The Google antitrust ruling could be an existential threat to the future of Firefox | Financials show 86% of Mozilla's revenue came from the agreement keeping Google as Firefox's default search engine
The Google antitrust ruling could be an existential threat to the future of Firefox | Financials show 86% of Mozilla's revenue came from the agreement keeping Google as Firefox's default search engine
United States District Judge Amit Mehta found Google guilty of building a monopolistic position in web search. The Mountain View corporation spent billions of dollars becoming the...
Mozilla has a close relationship with Google, as most of Firefox's revenue comes from the agreement keeping Google as the browser's default search engine. However, the search giant is now officially a monopoly, and a future court decision could have an unprecedented impact on Mozilla's ability to keep things "business as usual."
United States District Judge Amit Mehta found Google guilty of building a monopolistic position in web search. The Mountain View corporation spent billions of dollars becoming the leading search provider for computing platforms and web browsers on PC and mobile devices.
Most of the $21 billion spent went to Apple in exchange for setting Google as the default search engine on iPhone, iPad, and Mac systems. The judge will now need to decide on a penalty for the company's actions, including the potential of forcing Google to stop payments to its search "partners completely," which could have dire consequences for smaller companies like Mozilla.
Its most recent financials show Mozilla gets $510 million out of its $593 million in total revenue from its Google partnership. This precarious financial position is a side effect of its deal with Alphabet, which made Google the search engine default for newer Firefox installations.
The open-source web browser has experienced a steady market share decline over the past few years. Meanwhile, Mozilla management was paid millions to develop a new "vision" of a theoretical future with AI chatbots. Mozilla Corporation, the wholly owned subsidiary of Mozilla Foundation managing Firefox development, could find itself in a severe struggle for revenue if Google's money suddenly dried up.
Based on their 2022 report, only half of their expenses were on software development costs - around $220m, and it’s not clear what portion of that was on Firefox vs other projects.
https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2022/mozilla-fdn-2022-fs-final-0908.pdf
In terms of revenue: around $100m was from sources other than Google.
Therefore, it seems plausible to me that Firefox development could still be funded with $100m of annual revenue. At a smaller level no doubt, but still in existence nonetheless.
Given that they are focusing on initiatives like intrusive adverts and machine learning BS, I'm okay with them cutting that kind of nonsense off; Firefox still doesn't have a native vertical tab bar.
Firefox still doesn't have a native vertical tab bar.
At least the extension APIs are powerful enough to have an extension that does a decent job (or even a great job, in the case of extensions like Sidebery), plus there's a way to hide the regular top tabs. That's not the case with Chrome - all the Chrome vertical tab extensions feel kinda janky and the regular top tabs are still visible.
You could also use a Firefox fork like Floorp that has native support for tree-style tabs.
Firefox still doesn't have a native vertical tab bar.
That is only mostly true now. There is an about:config setting you can turn on in FF 129 (released this week) which will let you have native vertical tabs. The implementation is only about half done, but it's good enough for me to use alongside Sidebery Tabs.
You can track progress on vertical tabs in Bugzilla. They are also working on tab groups, but that work is at an earlier stage.
All in all, I think we'll see vertical tabs in the next 6 months or so? As a devout Firefox user and resister of the Chromium monopoly, I am really excited.
And profiles work like shit, at least they announced they were gonna get to it...
Coincidentally, I just saw this article: https://www.howtogeek.com/mozilla-firefox-vertical-tabs-test/
This is the way. Mozilla is bloated to fuck as a company. They need to be forced to get back on their main goal: Building a fucking Browser.
No ad deals, no stupid cloud features, just actual browser and privacy features.
There is no fucking way all that money is actually being spent on maintaining core firefox functionality.
Mozilla is bloated to fuck as a company
On one hand, I think people underestimate how difficult it is to build a cross-platform browser in 2024. Just think about all the things that you now do through a web browser that used to require their own separate programs. A browser has to act as the UI for a word processor, a spreadsheet, online games, banking apps, etc. And, it has to work on multiple operating systems with different screen sizes etc. And, this is with constantly evolving web standards. Those web standards are things that Mozilla / Firefox has to participate in too, otherwise Google (the only other browser manufacturer) is going to steer them however it wants and do things like make ad-blocking impossible.
