[HN Gopher] Mozilla downsizes as it refocuses on Firefox and AI
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Mozilla downsizes as it refocuses on Firefox and AI
Author : awkwardpotato
Score : 96 points
Date : 2024-02-13 20:34 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (techcrunch.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (techcrunch.com)
| beretguy wrote:
| > Mozilla will focus on bringing "trustworthy AI into Firefox."
|
| I hope they will give us ability to turn it off. Or at least
| LibreWolf will turn it off / remove it. I'd rather they add
| optional small subscription fee to support themselves if they
| have to than add AI or some other questionable functionalities.
| kbelder wrote:
| And the ability to turn off whatever guardrails they put on it
| in an attempt to make it trustworthy.
| creatonez wrote:
| They seem to be inclined towards the idea of running language
| models on your own computer, given Mozilla released a cross-
| platform runtime for llama that can make use of either the
| CPU or GPU. So I won't be surprised if it's swappable.
| Am4TIfIsER0ppos wrote:
| Predicting: swappable on "nightly" versions only and
| release versions are 100% "I'm sorry Dave I'm afraid I
| can't do that"
| noirscape wrote:
| That's more a Chrome thing than a Firefox thing.
| coryrc wrote:
| I see you aren't a Firefox Mobile user.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| No, that's a Firefox thing:
| https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/add-on-signing-in-
| firef...
| rtkwe wrote:
| Aren't those generally burned into the model itself so not
| really configurable?
| JohnFen wrote:
| I assume that they will. They've been better than most at
| making sure we can disable various things that some users find
| objectionable.
|
| The last thing that they need is the firestorm that would
| certainly erupt if they didn't include a way to keep this
| disabled.
| Dwedit wrote:
| There's already AI in there, see the current Translation
| feature.
| elric wrote:
| Perfect example of why this is a bad idea. There is no
| immediately obvious way to turn off this obnoxious feature,
| which insists on hogging part of my precious screen real
| estate. By default, it only has a poorly worded way to
| disable it for a single language, but no way to simply turn
| it off forever. (Yes, you can disable it in about:config).
|
| If I want something translated, I'll ask for it. Feel free to
| add a menu item or a button somewhere to do this, but
| randomly popping up door hangers really grinds my gears.
| zztop44 wrote:
| On the flip side if I navigate to a page I may not be able
| to read (due to the language being different to my browser
| settings), offering to translate it seems like a good and
| helpful thing. Certainly better than a button I don't know
| about buried in a menu somewhere I won't find.
|
| And if you personally don't like it, you can disable the
| feature in the settings. What's wrong with that?
| jszymborski wrote:
| Which, I might add, is entirely local.
| klyrs wrote:
| > I hope they will give us ability to turn it off.
|
| I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that.
| clumsysmurf wrote:
| Recently there was some discussion about Jetbrains pre-bundled
| AI-related plugin:
|
| https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/LLM-1973/Provide-the-po...
|
| Hopefully Mozilla will do the same, ship the AI functionality
| as a plugin and allow people to explicitly opt in if they want
| to use it. Its OK if they show it during on-boarding, as long
| as there is an option.
| rvense wrote:
| Is there any sort of corporate structure around one of the forks?
| There's no doubt in my mind that if it were organized somehow the
| community would be able to fund a few developers to work on
| Firefox alongside Mozilla.
|
| I don't want an aggressive split, but I'd like to be able to
| support the project. I've donated to Mozilla in the past but it
| apparently was not going to Firefox directly.
| mozempthrowaway wrote:
| You shouldn't donate. The donations don't go to MoCo which is
| the for profit subsidiary of Mozilla Foundation under which FF
| is developed.
|
| All the donations go to MoFo, where they barely covered
| Mitchell's salary and what was left went to her pet political
| projects. People are pretty unaware/misled about how Mozilla is
| structured/funded.
|
| The only way you can contribute to FF directly is to keep and
| use Google as the default search engine.
