They’re not in a position to completely ignore some of the current AI trends. That much I can wrap my head around.
The seeming double down makes no sense to me. It won’t suddenly make Mozilla more popular. It could be useful, yes, however I doubt it’ll be radically different from other implementations of AI + Browser in such a way that it stands above the others.
What I wish they would realize in the Mozilla C-Suite is that there is real appetite browsers that get out of people’s way and focus on productivity. Given their small market share they could stand to grow by addressing that part of the market. Look at the previous success of Arc.
They keep chasing trends instead of creating them. And while it is a hard job to do that, I feel they haven’t given it an earnest attempt in some time
Firefox is still my daily browser of choice. I really want to see it do better and succeed
One of the findings Google shared as evidence in the DoJ's antitrust litigation was that Google's users consume "AI"-generated results more readily than "non-AI" results
Mozilla gets paid by sending search query data to Google
More user-facing "AI" potentially means more search data will be generated by (from) Mozilla's users
The number of gratuitous HTTP requests generated by mobile Firefox is, to me, nothing less than astounding. All this traffic is blocked from reaching the internet on the computers and networks I own but I would imagine most Firefox users allow this traffic to escape. I suspect "AI" will only increase the number of automatically-generated HTTP requests even further
"It won't suddenly make Firefox more popular."
Perhaps the goal is not necessarily to increase the number of Firefox users but to "extract" more data from existing users
"I really want to see it do better and succeed"
For Mozilla's CEO and senior management it looks like Mozilla is succeeding
The best part of Firefox, imo, is that its not just another chromium clone.
Seems odd to try to copy the current trend, when they built such a base on being unique
Mozilla is controlled by Google, they supply all the money and control the board. The board and executive suite are entirely SV VC types, no not-for-profit backgrounds, no free software backgrounds. Mozilla is controlled opposition for Google's monopoly.
> What I wish they would realize in the Mozilla C-Suite is that there is real appetite browsers that get out of people’s way and focus on productivity.
You cannot sell what cannot be seen. Business 101.
It can be seen though. Thats why I referred back to the Arc browser. People saw the real differences and it had fairly brisk adoption across a number of different type of folks, it didn't narrowly target technologists. Our designers, for example, at my last job, loved the heck out of it.
It was good enough for Atlassian to buy the whole company for a good chunk of cash too, if I recall correctly.
The abrupt ending of Arc's development has now left a hole in the market that Firefox could fill and gain marketshare.
Power user is not equivalent to technologists, though they overlap. Making inroads into power user marketshare would be at least a modest increase in Firefox marketshare, given how small their current share is.
Their main revenue is sending search traffic to Google. I imagine a near-future source will be paid subscriptions to LLM products that integrate tightly with the browser.
Both of those require convincing people to use the browser, which is "selling" in the sense of persuasion even though there's no exchange of money at that point.
By "sell" I do not mena to make a profit, I mean, make it visible to the market.
If firefox did its job and got out of the way, who would notice Firefox? It is hard to sell something with no "bells and whistles". Do you think it is a mistake that Liquid Glass exists? No. LG is there so you notice you are on an iPhone which uses to just get out of the way but now is just in my way all the time.
Adding AI to Firefox is to make it visible in the market.
Unfortunately this is not unexpected because Mozilla needs to continue receiving money to survive and unfortunately nobody wants to have the tough conversation about paying for a browser so when whoever is funneling money into Mozilla (Google) says you need AI in your product you have no choice but to jump.
I think their logic is a bit wrong here. Microsoft is a "trusted" entity. Trust doing a lot of heavy lifting here, and even they had to roll back their AI ambitions after seeing the lackluster adoption rates of people using their AI features. The trust part just doesn't matter. It's the principal that we've had browsers for over 20+ years and we never needed AI in our browsers. I would quickly abandon Firefox for an alternative in a heartbeat that doesn't include AI in it.
The uncomfortable truth for all these companies though is that most people simply do not need AI in the places they are shoving it into. Like why does notepad need AI?
I'm paying for my search engine now. I'd pay for Firefox if Mozilla wasn't a fucking clown car of an organization at the business level. I have a deep respect for the engineering team there, but the bean counters running the place should long ago have been ousted. It's the same cabal paying themselves exorbitant salaries and driving completely inane initiatives that nobody wants (see pocket, now AI). I'm not giving them a dime until they get their corporate shit together and I'll be disabling whatever crap they're shoving into Firefox.
Oh I agree 100%. I also play for my search engine so it's definitely not a lack of interest in doing so. I agree with your point as well. Get rid of the money vultures in the C-suite who are paying themselves exorbitant salaries and hand that money over to the Firefox devs. Give them the runway necessary to bring on more developers that would give Firefox the attention it needs to keep up with Chrome/Chromium and maybe start playing with the idea that if you want the latest updates when they release you pay for the browser. If you don't need immediate updates you'll get the deferred releases under a 1-2 month delay or whatever they deem fit with security fixes obviously being backported to keep those who refuse to pay happy enough to not abandon the browser entirely.