On the other hand, I completely agree that every sign points to Mozilla being ridiculously bloated. Being gifted half a billion dollars per year no matter what you do (as long as it doesn't displease Google) is going to lead to massive inefficiencies. The CEO's salary is an obvious red flag. But, it's a lot more than that. Why did Mozilla buy an advertising company? Why did they buy Pocket? Why are they getting into AI? Why do they sell VPN subscriptions?
Also, what's up with this weird structure where a non-profit (Mozilla Foundation) owns a for-profit (Mozilla Corporation). How can that not be a conflict of interest? I understand that there are some things that non-profits can't do. But, why don't they have two separate companies and have the for-profit one pledge to donate X% of profits or revenues to the non-profit?
It would be a bad thing if the result of the money spigot being turned off is that it was no longer possible to pay people to work on Firefox, resulting in Chrome being the one and only browser. On the other hand, it really does seem like Mozilla needs to be slimmed down and focused on a core mission of making an open source web browser (and hopefully their email client Thunderbird too).
No Zambia LGBT parties.
I have written this elsewhere many times and I know it's extremely unpopular with FOSS crowd but truth needs to be told in here once again:
Everyday I use Debian, Ubuntu and Windows 10/11/Servers.
I'm an "IT guy" and have installed Firefox on literally hundreds of computers over a decade. I also install and setup extensions like uBlock Origin (with few comprehensive ad & malware blocking lists) , Dark Reader, Auto Delete Cookies, Crypto blocking and many more... but I have given up on Firefox 2016 onwards.
You could give Mozilla 10 billion per year just to develop Firefox but Mozilla can and will decide that they wanna spend only 1 or 10 percent of that money on actual Firefox development.
They will spend most of their money on anything but Firefox.
I mean I love world-peace, and cancer and aids free world too but with the money Mozilla get in a year, none of that gonna happen.
Mozilla couldn't stop Russia attack on Ukraine; neither were able to solve Israel Palestinian conflict nor hunger and migration from African countries to Europe...
Then what are they spending money on?
What they could have done successfully is to spend all the money they made from Firefox towards Firefox development alone. But this is the thing Mozilla do not want to do and are open about it.
Now I don't want Mozilla to stop developing Firefox either but because Firefox needs money from Google, Google must be allowed their monopoly on search... is utterly insane thinking.
If Mozilla cannot survive without Google monopoly, so be it.
I would say some open source/ Linux foundations/ Linux distros needs to fork Firefox and let Mozilla die peacefully.
Servo is working on becoming a standalone browser.
I'm sorry, I don't think that's entirely correct:
Servo aims to provide an independent, modular, embeddable web rendering engine source - About Servo
I think it'd be better to say they're working on becoming a modern, easy to use alternative to the likes of Gecko and Blink, the engines powering Firefox and Chrome, respectively.
I saw nothing about plans to become a fully featured web browser, even in the roadmap. Do you have anything else to share that supports the browser idea?
There is already the Ladybird project, which is a fork of the SerenityOS browser. We can say that it is a spiritual successor, although its license is more permissive than the Firefox browser.
I think Servo, not the Ladybird project would be the rightful successor to Firefox
Once again, note that if you're the kind of user who shuns Brave because the CEO says stupid stuff every once in a while, you'll probably not look fondly upon Ladybird's project lead and main developer being scared of pronouns.
See the issue on github.
If you don't care about that, it's an interesting project. Can't say I approve, though.
Posting this to inform people and let each one decide what to do on their own. Don't harass anyone, please.
What improvements would you like to see through development?
Semi-TLDR: Improvements under Mozilla? None.
They do not even want to develop a better (than Chrome) browser... they wanna "build a better Internet".
Mozilla Foundation is making US$ 300-400 millions for many, many years (US$ 593 in 2021-22). If they could not develop a better Firefox all these years, it's not happening __ with or without Google money __ ever.
