Mozilla downsizes as it refocuses on Firefox and AI
Mozilla downsizes as it refocuses on Firefox and AI
After installing a new interim CEO earlier this month, Mozilla, the organization behind the Firefox browser, is making some major changes to its product
Mozilla downsizes as it
refocuses on Firefox and AIdrops multiple products and layoff 60 so that its current budget can accomodate the stratospheric compensation of its new CEO.it refocuses on Firefox
🤩
and AI
😩
Unfortunately Mozilla's brand new CEO is a McKinsey ghoul: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chamberslaura/
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.
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
I love firefox. Hate the managment
Oh for Fox’s sake!!!
That interim CEO seems like they suck; I hope they don't stay.
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!
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.
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.
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.
Why AI, no one wants AI...
Source for the no one wanting AI is me... I do not want AI
So... Who's the board of mozilla hiring the ceo, again? How did this board come to be?
Not sure what to think about this.
Focusing on the core business (the browser) and dropping products (that are already done better by others) seems like a very good idea. I have seen zero people on Mastodon on a mozilla.social account and I've never seen their VPN appear in a list of top/recommended VPNs. I just want a world class browser that pounds the competition and regains browser market share. If Firefox dies, we are f'kd.
Can an expert explain this - https://aussie.zone/post/6869951
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Privacy aside, in my experience over a long time Brave load up and response time is significantly faster than Firefox. And Brave renders the windowing geometry and toolbars correctly on Linux, while Firefox does not. I also do not consider Mozilla free speech friendly or privacy friendly because of this:
"We need more than deplatforming"
There is no question that social media played a role in the siege and take-over of the US Capitol on January 6."
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/we-need-more-than-deplatforming/
There was no 'siege' or 'takeover' of the capitol. Nobody stormed the place with guns or weapons. That is a fantasy tale. This choice of politically charged words turns the reality of the event into a fictional lie. This is all political theater. It's a patent lie. Those who are going along with this lie to promote censorship are a wart on a worm's rump.
A few FBI agents and FBI-paid provocateurs smashed some stuff and made some noise, then the clowns on Capitol hill who organized for and gave the orders for the FBI to do this, called it an "insurrection." So Mozilla is promoting censorship and deplatforming based on a fake insurrection. Just. Like. The. Nazis. And. Communists. did during WWII to crack down on Jews, Gypsies, and non-Catholic Christians.
Mozilla can keep their voluntary fascist browser.