Mozilla lays off 60 people, wants to build AI into Firefox
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/02/mozilla-lays-off-60-people-wants-to-build-ai-into-firefox/Open linkView original on lemmy.today676
Comments322https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/02/mozilla-lays-off-60-people-wants-to-build-ai-into-firefox/Open linkView original on lemmy.today
I don't see them joining anything?
I mean, let's be real, what major function has Mozilla implemented into Firefox that hasn't been opt-out? And no, UI doesn't count, I'm talking features.
The problem isn't the existence of AI. The problem is the inescapably of it and how, under Microsoft or Google, it will harvest your data whether you like it or not. When you tell them "fuck off, leave me alone, and keep my words out of your AI's mouth", they're not going to listen. Profit motive requires them to invade.
Mozilla is a non-profit, and they've long been very good about letting you opt out things, and listening. I'm not worried about them putting AI into Firefox, because I can be reasonably sure it will be optional, in a way I know the others won't.
I'd rather they didn't go chasing this car at all, to be honest, because they're not likely to catch it, but whatever. They're renewing focus on the browser and I'm taking that as a win.
I can't contest the first point cause I'm not a firefox junkie, so I won't.
What I will contest is that the existence of AI, or, deep learning, or LLMs, or neural networks, or matrix multiplication, or whatever type of shit they come up with next, I'll contest that it isn't problematic. I kind of think it is, inherently, I think it's existence is not great. Mostly because it obfuscates, even internally, the processing of data, it obfuscates the inputs from the outputs, the works from the results. You can do that with regular programming just fine, just as you can do most of the shit that AI does with normal programming, like that guy who made a program that calculates the prices for japanese baked goods and also recognizes cancer, right. But I think AI is a step further than that, it obfuscates it more. I kind of am skeptical of it's broad implementation.
For trivial use cases, it's kind of fine, but I think maybe use cases we might consider trivial, otherwise are kind of fucked, maybe. AI summary of an article? I dunno if that's good. We might think, oh, this is kind of trivial because the user should just not really trust what the AI says, but, as with all technology, what if the user is an idiot and a moron? They might just use it to read the article for them, and then spout off whatever talking points and headlines it gives them. I can't really think of a scenario where that's actually a good thing, and it's highly possible. It might make it easier to parse an article, like that, but I don't think that's actually a good or useful tool, it's just presented a kind of illusion of utility, most especially because it was redundant (we could just write a summary and have it at the top of the article, like every article on the face of the earth), and it was totally beyond our control, at least, in most circumstances.
Also, the Mozilla Foundation is nonprofit, but the Mozilla Corporation is not. The Foundation manages the Corp, which manages Firefox development. So depending on which one you're referring to, it might be a non-profit, or it might not be. In any case, the nonprofit is a step removed from Firefox development, which I think is an important side-note, even if it's not actually that relevant to whatever conversations about AI there might be.
Perhaps, comically, it is the perfect representation of the world as it is now: “knowledge” in people’s brains is created by consuming whatever source aligns with the beliefs that they think are theirs. No source or facts are required. Only the interpretation matters.
We already have AI in Firefox. And not gonna lie, offline (I.e. absolutely private) translations for webpages is pretty neat.
It’s really good but I do wish it supported more languages like Russian or Japanese. So far most of the times I have had to translate a page, Firefox didn’t support the language.
This. It has held back adoption for me. I want translations in my language of choice and it’s simply not one of the very few options of languages available. AI could help with this.
It's never too late to learn the language of enemy!
Да
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.
Mozilla has long been the most ethical player in this space (while still producing SOTA ML). All of their datasets/models are open source and usually crowdsourced. Not to mention, their existing work is primarily in improving accessibility.
ALSO, the other half of this story is that Firefox is becoming the primary focus again. Everybody's freaking out about the AI stuff but that's because they're only reading the headlines. The programs they've shut down are things like Hubs (Mozilla's metaverse platform), the VPN, and the sensitive data scrubber (which was using a third party service anyway).
As a software developer I am huge supporter of Mozilla's developer initiatives from Manifest V2 implementation to MDN. But it's also important to be realistic Mozilla has long had major money problems, and not the kind that giving them more would fix.
The Lunduke shit again? The one that takes offense to money being donated to support "politics" i.e abortion rights?
Take a look at the other trash he posts on his reddit profile. That blog is not a trustworthy source, by any stretch, and it's sweetly ignoring that he's not looking at Mozilla's spending alone, but of 3 separate entities that exist under the umbrella of the Mozilla Foundation.
I don't know anything about him, but the criticism of them spending money on donating to other charities rather than focusing on making Mozilla's core projects sustainable IMO is correct.
I don't think this is a money making move. The previous CEO was absolutely overly focused on monetization and this move is a step away from that. I should've addressed this more explicitly in the above comment but even for the players who actively monetize, AI is a money incinerator.
Cloud AI is, but for local AI, they only need to incinerate enough money to train it. That's none if they just end up using mixtral or something
I agree it's probably not for money making, that's my point, its instead that their management doesn't know how to spend money.
Ok. Mozilla was spreading itself too thin, spending resources trying to compete with multiple products against established brands that were already way ahead of them. They needed to focus down onto their core product rather than frivolously cast about.
And AI is the technology of the future, despite all the whinging and griping by commenters on the subject. It's being incorporated into the other major browsers, it's a must-have if Firefox is to remain relevant. I'm sure you'll be able to turn it off in the settings if you don't want it and if you're really concerned about getting AI cooties there'll be niche forks that are compiled without it.
And the ever increasing CEO wages and hiring of AirBnB/eBay executive as CEO? Their previous CEOs salary alone could've covered everyone of those employees fired.
That part's not good. I was addressing the "They fired 60 staff and are adding AI to their flagship program to earn more money." Part.
I know, I was more looking at the bigger picture.
Adding AI could be fine, but with the direction the leadership is going I can’t see it as good in this case.
They didn't hire the AirBnB/eBay executive to be CEO, they've been there for a while.
Also, you understand that people can work for companies without supporting their agendas, right?
I agree with you that Mozilla is spreading itself too thin. And don't get me wrong, I love Firefox and am a long time user. But they do need to understand their user base better.
They aren't going to become a sustainable business by copying more popular browsers. It's their differences from the mainstream that make them appealing as an alternative in the first place. I already don't like them foisting Pocket on me, which 100% should have remained an extension. I don't like the fact that Google is their default search engine, which goes against all their privacy messaging. I understand the reason is money, but that's kind of the definition of being a sellout isn't it? Their core values should always come first.
Fact is, those employees weren't fired for any good reason other than to hop on the latest tech trend. It's this sort of corporate "profit before people" bullshit that will erode any goodwill that people still have towards Mozilla. I couldn't give a fuck about adding a stupid AI driven chatbot to Mozilla, and neither, I imagine, do many of their current users. Honestly, I think "AI" has ruined the internet in a lot of ways already. It's already had a massive negative impact on the quality of search results, across all major search engines, because of all the low quality llm content that has been produced already, and it's only going to get worse. And you can't trust a single thing that comes out of those models, so what is even the point of them?
Sorry in advance for the old man rant lol.
