- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- technology@beehaw.org
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I don’t see them joining anything?
I mean, let’s be real, what major function has Mozilla implemented into Firefox that hasn’t been opt-out? And no, UI doesn’t count, I’m talking features.
The problem isn’t the existence of AI. The problem is the inescapably of it and how, under Microsoft or Google, it will harvest your data whether you like it or not. When you tell them “fuck off, leave me alone, and keep my words out of your AI’s mouth”, they’re not going to listen. Profit motive requires them to invade.
Mozilla is a non-profit, and they’ve long been very good about letting you opt out things, and listening. I’m not worried about them putting AI into Firefox, because I can be reasonably sure it will be optional, in a way I know the others won’t.
I’d rather they didn’t go chasing this car at all, to be honest, because they’re not likely to catch it, but whatever. They’re renewing focus on the browser and I’m taking that as a win.
I can’t contest the first point cause I’m not a firefox junkie, so I won’t.
What I will contest is that the existence of AI, or, deep learning, or LLMs, or neural networks, or matrix multiplication, or whatever type of shit they come up with next, I’ll contest that it isn’t problematic. I kind of think it is, inherently, I think it’s existence is not great. Mostly because it obfuscates, even internally, the processing of data, it obfuscates the inputs from the outputs, the works from the results. You can do that with regular programming just fine, just as you can do most of the shit that AI does with normal programming, like that guy who made a program that calculates the prices for japanese baked goods and also recognizes cancer, right. But I think AI is a step further than that, it obfuscates it more. I kind of am skeptical of it’s broad implementation.
For trivial use cases, it’s kind of fine, but I think maybe use cases we might consider trivial, otherwise are kind of fucked, maybe. AI summary of an article? I dunno if that’s good. We might think, oh, this is kind of trivial because the user should just not really trust what the AI says, but, as with all technology, what if the user is an idiot and a moron? They might just use it to read the article for them, and then spout off whatever talking points and headlines it gives them. I can’t really think of a scenario where that’s actually a good thing, and it’s highly possible. It might make it easier to parse an article, like that, but I don’t think that’s actually a good or useful tool, it’s just presented a kind of illusion of utility, most especially because it was redundant (we could just write a summary and have it at the top of the article, like every article on the face of the earth), and it was totally beyond our control, at least, in most circumstances.
Also, the Mozilla Foundation is nonprofit, but the Mozilla Corporation is not. The Foundation manages the Corp, which manages Firefox development. So depending on which one you’re referring to, it might be a non-profit, or it might not be. In any case, the nonprofit is a step removed from Firefox development, which I think is an important side-note, even if it’s not actually that relevant to whatever conversations about AI there might be.
Perhaps, comically, it is the perfect representation of the world as it is now: “knowledge” in people’s brains is created by consuming whatever source aligns with the beliefs that they think are theirs. No source or facts are required. Only the interpretation matters.
We already have AI in Firefox. And not gonna lie, offline (I.e. absolutely private) translations for webpages is pretty neat.
It’s really good but I do wish it supported more languages like Russian or Japanese. So far most of the times I have had to translate a page, Firefox didn’t support the language.
This. It has held back adoption for me. I want translations in my language of choice and it’s simply not one of the very few options of languages available. AI could help with this.
It’s really good but I do wish it supported more languages like Russian
It’s never too late to learn the language of enemy!
Да
Let me share some fun Mozilla facts about their previous CEO who has now stepped down to “executive chairwoman” last week.
She received 6.9 million dollars in 2022 and 5 million in 2021, 3 million in 2020.
Her replacement is an executive from AirBnB and eBay. We will find out how much both of these are earning in 2025 when they release their financial statements.
They fired 60 staff and are adding AI to their flagship program to earn more money.
Tell me this is a good thing.
Tell me this is a good thing.
Mozilla has long been the most ethical player in this space (while still producing SOTA ML). All of their datasets/models are open source and usually crowdsourced. Not to mention, their existing work is primarily in improving accessibility.
ALSO, the other half of this story is that Firefox is becoming the primary focus again. Everybody’s freaking out about the AI stuff but that’s because they’re only reading the headlines. The programs they’ve shut down are things like Hubs (Mozilla’s metaverse platform), the VPN, and the sensitive data scrubber (which was using a third party service anyway).
As a software developer I am huge supporter of Mozilla’s developer initiatives from Manifest V2 implementation to MDN. But it’s also important to be realistic Mozilla has long had major money problems, and not the kind that giving them more would fix.
The Lunduke shit again? The one that takes offense to money being donated to support “politics” i.e abortion rights?
