Mozilla is in a tricky position. It contains both a nonprofit organization dedicated to making the internet a better place for everyone, and a for-profit arm dedicated to, you know, making money. In the best of times, these things feed each other: The company makes great products that advance its goals for the web, and the nonprofit gets to both advocate for a better web and show people what it looks like. But these are not the best of times. Mozilla has spent the last couple of years implementing layoffs and restructuring, attempting to explain how it can fight for privacy and openness when Google pays most of its bills, while trying to find its place in an increasingly frothy AI landscape.

Fun times to be the new Mozilla CEO, right? But when I put all that to Anthony Enzor-DeMeo, the company’s just-announced chief executive, he swears he sees opportunity in all the upheaval. “I think what’s actually needed now is a technology company that people can trust,” Enzor-DeMeo says. “What I’ve seen with AI is an erosion of trust.”

Mozilla is not going to train its own giant LLM anytime soon. But there’s still an AI Mode coming to Firefox next year, which Enzor-DeMeo says will offer users their choice of model and product, all in a browser they can understand and from a company they can trust. “We’re not incentivized to push one model or the other,” he says. “So we’re going to try to go to market with multiple models.”

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[–] 547 points 9 months ago (2 children)
  • [–] 213 points 9 months ago (8 children)

    I feel like mozilla could switch to making all their decisions by flipping a coin and do better than they're doing in recent years

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  • [–] 50 points 9 months ago* (5 children)

    But how else would the CEO justify her $7 million dollar salary (in ‘22) that’s going up by a million or two every year since she returned, starting at $3 million in 2020.

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    [–] 116 points 9 months ago (2 children)

    Man, I so wish mozilla was a worker owned cooperative. These string of useless CEOs would have already been shown the door

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    [–] 103 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    Is "must make the dumbest fucking decision possible at all times" in the Mozilla CEO job description or something?

    I have no CEO experience, but I'll make stupid fucking decisions for a fifth of the salary you're paying the current guy.

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    [–] 95 points 9 months ago

    "AI is untrustworthy, therefore you can use multiple AI services in our product."

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  • [–] 80 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

    “What I’ve seen with AI is an erosion of trust.”

    Mozilla is not going to train its own giant LLM anytime soon. But there’s still an AI Mode coming to Firefox next year, which Enzor-DeMeo says will offer users their choice of model and product, all in a browser they can understand and from a company they can trust. “We’re not incentivized to push one model or the other,” he says. “So we’re going to try to go to market with multiple models.” Some will be open-source models available to anyone.

    This is such an out of touch non-answer here.

    People don’t oppose ai changes because they’re locked into a model. In fact most AI products I use for my job let you choose a fucking model.

    People hate them because

    A) 90% of the time they’re useless and the remaining 10 are detrimental to the product experience

    B) Ethical concerns about training off of artists and authors as well as environmental impact. EDIT: or also the general trend of trying to replace humans with AI.

    C) Not wanting to play into the fucking arms race the billionaire class are manufacturing

    D) The time they could be useful they have a risk of being either hilariously wrong or dangerously wrong. And there’s no amount of training and GPU manufacturing that’s gonna fix that.

    Absolutely none of this is addressed by the CEO. I’m sure he has to say this because of the fucking tulip crazy money is in around this but it doesn’t make it any less tone deaf or futile.

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  • [–] 67 points 9 months ago* (41 children)

    Their user base is almost exclusively tech savvy people, the same people who are most opposed to AI.

    I think this move signals that they believe we have nowhere else to go, and they're daring us to go fuck ourselves, because fuck you, what are you going to do, use Chrome?

    Yes, yes I will, well Chromium forks.

    In general, I prefer the look and feel of chromium-based browsers, but I use Firefox and Firefox forks for the reasons that I'm sure everyone here is aware of.

    If those reasons go away, I'll just switch to Vivaldi as my primary browser. I won't be happy about it, but if Firefox becomes another AI slop project. I might as well go with the browser whose UX I prefer.

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  • [–] 51 points 9 months ago

    Yes, yes I will, well Chromium forks.

    Yeah, I'm not going to switch to a Manifest V3 browser because Firefox puts in access to an optional AI agent. If Firefox makes it so you can't turn it off, which I wouldn't think is likely, I might switch to something like Librewolf, but Chromium? No.

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    [–] 63 points 9 months ago (2 children)

    Mozilla’s new CEO is a dumbass.

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    [–] 61 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    I've cancelled my monthly donation to Mozilla. What's the point. Every bit of feedback I've provided is to the tune of no goddamn AI, spend my money towards keeping up with the alternatives to make sure there's always an extra player in the field. Instead it's going to some overpaid dickhead who's going to introduce AI.

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    [–] 56 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    This is every Mozilla CEO in the last decade:

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    [–] 53 points 9 months ago (19 children)

    Is there like a petition or something we can all sign to show that literally no cunt wants this?

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    [–] 49 points 9 months ago (3 children)

    EU here is your chance! Fully fund Mozilla on the condition that they move to an EU country

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    [+] 44 points 9 months ago (33 children)
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    [–] 41 points 9 months ago (26 children)

    Any valid alternative for android phones to firefox with same add-on support? These idiots look like they are speedrunning it to become a shitty company.

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    [–] 40 points 9 months ago* (5 children)

    Mozilla is completely detached from its user base. They think their average user is a Microsoft enthusiast when in reality it's a Debian enjoyer.

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    [–] 37 points 9 months ago (6 children)

    Just like I said in another post related to this, I hope this doesn't kill LibreWolf, IceCat, and Waterfox.

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  • [–] 32 points 9 months ago

    Some of Mozilla's AI integrations have been amazing, despite the community crying about it. Like private, offline translation (I don't care what anybody says, this is much better than sending the contents of your web page to a proprietary Google Translate server), and enhanced screen reader functionality.

    But this one puzzles me. They're not being very descriptive, but it seems like it's just integrating generic LLM stuff? Not really what I'm after personally. At least it's opt-in, I guess.

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  • [–] 28 points 9 months ago (6 children)

    So many people mentioning (inferior, in my opinion) Firefox alternatives in the comments and nobody's mentioned Librewolf? Really? Maybe Librewolf will have to become a hard fork someday if this continues, but for now, it's just Firefox for people who care about their data. Aside from a few justifiably aggressive default settings, I've never had even a hint of an issue with it.

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  • [–] 28 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    Overpaid CEO has more money than actual sense.

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    [–] 27 points 9 months ago

    That's what all CEOs do. Double down on AI.

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  • [+] 26 points 9 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)
    [–] 26 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    I'm going to have to go Amish at this rate.

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    [–] 21 points 9 months ago

    It's almost as if they are out of touch with their users. I don't get it. CEOs are just normal people like us.

    /s

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  • [–] 20 points 9 months ago

    waterfox, pale moon, ironfox. there's your multiple models.

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  • [–] 19 points 9 months ago
    [–] 19 points 9 months ago

    Of course, this is just what Firefox needs fixing long standing issues, catching up to web standards, process isolation on mobile AI!

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  • [–] 19 points 9 months ago (2 children)

    You either die Old Mozilla or you live to see yourself become Current Mozilla.

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    [–] 18 points 9 months ago (3 children)

    Why do they keep going all in on AI when no one wants it?

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    [–] 17 points 9 months ago
    [–] 17 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    good fucking god, why does it have to be this way ? do I have to program my own browser now ? is that what they want ?

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