> At some point, though, Enzor-DeMeo will have to tend to Mozilla’s own business. “I do think we need revenue diversification away from Google,” he says, “but I don’t necessarily believe we need revenue diversification away from the browser.”
So they want to monetize the browser somehow outside of the Google deal. Future does't look good for Firefox
First want to address the general hate/distrust Mozilla is getting. Based on their behavior the last many years, this is fair.
However, we've got a new CEO, and one from the Firefox side who openly talks about Firefox being the core focus for Mozilla. This is exactly what we've been asking for! I think we should give them a chance.
On the AI thing - I don't personally want AI in my browser. However, I do see some inevitability there, and I appreciate the stated approach:
> 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.
If I can easily turn it off or point it at my own provider, this seems fine to me (maybe even good). I'm quite hesitant to let AI take any actions, but if there is sufficient user control/configurability then it could end up being a useful feature. If it's programmable through an API (such as with extensions) I could see some real personal use for that!
Let's not forget that Mozilla is one of the most important players in the open web. They made some big mistakes, but if they course correct and become what we need them to be, they could be one of the most important heroes of the time.
When the device sync finally works reliably or bookmark tags work on mobile, I will concede that you've turned a corner. What I expect is more theming and AI bullshit, time will tell.
> However, we've got a new CEO, and one from the Firefox side who openly talks about Firefox being the core focus for Mozilla. This is exactly what we've been asking for! I think we should give them a chance.
You know the saying “fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me”? Mozilla is well beyond a count of 2 for me and I assume everyone else who is generally pessimistic about every new plea for giving Firefox another chance. While I understand the angle you’re coming from, I think this argument will read as disrespectful to those who have given Firefox multiple chances.
Actions speak louder than words. I think that Mozilla has to make multiple moves in the right direction before this type of plea can be made.
> And Enzor-DeMeo is convinced Mozilla can get there, that people want what the company is selling. “There is something to be said about, when I have a Mozilla product, I always know my data is in my control. I can turn the thing off, and they’re not going to do anything sketchy.
I used to think that, but they no longer have as much of that trust, and announcements like this are part of the reason.
Their AI solution is all about trust, he says, and we can trust Mozilla because they're not incentivized to push any particular provider. But all we're trusting them with is a frontend for other AI providers, which really doesn't help much since the backend provider also needs to be trusted.
But wait! Since Mozilla is trusted, they're also going to provide their own AI backend service. And they're going to do placement deals with AI providers. Which of course incentivizes them to favor their own services and their partners, which nullifies the CEO's stated basis for trusting them, which makes the whole thing pointless.
Browser monoculture is bad for the open web and if all we have is Webkit (Safari on iOS, Macs) and its fork Blink for all the Chromium browsers, then the web will start becoming a mess of proprietary extensions instead of open standards.
I see this claim often. As someone who learned web dev during the days of IE dominance, I don't understand it.
Internet Explorer never kept up, especially after IE6 reigned supreme. They weren't "a little behind" or didn't have some more niche APIs missing or implemented in a buggy or proprietary way. It actively ignored standards, it didn't receive real updates for a long time (IE11 being the fruition of what the best they could offer was) and generally with few exceptions (namely, the invention of CSS Grid and XMLHttpRequest) generally degraded the ecosystem for over a decade. It actively held back companies from adopting new web standards. Its why polyfilling became as proliferated as it is now.
Safari / WebKit has not induced any of this. Yes, sometimes Safari lags behind in ways that are frustrating. Yes, sometimes Apple refuses to implement an entire API for political rather than technical reasons (see the FileSystem API), but largely it has managed to stay up to date with standards in a reasonable time frame.
While their missing or subset implemented APIs can feel really frustrating, they haven't actively held back any work nor the mass adoption of newer browser APIs.
Apple has their faults, but this isn't even close to the drudgery that was the IE heyday era.
out of curiosity, would you donate some of your GPU time as part of a distributed cloud of computers running AI to develop a browser?
My project ToyBrowser[1] got to the stage that it is able to render some very simple web pages and post on the Internet.
The size of the Internet standards for technologies is immense, but a million people contributing a few hours of GPU time might be enough to code it up if it is distributed in small and clear parts.
The result could be entirely in the public domain and people could have it do whatever they want. We are already collecting feature ideas here [2]
would you contribute a few hours of your gpu to make it a reality?
Ladybird is a pet project of no relevance to the web. there is no tech advantage, its just as riddled with vulnerabilities. chromium and webkit are the winners. you need a whole new ecosystem to get something different.
I think Ladybird is becoming more than that. It's actually helping set the web standard specifications straight in many cases and a from-scratch implementation will have its own advantages once it catches up. Which it will. There's no permanent winner as long as the standards are open.
Ladybird is playing catch-up with features already done years ago. They can either break compatability, or follow. Theyre following, which makes them yet another dead end.
