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Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

blog.mozilla.org

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Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#311

Post by worik »

reinar wrote: post #287
rolph wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>what is the alternative funding source that could keep a company making a free browser running? i wonder how linux does it? linus and anthony should have a head to head.

> i wonder how linux does it? they don't? There's no company, or rather - a lot of them, Linux kernel moves forward like 80% by corporate contributors. For some of them it's critical part of their infrastructure, some of them need to get their device drivers mainlined, for some of them it's gpl magic at work. Linux desktop experience, however, leaves a lot to be desired. Companies aren't interested to contribute to a…

> Linux desktop experience, however, leaves a lot to be desired.

No, it does not.

It is a wonderful world fill of variety, choice and diversity

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#312

Post by glenstein »

username223 wrote: post #282
glenstein wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right and to your point, there's not a whole lot of precedent for browsers successfully funding themselves when the browser itself is the primary product. Opera was the lightweight high performance extension rich, diversely funded, portable, adapted to niche hardware, early to mobile browser practically built from the dreams of niche users who want customization and privacy. They're a perfect natural experiment for w…

> Browsers are practically full scale operating systems these days with tens of millions of lines of code, distributed for free. Well there's your problem! Google owns the server, the client, and the standards body, so ever-increasing complexity is inevitable if you play by their rules. Tens of thousands of lines of code could render the useful parts of the web.

Can you say more? I do think Google has effectively pushed embrace-extend-extinguish, changing the rules so that it's a game they can win. And I do think part of the point of web standards protocols is to limit complexity. So I agree the rules as they exist now favor Google. I think the "real" solution was for the standards bodies to stay in control but seems like that horse left the barn.

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#313

Post by mixmastamyk »

gkoberger wrote: post #275

Having worked at Mozilla a while ago, the CEO role is one I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy. Success is oddly defined: it's a non-profit (well, a for-profit owned by a non-profit) that needs to make a big profit in a short amount of time. And anything done to make that profit will annoy the community. I hope Anthony leans into what makes Mozilla special. The past few years, Mozilla's business model has been to just m…

The job was always very easy, fire all of the pure managers and sock the google money into an endowment before it runs out. Then focus on privacy as you mentioned.

They’ve taken in several billion dollars by now. Let that sink in. They're supposedly a non-profit, so this plan is the well-trodden playbook.

But of course no Manager instance could imagine such a thing. Cue Upton Sinclair quote.

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#314

Post by mitthrowaway2 »

high_na_euv wrote: post #192
this_user wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What even is an "AI browser"? It's a browser, it's mainly supposed to render web pages / web apps. There is no obvious reason why it would need any AI features.

Translation? Image search? Live captions? Dubbing? Summary? Rewrite text better?

I get very annoyed by generative AI, but to be fair I could imagine an AI-powered "Ctrl+F" which searches text by looser meaning-based matches, rather than strict character matches; for example Ctrl+AI+F "number of victims" in a news article, or Ctrl+AI+F "at least 900 W" when sorting through a list of microwave ovens on Walmart.

Or searching for text in images with OCR. Or searching my own browsing history for that article about that thing.

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#315

Post by homebrewer »

LexiMax wrote: post #296
bigyabai wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having seen what Brave became, I'm extremely happy that Eich wasn't allowed to bring his "vision" to my favorite browser.

Even in a compromised state, if given the choice between Firefox and Brave, I would choose Firefox 10 out of 10 times. A closed source chromium fork put out by a business that still isn't sure what its business model is and already has a fair number of "whoopsies" under its belt is a complete non-starter for me. That is, given the choice between Firefox and Brave. For what it's worth, my current browser is Zen, and I…

Brave is 100% FOSS. At least the client side, I've not looked into their server applications.

https://github.com/brave

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#316

Post by gkoberger »

nightski wrote: post #309
gkoberger wrote: post #275

Having worked at Mozilla a while ago, the CEO role is one I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy. Success is oddly defined: it's a non-profit (well, a for-profit owned by a non-profit) that needs to make a big profit in a short amount of time. And anything done to make that profit will annoy the community. I hope Anthony leans into what makes Mozilla special. The past few years, Mozilla's business model has been to just m…

Why is so much profit needed?

Depends on how you look at it. They made $653 million in 2023, most coming from their biggest competitor, Google.

They don't need this much money, but it means more layoffs and cutting scope drastically. It's expensive to run a modern browser.

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#317

Post by [deleted] »

thesuitonym wrote: post #280
embedding-shape wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technically, both Chrome and Firefox are adware too, since Google's main business is ads, and Firefox/Mozilla get a lot of money from Google to display Google as a search engine in Firefox (an ad :) )

Firefox doesn't sell BATs, in-browser notification ads, or new tab takeovers. The closest you can get is a pinned site in the new tab page (new installs only) and ads in Pocket, or whatever they're calling that new tab thing these days. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/advertising/solutions/ https://brave.com/brave-ads/browser/

[deleted]

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#318

Post by AuthAuth »

ByThyGrace wrote: post #228
mgbmtl wrote: post #41

I for one, am grateful to Mozilla for still being around, pushing for an open web. Their documentation is excellent, the improvements and roadmap for Thunderbird made me finally adopt it, and I appreciate their privacy-friendlier translation services. uBO works great in Firefox, and I can't stand using a browser without its full features. About MBA types: the free software project I work for has an MBA type, which I…

> despite everyone saying for 10+ years that they are going to die. What many people have been saying in my experience is pretty much the opposite: that Mozilla isn't going anywhere because Google wants them (needs them) to be around. That it's their antitrust Trojan horse.

They dont need an anti trust trojan horse the US gov has 0 intention of enforcing anti trust.

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#319

Post by losvedir »

driverdan wrote: post #200
losvedir wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno. Public Defenders (and defense attorneys in general, but PDs don't get oodles of cash) have to work with some pretty reprehensible people sometimes. I used to live in Bahrain while my wife worked in oil and gas, and a lot of her colleagues had some... pretty different... views from us but we still got along. Hell, the country itself has a pretty significant Sunni / Shia divide, with employees being one or the…

> Public Defenders (and defense attorneys in general, but PDs don't get oodles of cash) have to work with some pretty reprehensible people sometimes. That doesn't mean they believe in the awful things their clients do.

That's exactly my point. They are able to do their job despite not believing in their clients, which for public defenders even means trying to let their clients go free, which is a fair bit further than is asked of a tech employee who disagrees with their CEO.

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#320

Post by atlintots »

TehCorwiz wrote: post #168
netdevphoenix wrote: post #118

I love Mozilla but this feels like marketing imo. From the article: "AI should always be a choice — something people can easily turn off" and "Firefox will remain our anchor. It will evolve into a modern AI browser". I highly doubt you will be able to turn of the transformer tech features in an AI browser imo. And they won't make a separate browser for this. This really feels like the beginning of the end for Mozilla…

This is why I'm hopeful that at least one of Ladybird, Flow, and Servo emerge as a viable alternative to the current crop.

I recently learned of Flow, and I don't understand why people group it together with Ladybird and Servo, which are both developing the browser engine from scratch mostly, while Flow seems to be based on Chromium. Is Flow doing anything different compared to the numerous other Chromium-based browsers? Genuinely curious.
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