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Mozilla's open source AI strategy

blog.mozilla.org

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Re: Mozilla's open source AI strategy

#81

Post by WorldMaker »

devsda wrote: post #75
dralley wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

End users are easily influenced but they could have targeted developers. I think they should have pushed for a gecko based electron alternative. End user dont really care if their favourite markdown editor or notes software is based on electron or gecko but it would have made sure that developers do not target, develop and test for only chromium based browsers.

That would probably also be considered a "distraction" by HN. Electron isn't built by the Chrome team.

It also wouldn't be directly revenue diversification. You can't beat Electron by selling an alternative.

Firefox has somewhat tried to target developers. There's Developer Edition with a "direct to the dev tools" focus. Firefox's Dev Tools still generally are somewhat ahead of Safari's and Chrome's (though not always Edge's, even in the Edgmium era one of the few teams that still exists that doesn't upstream everything immediately is Edge's Dev Tools work). Firefox was directly ahead on Flexbox and CSS Grid debugging tools, though now everyone else has copied them. (Not to mention that the history of Dev Tools in the first place all points back to Firebug and other Firefox extensions that went mainstream and then made sense to prioritize as out-of-the-box tools.)

Firefox probably can't do much more to target developers on its own, from a browser perspective. Targeting developers doesn't seem to move the needle enough in marketshare, either.

It's not just Electron that developers are stuck in "develop and test for only chromium based browsers" modes. There's also all the top-down pressure in corporate environments to standardize on only one browser to "cut down" on "testing costs". There are the board room-driven development cycles of "I only care if it looks good on the CEO's iPhone" or "the CEO is into Android this year, that's the focus, everything else is garbage". There's also the hard to avoid spiral of "Firefox marketshare is low, don't worry about it" to more sites not working as well in Firefox to Firefox marketshare getting lower to more "don't worry about it" websites and so on.

Re: Mozilla's open source AI strategy

#82

Post by WorldMaker »

LunaSea wrote: post #71
jampekka wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Firefox market share was eaten largely by the enormous and legally dubious marketing campaigns by Google and Microsoft. Hard to see how Mozilla could compete with constant forced nags and defaults in the most widely used websites and operating systems.

The Firefox market share was eaten by being worse than Chrome, especially around the developer tools and extensions market places at the time.

There's a lot of opinions and anecdata in that. Firefox was almost never as bad as it was marketed to be (by its competition), and Chrome was certainly never as good as it was marketed to be (by an evil ad company pretending to be a good, well adjusted internet benefit company).

Re: Mozilla's open source AI strategy

#83

Post by pluralmonad »

LunaSea wrote: post #48
morcus wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone that uses Firefox as my main browser on desktop and mobile, I am curious here - what exactly are the complaints with Firefox? I'm using 3+ year old hardware that was mid-range even when it was new and it seems to do everything I would want with reasonable performance.

> what exactly are the complaints with Firefox? If you are a (the) leading browser like Firefox once was, the "what are the complaints?" is the right question. If you are a minor browser like Firefox currently is (~2.5% market share), the "what is it doing better?" is the correct question.

Supporting a proper ad blocker makes it automatically superior than any of the more popular browsers. The fact most people don't mind being fuel for the machine is another issue.

Re: Mozilla's open source AI strategy

#84

Post by hedora »

LunaSea wrote: post #72
duped wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what is it doing better adblock is the single most important feature of a web browser to me. Firefox has the best adblock support.

I agree, although Chrome has extensions like uBlock Origin Lite and Privacy Badger which are decent enough for most people and uses.

I’d argue they aren’t, but the number one threat actor in the privacy space is Google.

I occasionally have to use Chrome to test with it. Can someone explain concisely how it manages Google logins? They clearly bolted it in at some low level to help violate privacy, and or shove dark patterns.

Also, the out of the box spam and dark patterns are over the top. It reminds me of Win 95 bundled software bullshit.

