alt Hacker NewsMozilla's latest quagmire
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Mozilla has the classic problem of a non-profit that achieved its aims. I was around back in the day and my friends and I were avid evangelists of Firefox - a few cogs in the wheel of the marketing installing Firefox on school machines and getting all the elderly people to use it and so on. There were user groups and student ambassador programs and so on. It was an incredible marketing effort combined with an effort to bring standards and compliance to them into the mainstream. And it worked because they added features at a rate that IE simply did not match.
The extension ecosystem, tabs, plugins, and notably whatever effort they did behind the scenes to ensure that companies that did streaming video etc. would work with their browser all played out really well.
I think the ultimate problem is that Mozilla's mission of a standards-compliant web with open-source browsers everywhere ultimately did get achieved. The era of "Works with IE6" badges has ended and the top browsers run on open-source engines. Despite our enthusiasm at the time for it, I think the truth is that Firefox was probably just a vehicle for this, much bigger, achievement.
Now that it's been achieved, Mozilla is in the fortunate place where Firefox only needs to exist as a backstop against Chrome sliding into high-proprietary world while providing the utility to Google that they get to say they're not a monopoly on web technologies.
Mozilla's search for a new mission isn't some sign of someone losing their way. It's just what happens to the Hero of Legend after he defeats the Big Bad. There's a post-denouement period. Sam Gamgee gets to go become Mayor of the Shire, which is all very convenient, but a non-profit like Mozilla would much rather find a similar enough mission that they can apply their vast resources to. That involves the same mechanics as product development, and they're facing the same primary thing: repeated failure.
That's just life.
The biggest problem with mozilla is they are trend chasing instead of finding a niche.
The AI stuff is the perfect example. Are there people who like AI? Certainly. Will they use firefox? Probably not.
At this stage firefox is the anti-establishment choice. That crowd hates AI. Betting on AI might make sense if you are chrome. It doesn't make sense if you are firefox.
Mozilla is a search traffic vendor with one client, not a combination of the EFF and the FSF. That's their behavior and motives in a nutshell. How big of a fraction of the Google traffic comes from power users? How would they find an alternative? Those are the questions the (rational) high-paid execs at Mozilla ask about us.
I think something people should take a hard look at is Firefox's crypto libraries. Firefox's implementation of cryptography in NSS is fundamentally in the browser. Chrome works with the OS. One could argue which implementation is better, but as a user, it's really helpful to have Firefox laying around from time to time. For all sorts of reasons.
I noticed the ai sidebar. Annoying. But left column browser tabs are back, which is a plus.
I guess Mozilla also wants to jump on the AI bandwagon.
Out of the five options available, only one is European (the one I am using). What I don't like is how I cannot add my own custom endpoint. What if I run Mistral locally (with Ollama, for example) and want to use that?
Also, I really do think there should be a fat warning about uploading data from browser to a third party. Yes, every bloody time. Not everything the browser shows is publicly available data. There are people who are going to break the law with this tool (ie. using PII with LLM), and the people who are damaged are going to be innocent third parties who didn't opt-out or opt-in anything.
The BS with not being easily able to disable a feature like this is probably to deter, or because 'user studies' showed people don't want to disable it. Well, fuck that. It isn't rocket science to have a checkbox which just deals with these values in about:config.
It's been all downhill for Mozilla since Brendan Eich was fired.
The latest quagmire is Firefox adding a completely optional AI sidebar? Seriously, some people are impossible to please. Just don’t open it if you don’t like it…
I think I disabled "Use AI to suggest tab group names" and "enable link previews" in settings (not about:config), and I don't really see any AI anywhere else? I can add/remove some chat thing from the sidebar, but you can just remove that button and you don't need to use it. It's like any other feature one may choose to not use.
I now see there's also a "Create alt texts automatically" for pdfjs. This actually seems one of the more useful AI features I've seen. But I've never noticed it exists as I don't need this accessibility feature. You can disable it in the pdfjs (no about:config needed).
In short, Firefox is not forcing anyone to use AI and ways to disable it are not that obfuscated.
Another user said this, but I'm going to echo it -- Firefox opened up the LLM chat sidebar one time. I closed it. It's stayed closed. It hasn't asked me to open it again. I don't understand the hatred for something you can just _not use_. People will use it if they want to. Firefox also has a very tiny market share in comparison to other browsers.
People should also know that Firefox (and Thunderbird) collect _quite a bit_ of information about your interaction via their telemetry mechanisms.
Here are instructions on how to disable all of it:
https://github.com/Aetherinox/firefox-telemetry-block
(and no, you can't do it with just a few checkboxes in the prefs, you have to go into the advanced pref editor and look up some stuff.)
> the majority who don’t use “AI”
Citation definitely needed. ChatGPT has almost a billion users.
I do agree with the main point that this should be easy to turn off, but let's not pretend that everyone hates AI as much as the average HN nerd.
Also, you could argue that Firefox's only remaining users are the average HN nerd and therefore it shouldn't pursue AI, but that's exactly the problem.
Putting the flags in Firefox just seems logical not "Hostile Design". Yes, there could be an easier way to turn it off, such as a menu item, but the flags need to be there first before the menu entry can exist.
The author claims to be an "IaaS engineer", surely, he can figure out how to write a firefox plugin, that can do what he wants, and use that to help non-technical users, and if it becomes popular enough will probably effect the change he wishes to see.
I use Firefox as my main browser.
when the AI tab/sidebar appeared, I just closed it. that's it. and it never appeared again. I didn't need to change any special setting.
maybe there was another dialog or two which asked me to enable AI something which I answered No and dont remember.
this article is written in bad faith, Firefox is not pushing AI at every opportunity like Edge for example
> It might be hard to believe for my younger readers, but Mozilla took on Internet Explorer that was just as entrenched as Chrome is now, and they kicked proverbial posterior! They did because they offered a better browser that respected the people who used it, and gave them agency in their browsing experience.
That is revisionist history. Firefox succeeded because MS was sitting on their hands with IE, and it was stagnating. Firefox didnt do the opposite of what IE - you could argue Mozilla was doing what MS should have been.
It wasnt about "respecting users", or "agency" but simply implemented standards properly.
And that's going to be a hard problem with Chrome because you're up against a browser that is moving very, very, fast.