To be honest while I dislike most AI integration that gets pushed, I really enjoy Firefox' local translation model features. I appreciate that I can conveniently translate things with a reasonable degree of accuracy without having to send that text to god knows where.
More stuff like that would be appreciated, though I don't know if their plans for the future will fit that definition.
Maybe this is a lever that they now have to finally break free of their total dependence on Google. Get someone like Meta to pay them to be the default AI model / interface.
Wow, to be honest I hadn't thought of it that way but that might be exactly what's on the horizon. Hard to survive on a search licensing deal in a world where LLMs threaten to eclipse search, but it may mean that LLMs want to compete to be in the browser space.
Almost all tech CEOs think we want an AI button on every window, every app, every dialog. Always there no matter what to make workers more productive or need fewer workers or whatever.
The reality is that even the most ardent supporters of AI want it only in a single web page or in their IDE and that's about it.
Multi-model or no, “AI in the browser” seems like one of those things destined to be eaten by “AI in the OS”, even more surely and to a greater degree than Dropbox was destined to be an OS feature. Having those same tools available system-wide covers the browser case while being far more useful and easier to use (because it’s one interface and set of behavior everywhere).
> He says he could begin to block ad blockers in Firefox and estimates that’d bring in another $150 million, but he doesn’t want to do that. It feels off-mission
Eh yeah, killing the #1 reason why people still use your product is pretty much off-mission yes. I don't really understand how this would make money for them but either way it is the worst idea possible.
I understand more that he wants to be all in on AI. It's the big thing now. Billions are splashing around and Mozilla badly needs money. But everyone is doing AI browsers now. What would make Firefox so different from the rest? What is their moat? Better to focus on what makes it different rather than trying to play the same game as everyone else.
And yeah the web is in an existential crisis, but that's not really up to Mozilla to fix. I definitely won't stop adblocking that's for sure.
It's disconcerting that he's on the fence about this. They obviously seriously considered the option and worked out an estimate of how much money it would bring in. Would they have done it for $175 million?
It also seems at odds with the user being in control of their own data, which he says "there is something to be said about". Mozilla wouldn't be able to impose that sort of restriction on the user if the user were really in control, so I suppose that's why he only voices weak and vague support of user control.
Do any of the big-four (counting Edge as its own thing) browsers not easily allow and facilitate ad blockers? Chrome and Safari definitely do, I assume Edge does too?
What a deeply weird thing to even bring up, under those circumstances. Why was that kind of a thing even kicking around in his head?
Chrome NERFed the filtering API which limits the effectiveness of ad blockers in Chrome. I think that's the one point of technical superiority that Firefox has.
I think Firefox is not alive based on being "a better product" in most respects, it's alive because it's the anti-Chrome, I mean, that's why I run it. In the early 2000s I despaired for the future because I was afraid it would be impossible to browse the web without Internet Explorer and thus, Windows -- Mozilla and Firefox kept hope alive.
Mozilla might not be happy with it but a large chunk of their user base are the kind of anti-big tech people who will explode on Mastodon if you confess that you make an AI generated image once in a while. It might not be rational, but the fury is deep. The thing though is that people's connection to Firefox is not rational it's about wanting to feel you have some choice, control and agency in technology. This article which is the top story on HN expresses this sentiment and it's success shows that a lot of HN users [1] feel this way
I think the difference is really more noticeable if you're on a limited connection. For example, on Starlink I only have 50 GB to play with. It's entirely ineffective if the browser downloads the ads and only scrubs them out of the view after the fact. Same with anybody using a mobile hotspot over LTE. In those situations bandwidth is super limited (I have 5 GB of hotspot data a month) unless you can convince the carriers to zero-rate data pulled for advertisements (they won't) I'll continue blocking ads before they can be loaded.
Edit: and I'm not on some cheap MVNO, I'm paying over $80 a month with AT&T on their post-paid plan. The phone gets unlimited data but any other device I may need to share that connection needs to be as efficient with bandwidth as possible. Only Firefox and derivatives provide proper ad blocking at this time.
Didn't the most recent manifest version update for Chrome extensions drop the ability to block ads at the network level? Extensions can still prune them from the DOM but only after the request has finished; something like that, I don't remember clearly.
I'm pretty sure that's what the quote is a reference to.
It's clear that the professional managerial class (PMC) has its own social circles and inputs. I don't see how else they could continue to lean so aggressively into positions which are alien to most normal people. I don't necessarily just mean "the elite are out of touch," although that's a fair reading of the situation as well.
Rather, we all talk about people being in a bubble. (and these days, everyone is in a bubble) The PMC is for certain in their own bubble and I really have no idea what the inputs are. They're totally alien to me.
The managerial class found my LinkedIn findings irritating
I just got a job recently after getting laid off three years ago
I spent a lot of time in the San Francisco Bay Area talking to people
That data is simple:
100% of the people excited about the prospects of AI are currently employed.
And even then, I do sense a wavering in the voice where they’re making sure to tell their manager that they use ai just enough to not need to be replaced by a different person or the machine they’re training.
Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano was written for this current moment
Mozilla dropped it. It's still getting developed, but it is now focused more on embedded webview use cases. That's not to say someone couldn't build a full browser from it, but that isn't a goal of the current servo devs. Servo also isn't quite mature enough for that.
It's the n-th iteration of "maybe this will work ... nope that didn't work either".
The core value for Firefox users using Firefox is that it's a no-nonsense browser that protects you from ads, obnoxious popups, cooky hoarding social networks looking to sell your data, etc.
AI is not a core browser feature. Nobody is waiting for a Mozilla sanctioned or hosted AI model. Some AI companies are building their own browsers. Given how OpenAI has stopped talking about theirs, you might conclude it is not that successful though. Google is vaguely threatening to add some Gemini stuff to Chrome (not Chromium). The point here is that all the AI browsers are Chromium based.
That points to a problem in Firefox: it's a monolith that is hard to use as the basis for specialized applications that use it as the application runtime. That would be the core problem to fix for Mozilla. Not just cherry picking a particular application and doing a "me too" version of that without any obvious added value whatsoever. Which is what Mozilla is doing here and why it is obviously doomed to fail. Again.
For some reason, Mozilla ceded the whole bespoke application on top of the browser market to Chromium and Electron, even though the starting point of Mozilla was actually to be a generic application platform with things like Xul. Xul kind of flopped but otherwise it was the right move.
Instead of chasing this AI stuff without a coherent plan, which is what this looks like, that would be a more coherent plan.
The alternatives are not so viable. Librewolf is nice, but is still just 99% Firefox. Same with the Chromium-based browsers. We need real alternatives in this space.
The capital intensity of browsers is so high that there won't be any alternatives unless standards evolve to be simpler and easier to implement. That won't happen while Google and co are driving.
> unless standards evolve to be simpler and easier to implement.
It's almost impossible for people to prevent themselves from saying "we could do just a _bit_ more here" until over time they've built something complex enough they cannot manage it.
1. reskin chromium, or webkit. firefox is dead tech, cannot be used for anything other than firefox, and is no longer a testing target. it is insane to continually play catch-up with companies 1000x the size of your team. V8 is now the standard JS engine, spidermonkey is an insecure time bomb and again not modular.
Brave got it right and then got it wrong with pushing crypto and its buggy.
2. Push for local AI. local tooling is going to get big when we get past the current drought. We need fast reactive systems not dependent on servers. Chatgpt is like gaming on the cloud - its still bad even when its good. Need to learn the meta and understand why people are buying 5090’s just to run agents.
3. Remove everyone that wont follow good engineering or otherwise is using your cashflow as jump. This means no diversity hiring. No h1b’s, no cultural or ethnic political warring. Ignore the fake resumes go for git history only. If its mass firing so be it theres no shortage.
4. youre going to make everyone very upset to get anything of value done.
They’re not in a position to completely ignore some of the current AI trends. That much I can wrap my head around.
The seeming double down makes no sense to me. It won’t suddenly make Mozilla more popular. It could be useful, yes, however I doubt it’ll be radically different from other implementations of AI + Browser in such a way that it stands above the others.
What I wish they would realize in the Mozilla C-Suite is that there is real appetite browsers that get out of people’s way and focus on productivity. Given their small market share they could stand to grow by addressing that part of the market. Look at the previous success of Arc.
They keep chasing trends instead of creating them. And while it is a hard job to do that, I feel they haven’t given it an earnest attempt in some time
Firefox is still my daily browser of choice. I really want to see it do better and succeed
"The seeming double down makes no sense to me."
One of the findings Google shared as evidence in the DoJ's antitrust litigation was that Google's users consume "AI"-generated results more readily than "non-AI" results
Mozilla gets paid by sending search query data to Google
More user-facing "AI" potentially means more search data will be generated by (from) Mozilla's users
The number of gratuitous HTTP requests generated by mobile Firefox is, to me, nothing less than astounding. All this traffic is blocked from reaching the internet on the computers and networks I own but I would imagine most Firefox users allow this traffic to escape. I suspect "AI" will only increase the number of automatically-generated HTTP requests even further
"It won't suddenly make Firefox more popular."
Perhaps the goal is not necessarily to increase the number of Firefox users but to "extract" more data from existing users
"I really want to see it do better and succeed"
For Mozilla's CEO and senior management it looks like Mozilla is succeeding
Look at the steady increase in pay for Ms Baker
https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/200...
https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2024/b200-mozilla-fo...
Primarily, Mozilla serves website operators, advertisers and Google
Generally, Firefox users are data sources and ad targets
The best part of Firefox, imo, is that its not just another chromium clone. Seems odd to try to copy the current trend, when they built such a base on being unique
Mozilla is controlled by Google, they supply all the money and control the board. The board and executive suite are entirely SV VC types, no not-for-profit backgrounds, no free software backgrounds. Mozilla is controlled opposition for Google's monopoly.