As fair as I am aware, Mozilla so far is only thinking about integrating AI in relatively smart ways that leverage their limited resources well. (There were some rumours a while back about using ai locally to search your history and tabs, as well as (arguable if this counts as AI, but branding is everything) on device translation)
Then Mozilla, please, emphasize the results instead of saying "We're adding AI!"
They had 400m in cash in 2022, they don't have any sustainability issues.
I think the obvious worry being alluded to is the reason they had 400m in cash due to their arrangement with Google. Their primary sustenance comes from an entity actively seeking their destruction.
Yeah because we've never seen tech fads before heralded as the next big thing. If I could roll my eyes any harder we could harness that for power generation.
The tools I want to see integrated into Firefox already exist. I've used them. It's just a matter of putting them together with it.
You have no idea, any more than the rest of us. Like, please tell me you understand "____ is the technology of the future" has been said more times than it's ever been true.
The idea of AI is a technology of the future, but what we have growing now is not AI, not really, and this iteration can be just as big a flop as any other technology of the moment.
LLMs are what everyone dunks on, and “image generators are coming for our jobs! Think of artists! It’s not real art if a cheating machine does it!” is also a common cry.
But do any of those people even know about the new class of antibiotics a neural network trained to find patterns in protein folding discovered? Do any of them know about the accuracy of diagnosis that IBM Watson was able to make in cases of rare cancers, even when doctors didn’t see it? What about changes in weather prediction accuracy? Novel suggestions in materials science?
We are mimicking neural patterns, similar to the way our own minds work, to achieve pattern recognition and even extrapolate from them. And yeah, right now we’re brute forcing it, and we’re not even entirely sure how these relationships develop. It’s in its infancy, and growing fast.
This is technology considered the holy grail of computing. We have been chasing this concept since the 1940s. There are a million sci-fi stories about it and there are a million more attempts to make it work before one really stuck.
And now we’re at the beginning of it being practical and you think we’re just gonna go “eh it’s a wet fart like the Virtual Boy. Oh well, let’s make some new phones or something”?
No. This is literally the technology of the future. Within your lifetime (assuming you live a reasonable while longer) there will come a point when you won’t be able to buy a CPU without some type of neural engine in it.
And yes, people will (and already are) do horrific shit with it. It will fuck over a large portion of the white collar economy; a portion of which were told to go into the careers they did because they’d be safe from automation. “Get a degree and you’ll be safe!” they told us! Now they tell us “you better work at two different targets to make that payment, should have studied a trade!”
So the reason for skepticism and animosity is almost certainly the fear of being replaced; but look at how far these AI models have come in the last month alone. We’re already in “this is changing the future” territory and those things are just getting started.
Here's one of the big issues: Basically all of the AI is not even happening on your CPU, it's happening on the cloud.
And that wouldn't be in issue if companies stopped shoving "AI" into everything not originally built for AI.
And even that wouldn't be as big of an issue if the companies talked about the benefits of the new tech instead of just going "AI!!!!1!!! drops mic"
Dude. Take a chill in the bathtub and touch grass. AI is never taking my job, since it's physical labor since I removed myself from the computer industry 15 years ago. But as someone who studied AI and LISP (which was mired in the previous AI craze), it's not actually wrong to have animosity and be skeptical about the current AI. we're literally using the same techniques than we did 30 years ago. We've invented nothing new since the last AI fad. What is driving this craze is the brute force approach of massive parallel processing, not actual innovation.
There's been some minor refinement, so it's not exactly identical, but to use a metaphor... We've using more Lego bricks and different colours now to build our castles, but they're all still lego bricks. Nothing has fundamentally changed.
... and you should know by now that tech industry is funded by hype machine, so temper your expectations. Current machine learning techniques are limited and inefficient, it's not actually really a solvable problem with the current approach.
TLDR; LLMs are a super far cry from actually being "intelligent" and calling it AI is the equivalent of calling a wheeled electric self balance board a "Hoverboard".
This shit is just analog computing though, right? Like at it's base, we're just reproducing analog computation in a digital environment and then we're framing that in a million different ways, like we've been doing since the seventies. We've actually had this shit since the first computers, which were analog. The whole reason we moved to digital, though, is because the results were easier to break down, parse, and we had control over every step of the process to confirm it was correct, and it was going to be correct every time. A clearer sense of limitations and constraints, basically.
Now I'm not entirely against analog computing as a matter of fact, right, in fact I think it can be pretty cool if we recognize it for what it is, but at the same time I can't help but think that the level of hype around it is fucking insane. Primarily because it's not easily controllable or reproducible. Not in the sense that we're gonna somehow invent a rogue AI that will kill us all, or whatever garbage, but in the sense that, while you can get easily reproducible results (such is the nature of computation), it is very hard to control what the output is of a given neural network. You can process loads of information extremely quickly, but, like, what use is that if I don't know whether or not the solution is correct, or if it's just a kind of ballpark figure? That's the main issue.
Again, fine if we recognize it, but I don't think we're really close at all to just like, randomly inventing a rogue consciousness. We're not anywhere close to that, from what I've seen. We're still barely good at image recognition and generation in an actually complicated environment, and even then it's still pretty hard to get what it is that you specifically want, partially because the hype is driving so much development at this point, and the implementation is bunk and, again, kind of uncontrollable. Venture capital jumping down this thing's throat has partially blocked it's airway, as I see it. Still a useful technology, potentially, but a million stupid tech demos and image generators for nonsensical memes that we can flood everyone with is the dumbest shit imaginable, and even dumber than that is the level of venture capitalists I see that want to somehow monetize that.
And so I have to ask, right, if I want a robot to sort through the different colors of little plastic beads, right, do I get a large language model on that, or do I just run a pretty basic and more efficient algorithm that just narrows the parameter of beads to a certain color, as recorded by the camera, and then that's it? Do I want to translate a sentence with AI, or do I want to just manually run a straight word to word conversion that maybe changes based on a couple passes I'm gonna run at it to check whether or not it contextually makes sense with something like a markov chain? Trick question, they are both the same approach, AI has just done it in a way where I could apply a kind of broader paintbrush to the thing and get my results a little faster and with a little less thought even if I have less control over it.
The entire discussion is to distract ourselves from the raw truth:
Fax machines are the technology of the future.
Fax machines will outlive us all. AI and VR will reach their heyday, then wane with years and be replaced. But whatever replaces them will sit quietly in the shadow of the everlasting Fax machine.
Don't forget that Mozilla even had a Metaverse instance, chasing the VR fad, only to turn around and chase the latest trendy subject.
The answers to both of those things depends very heavily on the details. I think focusing on their main products is a good thing, but adding AI sounds like one of those likely terrible decisions. We definitely need privacy friendly & open source based AI though, in all areas, so I hope this is Mozilla pushing for something sensible here.
$6.9 million dollars?
Nice.
Ni.ce
You're right. Mozilla is the devil. Everyone go to the better option in Silicon Valley for web browsing....
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Can you tell me what they were doing at either of those companies, or what they've been doing at Mozilla since they were hired there? Have you done any actual research into this, at all, are you just assuming that because you saw two shitty companies on the resume, they must be a champion of those shitty companies?
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:
1995: animated gifs, , guest books, site rings!
"Under Construction" GIF
I'm not sure if you remember, but site rings were what you used instead of Google. They were useful.
