156
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2025
156 points (90.2% liked)
Firefox
4 readers
60 users here now
The latest news and developments on Firefox and Mozilla, a global non-profit that strives to promote openness, innovation and opportunity on the web.
You can subscribe to this community from any Kbin or Lemmy instance:
Related
- Firefox Customs: !FirefoxCSS@fedia.io
- Thunderbird: !Thunderbird@fedia.io
Rules
While we are not an official Mozilla community, we have adopted the Mozilla Community Participation Guidelines as far as it can be applied to a bin.
Rules
-
Always be civil and respectful
Don't be toxic, hostile, or a troll, especially towards Mozilla employees. This includes gratuitous use of profanity. -
Don't be a bigot
No form of bigotry will be tolerated. -
Don't post security compromising suggestions
If you do, include an obvious and clear warning. -
Don't post conspiracy theories
Especially ones about nefarious intentions or funding. If you're concerned: Ask. Please don’t fuel conspiracy thinking here. Don’t try to spread FUD, especially against reliable privacy-enhancing software. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Show credible sources. -
Don't accuse others of shilling
Send honest concerns to the moderators and/or admins, and we will investigate. -
Do not remove your help posts after they receive replies
Half the point of asking questions in a public sub is so that everyone can benefit from the answers—which is impossible if you go deleting everything behind yourself once you've gotten yours.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
This might shock you but Firefox is trying to appeal to people who are not already firefox users.
An additional shocking revelation of which you seem to be unaware is that a lot of people do find value in these chat bots.
I do mostly kind of agree with you. Yes Gen AI is over-hyped. Yes their is a dangerous investment bubble. Yes I wish Firefox would just focus on being a great browser.
Yeah this is a feature we have because mozilla listens to their users.
This is tough to swallow for most of us - I hate this crap except for a minority of ultra-narrow use cases - but the general population of users loves AI. They want more of it.
No they aren't. They are trying to appeal to investors and advertisers.
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/advertising/index-exchange-partnership/
... and what, pray tell, do advertisers and investors desire?
The same thing they always want: Surveillance, behavior tracking, and avenues to advertise.
Yes, but they want more users to surveil and track.
Sure, but Mozilla doesn't care about that. They only care about the short-term gains they can get by milking those advertisers and investors.
If Mozilla cared about bringing in more users, they would do things that users want, instead of what they have been doing for the past decade or so.
Users love AI chat bots.
*citation needed
Fuck them if they want the opposite of what firefox users want. Stop fucking chasing whoever isn't already on board with your current offering by fucking over your current users.
Firefox isn't really viable with it's current user base. Mozilla is circling the drain really.
It could have been viable with the user base that they had years ago, and it probably could be viable today, but Mozilla keeps throwing away all of their goodwill so that they can keep paying absurd salaries for shitty executives.
I absolutely agree that mozilla has squandered it's strong position from a decade ago.
... the series of "strategic" decisions that have been unsuccessful is embarrassing really.
That said, the "shitty executives" narrative is reddit edge lord stuff. Any large successful project is going to need well paid experienced executives. Of course you can judge them harshly in hindsight, but it's naive to assume they're making poorly informed decisions.
Like in your other comment suggesting there's no evidence that users love chat bots - you can absolutely guarantee that mozilla has conducted some market research indicating that it's a feature set that will attract more users.
Of course you can engage in supposition that such an assertion is incorrect, you can even predict that it will ultimately be another failure.
However, it's hubris to suggest that your own assessment of the market is more accurate than mozilla's - exactly the kind of hubris you're accusing mozilla of.
That's not true at all. There are plenty of large, successfull projects that don't have well paid experienced executives.
I can not guarantee that at all. They have a long history of doing things to make money, at the cost of users. I don't see why this has to be any different.
That's not what I'm accusing them of at all. What I'm accusing them of is having mis-aligned goals.
My goal would be to have useful, free software that gives agency and power to it's users.
Mozilla's goal is to give their executives a lot of money, by pretending to give a shit about their users, while openly selling them out.
