have. their dev console is so bad compared to Chrome. Mozilla abandoned their user base and the users have moved on.

Re: Mozilla's open source AI strategy

#180

Post by steveklabnik »

glenstein wrote: post #165
steveklabnik wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure Mozilla has shipped more Rust code than anybody, FWIW. The obviously have a lot, but so have other companies as well.

In the browser space they have. Google has been a lot more tentative about working it into their various toolkits.

Yeah if you’re going to scope it to browsers alone, sure but Google is catching up. They just implemented JPEG-XL as a rust library for Firefox to use too, for example. Nothing at the scale of Stylo but it seems to be accelerating.
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