I find it sad that most comments here just focus on the OPTIONAL AI possibilities.

And Google Chrome has absolutely no leg to stand on, there.

I ninja edited, but basically I just don’t see Firefox surviving without “ecosystem leverage” like WebKit, which is permanently embedded in the Apple ecosystem.

Or even Ladybird, which I imagine will be a permanent fixture on Linux systems.

So… however they organize it, Mozilla should take their browser dev experience there. But maybe they could keep Firefox the brand alive, and automatically shift users to whatever the new rendering engine will be.

Alternatively I guess Firefox could stay Mozilla and just adopt WebKit or Ladybird’s engine. “Merge” development efforts across different teams, so to speak, but keep the browser frontend separate.

The brand, development power, and bits from the Firefox codebase they could re-use.

More importantly, Firefox’s devs get to work on something that already has leverage in an ecosystem, eg WebKit for Apple or Ladybird for Linux.

…Do they?

I feel like we are very close to a cyberpunk future where Alphabet doesn’t have to pretend.

And I feel that’s quite dismissive. Mozilla doesn’t have enough development resources as-is, hence the whole original article. And abandoning Servo. And a bunch of other things. If money was a non-concern, they wouldn’t be here.

I mean, I’ve been messing with LLMs before Llama 1. I don’t hate chat bots in general. But I found the sidebar kind of stupid. It didn’t feel like a smart model when I tried, it didn’t have knobs to tune, and literally everything has a chatbot anyway.

There are cool Firefox forks built as “agenic browsers” to interact with LLMs in a structured way. But I think they should be just that: separate. A different program to open when you want an LLM messing with your browsing, with all the security hazards that entails.

Yeah.

I think they tried with a few services, like the VPN, but could never afford to go whole-hog with a stack like Proton.

…In fact, it’d be interesting if Mozilla merged with Proton, DuckDuckGo or something.

It’s a rigged game though. Mozilla’s struggling to even implement feature parity with the income they have, and being “good” isn’t going to place redirects to install Chrome over half of people’s phones and web browsing.

…Personally, I think Mozilla should dump Firefox.

And put everything they have into Ladybird, or maybe Apple’s WebKit.

Mozilla are playing a rigged game, and the only way to survive is get out of Google’s grasp. Practically, that means joining some other entity who already has dev money and a good project.

Chrome will inevitably become worse all by itself

But when?

Again, this isn’t Microsoft, whom you can rely on for prompt footgunning. Chrome is still very fast, reasonably lean, and developed with more resources than Mozilla.

Hence Firefox could die before Alphabet starts to really tighten the screws. That’s what I’m most afraid of, as the next step for Alphabet would be “depreciating” Chromium, closing the source, and killing all the forks.

I don’t want a world where the only viable browser is a Chrome binary.

I don’t think “more AI” is the right answer, but I also don’t know what I would do in their position.

Yeah.

I think “nontoxic” machine learning features are nice. You know, oldschool stuff. Firefox’s auto translation, as an example, is really cool, (AFAIK) completely local, and way better than Chrome’s equivalent.

But they poisoned that well with the yet-another-stupid-chatbot thing.

I dunno what Mozilla was thinking. It was so shitty. And now there will be a negative reaction to anything even ML-adjacent, even if it isn’t enshittified.

I dispute this as well:

“Don’t try to be like the other browsers, chasing daily active users. Get back in touch with your userbase and understand why they choose Firefox every day instead of just mindlessly picking one of the larger browsers like the majority of users. Then build a browser for these users, instead of pushing them away by doing what the other browsers (which they actively try to avoid) do.”

This is a nice sentiment.

But these aren’t the Internet Explorer days.

A browser engine with less than 1% market share isn’t going to be supported by web developers, and then everything about its development becomes an uphill battle. Major sites won’t work, and they can’t afford to fixe them all on an ad hoc basis. And again, it’s not like the IE days where the “default” browser is so unbelievably dysfunctional, the OS was more open, and the user base was a bit more technical.

I’d argue one of Firefox’s most important functions (alongside Safari) is to stop Chrome from becoming the de facto web standard, instead of the HTML spec.

And it’s been repeatedly demonstrated that “these users” the quote describes is an exceedingly small base. It’s reasonable for Firefox to want to expand that, instead of catering to an ever shrinking pie.

