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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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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.
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? 🫠
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.
deleted by creator
Oh ya? Where u gonna go? Chrome?
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.
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.
I use SeaMonkey as my usenet client. I prefer it to anything else for that.
It is great that it still exists.
Can it survive if Firefox goes down?
Ofc No. But waterfax might disable ai by default.
Ladybird 🤞
Yeah I’ve heard of it but is it even installable?
It’s slated for a early 2026 alpha. So it’s actually pretty close.
So no. The answer is no.
EU here is your chance! Fully fund Mozilla on the condition that they move to an EU country
And fire the CEO :)
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
AI “engineer” shill says what?
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.
While AI use doesn’t guarantee loss of cognitive abilities there is growing research showing that it is likely.
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?
“AI is untrustworthy, therefore you can use multiple AI services in our product.”
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.
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.
Overpaid CEO has more money than actual sense.
“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.
This is every Mozilla CEO in the last decade:
Just like I said in another post related to this, I hope this doesn’t kill LibreWolf, IceCat, and Waterfox.
Librewolf have put a post out a few days ago that they won’t add any AI stuff.
Waterfox is on the same page. As long as the browser doesn’t outright require it to functio0n, I think the privacy-focused forks will remain. Of course, it’s extra work to maintain divergent code, but this is worth it, IMO.
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.
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.
Check out Ironfox
I second ironfox
Zen Browser https://zen-browser.app/
They explicitly asked “for android phones”
Vivaldi for me.
It is based on Opera, but is nothing like the Opera company, does a really good job at blocking ads out of the box and is lighter in ram than FF android.
edit: Vivaldi also holds a zero AI policy. https://vivaldi.com/blog/keep-exploring/
but its closed source…
that wasn’t the question lol.
true, but thats a no-go for me. Who knows what that browser secretly does or what they could put in, well never know for sure…
I get the resentment for closed source and the love for FOSS, but just because it’s closed doesn’t mean it’s bad.
I’ve been a Slackware user since 1994 and if you’ve ever used sg3_utils or lsscsi, you’ve used my code lol.
I just cannot commit to fanboing like that as there’s reasons even today not to gnu everything. Vivaldi has a descent reason too https://vivaldi.com/blog/technology/why-isnt-vivaldi-browser-open-source/
Vivaldi’s core reason can be summarised as
when it comes to large projects that have been around for ages or are household names, people might not even notice the fork. But with Vivaldi’s relatively smaller footprint, we could be easier to overshadow, making our brand more vulnerable.
They put their brand before user security and sustainability. And still have the gall to claim to be ethical. Sorry but that’s absurd. If imagined how it looks from outside their firm, they might wake up. Instead, they’ll probably putter along for a while, then get bought or fail or change direction or something, and their browser will be lost like the Presto Opera before them.
None are so cursed as those who fail to learn from history.
They put their brand before user security and sustainability. And still have the gall to claim to be ethical.
Wait wait wait. Where does Vivaldi say that in any way? On the contrary, they’re pretty damned clear about
Their brand https://vivaldi.com/for-a-better-web/
Vivaldi is headquartered In Norway, proudly employee-owned, with no external investors pulling the strings. This means we make decisions that are best for you, not for shareholders’ profit. We build the browser we want to use, listening to our users to create a web experience that’s free, powerful, and uniquely yours.
Their user security https://vivaldi.com/privacy/browser/
We strictly protect the security of any and all personal information you provide to us while using Vivaldi products and services. We do not share or sell information to any third party and we proactively protect all user data from disclosure, with the only exception being if requested by legitimate law agencies with a court order.
and their sustainability https://umatechnology.org/why-vivaldis-anti-ai-browser-is-great-news-for-humanity/
So I’m sorry, but your own comment sounds absurd because it lacks any proof thereof.
None are so cursed as those who fail to learn from history.
No disagreement there, but Vivaldi isn’t repeating anything that’s been tried before. Vivaldi is an employee owned company that wants to succeed, wants to offer the best interface, security and features to the general public it can whilst simultaneously keeping itself uniquely true to its values and survival. Gee, so horrible of it to want to scrape a living for its employee owners. Ridiculousness indeed.