And I've seen some guest books with lots of people at some point in my childhood, but about half a year after that everybody firmly chose in favor of hierarchical boards.
And I don't share that hate for , it served the purpose of showing you a long line in a small space, implicitly saying that it's secondary temporary information, a bit like on TV.
And what's wrong with animated GIFs, animation is nice.
You forgot about blockchain and NFTs.
Remember all those IE toolbars?
I got enough installed once to fill the whole screen.
Ugh...please don't remind me.
I miss guest books tbh
They would be abused by spam bots in an instant, even before you could write your own "welcome to my guestbook" post.
So you've never had one of those bot blocking capcha things?
And yet Microsoft added a weather (and bullshit) widget to windows in like 2020
I suppose many people were already using a third-party Aero widget for weather forecast since Windows 7.
I know I did.
I actually liked those.
These could be used to create right atmosphere.
Back then I hated those, but maybe showing local weather on desktop is not such a bad thing.
Hate. Hate. Hate.
It really grinds my gears. Why does my bank insist on installing an app to approve transactions, and why does that app have a huge background video playing every time i open it? It really should consist of an MFA code generator.
2015: share to social media widgets on porn sites
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.
A browser could be top dog if it was just less shitty than the others, like the Brother printers, that print without bloatware and mob tactics of HP.
We want a browser that just browses.
But what about AI ? It has to be everywhere! Somebody please think about adding AI to Firefox! I need it to do ????????????
/s
At this point the only thing that could save Firefox is a rewrite
In Rust, right?
RIGHT?!?
No! Not again!
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.
AI will be great for translation of webpages locally instead of sending content over the wire
I can get behind this if everything is processed locally. Let my computer do the computing and stop harvesting my data, internet
Firefox already has that as a built-in feature on desktop version.
If the only use case is translation, that's probably not a good business case.
That's not the only use case. It could read a 400 page pdf locally and summarize it for you, answer questions and find which slide the data you want is on.
The use cases are only limited by how powerful the AI is
My brother, I weep with you and agree with angrily gritted teeth at all your words.
its* manifest v3 garbage.
FUCKING NO MOZILLA YOU WERE OUR LAST FUCKDAMN HOLDOUT
Gonna have to pass on that one good buddy. Don't shit up Firefox.
why the fuck would I need an AI in a browser? 0 fucks given for this "feature". firefox is devolving into an edge.
Nowadays we are supposed to need AI everywhere. I'm waiting for my AI bidet so that I can chat with it when I do my business.
Fuck sake. Sick of ai being added into everything. Please dont ruin 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!
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.
Votes are meant only to increase or decrease visibility, especially on Lemmy where karma doesn't exist.
still, it'd be nice to have a "upvote, but fuck this content" button
gotta add emoji reactions on posts
The "upvote good, downvote bad" mentality needs to die. As others have said, the arrows are to promote/reduce visibility of content. Whether you agree with the content of the post should be irrelevant.
People have been saying some variant of this at least as far back as Slashdot in the late 90s. Nobody has come up with a viable way to change peoples habits.
Instead of fighting it, what can we do knowing that this is how it works?
New idea I've just come up with, we make it so, before upvoting or downvoting something, you have to press a button, and then wait at least a minute, or, better yet, solve a captcha, and then you don't even have to have accounts anymore and that takes about a minute. The only people upvoting or downvoting will be those who are really reflecting on what it is that they're doing, or the people who are really really committed and pissed off about something. I'm sure the latter won't happen like, ever.
That's precisely how it's being used now though. People don't want things they don't like to be seen, so they downvote.
Obviously. I've just got two emotions about the content I want to show.
I think maybe that's exactly how people are using it, it's just that most people aren't thinking "oh, well, this post made me a little mad or uncomfy, but I like the content and discussion that it's spurned, so I'll toss it an upvote". I think most people are more inclined to go "THIS POST MADE ME MAD! GRUG DOWNVOTE!". It doesn't even really not make sense, it would be kind of insane to spend like, even just a minute, thinking consciously about every single upvote or downvote you make, it would take a million years for anyone to ever upvote or downvote anything, and a lot of people would just not engage unless they were really committed, which doesn't necessarily map to their level of discernment, but might just instead map to how mad people could get over a given thing. Plenty of people could get mad enough about a thing to sit through a minute long wait period to downvote something.
Think of the up vote button more as a "this information is worth spreading" button than "I like or agree with this content".
🤦
Whyyyy Mozilla? I want to love you, rally, but you wont let me.
You may be in an abusive relationship with your browser. 💔
Enshittification continues.
I wonder when Steam will go.
It'll go when they go public.
That's the downfall of every company
i literally dont open the steam client anymore, that's how bad it is, it regularly consumes an ENTIRE gigabyte of ram doing literally nothing in the background, the UI is buggy, messy, and just generally hard to navigate. It's also just not a very good platform, steam doesn't have a particularly good linux release binary.
I actually cannot stand steam anymore.
"Doing nothing" is probably downloading an update. There's also a difference between reserved RAM and actually used one.
For example .NET applications grab RAM when they need it, but they don't just free it afterwards if not necessary (Like it needs 1 GB, uses that, but when the work is done your task manager keeps showing 1 GB). This helps performance, if the application needs RAM again a short time later it's already reserved and ready to go.
The whole behavior changes when Windows is low on free RAM, then applications are forced to free up their reserved RAM so you don't start swapping too much.
Overall this means: The more RAM your system has the higher the perceived RAM usage of your system. Unused RAM is wasted RAM and it's easy to free up some if you actually hit the limit. As long as your RAM is not full applications will happily use more and hold onto it to be more responsive.
everybody says this in response to my statement. Steam is doing NOTHING. I've checked, it's not downloading an update, it's not pre compiling shaders, it's not caching them, it's not doing ANYTHING. I don't know if people just don't understand how obscene this is, or think im just wrong.
Heroic, a launcher for both epic games, and GOG. idles similarly to steam uses a bit less ram though, launches multiple times faster, and is much more usable. And this is ANOTHER web app.
I use linux, it reports as used ram, not cached ram. Again, im not wrong. I understand the concept of caching ram, i understand the concept of actively used ram, this is not cached ram. That's also not a very complete explanation of ram caching, ram caching helps in the event that you use that same information, that was already cached. For example, you open a game, or a project, and then close it, it's pretty likely that some of that will be cached, so that way when you open it again, it launches quicker (particularly if you open and close it multiple times)
again i use linux, i literally hand formatted my swap partition, i understand how this works. Also generally, how swapping works, is that it actually swaps cached ram into swap, and only upon swap being filled or almost full, does it actually start to clear cached ram. This may not be the default behavior on windows though, since solidstate drives handle different these days. But this is the default on linux (configurable obviously)
The last tidbit is not quite true, it's true to a point, your system will idle at a higher memory usage, the fundamental problem here is different, actually unused ram is wasted ram, having too much ram, does actually just waste ram. (though im sure linux would absolutely love to use it for cache) Caching everything is an obscene proposition, considering that most people don't have a lot of ram. Chances are, if you have 16 gb of ram, and upgrade to 32, you will see a bump in max used ram, and overtime cached ram. However when we upgrade from 32 to 64 in this same scenario, you probably won't notice a change at all, except for the outliers in the data. Though i suppose you might cache more things, but at that point it really doesn't matter tbh.
