Not commenting the Mozilla layoffs or new direction but I see my timeline going “Oh no Firefox will go full hype on AI”.
This is only due to the framing by Techcrunch: If you read the memo that partially leaked, there's no sign that Firefox will receive a massive influx of generative AI features.
When you say you don't want AI in your browser. Really, you don't want translation services or copy text from image? Not all AI is equal.
Have you reacted after only reading the title of the article?
@anthony I'm inclined to say that Mozilla dug their own hole here, with the way they've approached the LLM nonsense on MDN, and this interpretation is simply a consequence of that.
When as an organization you've repeatedly breached people's trust, it shouldn't really be a surprise that you don't get the benefit of the doubt anymore...
@julienw Bluntly put: you cannot expect random people to follow the internal structure of an organization, be it Mozilla's or otherwise.
It's the job of Mozilla itself to convey things to the public accurately, and to give people a reason to trust the organization. So "different teams" doesn't matter for this to anyone other than Mozillians, regardless of whether it is true.
From the perspective of people who don't work there, it's "Mozilla" that has done such-and-such, and conclusions about trust will be drawn from that as such.
(The LLM nonsense has also never been 'rolled back', just turned into a different variant with the same problems - "AI Help" is just as problematic for basically the same reasons.)
@julienw So the thing is that over the years I've both had frequent close connections with Mozilla folks, but also a lot of 'outside perspective' from communities that have no knowledge about Mozilla internals.
And unfortunately, the explanation is not that "users tend to consider a bad agenda first". Mozilla has lost a ton of goodwill over the past decade or so, for various reasons, some legitimate and others not.
This distrust is not coming from nowhere; there are specific things that people bring up again and again that have eaten into their trust of the organization, and that were never rectified. People don't feel that there's even transparent communication.
That simply isn't going to go away until Mozilla as an organization starts - publicly - acknowledging and reckoning with this issue, and gives people reason to believe that it's not just a completely unaccountable tech corporation with a slightly different coat of paint.
Regarding the AI stuff: "AI Help" and "AI Explain" are fundamentally the same technology with the same problems. The framing that it was just one of the two that was a problem, has been repeatedly debunked in depth in the relevant Github threads. It's both.
@joepie91
Re: communication: kind of agree with you there. But also users tend to consider a bad agenda first...
Re: MDN and AI: Both AI Help and AI Explain were launched together in the same time, so no, it's not one turned into the other, but the problematic one was removed.