When Mozilla /Firefox developers don't even care/do not listen to feedback for simple things like ability to differentiate between active and inactive tab colors (why everyone that uses Firefox must play around with css to make Firefox usable?), expect them to develop something better or comparable to Chromium based browser is out of question.
Longer, rant version:
According to the Mozilla Foundation’s 2021–2022 financial statement, which is the most recent one published, $510 million out of its $593 million in revenue came courtesy of Google’s search payments.
The fundamental issues as I see are:
Complete lack of vision. Utterly worthless CEOs. Spending money on everything else but development of Firefox.
Especially when Firefox made them US$ 510 million in 2021-22.
Instead of spending millions on worthless CEOs, why not spend millions on developers so people would use Firefox on their own, instead IT guys like me forcing friends & family to use it.
I try to find annual cost of developing & maintaining Linux kernel but could only find articles and PDFs from 2008/2017 mentioning total worth etc but not actual annual cost.
Just as a thought experiment, imagine every Firefox (desktop, mobile etc) stops working all of a sudden... IMO, the world and internet will not come to a full stop.
Now imagine what would happen if every computer, server, router, switch, phone, tablet, stops working completely at once, that runs on Linux kernel.
So if Linux kernel can be developed for $510 million (assuming its below this mark), why can't Firefox be?
I'm trying to figure out why US$ 510 million is not able to develop something better or comparable to Chromium based browsers.
Then there are issues related to lack of vision and no importance/urgency towards finishing a product.
Why only few extensions were allowed on Firefox mobile for many years without any explanations. Even developers of major extensions were not able to figure out the criteria to make their addon available on Firefox mobile.
What was the rationale behind it... Driving people away who were using Firefox mobile? If the product was not ready, do not fucking release it.
You need highly talented and additional developers to release product sooner... hire more, pay more. You got $510 mil just from Firefox.
I do not see any future for Firefox under Mozilla.
Only if some real big names (like Linux foundation etc) from FOSS world hard fork the Firefox, it might have a future.
I think, with real big name sponsors (pro-open source companies), search revenue will not be an issue.
IMO, the new organization (of course with big sponsors) of new fork must have one, single mission/goal... develop a great browser. New org must not have a mission statement written by MBAs:
"We’re building a better Internet"
Source: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/mission/
Something people will use it on their own for its merit.
Diversifying into non-firefox stuff people can pay for is the way they try to get some extra revenue in case something catastrophic happens.
I don't think diversification gonna help with the mindset Mozilla Foundation have.
For my take on Mozilla, please read the reply I've just posted:
https://lemmy.world/comment/11639087
Thanks.
How about... AI instead?
It’s strange how the Internet has been flooded by this news. Like leave Google alone or Firefox gets it. Very strategic use of the media might I say.
Wtf, no? It's saying "Hey, it's great that you're angry about Google search being a monopoly, but you need to be aware and ready that this ruling could further cement their browser monopoly."
Mozilla gotta do something.
And based on their actions on recent years, that something is probably going to be: 1) firing more developers, and 2) increasing the compensation of their CEO.
While I do want competition in the web space, its a good thing that Google could get told to stop doing stuff like this.
I dont want Mozilla to die of course but companies need to be held responsible for all the shit they pull. I'd imagine if Mozilla wasnt able to maintain firefox anymore it would fall to the open source community like they said in the article and I'd probably still use it.
No one company should own the internet.
Who in the open-source community would pay what it costs to develop Firefox? I hope some organization would, but it's a huge and expensive project to run.
Great question that I dont have an answer for. Maybe one of the foundations that supports Linux development? This is just my hope though. No idea what it would really take to maintain Firefox at this point. Maybe if it was scaled down or something it'd be ok in the hands of just the open source community as a whole but I'm not well versed in programming or development so i dont know.
I gotta try and be optimistic about this kinda stuff because i forsee a future where Google just ruins more and more of the internet and i hate the thought of that.