It's compounded by applications being heavily bloated and stupidly non performant, i would argue it matters more to have more efficient usage of ram application wise, than it would be to have better ram management OS wise. This should be fairly simple to understand why. An application using 1GB of memory, when in reality it should be capable of using as little as 250MB for instance, is the single worst form of wasted memory you can possibly create, because that memory CANNOT be used for anything else. Period, until the application is no longer running.
That said, again to reiterate my original point here, steam on idle, closed, in the background, not in the foreground, no updates, no game updates, etc... Consumes an entire gigabyte of ram. Why? Because the web front end runs at ALL times, for some reason. Steam is running an entirely separate web browser installation, 24/7 because, why not i guess? Fun fact, you used to be able to disable it under linux, and steam ram usage would drop to under 200MB.
Here's another funny pain point of ram caching, when dedicated applications like discord, and steam, start using web backends, you compound this with software bloat, they all use a web backend, and instead of running on a single web browser like all of your tabs, they now run in THREE separate web browsers, thats THREE times the idle wasted ram, because you have three separate web browsers, all running, and all individually sandboxed. This is actually just bad ram management, inherently. It's more secure i suppose, provides a development benefit, technically. But to the end user, and the ram itself, harms it actively.
Ah, I didn't expect it to be actually used RAM. Maybe this is a Linux issue with the Steam build then? Here is my Windows 11 task manager, Steam just downloaded 10 different game updates (so did plenty of work) and is now idle:
In total 516.5 MB RAM on a machine with 32 GB (22 GB free at the moment), if there was any pressure on RAM usage it would probably go down further.
Either way, since upgrading to 32 GB RAM nearly a decade ago I haven't had a single issue with RAM usage (While with 16 GB I actually had games in the past where I ran out of memory). So it's no big deal as far as I'm concerned and if I'd actually run any applications that needs tons of RAM I'd quickly upgrade to 64 GB and be done with it.
The only way this would be annoying is on low-end machines, like 4 or 8 GB RAM in total, but those have plenty of issues anyway in regards to games (otherwise why would you install Steam?). On a high-end machine complaining about 1 GB of RAM is a waste of time in my opinion, there are a ton of better topics you can rage at.
it could very well be a linux build issue, it wouldn't surprise me honestly. The main telling thing for me though is that heroic uses the same if not more ram, and is actually many times more performant.
My main problem with the ram usage is that steam takes equally as long to launch as it does to boot a game, which is super annoying, not including any updates it hasnt performed yet. Heroic launches faster than my web browser does, even though its literally an electron app.
I wouldnt really care how much ram it used if i could just close it when i was done with it, and have it go away, but it's such a mess that's not really feasible.
The whole "just buy more ram" is not really a solution im a fan of. My system has 16GB. which is fine most of the time, it gets stretched sometimes, most of that ram is used by browsers, (because three different containerized browsers run simultaneously for some reason) so my idle ram quickly becomes 8GB. 8GB is still a lot of available ram though, if steam didn't use an additional gig on top of that it would only be beneficial. Maybe i'm just too jaded in general. But saying just get more ram is kind of like saying "just repair a cracked back glass on a phone" When i never wanted to have a piece of glass on the back of my phone which could get broken in the first place.
Although to preface this, i AM a linux user, and i can routinely enjoy a machine with 4GB of ram through the magic of non shit software. i3 + debian cooks. Idle ram usage under 100M is trivial when you aren't running any bloat. In fact, my server actually on average, uses less ram than my workstation. It's probably sitting at like 4GB util right now, running a handful of services, and a handful of game servers.
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
People read the headline and get angry, then want to tell everyone how angry they are. It's a badge of honour - look guys, I'm also angry.
Reading into their AI plans - it's to be run completely locally using only the data you want to give it, and it doesn't send info back to Mozilla.
Now, personally, my biggest issues with AI is data collection and where the training data comes from. It seems for FF, neither of these will be problematic, so I don't see the issue.
Training data could still be an issue, but if anyone is going to do it right it’s Mozilla.
Though, it's tough to pull from the headline/discussion this pivot is explicitly meant to refocus on the browser.
As far as the AI stuff goes, Mozilla has long been the most ethical player in this space. All of their datasets/models are open source and usually crowdsourced. Not to mention, their existing work is primarily in improving accessibility. It's really hard to see how this is a bad thing.
If they just built a browser and started acting like a foundation, I’d support them in a heart beat. As it happens today, I feel like I’m pouring money into a set of holes that neither I, nor seemingly the whole world, has much interest in.
There is no such thing as a good AI engine… all I really want from any AI engine is the ability to watermark everything it outputs as generated by an AI so it can later be filtered out when it's discovered to be inaccurate or just simply plagiaristic.
Why has opposition to AI become so ideological? I had to show my dad how easy it is to unintentionally induce very confident hallucinations in Google Bard when it was giving him false medical information, but that doesn't make it any more useless than using a search engine in general. The only difference is rather than blindly trusting a "reliable" site, you instead have to think critically and investigate content. I personally find AI most useful in giving me the names of solutions to problems, allowing me to more effectively search for information on them.
Honestly, a search engine companion is probably its least offensive case, you're correct. Mostly, it makes me so mad because they are polluting our entire collected knowledge base, because there is no way to watermark anything as AI-generated (especially when it's text, not images) which means that every search you make from here on out returns worse results. It's like being forced to share the road with self-driving Teslas because the self-driving car companies (especially Tesla) have made us all involuntarily part of their beta test.
The "screw everyone else trying to use the same public resource" mentality is out of control.
The thing is all those SEO bait articles existed long before modern LLMs, they just filled in templates basically. I agree though I am a bit worried that it will get worse now.
I mean you're also part of testing a human driver.
Yeah, but that's unavoidable. Whereas, Tesla and Waymo, etc getting to use our roads for self-driving testing is just our government not doing their job to protect the roads adequately, IMHO. This is veering way off topic, but I just recently watched a video that had stats on Teslas and the fact they're like 8.2x more likely to be in a crash than a standard level 2 car driving system.
What a slap on Konqueror's face.
And text only browsers too.
I don't really see it this way it's just marketing. Saying "all other browsers descend from big bad corporate Apple" is scary, saying "all other browsers descend from another open source project" is meh.
"It's all KHTML", I heard.
You have a point. But still, they could have added an "ackshually" footnote or something.
Unfortunately, KHTML was discontinued in 2023 (according to Wikipedia)
That's quite the bummer. But still. Saying that almost all browsers can trace their lineage to Apple and Webkit is technically correct, but it's just a half-truth. As Apple and Webkit were once based on KHTML.
I mean yes no kinda Konqueror simply accepted a bunch of downstream patches, including a name change.
...more or less. It could for a long time use all three of KHTML, WebKit (fork of KHTML) and QtWebEngine (Blink wrapped for Qt, that is, a fork of WebKit), they recently removed KHTML support because noone was updating it and it hadn't been the default for ages.
If they hadn't implemented multi-engine support in the past they probably would've switched over to "whatever Qt provides" right-out, it's KDE after all. Ultimately they're providing a desktop, not a web browser. Back in the days they did decide to roll their own instead of going with Firefox but it was never a "throw project resources at it" kind of situation, there were simply KDE people who felt like working on it. Web standards were a lot less involved back around the turn of the millennium, and also new and shiny. Back in the days people thought that HTML 4.01 Strict and XHMTL would be a thing that servers actually would start to output instead of the usual tagsoup.
