Anthony Enzor-DeMeo is taking charge of one of the internet’s most important — and most complicated — companies.

Mozilla is in a tricky position. It contains both a nonprofit organization dedicated to making the internet a better place for everyone, and a for-profit arm dedicated to, you know, making money. In the best of times, these things feed each other: The company makes great products that advance its goals for the web, and the nonprofit gets to both advocate for a better web and show people what it looks like. But these are not the best of times. Mozilla has spent the last couple of years implementing layoffs and restructuring, attempting to explain how it can fight for privacy and openness when Google pays most of its bills, while trying to find its place in an increasingly frothy AI landscape.

Fun times to be the new Mozilla CEO, right? But when I put all that to Anthony Enzor-DeMeo, the company’s just-announced chief executive, he swears he sees opportunity in all the upheaval. “I think what’s actually needed now is a technology company that people can trust,” Enzor-DeMeo says. “What I’ve seen with AI is an erosion of trust.”

Mozilla is not going to train its own giant LLM anytime soon. But there’s still an AI Mode coming to Firefox next year, which Enzor-DeMeo says will offer users their choice of model and product, all in a browser they can understand and from a company they can trust. “We’re not incentivized to push one model or the other,” he says. “So we’re going to try to go to market with multiple models.”

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  • Tonava@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    231·
    5 hours ago

    Programs are like socks, once they get dirty, you change them. Do these people really not understand how this stuff works? Even giants can fall when enough people switch to other options

    • Bahnd Rollard@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      3 hours ago

      Given what Microsoft is smoking these days, no AI would be a selling point, and Mozilla does not seem to realize they are playing with fire. Their userbase chose their product instead of using the system defaults of Chrome, Safari, and Internet Exploder. Their users, just like Lemmy, are tech-litrrate and more socially concious than the masses. If an alternative or fork appears, with sufficent support, and Mozilla does not put the breaks on their AI train, were all just going to jump ship. We do it every time a new OS is installed, there is no Firefox loyalty, only lesser evils.

      • uncouple9831@lemmy.zipEnglish
        13·
        2 hours ago

        It’s hard to imagine being so butthurt at a piece of now-defunct, 20-year-old software that you pretend it still is the default just so you can call it a dumb name.

        • Bahnd Rollard@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          2 hours ago

          I was in the trenches for that nonsense fixing stuff daily because of them. Oracles wacky tacky shit that kept their users locked to Java 7.21 for a decade past the support date. Bloated language packs and not being able to keep up with basic HTML tags… You dont know how good yall have it today.

          I dont care how much MS dresses up Edge, we know its just Chrome in a poorly fitted suit. The old addage still holds true, Microsofts default browser (formerly IE, currently Edge) is the best browser to use to go download another browser.

          [This concludes grumpy old tech speech]

  • Dr. Moose@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4·
    4 hours ago

    Who is this a signal for though? They could silently add the AI features and rally their base on aspects people actually like. It’s almost like Firefox doesn’t want to succeed

    • Nalivai@lemmy.worldEnglish
      7·
      4 hours ago

      CEOs have this massive psychosis, they really believe everyone wants this bullshit. I have a theory that it’s because they were always surrounded by yesmen, and simultaneously they hate people, so for them the LLM is the best thing ever, all the constant agreeing and affirmation with no pesky humanity, and they can’t believe there is anyone who don’t want that.

  • tired_n_bored@lemmy.worldEnglish
    27·
    8 hours ago

    Mozilla is completely detached from its user base. They think their average user is a Microsoft enthusiast when in reality it’s a Debian enjoyer.

  • LiveLM@lemmy.zipEnglish
    17·
    11 hours ago

    Of course, this is just what Firefox needs fixing long standing issues, catching up to web standards, process isolation on mobile AI!

  • criss_cross@lemmy.world
    English
    69·
    15 hours ago

    “What I’ve seen with AI is an erosion of trust.”

    Mozilla is not going to train its own giant LLM anytime soon. But there’s still an AI Mode coming to Firefox next year, which Enzor-DeMeo says will offer users their choice of model and product, all in a browser they can understand and from a company they can trust. “We’re not incentivized to push one model or the other,” he says. “So we’re going to try to go to market with multiple models.” Some will be open-source models available to anyone.

    This is such an out of touch non-answer here.

    People don’t oppose ai changes because they’re locked into a model. In fact most AI products I use for my job let you choose a fucking model.

