This is how you lose. I only use FF. I will not if they enshittify with AI.
Mozilla lays off 60 people, wants to build AI into Firefox
Submitted 9 months ago by einat2346@lemmy.today to technology@lemmy.world
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/02/mozilla-lays-off-60-people-wants-to-build-ai-into-firefox/
Comments
RememberTheApollo@lemmy.world 9 months ago
FaceDeer@kbin.social 9 months ago
Which browser is not going to have AI?
Deceptichum@kbin.social 9 months ago
Netscape Navigator!
benjhm@sopuli.xyz 9 months ago
Vivaldi recently posted this -vivaldi-wont-allow-a-machine-to-lie-to-you.
See also vivaldi communityavidamoeba@lemmy.ca 9 months ago
Ungoogled Chromium
Deceptichum@kbin.social 9 months ago
Netscape Navigator!
demonsword@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Which browser is not going to have AI?
the ones worth using, of course
KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 months ago
Why though? I’ve pointed out elsewhere, a browser is one of the few places an LLM makes sense. Especially if it’s local.
barsoap@lemm.ee 9 months ago
Too late Firefox already contains neural nets. It’s how the inbuilt local machine translation works.
raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world 9 months ago
oh fuck off Mozilla…
Chakravanti@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
I double that. I’ll go so far as to manually remove it from my fucking OS before I install it. Seriously, major Fuck You, Mozilla.
qooqie@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Honestly, it sucks, but I expected hundreds in line with the other huge layoffs we’ve seen. It being 60 seems more reasonable
kzhe@lemmy.zip 8 months ago
They’ve said they want to do local AIs though. If that’s the case I’m all in.
Coreidan@lemmy.world 9 months ago
This world blows
sunbeam60@lemmy.one 9 months ago
It’s remarkable really. They are competing against another browser which users have to actively go out and find, then install.
Some people are used to how chrome looks and that’s powerful glue, of course, but very few normal users (ie almost none of us in here on Lemmy) needs things beyond what both Firefox and Chrome does equally well.
The simple difference in adoption rate is this: Google pushing Chrome through people’s use of Google. Diminish the need for Google, diminish people’s discovery of Chrome.
Also, I cannot understand why they need this many people. If 5% of their workforce is 60 people, they have 1200 people employed. I can almost guarantee that Google’s Chrome team isn’t 1200 people strong.
Maybe Firefox would be better being smaller and more nimble. Maybe they should stop pretending they’re a company and start pretending they’re a foundation (which is what they are). 300 people working on a core browser seems a lot of full time people, still, and that’d be a quarter of what they are today.
Also, Mozilla’s inability to produce a simple interface for embedding Firefox is simply baffling to me. The reason so many other skin-browsers are built on chromium is that it’s a LOT easier to embed.
I speak as someone who’s run Firefox since the day it was born.
Nurgle@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Well it was 1200 people at Mozilla, not necessarily directly working on Firefox. They have multiple products and they still need HR and lawyers and all the other support roles any other company needs.
Kraiden@kbin.social 9 months ago
Tell me you don't understand your userbase without telling me you don't understand your userbase
kittenzrulz123@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Why Mozilla? You had so much good faith
Deceptichum@kbin.social 9 months ago
Because money.
A non-profit that begs for donations has become a money making machine netting their ceos over $10m in 3 years.
FaceDeer@kbin.social 9 months ago
And they still will. I'm sure most people haven't heard of the projects they're getting rid of (that's why they're getting rid of them) and the anti-AI circlejerk is going to melt away once it rolls out and people are surprised to learn it's actually a really useful technology.
kittenzrulz123@lemmy.world 9 months ago
I’m happy I use Librewolf, I get the good parts without the nonsense
KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 months ago
oh good firefox. Wonder what other browser i can use, oh wait…
Can someone just make a minimalist browser that isn’t chrome/firefox based?
force@lemmy.world 9 months ago
There are plenty of browsers. Dillo, NetSurf, surf, w3m, Lynx, Links, Via, Midori, Pale Moon although it’s based on a fork of Gecko, Tunnel, qutebrowser. And there are even options for a search engine, although the only one worth considering that isn’t just a layer on top of other search engines is Kagi which costs $10 a month, and I wouldn’t exactly call it minimalist.