I wonder if this ruling over search engines could spook them with browser development as well considering they nearly have a monopoly with chromium too. Perhaps they'll release control of it and stop pushing anti-consumer updates like removing your ability to block ads.
I wonder how much of their income actually goes towards development. At a glance, it seems a great deal of unnecessary administrative bloat has been added to Mozilla.
I honestly don't see why a browser company needs to be so large (>700 employees).
Not that I want people to lose their jobs, it just seems unnecessary.
Well, a browser is a massive piece of software, especially if you include the development of a render engine as Firefox does
Web standards evolve constantly, you need to keep up somehow, together with optimizations, bug fixing, patching of security vulnerabilities, etc
Indeed. People severely underestimate how complex and costly developing a browser and web renderer is.
In many ways it's far more complex than OS development.
Firefox cannot get by on user donations alone. Mozilla needs a way to generate revenue, but nobody wants Mozilla to commercialise in any way. They're stuck between a rock and a hard place.
And a JS engine! Firefox uses Mozilla's SpiderMonkey, unlike every other (Blink/chrome-family) browser which uses Google's V8.
Mozilla is not a browser producer, it's a general internet charity that earns money by producing a browser. Most of their income goes to charity and reserves of which they have about 1bn -- roughly four times as much as wikipedia just for a sense of scale, wikipedia doesn't do any business deals to get at cash but instead does annoying donation drives.
They could scale down significantly while still keeping firefox development ongoing, they probably wouldn't have much issue finding enough donations to fund development, but the strategy seems to be building reserves and diversify commercial income, things like the revenue share they get from pocket for sending people to ad-ridden pages.
When you're currently donating to Mozilla you're not donating towards Firefox: Mozilla-the-company can't receive funds from Mozilla-the-foundation, those donations are going to charity work.
And, to make this clear: None of this is a grand revelation, or new, or outrageous, it's basically always been like that and it's always been a perfectly proper way to run a charity. Most of the recent pushbacks comes from people hating that Mozilla funds stuff like getting women into STEM, being outraged that the wider Mozilla community is not keen on having a CEO which opposes gay marriage (very staunchly so), etc.
They do more. They are also a vpn, and they are standing up new services.
There's a reason why every other browser maker has given up and adopted Chromium. It's not easy to support a browser and rendering engine across half a dozen OSes while keeping it secure, performant and stable.
Good, Baker can go find an other x millions salary elsewhere because it's necessary for her family (as she said in an interview), and Firefox can become a community project again that still pays salary to actual developers but without the expensive bullshitting C-suite.
On the other hand, might also be good for Firefox to not be 86% funded by the maker of its top rival (Chrome).
Right? Great knowing there wouldn't be an adblock killswitch waiting for us all like the sword of damocles
if you only do a monthly donation of $5 a month that's still $60 a year and i urge you do do it. i have a recurring donation for firefox, thunderbird, and wikipedia because i believe they're essential to the internet.
I will not donate anything to Firefox until Mozilla guarantees my money will be spent on Firefox.
But yeah wikipedia, archive.org, etc. Give them your money.
don't forget archive.org!
Mozilla doesn't use their donations for Firefox, though that might change if they lose the Google money.
I would stand behind the idea of splitting Google in it's seperate branches with no shared assets. Basically Google search becomes is seperate corporation, Google AI, Google Webservices, Google Ad Services, YouTube. etc.. This will hopefully undo some of the webs enshitification since now the essentially most powerful company on the web has to actually offer good product for profit instead of compensating bad product with more profitable one.
That doesn't produce any practical competition however. Some vertical splitting of the search business seems reasonable so we end up with multiple companies doing search out of it.
How exactly would you break up search? You can't really do it geographically like the Bells.
I use only Firefox / Fennec, but fuck Mozilla. The obscene amounts they paid their CEO for stupid decisions, their shitty Pocket acquisition, regressions such as saving page as pdf simply disappearing on mobile. Let that rotten corporation die, the code is open source, someone will do a Gecko browser.
