this post was submitted on 14 Feb 2024

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Mozilla lays off 60 people, wants to build AI into Firefox (arstechnica.com)

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 40 points 8 months ago (3 children)

Okay, the responses here are kinda disappointing because folks here seem to be unaware that (1) Mozilla has already added "AI" info Firefox a few versions ago (to provide machine translations of pages), and (2) the way they did it is very responsible (the whole thing is 100% local, no info is sent to other servers).

I understand that we're all tired of this whole trend of language models being put where they don't belong, but from what I see, Mozilla is actually the company I'd trust the most to do it right. (AFAIK, one area where the FOSS world is severely lacking and where Mozilla works to solve it is speech recognition with the Common Voice project, and if they start working on an LLM-based program to do that, I'd welcome it.)

[–] [email protected] 18 points 8 months ago

I wish I shared your confidence. Mozilla jumped on the VR hype, then the Metaverse hype and now they're specifically betting on generative AI. It's leaving me feeling as suspicious as the article's author about Mozilla's latest ventures.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 8 months ago

If it is totally local, (and able to be disabled easily) then great.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

Do it right? Do what right? Stop making a browser?

[–] [email protected] 13 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

FFS lay off the artificial intelligence bullshit. I don't want or need machine learning in my fucking browser. I tell it where to go, and it goes there. This is not a problem that needs solving. There had better be a way to turn this garbage off.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 8 months ago

The future fucking sucks.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 8 months ago

So the enshittification continues.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago

🤢🤮

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago

WTF?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Someone knows any good Firefox hard forks?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago

Try LibreWolf or Floorp.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

@luciole Pale Moon maybe?

@hedge

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago

So I'm out of a browser. Yay

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Unfortunately the problem lies with the foundation. The one thing they made worth a damn in the past decade was Rust, and they promptly fired the whole Rust team. Servo is maintained by the Linux foundation now ffs. What does the foundation do besides zombie walk and eat Googles money?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago

Man I hope Servo pans out. I'm hopeful since it's seen increased activity lately.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

What does the foundation do besides zombie walk and eat Googles money?

The very purpose of the foundation is to spend money Firefox earns. What they fund is not exactly a secret. They're kinda -- a self-funded thing somewhere in between UNESCO and the EFF?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

It was rhetorical.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Always sucks to have more tech layoffs.

The article mentions they're "decreasing their investment" in Firefox Relay, which is a service for creating burner email addresses that get forwarded to your real email address. It's honestly the best spam-prevention method I've ever used. If Mozilla decides to axe that project, I hope the Thunderbird team can somehow pick it up. Seems like it could be an opportunity for some recurring income for them.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Firefox Monitor is great as well. The premium version looks nice, you can pay to have it go remove your data from many data brokers. It seems mostly focused on US brokers, I'd pay for it worked with more european data collection companies.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I like and use Relay as well. Probably a very naive thought, but couldn't Mozilla just ask for donations the way Wikipedia does?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

I don't think I've ever seen them ask for donations as visibly as Wikipedia does. Sometimes there's a small banner at the top of their website with a donate button. Currently, if you go to https://mozilla.org and scroll all the way down, there's a "Donate" link in their footer.

Seems like they're always kind of subtle about asking for donations -- I wonder if they think that if they pushed for donations harder, it would just make more people use Chrome. (On the other hand, there is no real alternative to Wikipedia, so they can do the big banner once a year.)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

I hope that ai will help us also remove ai.