The problem is that no browser can allow you to escape the horror that is web standards & practices that have been developed over decades and are almost unchangeable, without sacrificing basic web functionality and just making it a worse experience than it needs to be at least. The fact is that practically the entire web is reliant on JavaScript, on top of HTML and CSS which take a lot more resources to utilize/display than it looks, 3 interpreters constantly running that must be sandboxed to each tab you have open (every tab is pretty much a new completely separate program/process!) with a lot of overhead to manage security.
In an ideal world we’d all just be using provably-safe high-performance compiled WASM-but-stronger (from functional languages or more likely Rust or something less boiler-platey but similar), without having such a complex and fucked dependency situation*, where we wouldn’t need to sandbox interpreted languages and slaughter performance. Of course, in an ideal world, we also wouldn’t have to be concerned about aggressive tracking, ads, clickbait, SEO abuse, scams, or even malware, so there’s not much use in imagining a reality where we actually have quality web browsing.
The actual answer to using the web without the fucked-ness of browsers is to not use a web browser at all for sites you use frequently. Use stuff like this instead.
*seriously, you can write the most basic website with JavaScript and it’ll probably rely on tens of thousands of expressions of code which realistically should just be expressable in like a small page or two, you do webdev and you’ll probably accidentally be implicitly committing a sacrifice to some Aztec God in order to check if a number is even or odd
Also just imagine if all of web dev was just ML/Scala/Rust/Swift/Erlang without compiling to JavaScript 🤤 That is the definition of a perfect universe
lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.org 9 months ago
The problem is that no browser can allow you to escape the horror that is web standards & practices that have been developed over decades […] practically the entire web is reliant on JavaScript, […]
I’ve been saying it for a while: continuing to play catch is a losing move for Mozilla or for any independent browser maker.
The real move, is to switch to or at least integrate an alternate internet, something that uses a protocol that is simpler and more limited by design - just get rid of Javascript (or of “remote execution”, really) and you instantly get a much leaner, much securer internet design.
I’ve heard pretty good things about the Gemini protocol, but IMHO they went too far too extremist into the “text internet” philosophy, and as a result is a raw downgrade from Gopher. Gopher could actually be a good option.
KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 months ago
I’ll definitely have to check out a few of those browsers at some point. It’s kind of insane how much tech debt we’ve accrued over the years.
I think honestly we just need to start waning off half the shit we support. Minimize the amount of support required, and somehow manage to provide a smaller attack window so that way we can stop writing protections for problems that honestly shouldn’t even exist to begin with. Bonus points to microsoft for creating security certs that don’t do their jobs because hahafunneemalware.exe is signed by fucking oracle of all people, and i guess we should just blindly execute that file because it says it’s trustworthy!
Though it would be interesting to have a sort of “web browser” which is actually just an application based on plugins for different frontends, for stuff like yewtube, we do only use a handful of sites from time to time. Plus maybe a basic web fronted for stuff that isn’t JS because honestly who wants it anyway.
AnAngryAlpaca@feddit.de 9 months ago
Unfortunately none. Developing a rendering engine that can handle css, html, javascript, while also rendering a website in the exact same way as Chrome and Firefox is a huge tasks, and not something a hobby programmer can whack out in a few weeks. Thats the reason why even Microsoft abandoned their own rendering engine, because things did always look and work different in IE.
laughterlaughter@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Unfortunately none.
This is not true. Pale Moon, Ice Weasel, Librewolf…
Developing a rendering engine that can handle css, html, javascript, while also rendering a website in the exact same way as Chrome and Firefox is a huge tasks
It doesn’t have to be from scratch. Not even Apple did this with Safari (they based in on KHTML, the rendering engine of KDE’s Konqueror.)
LibreFish@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Servo in future, LibreWolf for now imo
THE_MASTERMIND@feddit.ch 9 months ago
Its about time i would settle for the bare minimum at first then we can built up on it as a community
KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 months ago
honestly, yeah.
Sanctus@lemmy.world 9 months ago
90% of these comments didn’t even read the article. Its local only, and doesn’t even send data to mozilla.
melroy@kbin.melroy.org 9 months ago
Yet...
RandomVideos@programming.dev 9 months ago
Why would Mozilla make AI so they could steal personal information when they already own the browser that gives the information to the AI
kakes@sh.itjust.works 9 months ago
Yeesh people here are salty.
Honestly, if they make it optional and/or give the option to run it locally, I could see this being a good thing.
