I’ve still got my ublock origin in a far faster version of my web browser than what normies use.
And no, I obviously don't want to fund Mozilla, a hilariously incompetent entity that hates its users.
We’ll socialize losses for banks to pay bonuses, but funding shared infrastructure that serves citizens is a bridge too far.
Not really.
It's a web browser and from a non-tech politician they already have the internet.
It's pretty hard to get a government to understand why the 1000 webkit browsers aren't actually competitive.
They'd rather send money and regulations towards something they can better understand like healthcare or right to repair. Heck, even "AI".
I could count on one hand the jurisdictions in which a publicly-funded browser wouldn’t eventually cause a voter backlash. Unless it—and the rest of the government—are run perfectly, paying for something most people get for free sounds like corruption.
Our national labs fund aren’t typically replicating commercial findings.
Nuclear fusion isn’t something you can download for free. Browsers are. It looks wasteful to everyone but the technically inclined, and even we would be undercut by those who never trust the government.
Non-profit that competes for government grants and contracts seems the way to go.
I'm on Debian, and my requirements is that I'm able to run uBlock Origin. In addition containers and vertical tabs would be nice to have.
What are the options here?
> "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."
The article doesn't give an exact quote from Enzor-DeMeo.
[0]: https://www.theverge.com/tech/845216/mozilla-ceo-anthony-enz...
God, people are so weird. Why make stuff up?
No, in fact, he said the opposite. He said he doesn't want to do that because it feels "off-mission".
Whether he changes his tune in the future or not is up for debate, but come on. Lets not skip right to the pitchfork stage just yet.
"no no I'm not going to do this thing that likely nobody wants and nobody is asking about but would be really profitable for my pocket in the short term!" -> observe how much pushback he gets -> "guys guys I said I would NOT do it, god some people are weird".
> that's calling "putting out a feeler"
Sorry, I think you're looking for reasons to hate on Mozilla
If your first comment wasn’t a lie, and instead talked about how you think that he’s putting out feelers, I wouldn’t have commented. But instead, you made stuff up and that’s weird.
2. The text made clear he didn't want to do that.
3. Your comment is at best a lie.
> 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.” It seems he thinks a combination of subscription revenue, advertising, and maybe a few search and AI placement deals can get that done. He’s also bullish that things like built-in VPN and a privacy service called Monitor can get more people to pay for their browser. 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.[0]
If we were just profit motivated we could block ad blockers, but we're not
[0] https://www.theverge.com/tech/845216/mozilla-ceo-anthony-enz...
Not really. The closest it comes is briefly mentioning some 2024 layoffs.
What the article is discussing is revenue diversification.
> Which is a constant issue for Mozilla.
No, Mozilla has had a consistent and growing revenue stream from Google.
> Which a big reason for that is the low browser share.
In what way? Software development costs have been less than half Mozilla's annual revenue for over a decade.
> 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.
This isn't a direct quote, but voy does the Author of that article not inspire confidence by the way this is worded. "It feels off-mission" should be "It would be antithetical to everything Moxilla standa for". The way this is phrased it feels like Mozilla explored this and decided that the 150 million wasn't worth the reputation hit (yet.)
Edit: I do suspect that the lack of revenue diversity led to product decisions that favored their paying customer's and prevented the types of browser innovation that would have competed more successfully for market share against that paying customer.
>> Which is a constant issue for Mozilla.
> No, Mozilla has had a consistent and growing revenue stream from Google.
I hope this fact is obvious...
I would also guess that there will be alternative packages for Firefox if there are enough people interested. Tor Browser is a example of Firefox being packaged using different defaults and plugins. In theory one could take Tor Browser, remove Tor, and have a hardenized version of Firefox with saner defaults.
Firefox is good, but it could be great. Adding AI features aren't what will move the needle on their core competency.
Well, it was an excuse to get the pitchforks out! We love to do that around here. Especially if I can say "AI", "slop", "crypto", "MBA", etc.
(This isn’t how I approach the topic, but one hopes that such unfounded dismissals are not widespread, eh?)
Same here, but lately it seems like Mozilla will stop at nothing to get me to stop using Firefox. At what point should I say enough is too much?
> It felt like everyone overreacted
I seriously don't get it and I understand why there's conspiracies about disinformation campaigns. But on all places I don't understand how HN users are just happily giving the keys to the internet to a singular company, let along Google.
