I don’t understand Mozilla’s current strategy; their attempt to pander to the advertising industry and produce a Chrome clone has been a massive failure as demonstrated by their ever-shrinking browser market share which is now effectively a rounding error. For people that are satisfied with being part of the advertising economy, why wouldn’t you just use Chrome and the Google ecosystem? If you don’t mind your data being used for advertising purposes, Chrome is an excellent browser and their broader ecosystem gives you functionality Mozilla will never match.

Mozilla’s only way out is to go back to its roots and build a better user-agent, and provide an adversarial alternative to the current advertising-based ecosystems.

I don't want to use a blink based browser. If/When mozilla finally dies I don't have high hopes that Firefox won't just die with it.

Certain aspects of human nature, as they apply to the corporate world, can be acknowledged and understood, even if they're not excuses when they lead to the downfall of a prominent organization. When you give someone a big title, a dump truck full of cash, and a mandate to innovate, human nature dictates that most people will internalize the idea that "because I was given all this, I must be competent", even if they very obviously are not. Typically the outcome is a "bold plan forward" which is notable for lacking any actual clear solution to the company's main problems. In one example I know of, the CEO decided to pivot from an unrelated field towards launching a cryptocurrency, and cooked up a cartoonishly-dangerous marketing scheme to support the idea. One person ended up dying as a result, and the company then purged every mention of crypto from its website. (And yes, the company collapsed soon afterwards.)

While it's easy to blame the CEO with their oversized salary, the blame for such disasters doesn't just lie with them. After all, arguably the most important roles of the board are to hire a good CEO, ensure the CEO is actually performing as they should, and fire them if they're not. When politics, cronyism, or again, simple incompetence, lead the board to also fail at its job, you end up with the long, slow decline into obscurity we've seen so often in the tech world.

But Mozilla had a good run.

Firefox probably won't suddenly have the best AI, but they could have the only browser that does this.

Insofar as I count as part of the Firefox community as a long-time user and infrequent bug reporter: I want useful, non-creepy AI features in my main browser, or it's probably not going to remain my main browser for too long.

Of course I also want them to be fully optional, but I have no reason to believe that they would be anything but.

With an order of magnitude less money, I think they would have been more focused on improving Firefox rather than trying to diversify with projects like Firefox OS, VPN services or AI.

Even today, given their ~$1.5B in the bank, at the cost of a really painful downsizing, the interests alone could probably pay for a Firefox development focused on standard adherence, performance, quality and privacy.

Mozilla is not a company trying to reinvent itself to survive. If it becomes irrelevant because the Browser becomes irrelevant in the future, that's fine in my book, the organization would have fulfill its mission.

But it is sad to see it become irrelevant because of mismanagement and lack of focus.

1. That Google is a competitor to them in the AI space.

2. That Google has such a strong stranglehold over the web, and Chromium/Chrome is a big part of that. I mean, why ultimately help your competitor here?

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1445596

The other one is Firefox Sync not storing shortcut bar favicons. Every install, I have to click on every web site one by one to bring back their favicons. It's a 17 year old ticket:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=428378

Firefox adding crazy features that it may or may not cancel in a few years while ignoring these minor issues frustrates me, and keeps me away from it.

That'd be great, if that pristine Web still existed to search and people were happy with today's results of searching it. But in the real world, the Web is a pile of auto-generated and auto-assembled fragments of slop, SEO-optimized to death, puddled atop and all around the surviving fragments of value. (The value is still there! I suspect the total value in the Web has never stopped increasing. Just like those monkeys are always typing out more and more Shakespeare.) Also in the real world, people are decisively choosing the AI-generated summaries and fevered imaginings. Not for everything, but web search -> URL -> page visit is becoming a declining percentage that won't always be able to support everything that it does today.

It's not that I particularly want AI in my browser. I would say that I emphatically don't, except that automatic translation is really nice, and Firefox's automatic names for tab groups are pretty cool, and I'm sure here and there people will come up with other pieces. I'm actually ok with AI that targets real needs, which is 0.01% of what people are pushing it for. But I also think that we're past the point where NOT having AI in the browser is a sustainable position. (In terms of number of users and therefore financially.)

Should Mozilla be head over heels in love with AI, as it appears to be now? I'd definitely prefer if it weren't. But telling Mozilla "don't do bad thing, it'll make you irrelevant and have no users" is fine and dandy but ultimately pointless unless you have an alternative that doesn't require the entire world to cooperate in turning back the clock.

(Disclosure: Mozilla pays me a salary to write bugs.)

(And working code! I write some of that too!)

(And no, I currently don't do anything that adds AI to the browser, nor can I think of anything I'd want to work on that would add any AI.)

Does it include dilution from mobile? China/Russia-mandated browsers?

Even with that (Chrome probably is below 50% if you count that way), 3% is lower than I’ve seen.

I know things vary site by site, but still. 3% is not coming from the planet I live on, even before you start filtering out bot traffic and click fraud (both are typically detected as Chrome).

I haven’t done this, but if you want to be fair, you should also add a weight based on likelihood to pay or be an influencer in a western market. That probably cranks the percentage up even further.

Their leadership is often not that much different, with similar people working in similar jobs educated in the same institutions and walking in the same social circles, producing the same solutions to the existential problem of organisational survival.

I disabled the AI summaries, but the automatic translation support is very helpful. And I'd love to have automatic subtitles and/or translation support for videos.

On top of that, the whole premise that AI is just being a nothing burger. Pull your head out of your arse.

Is there an AI bubble? I tend to agree, likely yes. And yes it is very much overhyped etc. Does that mean that AI is useless and will disappear? No way! Just observe how Joe Doe's are interacting with the web. AI engines have taken over from where people used to use search. It's ironic how they say they just want search results when typing in their address bar, at a time when everyone is complaining that search has become increasingly useless (and yes we can blame AI tools at least partly, doesn't change the fact). Moreover, there are definitely use cases where an AI gives a much better answer than search (just try searching for how to do something a little niche with e.g. ffmpeg, you can either read 10s of block/stackoverflow posts try to understand the manual or ask an AI and typically immediately get a decent answer).

I tend to agree with Mozilla org here, AI does pose an existential thread to the web as we know it and if we don't get non-profit organisations to develop "open" (and I acknowledge the discussion what that entails is important) tools we will end up with a web that is much less free than it is today.

Same with Microsoft and Windows PC power users as well.

A comment on the article:

>Google's AI Overview continues to be an inferior provider of information than solid web search results.

I would love to hate that feature, but i don't. I kind of like it. It's useful sometimes and easy to ignore if i want. Honestly i would say it enhances my browsing. You can complain that it's often wrong and 2 dimensional and you would be right. But that would be missing the point. Maybe you can complain about secondary effects. I don't know what those would be though. Perhaps that it degrades the overall browser ecosystem and locks you into googles own, but that is moving the goalposts.