I’m not sure where people are getting the idea that they’re talking about putting AI in Firefox.
Mozilla seized an opportunity to bring trustworthy AI into Firefox, largely driven by the Fakespot acquisition and the product integration work that followed. Additionally, finding great content is still a critical use case for the internet. Therefore, as part of the changes today, we will be bringing together Pocket, Content, and the AI/ML teams supporting content with the Firefox Organization.
emphasis mine
How do you interpret that?
Sings “it’s the end of Mozilla as we know it”.
Jamie Zawinski would probably be laughing very hard at this statement
Can they just focus on the browser? I really don’t need the AI stuff.
The issue is that Firefox alone doesn’t pay the bills and I’d imagine they really want to get away from being dependent on the Google deal they have.
We don’t need AI stuff but if they can get some good funding from it, they can put more into the browser
how will putting AI in Firefox get them funding?
That’s not what they’re doing. They’re going to focus on two separate products: Firefox and AI.
Mozilla seized an opportunity to bring trustworthy AI into Firefox
Therefore, as part of the changes today, we will be bringing together Pocket, Content, and the AI/ML teams supporting content with the Firefox Organization
This is from the Mozilla release. The second quote does say “Firefox Organization” and not “Firefox”, but it seems clear they are planning on integrating AI into Firefox.
But, I’ve reread @NotSteve_'s comment and they were saying the funding earned from AI could be put into Firefox, not AI itself. NotSteve wasn’t claiming that putting AI into Firefox would bring in more funding, only that AI could be a separate source of revenue. So my question is moot.
And maybe merge the two, like adding a tldr feature to reader mode, instead of an obnoxious sidebar like a lot of browsers right now
Arguably the issue here is that Firefox pays too many of the bills, directly from its main competitor
Yeah, fair I could have worded that better. Finding better ways of funding is the goal
And sometimes, those searches will end in failure. Resulting in what we’re seeing today.
so they build the thing that pretty much everyone is running at a loss…
I wish they’d do both but separately
If AI stays, Mozilla would be better off to still have some irons in the fire.
Not sure what to think about this.
Oh for Fox’s sake!!!
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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
Monitor is something different than mentioned. Based on this article, that product is still good. See the correction at the bottom
Same. Wth Mozilla?
I thought they switched CEOs to focus on privacy a week or so ago?
The data privacy angle was just editorialized headlines, the CEO statement did not mention it.
At the very least I don’t feel like I need more out of Firefox than it has today. If it all goes to shit, then a free Firefox Ala chromium would do fine.
I remember what happened last time. Gradually the web will become unusable if you’re not using Chrome. That’s how it worked back in the day with Internet Explorer. Microsoft even began hooking things into IE that can only work on windows (activex controls) and then getting websites to support them.
When I first started using Linux I had to switch to Netscape 4.7 because it was the only browser available and the web barely worked. I remember thinking “well, the web sucks on Linux but I guess I can live without it.”
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.
According to the Librewolf documentation, fingerprinting can be turned off, but they recommend adding the Canvas Blocker extension in its place. That is my current setup, as I didn’t like that websites in Librewolf couldn’t get the correct time and time zone for me.
Here’s the direct quote from the Librewolf documentation:
If you don’t like the downsides of RFP, or you are not concerned about fingerprinting, you can disable RFP in the LibreWolf settings, or in your overrides. In that case consider using an extension like CanvasBlocker to retain at least a minimum amount of fingerprinting protection.
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.
I think the focus is more on how it’s the new buzzword that companies are chasing and that most have a solution looking for a problem.
Especially since AI is already in Firefox, the offline translation feature uses local NMT models.
I like how Kagis search AI works. It gives a link to all of the sources it scraped from.
AI is useful, we’re just tired of seeing it stuffed everywhere
Focusing on FF: Yay!
Adding AI to FF: NOOOOOOOOOOOooooooooo!
A browser AI to detect AI shenanigans on websites would be awesome. Let the AI wars begin!
I mean, a local-only AI would be really cool to have, especially if they need to be competitive against Google and Microsoft with Edge who are investing significant ressources in AI and are trying various ways to integrate it into their products
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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!
This is awful lol
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.
Train ai to I filtrate Google and kill sundar prichai.
It won’t help anyone’s bottom line but then at least sundar prichai would be dead.
