- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- firefox@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- firefox@lemmy.ml
Mozilla is in a tricky position. It contains both a nonprofit organization dedicated to making the internet a better place for everyone, and a for-profit arm dedicated to, you know, making money. In the best of times, these things feed each other: The company makes great products that advance its goals for the web, and the nonprofit gets to both advocate for a better web and show people what it looks like. But these are not the best of times. Mozilla has spent the last couple of years implementing layoffs and restructuring, attempting to explain how it can fight for privacy and openness when Google pays most of its bills, while trying to find its place in an increasingly frothy AI landscape.
Fun times to be the new Mozilla CEO, right? But when I put all that to Anthony Enzor-DeMeo, the company’s just-announced chief executive, he swears he sees opportunity in all the upheaval. “I think what’s actually needed now is a technology company that people can trust,” Enzor-DeMeo says. “What I’ve seen with AI is an erosion of trust.”
Mozilla is not going to train its own giant LLM anytime soon. But 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. “We’re not incentivized to push one model or the other,” he says. “So we’re going to try to go to market with multiple models.”
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I feel like mozilla could switch to making all their decisions by flipping a coin and do better than they’re doing in recent years
But how else would the CEO justify her $7 million dollar salary (in ‘22) that’s going up by a million or two every year since she returned, starting at $3 million in 2020.
At least she didn’t cut every interesting program in Mozilla’s portfolio when every other company was laying off employees. She wasn’t great, but she was operating in a bad economy.
This new guy tho, he sounds like good news if you’re the CEO of Google.
Anthony is a she?
Oh shit they literally changed CEO a few hours ago. My bad.
Doubt the wage issue will change though.
I get missing it in the title, but you didn’t read the article or even the summary blurb either?
No, because I wasn’t commenting on the article. I was commenting on the other users comment about the last few years of Mozilla, something I’m already well aware of.
mozilla is nothing more than an extension of GOOGLE, since they recieved most of thier funding from them. they are essentially google shills, and probably using thier AI too. i wouldnt be surprise if google tries to buy them down the line.
They aren’t using their AI. They currently use open source ondevice models and have perplexity as a search option.
Man, I so wish mozilla was a worker owned cooperative. These string of useless CEOs would have already been shown the door
mozilla foundation is like susan comen breast cancer foundation, where the CEO takes the large chunk of donation for him/herself.
Well if Susan isn’t being compensated several million dollars a year, what incentive would she have to help cancer patients? 🫠
“What I’ve seen with AI is an erosion of trust.”
Mozilla is not going to train its own giant LLM anytime soon. But 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. “We’re not incentivized to push one model or the other,” he says. “So we’re going to try to go to market with multiple models.” Some will be open-source models available to anyone.
This is such an out of touch non-answer here.
People don’t oppose ai changes because they’re locked into a model. In fact most AI products I use for my job let you choose a fucking model.
People hate them because
A) 90% of the time they’re useless and the remaining 10 are detrimental to the product experience
B) Ethical concerns about training off of artists and authors as well as environmental impact. EDIT: or also the general trend of trying to replace humans with AI.
C) Not wanting to play into the fucking arms race the billionaire class are manufacturing
D) The time they could be useful they have a risk of being either hilariously wrong or dangerously wrong. And there’s no amount of training and GPU manufacturing that’s gonna fix that.
Absolutely none of this is addressed by the CEO. I’m sure he has to say this because of the fucking tulip crazy money is in around this but it doesn’t make it any less tone deaf or futile.
Mozilla is completely detached from its user base. They think their average user is a Microsoft enthusiast when in reality it’s a Debian enjoyer.
They have telemetry to track the number of installations on different systems
And most debian user disable telemetry. Their numbers probably show its all windows folk heavily using AI because its the default.
Then enable “Send daily usage ping to Mozilla”
I guess I should turn the telemetry on so they’d see I’m using it on linux. Muh privacy
Yes.
“AI is untrustworthy, therefore you can use multiple AI services in our product.”
I’ve cancelled my monthly donation to Mozilla. What’s the point. Every bit of feedback I’ve provided is to the tune of no goddamn AI, spend my money towards keeping up with the alternatives to make sure there’s always an extra player in the field. Instead it’s going to some overpaid dickhead who’s going to introduce AI.
firefox is almostly completely dependant on google through ad revenue, hence thats why the sudden jump into AI, which google is trying to jam into all its services.
Overpaid CEO has more money than actual sense.
They all just do the same exact predictable thing. It’s always the shittiest thing for everyone but the “share holders”. Just automate them away and call it a day at this point.
Their user base is almost exclusively tech savvy people, the same people who are most opposed to AI.
I think this move signals that they believe we have nowhere else to go, and they’re daring us to go fuck ourselves, because fuck you, what are you going to do, use Chrome?
Yes, yes I will, well Chromium forks.
In general, I prefer the look and feel of chromium-based browsers, but I use Firefox and Firefox forks for the reasons that I’m sure everyone here is aware of.
