After installing a new interim CEO earlier this month, Mozilla, the organization behind the Firefox browser, is making some major changes to its product
  • jecht360@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1139·
    9 months ago

    This just screams “stupid new CEO obsessed with trying to implement AI into everything”.

    • HuntressHimbo@lemm.eeEnglish
      671·
      9 months ago

      I wouldn’t dismiss this just yet. Mozilla has already been doing some open source AI work, specifically their speech offerings. If they invest in these and they get better I think we all stand to gain from having good text to speech and speech recognition available outside of Apple/Amazon/Microsoft/Google

      • errer@lemmy.worldEnglish
        311·
        9 months ago

        Also my understanding is they’d use AI for local language translation so it doesn’t have to connect to some external server to do it.

        Just cause for-profit organizations are heavily pushing AI doesn’t mean there aren’t unskeezy uses for it…

    • ThiefUserPermissions@lemmy.myserv.oneEnglish
      232·
      9 months ago

      Im so sick of AI being inserted into every inane thing. Next it will be AI lego, AI gaming chair, AI toilet seat. Its just so fucking droll at this point. There is literally no technology I want to use less than your idiot pet AI project you just came up with. Everything now has AI in it yet nothing feels revolutionary or interesting. Its all just worse. Everything is just worse but with AI in it. Its just CEOs piling shit on top of shit on top of shit and expecting something beautiful to come out the other end. Drives me nuts.

      • bionicjoey@lemmy.caEnglish
        7·
        9 months ago

        The worst part is they still barely understand how to get AI to actually do anything. So it’s always just “yo dawg, we heard you like ChatGPT, so we put ChatGPT in your car so you can chat while you drive”

    • rottingleaf@lemmy.zipEnglish
      5·
      9 months ago

      The only good use I can think of is generating simple readable summaries of ad and picture heavy pages.

      A bit like spam filters, to make the Web usable.

      Could be an advantage similar to what Opera had in olden days.

    • FaceDeer@kbin.social
      1244·
      9 months ago

      Or “fresh new CEO without baggage who sees where the future of the technology is heading.”

      • Shadywack@lemmy.worldEnglish
        297·
        9 months ago

        More like “new CEO knows how to chase the latest shiny fad”

        Where tech is going, that couldn’t be more absurd. When you’re done bootlicking, that taste takes a while to clear out.

  • narc0tic_bird@lemm.eeEnglish
    723·
    9 months ago

    Compared to the blockchain type train, I thought this whole AI thing was quite cool and actually useful, but it feels more and more similar to the blockchain hype, where companies tried to solve every problem with some form of blockchain (for example in-game items).

    The same is kind of happening with AI now.

    • jbk@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      257·
      9 months ago

      Guess what, the local private translations feature depends on AI/ML. All this blind hate for AI is so stupid.

        • nature_man@lemmy.worldEnglish
          63·
          9 months ago

          No. There are hundreds of entirely valid reasons to be wary of AI, especially the fact that the word AI has just turned into a corporate buzzword, when I hear that (insert thing) has had AI added to it, that can mean anything from a single static image that was made using “AI art” , to a large language model being used, or maybe they just grafted chatGPT to it.

          Maybe if people and companies stopped labeling everything even tangentially computer related as AI I’d be less dismissive of it, but as it is now, whenever “AI” is mentioned in relation to a product it feels like a “corp wants to artificially increase percieved value by using latest trend” moment

          • wabafee@lemmy.worldEnglish
            51·
            9 months ago

            What is wrong with companies showing that they do work with this kind of stuff. They probably do already but they are just letting the people know that they do and it just happened the word AI sends that message. Though Mozilla downsizing is a bad thing and the job loss would be a valid reason. But from the thread I’m not seeing that kind of atmosphere here.

    • Infiltrated_ad8271@kbin.social
      104·
      9 months ago

      Edit: I’m going to rephrase this so as not to divert it on the misinterpretation of a particular case.

      Librewolf doesn’t check anything, it just applies patches automatically. That’s why sometimes bugs happen, like corrupting the user profiles of all flatpak users a year ago; entirely the fault of librewolf for not updating a line of code, and not of any third party.

      • LucidNightmare@lemm.eeEnglish
        10·
        9 months ago

        If you read into it, it was because the users Software Manager chose to downgrade from v108 > v107. I wouldn’t knock this on the Librewolf team, although I don’t use it, so there could be other issues I wouldn’t know about.

  • Veedem@lemmy.worldEnglish
    25·
    9 months ago

    You know, I’m surprised they haven’t launched a paid for, privacy centric email service like Proton or FastMail. They can give basic service for free and then charge a nominal fee for more storage like the others do. It seems like a simple way to drum up some revenue and rely a little less on the payment from Google.

    • shadow@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
      7·
      9 months ago

      From everything I’ve heard about running a reliable and trustworthy email service, it sounds like a fucking nightmare. I’m glad to pay something like proton to handle it for me.

      • barsoap@lemm.eeEnglish
        1·
        9 months ago

        Yep and making basic accounts free means that you either have to cripple them, ad-finance the whole thing, and/or sell private data.

        A posteo account costs an euro a month and even if you don’t care about your privacy it’s one of the places you can be sure of to not shut down or alter the deal: A euro is sustainable for them and it means that you’re a customer, not the product.

    • dco@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      9 months ago

      Wouldn’t really consider Fastmail privacy centric, but Proton sure. And a definite step up from Gmail.

  • PeterPoopshit@lemmy.worldEnglish
    174·
    9 months ago

    Welp, using the internet was fun while it lasted. I’ll still use Firefox for all my browsing until I can’t anymore and after that I guess I’ll go fuck myself for entertainment instead of internet browsing.

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldBEnglish
    9·
    9 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:

    After installing a new interim CEO earlier this month, Mozilla, the organization behind the Firefox browser, is making some major changes to its product strategy, TechCrunch has learned.

    Specifically, Mozilla plans to scale back its investment in a number of products, including its VPN, Relay and, somewhat remarkably, its Online Footprint Scrubber, which launched only a week ago.

    Going forward, the company said in an internal memo, Mozilla will focus on bringing “trustworthy AI into Firefox.” To do so, it will bring together the teams that work on Pocket, Content and AI/Ml.

    Mozilla started expanding its product portfolio in recent years, all while its flagship product, Firefox, kept losing market share.

    And while the organization was often sharply criticized for this, its leadership argued that diversifying its product portfolio beyond Firefox was necessary to ensure Mozilla’s survival in the long run.

    Firefox, after all, provided the vast majority of Mozilla’s income, but it also meant the organization was essentially dependent on Google to continue this deal.

    The original article contains 234 words, the summary contains 166 words. Saved 29%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!