Comment by undeveloper 5 hours ago
This is a very pessimistic post about mozilla, and a lot of it is warrented -- but also it's trivial to disable the AI stuff. dead simple. so until that day comes, I'll still be supporting mozilla (for now, using firefox relay). It looks like till then google will be propping up mozilla to avoid looking like a browser monopoly, and i'm not sure about a future where the community maintains the remains of the firefox source.
It’s also trivially easy to disable ads in the Windows start menu, but the fact that they’re even there is shocking.
I use Firefox because I want to do at least something to keep the web browser market from becoming a monoculture again, but they’re making it increasingly hard to justify.
I think I understand where he's at. If your web site has compatibility issues with smaller browsers like Firefox at 3%, Opera at 2% etc. then you could be losing out on 5% of your sales. If you were to approach any CEO and ask if they'd be interested in an initiative to increase sales by 5%, they would most likely express an interest.
there is good chance whoever site didn't worked for will just switch to chrome for that site. I did that few times.
We have "any browser above 5% market share" in deals with our clients. So FF testing is not even required
It's pretty clear opportunists displaced the software ideologues at Mozilla a long time ago, but I still find the products to be more palatable than alternatives. It would take a long time to burn off all relevance of Firefox and Thunderbird even without adequate maintenance.
Maybe it is possible to make it (and other functions) to stay disabled by the enterprise policies file.
The problem with AI integrations in Firefox is not in whether they could be disabled or not.
Given that Mozilla Foundation isn't swimming in cash, "investing" in AI (a well known money sink) makes very little sense and will definitely undermine the development of their core product (the freaking browser).
Also, the timing of their Nov. 13 announcement is pretty bad. There is already chatter that AI may be a bubble bigger than the dotcom bubble. For a company that doesn't have deep pockets, it would be prudent to take the back seat on this.
> Also, the timing of their Nov. 13 announcement is pretty bad. There is already chatter that AI may be a bubble bigger than the dotcom bubble. For a company that doesn't have deep pockets, it would be prudent to take the back seat on this.
Unless Mozilla plans to spend millions on cloud GPUs to train their own models, there seems to be little danger of that. They're just building interfaces to existing weights somebody else developed. Their part of the work is just browser code and not in real danger from any AI bubble.
It could still be at risk as collateral damage. If the AI bubble pops, part of that would be actual costs being transmitted to users, which could lead to dramatically lower usage, which could lead to any AI integration becoming irrelevant. (Though I'd imagine the financial shocks to Mozilla would be much larger than just making some code and design irrelevant, if Mozilla is getting more financially tied to the stock price of AI-related companies?)
But yeah, Mozilla hasn't hinted at training up its own frontier model or anything ridiculous like that. I agree that it's downstream of that stuff.
If they just use 3rd party APIs/models, and AI bubble pops, the amount of users of AI in FF will not change.
The upstream might earn less, and some upstreams might fail, but once they have code switching to competition or local isn't a big deal.
That being said
"This could've been a plugin" - actual AI vendors can absolutely just outcompete FF, nobody gonna change to FF to have slightly better AI integration - and if Google decides to do same they will eat Mozilla lunch yet again
The bubble if any is an investment bubble. If somebody likes using LLMs for summaries, or generating pictures or such things, that's not going anywhere. Stable Diffusion and Llama are sticking around regardless of any economical developments.
So if somebody finds Mozilla's embedded LLM summary functionality useful, they're not going to suddenly change their mind just because some stock crashed.
The main danger I guess would be long term, if things crash at the point where they're almost useful but not quite there. Then Mozilla would be left with a functionality that's not as good as it could be and with little hope of improvement because they build on others' work and don't make their own models.
I mean maybe it needs to be said again but
> Given that Mozilla Foundation isn't swimming in cash, "investing" in AI (a well known money sink) makes very little sense and will definitely undermine the development of their core product (the freaking browser).
The browser doesn't make any money (the Google search bar money would not be replaced by another entity if they stopped). That is why Microsoft abandoned theirs and why Safari is turning in to IE. Every one of these threads lambasting Mozilla for the "side projects" doesnt seem to have an answer for how does mozilla make money.
Often it will be people complaining they can't "donate directly to browser development" not realizing that it will be peanuts compared to the google money. Most people in the market wont pay for a web browser.
It would be one thing if the side projects made money. But they don't.
If they aren't making money either way, I'd prefer they focused on the core product.
Or charge for an actually useful feature like Firefox sync which is currently free.
They already do that. They invest the endowment, and right now it exists as a firewall to cover operations in the event that their search licensing revenue becomes unstable. The annual growth of the endowment is not nothing, but it's also nowhere near enough to fund their browser development on a yearly basis.
And while I don't love the dabbling in ad tech, and I do think there's been confusion around the user interface, I think by far the most unfair smear Mozilla has suffered is to claim they haven't been focusing on the core browser. Every year they're producing major internal engine overhauls that deliver important gains to everything from WebGPU to spidermonkey, to their full overhaul of the mobile browser, to Fission/Site Isolation work.
Since their Quantum project, which overhauled the browser practically from top to bottom in 2017 and delivered the stability and performance gains that everyone was asking for, they've done the equivalent of one "quantum unit" of work on other areas in the browser on pretty much an unbroken chain from then until now. It just doesn't get doesn't mentioned in headlines.
> It looks like till then google will be propping up mozilla to avoid looking like a browser monopoly
This is less and less the case each year. Historically, Google's accounted for over 95% of Mozilla's revenue. But through the recent launches of a bunch of products it's gradually knocked that number down to under 70% and seems to continue decreasing rapidly.
I often see two demands made of Mozilla: (1) focus on Firefox; (2) become financially independent from Google. IMO these two goals are going to be in conflict with each other. They started their own VPN, launched MDN Plus, etc in an effort to improve their financial independence. The AI gimmicks feel like they're in the same thread. I don't like it and don't ever wanna use it but I can't fault Mozilla for exploring that option.
Based on independent audits they are accomplishing (2) and based on their amazing performance in interop-25, interop-24, etc they are also accomplishing (1) as best they could.