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.”
-_-
This is such a fantastic way to put it. I fuckin love the internet, people have amazing ways to say things lol
There are two things that the Internet has taught me: the incredible creativity people have about absolutely everything and the unimaginable levels of stupidity that people have about absolutely everything. Sometimes one of those things only exist because of the other, and that’s hard to process.
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
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.
Anthony is a she?
Oh shit they literally changed CEO a few hours ago. My bad.
Doubt the wage issue will change though.
I get missing it in the title, but you didn’t read the article or even the summary blurb either?
No, because I wasn’t commenting on the article. I was commenting on the other users comment about the last few years of Mozilla, something I’m already well aware of.
At least she didn’t cut every interesting program in Mozilla’s portfolio when every other company was laying off employees. She wasn’t great, but she was operating in a bad economy.
This new guy tho, he sounds like good news if you’re the CEO of Google.
mozilla is nothing more than an extension of GOOGLE, since they recieved most of thier funding from them. they are essentially google shills, and probably using thier AI too. i wouldnt be surprise if google tries to buy them down the line.
They aren’t using their AI. They currently use open source ondevice models and have perplexity as a search option.
Man, I so wish mozilla was a worker owned cooperative. These string of useless CEOs would have already been shown the door
mozilla foundation is like susan comen breast cancer foundation, where the CEO takes the large chunk of donation for him/herself.
Well if Susan isn’t being compensated several million dollars a year, what incentive would she have to help cancer patients? 🫠
Programs are like socks, once they get dirty, you change them. Do these people really not understand how this stuff works? Even giants can fall when enough people switch to other options
Oh ya? Where u gonna go? Chrome?
Hell no. For now just gonna switch to some firefox fork that won’t include the AI.
Jumping to the dingy tied to the sinking ship.
Thus the “for now”
That was meant as a sarcasm. Point is there are nonalternatives
Can it survive if Firefox goes down?
Ofc No. But waterfax might disable ai by default.
Wouldn’t trust waterfox as far as I could throw a bull elephant.
Librefox or fuck even floorp is better then waterfox.
I’m also curious. From what I understand, Waterfox is more secure than Firefox out of the box.
Why? Just curious
You could always go Safari, at the rate Apple is going with Ai integration you should be good for… well forever really 🤣
Safari is only available on Apple hardware and operating systems though
Ladybird 🤞
Yeah I’ve heard of it but is it even installable?
Ladybird is an open-source web browser developed by the Ladybird Browser Initiative, a nonprofit organization focused on development of the browser.[1] It is licensed under the BSD 2-Clause License.[2] An alpha release is planned in 2026,[3][4] beta release is expected in 2027, and a stable release for general public in 2028.[5] Originally a component of SerenityOS, it is now being developed as a standalone project.[6] The initiative is funded entirely through donations, with Cloudflare, FUTO, Shopify, and 37signals among its sponsors. Ladybird uses a new browser engine called LibWeb that is being created from scratch by the development team. Unlike SerenityOS, it will also use other open source libraries for development.[2] An ad blocking feature is planned.[7] Unlike most new web browsers, Ladybird does not rely on Chromium or Firefox and uses its own rendering engine and JavaScript engine.[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ladybird_(web_browser)
Yeah that’s what I’m saying. I watched some interview awhile back, but when I went to install it it was not available yet. Ok fine 2026 - will check it out
It’s slated for a early 2026 alpha. So it’s actually pretty close.
So no. The answer is no.
Yeah dude I actually saw primeagen video about it and sort of definitely waiting for it.
Omi want ublock, dark reader. I will use it
There are literally dozens of browser options out there.
Most of which are just chrome in a trench coat.
When clicking Download
Page not found
Oops! We weren’t able to find your Azure Front Door Service configuration. If it’s a new configuration that you recently created, it might not be ready yet. You should check again in a few minutes. If the problem persists, please contact Azure support…yeah
Seamonkey is barely maintained.