If those reasons go away, I’ll just switch to Vivaldi as my primary browser. I won’t be happy about it, but if Firefox becomes another AI slop project. I might as well go with the browser whose UX I prefer.
Yes, yes I will, well Chromium forks.
Yeah, I’m not going to switch to a Manifest V3 browser because Firefox puts in access to an optional AI agent. If Firefox makes it so you can’t turn it off, which I wouldn’t think is likely, I might switch to something like Librewolf, but Chromium? No.
I would use a Firefox fork over Vivaldi simfly because of extensions (including uBO)
Just like everything in North America it’s about aquisition not retention.
Vivaldi is like the only tech company in the world that has come out and stated definitively “we will not use AI”.
I did exactly this a while back. And as a self protection mechanism I’ve just completely written off Mozilla products as free falling in the enshittification process. I don’t care enough to be disappointed any more, it’s much nicer this way.
Why do you say that tech savvy people are “most opposed to AI?” Don’t conflate “the membership of this small social media bubble called ‘technology’” with tech-savvy people in general. Lots of tech savvy people are developing and using AI, where else do you think it’s coming from?
The problem here is that we’ve got a small crowd with a strong opinion, constantly shouting their opinion to each other and making an unfriendly environment to anyone who doesn’t share that opinion. So of course it seems like “everyone” shares that opinion, you never see otherwise.
Most people in tech that I know hate AI, including devs. I know one manager who is gung ho for it but everyone is annoyed by him and he was already well known for going apeshit over whatever the latest tech buzzword is before the whole AI craze kicked off.
Anecdotal I suppose, but IMO, most people who are actually technical seem to treat AI with a good degree of skepticism if not outright disdain.
Most people in tech that I know hate AI
Emphasis added. We all live inside social bubbles, if one wants to talk about what most people in general believe then one must use data from beyond that. Otherwise you’re going to get a very biased sample, since we generally choose to associate with people who share our own personal values.
Removed by mod
I don’t disagree with using unbiased data, but where is yours?
Data for the claim that lots of tech-savvy people are developing and using AI? Some of the biggest tech companies in the world right now have an AI focus. NVIDIA, OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, they’re all making massive use of AI. If you want to discount “corporate” tech-savvy people, This page indicates 15 million developers are using GitHub Copilot. Linus Torvalds has spoken in favor of using AI to maintain Linux, if you’d like someone specific and big-name as an example.
tech bros and their employees lmao
and Linus has said some stupid shit over the years
AKA, tech-savvy people.
Those are blatantly not people, they aren’t even human.
the keyword word you missed was “unbiased”
of course the AI peddlers will peddle it and their employees would probably be fired if they did not toe the company line
on the otheer hand, that mit studyshowed 95v of them failed… I find it hard to believe people enjoy failing
So we’ve moved from “no tech-savvy people use AI!” to “lots of tech-savvy people use AI, but many of them fail to make it profitable!”
The Commerce Institute puts that 95% figure in perspective, about 65.3% of all businesses fail by their tenth year. That’s not focusing just on a particular industry that’s the most unknown and volatile one, that’s everything, including fields that have been well known and understood for decades. And I should also note, your source said 95% had yet to grow their revenue, not that 95% had failed - it’s only been a year or two for most.
Your own source provides some other bits of information that support my view, too. Just look past the bias in how it’s worded.
Previous tests show even the most advanced AI products successfully complete only about 30 percent of assigned office tasks.
Wow, only 30% of office tasks can be handled by AI? Clearly a useless technology, throw it away.
Or maybe 30% is actually quite an impressive number. Wouldn’t you like something that handles 30% of your routine work for you?
Gartner’s survey of 163 business executives found that half have abandoned plans to dramatically cut customer service staff by 2027.
So, half of them haven’t abandoned those plans.
Research from GoTo and Workplace Intelligence found that 62 percent of workers believe AI is “significantly overhyped.”
I don’t see a link to that research, but that means 38% don’t believe AI is significantly overhyped.
I never said everyone liked AI, just that lots of tech-savvy people did. I think 38% would count as null
Basically, you’re falling into the trap of assuming if something’s not perfect and not universally loved then it must be awful and universally hated. Communities like this reinforce that view, but the real world outside these digital walls is not like that.
proving their point
AI “engineer” shill says what?
Here in Lemmy, in my experience, this goes nowhere. You put it very clearly on your second paragraph. The small crowd with a strong opinion that thinks all AI is terrible in Lemmy is a bigger or at least more active group than the opposite. And with no ability to consider opposite points of view.
As a developer, most others I know of actually like the ai technology and use it as a way to analyze big amount of data quickly or as a starting point, while at the same time basically all hate the corporate AI side of things, specially idiotic managers and ceo-like asshats that keep pushing AI for all the wrong reasons and in all the wrong ways.