I don't think it's quite as simple as someone just forking it. Realistically, a browser is an extremely complex piece of software that requires a lot of organizational effort to maintain, deal with security issues, etc. Pretty much every other piece of software on a similar scale I can think of (the kernel, KDE, Blender, Libreoffice) has some sort of organization behind it with at least some amount of officially paid work. All the major forks of Firefox or chromium follow quite closely to upstream for this reason (which is also why I'm skeptical of Brave's ability to maintain manifest v2 long term, despite their probably genuine best efforts to do so).
I do wish that Firefox were developed and funded by an organization specifically dedicated to developing it. This could of course happen if Mozilla dies. But that's going to require someone starting it, which is not at all a small or cheap task.
I could also see a future where Oracle or IBM buys it 😂🤡
Firefox enterprise edition, now with Lotus integration!
Everybody forgets that if chrome and chromium breaks away from Google because of this ruling, it's going to have the same issues as Firefox, if not worse because it's an arguably worse product. The ruling has been pronounced, but what will happen because of it is yet to be defined.
That's not it at all. The issue is funding Mozilla. Having it as the default search engine is something google currently pays them for the right for. If the DOJ says that's anti-trust practices, then Google stops paying Mozilla for that right, and 80% of Mozilla's funding dries up overnight.
I feel like the real problem is Google paying Apple, since they're both major players, not Google paying Mozilla. Firefox is not a major player at all (unluckily...)
Why would Chrome/chromium break away? Isn't this just about the search engine side of things? There's no need to dump Chrome if all they need to do is drop themselves as the default search engine.
I needed, I would pay $5 per month in perpetuity for access to Firefox. Fuck google
You’d need a hundred million people sign up for that $5 subscription to make up for Google’s bribe.
Your math is off. It would take 8.5 million people donating $5 a month, to equal the 510 million a year from Google.
My math (please correct me if I am wrong):
$510 million / 1 year
$ X / 1 month?
$510 million / 12 months = $42.5 million / 1 month
$42.5 million / $5 per person a month = 8.5 million people a month
You mean 510 million divided by 12. That's "only" 42.5.
If were going to go after them for a monopoly, shouldn't it be for chromium? At least with search there are actual viable alternatives that don't get 86% of their money from a direct competitor...
I don't think they pay others to use chromium tho. Other browsers independently decided to use it. That makes it a lot harder to argue that this is a monopolistic practice than when they explicitly pay people to make them the default.
That's not entirely accurate. Google's influence on the web has grown even beyond the web browser engine majority share (which is bad enough in itself). They offer one of the most popular web frameworks and run several of the most popular websites. There is almost no way to compete when the market leader is simultaneously the developer and the major user of new features. Of course everyone else is going to switch to using your browser engine. What else are they gonna do? There are even websites now that just check the user agent string and refuse service if you don't use a chromium based browser. Shit's fucked.
It's a threat to the Mozilla CORPORATION, not the Mozilla Foundation nor the browser.
Nothing to be really scared about. Move along.
why do you think the Mozilla corporation losing 86% of their revenue wouldn’t hurt the Firefox browser?
There was a well sourced video a few months ago that showed where the money is going. Long story short, not into development, for the most part.
Well, only way I can figure it wouldn't effect the foundation, is that the corporation is a wholly owned subsidiary of the foundation, presumably this is to protect the foundation financially and legally from anything that might happen to the corporation.
The corporation is owned by the foundation, and does most of the browser development. If you want the browser development to continue, it is a concern.
Not necessarily. Corporate money has a hidden contract. Mainly, you will develop what we tell you to develop and you will stall what we tell you to stall.
Google money is ad money. It's DRM money, it's private silo money, not general development money.
If you believe corporations drive all good development in the world, look at how many projects have been bought and killed by Microsoft.
In fact, why would Firefox accept money from one of its competitors? That's SUPER fucked up.
Just think about the anti features that Google mmay want Firefox to implement: Unlockable ads, third party cookies, user tracking, and so on.
Is tha the development we want?
I say, let's open fundraisers and keep Firefox free of corporate influence.
Almost hoping this somehow causes browser support to fracture again.
It would be a pain for developers, but firefox and chrome using a gig of ram to view webpages and play videos is horrendous even with isolated design.
