This is the best summary I could come up with:
After installing a new interim CEO earlier this month, Mozilla, the organization behind the Firefox browser, is making some major changes to its product strategy, TechCrunch has learned.
Specifically, Mozilla plans to scale back its investment in a number of products, including its VPN, Relay and, somewhat remarkably, its Online Footprint Scrubber, which launched only a week ago.
Going forward, the company said in an internal memo, Mozilla will focus on bringing “trustworthy AI into Firefox.” To do so, it will bring together the teams that work on Pocket, Content and AI/Ml.
Mozilla started expanding its product portfolio in recent years, all while its flagship product, Firefox, kept losing market share.
And while the organization was often sharply criticized for this, its leadership argued that diversifying its product portfolio beyond Firefox was necessary to ensure Mozilla’s survival in the long run.
Firefox, after all, provided the vast majority of Mozilla’s income, but it also meant the organization was essentially dependent on Google to continue this deal.
The original article contains 234 words, the summary contains 166 words. Saved 29%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
They will be shoving AI / ML into Firefox. FFS.
Guess what, the local private translations feature depends on AI/ML. All this blind hate for AI is so stupid.
No. There are hundreds of entirely valid reasons to be wary of AI, especially the fact that the word AI has just turned into a corporate buzzword, when I hear that (insert thing) has had AI added to it, that can mean anything from a single static image that was made using “AI art” , to a large language model being used, or maybe they just grafted chatGPT to it.
Maybe if people and companies stopped labeling everything even tangentially computer related as AI I’d be less dismissive of it, but as it is now, whenever “AI” is mentioned in relation to a product it feels like a “corp wants to artificially increase percieved value by using latest trend” moment
At least the code is open, and Librewolf works great.
Edit: I’m going to rephrase this so as not to divert it on the misinterpretation of a particular case.
Librewolf doesn’t check anything, it just applies patches automatically. That’s why sometimes bugs happen, like corrupting the user profiles of all flatpak users a year ago; entirely the fault of librewolf for not updating a line of code, and not of any third party.
If you read into it, it was because the users Software Manager chose to downgrade from v108 > v107. I wouldn’t knock this on the Librewolf team, although I don’t use it, so there could be other issues I wouldn’t know about.
So Thunderbird is super dead this time huh?
Isn’t Thunderbird completely self-managed? I don’t think they have anything to do with MozCorp.
This just screams “stupid new CEO obsessed with trying to implement AI into everything”.
Or “fresh new CEO without baggage who sees where the future of the technology is heading.”
More like “new CEO knows how to chase the latest shiny fad”
Where tech is going, that couldn’t be more absurd. When you’re done bootlicking, that taste takes a while to clear out.
I wouldn’t dismiss this just yet. Mozilla has already been doing some open source AI work, specifically their speech offerings. If they invest in these and they get better I think we all stand to gain from having good text to speech and speech recognition available outside of Apple/Amazon/Microsoft/Google
Im so sick of AI being inserted into every inane thing. Next it will be AI lego, AI gaming chair, AI toilet seat. Its just so fucking droll at this point. There is literally no technology I want to use less than your idiot pet AI project you just came up with. Everything now has AI in it yet nothing feels revolutionary or interesting. Its all just worse. Everything is just worse but with AI in it. Its just CEOs piling shit on top of shit on top of shit and expecting something beautiful to come out the other end. Drives me nuts.