> What I wish they would realize in the Mozilla C-Suite is that there is real appetite browsers that get out of people’s way and focus on productivity.
You cannot sell what cannot be seen. Business 101.
It can be seen though. Thats why I referred back to the Arc browser. People saw the real differences and it had fairly brisk adoption across a number of different type of folks, it didn't narrowly target technologists. Our designers, for example, at my last job, loved the heck out of it.
It was good enough for Atlassian to buy the whole company for a good chunk of cash too, if I recall correctly.
The abrupt ending of Arc's development has now left a hole in the market that Firefox could fill and gain marketshare.
You are a power user if you are using Arc. I know a few people who do not even really understand what a browser is.
Atlassian bought Arc to put AI in it by the way; "Welcoming The Browser Company to Atlassian Building the AI browser for knowledge workers"
https://www.atlassian.com/blog/announcements/atlassian-acqui...
Power user is not equivalent to technologists, though they overlap. Making inroads into power user marketshare would be at least a modest increase in Firefox marketshare, given how small their current share is.
Sell what? What is Mozilla hoping to selling here? Firefox is free.
Their main revenue is sending search traffic to Google. I imagine a near-future source will be paid subscriptions to LLM products that integrate tightly with the browser.
Both of those require convincing people to use the browser, which is "selling" in the sense of persuasion even though there's no exchange of money at that point.
Your data, presumably.
Sorry, you are all missing the point.
By "sell" I do not mena to make a profit, I mean, make it visible to the market.
If firefox did its job and got out of the way, who would notice Firefox? It is hard to sell something with no "bells and whistles". Do you think it is a mistake that Liquid Glass exists? No. LG is there so you notice you are on an iPhone which uses to just get out of the way but now is just in my way all the time.
Adding AI to Firefox is to make it visible in the market.
Unfortunately this is not unexpected because Mozilla needs to continue receiving money to survive and unfortunately nobody wants to have the tough conversation about paying for a browser so when whoever is funneling money into Mozilla (Google) says you need AI in your product you have no choice but to jump.
I think their logic is a bit wrong here. Microsoft is a "trusted" entity. Trust doing a lot of heavy lifting here, and even they had to roll back their AI ambitions after seeing the lackluster adoption rates of people using their AI features. The trust part just doesn't matter. It's the principal that we've had browsers for over 20+ years and we never needed AI in our browsers. I would quickly abandon Firefox for an alternative in a heartbeat that doesn't include AI in it.
The uncomfortable truth for all these companies though is that most people simply do not need AI in the places they are shoving it into. Like why does notepad need AI?
I'm paying for my search engine now. I'd pay for Firefox if Mozilla wasn't a fucking clown car of an organization at the business level. I have a deep respect for the engineering team there, but the bean counters running the place should long ago have been ousted. It's the same cabal paying themselves exorbitant salaries and driving completely inane initiatives that nobody wants (see pocket, now AI). I'm not giving them a dime until they get their corporate shit together and I'll be disabling whatever crap they're shoving into Firefox.
Oh I agree 100%. I also play for my search engine so it's definitely not a lack of interest in doing so. I agree with your point as well. Get rid of the money vultures in the C-suite who are paying themselves exorbitant salaries and hand that money over to the Firefox devs. Give them the runway necessary to bring on more developers that would give Firefox the attention it needs to keep up with Chrome/Chromium and maybe start playing with the idea that if you want the latest updates when they release you pay for the browser. If you don't need immediate updates you'll get the deferred releases under a 1-2 month delay or whatever they deem fit with security fixes obviously being backported to keep those who refuse to pay happy enough to not abandon the browser entirely.
> At some point, though, Enzor-DeMeo will have to tend to Mozilla’s own business. “I do think we need revenue diversification away from Google,” he says, “but I don’t necessarily believe we need revenue diversification away from the browser.”
So they want to monetize the browser somehow outside of the Google deal. Future does't look good for Firefox
I really think they should look into B2B products with a strong synergy with the browser. Some example ideas:
- password manager with team and enterprise features that natively integrates with the built in firefox password manager
- hosted private addon store that gives employers more control over what plugins employees install, and can easily host internal addons
- enterprise grade "zero trust" solution with native browser support.
- related to the above, something like Mozilla VPN, but for connecting to a corporate network, possibly with split tunnel features.
Etc.
First want to address the general hate/distrust Mozilla is getting. Based on their behavior the last many years, this is fair.
However, we've got a new CEO, and one from the Firefox side who openly talks about Firefox being the core focus for Mozilla. This is exactly what we've been asking for! I think we should give them a chance.
On the AI thing - I don't personally want AI in my browser. However, I do see some inevitability there, and I appreciate the stated approach:
> 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.
If I can easily turn it off or point it at my own provider, this seems fine to me (maybe even good). I'm quite hesitant to let AI take any actions, but if there is sufficient user control/configurability then it could end up being a useful feature. If it's programmable through an API (such as with extensions) I could see some real personal use for that!