| JohnFen wrote:
| These truths are, in my opinion, a great tragedy. I'd
| absolutely pay for Firefox if I could, but I can't.
|
| > The only way you can contribute to FF directly is to keep
| and use Google as the default search engine.
|
| Which is a much greater cost than I'm willing to pay.
| offmycloud wrote:
| I would be willing to make a monthly donation, but only if I
| knew that it was going to the development of Firefox and/or
| Thunderbird.
| NoboruWataya wrote:
| An org like Mozilla making a real effort to bring open, privacy-
| focused AI to Firefox is interesting for sure. But I hope they
| don't get too distracted by the AI hype train.
|
| Interesting that they are still as focused as ever on Pocket.
| gnicholas wrote:
| Does Pocket give them the ability to create useful data for use
| in their AI efforts?
| autoexec wrote:
| It certainly gives them the ability to collect a lot of data,
| which is why I disable it on every install.
| throwawa14223 wrote:
| Can they get rid of AI? Blockchain was annoying trend but it
| wasn't wrecking products I actually used.
| pupppet wrote:
| The new CEO mantra...nobody got fired for pivoting to AI.
| jsheard wrote:
| Not yet, at least.
| chasd00 wrote:
| I was on a call this morning where a team had decided to
| break it to their leadership that genai was not the answer
| they thought it was going to be. I bet there's going to be a
| lot of that this year.
| __loam wrote:
| This is what is so frustrating about this technology.
| Everyone seems completely convinced this is going to be
| bigger than sliced bread but a year later, I haven't seen a
| truly good killer app. A year ago we had chatgpt, co-pilot,
| mid journey, and stable diffusion, and today we have
| basically the some products. I've seen a lot of bad code, a
| lot of boring prose, and a lot of bad art. Meanwhile
| there's people breathlessly yelling us we'll get agi in 5
| years.
| chmod775 wrote:
| > its leadership argued that diversifying its product portfolio
| beyond Firefox was necessary to ensure Mozilla's survival in the
| long run
|
| This always bugged me. Are they expecting Firefox to die? If that
| happened, there would be _little_ reason for Mozilla to exist.
|
| The project lives and dies with the browser. Having a "plan B" is
| complete nonsense and an unnecessary distraction.
|
| I'm glad they're shifting focus back on the browser.
| skywhopper wrote:
| Agreed. The goal was to create and maintain an open web
| browser. If the goal of Mozilla is now to ensure Mozilla
| continues to exist, that's a bad sign.
| wmf wrote:
| I hope the idea is for the profits from other products to fund
| Firefox but so far every attempt has failed.
| mozempthrowaway wrote:
| The other products are very unprofitable. FF profits actually
| fund everything else. Search deals on FF are over 80% of
| revenue yet less than half the company works on FF.
| jsheard wrote:
| The monkey's paw outcome is they re-focus on the browser, but
| follow Opera and Edge in pivoting to Yet Another Chromium
| Reskin, massively cutting their development costs while
| _technically_ remaining in the browser market. Hopefully it
| doesn 't come to that but I'm not ruling it out.
| Atotalnoob wrote:
| This would be very sad.
|
| One browser engine would be really bad for the web
| skywhopper wrote:
| Sure sounds like they haven't learned any lessons from past
| trend-chasing. They are shutting down their VR world and their
| Mastodon instance. This content-free AI promise just sounds like
| more of the same desperate grabbing for hype, while also cutting
| jobs and notably not mentioning any actual initiatives to prop up
| the core product and actual reason for Mozilla's existence.
|
| The main difference between the past hype-grabs and generative AI
| is that genAI is incredibly expensive. So long as Mozilla follows
| this pattern of chasing the latest hypewagon instead of working
| on its core product, they will continue to lose relevance. It's
| too bad.
| zuminator wrote:
| Not quite shutting down mozilla.social yet, just scaling back
| for now it seems.
