one passage of note:
Where does all of this leave the Firefox browser. Surman argued that the organization is very judicious about rolling AI into the browser — but he also believes that AI will become part of everything Mozilla does. “We want to implement AI in a way that’s trustworthy and benefits people,” he said. Fakespot is one example of this, but the overall vision is larger. “I think that’s what you’ll see from us, over the course of the next year, is how do you use the browser as the thing that represents you and how do you build AI into the browser that’s basically on your side as you move through the internet?” He noted that an Edge-like chatbot in a sidebar could be one way of doing this, but he seems to be thinking more in terms of an assistant that helps you summarize articles and maybe notify you proactively. “I think you’ll see the browser evolve. In our case, that’s to be more protective of you and more helpful to you. I think it’s more that you use the predictive and synthesizing capabilities of those tools to make it easier and safer to move through the internet.”
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It’s kinda crazy to me how hate-filled Lemmy is just a half-year after I joined (when it felt like a breath of fresh air after deleting my Reddit account), especially for Mozilla. Mozilla has issues, but it’s nothing they can’t fix or come out of. They don’t deserve to die. And all the conspiracy theories I’m reading is just nonsense. I happen to be a Firefox user, but really it’s mainly because Google decided to screw with user choice (i.e. Manifest v3). Firefox is still FOSS, and it’s still giving plenty of user choice.
And all this AI talk is just bandwagoning by every corporation because if AI (as in LLM and whatnot) happens to be a baseline thing for many corporations, Mozilla not implementing it could backfire for them, so while it is bandwagoning, it also makes sense to hedge one’s bets on it.
I, for one, think this current notion of AI is too raw to take any real shape (outside of the current novelty), and these corps that are jumping on it, just like they did with “web 2.0” and “big data” and “the cloud” and “blockchain”, will eventually find that while there is some tangibility to be found, it will take many years to solidify into products that make sense for a consumer.
I happen to be a Firefox user
I happen to be a former
conkeroruser, which was based on XULRunner, which Mozilla dropped, just like other ways to use their engine for other browsers.But I could use pre-Australis Firefox.
Only then their experiments on people with UI design happened.
And yes, Mozilla as an organization has objective flaws. Their treatment of the SeaMonkey project (now separate) has not been good as well.
Yeah and AI is pretty useful for doing certain things. For example my pixel can turn on subtitles for any video or audio playing and even translate it for me on the fly. AI isnt blockchain and it isnt all chatgtp or making images with too many fingers. People are talking about improving web standards as if whatever ai stuff google,MS, and apple are cooking up wont be used in order to enhance various web features.
Likewise firefox is currently a good browser and does keep up for the most part. I’d understand the criticisms if firefox was suck in 2009, but modern day firefox is fast and works well and they will likely continue keeping up with standards while an independent team works on the open source AI stuff
I personally just don’t like people calling it AI. It’s not.
What an absolute shitshow this is going to be. If I want a digital assistant, I’ll get one. Keeping concerns separate is what has always worked. This reads like Elon wanting X to be the “everything app”. That ship has already sailed. The web is the everything app. Back when the web was new, you had AOL and Yahoo wanting to be the “gateway” to everything. How did that work out? My gateway to everything is my bookmarks folder. I don’t want AI in anything I use locally unless I explicitly enable it and ask for assistance. IMHO, this is the reason so many digital assistants have failed (especially Microsoft’s); because they tried to anticipate your needs rather than STFU and stay out of the way.
I’m old.
/rant
My feeling is that AI is the new solution looking for too many problems to solve. I had the same feeling with microservices, big data, block chain, NoSQL databases and all those other hype driven development things. Different products and solutions exist to solve their respective problems. I notice that AI (notably since ChatGPT and related) are pushed in all directions.
I’m absolutely with you. Having run face-first into MongoDB more than once, I finally learned not to trust the hype around these things.
How else would we know what niche to exploit with it other than brute forcing it into everything!
Could we have an AI do the brute forcing?.. /s
The Gartner hype cycle strikes again.
Isn’t Firefox generally quite good at letting you turn off features you don’t want?
That’s not my problem personally. It’s that they’re wasting time on stuff like this when they could be spending it on enhancing their browser in other ways
I am worried about the direction of Mozilla, it VERY FUCKING MUCH needs to invest on the browser instead of wasting time on “AI”
The conspiracy theory I’ve heard is that Mozilla is basically paid opposition to Google. Their leadership is being paid (by Google) to run Firefox into the ground without actually going out of business.