I use SeaMonkey as my usenet client. I prefer it to anything else for that.
It is great that it still exists.
So file a bug report. The link is literally right there
The point is that it does not inspire confidence when that is the introduction… (You can also file the bug report, or I could, but you are the one championing it)
Indeed, that was my point. I am not sure that Mozilla pays someone to work on it, at this point. It’s likely the passion project of a couple of employees.
“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.
I’m going to have to go Amish at this rate.
Off grid is an easier transition :)
Yah but I like the pies.
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.
The job of a CEO is to make the line go up, and that almost always comes at the expense of the consumer and the quality of the product itself.
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.
They have telemetry to track the number of installations on different systems
And most debian user disable telemetry. Their numbers probably show its all windows folk heavily using AI because its the default.
Then enable “Send daily usage ping to Mozilla”
I guess I should turn the telemetry on so they’d see I’m using it on linux. Muh privacy
Yes.
“AI is untrustworthy, therefore you can use multiple AI services in our product.”
Is there like a petition or something we can all sign to show that literally no cunt wants this?
Uninstall it and pick a different platform. These cunts think you won’t and THATS why they don’t give a fuck. Enough people swap and oh, hey, maybe we should rethink this mistake. If not - not your problem… You already bounced.
If anyone has any suggestions for browsers hook me up, I’m running out of browsers with thier own engines to try. I don’t see much point in using, say, LibreWolf if the engine is still the same as Firefox (Gecko in this case). Maybe I’ll give NetSurf a try and pretend like it’s 1996 again.
edit i don’t see much point because doing some about:config shenanigans is nearly the same amount of work to me as switching browsers.
If all of the web engines enshittify, you can always
curlthe HTML/CSS/JS and hand-parse it. Might have suboptimal performance however.lol if it ever gets to that point i’m just gonna go straight Lynx.
The Lynx browser is surprisingly nice.
It’s actually incredible for getting real reading done without my ADHD taking over and opening up 30 tabs of “ooh whats this?”
getting real reading done without my ADHD taking over
Maybe that’s the appeal.
“Might” is doing some awfully heaving lifting there 🤣
Gonna get my news one pixel at a time just like grandpappy did on his 9600 baud.
I’m afraid that not using Gecko or Blink may expose me to any sort of malware while visiting the web tbh
That’s still a fork of Firefox, isn’t it? I was hoping to find a reasonably modern browser that doesn’t rely on gecko or blink. I’d be okay with a WebKit browser but I don’t have a Mac.
Servo is the one I follow in that space
Oh good, more rust! (j/k i don’t have the feverish hatred of rust that some people seem to)
You really don’t understand what a browser engine is, do you?
I do, in fact. I get that they are typically open-source, and I also understand how ridiculously difficult it is to create one from scratch. If LibreWolf or whoever want to make privacy focused browsers based on mozilla foundation or google’s work then that’s fine and I support it, but I’m personally curious if there are any mainstream browsers that don’t have any (or minimal) reliance on google and mozilla foundation. Someone pointed me towards an engine in development Servo which looks quite interesting! Hopefully there will be a browser based on it soon.
https://www.spacebar.news/servo-undercover-web-browser-engine/
At the start of the millennium, Internet Explorer used its own Trident engine on Windows and Tasman on Mac, Opera used Presto, some embedded devices used NetFront, Netscape had Gecko, and KDE made KHTML for its Konqueror browser. Those browsers eventually faded away or adopted a competing engine to simplify development. KHTML was the basis for Safari’s WebKit, which in turn became Chromium’s Blink engine, and Netscape’s Gecko engine became the foundation for Firefox. Opera ditched its custom Presto engine in 2013 and switched to Chromium, and Microsoft Edge made the same move in 2020.
