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Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

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Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#651

Post by mminer237 »

bambax wrote: post #340
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…

> It will evolve into a modern AI browser OMG, please, no! What are they thinking and who wants an "AI browser"? > Are there any true alternatives Firefox with blocked updates works pretty well.

Not updating works until an exploit fixed years ago exfiltrates your bank info

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#652

Post by amatecha »

marky1991 wrote: post #350
lalaland1125 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not really possible to do that when the opposing beliefs are so fundamental. Mozilla had, and has, a lot of LGBT staff. How could you expect those staff to work under and trust a CEO opposed to their very existence as equal members of society?

It's basic tolerance, it's not that hard. You do your job and collect your paycheck at the end of the week, same as everyone else.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#653

Post by amatecha »

ecshafer wrote: post #332
add-sub-mul-div wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if in hindsight he's embarrassed to have been on the wrong side of history. Imagine spending your time and money fighting inevitable social change. Fighting gay marriage is just a time-shifted fight against women voting or interracial marriage.

No, those are all completely separate things.

they really are kind of the same thing: basic human rights.

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#654

Post by keeda »

afarah1 wrote: post #533
keeda wrote: post #482

Everyone is reacting negatively to the focus on AI, but does Mozilla really have a choice? This is going to be a rehash of the same dynamic that has happened in all the browser wars: Leading browser introduces new feature, websites and extensions start using that feature, runner-up browsers have no choice but to introduce that feature or further lose marketshare. Chrome and Edge have already integrated LLM capabiliti…

Of course they have a choice. Just don't do it. All you said are predictions of what may or may not happen in the future. The opposite could be true - the audience at large may get sick of AI tools being pushed on them and prefer the browser that doesn't. No one knows. But even if you are right, supporting an hypothetical API that extensions and websites may or may not use and pushing opt-out AI tooling in the browse…

Sure, these features may never catch on... but if they do, consider the risk to Firefox: an underdog with dwindling market share that is now years behind capabilities taken for granted in other browsers. On the other hand, if these features don't pan out, they could always be deprecated with little hit to marketshare.

Strategically I think Mozilla cannot take that risk, especially as it can get feature parity for relatively low cost by embracing open-source / open-weights models.

As an aside, a local on-device AI is greatly preferable from a privacy perspective, even though some harder tasks may need to be sent to hosted frontier models. I expect the industry to converge on a hybrid local/remote model, largely because it lets them offload inference to the users' device.

There's not much I could do about a hosted LLM, but at least for the local model it would be nice to have one from a company not reliant on monetizing my data.

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#655

Post by cpburns2009 »

quchen wrote: post #46
miki_oomiri wrote: post #39

If I were the CEO, I would: - focus 100% on Firefox Desktop & Mobile - just a fast solid minimalist browser (no AI, no BS) - other features should be addons - privacy centric - builtin, first-class, adblocker - run on donations - partner with Kagi - layoff 80% of the non-tech employees I worked for them for many years, I guarantee you that Mozilla will be fine without all the non-sense people, just put engineers in c…

To expand on Firefox mobile: if you haven’t tried it, give it a shot. uBlock Origin works just like on desktop. I have seen maybe five ads on my phone browser (including Youtube!) since buying it in 2019.

My only complaint about Firefox on Android is it's slow even with ad blocking. Chrome is noticeably faster. Brave gives you the best of both worlds: speed and ad blocking.

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#656

Post by sfink »

cpburns2009 wrote: post #514
sfink wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you implying that the direct competitor, Chrome, is taking in the same or less? Chrome has a much larger staff (excluding the rest of Google), so I guess they must all be earning a small fraction of Mozilla staff salaries. Such dedicated people!

My point is Mozilla achieves practically nothing despite making half a billion ad dollars for free from Google. If Wikipedia's numbers are right, that's $730,000 per employee.

Ah, but your words say Mozilla should be doing more than nothing, they should in fact be winning:

> With that income there's no reason they shouldn't be the leading browser.

despite having less resources than their primary competitor.

Well, our primary competitor. I work for Mozilla. Which apparently means I'm making $730K. Maybe that's why I pay my house cleaner with a suitcase full of cash every week. Who isn't as happy about it as she could be, on account of not existing. Some people are picky about that.

I'd love to be growing our market share dramatically, since I put in a lot of work when I'm not on HN. Sadly I've been told that work is achieving practically nothing. I will point out that practically nothing does at least include still having enough sway in standards committees to hold the line against an ad-tech company whose incentives all push in the dystopic direction that everything is currently headed in. (Ok, maybe not fully holding the line...) If that stops being the case and Mozilla stops making a difference, then I believe I could still get a job elsewhere for a fair bit more than I'm currently making.

Oh wait, I forgot I'm already making $730K. Maybe not, then.

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#657

Post by tomhow »

the_pwner224 wrote: post #256
mossTechnician wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We know for a fact that whenever Mozilla solicits feedback for AI additions, it heavily leans negative. https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/building-ai-the-f...

[flagged]

Please don't fulminate or sneer like this on HN. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#658

Post by CuriousRose »

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…

Fully agree with this.

- Mozilla SSL Certs - for corporations that don't want Let's Encrypt

- Mozilla Mail - a reliable Exchange/Google Mail alternative (desperately needed imo)

- Thunderbird for iOS - why is this not a thing yet?

- Mozilla Search - metasearch that isn't based on Bing/DDG/Google

- Mozilla HTTPS DNS - although Cloudflare will probably always do this better

All seemingly low-hanging fruit with brand alignment.

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#659

Post by the_biot »

mmooss wrote: post #548
the_biot wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're assuming Mozilla would be successful at a privacy play because they are a trusted organization. I can't stress this enough: they are not.

What is that based on? You can trust your doctor much more about your knee and much less about their billing. Trust isn't binary and isn't per person/organization/object, but varies by person and (activity?). And anything will be trusted more or less by different people. Is there evidence of who trusts Mozilla with what, and how much? The the fact that you don't trust them or that some on HN don't trust them isn't ev…

That's a fair question. It's of course my opinion, not hard fact, but here goes:

- They have for years been trying to add stuff to Firefox that nobody wants, and were privacy violations. The "marketing studies" come to mind.

- They have for decades been wasting their time and money on everything BUT Firefox, and failing at literally all of it. You can't help but notice the stellar incompetence of Mozilla leadership.

- They have for a long time been raking in hundreds of millions of dollars a year from Google, pissing it away on useless stuff, but mostly on enriching the management layer. How can somebody like Mitchell Baker be making millions of dollars a year while simultaneously seeing Firefox market share drop to damn near zero? This is a thoroughly corrupt organization.

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#660

Post by mm263 »

smt88 wrote: post #390
abcd_f wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They had one. Until he made a fatal mistake of giving a tenner to the wrong people.

Eich chose to resign due to internal and external protest in the form of petitions and resignations. No one forced him to do anything, and Mozilla itself certainly didn't force him out. His free speech was met with the free speech of others, and he decided it was too painful to stay in that spotlight. How would you prefer it to have gone?

Not to have him cancelled in the first place. No need to pretend that doing something under the mob pressure is the same as doing something entirely willingly
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