Also because I'm tired of google dictating the www by being a monopoly. It's 2024 and jpegxl is being treated as ransomware as if enabling a god damn image format is too hard for web browsers. HTTP3/QUIC was 100% google's invention that they just threw onto the web because no one else is developing this standard anymore. Manifest v3 is an explicit attempt to limit user control over web content. They even cornered the market along with Microsoft using gmail.
It would be a pain for developers, but firefox and chrome using a gig of ram to view webpages and play videos is horrendous even with isolated design.
That can't be helped. Hard to explain well without knowing how much CS you're familiar with, but basically in order to guarantee security/user safety you have to sandbox each tab (basically running an entirely separate container program for each tab which constantly checks for illegal memory access to prevent it from being exploited), all separately running their own interpreters for javascript/typescript, HTML, CSS, all of which are very resource intensive (mainly javascript/typescript). There's not really any getting around this, no matter how well you design your browser.
Now, theoretically, with the growing popularity/advances in WebAssembly, and increase in usage of frameworks/graphics APIs like WebGPU, you could completely get rid of that sandboxing and completely get rid of the extremely slow javascript and html/css, in favor of completely using safe, compiled Rust programs. There's active research using versions of WASM which only accept completely safe code (mainly safe Rust code) so using memory bugs generated from user error to access data in different tabs becomes impossible (aside from potential unaddressed bugs in Rust itself obviously) and you don't need to sandbox each tab – the program practically sandboxes itself. Then you could potentially have browsers with thousands of tabs perform perfectly fine, assuming each of the websites is programmed competently.
But that's not going to happen, because billions of users rely on HTML/CSS and JS, and it's not pretty to transition away from. Getting rid of it would be like getting rid of pointy shoes, or getting rid of US Customary Units in the US, it's just not happening no matter how much benefit it would bring to users. It's not so much of a browser company issue as it is everyone ever would complain and potentially trillions of dollars of damage would be done. Also frontend web devs can barely punch out a "hello world" program in JS so there's no way most of them are gonna be touching Rust or Haskell or something.
Also frontend web devs can barely punch out a “hello world” program in JS so there’s no way most of them are gonna be touching Rust or Haskell or something.
This is kind of true, but at the same time, I've also seen some pretty talented front-end devs fwiw.
If this hurts Firefox more than it hurts Chrome, that's probably not a good thing for the health of the Internet. Google running the Internet unchecked would be bad for everyone.
So Mozilla will find other forms of funding. That’s how this works.
quite a good chunk of that goes to their ceo anyway.
I am livid over her absolutely disgraceful management over Moz. When electron was building a de facto monopoly of Chromium on the desktop she made no moves to produces equivalent tooling. While Node grew into a behemoth she totally ignored it. The only thing that has come out of Moz in the last decade that mattered was Rust, and she’s already fired the Rust team. She is poison and serves only to suck up a salary that could fund development.
Mozilla needs its wake up call and to start being the underdog that makes something worth doing. With Manifest V3 and the anti-trust case on the horizon they have a fork in the road that will define what becomes of them. Hopefully she can make one good decision and it’ll be the right one.
thats ceos for ya.
i doubt they will escape from going through some bad times.
Even if Mozilla survives it'll need to cut off some spendings.
I can very much imagine this being a short to medium term issue (and still an existential threat to Mozilla), but hopefully, this improves the situation to the point that there is no future company like google who artificially maintains control over browsers and search engines, rendering competitors dependent on these massive contracts? I mean, this is what got them there, right?
Tax/fine Google more and give the profits to competitors like Mozilla (as long as those competitors use the funds for Firefox)
Sounds too European for the "land of the free"
The land of the free? Whoever told you that is your enemy!
#BreakThemUp
Specifically separate the browser side from the advertiser side. Get rid of that conflict of interest.
I would pay money to keep Firefox foss for other people who can't afford to do so.
This isn't a new threat. This was always a threat.
The things that give google money are the reasons why we don't want to use google. The things that firefox does to get money are basically just giving google the thing that makes them money.
