371–380 of 417 posts
Am I the only person who isn't hugely interested in summarizing emails? I don't want emails summarized because that bypasses a tell-tale sign that said email isn't worth reading in the first place.
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>Maybe we shouldn't be too critical of Mozilla for providing a privacy-first LLM service It is just Mozilla have a tendency of chasing hype rather than focusing on what they are doing. During early smartphone era they spend most of the resources trying to write an OS with Javascript ( Firefox OS ) that works on a $35 Smartphone. Now they are doing it again with AI. Although this time around Firefox is in fairly good…
I don't think the Firefox OS team was ever bigger than maybe 100 people at the absolute most, and I feel like it was closer to half of that. Admittedly it's been over a decade since I left, so my recollection could be wrong, but it was never "most of the resources" by any metric. It was a tiny percentage of the overall staff; I traveled to the Toronto office to work with some of the graphics devs (the area I primaril…
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I don't think the Firefox OS team was ever bigger than maybe 100 people at the absolute most, and I feel like it was closer to half of that. Admittedly it's been over a decade since I left, so my recollection could be wrong, but it was never "most of the resources" by any metric. It was a tiny percentage of the overall staff; I traveled to the Toronto office to work with some of the graphics devs (the area I primaril…
FxOS at its height was an absolutely huge resource and personnel commitment; I seem to recall it being half of MoCo, maybe more. Mark Mayo, then SVP Firefox, was quoted in a 2017 interview with Walt Mossberg: > Mayo says [FirefoxOS] took the focus off of Firefox. “It was close to a bet-the-farm effort” Cite: https://www.theverge.com/2017/1/25/14376710/walt-mossberg-mo...
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Any revelation that Google is siphoning data out of other companies GCP instances would be so earth-shattering I don't think it is happening.
If you aren't running an encrypted disk on any cloud provider you should absolutely fundamentally understand that your data has been scanned and that your VM data is "business data" so a copy gets sent to whomever wants it, in bulk.
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If those are the only examples of privacy-tarnishing theyve done, I think that would speak for Firefox and Mozilla.
They literally have Google Analytics which sends telemetry data to Google integrated into the Firefox UI.
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Mozilla is almost totally dependent on payments from Google to survive. If Google stops the payments, Mozilla probably goes out of business. I think it’s pretty clear why they keep on doing this type of side project. They are trying anything they can think of to diversify revenue.
> from Google to survive. If Google stops the payments, Mozilla probably goes out of business. > I think it’s pretty clear why they keep on doing this type of side project. It’s not clear to me. I agree they would have some problems if Google declined to pay them because the next best offer would be lower. But the best way to keep these payments, or to increase them, is by making a better browser and giving people a…
We’re at a point where the core functionality of browsers is very mature. It’s unlikely that any amount of investment will produce a browser that is significantly faster at things like JS execution or rendering compared to Chrome.
So alternative browsers add things like better ad blockers, more privacy protections, or maybe LLM summaries to enhance the core browser experience instead.
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I don't think the Firefox OS team was ever bigger than maybe 100 people at the absolute most, and I feel like it was closer to half of that. Admittedly it's been over a decade since I left, so my recollection could be wrong, but it was never "most of the resources" by any metric. It was a tiny percentage of the overall staff; I traveled to the Toronto office to work with some of the graphics devs (the area I primaril…
As a user I always wished Firefox OS had stuck around - I think it would absolutely be practical today with so many PWAs around these days, and KaiOS seems to have done surprisingly well on its Firefox OS base.
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> Firefox the browser doesn’t make any money Firefox the browser is responsible for the vast majority (81%?) of the money that is injected into Mozilla annually.
What % of the money that is injected into Mozilla annually is paid by Google?
You're moving the goalpost rather substantially. "It makes no money" and "it costs millions to maintain" -> it pulls in hundreds of millions per year, the majority of their income. They can afford to focus on it.
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Mozilla is almost totally dependent on payments from Google to survive. If Google stops the payments, Mozilla probably goes out of business. I think it’s pretty clear why they keep on doing this type of side project. They are trying anything they can think of to diversify revenue.
For some of the stated reasons this seems like a terrible way to diversify and add any revenue. What if they take a page from Silicon Valley? If the US Government makes Hooli, I mean Google, divest Chrome could Mozilla acquire it?
Though in the long term, maybe they could use the market share to make money in other ways.
But if they can’t manage to make money in other ways with Firefox, I’m not sure that they’d be able to do it with Chrome either.
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I don't think the Firefox OS team was ever bigger than maybe 100 people at the absolute most, and I feel like it was closer to half of that. Admittedly it's been over a decade since I left, so my recollection could be wrong, but it was never "most of the resources" by any metric. It was a tiny percentage of the overall staff; I traveled to the Toronto office to work with some of the graphics devs (the area I primaril…
FxOS at its height was an absolutely huge resource and personnel commitment; I seem to recall it being half of MoCo, maybe more. Mark Mayo, then SVP Firefox, was quoted in a 2017 interview with Walt Mossberg: > Mayo says [FirefoxOS] took the focus off of Firefox. “It was close to a bet-the-farm effort” Cite: https://www.theverge.com/2017/1/25/14376710/walt-mossberg-mo...