If you're that kind of person right now I'll point you in the direction of Servo. No, Firefox doesn't use it and it's not a Mozilla project any more, Firefox only incorporated bits and pieces with Quantum, the rest is still old Gecko.
What a sad day to be alive. I want to believe nothing bad will happen but this is scary
I've been trying Arc browser that has a bunch of AI shoved in it and.... It's actually kinda nice. I think Firefox COULD possibly not fuck this up. Before you down vote me, I too believe that Firefox would be better off focusing on the core browser experience. And I really hope they have a good solution to AI being all cloud based right now. Like having a lightweight local model. This is why I was glad Arc was trying it, not Firefox.
I agree, AI can be good for a browser, which is why I still have some hope. We just have to wait and see
but its open source so someone can just fork it
This is a pretty effective ad for LibreWolf
Gonna check it out. Is it foss? Didn't find it on fdroid
Ahh, not available for android
Mull is a good one for Android.
Yeah desktop only, as it stands today. As a person that only uses my phone to tide me over between PCs, I didn't really think of mobile.
DuckDuckGo browser is available for android
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.
In theory, that sounds amazing.
In practice, it will most likely need to send the contents of your browser to some third-party server. No, thanks.
(Unless it's crowdsourced, like the first person to visit a page gets dinged, but then the next persons just downloads the set of rules instead of uploading content.)
Privacy preserving federated learning is a thing - essentially you train a local model and send the weight updates back to Google rather than the data itself....but also it's early days so who knows what vulnerabilities may exist
Oh interesting!
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."
They're refocusing on Firefox and continuing the ai stuff they were already doing. They fireded people who were working on fediverse and metaverse platforms. Did you even read the article?
Ugh? It's far from complex
Okay Mr. Robot.
It's literally a marketing term for a bunch of structured algorithms at this stage - not some sentient witchcraft
It's definitely not sentient but to call it simple is definitely inaccurate.
I guess the point is that its complexity is overrated, but still definitely not 'simple'.
... It is simple, the idea exists since 40y ago, it's just being done at scale
Edit: make it 80 actually
I bet I know much more on the topic than you, but please enlighten me on which part of this is complex?
The core concepts of DNNs are taught in high-school, and putting them together can done by a Bachelor student. Shit, people often advise writing a NN libraries as a good learning exercise when picking up a new programming language.
I think mathematically illiterate people assume that incredible results necessarily imply complexity, but that's simply not the case here. Or the idea that unknown things are necessarily complex, maybe.
The main reason DNNs are popping up is because we finally have the hardware for it. And the second reason is that tech companies have the resources (both financial and in terms of available data) to throw at it.
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.
oh hey it's you! I actually thought about your comments as soon as I saw this headline. I switched from Firefox to brave a few years ago, then recently switched to waterfox as they are again independent of system1 like before. the browser itself removes a lot of unnecessary Mozilla integrations and also reverts the proton UI. maybe forks like this or Librewolf are the future for this browser?
Ah, the chromium approach.*
:D
No, I think you're right. (I think people will strip down Firefox and those strip down versions will probably persist to be the ideal browser for years to come)
*I am aware that there is a difference here
That's not the chromium approach. That's the Phoenix (a fork of Netscape Navigator) approach.
Of course, Phoenix ended up becoming Firefox.
If you don't mind me asking What is the difference?
Willfully ignorant until the end. single browser for everything will be worse for sure
That's a very good way of me leaving Firefox behind...
To go where, though? Lynx? Everything else is Chromium and that's not much better.
Am smelling a Firefox fork. Though if AI is anything malicious you can rest assured Debian folks would declaw it.
Librewolf. If all else fails I'll pop my old Emacs config and browse whichever websites I can there
To a Gemini reader. Kristall is nice. Lagrange is ... interesting.
Librewolf is a nice fork of Firefox
If the past is any indication, it'll either be off by default or you can turn it off. So maybe it isnt' all the drama that people make it sound like.
But it's a hellishly expensive thing that seems to not attract enjoyment from current Firefox users, and seems unlikely to bring new users, and (again) seems to be prioritised over other things that could better use the money, like developers, so...
Why.
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.
And I’m still waiting for them to open source Pocket. Silly me.
I'm still waiting for them to make it an optional extension… oh wait.
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?
they have a mastodon instance, and many official accounts with job titles.
browse mastodon.social
I gotchu fam.
[email protected]
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.
What if you don't have a decent graphics card? Wait 5 minutes for your URL completion to finish?
You can run a 7b model on cpu really fast even on a phone.
Using an LLM is quite fast, especially if it's optimised to run on normal hardware
Decent models are huge; an average one requires 8GB to be kept in memory (better models requires something like 40 to 70 GB), and most currently available engines are extremely slow on a CPU and requires dedicated hardware (and even relatively powerful GPU requires a few seconds of "thinking" time). It is unlikely that these requirements will be easily squeezable in current computers, and more likely that dedicated hardware will be required.
I don't think any inference engines have actually been optimised to run on CPUs. You're stuck with 32-bit floats but OTOH that just means that you can do gigantic winograd transformations with the excess precision, needing far fewer fmuladds in total and CPUs are better at dealing with the memory access patterns that come with transforming the convolution. Most people have at least around 1TFLOP of compute in their CPU (e.g. a Ryzen 3600 has that much) that's not ever seeing the light of day. About a fifth of what an RX 570 has, it's a difference but not a magnitude and you can run SDXL with that kind of class of card (maybe not the 570 dunno about software support but a 5500 works, despite AMD's best efforts to cripple rocm).
Also from what I gather they're more or less doing summarybot for your browsing history, that's not a ChatGPT or Llama-style giant model you can talk with.
Also to all those people complaining: There's already AI in firefox, the translation models are about 17MB per language pair, gzipped.
ONNX Runtime is actually decently well optimized to run on CPUs; even with large models. However, the simple truth is that there’s really no escaping that Billion+parameter models need to be quantized and even pruned heavily to fit in memory and not saturate the CPU cache so inferences/generations don’t take forever. That’s a reduction in accuracy, so the quality of the generations aren’t great.
There is a lot of really interesting research and development being done right now on smart quantization and pruning. Model serving technologies are improving rapidly too—paged attention is a really cool technique (for transformer based models) for effectively leveraging tensor core hardware—I don’t think that’s supported on CPU yet but it’s probably not that far off.
It’s a really active field and there’s just as much interest in running huge models on huge hardware as there is big models on small hardware. I recently heard of layerwise inference for CPUs; load each layer of the network to the CPU cache on demand. That’s typically a bottleneck operation on GPUs but CPU memoery so bloody fast that it might actually work fine. I haven’t played with it myself, or read the paper all that deeply so I can’t really comment more than it’s an interesting idea.
Sorry but has anyone in this thread actually tried running local LLMs on CPU? You can easily run a 7B model at varying levels of quantization (ie. 5 bit quantization) and get a generalized prompt-able LLM. Yeah, of course it's going to take ~4GB of RAM (which is mem-mapped and paged into memory), but you can easily fine tune smaller more specific models (like the translation one mentioned above) and have surprising intelligence at a fraction of the resources.
