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I love firefox. Hate the managment
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!
Sings “it’s the end of Mozilla as we know it”.
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.
Train ai to I filtrate Google and kill sundar prichai.
It won’t help anyone’s bottom line but then at least sundar prichai would be dead.
I’m not sure where people are getting the idea that they’re talking about putting AI in Firefox.
Mozilla seized an opportunity to bring trustworthy AI into Firefox, largely driven by the Fakespot acquisition and the product integration work that followed. Additionally, finding great content is still a critical use case for the internet. Therefore, as part of the changes today, we will be bringing together Pocket, Content, and the AI/ML teams supporting content with the Firefox Organization.
emphasis mine
How do you interpret that?
fuuk this AI bubble. the browser is one place where ai is not needed
I dunno, having a free, open model made by a trusted company would be nice. I like initiatives like Mozilla Voice, this could be something similar. Probably not great if it’s replacing focus on the other things though.
Actually I think AI in browser could potentially become a much more effective content blocker than ad blockers like unlock in the future.
I recall there being at least one content blocker that worked by heuristics instead of rulesets. Cannot remember the name, but it was clearly not as effective as conventional ones, because not all ads look the same and usually people want to block the invisible trackers as well.
You only need Bayesian filters for that IMHO.
100% agreed. I just hope whatever this AI they are thinking isnt about what info I should consume. What the AI think is good doesnt mean its the only info I should consume.
One feature that is currently using a trained model for local processing is Firefox Translations. There are good use for AI that can enhance privacy, but yeah the trend of slapping AI on everything because it is trendy to do so must end.
The worst enemy of Mozilla is: Mozilla. This hasn’t changed in many years.
Won’t donate a cent to Mozilla unless they become a Firefox only non-profit. Fuck em.
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.
I just purchased an annual plan for Monitor, partially to help Mozilla. I guess this is my thanks
Monitor is something different than mentioned. Based on this article, that product is still good. See the correction at the bottom
Same. Wth Mozilla?
Focusing on FF: Yay!
Adding AI to FF: NOOOOOOOOOOOooooooooo!
I mean, a local-only AI would be really cool to have, especially if they need to be competitive against Google and Microsoft with Edge who are investing significant ressources in AI and are trying various ways to integrate it into their products
thanks ollama
A browser AI to detect AI shenanigans on websites would be awesome. Let the AI wars begin!
While we resourced mozilla.social heavily to pursue this ambitious idea,
How many people do you need to administer a Mastodon instance? I’m pretty sure infosec.exchange is like one dude.
Didn’t they have acustom ui though? Also their moderation is pretty strict
That interim CEO seems like they suck; I hope they don’t stay.
Oh for Fox’s sake!!!
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.
Can an expert explain this - https://aussie.zone/post/6869951
Comparing brave and base Firefox is unfair IMO. Brave is security hardened out of the box, where as Firefox is a general purpose browser and has telemetry in the form of crash reports and the like (which can be turned off). It can be hardend well through arkenfox, or using a fork like Librewolf. Comparing Firefox and chrome is better imho.
Firefox has many built-in anti fingerprinting flags (such as letterboxing, RFP, font limiting, and many more} which when combined with ublock origin are unbeatable. A baked-in content blocker like that of braves loses because it isn’t extensible. This website compares on only default settings which aren’t representative of the extent each browser can be taken but useful nonetheless: https://privacytests.org/
A baked-in content blocker like that of braves loses because it isn’t extensible.
In what way? I use(d) Firefox since the very first Firebird days, and Netscape Navigator before it, and I’m practically married to uBO (don’t tell my wife!). That said, Brave’s ‘shields’ blocker is just skinned uBO with some tweaks. It can add custom cosmetic filtering rules, additional adblock format filter lists, disable or enable JS (globally or per-site) and has built in fingerprint resistance. Aside from the differing UI, I genuinely can’t think of anything overtly missing as such.
I’m stated that because I know baked in features must wait for browser updates to get fixes (not talking about block list updates but the core itself). I also was basing it off a comment I read (can’t find sadly) on the limitations of implementing a ublock-style blocklist into brave. And thirdly, I have seen no mention of anything like ublock’s blocking modes (block 3rd party scripts/frames). Can you quickly select an element to block in brave?
I might have considered using brave as a 2ndary browser if it werent for the ceo’s politics (spending thousands to support anti-lgbt legislation) which I feel are antithetical to privacy.
And thirdly, I have seen no mention of anything like ublock’s blocking modes (block 3rd party scripts/frames). Can you quickly select an element to block in brave?
You can enter as many custom filter rules as you like, with adblock syntax support. You can select an element to block, yes.
Here is a graph the illustrates the block efficiency of ublock+Firefox compared to other browsers with/without ublock. https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-best-on-Firefox
Despite the URL name, it shows bare browse Brave and Firefox+ublock compare at blocking 3rd party ads/trackers. It looks like this was updated November of last year.
Brave isn’t represented anywhere on the graph? Unless I’ve misunderstood you. That’s a comparison of Firefox with various ad blockers, and uBO with and without CNAME unclocking enabled. Brave also uncloaks CNAMEs, so that’s one place they are equal. Chromium based browsers do lack some abilities compared to Firefox, however. I have daily driven Firefox since the first day, but Brave and Blink/Chromium based browsers are undeniably faster at rendering (unfortunately).
Look at the bottom of the graph. Each grouping is per browser.
The website you mentioned is created by Brave Developers
Incorrect. It is created by someone who is associated with brave, but not a directly created by Brave. I am sure the tests is accurate (at least per test), but the testing criteria could be biased. It’d just be weird to the end up with Librewolf and Mullvad as a clear winner if the intention was to favor brave browser.
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.