Lord knows the competition is going full bore on AI, and if FF wants to stay relevant with the mass market they’ll need to keep up.
pennomi@lemmy.world 9 months ago
It depends on what they mean by AI. I can think of oodles of great uses:
- An AI-powered adblock that removes all trackers, cookie confirmation popups, those annoying “please subscribe” popups, etc. would be badass. It would be virtually invisible but it would make the internet usable again.
- A content filter that magically extracts the recipe you’re looking for out of the stupid blog post they
- Or to expand on that, an AI that goes through the page of search engine results and removes the ones that are SEO spam instead of actually useful content
- An AI that can review at a page or email and determine if it’s a scam would save a TON of people by pointing out suspicious features.
- Basically anything that requires you to copy data from one context to another is a good use of AI. You could probably have a nice resume-filling feature, for example.
But yeah, Mozilla will probably just go for a “chat with your browser” feature. Total waste of space.
DarkThoughts@kbin.social 9 months ago
All of those could be terrible to be honest, because AI is a data tracking vacuum. An AI adblocker or content filter sounds cool at first, but it would mean it reads and analyzes your data, just like the shit you do with chatbots too. Reading your mails? That's basically what Google does for years with gmail, that's why they have such a good spam filter. I agree that a chatbot would be kinda useless though, even if privacy friendly, which in of itself would be great but I just don't see the use. This could simply be outsourced to a website.
DarkThoughts@kbin.social 9 months ago
There's no way it would be running locally.
kakes@sh.itjust.works 9 months ago
In their defense, Mozilla did create the easiest way to run and integrate an LLM locally, so if anyone could do it, I imagine it would be them.
Heresy_generator@kbin.social 9 months ago
Or they can be the browser that rejects the inclusion of bloat for functionality most people don't actually want and be the go-to for people who want a secure, private, light-weight web browser that's, ya know, intended to browse the fucking web. I'm so sick of web browsers trying to be application platforms; shit's been going on for decades and it was never a good idea.
SineNomineAnonymous@lemmy.ml 9 months ago
Long time FF user, things really aren’t looking good for Mozilla as a whole.
EdibleFriend@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Lol when that airbnb fuck took over I knew things were going to go south.
dojan@lemmy.world 9 months ago
That was my thought too.
kalkulat@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Looks like I’ll need to switch to one of those browsers that only take and show characters I can type on a keyboard. Like F and U.
yojimbo@sopuli.xyz 8 months ago
Firefox on Android doesn’t support keyboard shortcuts - for the last 12 years. Sooo - let’s add the bloody AI, that is going to help
Blisterexe@lemmy.zip 8 months ago
- They’re not adding ai to Firefox, at least that’s not what the memo said, the memo said they were refocusing on Firefox (firing people who worked on their metaverse thing for example), and doing so on the side.
- They specifically stated that Firefox mobile is a big focus moving fowards
vox@sopuli.xyz 8 months ago
tbf most people aren’t using physical keyboards with their phones, this mostly applies to tablets which are much less popular and android tv (where firefox isn’t even officially supported anymore)
yojimbo@sopuli.xyz 8 months ago
bt keyboards can be absolutelly critical for some users with disabilities. most of the developing world can’t afford to own several devices like a computer and a phone.
Siegfried@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Why are u using a keyboard on a smart phone? Is that a thing?
grubders@sopuli.xyz 9 months ago
i thought mozilla new CEO would be better but heck no, sounds like i’ll be hoping around in webkit browsers
spaduf@slrpnk.net 9 months ago
So frustrated to see how this conversation is playing out.
This pivot is about refocusing on: The Browser Privacy Ethical AI
This seems like a much better position for Mozilla to operate from, particularly because they’ve excelled at producing ethical SOTA ML for YEARS before ChatGPT. In all, this seems far more forward looking than the previous strategy of “make weird little web tools to make money maybe” and it’s an absolutely massive untapped niche, that they already have the talent to tap into.
Sanctus@lemmy.world 9 months ago
It is a better position and FF is going to be even better because of it. We need more options than just chromium. Open web standards dont stay open when everyone congregates.
Kecessa@sh.itjust.works 9 months ago
No one asked for AI
Holyginz@lemmy.world 9 months ago
No one asked for the shitty LLMs masquerading as AI. However, an AI that can do specialized things to help people out in day to day tasks would be great.
drdiddlybadger@pawb.social 9 months ago
Oh god dammit
hatsa122@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Plz not you mozilla, you are one of the last good guys that remains from the early days
bigMouthCommie@kolektiva.social 8 months ago
hard to tell what your objection is. i think layoffs are sad, and i hope it wasn't a matter of corporate greed. but i'm excited for the AI thing
LightDelaBlue@lemmy.world 9 months ago
FF no !