Take a look at the other trash he posts on his reddit profile. That blog is not a trustworthy source, by any stretch, and it’s sweetly ignoring that he’s not looking at Mozilla’s spending alone, but of 3 separate entities that exist under the umbrella of the Mozilla Foundation.
I don’t know anything about him, but the criticism of them spending money on donating to other charities rather than focusing on making Mozilla’s core projects sustainable IMO is correct.
I don’t think this is a money making move. The previous CEO was absolutely overly focused on monetization and this move is a step away from that. I should’ve addressed this more explicitly in the above comment but even for the players who actively monetize, AI is a money incinerator.
Cloud AI is, but for local AI, they only need to incinerate enough money to train it. That’s none if they just end up using mixtral or something
I agree it’s probably not for money making, that’s my point, its instead that their management doesn’t know how to spend money.
Tell me this is a good thing.
Ok. Mozilla was spreading itself too thin, spending resources trying to compete with multiple products against established brands that were already way ahead of them. They needed to focus down onto their core product rather than frivolously cast about.
And AI is the technology of the future, despite all the whinging and griping by commenters on the subject. It’s being incorporated into the other major browsers, it’s a must-have if Firefox is to remain relevant. I’m sure you’ll be able to turn it off in the settings if you don’t want it and if you’re really concerned about getting AI cooties there’ll be niche forks that are compiled without it.
And the ever increasing CEO wages and hiring of AirBnB/eBay executive as CEO? Their previous CEOs salary alone could’ve covered everyone of those employees fired.
That part’s not good. I was addressing the “They fired 60 staff and are adding AI to their flagship program to earn more money.” Part.
I know, I was more looking at the bigger picture.
Adding AI could be fine, but with the direction the leadership is going I can’t see it as good in this case.
They didn’t hire the AirBnB/eBay executive to be CEO, they’ve been there for a while.
Also, you understand that people can work for companies without supporting their agendas, right?
And AI is the technology of the future, despite all the whinging and griping by commenters on the subject.
Yeah because we’ve never seen tech fads before heralded as the next big thing. If I could roll my eyes any harder we could harness that for power generation.
The tools I want to see integrated into Firefox already exist. I’ve used them. It’s just a matter of putting them together with it.
And AI is the technology of the future, despite all the whinging and griping by commenters on the subject.
You have no idea, any more than the rest of us. Like, please tell me you understand “____ is the technology of the future” has been said more times than it’s ever been true.
The idea of AI is a technology of the future, but what we have growing now is not AI, not really, and this iteration can be just as big a flop as any other technology of the moment.
LLMs are what everyone dunks on, and “image generators are coming for our jobs! Think of artists! It’s not real art if a cheating machine does it!” is also a common cry.
But do any of those people even know about the new class of antibiotics a neural network trained to find patterns in protein folding discovered? Do any of them know about the accuracy of diagnosis that IBM Watson was able to make in cases of rare cancers, even when doctors didn’t see it? What about changes in weather prediction accuracy? Novel suggestions in materials science?
We are mimicking neural patterns, similar to the way our own minds work, to achieve pattern recognition and even extrapolate from them. And yeah, right now we’re brute forcing it, and we’re not even entirely sure how these relationships develop. It’s in its infancy, and growing fast.
This is technology considered the holy grail of computing. We have been chasing this concept since the 1940s. There are a million sci-fi stories about it and there are a million more attempts to make it work before one really stuck.
And now we’re at the beginning of it being practical and you think we’re just gonna go “eh it’s a wet fart like the Virtual Boy. Oh well, let’s make some new phones or something”?
No. This is literally the technology of the future. Within your lifetime (assuming you live a reasonable while longer) there will come a point when you won’t be able to buy a CPU without some type of neural engine in it.
And yes, people will (and already are) do horrific shit with it. It will fuck over a large portion of the white collar economy; a portion of which were told to go into the careers they did because they’d be safe from automation. “Get a degree and you’ll be safe!” they told us! Now they tell us “you better work at two different targets to make that payment, should have studied a trade!”
So the reason for skepticism and animosity is almost certainly the fear of being replaced; but look at how far these AI models have come in the last month alone. We’re already in “this is changing the future” territory and those things are just getting started.
Dude. Take a chill in the bathtub and touch grass. AI is never taking my job, since it’s physical labor since I removed myself from the computer industry 15 years ago. But as someone who studied AI and LISP (which was mired in the previous AI craze), it’s not actually wrong to have animosity and be skeptical about the current AI. we’re literally using the same techniques than we did 30 years ago. We’ve invented nothing new since the last AI fad. What is driving this craze is the brute force approach of massive parallel processing, not actual innovation.
