Technology

Realistically, firefox will monetize advertising. But as long as they remain true to open source, we will have the forks to strip out the nasty bits. The normies will get less violated than elsewhere and people in the know will still have the dream browser.

This 500 million per year pay cut is going to hurt no matter what.

So you got this survey in an email. Was the link intended to be shared like this? Can I find the survey link somewhere on Mozilla’s own websites?

The email was through their newsletter and I would have offered to forward it, if it didn't have personal information in it. Maybe someone else who is subscribed to the newsletter can back up the claim instead?

I actually searched for the website link to put in the post body before sharing, and went through a similar thought process as yours when I didn't find it. My reasons for sharing it anyway were:

• Sometimes these emails say to not share it further, but this one didn't
• I see it shared already in a few places unofficially (Mastodon, Reddit, Twitter)
• It mentioned 'Mozilla Community' and not a more specific group, so this audience seemed appropriate
• People here might have better feedback than I could write up, so it should be a net positive for Mozilla

It would be nice if they did post about it on an official account to resolve any concerns. If it helps, it looks like "mozillafoundation.tfaforms.net" has been used for other surveys in the past and so you might find a link to that domain from an official source

edit:

their website has links to that domain based on a search of the GitHub repo

For example, the 'Submit a product here' link on this page: https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/

It's also possible to submit without filling in the demographic questions if people are concerned but still want to submit

An engine component separable from the UI (which was XUL and thus Firefox initial advantage that gave it popularity), deeply extensible via plugins, tunable (it would be so frigging cool to be able to turn off sections of EDIT: ... what's currently called web standards, say, drop HTML5 or JS).

What it was needed for when it was popular.

Not a Chrome alternative with a different engine.

Somehow every time I mention XUL and XULRunner people mention that one can use PaleMoon or that XUL is incompatible with some security and stability changes and so on.

I know that. I don't mean literally XUL, I mean low-level access to the engine. Allowing it to be used for things like old Conkeror and such, or just customizing Firefox as deeply as it was possible in olden days.

But their AI helps protect privacy? The main thing it's currently used for is offline private translation that doesn't send data to Google's servers.

The other main AI feature they're working on is AI-generated alt-text for untagged images, so that blind people can better use the web.

I feel like you're doing the classic Lemmy/Reddit thing of seeing the letters "AI" and automatically freaking out, before looking into what they're actually doing. We aren't talking about ChatGPT integration here...

Helping blind people use computers is a good thing.

Private, offline translation is a good thing.

If they had called these features "machine learning" instead of "AI", it would make zero function difference, but you wouldn't be reacting in this manner.

There's nothing wrong with using an LLM for offline private language translation. It literally preserves privacy by not simply sending all that data to a Google translation server.

There's nothing wrong with using offline image recognition to aid in helping blind people know what's on their screen.

As for their "advertising" - you should look up what they actually did. It completely preserves privacy while at the same time not completely destroying the economic model that content creators rely on. It's a good thing. With any luck, regulators will enforce it.

"Would you like to see us leverage AI to help address societal issues such as racial justice, climate justice, gender justice, etc.?"

Absolutely fucking not.

Private, offline language translation is not "no tangible benefit".

Neither is alt-text generation for images to assist blind people in searching the web. That's a massive feature.

E: idk whether you're down voting because you don't want privacy or because you don't like blind people lol

It's opt-in already, in fact you have to go out of your way to do it. And it's currently only used for offline, private language translation, to my knowledge.

That is a very good usecase considering the alternative is to send it to a Google translation server.

I feel like people need to actually read beyond the "Mozilla adds AI to Firefox" headlines.

Of all the things you could want from Firefox. Of all the possibilities.

The primary, only, thing you could come up with is "I don't want privacy focused translation, because AI"

Without realizing the the grand majority of all translation tools that don't suck have been AI driven for like 8+ years (Long, long, before LLMs of today).

This is why we can't have nice things...