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Mozilla's open source AI strategy

blog.mozilla.org

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191–200 of 213 posts

Re: Mozilla's open source AI strategy

#191

Post by encom »

gitaarik wrote: post #183
encom wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a former Firefox user, I got fed up with the constant change for the sake of change. Why change the tabs? They were fine the way they were. People got mad about the addon situation since it broke their workflows because of vague technical reasons. And Mozilla usually ignored user protests while pointing at telemetry, and did whatever they wanted to, users be damned. At least that's how it looked from this side. I…

I don't know but I've been using Firefox since forever and I can't even recall the tabs changing at all. Of course they have changed many times over the course of years, but that happens in every browser. I don't know what happened to tabs that affected you so badly? I feel like it's an excuse for some people sometime that if some little thing in the UI changes that they claim their whole flow is now compromised so t…

I'm obviously not just talking about the tabs. And "some little UI thing" can absolutely break your workflow - UI isn't just how things look. Mozilla purged lots of minor features over the years, and the goto excuse was usually "parity with Chrome" or "telemetry".

Re: Mozilla's open source AI strategy

#192

Post by encom »

subsection1h wrote: post #188
encom wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a former Firefox user, I got fed up with the constant change for the sake of change. Why change the tabs? They were fine the way they were. People got mad about the addon situation since it broke their workflows because of vague technical reasons. And Mozilla usually ignored user protests while pointing at telemetry, and did whatever they wanted to, users be damned. At least that's how it looked from this side. I…

> broke their workflows because of vague technical reasons > I switched to Vivaldi You refer to important security improvements as "vague technical reasons" and you switched to Vivaldi, a browser that is based[1] on extended stable Chromium, which is not "recommended for any team where security is a primary concern"[2]. It seems you don't care about security. [1] https://help.vivaldi.com/android/android-privacy/secur…

You're right - security is not my primary concern.

>security fixes that are relevant to any Chrome Browser platforms will be landed on the extended stable branch

>complex and risky changes [...] may not be viable to backport

Big deal.

Re: Mozilla's open source AI strategy

#194

Post by criticalfault »

glenstein wrote: post #170
criticalfault wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

all this should have been developed in 2000s different point of view: tab grouping took 20+y to develop (since opera had it in 2000s). in 2026 firefox should have: - fast ui - fast js - fast rendering - hw acceleration for video - same look and feel on all platforms - faster adblocker just the basics, no? didn't add more advanced features here. and let's see what is actually here: - UI rendered via HTML/xul. an abomi…

Look at what happened to Opera. They fell apart, abandoned their Presto engine for Chromium and sold to an outside investment group and now they serve ads based on user data. There was, in my opinion, no better browser company past or present than Opera in the 2000s and 2010s (sorry Mozilla). But their example exposes the fallacy of assuming that building out great features guarantees market share gains.

opera had a different business model. I don't think they had millions upon miliona that Mozilla gets from Google for antitrust reasons.

opera had to earn their money.

this aside, Mozilla just now implemented tab grouping. does that mean they are going to, because of the added features, follow opera's path?

my point was that someone said how they increased development speed. and I'm saying they are breaking record in how slow it is. it's not 1y, it's since the feature appeared anywhere and it's 20y ago. what the f was Mozilla doing since then? obviously they didn't work on the features. but also they didn't work on the other list of things I mentioned since only one is fully delivered (look and feel on all platforms) and those are non-features like fore mentioned tab groupings, but core capabilities for a browser.

in everything else they are so much behind it's really a wonder they still have market share as much as they do.

Re: Mozilla's open source AI strategy

#195

Post by giancarlostoro »

spartanatreyu wrote: post #189
wolvoleo wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cloudflare hates Firefox though. I get a lot more captchas on Cloudflare sites with Firefox.

Yeah, but if they controlled firefox, there'd probably be less captchas to complete

I like the way you think ;)

Re: Mozilla's open source AI strategy

#196

Post by countWSS »

This has the feeling of corporate feel-good PR release: its essentially content-less AI-generated rehashing "our models are freer/more open-source" which seems silly since they don't develop anything unlike DeepSeek/GLM/Qwen the real open-source giants. Mozilla is a middle-man that could use open-source agents, but it pretending to be the "gatekeeper" of "open AI". Their key motivation is exposed in the middle of text: "The Mozilla Data Collective is building a marketplace for data that is properly licensed, clearly sourced, and aligned with the values of the communities it comes from."

This is far away from Firefox roots, whatever corporate stewards are at helm of mozilla now think exclusively in terms of marketplaces and "economics of data".. Futher reading "so we’re deepening our engagement with governments and enterprises adopting sovereign, auditable AI systems. These engagements are the feedback loops that tell us where the stack breaks and where openness needs reinforcement." Hard pass.

Re: Mozilla's open source AI strategy

#198

Post by Yoric »

evilduck wrote: post #186
Yoric wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Additionally, my perception (from posts and discussions like these, I'm not a financial analyst and I have no meaningful insights into their business) is also that they probably receive enough funding through non-advertising means that they don't actually need to do this if they were to pare back the nonsense spending they're so greatly known for. Last time I checked, Mozilla received 90%+ of its funding from Googl…

I don’t actually mind their money from Google but why is charging money for a quality product an unfathomable business model? Ads or bust it seems.

Because pretty much nobody is willing to pay for it.

Re: Mozilla's open source AI strategy

#199

Post by hurfdurf »

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.

Going by the 2023 financial report (getting the 2024 report requires to submit a mail address?!), Mozilla spent over 500mil in that year, 328m on salaries (page 5).

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2024/

Re: Mozilla's open source AI strategy

#200

Post by LunaSea »

WorldMaker wrote: post #82
LunaSea wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There's a lot of opinions and anecdata in that. Firefox was almost never as bad as it was marketed to be (by its competition), and Chrome was certainly never as good as it was marketed to be (by an evil ad company pretending to be a good, well adjusted internet benefit company).

Firefox used to be the first browser with decent developer tools thanks to the Firebug extension.

Then Chrome pushed heavily the development of its own development tools and crushed Firefox in the process. Chrome has now been the best browser for developers for the last +10 years.

The consequence is also that when the new generation of headless browsers were developed (Puppeteer) they were based on Chromium because it is so hackable and developer friendly.

This means that Firefox lost a big chunk of the developer community which constituted also a non trivial amount of their user base and advocates.

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