Take, for example, phi-2 which performs as well as 13B param models but with 2.7B params. Yeah, that's still going to take 1.5GB RAM which Firefox wouldn't reasonably ship, but many lighter weight specialized tasks could easily use something like a fine tuned 0.3B model with quantization.
Yes, I did. And yes, it is possible. It's terribly slow in comparison, making it less useful. It very quickly devolves into random mumbling or get stuck in weird loops. It also hogs resources that are actually used by other tasks you may be doing.
I mainly test dev AI solutions, and moving from 1B to 7B models made them vastly more pertinent. And moving from CPU implementation (Ryzen 7 3700X) to GPU (RTX 3080 Ti) made them fast enough to be used as quick completion and immediate suggestion without breaking workflow, in addition to freeing resources for IDE, building tools and the actual software being run, while running it on CPU had multi-seconds delay, which made this use case completely useless.
yeah, CPU vendors will love the increased sales thanks to an even more resource hogging shitty web browser
This is how you lose. I only use FF. I will switch to another browser if they enshittify with AI.
Which browser is not going to have AI?
Netscape Navigator!
Vivaldi recently posted this -vivaldi-wont-allow-a-machine-to-lie-to-you.
See also vivaldi community
Ungoogled Chromium
the ones worth using, of course
That was an empty answer.
I assume there'll be some niche little fork for the die-hards for whom clicking a button in the settings to turn off the features they don't like isn't enough.
Ok. You're entitled to have your own opinion, as I do.
Problem is that the anti-AI folk don't want me to have the option to have AI in my browser of choice.
Not me, though. You want your AI browser, and I want my "dumb" browser, of course they can coexist
Lync?
you meant lynx, I suppose? it's still useful sometimes... last time I needed it was last year, when I did a bad nvidia driver install
edit: I meant elinks not lynx
Yes, Lynx is the one I meant. Haven't heard of it nor seen it since university in the early 90's so I thought it would be fitting here.
Why though? I’ve pointed out elsewhere, a browser is one of the few places an LLM makes sense. Especially if it’s local.
Too late Firefox already contains neural nets. It's how the inbuilt local machine translation works.
They've said they want to do local AIs though. If that's the case I'm all in.
oh fuck off Mozilla....
I double that. I'll go so far as to manually remove it from my fucking OS before I install it. Seriously, major Fuck You, Mozilla.
Well guys we had a good run, free and open source software is officially over
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.
Well it was 1200 people at Mozilla, not necessarily directly working on Firefox. They have multiple products and they still need HR and lawyers and all the other support roles any other company needs.
This world blows
Why Mozilla? You had so much good faith
Because money.
A non-profit that begs for donations has become a money making machine netting their ceos over $10m in 3 years.
And they still will. I'm sure most people haven't heard of the projects they're getting rid of (that's why they're getting rid of them) and the anti-AI circlejerk is going to melt away once it rolls out and people are surprised to learn it's actually a really useful technology.
I'm happy I use Librewolf, I get the good parts without the nonsense
Lol when that airbnb fuck took over I knew things were going to go south.
That was my thought too.
I think they were commenting on how people seem to be zealots for Firefox on Lemmy, despite having some (reasonable) flaws. Despite this news, I'd bet a lot of them will continue. Not a pro-Chrome stance by any means.
(I had to block the Firefox and Linux subs day 1 because of how much anti-Chrome/ anti-Windows I saw).
I think it's more that the Firefox/Mozilla community is relatively small and has a self imposed echo chamber.
For example, when discussing mobile browsers on Android, it's a fact that Chromium based ones have significantly better security then those based on Firefox for Android. It sucks, but it's true.
Whenever that's brought up, downvotes follow.
Whether, or not, that echo chamber is so large that includes Mozilla leadership, I can't speak to. But I wouldn't be surprised.
What did he say? He deleted all hai comments. The coward.
It's funny. I'm using a different browser that gets shit on constantly on here despite being really solid. I always see posts on here about having to use addon ABC cause XYZ stopped working, or faking the browser to look like Chrome, so sites work with Firefox.
I just eat my popcorn, open my add-on free browser, and surf ad free and problem free. People here REALLY try to justify Firefox. It's not a shit browser by any means, but damn do you have to tweak it to get it to run right.
Ditto. FF/Mozilla community (especially the /r/firefox mods), along with the nonsense changes to FF, are a big reason why I decided to leave FF after 20 years and use something else. At the moment, I couldn't care less about Mozilla future.
Have you read any of the other comments in this thread? Large numbers of people are gleefully dumping all over Mozilla, it's the few who are trying to go against that narrative that are getting downvotes.
You enjoy your angry mob. I'll enjoy having AI tools in my browser.
It literally states it will be local only and not send data to third parties or even Mozilla. But go off.
oh good firefox. Wonder what other browser i can use, oh wait...
Can someone just make a minimalist browser that isn't chrome/firefox based?
There are plenty of browsers. Dillo, NetSurf, surf, w3m, Lynx, Links, Via, Midori, Pale Moon although it's based on a fork of Gecko, Tunnel, qutebrowser. And there are even options for a search engine, although the only one worth considering that isn't just a layer on top of other search engines is Kagi which costs $10 a month, and I wouldn't exactly call it minimalist.
The problem is that no browser can allow you to escape the horror that is web standards & practices that have been developed over decades and are almost unchangeable, without sacrificing basic web functionality and just making it a worse experience than it needs to be at least. The fact is that practically the entire web is reliant on JavaScript, on top of HTML and CSS which take a lot more resources to utilize/display than it looks, meaning 3 interpreters constantly running that must be sandboxed to each tab you have open with a lot of overhead to manage security.
In an ideal world we'd all just be using provably-safe high-performance compiled WASM-but-stronger (from functional languages or more likely Rust or something less boiler-platey but similar), without having such a complex and fucked dependency situation*, where we wouldn't need to sandbox interpreted languages and slaughter performance. Of course, in an ideal world, we also wouldn't have to be concerned about aggressive tracking, ads, clickbait, SEO abuse, scams, or even malware, so there's not much use in imagining a reality where we actually have quality web browsing.
The actual answer to using the web without the fucked-ness of browsers is to not use a web browser at all for sites you use frequently. Use stuff like this instead.
*seriously, you can write the most basic website with JavaScript and it'll probably rely on tens of thousands of expressions of code which realistically should just be expressable in like a small page or two, you do webdev and you'll probably accidentally be implicitly committing a sacrifice to some Aztec God in order to check if a number is even or odd
Also just imagine if all of web dev was just ML/Scala/Rust/Swift/Erlang without compiling to JavaScript 🤤 That is the definition of a perfect universe
I've been saying it for a while: continuing to play catch is a losing move for Mozilla or for any independent browser maker.
The real move, is to switch to or at least integrate an alternate internet, something that uses a protocol that is simpler and more limited by design - just get rid of Javascript (or of "remote execution", really) and you instantly get a much leaner, much securer internet design.
I've heard pretty good things about the Gemini protocol, but IMHO they went too far too extremist into the "text internet" philosophy, and as a result is a raw downgrade from Gopher. Gopher could actually be a good option.
I'll definitely have to check out a few of those browsers at some point. It's kind of insane how much tech debt we've accrued over the years.
