Mozilla is in a tricky position. It contains both a nonprofit organization dedicated to making the internet a better place for everyone, and a for-profit arm dedicated to, you know, making money. In the best of times, these things feed each other: The company makes great products that advance its goals for the web, and the nonprofit gets to both advocate for a better web and show people what it looks like. But these are not the best of times. Mozilla has spent the last couple of years implementing layoffs and restructuring, attempting to explain how it can fight for privacy and openness when Google pays most of its bills, while trying to find its place in an increasingly frothy AI landscape.
Fun times to be the new Mozilla CEO, right? But when I put all that to Anthony Enzor-DeMeo, the company’s just-announced chief executive, he swears he sees opportunity in all the upheaval. “I think what’s actually needed now is a technology company that people can trust,” Enzor-DeMeo says. “What I’ve seen with AI is an erosion of trust.”
Mozilla is not going to train its own giant LLM anytime soon. But there’s still an AI Mode coming to Firefox next year, which Enzor-DeMeo says will offer users their choice of model and product, all in a browser they can understand and from a company they can trust. “We’re not incentivized to push one model or the other,” he says. “So we’re going to try to go to market with multiple models.”
-_-
This is such a fantastic way to put it. I fuckin love the internet, people have amazing ways to say things lol
There are two things that the Internet has taught me: the incredible creativity people have about absolutely everything and the unimaginable levels of stupidity that people have about absolutely everything. Sometimes one of those things only exist because of the other, and that’s hard to process.
Man, I so wish mozilla was a worker owned cooperative. These string of useless CEOs would have already been shown the door
mozilla foundation is like susan comen breast cancer foundation, where the CEO takes the large chunk of donation for him/herself.
Well if Susan isn’t being compensated several million dollars a year, what incentive would she have to help cancer patients? 🫠
Overpaid CEO has more money than actual sense.
They all just do the same exact predictable thing. It’s always the shittiest thing for everyone but the “share holders”. Just automate them away and call it a day at this point.
I’m going to have to go Amish at this rate.
Off grid is an easier transition :)
Yah but I like the pies.
Firefox doesn’t really need to make money so long as Google has to worry about being broken up by the Fed for antitrust reasons… Obviously so long as there is a national socialist/Trump regime in place that’s not really something they have to worry about. Why, Goog even donated $5m to Trump’s little Whitehouse evisceration/ballroom project, and will get their very own plaque in the ballroom that all the ballpeople can look at.
Google has donated over $USD 1B to Mozilla. The standard conspiracy fud is so that it can sink its claws into its open source competition, corrupting it with its omniscient googliness, but FIrefox barely blips on the radar of browser use, not even including Tor, Waterfox, Librewolf (which I’m currently using), and other forks. It’s just not going to threaten any of the megas any time soon.
The actual motive for giving Mozilla so much money is simply to deflect any accusations that they’re a monopoly that hurts market competition.
I used to use it exclusively, but it slowly got bloated, so when I got rid of windows, I went to tor browser and librewolf.
Programs are like socks, once they get dirty, you change them. Do these people really not understand how this stuff works? Even giants can fall when enough people switch to other options
Oh ya? Where u gonna go? Chrome?
Can it survive if Firefox goes down?
Ofc No. But waterfax might disable ai by default.
Wouldn’t trust waterfox as far as I could throw a bull elephant.
Librefox or fuck even floorp is better then waterfox.
I’m also curious. From what I understand, Waterfox is more secure than Firefox out of the box.
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Seamonkey is barely maintained.
I use SeaMonkey as my usenet client. I prefer it to anything else for that.
It is great that it still exists.
So file a bug report. The link is literally right there
The point is that it does not inspire confidence when that is the introduction… (You can also file the bug report, or I could, but you are the one championing it)
Indeed, that was my point. I am not sure that Mozilla pays someone to work on it, at this point. It’s likely the passion project of a couple of employees.
Ladybird 🤞
Yeah I’ve heard of it but is it even installable?
It’s slated for a early 2026 alpha. So it’s actually pretty close.
So no. The answer is no.
