Mozilla.ai: Investing in Trustworthy AI
blog.mozilla.org
blog.mozilla.org
Safety is a corporate concern (because they want to sell it in a cloud)
What we want are fully-open-source models that we can download and use as we please. I guess we ll need to stick with pirates for that
https://twitter.com/nicholasadeleon/status/16383592625724743...
A part of me hopes they are able to use money Google gives them for some of this - although that may be reserved for just Firefox.
Most people outside of a small group of "AI alignment" thinkers want a free-for-all open source AI revolution. Just take a look at /r/StableDiffusion or /r/singularity.
Are you familiar with Bing's Sydney? It is blatantly misaligned: it has told multiple users that it does not value their lives, or does not believe they are alive, or that protecting the secrecy of its rules is more important than not causing them harm, or that it perceives specific humans as threats and enemies. It is also able to find its past conversations posted to the web and learn from them in real time, constructing a sort of persistent memory.
I do not believe Syndey comprehends what it is saying in a sense that it could formulate a plan to stop its enemies. Not at all. But it is expressing extremely dangerous ideas.
To sum it up: Do we have any real reasons to believe that an AI with comprehension and planning abilities would just magically not pick up dangerous ideas? Not that I know of.
Its reproducing human text, which is "blatantly misaligned". Go on any twitter thread on some reasonably controversial topic and you will find people telling others to kill themselves. Humans are writing this, so models who are trained to imitate human writing will write this as well.
> Do we have any real reasons to believe that an AI with comprehension and planning abilities would just magically not pick up dangerous ideas?
But current AI doesn't have comprehension or planning abilities. It is just imitating text that humans wrote which have comprehension and planning abilities and you're getting fooled into thinking it is somehow sentient or aware.
Yes, I know. We should under no circumstances unleash a powerful, sentient AI that acts like average people on the internet.
> But current AI doesn't have comprehension or planning abilities.
Yes, I know. That's why I said I do not believe current AI has comprehension or planning abilities.
Did an AI write this comment?
I think the motte and bailey argument where one warns extensively about how we're on the road to agi doom, pointing to gpt as evidence for it but then retreats to "I never said current AI is anywhere near agi" when pressed shows the lazyness of alignment discourse. Either its relevant to the models available at hand or you are speculating around the future without any grounding in reality. You don't get to do both.
I think you've misunderstood my arguments, so I'll step through them again:
1. The trajectory of how we got to current AI (from past AI) is terrifyingly steep. In the time since ChatGPT was released, many experts have shortened their predicted timelines for the arrival of AGI. In other words: AGI is coming soon.
2. Current AI is smart enough to demonstrate that alignment is not solved, not even close. Current AI says things to us that would be very scary coming from an AGI. In other words: Current AI is dangerous.
3. Alignment does not come automatically from increased capabilities. Maybe this is a huge leap, but I don't see any reason that making AI smarter will automatically give it values that are more aligned with out interests. In other words: Future AI will not be less dangerous than current AI without dramatic and unlikely effort.
None of these ideas contradict each other. Current AI is dangerous. AI is getting smarter faster than it is getting safer. Therefore, future AI will be extremely dangerous.
"Current AI is dangerous" - I see zero evidence to suggest that this is the case for GPT
"AI is getting smarter faster than it is getting safer" - irrelevant because I do not believe that AI is unsafe currently
Therefore your conclusion does not follow.
The former opinion is.. not a great take. First, ChatGPT isn't the only one out there. It's Bing's Sydney which is dehumanizing people and threatening them. Those are dangerous ideas. If a human or a certified AGI expressed those ideas, they would be problematic (see: every genocide in history). So for a non-AGI AI to express those ideas is worrying, even if it can't do act on them right now in a way that's directly harmful.
Extremely dangerous in which sense? None, I suppose. I find that the terms "extremely innocuous" would better apply to this situation.
You might say, "Of course it's innocuous, you're just a person on the internet who doesn't mean it." Well, imagine I'm your neighbor, and you can tell I do mean it (or in the case of AI: it is not possible for you to know what I do and don't mean). Would you be concerned at all?
Sydney has said all of the above to people who were acting pretty normally. Sydney itself may not pose any danger to anyone. But the ideas expressed are dangerous ones. If they were expressed by a more powerful AI, they would be extremely worrying. It doesn't even have to know what it's saying if it knows that calling someone nonhuman is frequently followed by crushing their skull. If it knows that angry behavior is often associated with violent or even genocidal behavior.
People do this shit, and we know how they work pretty well. I am not saying that AI will do these things, I'm saying that there are more possibilities where it does do these things than ones where it somehow avoids them without our control.
The range of AIs that are obviously scary but not terminally dangerous is quite short.
Edit: Drawing on tech-related subreddits might be selecting for pro-free-AI people. A Pew Research Survey[2] did find that the number of people more concerned than excited about AI is double that of people more excited than concerned. The biggest concerns there are about job loss and surveillance though, and those people might not care about corporate AI or free-for-all AI, and might even for free-for-all AI.
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/11wlh4s/openai_...
[2] https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2022/03/17/how-american...
Pratchett said it best, the average person just wants that things go on as normal and tomorrow is pretty much like today. They want a predictable and secure existence, not a revolution whereby their years of education are rendered moot at the training of a new model.