I think honestly we just need to start waning off half the shit we support. Minimize the amount of support required, and somehow manage to provide a smaller attack window so that way we can stop writing protections for problems that honestly shouldn't even exist to begin with. Bonus points to microsoft for creating security certs that don't do their jobs because hahafunneemalware.exe is signed by fucking oracle of all people, and i guess we should just blindly execute that file because it says it's trustworthy!
Though it would be interesting to have a sort of "web browser" which is actually just an application based on plugins for different frontends, for stuff like yewtube, we do only use a handful of sites from time to time. Plus maybe a basic web fronted for stuff that isn't JS because honestly who wants it anyway.
Unfortunately none. Developing a rendering engine that can handle css, html, javascript, while also rendering a website in the exact same way as Chrome and Firefox is a huge tasks, and not something a hobby programmer can whack out in a few weeks. Thats the reason why even Microsoft abandoned their own rendering engine, because things did always look and work different in IE.
This is not true. Pale Moon, Ice Weasel, Librewolf....
It doesn't have to be from scratch. Not even Apple did this with Safari (they based in on KHTML, the rendering engine of KDE's Konqueror.)
librewolf is a firefox fork, anything thats a fork of firefox/chrome is automatically not counted, because it is inherently bulkier than the original (though maybe more secure)
Unless it's pissandshittium of course.
Says who?
How is "being bulkier" relevant at all? But let's just go down that route and say that a fork does not necessarily end up in a bulkier product. A dev team could decide to fork, then remove unwanted features from the original project; which is what's happening with Librewolf as far as I know (e.g. no Pocket bs.)
Finally, let's remember that both Safari and Chrome have their roots on Konqueror's KHTML rendering engine. By your metric, we should be saying that they don't count either; because they're "(definitely) bulkier forks" of KHTML.
says me, the one who made the original comment.
now you just have a patched together, disjointed, mess of a browser, on top of a second dev team, who now needs to unpatch it together, re patch it together, and then somehow repackage that. It's just hopeless. It's like trying to turn a full size pickup into a small lightweight town car. It's just not going to happen.
It's worth noting that when a fork is building on top of something, there is a point where the original roots are no longer present, or no longer significantly present. It's like saying that android is linux. Which doesnt stop the charts from displaying android separately to linux, or chromeos for that matter. Even if it did i don't like the browsers because they're too bulky so it's not like it influences my opinion anyway lol.
Then it's a weak argument without real support.
You are assuming way too much. As if Apple and Google did all this with KHTML. Which lead us to:
And what's your point by saying this? What does it matter if the roots "disappear," if the product is good enough for competition?
What bulky browsers don't you like?
I mean yeah, but it's my opinion on the matter. Even then my original claim is based on the fact of something being an active fork of another browser. Which is still going to line up with my point just fine.
assuming too much if you think modern applications are programmed/designed well. Ultimately no matter what you do, having a product be around for a decade, let alone multiple of them, is going to incur substantial tech debt, and significant feature creep. There is nothing you can do about this. It happens in EVERY industry. In fact the only thing that helps to prevent this is an almost religious and fervent dedicated to pure minimalism when it comes to what your software is doing. Look at something like DWM for example.
My point is that beyond a certain point, a fork is no longer a fork, but more like a competing piece of software. You see this all the time, look at android or chromeos. Technically "based" on linux, but so far gone that almost nobody considers it linux, i only ever see it mentioned in jokes. Something like prism which is a fork of poly, which is a fork of multimc is starting to get to the point where it's more of an alternate piece of software, than a direct fork. It's twice independently maintained, it's feature set is focused differently.
If you need more examples why dont we have a look at a COW filesystem? When you make a change to a file, a fork is created, and that change is then saved on that forked path, so now you have multiple different versions, throughout the chronological history of that fork. If you have auto-deletion enabled for old forks, as you should, at some point you will have "orphaned" forks. Which no longer represent in anyway the original file, but exist as an independently separate instance of that file, in a different state. It's a similar idea, in a different scale, on a different system. There is also a point where it no longer exists as a fork, but as an implementation on top of that original piece of software. How that's defined is a little more complicated though.
It's a little bit philosophical, and semantical, but my point is simple, if your piece of software exists as a fork on top of another piece of software, you don't get to call yourself "faster" or "leaner" or "more optimized" than the original. Your base browser is still a piece of shit, you've taken a bad car, and repainted it, now it looks a little bit better. But it's still a shit car. You turn a beater into a race car by completely stripping it to bits, at a certain point, it's not really a fork anymore. In the same way that putting a body on a different frame isn't the same as the original.
it's not like i've literally named them or anything.
Its about time i would settle for the bare minimum at first then we can built up on it as a community
honestly, yeah.
Servo in future, LibreWolf for now imo
Looks like I'll need to switch to one of those browsers that only take and show characters I can type on a keyboard. Like F and U.
Long time FF user, things really aren't looking good for Mozilla as a whole.
90% of these comments didn't even read the article. Its local only, and doesn't even send data to mozilla.
Yet...
Why would Mozilla make AI so they could steal personal information when they already own the browser that gives the information to the AI
The AI is claimed to be local.. Did you know that even local AIs are able to contact the internet again? So without knowing a local LLM system might execute some HTTPS calls for you, without knowing.
Except its open source. So it would last all of 4 seconds before being called out. Those HTTPS calls are a separate service the LLM will access not a part of the LLM itself.
Cant they do the same with firefox?
Tell me you don't understand your userbase without telling me you don't understand your userbase
Yeesh people here are salty.
Honestly, if they make it optional and/or give the option to run it locally, I could see this being a good thing.
Lord knows the competition is going full bore on AI, and if FF wants to stay relevant with the mass market they'll need to keep up.
It depends on what they mean by AI. I can think of oodles of great uses:
But yeah, Mozilla will probably just go for a “chat with your browser” feature. Total waste of space.
All of those could be terrible to be honest, because AI is a data tracking vacuum. An AI adblocker or content filter sounds cool at first, but it would mean it reads and analyzes your data, just like the shit you do with chatbots too. Reading your mails? That's basically what Google does for years with gmail, that's why they have such a good spam filter. I agree that a chatbot would be kinda useless though, even if privacy friendly, which in of itself would be great but I just don't see the use. This could simply be outsourced to a website.
The only reason this would be an issue is if it’s sending that data off to a third party. If its fully local, who cares what data it sees?
If they're local they'd be basically useless due to a lack of computing power and potential lack of indexing for a search engine chatbot, so I doubt it. It would also have to be so polished that it wouldn't require further user knowledge / input, and that's just not a thing with any local LLM I've come across. Mozilla can gladly prove me wrong though. I certainly wouldn't mind if they generally can make the whole process of local LLMs easier and more viable.
The requirements to run good local LLMs have really been shrinking this past year… I have a lot of faith that there is a generally useful yet tiny AI tool within the grasp of Mozilla.
I can understand your thinking, but it could be as simple as giving the user the option to outsource the computation to a secure something or other, if their machine can’t handle it.
And yeah, the requirements are still quite high, but they are being reduced somewhat steadily, so I wouldn’t be surprised if average hardware could manage it in the long term.
