this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2024
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It is not really FUD to point out that Mozilla wastes ungodly amounts of money on projects of dubious utility instead of investing it into their browser. Their current trajectory doesn't inspire much confidence either. Mozilla started to waste even more money on 'AI' features nobody asked for.
Mozilla doesn't exist to fund Firefox. Firefox exists to fund Mozilla. It's been that since the very fucking beginning: Mozilla is a general internet charity that makes money with a browser. It's always been that way. It never has been any different. I may have to repeat myself: The purpose of Mozilla isn't to fund Firefox the purpose of Firefox is to be a money-maker for Mozilla's charitable causes.
usually you invest in the main product to drive higher returns for diversifying. diversifying first means your baseline is unstable.
During the google money years the ROI on Firefox was so mind-bogglingly high it would've been insanity to drop it all into the browser: It couldn't possibly have soaked up the sheer amount of resources.
Meanwhile, yes they did sink a large amount of resources into it in a way a profit-driven company never would have: They designed a whole fucking new programming language to get proper concurrency into the thing. Rust is, in a very real way, a language to write browsers in. That's its purpose. And then they set the language free because, among other things, you can't make money with it.
Sure, lots of those investments tanked. But OTOH you have stuff like pocket which makes money and could probably keep the lights on by itself. If everything but pocket were to fail Mozilla absolutely would have to downsize, would definitely have to scale back its charity spending, rely more on the FLOSS community to actually write code, but it'd continue with the same kind of force as say Blender, which wouldn't be what it is without its paid staff (both coders and artists) and sidle-hustles (commercial support, training, and cloud services, mostly. Oh, t-shirts and mugs. Don't forget t-shirts and mugs).
I guess overall the gripe I have with the "Mozilla should invest more in Firefox" chorus is that it implies "Do you want Mozilla to be way smaller and less capable of shaping the web than it currently is". People have no sense of the scale of Mozilla, think that it's running on donations etc.
wait, pocket makes money?
There's a subscription if you want and they're also earning some money off referrals. In 2022 they made ~80m dollars off all those side hustles, should probably be 100m by now. Selling the default search engine spot is still the biggest number, about 500m. And they have a piggy bank of over a billion.
man, i haven't thought about pocket for like 10 years. i remember being annoyed that they added yet another binary blob to the software.
It's not a blob the client is definitely open source, not sure about the server software but you're not running that. It's an extension like any other, just that it comes bundled with the default install and doesn't use the usual extension enable/disable UI: Go to
about:config, setextensions.pocket.enabledto false. It's going to stay that way, this isn't microsoft which likes to "fix" your settings.when moz first bought pocket and the extension was included by default, it was before they open-sourced it. this was in the NPAPI days when plugins could do basically anything on the host system. that shit got disabled the moment it touched my browser. same as the drm blob.
Actually, their new AI thing is actually useful: stays on-device, and summarizes web pages and videos.
But yes, they could stand to spend more money on the browser, and less on their CEO and other non-browser things.
Yeah. Offline translation (i.e. that doesn't send data to Google to translate), better screen reader functionality for blind people? Sign me the fuck up.
People are just seeing "AI" and getting upset about it. Absolutely stupid.
Also they made llamafile We need a slur for the obnoxious and deluded anti ai people
I’ll be honest, when I first heard that Mozilla had come out with an AI I figured it was on the back of them trying a couple different ad scenarios, and assumed the worst. Pleasantly surprised by Orbit.
it's a good idea to not look to deeply into the historic actions of the creator of llamafile. she's pretty polarising.
Care to share some highlights?
she was the face of the occupy wall street movement, but her views back then were more ancap than anti capital. while working for google she tried to petition the us government to shut itself down and hand the reins over to the tech industry, with google's ceo as president.
the base of the APE library that powers llamafile is called cosmopolitan libC, iirc in direct reference to the old soviet term.
to give credit she's mellowed out a lot in recent years.
I don't care who they are or what their Xitter history is.
The tools is great, the tool is not backdoored. I ruthlessly use effective tools that I can get my hands on.
Using open source software on its own does not even entails economic support for its creator.
llamafile is not really "effective". it's incredibly impressive, but it's the opposite of effective. it's a collection of a bunch of hacks reliant on coincidences in OS design, and works by basically recompiling itself on the fly to work with different architectures.
if you want effective, run llama.cpp compiled with actual optimizations for your platform.
By effective I mean, I downloaded one file, renamed it to .exe, ran it and now my shitty company laptop was running a basic LLM with actually lots of features, right then and there. I didn't even have a GPU or admin privileges, and it just worked
Sure, maybe it's possible to squeeze more performance out of a 3 years old laptop, but that was actually very usable out of the box. And I didn't even need to unbox it !
We already have one. They're called luddites. They've always existed, and will bemoan any new technological advancement.
Actually luddites were and are based. Neoluddites might be able to help artistes get unfucked by Disney & co