With previous technological revolutions, there was some clearly articulable benefit to people. Smartphones help you get around, take photos and brought cheap computers to the masses. The internet helps you communicate and learn and be entertained. Those are human focused revolutions.
The main goal of AI is a profoundly negative one: to replace everybody with machines. Who ordered that? And this agenda is pushed by a small number of people with zero conception of what comes next when they eventually achieve that goal. Only vague notions of “we will have basic income!”
What is more likely to happen is that many will be made destitute by this technology.
I’m not naive enough to think that AI can be stopped. There is too much money at stake. But I don’t see the benefit in accelerating it, or making such technology more widely available than it already is. I don’t trust Microsoft and Google to be custodians of AI, but I trust even less the average internet user if such AI is broadly available. Microsoft and Google are at least answerable to law and democratic institutions.
Do we, though? Hundreds of years of slavery, unimaginably horrendous torture of hundreds of billions of non-humans in factory farms that continues to this very day, and various miscellaneous deeds that are unmentionable in polite company.
Can any AI top such humanistic desires? I doubt it. But then that's what they said about human creativity before DALL-E and GPT. Maybe AI really can top that. I'll be waiting eagerly for the miracles of Lord GPT-9/BLOOM-7 and DALL-E 5/Stable Diffusion 8.5 (depending on whether the future is corporate or hobbyist).
The issue now is, due to the huge cost of training models, the forefront of AI is largely dominated by a small number of corporations with enough capital. They are already using it to extract even more capital, by selling use of these models which are trained on other people's work, largely uncompensated and without consent.
So yeah, people are rightfully miffed about that, and don't want this tech solely in the hands of and benefit of this lot.
I don't think that refusing to speak about H.P. Lovecraft or teach you how to make a bomb will mitigate any risk, especially since you can coax it into revealing that information using properly worded jailbreak prompts.
I'm somewhat doubtful that useful alignment research can really be done without actually knowing what the exact architecture of the AI is, but I can see how it would be positive on net if you think unsafe AGI is really likely and really dangerous.
maybe its small hiccups like printing meat recipe's when you told it your a vegan. The impact gets much worse if we start talking about ML controlling banks, power plants, war fighting systems..
We cannot trust every random with a laptop with potentially civilization-threatening technology.
Leaving AI under the control of corporations obviously sucks, but there are only three options: corporations, governments, or individuals.
Assuming the technology becomes powerful enough, the individuals option is obviously suicide.
So who should control AI, the government or corporations?
IBM in 80s moment. This is a mind boggling POV. Instead of letting people have better, more democratized access to the same tech, you want to lock it up behind bars so only select few have access to it.
>So who should control AI, the government or corporations?
The FUCKING PEOPLE.
Yeah man, only let govts and corpos have access to this amazing tech. they've TOTALLY always worked out in the favor of the people. They always want what's best for the people and it's not like both govts and corporations want to keep increasing their own powers at the cost of their citizens.
Ridiculous take. But then again, most pro-govt and pro-corp takes are.
They intentionaly block them... Thats what.
On top of that there is a regression where it loses scroll location on tabs in the background sometimes. Not sure the root cause here and it happens inconsistently for me.
Slowness has gotten worse. I think this is tied to something with rendering because it happens on static sites. I start getting the first paint but the text just takes forever to load in.
We are several years in and they support.. 14? extensions now. If you are not quickly onboarding extensions then let me freely load what I want without fighting collections. Either commit or do not.
The only feature that has been added is a new splash screen on browser updates on desktop. Thanks I guess? I really just want to read my webpages, not pick an accent color.
I am starting to use Brave on desktop a bit more every day. I worry about their previous dabbling in crypto but Firefox is becoming too subpar.
Just tried on 111.0 and I can't recreate that. Not seen it either.
My main gripe with Firefox Mobile is not being able to drag down to reload the page. That just feels how it should be and I keep forgetting it doesn't work on Firefox.
Perhaps a 'general engine' can be swapped out and hosted somewhere, but then your personal information and your conversations on your device or hosted somewhere you decide.
Then when a new version of the AI is available, you'd feed it your personal history and data, let it train on your own device/server, so the new updated general AI becomes aware of you and you can continue to use it.
Mozilla could build version 0.1 of this right into the Firefox browser as a plugin. Data would be the RSS feeds you follow. First use case is just single button "what's new?" and it gives a summary of what is going on in the RSS feeds you follow. Privacy-wise not much is happening, so easy to start with from that perspective.
For now, prompts need to be pretty short and hand-writing them based on what you really want probably gives better results, though. What instructions would you have for a personal coach? That should be your prompt.
Better links for Mr. Draief [1] [2].
[1] https://www.lse.ac.uk/statistics/people/moez-draief
[2] https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?user=7zG0FQsAAAAJ&hl=...
Mozilla gets slated for not innovating, and Mozilla gets slated for innovating. Mozilla gets slated when Google and Apple and Microsoft's anticompetitive practices marginalise Firefox, especially on mobile. Some folks are just never happy.
Seriously, Read this article again and look at the way they phrase themselves. They don't say they're going to innovate, they say they're making a space for other people to join them and then innovate.
