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101 comments

  • 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

  • Let's skip the AI and give thunderbird some love instead. Then again, it's pretty feature complete as is. Just keep it up to date to keep running and secure.

  • 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.

  • 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!

  • A reminder that there are many firefox forks that exist if base firefox is adding unwanted things or you might have different wants, but sites will still "see" firefox in terms of compatibility. I'm using Librewolf with some annoyances (it doesn't let things fingerprint to the point that it can't even get your current time), but overall I like it.

    • According to the Librewolf documentation, fingerprinting can be turned off, but they recommend adding the Canvas Blocker extension in its place. That is my current setup, as I didn't like that websites in Librewolf couldn't get the correct time and time zone for me.

      Here's the direct quote from the Librewolf documentation:

      If you don't like the downsides of RFP, or you are not concerned about fingerprinting, you can disable RFP in the LibreWolf settings, or in your overrides. In that case consider using an extension like CanvasBlocker to retain at least a minimum amount of fingerprinting protection.

  • 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.

101 comments