I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

> All the comments I read always highlight how they keep wasting time and money instead of working on more important things.

Nail on the head. Longtime Firefox user. All the way back to when it was called Netscape in fact, though I did roll chrome for a few years before coming back.

It was sometime around Mozilla's acquisition/integration of Pocket that shit started going sideways. Though, aside from the ad/privacy bullshit recently, their decisions haven't necessarily been "bad" ones so much as strange ones, and are all too often opt-out by default instead of opt-in. I just constantly find myself asking "Why?" more than actively being against what they're doing.

These days I use waterfox as it's Firefox without all the weird decisions (and telemetry), but truth be told the only reason I recommend Water/Firefox to anyone these days is by-and-large when they're bitching about ads and why their adblock doesn't work as well as it used to because of chrome and their MV3 chicanery. There are other reasons to use firefox, but for the average/casual user that's the main differentiator between it and chrome.

The reason Google Wave failed so spectacularly was that Google's Marketing team insisted on copying the "invite only rollout" that was so successful for Google Mail.

The thing is that a Google Mail early invitee could collaborate with everybody else via the pre-existing standard of SMTP email. They felt special because they got a new web UI, told their friends about it, generated hype, which then made the invites feel even more special, etc...

Google Wave had no existing standard to leverage, making it 100.00% useless if you couldn't invite EVERYBODY you needed to collaborate with. But you couldn't! You weren't allowed! They had to wait for an invite. Days? Weeks? Months? Years!? Who knows!

There was a snowball's chance in hell that this marketing approach could possibly work for a collaboration tool like Google Wave, but Google knew better. They knew better than every journalist that pointed this obvious flaw out. They knew better than every blog post, Slashdot commenter, etc...

It was one of the most spectacular failures caused by self-important hubris that I've ever seen in any industry.

  > Mozilla is not morally trustworthy

I'm a big fan of being critical of corporations. But we're worse off by treating this as a binary condition (moral vs immoral) rather than a continuum. No company is fundamentally moral and nobody is perfect. By creating a binary distinction we end up either placing everything into the same bucket or being disillusioned to their faults. Neither is good but the former allows for a race to the bottom and the least moral one to win. That's worse for us users.

I'm not saying don't criticize Mozilla. I'm saying don't act like their problems are even in the same ballpark as Google. Even if Mozilla was "equally evil" it's better to support them simply to distribute that power as I'd rather two evils fight than one evil reign. This is the problem we have and why I'm not addressing your points or why most people aren't. Because we too have the same problems with Mozilla but we recognize what we've been doing has just been giving Google more power. So let's not?

It's not about being dismissive, it's about prioritization.

Let's be honest here, Firefox is only alive because Google needs them to avoid monopoly regulation. I'm not surprised they're trying to do anything they can to survive and that that also involved many bad ideas. Like you said, they're free. But do you donate? How do they fund themselves? They don't have an ad empire to back them up. You might say the CEO is paid too much and I'll agree but this is also a silly conversation when we look at other CEOs pay. The complaint is more a manifestation of being frustrated with Mozilla and a justification. If it was really about the money we'd be prioritizing our conversations about the companies giving magnitudes more. You don't complain about wasting pennies while dollars are flying out the window. So let's make sure we're on the same page.

All this comes down to: if not Firefox, who?

Picking chrome/chromium creates a monopolization of the infrastructure of the Internet. By a mega corp who's primary goal is to destroy privacy. A corporation who is already demonstrating that they will dictate the specifications of internet protocols and in their own interest.

Picking Safari gives undue power to a different mega corp who is less interested in destroying privacy (more ambivalent) but interested in walled gardens.

Picking Firefox gives power to a non profit (giving transparency into their financials) who's primary funding comes through donations and publicly takes a stance on privacy. It's the backbone of privacy browsers like Tor and Mullvad.

Picking Ladybird is currently not viable as it's still in alpha.

I'd say we're going "most to least evil" through that list. I won't call any of them saints or perfectly moral. That's not the bar!

I don't actually want to replace Google's dominance with Mozilla dominance and I don't think most pro Firefox people do either. We want competition in the space. I don't want any one entity controlling the internet. I don't want any 2 or 3! I want healthy competition with more actors than we have today because any dominating player risks jeopardizing the entire internet. So at this point it doesn't matter how good or bad Mozilla is, it really only matters that someone is fighting Google. Its priorities. We're so far gone that we don't have the liberty to have that discussion because frankly Mozilla has no teeth. Let's talk when they can bite or when they're close to having that capacity. Until then, stop sharpening Google's teeth!

Allowing the user to pull tabs into its own windows and merge them back was magic back then, as was including search and url in a minimalistic bar, when other browsers had 3-row bars at times. Such a simple and elegant product.

How the mighty have fallen.

I think AI can add a lot of functionality but on the margins. Making things “work better”. I think AI as a focal point—in that it is The feature is a mistake for most things. But making code completion work better or suggestions more accurate? Things that are largely invisible UI-wise.