Ladybird is an open-source web browser developed by the Ladybird Browser Initiative, a nonprofit organization focused on development of the browser.[1] It is licensed under the BSD 2-Clause License.[2] An alpha release is planned in 2026,[3][4] beta release is expected in 2027, and a stable release for general public in 2028.[5] Originally a component of SerenityOS, it is now being developed as a standalone project.[6] The initiative is funded entirely through donations, with Cloudflare, FUTO, Shopify, and 37signals among its sponsors. Ladybird uses a new browser engine called LibWeb that is being created from scratch by the development team. Unlike SerenityOS, it will also use other open source libraries for development.[2] An ad blocking feature is planned.[7] Unlike most new web browsers, Ladybird does not rely on Chromium or Firefox and uses its own rendering engine and JavaScript engine.[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ladybird_(web_browser)
I feel like mozilla could switch to making all their decisions by flipping a coin and do better than they’re doing in recent years
But how else would the CEO justify her $7 million dollar salary (in ‘22) that’s going up by a million or two every year since she returned, starting at $3 million in 2020.
Anthony is a she?
Oh shit they literally changed CEO a few hours ago. My bad.
Doubt the wage issue will change though.
I get missing it in the title, but you didn’t read the article or even the summary blurb either?
No, because I wasn’t commenting on the article. I was commenting on the other users comment about the last few years of Mozilla, something I’m already well aware of.
mozilla is nothing more than an extension of GOOGLE, since they recieved most of thier funding from them. they are essentially google shills, and probably using thier AI too. i wouldnt be surprise if google tries to buy them down the line.
“What I’ve seen with AI is an erosion of trust.”
Mozilla is not going to train its own giant LLM anytime soon. But there’s still an AI Mode coming to Firefox next year, which Enzor-DeMeo says will offer users their choice of model and product, all in a browser they can understand and from a company they can trust. “We’re not incentivized to push one model or the other,” he says. “So we’re going to try to go to market with multiple models.” Some will be open-source models available to anyone.
This is such an out of touch non-answer here.
People don’t oppose ai changes because they’re locked into a model. In fact most AI products I use for my job let you choose a fucking model.
People hate them because
A) 90% of the time they’re useless and the remaining 10 are detrimental to the product experience
B) Ethical concerns about training off of artists and authors as well as environmental impact. EDIT: or also the general trend of trying to replace humans with AI.
C) Not wanting to play into the fucking arms race the billionaire class are manufacturing
D) The time they could be useful they have a risk of being either hilariously wrong or dangerously wrong. And there’s no amount of training and GPU manufacturing that’s gonna fix that.
Absolutely none of this is addressed by the CEO. I’m sure he has to say this because of the fucking tulip crazy money is in around this but it doesn’t make it any less tone deaf or futile.
Mozilla is completely detached from its user base. They think their average user is a Microsoft enthusiast when in reality it’s a Debian enjoyer.
They have telemetry to track the number of installations on different systems
I guess I should turn the telemetry on so they’d see I’m using it on linux. Muh privacy
Yes.
And most debian user disable telemetry. Their numbers probably show its all windows folk heavily using AI because its the default.
Then enable “Send daily usage ping to Mozilla”
Mozilla’s new CEO is a dumbass.
It’s hard to beat the last one, but he somehow managed to pull it off.
Then again, Mitchell Baker is still on the board of directors if I’m not mistaken, so it sounds like the rot is too pervasive for just one CEO to change.
Why do they keep going all in on AI when no one wants it?
Power users don’t want it.
Regular users say they don’t want it but actions don’t lie. They love AI. They love the slop. They just don’t want to be reminded that that’s what it is.
Google threatens to rip their funding if they don’t advocate for AI
Is that actually on record somewhere, or just speculation?
Just like I said in another post related to this, I hope this doesn’t kill LibreWolf, IceCat, and Waterfox.
Librewolf have put a post out a few days ago that they won’t add any AI stuff.
Waterfox is on the same page. As long as the browser doesn’t outright require it to functio0n, I think the privacy-focused forks will remain. Of course, it’s extra work to maintain divergent code, but this is worth it, IMO.
CEO = bad
every. single. time.
“AI is untrustworthy, therefore you can use multiple AI services in our product.”
