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Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

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Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#661
post #650
post #603

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The contributors are paid by Mozilla Foundation. This is not complicated.

Hm. I'm dumb so you'll need to spell it out for me. MoFo and MoCo both have contributors, yes. Both have unpaid contributors, which apparently are not who you're talking about. Both also have paid people who work for them. Whether or not you call them "contributors" or "employees" doesn't matter much, I guess. But still, MoFo contributors, paid or not, do not work on Firefox. Firefox is not a MoFo product. Most MoCo…

> Most MoCo contributors do work on Firefox. Firefox is a MoCo product.

This is true.

> But still, MoFo contributors, paid or not, do not work on Firefox.

This is not true, based on what I've read about it. Do you have personal experience with these orgs that suggests otherwise?

Regardless, nothing is stopping Foundation funds from being directed to Firefox development. If someone gave them, for example, $1M that could only be spent on Firefox, they could pay Corporation or an external consultancy to contribute to the open-source Firefox repositories.

This is already happening, either through Foundation or Corporation. One of the biggest Servo contributors works for a FOSS consultancy.

There are corollaries to what I'm describing in most large nonprofits in the US. You get money that a donor requires you to spend in a certain way, and you spend that money that way. If you can't do it with in-house people, you give it to consultants.

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#662

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 al…

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

Thunderbird Pro was announced a while back, still not GA though

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#663

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're the only modern usable browser engine not developed by a multi-trillion dollar corp. I'd say that's a pretty big achievement.

They're developed by a billion dollar corp riding on their past success from when they challenged the leader of that time, Microsoft.

And their engine is still around, how's the leader of the times web engine going?

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#664

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just never used Pocket. I don’t think I had to change my habits or settings to do so.

Sure, living with the nuisance of the advertising and UI clutter is an option, as I said. But the fact that they were relatively minor nuisances compared to eg. Windows 11's BS doesn't change the fact that they were still unwelcome and unnecessary and disrespectful. I don't think there's anything radical about my stance that a new toolbar button showing up—with advertising calling attention to it—integrating a propri…

> Sure, living with the nuisance of the advertising and UI clutter is an option

    about:config
    extensions.pocket.enabled
set to `false`.

That's how hard that used to be.

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#665
post #7

Does anyone else feel like the "Trust" angle is the only card they have left to play? Technically, Chrome is faster on JS benchmarks. Edge has better OS integration on Windows and comes by default. Safari wins on battery life on Mac. Firefox's only unique selling point is "We aren't a massive data vampire." If they clutter the browser with AI which inherently requires data processing, often in the cloud, they dilute…

Looking at their strategy doc, it doesn't seem like they hear their users at all. It's riddled with AI. In fact their aspiration is "doing for AI what we did for the web." Oh boy! https://blog.mozilla.org/wp-content/blogs.dir/278/files/2025...

[deleted]

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#666

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…

> And anything done to make that profit will annoy the community.

I don't keep close track of this, but as far as I remember they haven't tried donations that go only to Firefox/Thunderbird/etc of the person's choice, instead of Mozilla as a whole. That's what people always claim they want in these threads. I doubt donations would be enough, but I think doing it like that would at least be a step in a direction people like instead of are annoyed by, as long as they don't go nagging like Wikipedia.

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#667

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of those things weren't very good before AI was applied. Translation specifically was pretty bad before Google applied machine learning methods to it around 2007 when it became very good almost overnight.

Stop blurring the lines, google translate using machine learning has nothing to do with turning firefox into an ai browser

It has everything to do with it. Mozilla explicitly talked about AI in the context of their relatively new translation feature a year or two back. Live captions also uses "AI". The term AI includes machine learning in marketing speech.

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#668

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 al…

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

I think the privacy industry is oversaturated we already have: ProtonMail, Tuta and Mailbox Mail

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#669

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…

I wouldn’t mind privacy-focused AI tools, either (as long as they don’t cram it in our faces). On its AI search assist, DDG has a button to open up a private session with GPT, which I use on occasion.

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#670
post #436
post #25

Dumb question: who’s Firefox target user? Chrome is able to capture the mass consumer market, due to Google’s dark pattern to nag you to install Chrome anytime you’re on a Google property. Edge target enterprise Fortune 500 user, who is required to use Microsoft/Office 365 at work (and its deep security permission ties to SharePoint). Safari has Mac/iOS audience via being the default on those platform (and deep platf…

It seems to me Android users who want to block ads are a strong target market. Desktop Chrome has extensions and despite the nerf, it has adblockers that mostly work; Android Chrome doesn't have extensions. A built in adblocker would probably help Firefox attract those users, but might destroy their Google revenue stream.

I think the problem with that is that Firefox Android with uBO still feels like it has worse First Contentful Paint than Chrome Android. Even on a high-end phone the difference can feel ridiculous; sites render after 1-2s on Chrome but sometimes I can count up to 5 with FF.

The benefits of having uBO might matter more to you and me, but let's not forget that faster rendering was arguably the main reason Chrome Desktop got popular 20 years ago, which caused Firefox to rewrite its engine 2 (3?) times since then to catch up. 20 years later this company still hasn't learned with Android.

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