Fortunately the one saving grace of the Fediverse in this regard is that you can see both the upvote and downvote totals for a comment, not just the net difference between them. So even though it’s clear what the majority view is - “AI bad, everyone hates it, and you’re bad for suggesting it could possibly be otherwise!” - I can still see that there are a minority who appreciate my perspective as well. So I continue rolling that boulder up the hill, for the benefit of those who might otherwise only see the “nobody wants AI!” messaging and think it might be true.
Yeah, lemmy is really a hell of an echo chamber on certain topics. I see both pros and cons to AI, and that balanced view makes me literally the most anti-AI person in my social circle.
Librewolf, or Ladybird, or dillo, or links2 or lynx, or heck, even brave!
Luakit’s still a thing. Or vimb. Or qutebrowser. I miss uzbl. Uzbl was the best.
No need to use proprietary wrapped Vivaldi.
the same people who are most opposed to AI.
programmers almost exclusively use LLM
Only ever dealt with dog-shit programmers, huh?
an elitist response.
here’s actual data https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2025/ai
half use AI tools daily
Professionals show a higher overall favorable sentiment (61%) than those learning to code (53%).
Not elitist to say that people who use what are essentially weighted random word generators for programming, a career that requires one to know exactly how their code works in case it breaks, are bad at their jobs. Just like how it’s not elitist to say that generated images are not art, and that flying a plane into a building doesn’t make you a good pilot.
a career that requires one to know exactly how their code works in case it breaks
Using AI doesn’t mean that you lose the ability to reason, debug, or test generated code. All code merge should be peer-reviewed and tested
We’re not discussing images, nor planes.
The claim was
tech savvy people, the same people who are most opposed to AI.There’s data that to suggest otherwise. people who are technically inclined engage with AI more and have a more positive reception compared to less experienced users.
Unless you have additional data to support that they are in-fact “dog-shit programmers”, this appears to be an emotional claim colored by your own personal bias. Though if you’re a “pure” programmer who is better than the dog-shit developers I would love to see some of your work or writings.
While AI use doesn’t guarantee loss of cognitive abilities there is growing research showing that it is likely.
I posted a response in another reply but thats for sharing something. still does not support the claim of dog-shit developers
Oh I get it now- you ARE one of those dog-shit AI vibe programmers.
if that makes you feel better, but i wish you responded to the original claim with data vs ad hominem. but if you’re so good can i view your github to learn how you program?
CEO = bad
every. single. time.
This is every Mozilla CEO in the last decade:
Eh, the privacy trend was also s bandwagon. They removed a ton of power user features and touting privacy with things like enchanced tracker protection which could’ve as well be done with an addon. And they integrated pocket in at around the same time.
EU here is your chance! Fully fund Mozilla on the condition that they move to an EU country
And fire the CEO :)
This. There is so much Mozilla and EU can offer each other.
I think the money would be better spent on Servo, which is already based in the EU. While it’s still in it’s early days, it seems to be making some good progress lately and it might just be me, but I think Servo has a lot more potential. At least using Rust and not relying on GTK already sounds like a dream to me.
Just like I said in another post related to this, I hope this doesn’t kill LibreWolf, IceCat, and Waterfox.
Librewolf have put a post out a few days ago that they won’t add any AI stuff.
Thank goodness.
Waterfox is on the same page. As long as the browser doesn’t outright require it to functio0n, I think the privacy-focused forks will remain. Of course, it’s extra work to maintain divergent code, but this is worth it, IMO.
If brave is able to have their own adblock integrated into the browser by default despite Google being behind much of Chrome I think Firefox forks should be fine. Sucks everything seems to have AI these days shoved in, so it’s hard to escape whether it is Chrome forks or chromium alternatives.
i download UBLOCK origin anyways for brave, since the brave doesnt entirely block what the ublock can do.
Why do they keep going all in on AI when no one wants it?
Power users don’t want it.
Regular users say they don’t want it but actions don’t lie. They love AI. They love the slop. They just don’t want to be reminded that that’s what it is.
Google threatens to rip their funding if they don’t advocate for AI
Is that actually on record somewhere, or just speculation?
I used to use it exclusively, but it slowly got bloated, so when I got rid of windows, I went to tor browser and librewolf.
Firefox doesn’t really need to make money so long as Google has to worry about being broken up by the Fed for antitrust reasons… Obviously so long as there is a national socialist/Trump regime in place that’s not really something they have to worry about. Why, Goog even donated $5m to Trump’s little Whitehouse evisceration/ballroom project, and will get their very own plaque in the ballroom that all the ballpeople can look at.
Google has donated over $USD 1B to Mozilla. The standard conspiracy fud is so that it can sink its claws into its open source competition, corrupting it with its omniscient googliness, but FIrefox barely blips on the radar of browser use, not even including Tor, Waterfox, Librewolf (which I’m currently using), and other forks. It’s just not going to threaten any of the megas any time soon.
The actual motive for giving Mozilla so much money is simply to deflect any accusations that they’re a monopoly that hurts market competition.