| pavon wrote:
| Backing off of VPN, Relay and Monitor sounds like bad news. They
| are the Mozilla's only source of income if the Google search deal
| goes away. Mozilla's financial statements never detailed how much
| money they were spending on their different segments, so perhaps
| those projects weren't generating profit, and thus weren't worth
| keeping even though they brought in revenue. I can certainly see
| how it would be hard to compete with other business that are
| focused solely on that market, while Mozilla is trying to use it
| as a side-gig to fund Firefox.
|
| But they were at least an attempt to create alternate revenue
| streams and seemed like useful products that were complementary
| to Firefox. I am very skeptical that Mozilla will be able to
| monetize any AI integration they include, assuming they even
| build anything worth using given how far removed AI is from their
| existing competencies.
| mozempthrowaway wrote:
| It fluctuates a little bit but 80-85% of revenue comes from
| search deals with Google being the dominant one. Everything
| else has a lot of overhead because nothing is developed in
| house; it's just white labeled. VPN is Mullvad, Monitor is
| OneRep, etc. So even that 15% of revenue doesn't/barely covers
| all the product/marketing/etc personnel that work on those
| teams.
|
| Every quarter that segment is behind forecasts - pocket too -
| mostly because the forecasts are widely optimistic. It's not a
| viable business strategy to pursue them much further.
| dvngnt_ wrote:
| literally the only thing i've paid mozilla for lmao. let's see
| how this works out
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| [dupe]
|
| More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39361493
|
| Actual bloomberg report:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39361802
| krasin wrote:
| The new CEO, Laura Chambers, is an MBA and a former McKinsey
| consultant ([1]). I would not hold my breath about the future of
| Firefox.
|
| 1.
| https://www.linkedin.com/in/chamberslaura/details/experience...
| n2d4 wrote:
| Laura Chambers is only the interim CEO. In the original
| announcement post, it was stated that she would stay for the
| "remainder of this year", and Chambers later said that she
| would move to Australia in 2024 [1].
|
| [1] https://fortune.com/2024/02/08/mozilla-firefox-ceo-laura-
| cha...
| stefan_ wrote:
| Obviously she will. Jesus, that's about 2/3rds of the
| problems of Firefox right there.
| huytersd wrote:
| Oh, this is going to go the way of Meg Whitman and Marissa
| Meyer.
| __loam wrote:
| Maybe time to fork Firefox.
| zamadatix wrote:
| And then convince ~200 million people to use your browser so
| you can get the same bare bones level of funding via search
| deals Mozilla is having trouble sustaining on. Things do get
| in a progressively easier feedback loop after that though.
|
| I almost wonder if the Edge/Brave approach is the smarter
| approach. Build something on top of Chromium, trading full
| independence for the ability to focus on differentiation, and
| then if you ever show you can actually make a more popular
| browser you're free to take over/break away from/fork
| Chromium for full independence again at the end. Either way
| you have a tradeoff.
| JohnFen wrote:
| There exist a number of reasonable Firefox forks right now.
| msub2 wrote:
| While I always marveled at how Hubs survived the 2020 layoffs
| (which included the people working on WebVR/WebXR at the time),
| seeing it shutting down is a shame. We used it to run monthly
| meetups for the WebXR Discord for just about the last 3 years.
| Very curious what's going to happen to it now, whether it gets
| handed off to another entity (i.e. Firefox Reality to Igalia) or
| left to the community somehow.
| bluish29 wrote:
| What does scaling back investment means in this case, does it
| mean shutting down these services? Or does it mean that they will
| put it on maintenance mode? or just not care about it at all?
| mplewis wrote:
| What if they refocused on building an excellent browser?
| __loam wrote:
| Keep this shit out of my browser please.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| I will ditch Firefox the moment they introduce some shitty
| chatbot no one asked for. I'm already absolutely fed up with the
| constant problems, missing features and pages failing to work
| properly.
| piafraus wrote:
| So many people I know don't switch to FF because of missing tab
| grouping (and no, not a single addon gives the similar fast and
| nice experience). It's like number one feature and yet they waste
| time on stuff like this
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