> Firefox still checks off the most boxes of what I want in a browser.
Why are browsers even "sticky"? There's no social network. Bookmarks are trivial to migrate. It's like the easiest thing to switch out there...
I do think there have been missteps. I think Firefox is good and is my browser of choice but most of their new features feel superfluous.
> If I can turn it off as they claim
You can already do so with the current AI stuff and it is an open source browser so they couldn't stop you if they wanted to.
What Firefox provides today isn't drawing in new users. Those of us who use Firefox do so for a number of reasons related to privacy or security or what not.
I simultaneously like being able to use ChatGPT to look stuff up and I hate that I'm feeding the machine a profile of me. I don't use ChatGPT nearly as much anymore mostly because of that sick feeling I get in my stomach knowing whatever I tell it will absolutely be abused in some way some how.
Nobody is building a very good "thing" that lets you use AI services with a solid layer of protection. That is a new market that deserves a product. I'm not saying that I think putting AI in Firefox is a good idea. Just that I can finally see the motivation.
Personally, I think the "solution" should be some kind of stand alone product that maybe has integrations into Firefox if you have both of them installed. Keep it in it's own cage. Make the only possibility of it existing on my system be me choosing to install a specific app. And if I'm going to do that, let me also use it outside of Firefox if I want.
But at least now I see a reason for what seems like such a bone headed decision.
It is the very information you feed to the AI to get results that is in danger. No matter how you mask some metadata or account info, the actual in-band content is a problem.
The only solution is self-hosting of a model so the input and output cannot be monitored. And this also means running it offline, since a "black box" model that can do RAG or MCP or anything like that could also use covert channels to leak the information you are trying to control.
Ideally the fork should compete with Chrome and not Firefox for market share while acting as a hedge/warning against bad decisions from Mozilla and its leadership.
Pining for pre-AI world is like wanting families to gather around the radio. Those days are gone.
I tend to agree with you. Doesn’t make what Mozilla is doing sensible.
In 1995, one could correctly observe that the internet would “play a role in nearly every interaction we have with a computer.” It would not follow that every app must reïnvent the network stack.
An AI helping out can be useful. Every app being a tiny AI is a cacophony of idiots.
CLIs preceded GUIs. This would be like a CLI jamming mini GUIs into its flow because that’s the next thing.
I know it's a paradigm shift. That's not the problem. The problem is that it's often wedged into workflows in ways that aren't helpful to me or are actively harmful. And then there's the question of what is done with the data. I don't need another tech company, non-profit or not, getting a hold of my chatbot conversation history and doing God knows with it.
Mozilla should be a better facilitator of the ecosystem around AI than just putting it in Firefox. Take care of the concerns before just shouting "me too" on a bunch of LLM features, which, to be honest, shouldn't even be a concern for FLOSS.
If someone wants GenAI in Firefox, they can create a branch, design it, implement it, and put it up for discussion. I don't need some CEO telling me the direction of the project. It's the cathedral vs the bazaar, which has been a major part of the FLOSS ethos for decades now.
Yes, it might totally be the case that in 5 years this comment reads as correctly predicting the future that is to come. But it's also possible that it doesn't.
It's not at all clear to me which things will persist in time at the moment they are getting popular. There are lots of technologies that look promising in the beginning and up fizzling out.
Browsers are useful now, and they have been useful for a while. It seems to me like a safer bet to invest on them still doing what they are useful at, in the case that the web keeps being a thing for a while still :)
There is a great deal of doubt about that. I think that's a very unlikely prediction you're making.
Nowadays google search results are so cluttered with paid promotion that the genuine content creating websites and blogs are drowned. So we turn to AI not because it's better than the old straightforward search, but because it is better and currently less ad-laden than the current search?
For me though the closest I can get to the good old days is Kagi. Not a sponsor.
LLMs that are trained off of that dreck and give you the answer you were looking for sometimes, when they don't make it up.
And they've gotten to the point where they do so more quickly than trying to find it yourself in many cases, but I would much rather websites and search results being faithful stewards of the functions they are intended for and to get the information from the tap rather than having an AI butler deliver it to me.