That’s to say nothing of their B-tier properties, like Google TV or YouTube client:

When the kids use this garbage it’s all “Bruh, what is this screen?”, or “I swear I’m not touching the remote!”

(The official YouTube client loses monitor sync(!!) as it rapid cycles through ads on its own now. I guess this is part of an apparent google-run ad fraud campaign, since it routinely seems to think it ran > 5-10 ads to completion in ~15 seconds. We can’t even see all the ads start because each bumps the monitor settings around, which has the effect of auto-mute.)

Re: Mozilla's open source AI strategy

#85

Post by WorldMaker »

embedding-shape wrote: post #40
no_wizard wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ubiquity of their plugin model is why. Near all editors have a VS code plugin compatible layer

> 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.

If you count LSP (Language Server Protocol) as a VSCode plugin-compatible layer as LSP was built and standardized by the VSCode team (so many do), then Emacs and Neovim are full of VSCode-compatible plugins today. One of Neovim's selling points right now over bare Vim is better/more direct LSP support.

Re: Mozilla's open source AI strategy

#86

Post by account42 »

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…

> But if you dig deeper nearly always the commenter is using a version of Chrome

Pure cope

Re: Mozilla's open source AI strategy

#87

Post by embedding-shape »

WorldMaker wrote: post #85
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.

If you count LSP (Language Server Protocol) as a VSCode plugin-compatible layer as LSP was built and standardized by the VSCode team (so many do), then Emacs and Neovim are full of VSCode-compatible plugins today. One of Neovim's selling points right now over bare Vim is better/more direct LSP support.

Ah, if LSP is what parent meant with "VS code plugin compatible layer" then what you say makes sense, I personally also moved from vim to neovim mainly because of better LSP support.

But I understood "VS code plugin compatible layer" to mean there is something that lets you run VSCode plugins with other editors, which is what I haven't seen anywhere (yet?).

Re: Mozilla's open source AI strategy

#88

Post by evilduck »

morcus wrote: post #31
Larrikin wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As someone that uses Firefox as my main browser on desktop and mobile, I am curious here - what exactly are the complaints with Firefox? I'm using 3+ year old hardware that was mid-range even when it was new and it seems to do everything I would want with reasonable performance.

My primary complaint is that they have a bunch of ad placements on the product out of the box when it's opened for the first time and any time I set up a new system I have to go configure Firefox to not be annoying by default. It makes the Firefox experience feel subversive and untrustworthy because this freshly installed application is obviously bedfellows with advertisers. I know I can't trust advertisers with my data or browser behavior, so why should I trust Firefox with it? If I stop using Firefox for a little while, they _so helpfully_ offer to reset my configuration back to default so those ads will get shown again. It's a hostile experience.

Additionally, my perception (from posts and discussions like these, I'm not a financial analyst and I have no meaningful insights into their business) is also that they probably receive enough funding through non-advertising means that they don't actually need to do this if they were to pare back the nonsense spending they're so greatly known for.

Re: Mozilla's open source AI strategy

#89

Post by zamadatix »

jampekka wrote: post #58
LunaSea wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what exactly are the complaints with Firefox? If you are a (the) leading browser like Firefox once was, the "what are the complaints?" is the right question. If you are a minor browser like Firefox currently is (~2.5% market share), the "what is it doing better?" is the correct question.

The Firefox market share was eaten largely by the enormous and legally dubious marketing campaigns by Google and Microsoft. Hard to see how Mozilla could compete with constant forced nags and defaults in the most widely used websites and operating systems.

It was a big factor, but so were things like the way they treated their mobile browser for years and years, which is the platform 2/3 of browser traffic now originates.

According to statcounter's stats, Firefox never cracked 1% of monthly mobile traffic any month from when stats started in 2009. Even Opera and UC have more than double Firefox's average for the last year and they are just Chromium forks users are downloading off the stores.

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