    People hate them because

    A) 90% of the time they’re useless and the remaining 10 are detrimental to the product experience

    B) Ethical concerns about training off of artists and authors as well as environmental impact. EDIT: or also the general trend of trying to replace humans with AI.

    C) Not wanting to play into the fucking arms race the billionaire class are manufacturing

    D) The time they could be useful they have a risk of being either hilariously wrong or dangerously wrong. And there’s no amount of training and GPU manufacturing that’s gonna fix that.

    Absolutely none of this is addressed by the CEO. I’m sure he has to say this because of the fucking tulip crazy money is in around this but it doesn’t make it any less tone deaf or futile.

  • FluidBeef@quokk.auEnglish
    6·
    10 hours ago

    Is it possible for the major forks to just go their own way, or is it more complicated than that? Obviously anyone building a new browser engine from the ground up now with complete HTML, CSS and JavaScript spec is so immense an undertaking as to sound far-fetched, so the open source community would need to leverage whatever it can.

    • tired_n_bored@lemmy.worldEnglish
      11·
      8 hours ago

      They surely can. But if both Mozilla and Google are shit companies, one can just choose to use a browser based on the open source Chromium. As far as I know it performs better than Firefox

  • 58008@lemmy.worldEnglish
    491·
    15 hours ago

    Is there like a petition or something we can all sign to show that literally no cunt wants this?

    • Yggstyle@lemmy.worldEnglish
      121·
      13 hours ago

      Uninstall it and pick a different platform. These cunts think you won’t and THATS why they don’t give a fuck. Enough people swap and oh, hey, maybe we should rethink this mistake. If not - not your problem… You already bounced.

      • kieron115@startrek.websiteEnglish
        12·
        12 hours ago

        If anyone has any suggestions for browsers hook me up, I’m running out of browsers with thier own engines to try. I don’t see much point in using, say, LibreWolf if the engine is still the same as Firefox (Gecko in this case). Maybe I’ll give NetSurf a try and pretend like it’s 1996 again.

        • sudoer777@lemmy.mlEnglish
          51·
          11 hours ago

          If all of the web engines enshittify, you can always curl the HTML/CSS/JS and hand-parse it. Might have suboptimal performance however.

        • tired_n_bored@lemmy.worldEnglish
          11·
          8 hours ago

          I’m afraid that not using Gecko or Blink may expose me to any sort of malware while visiting the web tbh

          • kieron115@startrek.websiteEnglish
            8·
            11 hours ago

            That’s still a fork of Firefox, isn’t it? I was hoping to find a reasonably modern browser that doesn’t rely on gecko or blink. I’d be okay with a WebKit browser but I don’t have a Mac.

            • kieron115@startrek.websiteEnglish
              4·
              10 hours ago

              I do, in fact. I get that they are typically open-source, and I also understand how ridiculously difficult it is to create one from scratch. If LibreWolf or whoever want to make privacy focused browsers based on mozilla foundation or google’s work then that’s fine and I support it, but I’m personally curious if there are any mainstream browsers that don’t have any (or minimal) reliance on google and mozilla foundation. Someone else was actually helpful and pointed me towards an engine in development Servo which looks quite interesting! Hopefully there will be a browser based on it soon.

              https://www.spacebar.news/servo-undercover-web-browser-engine/

              At the start of the millennium, Internet Explorer used its own Trident engine on Windows and Tasman on Mac, Opera used Presto, some embedded devices used NetFront, Netscape had Gecko, and KDE made KHTML for its Konqueror browser. Those browsers eventually faded away or adopted a competing engine to simplify development. KHTML was the basis for Safari’s WebKit, which in turn became Chromium’s Blink engine, and Netscape’s Gecko engine became the foundation for Firefox. Opera ditched its custom Presto engine in 2013 and switched to Chromium, and Microsoft Edge made the same move in 2020.

              This is a danger to the open web in more ways than one. If there is only one functioning implementation of a standard, the implementation becomes the standard. The web becomes to Google what Java is to Oracle. It also means the limitations and security flaws in Chromium affect most other browsers, which became a topic of conversation with Google’s recent Manifest V3 transition.

              • ikidd@lemmy.worldEnglish
                4·
                10 hours ago

                I figured you did. It’s the guy you were replying to that seems confused.

                • kieron115@startrek.websiteEnglish
                  4·
                  10 hours ago

                  Oh shit my bad! Leaving the info up anyway, in case anyone else is wondering why only two major engines is a bad thing for the open internet.