This is a danger to the open web in more ways than one. If there is only one functioning implementation of a standard, the implementation becomes the standard. The web becomes to Google what Java is to Oracle. It also means the limitations and security flaws in Chromium affect most other browsers, which became a topic of conversation with Google’s recent Manifest V3 transition.
It would have been nice if Opera had released the source code of Presto
I figured you did. It’s the guy you were replying to that seems confused.
Oh shit my bad! Leaving the info up anyway, in case anyone else is wondering why only two major engines is a bad thing for the open internet.
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.
firefox is almostly completely dependant on google through ad revenue, hence thats why the sudden jump into AI, which google is trying to jam into all its services.
Overpaid CEO has more money than actual sense.
They all just do the same exact predictable thing. It’s always the shittiest thing for everyone but the “share holders”. Just automate them away and call it a day at this point.
Mozilla’s new CEO is a dumbass.
It’s hard to beat the last one, but he somehow managed to pull it off.
Then again, Mitchell Baker is still on the board of directors if I’m not mistaken, so it sounds like the rot is too pervasive for just one CEO to change.
Just replace it by ai
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.
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.
I would use a Firefox fork over Vivaldi simfly because of extensions (including uBO)
Just like everything in North America it’s about aquisition not retention.
Vivaldi is like the only tech company in the world that has come out and stated definitively “we will not use AI”.
I did exactly this a while back. And as a self protection mechanism I’ve just completely written off Mozilla products as free falling in the enshittification process. I don’t care enough to be disappointed any more, it’s much nicer this way.
Why do you say that tech savvy people are “most opposed to AI?” Don’t conflate “the membership of this small social media bubble called ‘technology’” with tech-savvy people in general. Lots of tech savvy people are developing and using AI, where else do you think it’s coming from?
The problem here is that we’ve got a small crowd with a strong opinion, constantly shouting their opinion to each other and making an unfriendly environment to anyone who doesn’t share that opinion. So of course it seems like “everyone” shares that opinion, you never see otherwise.
Most people in tech that I know hate AI, including devs. I know one manager who is gung ho for it but everyone is annoyed by him and he was already well known for going apeshit over whatever the latest tech buzzword is before the whole AI craze kicked off.
Anecdotal I suppose, but IMO, most people who are actually technical seem to treat AI with a good degree of skepticism if not outright disdain.
proving their point
Most people in tech that I know hate AI
Emphasis added. We all live inside social bubbles, if one wants to talk about what most people in general believe then one must use data from beyond that. Otherwise you’re going to get a very biased sample, since we generally choose to associate with people who share our own personal values.
I don’t disagree with using unbiased data, but where is yours?
Data for the claim that lots of tech-savvy people are developing and using AI? Some of the biggest tech companies in the world right now have an AI focus. NVIDIA, OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, they’re all making massive use of AI. If you want to discount “corporate” tech-savvy people, This page indicates 15 million developers are using GitHub Copilot. Linus Torvalds has spoken in favor of using AI to maintain Linux, if you’d like someone specific and big-name as an example.
the keyword word you missed was “unbiased”
of course the AI peddlers will peddle it and their employees would probably be fired if they did not toe the company line
on the otheer hand, that mit studyshowed 95v of them failed… I find it hard to believe people enjoy failing
So we’ve moved from “no tech-savvy people use AI!” to “lots of tech-savvy people use AI, but many of them fail to make it profitable!”
The Commerce Institute puts that 95% figure in perspective, about 65.3% of all businesses fail by their tenth year. That’s not focusing just on a particular industry that’s the most unknown and volatile one, that’s everything, including fields that have been well known and understood for decades. And I should also note, your source said 95% had yet to grow their revenue, not that 95% had failed - it’s only been a year or two for most.
Your own source provides some other bits of information that support my view, too. Just look past the bias in how it’s worded.
Previous tests show even the most advanced AI products successfully complete only about 30 percent of assigned office tasks.
Wow, only 30% of office tasks can be handled by AI? Clearly a useless technology, throw it away.