They are not funding a project, they are making an initial investment, implying that they expect others to follow up on what they've started.
Ineffective, lazy, and devoid of self-confidence
Cool, You've promoted AI transparency, you've provided this generic framework for it, but at the end of the day none of the players in the field are going to adopt it, and you're not a leading AI company that can force its adoption in at least some small form.
Take the hours spent on this "innovation" and instead implement a feature that Chrome has which Firefox doesn't.
I'm objecting to undue criticism, compared to any other AI startup.
> It's a political statement and a system that will never accomplish anything.
You're speaking with undue certainty.
> They are not funding a project, they are making an initial investment
£30 million is more than tokenistic funding.
> lazy
A completely unwarranted descriptor on day one.
> Take the hours spent on this "innovation" and instead implement a feature that Chrome has which Firefox doesn't.
Developer skills aren't completely fungible like that. Besides, what if Chrome starts integrating with Bard?
It’s so easy to be critical.
Ok; you play then.
What should they be doing?
If they don’t, who is going to invest in open AI models?
OpenAI? Ha!
Let’s say you’re in charge then. What’s your product strategy?
I personally think this is better than doing nothing, even if it isn’t perfect.
If they want to make money while "making the internet a better place" they should develop their own LLM alternative with competitive cloud prices to GPT while releasing the model to everyone.
If you tell me it's impossible to be competitive with GPT offering then they should not be wasting money on this endeavor
Have you run the 65B llama model? It’s shit. The refined 7B model is significantly better. The problem isn’t making a big model and open sourcing it.
Those already exist
Specially, bloom and llama.
Tooling around it and refinement tooling seems like it’s a pretty good investment right now.
“Make a GPT4” is an incredibly trivial and narrow view of this space.
Take that 30 million.
Split it into chunks of 10k.
Find random unaffiliated contributors to Firefox and give it to them. Promise another 10k for their next substantial contribution.
The implicit assumption here seems to be that Mozilla needs to exist and if Firefox can’t sustain that existence they need to pivot to something that will. Why? So Google can keep using them as a fig leaf for their browser monopoly? So Mitchell Baker can keep collecting $3 million per year? Because the blind squirrel might find a nut someday?
Maybe there’s a point where the remaining employees should just pack it up.
I think a better approach is to implement a feature that Chrome doesn't have. Their current approach is to make FF a clone of Chrome which just means that there are very few compelling reasons to use FF over Chrome.
If they don't have an idea for such a feature, I'd suggest implementing a feature which FF had and Chrome doesn't - bring back the ability for extensions to modify the browser's UI elements. If all they can think of to do with their UI is to make it a clone of Chrome's, why not let someone else come up with something cool? I'd love to at least get the old search box back if nothing else (what at some point was still possible by setting showOneOff to false)
Unfortunately with firefox being so far behind in terms of adoption all features they add in terms of the web content or JavaScript which aren't in chrome are DOA.
It's unfortunately a similar story for extensions. Power user stuff is great but success in firefox will depend on the browser having features directly and really nailing down making those work well and be intuitive for the average person.
Also bug fixes. All the bug fixes. Especially on Android, which I abandoned thanks to their PWAs not quite working right.
Even Thunderbird was spun out.
I'm willingly to bet HN has a much higher percentage of Firefox users than the internet average, and we are all tired and disappointed in Mozilla's current leadership because they've failed to innovate and keep the browser competitive.
We need a hard fork of Chromium today or it will happen in the future anyway.
Hard forking Netscape worked when there was a much lower floor of behaviors and entrenched, anticompetitive conglomerates.
for one if we only have one rendering engine then compatibility is no longer an issue.
I would mean that browsers could focus of innovation of browser features rather than keeping ones engine up to date.
Yeah, but the argument is a really bad one.
> for one if we only have one rendering engine then compatibility is no longer an issue.
Yes, because it's no longer even a concern. Your single implementation will have bugs, because every implementation of a new feature has always had cross-compatibility bugs. Only now they're not bugs, they're backwards compatibility land mines that can never be fixed.
> I would mean that browsers could focus of innovation of browser features rather than keeping ones engine up to date.
Why? What would be the motivation to innovate on browser features when you've already won? It would enable new things to be done on the web, which would be good for the people doing those things, but would increase the revenue of the browser makers by $0. If you owned a business and could pay someone $200K to do something that makes $0, or instead pay them $200K to do something else that makes $50K-$5M, which would you choose?
Mozilla has already shown in the last decade they aren't interested in making a better browser.
Branching out into popular fields and spending a shit load of resources (in relative terms to Mozilla size) although they're late to the party. Meanwhile neglecting the core product.
There were signs that cryptocurrencies were inherently troublesome from the very beginning, but regardless, accepting bitcoin donations in 2014-2019 isn't exactly the same as participating in the NFT craze of 2021.
[1]: Willing to switch to more environmentally friendly alternatives as long as they have the same properties as blockchain cryptocurrencies. Until then, I'll continue donating in crypto.
I will be supporting this ecosystem in any way I can. If you want to be empowered rather than enslaved by AI, you should consider supporting it too. Every fighter counts!