There’s been some minor refinement, so it’s not exactly identical, but to use a metaphor… We’ve using more Lego bricks and different colours now to build our castles, but they’re all still lego bricks. Nothing has fundamentally changed.
… and you should know by now that tech industry is funded by hype machine, so temper your expectations. Current machine learning techniques are limited and inefficient, it’s not actually really a solvable problem with the current approach.
TLDR; LLMs are a super far cry from actually being “intelligent” and calling it AI is the equivalent of calling a wheeled electric self balance board a “Hoverboard”.
Here’s one of the big issues: Basically all of the AI is not even happening on your CPU, it’s happening on the cloud.
And that wouldn’t be in issue if companies stopped shoving “AI” into everything not originally built for AI.
And even that wouldn’t be as big of an issue if the companies talked about the benefits of the new tech instead of just going “AI!!!1!!! drops mic”
This is technology considered the holy grail of computing.
This shit is just analog computing though, right? Like at it’s base, we’re just reproducing analog computation in a digital environment and then we’re framing that in a million different ways, like we’ve been doing since the seventies. We’ve actually had this shit since the first computers, which were analog. The whole reason we moved to digital, though, is because the results were easier to break down, parse, and we had control over every step of the process to confirm it was correct, and it was going to be correct every time. A clearer sense of limitations and constraints, basically.
Now I’m not entirely against analog computing as a matter of fact, right, in fact I think it can be pretty cool if we recognize it for what it is, but at the same time I can’t help but think that the level of hype around it is fucking insane. Primarily because it’s not easily controllable or reproducible. Not in the sense that we’re gonna somehow invent a rogue AI that will kill us all, or whatever garbage, but in the sense that, while you can get easily reproducible results (such is the nature of computation), it is very hard to control what the output is of a given neural network. You can process loads of information extremely quickly, but, like, what use is that if I don’t know whether or not the solution is correct, or if it’s just a kind of ballpark figure? That’s the main issue.
Again, fine if we recognize it, but I don’t think we’re really close at all to just like, randomly inventing a rogue consciousness. We’re not anywhere close to that, from what I’ve seen. We’re still barely good at image recognition and generation in an actually complicated environment, and even then it’s still pretty hard to get what it is that you specifically want, partially because the hype is driving so much development at this point, and the implementation is bunk and, again, kind of uncontrollable. Venture capital jumping down this thing’s throat has partially blocked it’s airway, as I see it. Still a useful technology, potentially, but a million stupid tech demos and image generators for nonsensical memes that we can flood everyone with is the dumbest shit imaginable, and even dumber than that is the level of venture capitalists I see that want to somehow monetize that.
And so I have to ask, right, if I want a robot to sort through the different colors of little plastic beads, right, do I get a large language model on that, or do I just run a pretty basic and more efficient algorithm that just narrows the parameter of beads to a certain color, as recorded by the camera, and then that’s it? Do I want to translate a sentence with AI, or do I want to just manually run a straight word to word conversion that maybe changes based on a couple passes I’m gonna run at it to check whether or not it contextually makes sense with something like a markov chain? Trick question, they are both the same approach, AI has just done it in a way where I could apply a kind of broader paintbrush to the thing and get my results a little faster and with a little less thought even if I have less control over it.
And AI is the technology of the future, despite all the whinging and griping by commenters on the subject.
The entire discussion is to distract ourselves from the raw truth:
Fax machines are the technology of the future.
Fax machines will outlive us all. AI and VR will reach their heyday, then wane with years and be replaced. But whatever replaces them will sit quietly in the shadow of the everlasting Fax machine.
Don’t forget that Mozilla even had a Metaverse instance, chasing the VR fad, only to turn around and chase the latest trendy subject.
$6.9 million dollars?
Nice.
Ni.ce
The answers to both of those things depends very heavily on the details. I think focusing on their main products is a good thing, but adding AI sounds like one of those likely terrible decisions. We definitely need privacy friendly & open source based AI though, in all areas, so I hope this is Mozilla pushing for something sensible here.
You’re right. Mozilla is the devil. Everyone go to the better option in Silicon Valley for web browsing…
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Her replacement is an executive from AirBnB and eBay. We will find out how much both of these are earning in 2025 when they release their financial statements.
Can you tell me what they were doing at either of those companies, or what they’ve been doing at Mozilla since they were hired there? Have you done any actual research into this, at all, are you just assuming that because you saw two shitty companies on the resume, they must be a champion of those shitty companies?