Or maybe 30% is actually quite an impressive number. Wouldn’t you like something that handles 30% of your routine work for you?
Gartner’s survey of 163 business executives found that half have abandoned plans to dramatically cut customer service staff by 2027.
So, half of them haven’t abandoned those plans.
Research from GoTo and Workplace Intelligence found that 62 percent of workers believe AI is “significantly overhyped.”
I don’t see a link to that research, but that means 38% don’t believe AI is significantly overhyped.
I never said everyone liked AI, just that lots of tech-savvy people did. I think 38% would count as null
Basically, you’re falling into the trap of assuming if something’s not perfect and not universally loved then it must be awful and universally hated. Communities like this reinforce that view, but the real world outside these digital walls is not like that.
tech bros and their employees lmao
and Linus has said some stupid shit over the years
AKA, tech-savvy people.
Those are blatantly not people, they aren’t even human.
Removed by mod
AI “engineer” shill says what?
Here in Lemmy, in my experience, this goes nowhere. You put it very clearly on your second paragraph. The small crowd with a strong opinion that thinks all AI is terrible in Lemmy is a bigger or at least more active group than the opposite. And with no ability to consider opposite points of view.
As a developer, most others I know of actually like the ai technology and use it as a way to analyze big amount of data quickly or as a starting point, while at the same time basically all hate the corporate AI side of things, specially idiotic managers and ceo-like asshats that keep pushing AI for all the wrong reasons and in all the wrong ways.
Fortunately the one saving grace of the Fediverse in this regard is that you can see both the upvote and downvote totals for a comment, not just the net difference between them. So even though it’s clear what the majority view is - “AI bad, everyone hates it, and you’re bad for suggesting it could possibly be otherwise!” - I can still see that there are a minority who appreciate my perspective as well. So I continue rolling that boulder up the hill, for the benefit of those who might otherwise only see the “nobody wants AI!” messaging and think it might be true.
Yeah, lemmy is really a hell of an echo chamber on certain topics. I see both pros and cons to AI, and that balanced view makes me literally the most anti-AI person in my social circle.
Librewolf, or Ladybird, or dillo, or links2 or lynx, or heck, even brave!
Luakit’s still a thing. Or vimb. Or qutebrowser. I miss uzbl. Uzbl was the best.
No need to use proprietary wrapped Vivaldi.
the same people who are most opposed to AI.
programmers almost exclusively use LLM
Only ever dealt with dog-shit programmers, huh?
an elitist response.
here’s actual data https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2025/ai
half use AI tools daily
Professionals show a higher overall favorable sentiment (61%) than those learning to code (53%).
Not elitist to say that people who use what are essentially weighted random word generators for programming, a career that requires one to know exactly how their code works in case it breaks, are bad at their jobs. Just like how it’s not elitist to say that generated images are not art, and that flying a plane into a building doesn’t make you a good pilot.
a career that requires one to know exactly how their code works in case it breaks
Using AI doesn’t mean that you lose the ability to reason, debug, or test generated code. All code merge should be peer-reviewed and tested
We’re not discussing images, nor planes.
The claim was
tech savvy people, the same people who are most opposed to AI.There’s data that to suggest otherwise. people who are technically inclined engage with AI more and have a more positive reception compared to less experienced users.
Unless you have additional data to support that they are in-fact “dog-shit programmers”, this appears to be an emotional claim colored by your own personal bias. Though if you’re a “pure” programmer who is better than the dog-shit developers I would love to see some of your work or writings.
Oh I get it now- you ARE one of those dog-shit AI vibe programmers.
if that makes you feel better, but i wish you responded to the original claim with data vs ad hominem. but if you’re so good can i view your github to learn how you program?
While AI use doesn’t guarantee loss of cognitive abilities there is growing research showing that it is likely.
I posted a response in another reply but thats for sharing something. still does not support the claim of dog-shit developers
CEO = bad
every. single. time.