Let's not forget that Mozilla is one of the most important players in the open web. They made some big mistakes, but if they course correct and become what we need them to be, they could be one of the most important heroes of the time.
When the device sync finally works reliably or bookmark tags work on mobile, I will concede that you've turned a corner. What I expect is more theming and AI bullshit, time will tell.
> However, we've got a new CEO, and one from the Firefox side who openly talks about Firefox being the core focus for Mozilla. This is exactly what we've been asking for! I think we should give them a chance.
You know the saying “fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me”? Mozilla is well beyond a count of 2 for me and I assume everyone else who is generally pessimistic about every new plea for giving Firefox another chance. While I understand the angle you’re coming from, I think this argument will read as disrespectful to those who have given Firefox multiple chances.
Actions speak louder than words. I think that Mozilla has to make multiple moves in the right direction before this type of plea can be made.
> And Enzor-DeMeo is convinced Mozilla can get there, that people want what the company is selling. “There is something to be said about, when I have a Mozilla product, I always know my data is in my control. I can turn the thing off, and they’re not going to do anything sketchy.
I used to think that, but they no longer have as much of that trust, and announcements like this are part of the reason.
This makes no sense.
Their AI solution is all about trust, he says, and we can trust Mozilla because they're not incentivized to push any particular provider. But all we're trusting them with is a frontend for other AI providers, which really doesn't help much since the backend provider also needs to be trusted.
But wait! Since Mozilla is trusted, they're also going to provide their own AI backend service. And they're going to do placement deals with AI providers. Which of course incentivizes them to favor their own services and their partners, which nullifies the CEO's stated basis for trusting them, which makes the whole thing pointless.
Help me, Ladybird. You’re my only hope.
That or the Kagi Browser... Waiting for a Linux release.
More Webkit :/
Just curious, what don't you like about Webkit?
It's the IE of the 21st century.
Browser monoculture is bad for the open web and if all we have is Webkit (Safari on iOS, Macs) and its fork Blink for all the Chromium browsers, then the web will start becoming a mess of proprietary extensions instead of open standards.
>It's the IE of the 21st century
I see this claim often. As someone who learned web dev during the days of IE dominance, I don't understand it.
Internet Explorer never kept up, especially after IE6 reigned supreme. They weren't "a little behind" or didn't have some more niche APIs missing or implemented in a buggy or proprietary way. It actively ignored standards, it didn't receive real updates for a long time (IE11 being the fruition of what the best they could offer was) and generally with few exceptions (namely, the invention of CSS Grid and XMLHttpRequest) generally degraded the ecosystem for over a decade. It actively held back companies from adopting new web standards. Its why polyfilling became as proliferated as it is now.
Safari / WebKit has not induced any of this. Yes, sometimes Safari lags behind in ways that are frustrating. Yes, sometimes Apple refuses to implement an entire API for political rather than technical reasons (see the FileSystem API), but largely it has managed to stay up to date with standards in a reasonable time frame.
While their missing or subset implemented APIs can feel really frustrating, they haven't actively held back any work nor the mass adoption of newer browser APIs.
Apple has their faults, but this isn't even close to the drudgery that was the IE heyday era.
out of curiosity, would you donate some of your GPU time as part of a distributed cloud of computers running AI to develop a browser?
My project ToyBrowser[1] got to the stage that it is able to render some very simple web pages and post on the Internet.
The size of the Internet standards for technologies is immense, but a million people contributing a few hours of GPU time might be enough to code it up if it is distributed in small and clear parts.
The result could be entirely in the public domain and people could have it do whatever they want. We are already collecting feature ideas here [2]
would you contribute a few hours of your gpu to make it a reality?
[1] https://medium.com/@rviragh/our-new-ai-generated-browser-bar...
[2] https://pollunit.com/en/polls/ahysed74t8gaktvqno100g
Ladybird is a pet project of no relevance to the web. there is no tech advantage, its just as riddled with vulnerabilities. chromium and webkit are the winners. you need a whole new ecosystem to get something different.
I think Ladybird is becoming more than that. It's actually helping set the web standard specifications straight in many cases and a from-scratch implementation will have its own advantages once it catches up. Which it will. There's no permanent winner as long as the standards are open.
Ladybird is playing catch-up with features already done years ago. They can either break compatability, or follow. Theyre following, which makes them yet another dead end.
and, again, riddled with vulnerabilities.
Mozilla spend a lot of time telling me I trust them. I don't think that's having the effect they expect.
https://archive.is/li0ig
Server timeout for me on that one. Got this one now as well: https://archive.ph/li0ig
To be honest while I dislike most AI integration that gets pushed, I really enjoy Firefox' local translation model features. I appreciate that I can conveniently translate things with a reasonable degree of accuracy without having to send that text to god knows where.
More stuff like that would be appreciated, though I don't know if their plans for the future will fit that definition.
> “We’re not incentivized to push one model or the other,” he says.
