Mozilla's New CEO Bets Firefox's Future on AI
- Reference: 0180396899
- News link: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/12/16/1359204/mozillas-new-ceo-bets-firefoxs-future-on-ai
- Source link:
Enzor-DeMeo announced on Tuesday that an "AI Mode" is coming to Firefox next year. The feature will let users choose from multiple AI models rather than being locked into a single provider. Some options will be open-source models, others will be private "Mozilla-hosted cloud options," and the company also plans to integrate models from major AI companies. Mozilla itself will not train its own large language model.
"We're not incentivized to push one model or the other," Enzor-DeMeo [2]told The Verge . Firefox currently has about 200 million monthly users, a fraction of Chrome's roughly 4 billion, though Enzor-DeMeo insists mobile usage is growing at a decent clip.
He takes over from interim CEO Laura Chambers, who led the company through a major antitrust case and what Mozilla describes as "double-digit mobile growth" in Firefox. Chambers is returning to the Mozilla board of directors. The new CEO has outlined three priorities: ensuring all products give users control over AI features including the ability to turn them off, building a business model around transparent monetization, and expanding Firefox into a broader ecosystem of trusted software. Mozilla VPN integration is planned for the browser next year.
[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/leadership/mozillas-next-chapter-anthony-enzor-demeo-new-ceo/
[2] https://www.theverge.com/tech/845216/mozilla-ceo-anthony-enzor-demeo
Blaaargh (Score:2)
Guess I'll have to switch to a de-mozillaed version of Firefox without the AI crap... or hope that the LadyBird browser takes off real fast.
Re: (Score:1)
Try Librewolf. It's a privacy aware Firefox fork with the tracking removed .. because it's 2025 and that's a thing now that everything is horrible and enshitted.
Re: (Score:1)
I will never trust a claim of privacy, security and freedom from people who make political activism (that has nothing to do with FOSS) the first value of the project. If the leader of a project thinks it's OK to insult, censor, and ban people from participating in the project based on their personal political views (that again has nothing to do with FOSS), then what's stopping that project leader from using the browser to do other nefarious things to the users?
Re:Blaaargh (Score:4, Informative)
As least as of today, the AI slop in Firefox is restricted to a slide out menu on left hand side that brings up a console for your LLM of choice. If you don't like it, just close the side menu and be done with it.
It's not nearly as obnoxious as Chrome or Edge, where they have a Gemini or Copilot agent reading everything on screen, eagerly waiting to offer "suggestions". I'm not sure what's done with the data they're scraping, but I can't imagine that they are just tossing it out without feeding at least some of it to an ad targeting mechanism.
No Longer an Optimist (Score:4)
Once upon a time, I was an optimist. I believed that the internet could make us better as individuals and as a human society as a whole. Anthony Enzor-DeMeo, and others like him, have beaten that notion completely out of me.
Why ? (Score:5, Insightful)
I have been using Firefox for more than 20 years. Please explain me why my browser needs an AI mode.
Re: (Score:2)
> I have been using Firefox for more than 20 years. Please explain me why my browser needs an AI mode.
Someone needs to train the AI to click around the web like a user, so that the web companies can keep their ad revenue up once they've knocked us pesky humans off the web.
Re: (Score:2)
It might make sense to add an integration point if they can sell the space as they do with search engines. I don't find them useful, but I knew a couple people who do and if it helps keep Firefox going...
Looks like a feature you have to choose (Score:2)
There are people who use AI. Giving them a choice is a good thing.
Re: (Score:1)
I'm also for giving knives to 5 year olds.
Execubot override (Score:5, Interesting)
This is classic executive lemming behavior. The C-suite almost always ends up full of crowd-followers - "leaders" who prefer to do stupid things as a pack to risking trying something novel that fails.
So Tony here sees the rush to turn everything into an LLM front end and it is literally a no-brainer to him. Doing otherwise means answering questions about why he's ignoring 'the biggest tech story since" whatever. It literally has nothing to do with the user.
Re: (Score:2)
[1]"None of us is as dumb as all of us." [despair.com]
[1] https://despair.com/products/meetings?_pos=1&_sid=039f6a292&_ss=r&variant=2457301507
What a f@#^wit (Score:1)
Firefox took a wrong turn when this idiot walked in the door and continues to always manage to find the wrong turn, over and over since
Well, time to look into the FF forks (Score:2)
I've been a user since it was still called not firebird but phoenix and I'll be sorry to let it go, but if they insist...
Re: (Score:2)
After 15 years I had enough of FF "improvements". Librewolf works very well for me.
Quite late (Score:2)
That's in no way a smart move, but right in time to get fired on the spot soon enough.
It is never too late (Score:1)
I just heard that slop was the word chosen to 2025. Now i see that Mozilla is also chasing the trend and wanna be one of the cool kids! Instead of focusing on making firefox a great browser they want to join the AI slop fest. What a disappointment.