Half plausible, but honestly I’m more inclined to lean into Occam’s Razor and believe there’s no conspiracy and the CEO just got AI mind worms, which is an epidemic right now
…which is an epidemic right now
Yes, it fucking is.
https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/8/24027112/volkswagen-chatgpt-openai-voice-assistant-cars-ces
Whats wrong with firefox currently?
Their CEO is the biggest symptom of their problem. She demands a sky high compensation despite her poor leadership. The company has been in a spiraling decline for the past decade now. Instead of focusing on bringing a great user experience, they alienated their most staunch users with things like Pocket and allowed PWAs and Electron to eat their lunch.
Their new shopping toolbar is coming next. At least Pocket was universal. The Shopping Toolbar will only be for three websites:
Amazon USA
Walmart
Best BuyYou know, the biggest brick and mortar monopoly, the biggest online sales monopoly, and the biggest tech chain.
Let’s face it, we lost the fun, early web long time ago. It was all taken over by corporations and when Mozilla dies (and that’s not if) they will finish locking it up and the only way to browse it will be by using official, ad filled tools. Best thing we can do is to prepare ourselves for the world without web (www?). We’ll still have apps and communicators and of course will still use websites at work but the days of ‘browsing’ will soon (well, hopefully not very soon) be over.
Can I get a browser that would automatically filter out AI generated content? That would be a killer feature!!
Can we please focus on actual user experience?
Firefox is the only major browser without HDR support on Windows…
I mean HDR support in Windows, at least in my anecdotal experience, is garbage, anyway. But I agree, that doesn’t mean the browser shouldn’t support it by now.
Yes, an ai assistant is that all it needs. And higher salaries to the c suite please. Also it needs to remove feature and ignore user requests
Say it with me now: local AI, local AI… or fuck off.
That being said, ARM laptops and probably even workstations are the future, and so is RISC-V. I suspect we’ll see more tensor cores or AI related processing built-in to the SoC’s.
If it’s then only a question of hardware enablement and a software companion to go along with it, I’m all for it.
Go Mozilla…! But again: local AI, or fuck off.
The use local models for Firefox Translations so I would expect they would do something similar
The vast majority of consumer devices, both mobile and laptops/desktops, are not powerful enough to run local AI with a good user experience yet, and even if they were, a lot of users would still prefer having it run in the cloud rather than using up their phone battery
Higher exec salaries.
Pretty much… Mitchell baker gets paid 7 million.
That being said though, just to play devils advocate, she was there since the beginning apparently (at Netscape). So, she actually seems to somewhat deserve it. And she’s well educated too and I get the impression she’s also a good person too
Whereas, you look at the Oracle CEO, and she’s what you expect (donates a lot of money to the right wing, banker, etc)
Bro, Mozilla needs to die. They don’t deserve all the money they are getting.
Literally the worst take I’ve heard all day
what does that creative commons license have to do with Firefox?
Yes, let’s let Google have complete control over the web, that will show them!
The majority of the opensource community won’t rally behind any browser other than Firefox or one of its soft forks. Firefox is alive by virtue of being the only fully opensource alternative to Chromium with a different webengine. If Firefox and Mozilla died, these are the possible outcomes I see:
- Majority of FF users jump to Chromium and never jump back, Chromium becomes the only opensource browser the majority knows of
- government does absolutely nothing and that’s that
- government (most likely EU) decides to do something like
- start developing their own browser
- fund a firefox fork or another opensource alternative
- take away chromium from google due to the marketshare (now a monopoly)
- FF users and devs disperse to either
- pick some Firefox soft fork to make that the new FF, a new foundation is established focused solely on the browser
- start a new browser from scratch with a new foundation focused solely on the browser
- a new browser is started that Google then pays to act as the new excuse not to have Chromium taken away from them due to being a monopoly (aka we’re back at square 1)
Except the first option where the government does fuck all and a new Mozilla+Firefox clone, it sounds like a win to me. No?
Even if something were to happen then it would take significant time, meanwhile the vast majority of Firefox users start using Chrome or its derivatives.
- Majority of FF users jump to Chromium and never jump back, Chromium becomes the only opensource browser the majority knows of