WallEx@feddit.de 9 months ago
I get that people are upset, because this fucking buzzword is haunting us. I’m just hoping that they don’t jump on that BS-bandwaggon and create something actually useful. But we’ll see I guess …
frozen@lemmy.frozeninferno.xyz 9 months ago
Yeah, it’s a hate-train for AI, I definitely get it, but Mozilla seems to be using it for actually useful things. Offline translation and fake reviewing checking for Amazon are pretty cool, in my opinion. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not brand loyal, and I’m ready to jump ship to a FLOSS alternative as soon as they do something stupid. I’ll just keep using Firefox until they do.
WallEx@feddit.de 9 months ago
Yep, thats my impression too. Let’s hope for some actual useful ai
FaceDeer@kbin.social 9 months ago
It's only a buzzword to people who've already decided it's a buzzword and are refusing to consider its actual good uses, of which there are plenty.
Being part of angry mobs is fun.
WallEx@feddit.de 8 months ago
Sure is, but doesn’t mostly lead anywhere
NocturnalMorning@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Guess it’s time to get off the internet.
seth@lemmy.world 9 months ago
There’s always trusty Lynx!
Etterra@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Well it’ll be fun trying to find a replacement that doesn’t small use anything made by Google, like Opera does.
laughterlaughter@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Librewolf, Pale Moon and Iceweasel.
heavyboots@lemmy.ml 9 months ago
I would fucking pay not to have AI in my browser, FFS…
Caboose12000@lemmy.world 9 months ago
ew.
snownyte@kbin.social 9 months ago
And the fanboys will still eat this up. "BECAUSE IT'S NOT CHROME!1!" - their reason.
Deceptichum@kbin.social 9 months ago
Not Chrome is an important reason however. Which makes this all the worse.
buddascrayon@lemmy.world 9 months ago
LoL, and I had been contemplating switching to Firefox on my phone. Fucking nope! Not gonna board a ship that has decided to follow the pack into the ice…
milicent_bystandr@lemm.ee 9 months ago
To be fair, I’ll take the ship at the back of the ice-kamakaze-pack over the one at the front. More time to jump ship when something better comes by.
twoshoes@lemmy.world 9 months ago
I’m using chrome on phone, because it’s basically part of the operating system, but I did like Fennec. It’s a fork of Firefox mobile with a few more privacy features (or so they advertise)
buddascrayon@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I’m just using Brave (yes, I know but it doesn’t annoy ME so I’m fine with it) which is just Chrome without the constraints.
autotldr@lemmings.world [bot] 9 months ago
This is the best summary I could come up with:
A TechCrunch report has a company memo that followed these layoffs, detailing one product shutdown and a “scaling back” of a few others.
reads the very top of the page; it then goes on to detail a lot of projects that aren’t in line with Mozilla’s core work of making a browser.
These non-browser projects could be seen as a search for a less vulnerable revenue stream, but none have put a huge dent in the bottom line.
TechCrunch managed to get an internal company memo that details a few “strategic corrections” for the myriad Mozilla products.
Mozilla seized an opportunity to bring trustworthy AI into Firefox, largely driven by the Fakespot acquisition and the product integration work that followed.
Mozilla paid an undisclosed sum in 2023 to buy a company called Fakespot, which uses AI to identify fake product reviews.
The original article contains 731 words, the summary contains 140 words. Saved 81%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
EmperorHenry@discuss.tchncs.de 8 months ago
fuck firefox! it’s been full of bloat for almost 10 years now. Use Librewolf instead.
havokdj@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Well guys we had a good run, free and open source software is officially over
Routhinator@startrek.website 8 months ago
Not entirely. There is LibreWolf (Formerly IceWolf) on desktop. librewolf.net
Mull is apparently an Android option that’s also a fork, but I’m just installing it now, and can also say its only on FDroid.
havokdj@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I know man it’s a joke lol. There’s a bajillion forks of firefox that are mostly better than vanilla firefox itself. FOSS will never die.
kzhe@lemmy.zip 8 months ago
Librewolf will die if Firefox dies. They don’t have the resources to maintain a rendering engine
Routhinator@startrek.website 8 months ago
Mull works well on android. Firefox login works too.
vox@sopuli.xyz 8 months ago
that’s a bit of an overreaction