Edit: For the record, Mozilla is one of the only companies I would trust if they said “the secure something or other is actually secure.” And they’d likely show actual proof and provide and explanation as to how.
There's no way it would be running locally.
In their defense, Mozilla did create the easiest way to run and integrate an LLM locally, so if anyone could do it, I imagine it would be them.
https://github.com/Mozilla-Ocho/llamafile
Yes, but what would a local model do for you in this case? Chatbots in browsers are typically used as an alternative / more contextualized search engine. For that you need proper access to an index of search results. Most people will also not have enough computing power to make use of any complex chatbot / larger context sizes.
Pennomi wrote a whole list of potential ideas. And honestly, while I agree that local LLMs on typical hardware are underpowered for most tasks, it's possible they would have the option for those that can run it.
People are getting all upset over this announcement without even knowing what their plan actually is, like the word "AI" is making them foam at the mouth or something. I'm just saying we should reserve judgements for when we have an idea of what's happening.
And I replied to that comment, without any mouth foaming.
Yes, and then you asked for ideas, which were in that comment that you replied to.
I honestly have no idea what you're referring to now. I never asked for any ideas.
Plz not you mozilla, you are one of the last good guys that remains from the early days
So frustrated to see how this conversation is playing out. This is exactly what people have been asking for but all anybody can seem to see is "AI" in the headline.
This pivot is about refocusing on:
This seems like a much better position for Mozilla to operate from, particularly because they've excelled at producing ethical SOTA ML for YEARS before ChatGPT. In all, this seems far more forward looking than the previous strategy of "make weird little web tools to make money maybe" and it's an absolutely massive untapped niche, that they already have the talent to tap into. If we punish the players best positioned to shift the industry standard away from extreme and exploitative data collection, we will end up in exactly the Orwellian AI hellscape that we're all so afraid of.
It is a better position and FF is going to be even better because of it. We need more options than just chromium. Open web standards dont stay open when everyone congregates.
No one asked for AI
No one asked for the shitty LLMs masquerading as AI. However, an AI that can do specialized things to help people out in day to day tasks would be great.
In this context or generally?
In the context of Firefox
Oh god dammit
I get that people are upset, because this fucking buzzword is haunting us. I'm just hoping that they don't jump on that BS-bandwaggon and create something actually useful. But we'll see I guess ...
Yeah, it's a hate-train for AI, I definitely get it, but Mozilla seems to be using it for actually useful things. Offline translation and fake reviewing checking for Amazon are pretty cool, in my opinion. Don't get me wrong, I'm not brand loyal, and I'm ready to jump ship to a FLOSS alternative as soon as they do something stupid. I'll just keep using Firefox until they do.
Yep, thats my impression too. Let's hope for some actual useful ai
It's only a buzzword to people who've already decided it's a buzzword and are refusing to consider its actual good uses, of which there are plenty.
Being part of angry mobs is fun.
Sure is, but doesn't mostly lead anywhere
FF no !
i thought mozilla new CEO would be better but heck no, sounds like i'll be hoping around in webkit browsers
Firefox on Android doesn't support keyboard shortcuts - for the last 12 years. Sooo - let's add the bloody AI, that is going to help
I would fucking rather pay not to have AI in my browser, FFS…
ew.
Guess it's time to get off the internet.
Could we just have the AI part separately? I want an AI that can help me around the house by learning all my books and documents in case someone needs a specific photo of the babies or maybe needs to know a derivation of greens theorem or a recipe for kombucha.
That’s much more than an LLM. I get where you’re going, and I legitimately want it as well, assuming it’s local of course. But we aren’t there yet.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
A TechCrunch report has a company memo that followed these layoffs, detailing one product shutdown and a "scaling back" of a few others.
reads the very top of the page; it then goes on to detail a lot of projects that aren't in line with Mozilla's core work of making a browser.
These non-browser projects could be seen as a search for a less vulnerable revenue stream, but none have put a huge dent in the bottom line.
TechCrunch managed to get an internal company memo that details a few "strategic corrections" for the myriad Mozilla products.
Mozilla seized an opportunity to bring trustworthy AI into Firefox, largely driven by the Fakespot acquisition and the product integration work that followed.
Mozilla paid an undisclosed sum in 2023 to buy a company called Fakespot, which uses AI to identify fake product reviews.
The original article contains 731 words, the summary contains 140 words. Saved 81%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Well it'll be fun trying to find a replacement that doesn't small use anything made by Google, like Opera does.
Librewolf, Pale Moon and Iceweasel.
LoL, and I had been contemplating switching to Firefox on my phone. Fucking nope! Not gonna board a ship that has decided to follow the pack into the ice...
To be fair, I'll take the ship at the back of the ice-kamakaze-pack over the one at the front. More time to jump ship when something better comes by.
I'm using chrome on phone, because it's basically part of the operating system, but I did like Fennec. It's a fork of Firefox mobile with a few more privacy features (or so they advertise)
I'm just using Brave (yes, I know but it doesn't annoy ME so I'm fine with it) which is just Chrome without the constraints.
Chromium is chrome without the constraints, Brave just has a different master holding the keys.
Not saying brave is bad btw, but chromium itself is literally the master branch for all of these different browsers
I did address that. I am fully aware of Brave's faults. But the benefits to me outweigh the negatives. Besides which, there isn't a browser in existence that doesn't collect data on you. Not unless you go ahead and compile your own. So I choose the one that is blatantly not following the rules and allows me some leeway to enjoy the web the way I like. It's also not the only browser on my phone. Chrome is obviously still here but so is Duckduckgo and I do have Firefox on here even though I never actually use it.
Chromite? Fennec? Iceraven? Lots of mobile browsers without telemetry on android.
Cromite and Fennec I've seen and don't trust their security at all. Better the devil you know and all that. But Iceraven is new to me and will have to look into that one. So thanks
Just remembered Mull. Have you heard of it?
So instead you're using a browser by companies already in the ice?
Jumping ship means trying to go in a different direction. I'm not gonna upheave my entire online presence just to get onboard with a company who is not only going the same way, but is woefully behind in the race to go that way.
So, what is else out there? Can the guys making adblocker just make a browser or so?
Making a browser from scratch would be very difficult. SerenityOS has one, but idk how usable it is.
Besides Firefox, I guess the least evil options would be something webkit-based. There are a few of those.
Apple didn't even build a browser from scratch. They took Konqueror's KHTML engine, then built Webkit with it.
We could do the same with Firefox. As the matter of fact, there are already forks out there, like IceWeasel, Librewolf, Pale Moon, etc.
What's going to happen is that one of those will start raising to the top. That's exactly what happened with Firefox. Mozilla had the Netscape suite, open sourced it, then fucked it up. When it fucked it up, I decided to try one of the alternatives, Phoenix in this case. Then Mozilla decided to drop the Netscape Suite and adopted Phoenix, which eventually became Mozilla Firebird, and finally Firefox.
I guess the cycle shall soon repeat.
For me chrome just worked better (Mac) but since adblock is mandatory for me I switched. Afraid that if ff will implement AI my experience will be even worse.
https://lunduke.substack.com/p/firefox-money-investigating-the-bizarre
paywall
And the fanboys will still eat this up. "BECAUSE IT'S NOT CHROME!1!" - their reason.
Not Chrome is an important reason however. Which makes this all the worse.