Things to add to your product when you want to look hip and trendy, but dont have any real ideas how to make your product better:
- 1990s: visitor counter
- 1995: Popups
- 2000s: flash intros
- 2005: stock photography
- 2010: local weather widget
- 2015: share to social media widgets
- 2020: fullsize 4k background stock videos
- 2024: AI assistant
1995: animated gifs, , guest books, site rings!
I’m not sure if you remember, but site rings were what you used instead of Google. They were useful.
And I’ve seen some guest books with lots of people at some point in my childhood, but about half a year after that everybody firmly chose in favor of hierarchical boards.
And I don’t share that hate for , it served the purpose of showing you a long line in a small space, implicitly saying that it’s secondary temporary information, a bit like on TV.
And what’s wrong with animated GIFs, animation is nice.
You forgot about blockchain and NFTs.
Remember all those IE toolbars?
I got enough installed once to fill the whole screen.
Ugh…please don’t remind me.
I miss guest books tbh
They would be abused by spam bots in an instant, even before you could write your own “welcome to my guestbook” post.
So you’ve never had one of those bot blocking capcha things?
visitor counter
I actually liked those.
flash intros
These could be used to create right atmosphere.
local weather widget
Back then I hated those, but maybe showing local weather on desktop is not such a bad thing.
share to social media widgets
Hate. Hate. Hate.
And yet Microsoft added a weather (and bullshit) widget to windows in like 2020
I suppose many people were already using a third-party Aero widget for weather forecast since Windows 7.
I know I did.
It really grinds my gears. Why does my bank insist on installing an app to approve transactions, and why does that app have a huge background video playing every time i open it? It really should consist of an MFA code generator.
2015: share to social media widgets on porn sites
uggggggggggh. I’m using Firefox because chrome is really going too far with it’s manifest v3 garbage killing decent adblockere and Firefox is basically the only non chromium based option. Please for the love of everything that is holy. Just. Make. Your. Browser. Better. Don’t need ai gimmicks. Definitely don’t need to lay people off. You need to get back on track. Holy heck. This is the worst.
AI will be great for translation of webpages locally instead of sending content over the wire
I can get behind this if everything is processed locally. Let my computer do the computing and stop harvesting my data, internet
Firefox already has that as a built-in feature on desktop version.
If the only use case is translation, that’s probably not a good business case.
That’s not the only use case. It could read a 400 page pdf locally and summarize it for you, answer questions and find which slide the data you want is on.
The use cases are only limited by how powerful the AI is
My brother, I weep with you and agree with angrily gritted teeth at all your words.
its* manifest v3 garbage.
FUCKING NO MOZILLA YOU WERE OUR LAST FUCKDAMN HOLDOUT
they sold out to google and other advertising trackers a long time ago. Librewolf
Gonna have to pass on that one good buddy. Don’t shit up Firefox.
You were the Chosen One! It was said that you would destroy the Sith, not join them! Bring balance to the browsers, not leave it in darkness!
Fuck sake. Sick of ai being added into everything. Please dont ruin firefox
I want a upvote for sharing, down vote the concept button. I hate it.
As much as I hate it, think it’s a terrible part for a free, open, and secure web; it’s probably a solid business move based on the hype.
Votes are meant only to increase or decrease visibility, especially on Lemmy where karma doesn’t exist.
still, it’d be nice to have a “upvote, but fuck this content” button
gotta add emoji reactions on posts
Think of the up vote button more as a “this information is worth spreading” button than “I like or agree with this content”.
🤦
Whyyyy Mozilla? I want to love you, rally, but you wont let me.
You may be in an abusive relationship with your browser. 💔
Enshittification continues.
I wonder when Steam will go.
It’ll go when they go public.
That’s the downfall of every company
From what I understand, they’re divesting resources that aren’t in Firefox or at least involved in a trustworthy/open source AI project.
I see a lot of people in this theead are upset at this, but I’m tentatively excited. If they can pull off a good AI engine, especially built into the browser, that would be nice. If it had offline capabilities, that would be amazing.
Even if they can pull off a good AI solution that’s not built into Firefox but it’s offline, I’d be really excited. I’m not crazy about having especially detailed and intimate information being thrown to some vendor out there, not knowing where it’s going. Modern AI can do some amazing things, but a lot of them reserve the right to have a human read whatever you put in them and warn you about that. This is too limiting to me for my preferred use-cases.