So long (Score:2)
Guess I'm moving to Vivaldi then. [1]https://vivaldi.com/ [vivaldi.com]
[1] https://vivaldi.com/
Yeah, that's what will make Firefox user base grow (Score:2)
Every time they release an "AI" feature or comment they'll use the tech, user opinions are awful everywhere: on their forums, on the linked article comments, on comments from news aggregators, on social networks... But yeah, let's bet the future of the browser already on a really difficult situation on the tech nobody wants on a browser.
Good thing it's open-source (Score:2)
So that someone motivated enough will inevitably fork it without this AI shit.
Getting ready (Score:2)
to load about:config
idiot (Score:3)
He's an MBA with degrees in forensics. MBAs invariably just jump on the latest trendy bandwagon.
The good news is that I can stop updating FF all the time on my devices.
AI to spy on people? (Score:2)
Whatever happened to Firefox being responsible?
Slashdot Poll please (Score:1)
AI in Firefox is;
A bad Idea
An Always Ignored option
A reason to create a fork
Message him on LinkedIn (Score:3)
I sent him a quick message on LinkedIn telling him no one wants this garbage. More people should do the same...
[1]Anthony Enzor-DeMeo [linkedin.com]
[1] https://www.linkedin.com/in/anthonyed
betting the farm. (Score:2)
As long has a the browser has a turn this AI crap off button I am fine with it. Its a browser, let me browse..
Why on earth?! (Score:5, Insightful)
I use Firefox and Thunderbird. They're nice. I'm not interested in AI, and I don't get why the org would bet the farm on it. I get that it's hard to keep Mozilla funded, and they may need to get creative somehow, but this isn't the way. It's not what people use Firefox for, and it's not exploring an obviously profitable direction.
Re: (Score:3)
> I use Firefox and Thunderbird. They're nice. I'm not interested in AI, and I don't get why the org would bet the farm on it. I get that it's hard to keep Mozilla funded, and they may need to get creative somehow, but this isn't the way. It's not what people use Firefox for, and it's not exploring an obviously profitable direction.
I'll add that I have zero issues with using "not the most popular" browser and email. I long ago learned that popularity doesn't mean best.
And I have too much of Google locked out to use Chrome anyhow.
Re:Why on earth?! (Score:4, Insightful)
As we watch CoPilot failures, AI browsers no one wants, a change for Firefox users to AI would be plainly a solution looking for a problem.
If Firefox can be successfully forked to a non-AI version, I'll go with that. Libre-stuff would get a great boost by navigating around the inevitable wasteland that Firefox will become.
Strangely, products taking an anti-AI stance are starting to thrive again. I hope their board notices and changes direction towards optimizing Firefox, getting rid of their new mercenary telemetry stance, and gets back to the basics of just doing an open good job.
Re:Why on earth?! (Score:4, Insightful)
I started using Librewolf years back.
I'm convinced Mozilla is just a money laundering organization now. They've never recovered from forcing out Brendan Eich.
Re: (Score:3)
I use LibreWolf on a couple of machines. It's OK, but it evolves slowly. They deserve the money I donated to Mozilla. But the distros don't include the LibreWolf version; Ubuntu as an example, puts in a godforsaken package island.
If the LibreOffice folks could somehow hug the LibreWolf people, distros could take a turn for the better.
Re:Why on earth?! (Score:4, Insightful)
> I get that it's hard to keep Mozilla funded
No it is not. The Mozilla foundation has pissed away tens of millions of dollars on "features" nobody asked for and which have since been removed , like Pocket which cost US$20M alone. What's hard is to keep the CEO's multi million dollar salary funded while also enabling them to waste money on things no one wants, which in turn is only done to justify their salary by looking busy.
This is like claiming it's hard to keep Wikipedia funded. Again, no it is not, because they have somehow spent millions of dollars producing multimedia bullshit that hobbyists could have done for free if there was any demand. Simply don't do that and funding is no problem.
The problem as ever isn't the thing, it's the people managing the thing and claiming that their malicious interference is necessary. It's only necessary for their yacht-buying capabilities.
Re: (Score:3)
Does anyone remember the Firefox phone OS debacle? I'll bet that one cost them tens of millions.
Re: (Score:2)
Because money. For years, where has most of Mozilla's revenue come from? Default search deals.
When you read:
"We're not incentivized to push one model or the other,"
You just have to understand that what's implied is:
"Yet. But we'd like to be, it's for sale."
And then, unfortunately, it makes perfect sense.
Re: (Score:2)
Mozilla has operated as if they were a silicon valley startup for the past 10-15 years. Their recent history is littered with with these decisions (e.g. pocket) instead of using the wikimeda model which recognizes its a charitable organization that needs to be sustainable.