Bold words from a browser whose finances hinge almost entirely around pushing one search engine over others.
Maybe this is a lever that they now have to finally break free of their total dependence on Google. Get someone like Meta to pay them to be the default AI model / interface.
Yeah. “We’re not incentivized to push one model or the other,” may be a statement of current fact, not of values.
Wow, to be honest I hadn't thought of it that way but that might be exactly what's on the horizon. Hard to survive on a search licensing deal in a world where LLMs threaten to eclipse search, but it may mean that LLMs want to compete to be in the browser space.
So, jump out of the frying pan and into the fire?
Almost all tech CEOs think we want an AI button on every window, every app, every dialog. Always there no matter what to make workers more productive or need fewer workers or whatever.
The reality is that even the most ardent supporters of AI want it only in a single web page or in their IDE and that's about it.
Multi-model or no, “AI in the browser” seems like one of those things destined to be eaten by “AI in the OS”, even more surely and to a greater degree than Dropbox was destined to be an OS feature. Having those same tools available system-wide covers the browser case while being far more useful and easier to use (because it’s one interface and set of behavior everywhere).
Ladybird can't come faster
> He says he could begin to block ad blockers in Firefox and estimates that’d bring in another $150 million, but he doesn’t want to do that. It feels off-mission
Eh yeah, killing the #1 reason why people still use your product is pretty much off-mission yes. I don't really understand how this would make money for them but either way it is the worst idea possible.
I understand more that he wants to be all in on AI. It's the big thing now. Billions are splashing around and Mozilla badly needs money. But everyone is doing AI browsers now. What would make Firefox so different from the rest? What is their moat? Better to focus on what makes it different rather than trying to play the same game as everyone else.
And yeah the web is in an existential crisis, but that's not really up to Mozilla to fix. I definitely won't stop adblocking that's for sure.
It's disconcerting that he's on the fence about this. They obviously seriously considered the option and worked out an estimate of how much money it would bring in. Would they have done it for $175 million?
It also seems at odds with the user being in control of their own data, which he says "there is something to be said about". Mozilla wouldn't be able to impose that sort of restriction on the user if the user were really in control, so I suppose that's why he only voices weak and vague support of user control.
How is that a realistic estimate? It's more likely their revenue would go to zero than increase $150M.
Do any of the big-four (counting Edge as its own thing) browsers not easily allow and facilitate ad blockers? Chrome and Safari definitely do, I assume Edge does too?
What a deeply weird thing to even bring up, under those circumstances. Why was that kind of a thing even kicking around in his head?
Chrome NERFed the filtering API which limits the effectiveness of ad blockers in Chrome. I think that's the one point of technical superiority that Firefox has.
I think Firefox is not alive based on being "a better product" in most respects, it's alive because it's the anti-Chrome, I mean, that's why I run it. In the early 2000s I despaired for the future because I was afraid it would be impossible to browse the web without Internet Explorer and thus, Windows -- Mozilla and Firefox kept hope alive.
Mozilla might not be happy with it but a large chunk of their user base are the kind of anti-big tech people who will explode on Mastodon if you confess that you make an AI generated image once in a while. It might not be rational, but the fury is deep. The thing though is that people's connection to Firefox is not rational it's about wanting to feel you have some choice, control and agency in technology. This article which is the top story on HN expresses this sentiment and it's success shows that a lot of HN users [1] feel this way
https://blog.mathieui.net/this-is-not-the-future.html
Firing your customers so that you can get some imaginary new customers is a story that rarely has a happy ending.
[1] who I think like those Mastodonsters are inclined to like technology but want to be in control, like political Linux enthusiasts.
I know it's been nerfed, but honestly I can't say that I really notice a difference using ublock lite on manifest v3 compared to before.
I think the difference is really more noticeable if you're on a limited connection. For example, on Starlink I only have 50 GB to play with. It's entirely ineffective if the browser downloads the ads and only scrubs them out of the view after the fact. Same with anybody using a mobile hotspot over LTE. In those situations bandwidth is super limited (I have 5 GB of hotspot data a month) unless you can convince the carriers to zero-rate data pulled for advertisements (they won't) I'll continue blocking ads before they can be loaded.
Edit: and I'm not on some cheap MVNO, I'm paying over $80 a month with AT&T on their post-paid plan. The phone gets unlimited data but any other device I may need to share that connection needs to be as efficient with bandwidth as possible. Only Firefox and derivatives provide proper ad blocking at this time.
Switch to an AT&T MVNO that gives you a lot more than 5 GB of hotspot for less than $80/month:
https://prepaidcompare.net/
Didn't the most recent manifest version update for Chrome extensions drop the ability to block ads at the network level? Extensions can still prune them from the DOM but only after the request has finished; something like that, I don't remember clearly.
I'm pretty sure that's what the quote is a reference to.
It's so incredibly baffling that I wonder if it was a mistaken transcription of something else similar.