One concern I have is that Firefox and its engine are one of the last non-chromium browser platforms that have a household name and are FOSS. So to me, that has to be the first goal to keep healthy. Maybe the AI thing will help in this respect
People read the headline and get angry, then want to tell everyone how angry they are. It’s a badge of honour - look guys, I’m also angry.
Reading into their AI plans - it’s to be run completely locally using only the data you want to give it, and it doesn’t send info back to Mozilla.
Now, personally, my biggest issues with AI is data collection and where the training data comes from. It seems for FF, neither of these will be problematic, so I don’t see the issue.
Though, it’s tough to pull from the headline/discussion this pivot is explicitly meant to refocus on the browser.
As far as the AI stuff goes, Mozilla has long been the most ethical player in this space. All of their datasets/models are open source and usually crowdsourced. Not to mention, their existing work is primarily in improving accessibility. It’s really hard to see how this is a bad thing.
If they just built a browser and started acting like a foundation, I’d support them in a heart beat. As it happens today, I feel like I’m pouring money into a set of holes that neither I, nor seemingly the whole world, has much interest in.
There is no such thing as a good AI engine… all I really want from any AI engine is the ability to watermark everything it outputs as generated by an AI so it can later be filtered out when it’s discovered to be inaccurate or just simply plagiaristic.
Why has opposition to AI become so ideological? I had to show my dad how easy it is to unintentionally induce very confident hallucinations in Google Bard when it was giving him false medical information, but that doesn’t make it any more useless than using a search engine in general. The only difference is rather than blindly trusting a “reliable” site, you instead have to think critically and investigate content. I personally find AI most useful in giving me the names of solutions to problems, allowing me to more effectively search for information on them.
Honestly, a search engine companion is probably its least offensive case, you’re correct. Mostly, it makes me so mad because they are polluting our entire collected knowledge base, because there is no way to watermark anything as AI-generated (especially when it’s text, not images) which means that every search you make from here on out returns worse results. It’s like being forced to share the road with self-driving Teslas because the self-driving car companies (especially Tesla) have made us all involuntarily part of their beta test.
The “screw everyone else trying to use the same public resource” mentality is out of control.
The thing is all those SEO bait articles existed long before modern LLMs, they just filled in templates basically. I agree though I am a bit worried that it will get worse now.
It’s like being forced to share the road with self-driving Teslas because the self-driving car companies (especially Tesla) have made us all involuntarily part of their beta test.
I mean you’re also part of testing a human driver.
Yeah, but that’s unavoidable. Whereas, Tesla and Waymo, etc getting to use our roads for self-driving testing is just our government not doing their job to protect the roads adequately, IMHO. This is veering way off topic, but I just recently watched a video that had stats on Teslas and the fact they’re like 8.2x more likely to be in a crash than a standard level 2 car driving system.
as Firefox is the only browser that can’t trace its lineage back to Apple and WebKit
What a slap on Konqueror’s face.
And text only browsers too.
I don’t really see it this way it’s just marketing. Saying “all other browsers descend from big bad corporate Apple” is scary, saying “all other browsers descend from another open source project” is meh.
“It’s all KHTML”, I heard.
You have a point. But still, they could have added an “ackshually” footnote or something.
Unfortunately, KHTML was discontinued in 2023 (according to Wikipedia)
That’s quite the bummer. But still. Saying that almost all browsers can trace their lineage to Apple and Webkit is technically correct, but it’s just a half-truth. As Apple and Webkit were once based on KHTML.
I mean yes no kinda Konqueror simply accepted a bunch of downstream patches, including a name change.
…more or less. It could for a long time use all three of KHTML, WebKit (fork of KHTML) and QtWebEngine (Blink wrapped for Qt, that is, a fork of WebKit), they recently removed KHTML support because noone was updating it and it hadn’t been the default for ages.
If they hadn’t implemented multi-engine support in the past they probably would’ve switched over to “whatever Qt provides” right-out, it’s KDE after all. Ultimately they’re providing a desktop, not a web browser. Back in the days they did decide to roll their own instead of going with Firefox but it was never a “throw project resources at it” kind of situation, there were simply KDE people who felt like working on it. Web standards were a lot less involved back around the turn of the millennium, and also new and shiny. Back in the days people thought that HTML 4.01 Strict and XHMTL would be a thing that servers actually would start to output instead of the usual tagsoup.
If you’re that kind of person right now I’ll point you in the direction of Servo. No, Firefox doesn’t use it and it’s not a Mozilla project any more, Firefox only included (AFAIK) parallel CSS handling, the rest is still old Gecko.
