Technology

I don't need or want any of that AI crap in my browser. Hopefully there will be a compiler flag to disable it.

Can they just focus on the browser? I really don't need the AI stuff.

Focusing on FF: Yay!

Adding AI to FF: NOOOOOOOOOOOooooooooo!

Mozilla downsizes as it ~~refocuses on Firefox and AI~~ drops multiple products and layoff 60 so that its current budget can accomodate the stratospheric compensation of its new CEO.

fuuk this AI bubble. the browser is one place where ai is not needed

I love Firefox. Don't screw it up, Mozilla.

it refocuses on Firefox

🤩

and AI

😩

Sigh, and here I was, thinking Microsoft trying to shove its useless (to me) AI down my throat at every opportunity was annoying... Quo vadis Mozilla, what are you guys doing... :(

Unfortunately Mozilla's brand new CEO is a McKinsey ghoul: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chamberslaura/

While we resourced mozilla.social heavily to pursue this ambitious idea,

How many people do you need to administer a Mastodon instance? I'm pretty sure infosec.exchange is like one dude.

Specifically, Mozilla plans to scale back its investment in a number of products, including its VPN, Relay and, somewhat remarkably, its Online Footprint Scrubber

IMO these were their best products. 🙁

Going forward, the company said in an internal memo, Mozilla will focus on bringing “trustworthy AI into Firefox.” To do so, it will bring together the teams that work on Pocket, Content and AI/Ml.

Ugh, god damn it.

The worst enemy of Mozilla is: Mozilla. This hasn't changed in many years.

Specifically, Mozilla plans to scale back its investment in a number of products, including its VPN, Relay and, somewhat remarkably, its Online Footprint Scrubber, which launched only a week ago.

I just purchased an annual plan for Monitor, partially to help Mozilla. I guess this is my thanks

I thought they switched CEOs to focus on privacy a week or so ago?

We dont want AI or pocket you assholes. We want a secure browser. Stop wasting your money on this shit

Let's skip the AI and give thunderbird some love instead. Then again, it's pretty feature complete as is. Just keep it up to date to keep running and secure.

This is awful lol

That interim CEO seems like they suck; I hope they don't stay.

Oh for Fox’s sake!!!

I didn't realize Lemmy hated AI so much. Pretty much every post in this thread is bashing the idea. I've found AI to be very useful personally, I use it almost every day. It helped me code a VBA macro from scratch with 0 experience. This tool is saving me and my team hundreds of hours per year. It's also great just as an improved search engine.

Kinda disappointing how much of the community just takes a giant 💩 on Mozilla whatever it does these days. Funding open source is super crazy hard folks. Notice that the really successful well funded projects are fueled by megacorps?

Offering constructive criticism is great but if you don't have better ideas around how to fund an open browser without selling your soul to GOOG or MSFT then perhaps your energy might be better spent elsewhere.

Lots of immediate hate for AI, but I'm all for local AI if they keep that direction. Small models are getting really impressive, and if they have smaller, fine-tuned, specific-purpose AI over the "general purpose" LLMs, they'd be much more efficient at their jobs. I've been rocking local LLMs for a while and they've been great as a small compliment to language processing tasks in my coding.

Good text-to-speech, page summarization, contextual content blocking, translation, bias/sentiment detection, click bait detection, article re-titling, I'm sure there's many great use cases. And purely speculation,but many traditional non-llm techniques might be able to included here that were overlooked because nobody cared about AI features, that could be super lightweight and still helpful.

If it goes fully remote AI, it loses a lot of privacy cred, and positions itself really similarly to where everyone else is. From a financial perspective, bandwagoning on AI in the browser but "we won't send your data anywhere" seems like a trendy, but potentially helpful and effective way to bring in a demographic interested in it without sacrificing principles.

But there's a lot of speculation in this comment. Mozilla's done a lot for FOSS, and I get they need monetization outside of Google, but hopefully it doesn't lead things astray too hard.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

After installing a new interim CEO earlier this month, Mozilla, the organization behind the Firefox browser, is making some major changes to its product strategy, TechCrunch has learned.

Specifically, Mozilla plans to scale back its investment in a number of products, including its VPN, Relay and, somewhat remarkably, its Online Footprint Scrubber, which launched only a week ago.

Going forward, the company said in an internal memo, Mozilla will focus on bringing “trustworthy AI into Firefox.” To do so, it will bring together the teams that work on Pocket, Content and AI/Ml.

Mozilla started expanding its product portfolio in recent years, all while its flagship product, Firefox, kept losing market share.

And while the organization was often sharply criticized for this, its leadership argued that diversifying its product portfolio beyond Firefox was necessary to ensure Mozilla’s survival in the long run.

Firefox, after all, provided the vast majority of Mozilla’s income, but it also meant the organization was essentially dependent on Google to continue this deal.

The original article contains 234 words, the summary contains 166 words. Saved 29%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

A reminder that there are many firefox forks that exist if base firefox is adding unwanted things or you might have different wants, but sites will still "see" firefox in terms of compatibility. I'm using Librewolf with some annoyances (it doesn't let things fingerprint to the point that it can't even get your current time), but overall I like it.