It's clear that the professional managerial class (PMC) has its own social circles and inputs. I don't see how else they could continue to lean so aggressively into positions which are alien to most normal people. I don't necessarily just mean "the elite are out of touch," although that's a fair reading of the situation as well.
Rather, we all talk about people being in a bubble. (and these days, everyone is in a bubble) The PMC is for certain in their own bubble and I really have no idea what the inputs are. They're totally alien to me.
Exactly this.
The managerial class found my LinkedIn findings irritating
I just got a job recently after getting laid off three years ago
I spent a lot of time in the San Francisco Bay Area talking to people
That data is simple:
100% of the people excited about the prospects of AI are currently employed.
And even then, I do sense a wavering in the voice where they’re making sure to tell their manager that they use ai just enough to not need to be replaced by a different person or the machine they’re training.
Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano was written for this current moment
I literally installed librewolf for the first time on my fresh Debian install. Couldn’t have had better timing!
What happened to servo? That looked pretty promising - is it dead?
Mozilla dropped it. It's still getting developed, but it is now focused more on embedded webview use cases. That's not to say someone couldn't build a full browser from it, but that isn't a goal of the current servo devs. Servo also isn't quite mature enough for that.
They can alienate whatever users left by introducing AI or they can alienate whatever investors left by not introducing AI. Sucks to be Mozilla.
It's the n-th iteration of "maybe this will work ... nope that didn't work either".
The core value for Firefox users using Firefox is that it's a no-nonsense browser that protects you from ads, obnoxious popups, cooky hoarding social networks looking to sell your data, etc.
AI is not a core browser feature. Nobody is waiting for a Mozilla sanctioned or hosted AI model. Some AI companies are building their own browsers. Given how OpenAI has stopped talking about theirs, you might conclude it is not that successful though. Google is vaguely threatening to add some Gemini stuff to Chrome (not Chromium). The point here is that all the AI browsers are Chromium based.
That points to a problem in Firefox: it's a monolith that is hard to use as the basis for specialized applications that use it as the application runtime. That would be the core problem to fix for Mozilla. Not just cherry picking a particular application and doing a "me too" version of that without any obvious added value whatsoever. Which is what Mozilla is doing here and why it is obviously doomed to fail. Again.
For some reason, Mozilla ceded the whole bespoke application on top of the browser market to Chromium and Electron, even though the starting point of Mozilla was actually to be a generic application platform with things like Xul. Xul kind of flopped but otherwise it was the right move.
Instead of chasing this AI stuff without a coherent plan, which is what this looks like, that would be a more coherent plan.
All I want is an off button. The AI results are just trash. If other people enoy the garbage data they are welcome to it.
Nobody got fired for pivoting to AI.
Yet.
How can they be this oblivious?
The food and wine at the fancy galas they’re more interested in attending than making a web browser must be really great.
Now I'm even more nervous about what Firefox is going to become.
bye-bye Firefox then
Related:
Mozilla Appoints New CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46288491
EAITD: Everything AI Touches Dies
Ugh.
All the more reason to ditch Firefox for the only viable alternative, Chrome, which famously has a much more restrained approach to AI.
Sigh...
(And yeah, I know, Degoogled Chromium, *Fox, curl... But viable is not only doing heavy, but required lifting here...)
The alternatives are not so viable. Librewolf is nice, but is still just 99% Firefox. Same with the Chromium-based browsers. We need real alternatives in this space.
You're... pretty much conceding my point, while appearing to disagree? But, yeah, I'll ask ChatGPT how to be less obtuse next time...
The capital intensity of browsers is so high that there won't be any alternatives unless standards evolve to be simpler and easier to implement. That won't happen while Google and co are driving.
> unless standards evolve to be simpler and easier to implement.
It's almost impossible for people to prevent themselves from saying "we could do just a _bit_ more here" until over time they've built something complex enough they cannot manage it.
Does Brave not exist anymore?
1. reskin chromium, or webkit. firefox is dead tech, cannot be used for anything other than firefox, and is no longer a testing target. it is insane to continually play catch-up with companies 1000x the size of your team. V8 is now the standard JS engine, spidermonkey is an insecure time bomb and again not modular.
Brave got it right and then got it wrong with pushing crypto and its buggy.
2. Push for local AI. local tooling is going to get big when we get past the current drought. We need fast reactive systems not dependent on servers. Chatgpt is like gaming on the cloud - its still bad even when its good. Need to learn the meta and understand why people are buying 5090’s just to run agents.
3. Remove everyone that wont follow good engineering or otherwise is using your cashflow as jump. This means no diversity hiring. No h1b’s, no cultural or ethnic political warring. Ignore the fake resumes go for git history only. If its mass firing so be it theres no shortage.
4. youre going to make everyone very upset to get anything of value done.
So that's it then. Zen is going to eat their market share for lunch.
https://zen-browser.app/
What happens if Mozilla goes down and Zen has to start maintaining the core of the browser themselves?
Can I make the window opaque or do I have to also browse whatever is behind the menu bar?
Switched to it a month ago and haven't looked back.