I hope some governments and EU see the need of a foss browser engine alternative from a non-profit and stuff some Money there
Chrome is the existential threat to FireFox.
Chrome is... Also Google.
Break up Google, make chrome competitive, and then we'll stop seeing advertisers own the web standards and implement things like AVIF and ManifestV3, and instead embrace open solutions that favor users.
The JPEG XL vs AVIF thing still makes me mad.
situational irony
$510MM out of $593MM?!? WTF Mozilla?
The problem is: who is going to hive money for a web browser?
They got a one of a kind deal with Google, which ended up being problematic, but where else are they going to find the same thing?
Asking for donations will get you chump change.
This. Web engines cost a tremendous amount to develop.
Donations won't raise hundreds of millions per year, unless they get serious commitment from the enterprise sector, which has already settled on Chromium unfortunately.
They're in a tough position.
Mozilla management was paid millions to develop a new “vision” of a theoretical future with AI chatbots
Is this llamafile?
The thing about LLMs is that no one knows how to write the ultra low level optimizations/runtimes, so they port others (llamafile largely borrows from llama.cpp AFAIK, albeit with some major contributions from their own devs).
Performance is insanely critical because they're so darn hard to run, and new models/features come out weekly which no sane dev can keep up with without massive critical mass (like HF Transformers, mainly, with llama.cpp barely keeping up with some major jank).
So... I'm not sure what Mozilla is thinking here. They don't have many of those kind of devs, they don't have a GPU farm, they're not even contributing to promising webassembly projects like mlc-llm. They're just one of a bazillion companies that was ordered to get into AI with no real purpose or advantage. And while Gemma 2B may be the "first" model that's kinda OK on average PCs, we're still a long way away from easy mass local deployment.
Anyway, what I'm getting at is that I'm a local LLM tinkerer, and I've never touched or even looked at anything from Mozilla. The community would have if anything of theirs was super useful.
From what I've heard the general idea is to run AI search on your browsing history, which is a very useful feature. I'm not deep into AI tech at all but to me it looks like that would involve local finetuning, ingesting all that history during inference sounds like a bad idea. It also wouldn't be necessary to generate stuff, only answer "Can you find that article about how nature makes blue feathers" and it's going to spit out previously-read links that match that kind of thing. Also, tl;dr-bot it.
Oh and there's already AI, as in ML, in firefox, in the form of machine translation. Language detection seems to be built-in, translating requires downloading a model per language pair, 16M parameters. Trained on workstations with 8GPUs. Which is all to say: You don't need gigantic GPU farms if you aren't training gazillion parameter models on the whole internet.
It shoudn't be finetuning, if anything it should be RAG with an embeddings model + regular inference.
This is kinda cool, but it still doesn't seem to justify bogging down a machine with a huge LLM. And I am speaking as a massive local LLM enthusiast who uses them every day.
I guess they read the room and this is why they started delving into the ad business
Fuck.
Will this make ladybird our only hope overnight?
ngl they can still get funding from donations but it only makes a little bit of their revenue
Don't worry, we have a possible replacement for Mozilla, meet Ladybird
So who's going to fund that who can't fund Mozilla Foundation?
Zuckerberg : Heyyy....
At least with this project when you donate it goes to direct development.
Do you mean the other software projects or the other non-software projects?
If the former, there is the Open Technology Fund (OTF), but it is affiliated with USAGM which is part of the government.
Ladybird can set Google search as the default for a donation from Google. /s
This project looks very cool, I hope it comes to be
2026 though...
That's a pretty good date. Browsers are monstrous software projects. I just wish it was written in a memory safer language. Oh well.
Good. Open source that shit.
I'm not sure what you mean, Firefox is already open source?
Well then double open source it! No excuses!
good. Maybe firefox will die like it should have long ago
Cool. Mozilla is a corrupt, useless org anyway. Not much better than Google.
Mozilla isn't and org. Mozilla Foundation is an org. And they get a fraction of that money. I don't know what you're talking about but you don't either, it seems.
Tomato tomato