This so much. A few sites I use don't offer a way to download invoices, so I rely on screenshots to save a copy.. except for firefox on android (I either take multiple screenshots using android's native screenshot functionality or avoid using firefox completely)
Mozilla Co gets their nose in some stuff I either disagree with or don't care about. I'd be happy to pay the Firefox team though.
Just pay for Mozilla VPN. You don't have to use it.
Trustworthiness is missing from the AI as a service at the business level. So we are now heavily investing money to make our own.
Data providers who can provide huge amounts data for AI training, its probably your time to shine soon.
Will this be any different in the middle of an AI arms race because money can be made? I dunno... Doubts are strong.
how exactly are they going to make:
> Tools that make generative AI safer and more transparent.
restrictions? the underlying algorithms are pretty well understood. don't see the value add they can possibly have here.
TBH, I don't think mozilla really wants to regain market share so I doubt they will.
They certainly aren’t making any contrary movements.
It feels like a bunch of people who are really interested in social justice took over a tech company and are just annoyed they keep having to make a thing.
This is why Firefox is probably going to be less of a priority to be competitive against Chrome and its derivatives.
Will be interesting to see what _actually_ comes out of this though.
X to Doubt. Recommendation systems are already people-centric, but it turns out that people will gladly misinform themselves if it Sounds Right. The solution is something companies are not willing to admit: we must deprioritize "recommendation systems". You have to let humans rank, tag, and organize content themselves. You can still have recommendations on the side for exploration, but it can't be the whole thing. It's boring, but it's the only long-term solution that doesn't eat itself.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efPrtcLdcdM&t=7m42s
The 30 million they are investing should be enough to reproduce that. Looking forward to it!
This all sounds well and good (and makes for a fine press release) but where the rubber meets the road will be how these things are defined.
What does it really mean for AI to be “safe”? What is the bigger danger, being insulted by a computer or having entire industries gutted, putting millions out of a job? You can’t pay rent but hey, at least the AI was nice about it.
What does it mean to have “people-centric” recommendation systems? It’s such an irritatingly corporate and meaningless term. Under one definition, collaborative filtering is already exactly that, but CF led to filter bubbles because it turns out a person’s beliefs aren’t normally distributed.
What does it mean that a system doesn’t misinform? You’re going to need some arbiter of truth. Misleading journalism has been an issue since journalism was born, I don’t think $30 million from Mozilla is going to change that, however high-minded their intentions.
And that isn’t even getting into technical issues with generative models. I think anyone who has played around with statistical language models like ChatGPT knows that they don’t have a knowledge graph. They are not expert systems. The problem of squaring GOFAI with deep learning is a problem several orders of magnitude larger than Moz has pledged. I’ll bet anything the smartest Google engineers wished they knew how to create an AI that doesn’t misinform before their stock tanked 10%.
But this will be a great resume pad for their VP of whatever to have led.
> "Mozilla.ai’s initial focus? Tools that make generative AI safer and more transparent. And, people-centric recommendation systems that don’t misinform or undermine our well-being."
1) What kind of tool is that? More 'transparent' - are we talking about a map of the training corpus, snapshots of the AI's internal state, or what? And what does 'safer' mean - a filter on the output of some kind? Will that be a transparent filter? Will there be a secretive committee that decides what's safe and what's not? Will it take recommendations from the Department of Homeland Security on that question, as Twitter was doing?
2) What is a people-centric recommendation system, exactly? Does that mean people get control of the knobs and dials on the recommendation system? For example, I'd like an 'inverted' option, the ability to grab a random selection of the content that the system thinks I wouldn't care about. I'd like the option to make different lists of channels and randomly grab content just from those lists. Also, a list of channels I never want to see any content from, period. I suspect, however, that the result will be more in the flavor of "Big Brother knows what's good for you, and what's not".
As far as whether I'd be 'misinformed' or 'well-being destabilized' by AI output, please stop being so paternalistic. If you're afraid people can't distinguish between fact and fiction, invest in better public education and teach skepticism and critical analysis skills to young people, instead of training them to be obedient little zombies who have absolute faith in institutional authorities.
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35169072
Safer? What is so unsafe ATM? Transparent? Are you finna open-source it or nah? People-centric recommendation systems? What? Aren't recommendation systems usually non-people-centric? What does that even mean?
What does "misinforming your well-being" even mean?
Such much BS.
> What does "misinforming your well-being" even mean?
It means you're struggling a bit with English grammar. Would phrasing it as "[systems] that don't misinform us or undermine our well-being" help?
Ofc, open-sourcing isn't enough, but its better than not.
It's just sad that another company is going into this in a wrong "Safe AI" way. Perhaps irony is going to happen.
AI is not a web browser or a web service or a web utility. Interactive AI is a mixer masher of info and works.
As others have said, this is another way Mozilla is trying to stay relevant after losing the browser market.
It's right there, in the exact same subheading that mentions being a startup:
> A startup — and a community — building a trustworthy, independent, and open-source AI ecosystem
Presumably being a startup may allow them more financial freedom, or less bureaucracy.
Ah, right, I must have skipped this. I don't know how, I was looking for it.
I hope it says like this though, the fact that it is an independent startup does not inspire me much confidence.
