State of Mozilla 2025
stateof.mozilla.org
Doing for AI what we did for the web
  • all of the planned new Firefox features for 2026 are “AI”-based (except for a new paid support tier)
  • they’re taking our money and establishing an “AI”-focused investment arm
  • all of the art appears to be slop

Remember when Mozilla was not awful?

  • evol@lemmy.todayEnglish
    410·
    3 days ago

    Im so confused, all the AI is literally like a sidebar you can click away right??? what is the hate. Mozilla needs an alternative revenue model so AI integrations make sense to me

    • ooterness@lemmy.worldEnglish
      8·
      3 days ago

      The problem is there’s only two browser engines: Chromium and Firefox. Literally everything else is just a skin on top of one or the other, usually Chromium.

      Chromium is developed and controlled by Google, an increasingly evil megacorp. Firefox is developed by a company that is notionally independent, but gets nearly all of its funding from Google.

      So if the Mozilla foundation is putting all of its development efforts into AI bullshit, then what’s the viable alternative?

      • Mwa@thelemmy.clubEnglish
        4·
        3 days ago

        Webkit also exists but it doesn’t have the best web compatibility and it only works on MacOS(Safari) and Linux(Gnome Web)
        And that’s controlled by Apple aswell.

      • evol@lemmy.todayEnglish
        12·
        3 days ago

        I mean read these commits, Most of the development effort for Firefox is obviously not AI related theirs so much plumbing, web standard chasing, maintenance that needs to be done instead https://github.com/mozilla-firefox/firefox/commits. A literal “Ask claude to summarize my webpage” is like an intern group project

        Mozilla seems to want to put funding into infrastructure for helping build open source AI models, IMO I don’t really think this is their expertise so it seems like not a very good idea. Could also be a useful revenue source.

        The more interesting thing is if AI adopts an ads model, firefox can sell the default AI integration in the same way they sell the default search engine to Google. Would help their revenue problem.

    • sidebro@lemmy.zipEnglish
      34·
      3 days ago

      And as long as you can actually turn it off, I don’t mind either.

      • Bongles@lemmy.zip
        32·
        3 days ago

        It’s opt-in to begin with.

        Building trusted AI experiences — build opt-in features into Firefox like AI Window, pushing the envelope on AI that is both useful and user respecting. Also, launch “AI controls” into Firefox, giving people a clear way to turn AI off entirely - current and future AI features. .