Why not? It worked so well for the Democrats!
checks the news ... wait ... oh god... ohgodohgodohgod
It'd be simpler to just write tRuMp 2028
If you think that's what I believe, you're even dumber than I thought. Fucking pathetic. Truly, you are a binary thinking dope of miniscule thinking capacity.
Seriously, if rightfully judging the Democrats implies to you that I support Republicans or especially Trump, then you are a brainless fool. A blithering moron incapable of understanding nuance.
Two things can be bad at the same time. So go right ahead and blame me, someone with NO political power, when the Democrats HAVE political power and will not stop it.
You are a fucking pathetic victim-blaming loser. Do better.
People who make everything about how much Democrats suck are rightfully judged as untrustworthy. Your insults mean nothing.
@null_dot If all of the not Firefox users are AI-shills, then I don't think we're missing much from excluding them.
And what value? Wasting a load of water just for the chatbot to tell you that "strawberry" has 2 r's in it? There is nothing generative-AI can do that other tech can't do better and costing far less resources.
The "value" of generative-AI outside of highly niche scenarios is an illusion. For example, people think generative-AI in the workplace improves productivity when it actually does the opposite: https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolinecastrillon/2025/10/02/ai-workslop-could-be-the-biggest-threat-to-productivity/
This is a good quote from that article: "A recent MIT Media Lab report found that 95% of organizations see no measurable return on their AI investments. Workslop helps explain why. When employees use AI to create low-effort output that shifts the burden downstream, any productivity gains are lost."
Generative-AI has also actively made search engines worse, especially with their "summaries" containing significant errors about 50% of the time: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0m17d8827ko
And I can go on and on. There is an entire laundry list why generative is just... not it, and whatever "value" people get from these can be gotten elsewhere, usually in higher quality and more ethically than relying on this tech.
Another shocker for you... mozilla isn't viable with it's current user base.
Idiots love AI chat bots, and there are plenty of idiots around.
@null_dot Even if that were true, that doesn't consider the fact that generative-AI is a money black hole and literally the only company type profiting from this bubble are ones like Nvidia that are producing the graphics cards these models use. Generative-AI is not and will not be profitable; Mozilla is losing money by shilling this tech.
So even if you do attract a high volume of users by shoving in generative-AI (which I DOUBT), I doubt that would offset the money burning from running these models. It's not a smart business move, either for users who despise the tech or users who love it. It's a lose-lose.
Sorry, this is objectively false.
Gen AI is not presently profitable due to the rate of innovation. Developing a new inference model needs a lot of cash for salaries. Populating that new model needs a lot of compute.
Once you have the model, the cost to query it is minimal. You can literally buy a $500 graphics card and download a model and have it perform useful tasks.
The difficulty is, if it costs you $n billion to develop whatever model today, and it's obsolete in 1 year, then thats a $n billion hit to your profitability this year. If innovation slowed down so maybe a model is still competitive after 10 years, then your costs have reduced by 90%.
There's loads of things to dislike about AI, but the profitability thing is borne of misunderstanding on your part.
The arguments against AI you're looking for are:
I would take issue with your implicit suggestion that humanity becoming slaves to AI would be fine if the machines doing it weren't under the direct central control of their elite owners. The gradual replacement of human thinking with rapid low-cost mediocre pseudo-thought is a problem for more than just the worlds of media and art, no matter who's nominally the owner of the process.
No, we're not going to be slaves to a general AI, but it will grant unlimited power to whoever controls it.
There's a large ecosystem of "open" models available to download and develop with. Sadly IMO this open movement is too small and too slow to assail the likes of openAI, but it's something.
An open model available to everyone doesn't concentrate power.
What I'm thinking of depends more on the training methods and data used. But I guess it's too early to say much about what strong AI would be like, we're not really close to it yet.
I mean some of it might turn out to be "profitable" in the narrow sense of earning financial returns for somebody, but that does not mean it will a profitable endeavour for humanity in general.