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Comment by mips_r4300i | Hacker News Reader

"The focus for the future of Mozilla -- according to Mozilla -- is primarily based around Artificial Intelligence services."

I sense a great disturbance in the Force...

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What you sense is a tech CEO weaving the hot trend of the day into her resume to try and remain relevant and jump ship to another job.

We laugh about it but at least it is not something cultural or political. I mean the bar is so low this focus is actually a plus in my book.

It is. Their interest in AI isn't about how to make it cheaper or more effective, it's how to make it "healthier" and "safer" by which they mean more ideologically controlled.

>it's how to make it "healthier" and "safer" by which they mean more ideologically controlled.

Thanks for pointing this out. I didn't read the actual details. I guess I still have too much good faith on these people.

Sigh.

Damn. Welp, that’s corruption

Can you please elaborate on why you consider it corruption?

Last year it was IoT

Or blockchain, Or metaverse, Or something else utterly useless that no one wants or asked for

Before that it was a mobile OS that failed to gain traction.

at least boot2gecko made 1000x more sense than a painfully vague "focus on AI"

I love FF and T-bird hard, but I have this mental image of a huddle full of brilliant, 20-year-plus systems engineers sitting in a room staring at a whiteboard with 'AI?' in the middle of it.

"Ok, everybody popcorn up some ideas. Don't be shy."

[one of them opens a laptop and begins fiddling with a flame graph]

So Bighead and Gavin Belson?

https://youtu.be/CFsRif1wVGs?si=5939fsuM2AigbB_9

At least that was plausibly related to browser development, vis-à-vis ChromeOS. With "AI services" they're totally dropping the pretext of caring about Firefox.

FirefoxOS may have died, but its fork KaiOS did quite well, shipping on tens of millions of cheap phones in developing countries.

I think these countries are moving to Android/iOS as they get wealthier, but the legacy of FirefoxOS was quite successful. It's just that Mozilla never got much out of it.

Is that true, or just a joke?

It's honestly hard to tell.

I swear 2019 was last year https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/04/introducing-mozilla-webthi...

And hilariously, Mozilla screamed blue-bloody-murder when people asked for Webserial (which they define as a standard themselves!) in Firefox which would make flashing devices much easier, for developers and users.

One asshole Mozilla employee responded with "no, the danger is too great" and spouted a crazy theoretical involving someone's pacemaker getting connected to Firefox and malware blah blah blah.

People pointed out that Firefox access people's cameras and microphones, and Chrome offers Web Serial support and users have to allow the permission and pick a device to connect to, a site can't just connect to any serial device.

Cue handwaving about "we have higher standards than that smelly privacy-violating evil browser."

What a bunch of fucking clowns.

LMAO the tech industry is such a joke.

I saw the same line and LOLed so hard.

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