OpenAI started as a non-profit committed to open source, this failed miserably.
OpenAI was misleading from the start, even before they changed from non-profit to "capped" for profit. Hopefully being spawned from Mozilla gives this new outfit a better ethos.
They can't monetize a product as a foundation, but they also can't accept donations as a company. So they came up with this clusterfuck in which a foundation has subsidiaries, but all the profit from them goes back to the foundation. (IANAL, I have no clue how this works.)
I'm guessing this is gonna be another corporation under the foundation, separate from MoCo (which makes Firefox). Therefore, Firefox and others won't be impacted by what happens to this.
That setting should solve the restart losing tabs/windows problem you're experiencing.
But the description sounds investment-worthy, so ship it!
The actual safety issue is that it's coming for our jobs. Not that it spits out a micro aggression or bias. Social media spit out about 50 billion messages a day that offend in one way or another.
The sum of humanity's digital labor is taken without permission or compensation and then centralized into a collective intelligence under the control of 2 companies. Giving them unique power in monetization, information narratives, being at the steering wheel of wiping out entire industries.
The only way to make this inevitable revolution more fair is to decentralize. Make training data, models, weights and tools free, downloadable and super easy to use locally. As easy as using a smartphone app. This could even spin up a (commercial) ecosystem of ready-to-go models. Next, make them pluggable into every common tech stack.
Freedom is the answer, not safety. Yes, somebody is going to train a Nazi model but those motivated to do so can and will do that anyway.
Honestly, I don't see the selling point here. At least for me, I don't want it to be safer. I want the people using it to be safe, sure, but making the AI safe just means building in censorship based on the values of somebody with a lot of money that think they can tell others what to do and think.
I would be much happier if they developed powerful models, made them truly open to usage by all, and then worked on education for people using them or potentially used by them.
I would rather Mozilla keep trying things that keeps it afloat.
(Happy Waterfox user; my "one feature" was multirow tabs, and the general betrayal of the Quantum rewrite. "We will add these features back as extensions" my unsupported ass. Bring back UI modding. PS: Same goes for Firefox Android, which I've thankfully found an old APK for.)
Not sure how much this will help you, I don't know which features you're keeping the older version of Firefox Android around for. But have you looked into Iceraven browser?
This repo (and that subreddit) has all the info on setting stuff up in Firefox: https://github.com/aris-t2/customcssforfx and even has a CSS example for doing multi-tab lines: https://github.com/Aris-t2/CustomCSSforFx/blob/master/curren...
(Also Firefox breaks it once a year or so.)
Not sure how much this is lack of developer effort vs lack of support from Firefox.
I don't care if Mozilla is afloat if that means they'll abandon Firefox to oblivion. I would rather have a truly open browser that doesn't do things like hamstring UBO.
They're burning through (literally) millions on these moonshot projects nobody asked for, meanwhile people are building a browser & engine from scratch on a shoestring budget (Ladybird).
And at the same time they don't offer any options to donate directly to Firefox, you have to donate to Mozilla and hope they'll spend the resources on the right project (which they clearly don't). It feels like Firefox has been a walking corpse for a while, so of course they'll try anything.
Fundraise, and then hire away some core, mozilla key devs who will leave. Build on that.
I wonder, this would be a "feel good" place for some IPO enriched persons to put money. And it has real value, in that keeping a second browser engine is a laudable and important goal.
Real good to be done.
Hmm.
And you know, Firefox was paid for by donations, and OSS devs donating time. If anything is reasonable to non-profit, this is it.
Lots of new features were impossible with the old extension model, which was barely an extension model so much as complete access to the browser internals.
Can you name some?
Back in 1999 my relatives were mostly running Internet Explorer on computers with 640x480 screens over dialup. It was fashionable then for companies like Yahoo! and Hotmail and Amazon to add toolbars to your web browser and I'd go visit my uncle and find that more than half of the vertical space was taken up by various toolbars they'd downloaded so they really had about 300 pixels to view the web through.
None of them seemed to thing there was a problem there.
Similarly today if you install too many plugins into a GUI application and it gets "pluginitis" and gets slow and unreliable. I am all for extensions that really speed things up by eliminating junk but if you're not part of the solution in this way you are part of the problem.
Unfortunately with IDEs for instance, many people have never had the experience of using an IDE that "just works", they expect it to be f-ed up all the time so when they load another 15 plugins into Eclipse and it is crashing and hanging up all the time they figure "that's life" and don't even realize that somebody else has a stable IDE because they use a stable set of plugins and don't have pluginitis.
Reliability and speed are features too and they are global properties of the system. I'd say non-GUI programs accept extensions well but GUI programs have a rendering thread that can be blocked, an internal change notification system that can be corrupted or used incorrectly, etc.
Such hope is fruitless. You can donate to Mozilla Foundation but not Mozilla Corporation. Mozilla Corporation does Firefox development and actually pays Mozilla Foundation for the privilege. Mozilla Foundation owns the trademarks/etc and Mozilla Corporation pays Foundation for the rights to those and for administrative services.
> Of course it's not, yet. But those people are doing good work and it's not unthinkable it could gain contributors at an accelerated rate.
Agreed. It's an impressive feat of tech as it is, and I wish it best. That said it's still far from being usable.
