Another diversion for Mozilla and further degraded Firefox delivery in my opinion.
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.