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Mozilla's open source AI strategy

blog.mozilla.org

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Re: Mozilla's open source AI strategy

#61

Post by sfink »

drnick1 wrote: post #38

The open source community will start taking Firefox seriously again when all the AI shit is removed for good and real improvements to performance and privacy are made. Despite all the posturing about "respecting your privacy and freedom," the stock configuration of Firefox is trivially fingerprintable. At the very least, a privacy-focused browser should adopt the Tor patches and report standardized spoofed values for…

Yes, it's the stock configuration to be not broken. If you are ok with breakage in exchange for less fingerprinting, the config setting privacy.resistFingerprinting is right there: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/resist-fingerprinting

It is an uplift from Tor, and I believe Tor just enables it in their build, though it doesn't end up being quite the same. Tor is always going to be better for this.

But turning it on in the stock Firefox configuration would be suicide in terms of market share. When "I want maximal privacy" fights "I want this site to work", guess which one wins?

Re: Mozilla's open source AI strategy

#62

Post by devsda »

dralley wrote: post #54
giancarlostoro wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the problem many of us have is it feels like Mozilla invests more effort into everything other than its browser, we see the things they do outside of Mozilla, I mean it was so bad Thunderbird had to become its own foundation due to lack of funding! I would love for there to be a world where Mozilla maintains Firefox and can make for product projects that provide higher value. I also have a pipe dream of one d…

> I think the problem many of us have is it feels like Mozilla invests more effort into everything other than its browser, we see the things they do outside of Mozilla, I mean it was so bad Thunderbird had to become its own foundation due to lack of funding! And then people simultaneously complain that Mozilla is reliant on Google for funding. There are not many good revenue options available for a browser other than…

It is more easier to secure revenue/funding from Google once they retain existing market share and gain more. They need to improve the product for that to happen.

With all the distractions they are abandoning their primary product and they are bleeding whatever miniscule market share they have. This means Google has more leverage over them and can eventually stop the funding once their market share drops beyond a threshold say 0.5% because we all know antitrust is not a strong reason anymore to keep FF alive based on trends of recent rulings.

Re: Mozilla's open source AI strategy

#64

Post by wolvoleo »

Larrikin wrote: post #24
nusl wrote: post #12

I guess replies on this thread are evident that Mozilla has lost much of the trust and goodwill it once enjoyed. Admittedly I am also very skeptical that Mozilla has the ability or genuine interest to make this work.

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…

I use Firefox almost exclusively on desktop and android and I'm still pretty critical of it.

Especially because I know I'm one of very few people that uses it that much.

Re: Mozilla's open source AI strategy

#65

Post by wolvoleo »

rzmmm wrote: post #16
nusl wrote: post #12

I guess replies on this thread are evident that Mozilla has lost much of the trust and goodwill it once enjoyed. Admittedly I am also very skeptical that Mozilla has the ability or genuine interest to make this work.

I'm hopeful. The open source AI ecosystem could benefit from large players like Mozilla making moves.

In what world is Mozilla large?

Re: Mozilla's open source AI strategy

#66

Post by PedroBatista »

Good decision for a change, now looking at execution track record and ability to stick with it..

yeah, that's where the bad news start.

They have a tendency to go from trend to trend and always a "me too, I'm here" player. Deliver first and stick with it, Mozilla's goodwill fund is long gone to be excited about "mission statements".

Re: Mozilla's open source AI strategy

#67

Post by devsda »

freedomben wrote: post #47
embedding-shape wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Near all editors have a VS code plugin compatible layer Huh, never heard about this before, and took a look at emacs and vim/neovim as those are the two most popular editors I know of, neither can run VS code plugins, that'd be crazy if true.

Very long time vim/neovim user here. I can't remember names atm and can't check, but I have definitely seen plugins that run a headless or subset of VScode in the background to pull info from it. It may not be super common, but it is being done

You are probably referring to language support plug-ins.

IIRC, debugger support for java needed a component from one of the official plug-ins.

Re: Mozilla's open source AI strategy

#68

Post by freedomben »

bluGill wrote: post #53
freedomben wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is also Ladybird, whose founder is a prolific and technically brilliant person but who is also, at minimum, a fascist sympathizer, in addition to being a supporter of white replacement theory and other racist ideas. I know nothing about Ladybird or their founder, so I'm taking your word for it that they are "at minimum, a fascist sympathizer, in addition to being a supporter of white replacement theory and ot…

You will never find somebody you 100% agree with. The question is when does something become so bad you will boycott them in other areas. Still a hard question, but the framing can help.

Indeed, thanks that is very helpful framing, thanks! Doesn't eliminate the subjectivity, but definitely helps limit it's scope by giving a more specific point to focus on

Re: Mozilla's open source AI strategy

#69

Post by dralley »

devsda wrote: post #62
dralley wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think the problem many of us have is it feels like Mozilla invests more effort into everything other than its browser, we see the things they do outside of Mozilla, I mean it was so bad Thunderbird had to become its own foundation due to lack of funding! And then people simultaneously complain that Mozilla is reliant on Google for funding. There are not many good revenue options available for a browser other than…

It is more easier to secure revenue/funding from Google once they retain existing market share and gain more. They need to improve the product for that to happen. With all the distractions they are abandoning their primary product and they are bleeding whatever miniscule market share they have. This means Google has more leverage over them and can eventually stop the funding once their market share drops beyond a thr…

If we're being completely honest, improving the quality of the product would not meaningfully improve their market share. That worked in the early 2000s when the competition (internet explorer) was utterly stagnant and the internet-using population was composed predominantly of techies willing to try new things. Browsers are commodities now, and most people aren't going to try a new browser when they're already using Chrome / Safari on their mobile device with all of the integrations that are available between the two.

Chrome gained marketshare not just because it was a good product but because they paid Adobe, Oracle, and legions of freeware antivirus providers lots of $$$ to put a checked-by-default box in their installers to install Google Chrome and make it the default browser for anyone not paying enough attention to uncheck the boxes, and because they targeted Firefox users visiting google.com with popups advertising how much better Chrome was. Mozilla could never do that and they would be excoriated if they tried. And as I mentioned, many of the aspects of Chrome that were indeed superior, were met with kicking and screaming when Mozilla tried to follow, e.g. choosing performance over the XUL extension ecosystem.

Sadly I think their best hope to regain marketshare is to indirectly benefit from Linux to capturing marketshare from Windows.

Re: Mozilla's open source AI strategy

#70

Post by rubyfan »

>Now AI is becoming the new intermediary. It’s what I’ve started calling “Layer 8” — the agentic layer that mediates between you and everything else on the internet. These systems will negotiate on our behalf, filter our information, shape our recommendations, and increasingly determine how we interact with the entire digital world.

This is a sad statement. It reminds me of Wall-E. Big tech created the environmental ruins of today’s internet through perverse incentives. Now we need robots to go sift through the garbage and think for us so we don’t have to be exposed to the toxic internet.

It feels like we have lost so much.

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