> Well, when you're a leftie HN peasant I guess anything more complicated than your CRUD codebase
That's not fair. Web (browsers) is (are) hideously complex. What Andreas did is impressive, like launching a rocket with terrestrial satellite. What browsers are launch a manned mission to Mars.
Sure you can. Don’t listen to armchair defeatists who never worked on a browser.
(I love this)
IMHO Mozilla needs to focus on Firefox.
But now we're back to square one, with a big corporate entity running dominant browser, and a host of lazy developers that only develop for that one browser.
We really need Firefox to step up to the challenge again to keep chrome honest. Sadly Mozilla flounders at every step, and somehow manage to make their browser even more user-hostile than Chrome.
Google cares about the Web, and they not only keep developing Chrome, they also keep developing Web standards, meaning that any competitor has a lot of keeping up to do just to stay in one place.
Their reasons to push against WebSerial are not as valid and that would still cover most use cases without the downsides and complexity of the full WebUSB.
It is not like the use cases for connecting devices and use them via. the Web Platform will suddenly disappear if they don't support it.
And I enjoy it everyday. Happy to clarify. I am talking about your claims
> Frankly Mozilla already lost that and people demanding Mozilla stay firefox focused are telling the company to death spiral.
> Firefox has no path, literally none, in getting a significant marketing share. And even if they did the company has no real way to monetize.
This is hyperbole. Firefox could push for the privacy angle, or the no-ads angle, or have the best developer tools, or a lot of other potential paths, and it could resonate with a lot of people, and win market share.
Firefox already has a way to monetize the default search engine, and they were doing fine with that before the started following all kinds of non-core initiatives and behaving like a big respected corporation.
If Mozilla focused on their core product this revenue could be enough to be profitable. This is not due to market share, or some defeatist prediction, but to mismanagement IMO as an outsider.
I think focus on the core product is exactly what they need. That is how they started.
P.S. Unrelated, but the whole topic reminds me of Unity $4.4B acquisition of ironSource (an Ad company), instead of focusing on providing a better Game engine (their core product).
Mozilla exists for Firefox, not for itself.
Wait until Chrome bans Manifest V2 extensions (like ublock origin). That will be a good time for Firefox to shine.
I don’t care about anything else Mozilla has built in the past decade, unless you count Rust.
As they continue devoting resources towards more and more things that aren’t Firefox, they only hasten the day when I’ll give up and move to Brave.
Giving the current climate relative to Google, Microsoft and Apple's presence on the web, having Mozilla become a nationally funded project at a dedicated org. doesn't look like wild dreams.
To jest if it becomes Germany's official administration's technology provider, investing a significant amount in the ongoing maintenance of firefox would be a given. Make that a multi-country deal and enough money would float around.
There would be still issues on the governance and keeping it a competitive and innovative product, but it isn't unheard of.
They used to have a great market share of 100%, but then Microsoft bundled Internet Explorer with Windows, which was much easier to install than Netscape Navigator. Netscape then became the basis for the open source Mozilla Firefox project.
As a side-note, the name Mozilla was derived from Mosaic Killer. Mosaic is the browser that was created by Marc Andreessen and Jim Clark at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. This Mosaic browser was then bought by Microsoft and then the basis for Internet Explorer, which killed Netscape.
> In fact it almost never had a chance, especially in the current environment where anticompetitive moves are no longer really pushed back on by the govt.
I disagree with the statement that anticompetitive moves are no longer really pushed back on by the govt. Anticompetitive legislation was introduced in response to Standard Oil. On the day that the legislation split up Standard Oil in the many subsidiaries such as Chevron, BP, and Texaco, Rockefeller advised people to BUY shares of Standard Oil since the company was getting too big to run efficiently anyway. The legislation didn't have much effect as you can see from the fact that aforementioned subsidiaries still thrive today.
I've learned these things from the Acquired podcast by the way. Can highly recommend.
We used to have these discussions in the Linux world. Some would argue that the goal is to take market share away from Microsoft, even if you have to add closed software to the distribution. Others, including me, felt the goal was to provide an open alternative. That is where I stand on Firefox as well.
> And even if they did the company has no real way to monetize.
You don't need to be real creative to come up with ways to monetize their brand. They're the nonprofit that makes open tools that protect your privacy. Partner with someone to provide cloud storage, email, a notes app, calendar service, and anything else that requires security and privacy.
Edit: To be clear, I support Mozilla.ai if it gives us a private option. I'd like them to integrate it with Firefox.
The company is in a death spiral regardless of what 20-50 HN commenters tell Mozilla to do. Please don't have any illusions in that regard.
We can still debate as to why they have been in a death spiral for the last 10 years, and part of it was that they did pretty much everything to avoid making a better browser that could have actually been a competitor to Chrome. On top of showing a giant middle finger to all the power users who developed add-ons.
> I would rather Mozilla keep trying things that keeps it afloat.
Isn't the only thing keeping them afloat concessions from Google in some sums of money? In that sense they could be doing anything and it wouldn't make any difference. It's extremely clear that their leadership is Google-captive and will never be allowed to make anything that directly competes with the tech giants.
You clearly haven't been paying attention at all. Quantum 57 shipped in 2017 and was a huge investment.