One area I really do think AI is going to take over is web search. Primarily because web search these days is so shitty but that’s besides the point. AI is absolutely going to be a core feature used by the users of web browsers, and a web browser is the core of what Mozilla offers. They absolutely should be present in this space. And I hope, even though it’s an immense challenge, they might be able to offer an alternative to the aforementioned snake oil salesmen.
Obviously there are a lot of reasons for this. But I think one of the most important reasons is that there is so few organic interesting content destinations anymore.
Sure there are some neat shopify stores, news sites, and a few dedicated souls keeping up blogs. But so much of the casual browsing that the web once was has been obliterated by the move to social media.
And what hasn't moved is now a mess of AI generated fluff or link farms.
I used to think Google made search worse to increase ad revenue. And maybe it's tangentially related. But the stuff I used to search for and find and get inspiration from has moved to walled gardens. Reddit is one of the few remaining open web destinations left.
AI can't solve that problem.
In fact I regularly use the summarize page functionality in one of my profiles and find in very convenient.
This seems like the usual Firefox criticism, where they get schtick for doing the same as all the others who don't.
Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46288491
Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46299934
No AI* Here – A Response to Mozilla's Next Chapter
It is beyond me that here, on HN, of all places people do not understand the criticality that FF is to the free and open internet. Use WaterFox or whatever, but stop picking a different color of Chrome.
It doesn't take a genius to figure out Mozilla is trying everything they can to stay relevant. Literally everything they do ends up with tons of HN comments making complaints. Tons of complaints coming from people who haven't even used FF in a decade! It feels like a disinformation campaign but I'm pretty sure you all just like to hate on Mozilla and justify your usage of Chrome.
We're just fucking ourselves over here. Yes, there's reasons to complain about FF. There's no shortage. But are they truly big enough reasons to hand over the keys to the internet to a singular entity? And to Google of all companies?! Who the fuck cares about this AI browser stuff, you can opt out or use a fork like WaterFox who makes that the default. Guess who's AI stuff you can't opt-out of?
Is it really worth it?
Is 3 clicks to uninstall AI seriously enough justification to give Google the internet?
What are we even doing...
> your favorite browser
Honest question. What does Chrome do that FF doesn't?
I use Brave or Ungoogled Chromium. What do they do better? Pretty much everything.
I'd like it a lot more if it was strictly opt-in, and they made non-AI LTS releases, but I understand that's at odds with eyeball acquisition
cranberryturkey•1h ago
ranger_danger•1h ago
cranberryturkey•55m ago
jqpabc123•1h ago
Brave
Helium
LibreWolf
MangoToupe•1h ago
Did brave's attempt to provide an alternative funding model to ads actually go anywhere?
mplewis•1h ago
jqpabc123•54m ago
It hasn't gone away or sold out to Google.
freehorse•45m ago
Similar notion of "privacy respecting advertising" has also been stated in mozilla's texts about firefox several times, eg [1], and that goes a long time back in general [2]. I don't think that any of these attempts from brave or firefox have actually worked.
In general, this is the business model (or part thereof) of many/most "privacy focused" services, ie serving ads while "respecting users' privacy". Duckduckgo does that for example. A few of them are even owned by advertising companies (eg startpage). Alternative models are subscriptions (eg kagi) and/or sponsorship/donations (eg ladybird?).
[0] https://brave.com/about/#:~:text=Brave%20Ads,-Brave
[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-leadership-growt...
[2] "we want to show the world that it is possible to do relevant advertising and content recommendations while still respecting users’ privacy and giving them control over their data" https://blog.mozilla.org/advancingcontent/2015/05/21/providi...
SirFatty•1h ago
ekjhgkejhgk•1h ago
Hey, I wonder if "exactly like Tor minus connecting to the Tor network" exists. No, don't tell me this is just Firefox, that's not true.
guizadillas•1h ago
godelski•23m ago
And no, you do not need to use Mullvad VPN
[0] https://mullvad.net/en/browser
ekjhgkejhgk•1h ago
I'm not interested in crypto right now, thanks for asking.
jqpabc123•53m ago
ekjhgkejhgk•45m ago
I don't have the technical skills or interest in examining if a browser is working for me or working for someone else, and therefore I have to trust the people developing the browser. I don't trust people who associate themselves with crypto, therefore I don't trust the software they write.
bigstrat2003•41m ago
cranberryturkey•55m ago
I use librewolf
godelski•25m ago