I do partially agree: Mozilla needs to touch some grass. They need to get sane. But there is no “option to pick” presented to most of the world. And if Mozilla caters to the same oldschool Internet users like they always have, Firefox will die.

I don’t have a good solution. I’m just arguing that sentiment is applicable to an era we are no longer in.

but it won’t make the money people happy

Aka pay the Firefox devs.

I understand Mozilla wastes a lot of income, but still. This isn’t a hobbyist piece of software, it’s an expensive, labor intense project that needs constant professional attention.

The income part isn’t trivial, unless they find some alternative source of funding (like the Ladybird project apparently has).

While problematic, yeah, I’d dispute that as Firefox’s market share problem.

Users like you and me, who are even aware of projects like Waterfox, are a minuscule, vanishing minority. We aren’t switching to Chrome anyway. But we aren’t representative of the web’s user base.

And if most Chrome users were sick of the Gemini spam… they’d have already switched to Firefox, where it’s toggleable and an order of magnitude less in-your-face. But they aren’t.

Same with Manifest V3. They neutered UBlock on Chrome long ago, yet that’s clearly not dissuading most Chrome users.

In short, if in-your-face-AI was a dealbreaker for most, Chrome wouldn’t be gaining market share.

If I was Mozilla’s CEO, I dunno what I’d do.

It doesn’t matter what Firefox implements; Google can spam instant “switch to Chrome” links in front of most of the world’s eyeballs. User couldn’t care less about privacy and adblocking performance, apparently. This isn’t Microsoft, and Mozilla is literally funded by Google as a token effort, so they can’t outdevelop Chrome nor attack it.

What are they supposed to do?

Yeah, Mistral is just… not very good anymore.

Even strictly compared to open weights models. Everything I’ve tried feels obsolete.

It’s still a leading long context model, IMO.

But I think it feels dumb because the default “harness” is pretty simple and dumb, more than the base LLM.

That, and it’s really awful at 1 temperature (which is its default).

Maybe some leadership is guzzling Kool-aid over how bad Google search has gotten? Because it leans on that pretty heavily, without many other tools.

At this point, it’s just insecurity about stuff not working right on Windows now.

To that point:

At the moment, on my dual boot desktop, hardware acceleration and video playback are busted in Chromium browsers on Windows. But it works perfectly fine in Wayland linux. And I don’t really know why.

This is fascinating to me, as the situation was reversed about a year ago.

And if I were Windows only, without years of experience under the belt to make Linux seem less daunting, I’d be feeling anxious about that.

Not that I’m a Linux fanboy: Windows is just better for some specific things. But still, I’m not going to either OS booth to complain.

Out of all “internet commenters who could not admit they were wrong,” this is quite high ranking in my memory.

I will remember you, friend.

Axios, as it’s known to do, doesn’t emphasize how absolutely fucking bonkers all of this is, but does its usual horse race nonsense, suggesting that if only…

That’s not fair.

For the heck of it, I’ll quote the whole article. It’s not that long:

…That’s it.

It’s just a bunch of sources.

That’s what journalism is supposed to be. The article author isn’t supposed to inject some heated take, they’re supposed to present what sources relayed, and let readers make the judgement. Anything beyond that is for opinion pieces.

And Axios didn’t suggest anything; the sources did.

In other words, that’s not Axios’s job.

And then we barrel towards regulatory capture, as the very biggest corporations can just lobby to their benefit.

The page touches on this:

When the YouTuber who exposed predators on Roblox brought them to light, the response was not to go after the predators, but to go after him.

We know these problems. If a YouTuber can find them, why can’t a company with billions of dollars, armies of engineers, and full control over their platform?

So I think govt should go after the most manipulative corporate offenders, but not create a situation where they can have so much control over individuals. In other words, no one should have that kind of manipulative power, and its the govt’s role to break it up wherever it pops up, not take control of it.

I mean, I think there should be a medium. Governments don’t need that power either.

In other words, I think this movement should be placing more blame on corporate lobbying and monopolies, too. But not let up on the censorship efforts from govts.

A little too corporate friendly here.

Not that I oppose the idea, but also, Big Tech wants a kind of narrower censorship… so they can be the defacto gatekeepers, and no one else.