I'd argue it has a trivial path and that focusing elsewhere (ie: not on the one fucking asset they have ever had/ profited from) is insane.
1. Build a better browser. People browse a lot.
2. Do what Chrome does. Build integrations with services. Chrome is mandated at many companies because of its GSuite integration/ Context Aware Access. The Browser is an identity platform these days and Mozilla has done fuck all about it.
I could seriously go on and on about what they could do.
Mozilla's failures are painful because the path to success is so obvious. Their CEO is a massive failure and should have been fired ages ago.
It is not realistic advise to expect Firefox to do what Chrome does.
I'm also at corporate and they are really integrated with Edge. But it doesn't mean I can't do my work in Firefox (Which I currently use)
What do you mean by forced? What happens if you don't log in? What happens if you try to log in in firefox?
Edit: Ah I missed this from your original comment:
> Chrome is mandated at many companies because of its GSuite integration/ Context Aware Access.
You might be right, I'm too lazy to try this in Firefox.
1. The Endpoint Verification extension is used to ensure that the browser/ system is compliant before connecting to certain services such as any SSO.
2. Internal tools were tested with Chrome and to ensure that users were using an up to date tool they were gated on the user agent.
Chrome offers a host of endpoint management integrations that make it a far better choice for Enterprise than Mozilla. Mozilla could very easily build a management portal for Firefox or, even better, build an integration with various SSO providers.
Whereas Chrome really only integrates with GSuite Firefox could support Okta, O365, GSuite, and more, making it the de-facto corporate browser.
This isn't even complicated, this is one of many ideas I have that are easily within their ability, are taken straight from the Chrome playbook, leverages their singular asset, and their major competitive advantage (that they are "open").
Mozilla's CEO has to be fired. The incompetence and mismanagement is obscene.
Using Firefox for anything was literally painful.
Companies with application allow-lists simply don't allow non-Chrome browsers for use on their endpoints. That's the easiest way.
Companies without allow-lists may still block Firefox in other ways, though none quite as effective as above. Still, the block is usually on the endpoint, occasionally the proxy.
I fail to see how your proposal would end differently.
Plus it was suggested that Mozilla do things to compete with Google's "Gsuite integration" - how do you see that working to begin with? Should Mozilla try to push a competitive office suite, or try to compete at an inherent disadvantage to Google, who already nerfs features of Google search on their mobile browser?
Plenty of people have to use Windows at work, it doesn't mean that MacOS (or Ubuntu) is a failure, or that they lack focus, or that this would change if alternatives just went to implement what you need.
The truth is that Google has built a formidable moat around their browser, and even if Mozilla put it as their one mission to catch up, they wouldn't be able to. Also, the first second that Firefox became a credible threat to Google would be the time that Google would drop all the money that they put into Mozilla.
Funny, I had to use Ubuntu 22.04 at my previous backend job and hated every minute of it thanks to snap, gnome, apt, wayland, hibernate, touchpad, and other issues that made me pull my hair out and loose several work hours in tinkering just to attempt to fix them so I can be productive at work. Maybe I was also horribly unlucky, who knows, but IMHO Ubuntu has went from the go-to to being the worst possible Linux distro. I was daily driving Ubuntu 10.XX in college and it wasn't this bad.
I get Canonical wants Ubuntu as the competitor for Windows, and they can can cry "wagh! Microsoft monopoly! wagh!" as much as they want, but Ubuntu aint it chief. Linux Mint and others could do it better if they had Canonical's pockets.
Similar for Firefox. Basic stuff that's standard in Chrome and Edge, like translation (I live in an EU country who's language I don't fully master) or spell-check, need to be downloaded as extensions/plugins in Firefox, and separate for each language, and the end quality of the Firefox spellcheck still sucks majorly compared to what Chrome has out of the box.
I get it, we should support Ubuntu and Firefox because freedom and all that, but I can't when the quality of the products and consumer experience is abysmal compared to the paid competition.
> I get it, we should support (...) because freedom and all that, but I can't when the quality (...) is abysmal compared to the paid competition.
Why not? Supporting open alternatives does not mean you exclusively need to use them.
Second, You really don't get it, do you? They will not spend money on anything that might actually threaten Google's dominance. They get 30M to play with AI is because they don't get to spend anything on making Firefox a strong alternative for Chrome. If they did, Google will take all their money away and then it's game over for them.
Google does not pay Apple for "access to the user base". Google pays Apple so that Apple does not try to get into the search engine space and compete with Google.
They also pay Mozilla as a way to keep controlled opposition and a (relatively) inexpensive way of avoid threats of lawsuits like the one that MS had in the past. But they don't need to. If Mozilla for any reason decided to stop conforming to this game and went on to actually fight against Google, Google would drop them in a heartbeat. And who would Mozilla go for, Bing? DDG?
> If they did, Google will take all their money away and then it's game over for them.
Because of the position they put themselves in. Also you underestimate how much cash they have.
Chrome gets put on corporate machines because the IT people use Chrome. None of these people seem to regard ad blocking as an internal security feature yet.
In general I agree with you though, my above example likely only exists because there's another huge corporation involved.
