"What Is Your Dream for Mozilla" - Mozilla is doing a survey, and it could be a good opportunity to share some of the feedback that usually gets commented here :)
"What Is Your Dream for Mozilla" - Mozilla is doing a survey, and it could be a good opportunity to share some of the feedback that usually gets commented here :)
I got a copy of the text from the email, and added it below, with personal information and link trackers removed.
Hello [receiver's name],
I’ve long dreamed about working for Mozilla. I learned how to send encrypted e-mail using Mozilla Thunderbird, and I’ve been a Firefox user since almost as long as I can remember. In more recent years, I’ve been an avid follower of Mozilla’s advocacy work, and was lucky enough to partner with Mozilla on investigative journalism in my last job.
In many ways, Mozilla was the dream – and now, as the leader of the Foundation, my job is to make my dreams for Mozilla come true. What that means, though, is making your dreams come true – for a trustworthy and open future of technology; for tech that is a tool for liberation, not limitation; and for tech that values people over profit.
So I’m reaching out to technologists, activists, researchers, engineers, policy experts, and, most importantly, to you – the people who make up the Mozilla community – to ask a simple question.
[receiver's name]. What is your dream for Mozilla? I invite you to take a moment to share your thoughts by completing this brief survey.
Let’s start with this question:
Question 1: What is most important to you right now about technology and the internet?
- Protecting my privacy online
- Avoiding scams
- Choosing products, apps, technology, and services that I can trust
- Keeping children safe online
- Responsible use of AI
- Keeping the internet is open and free
- Knowing how to spot misinformation
- Other (please specify)
With your help, together we can imagine and create the Internet we want. Thank you for being a part of this.
Always yours,
Nabiha Syed Executive Director Mozilla Foundation
"We've decided to focus our efforts on AI and advertising. Please tell us why you think that's a good idea!"
Well, you have the option to elaborate otherwise. Huge effort to normalize this survey.
Shame their AI question didn’t have a “my biggest concerns is companies chasing the AI buzzword with no tangible benefit”
right? mozilla, you gotta focus on making a good web browser right now. not a more gimmicky web browser
I agree that's basically what I out in the text box underneath the AI multi-select options. "We don't want yet another annoying AI search feature or chatbot! We want a focus on useable features and security!"
I'm not anti-ai, but all signs point to the who thing stagnating, I don't see what mozilla could contribute in the current climate.
Just make a better browser… you literally pioneered RUST
They were for years, called the servo engine. Until they killed off development of course
Thankfully, development of Servo has been revived, and it's now fully independent of Mozilla. I believe it's now being stewarded by the Linux Foundation of Europe, with a lot of contributions from Igalia.
The result of the whole thing was project quantum. Firefox includes lots of Rust code. Servo was never intended to be a product, it always was a research platform.
The fact that there's no option to express my anger over the environmental cost of AI is infuriating. There is no responsible or positive use of AI when it's accelerating the destruction of our climate.
I see a textbox saying "What do you want to see from Mozilla in the future?" You could add it there, as justification for why you want them to focus less on itThere is a text box part way through, I included my more general thoughts there
(my comment was getting rambly)
you get a star
The audacity to direct you to a donations page after you fill out their survey 😂
You can submit the survey without checking any of the boxes on the AI question, just FYI.
They seem to have a foregone conclusion that AI is a positive thing, rather than something that should be eradicated like smallpox or syphilis.
"Responsible use of AI" could mean things like providing small offline models for client-side translation. They're actually building that feature and the preview is already amazing.
Not just building it's shipping by default. That is, language detection and code that displays a popup asking you whether you want to download the actual translation model is shipping by default. About twelve megs per model, so 24 for a language pair.
IMO, there's no such thing as responsible AI use. All of the uses so far are bad, and I can't see any that would work as well as a trained human. Even worse, there's zero accountability; when an AI makes a mistake and gets people killed, no executives or programmers will ever face any criminal charges because the blame will be too diffuse.
You're going to upset a lot of chess players if you get rid of all AI.
I filled it, but there's no avenue there to express my complete disdain for AI and how shit it can make a product. Just make everything AI optional, don't make me download data for shit I'll never use.
I did the same thing. I just want a product or service that doesn't leverage AI. Mozilla's resources are better spent improving the web.
I want nothing to do with AI, everything is like "I want transparency" I dont want them involved at all, pissing away money buzz words.
What do you want from mozilla? an open source privacy focused browser.
You're free to send your data to google or deepl instead of using Firefox's included AI translate. You know, privacy, no AI in the browser, choose one.
Is the new Firefox built-in translate feature fetching from Google? Sigh.. I didn't know nor do they say on it that's where it's coming from. May better Firefox alternatives surge in the future, right now the best two that I am aware of is at a prototype or pre-alpha level (Servo/Verso and LadyBird)
Prolong your browser for as long as necessary and explore the possibility of using the internet without any web browsers. Firefox is a last stand of competition, and without choice there might as well not be browsers at all.
Is it wise to have such a complex everything-app with no end in sight? (more like, no end in site)
gecko webview for android, better site isolation
good set of questions while trying to be non biased on certain topics.
for me, topics about privacy and misinformation matter more than ai. i would like them to lean more on helping me identify ai generated text and deepfakes as far as ai is concerned.
i also liked that mozilla study about smart cars so more of that is nice.
My dream: mozilla.exe . Too bad it takes SeaMonkey to do mozilla better than Mozilla.
Besides the already sketchy AI thing, I wonder why they need to know gender & ethnicity.
"To disappear"
EDIT: I don't care if you don't agree and I'm not going to reply further. If you still did not came to the conclusion that Mozilla became just a cash grab machine by yourself, then you're hopeless.
What's the alternative, an even bigger cash grab machine like Google's chromium?
Take a minute to learn the difference between mozilla.org and mozilla.com. They are very much separate, and the .com has never pretended to not be there for the money. It's explicitly why it exists, so that the org can keep doing its thing.