Technology

Let me share some fun Mozilla facts about their previous CEO who has now stepped down to “executive chairwoman” last week.

She received 6.9 million dollars in 2022 and 5 million in 2021, 3 million in 2020.

Her replacement is an executive from AirBnB and eBay. We will find out how much both of these are earning in 2025 when they release their financial statements.

They fired 60 staff and are adding AI to their flagship program to earn more money.

Tell me this is a good thing.

Things to add to your product when you want to look hip and trendy, but dont have any real ideas how to make your product better:

• 1990s: visitor counter
• 1995: Popups
• 2000s: flash intros
• 2005: stock photography
• 2010: local weather widget
• 2015: share to social media widgets
• 2020: fullsize 4k background stock videos
• 2024: AI assistant

How about, and run with me on this, Mozilla stops trying to be Microsoft and Google and instead just provides the cleanest, most barebones-yet-privacy-oriented browser? Will they ever have market dominance? No, and they never will even with AI tools. Fuck AI and what it's doing to the planet and fuck all of the capitalists enshittifying The Last Browser.

We need a new Foundation willing to develop a fork.

uggggggggggh. I'm using Firefox because chrome is really going too far with it's manifest v3 garbage killing decent adblockere and Firefox is basically the only non chromium based option. Please for the love of everything that is holy. Just. Make. Your. Browser. Better. Don't need ai gimmicks. Definitely don't need to lay people off. You need to get back on track. Holy heck. This is the worst.

FUCKING NO MOZILLA YOU WERE OUR LAST FUCKDAMN HOLDOUT

Gonna have to pass on that one good buddy. Don't shit up Firefox.

You were the Chosen One! It was said that you would destroy the Sith, not join them! Bring balance to the browsers, not leave it in darkness!

why the fuck would I need an AI in a browser? 0 fucks given for this "feature". firefox is devolving into an edge.

Enshittification continues.

I wonder when Steam will go.

as Firefox is the only browser that can't trace its lineage back to Apple and WebKit

What a slap on Konqueror's face.

Whyyyy Mozilla? I want to love you, rally, but you wont let me.

Fuck sake. Sick of ai being added into everything. Please dont ruin firefox

What a sad day to be alive. I want to believe nothing bad will happen but this is scary

From what I understand, they're divesting resources that aren't in Firefox or at least involved in a trustworthy/open source AI project.

I see a lot of people in this theead are upset at this, but I'm tentatively excited. If they can pull off a good AI engine, especially built into the browser, that would be nice. If it had offline capabilities, that would be amazing.

Even if they can pull off a good AI solution that's not built into Firefox but it's offline, I'd be really excited. I'm not crazy about having especially detailed and intimate information being thrown to some vendor out there, not knowing where it's going. Modern AI can do some amazing things, but a lot of them reserve the right to have a human read whatever you put in them and warn you about that. This is too limiting to me for my preferred use-cases.

One concern I have is that Firefox and its engine are one of the last non-chromium browser platforms that have a household name and are FOSS. So to me, that has to be the first goal to keep healthy. Maybe the AI thing will help in this respect

This is a pretty effective ad for LibreWolf

I want a upvote for sharing, down vote the concept button. I hate it.

As much as I hate it, think it's a terrible part for a free, open, and secure web; it's probably a solid business move based on the hype.

The paradox of tech right now "we are going to build the most complex technology known to man into our product in the next 12 months. Are we hiring record numbers of people to get it done? No. We fired a bunch of people and everyone else will just have to be extremely hardcore."

So to recap, your choices are

1. One of 70 flavors of Chromium including the "privacy centric" Opera who run Chinese loan shark gangs for some reason, Edge which is Microsoft Chromium and aside from hardware acceleration capabilities is pretty meh, and Brave which despite operating their own separate search engine index are one of the most likely to sell your data and/or kidneys

2. Rapidly Enshitifying Firefox

3. Safari - no comment

4. Whatever the fuck Gecko is...

5. Tor Browser (for people with infinite time to wait for pages to load, or maybe just drug dealers)

That's a very good way of me leaving Firefox behind...

I hope the folks laid off land on their feet.

I'm starting to think FF is being deliberately run into the ground by the higher ups. It would be good to hear from some of the devs about their thoughts on all this.

This surprises people? Mozilla has always been Mozilla's biggest enemy.

Okay, well I'm ready to write a angry email now who's with me? Anybody know the best address?

I hate that they are laying people off. I do however want to use some machine learning powered adblock, for those harder to block ads. otherwise I don't feel like every app needs an AI assistant. It's bad for the Internet generally and for the power grid.

This is how you lose. I only use FF. I will switch to another browser if they enshittify with AI.

An exclusively locally running, opensource LLM might be a good thing though. In my amazing dreams where that's what they're planning to do.

Well guys we had a good run, free and open source software is officially over

Honestly, it sucks, but I expected hundreds in line with the other huge layoffs we’ve seen. It being 60 seems more reasonable

Been saying the writing is on the wall for their enshittification for months. On lemmy. Every time I end up with 20+ downvotes.

Eat me. Here it comes.

Still using Firefox until it officially sucks, but if you haven't seen it coming you've been willfully ignorant.

I expect a Ubuntu fork packaged with Firefox a la windows 98/IE as a paid OS in the next 5 years to try to undercut Microsoft. Or something. Idk the future.

It’s remarkable really. They are competing against another browser which users have to actively go out and find, then install.

Some people are used to how chrome looks and that’s powerful glue, of course, but very few normal users (ie almost none of us in here on Lemmy) needs things beyond what both Firefox and Chrome does equally well.

The simple difference in adoption rate is this: Google pushing Chrome through people’s use of Google. Diminish the need for Google, diminish people’s discovery of Chrome.

Also, I cannot understand why they need this many people. If 5% of their workforce is 60 people, they have 1200 people employed. I can almost guarantee that Google’s Chrome team isn’t 1200 people strong.

Maybe Firefox would be better being smaller and more nimble. Maybe they should stop pretending they’re a company and start pretending they’re a foundation (which is what they are). 300 people working on a core browser seems a lot of full time people, still, and that’d be a quarter of what they are today.

Also, Mozilla’s inability to produce a simple interface for embedding Firefox is simply baffling to me. The reason so many other skin-browsers are built on chromium is that it’s a LOT easier to embed.

I speak as someone who’s run Firefox since the day it was born.