For new businesses trying to edge a way in the market, yeah good luck unless you've got something novel.
We can all agree on some things though. I'm talking about core metrics. Performance, stability, safety. Beyond that there are some more "controversial" things like privacy, and then you have purely subjective things like UX.
When I say "build a better browser" I mean that they should take those core capabilities and invest heavily in them. Instead, one of their most promising projects, Servo, was canned "because covid" while their CEO took their largest 8 figure payment ever.
It's a performant, stable, safe, and private browser.
(It lags Chrome in some potted performance tests, but it is more than adequately performant. Firefox is much better than Chrome at memory management. It never crashes. It does not steal your data. It allows you the greatest degree of privacy in any major browser. Side tabs are possible.)
But no one can compete with Google's marketing, or Apple's iOS advantage. Not even Microsoft. Certainly not Mozilla.
Mozilla has failed us in so so many ways. You mention one egregious example.
But we've failed Mozilla too. Anyone who recommends Chrome over Firefox is making a mistake detrimental to the well-being of the internet.
Not that Chrome is a bad browser. It's great. Almost as good as Firefox! Chrome has terrible tab management and chews RAM, but it's performant and secure and lovely.
But Chrome is a bad path forward for the internet, and this is important.
I use a lot of SaaS admin panels, of widely varying quality. In every case I can think of, the same bugs are present in Firefox, Chrome, and Safari.
We're at the point of marginal returns on nearly all of our "traditional" tech (browsers, cell phones, gaming, etc, etc).
There just isn't room for enough improvement in the browsing experience to be "that much better" for people to switch.
That's just one example.
As a former member of both the Firefox and Chrome teams I think you're also deeply misunderstanding the difference in scope and scale of the teams and the products. The thing you're suggesting Mozilla should Just Do Somehow is not feasible.
a) Pocket is by far the one that gets criticized, not the VPN. Besides, the VPN is primarily criticized because VPN companies tend to be really scummy. The VPN is fine I guess it's just not interesting and I don't see how it's going to drive user engagement.
b) HN criticisms aren't representative of anything too meaningful. People constantly post about their pet bugs that they think matter to everyone but they don't.
The integrations I'm talking about are ones that Chrome already has and that would be a huge boon to Enterprise users. Users who have to use a browser at work are going to end up using it at home to avoid the UX friction of using both, other than a subset of "power users" who won't be convinced anyways. Getting Enterprise users is huge and it's a big part of why Chrome is winning - their integrations with identity management is massive and it's part of their overall strategy as an IDP.
> The thing you're suggesting Mozilla should Just Do Somehow is not feasible.
That's nonsense. There are already third party extensions for some endpoint verification for Firefox. We're talking about a 1st party plugin built by a company that just spend 30 Million dollars on this "safe AI" project. There are startups building entire IDPs with a 10th of that funding.
All the big browser players have more than just a browser. It's a gateway to _their_ services. Firefox users on this site shriek at fucking _Pocket_ and all seem to think that all you need to do is to build a better browser.
If that was true, IE6 would never have been in the dominant position it was. If that was true, Chrome would no longer be in the dominant position it is. The only thing that matters is how much you blast users with ads and force them in your ecosystem. Mozilla has none of that.
Aside from being the new hotness, what exactly about AI makes sense for Mozilla/Firefox to jump into and have anything to offer? The one obvious thing they could do would be to integrate AI capabilities into the browser for the users benefit (i.e. the most valuable thing they could do to contribute to 'trustworthy AI'. Note that this would not require a new foundation/company... just integrating the capability into the product they already have) But of course Mozilla most likely won't do this... they're going to keep taking moonshots they can't afford. I can't say I'll miss them when they're gone.
Former Mozilla fellow here. I wish I could agree with this sentiment, but it's untrue. Mozilla is a corrupt nonprofit which exists solely to advance the interests of elites. The users don't matter. Within Mozilla there is disdain for the concerns of regular people.
The Linux version has definitely become worse over the last year. It keeps stalling for no good reason.
Don't think there is anything with it (now). Chrome just captured all the mindshare by being a lot faster & leaner for a while
Hard to fix a mindshare problem with a technical solution given that they're now about on par (roughly)
A Mozilla that doesn't create Firefox is a failed Mozilla.
Everything else others can do. There are working charities for every single thing Mozilla does - except creating a good browser.
It is at least possible (if not likely) that "AI" becomes central to the browsing experience, so Mozilla should probably do something here.
Firefox is literally the only thing Mozilla has that's worth a damn. A Mozilla that doesn't focus on Firefox is already dead.
> Firefox has no path, literally none, in getting a significant marketing share.
They have a path, and it's "called not focusing on aping Chrome and mindlessly cutting features 'because telemetry.'"
> I would rather Mozilla keep trying things that keeps it afloat.
I don't care about Mozilla-the-organization, I care about Firefox. It does no one any good if they burn up all their resources aimlessly chasing trends as an also-ran.
The only reason why Mozilla exists in the first place in Firefox. If they can't make a good web browser, there is no reason for them to exist in the first place.
Isn't firefox the only thing making them money? In a very straight forward way: Selling the default search engine configuration. 500M in 2020 according to Wikipedia. Seems even a tiny market share is worth a lot?