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Comment by mentalgear | Hacker News Reader

I'm reading a lot of criticism here, some I understand, but honestly, this sounds pretty good for a free LLM service: "Orbit doesn't require account creation or save your session data."

Maybe we shouldn't be too critical of Mozilla for providing a privacy-first LLM service - for free. The other big privacy-first LLM provider is Apple, which requires users to have their devices/subscriptions to use, and definitely uses advanced telemetry by default.

Not to speak of all the other providers who are either paid or free-but-mine-your-data.

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>Maybe we shouldn't be too critical of Mozilla for providing a privacy-first LLM service

It is just Mozilla have a tendency of chasing hype rather than focusing on what they are doing. During early smartphone era they spend most of the resources trying to write an OS with Javascript ( Firefox OS ) that works on a $35 Smartphone.

Now they are doing it again with AI. Although this time around Firefox is in fairly good shape I guess this isn't too bad. But they need to figure out a way to generate revenue rather than relying on Google. And LLM service isn't it.

During early smartphone era they spend most of the resources trying to write an OS

Most of Mozilla’s resources have always been spent on Firefox. There was never a cycle where most of Mozilla’s resources were spent on FirefoxOS.

But they need to figure out a way to generate revenue rather than relying on Google.

The percentage of revenue from Google has fallen every year since 2016. Mozilla Corporation had a 33% profit margin in 2022 (The latest data on Wikipedia).

It’s a fantastic business model.

> The percentage of revenue from Google has fallen every year since 2016.

"Fallen" is too strong a word: Google still provided 81% of Mozilla's revenue in 2022.

This share probably decreased in 2023, but that's mostly because the revenue increased by $40M thanks to financial operations (see "Interest and dividend income" in Mozilla's annual report for 2023).

Who will pay the bills when Google is forced to end that search contracts?

One of the other bidders, like when Yahoo won the bidding in the early 2010s.

It is unlikely the incoming DOJ will pursue a breakup of Alphabet.

I don't think the Firefox OS team was ever bigger than maybe 100 people at the absolute most, and I feel like it was closer to half of that. Admittedly it's been over a decade since I left, so my recollection could be wrong, but it was never "most of the resources" by any metric.

It was a tiny percentage of the overall staff; I traveled to the Toronto office to work with some of the graphics devs (the area I primarily worked in) and the floor we were on easily had 200 people in that one -- relatively small -- location.

B2G/FFOS gets a lot of well-deserved hate -- I quit after a year -- but its impact has been wildly blown out of proportion.

As a user I always wished Firefox OS had stuck around - I think it would absolutely be practical today with so many PWAs around these days, and KaiOS seems to have done surprisingly well on its Firefox OS base.

But that's the thing, KaiOS is exactly the best that Firefox OS could have hoped to achieve: installs on most feature phones. Sure, it's hard to find a phone with KaiOS in the West, but Firefox OS could have never hoped to be an alternative to Android.

There are still some things I like better about FFOS than iOS / Android. It had a lot of polish needed even near the end, but some of the foundational bits were very solid.

Is KaiOS still being used in any newer feature phones? I believe even its biggest customer Jio Telecom has moved on to android in its entry level phones and any new feature phone I see here (India) occasionally are Nokia.

Firefox OS was around 600-700 people strong at the largest.

FxOS at its height was an absolutely huge resource and personnel commitment; I seem to recall it being half of MoCo, maybe more.

Mark Mayo, then SVP Firefox, was quoted in a 2017 interview with Walt Mossberg:

> Mayo says [FirefoxOS] took the focus off of Firefox. “It was close to a bet-the-farm effort”

Cite: https://www.theverge.com/2017/1/25/14376710/walt-mossberg-mo...

I like Firefox OS, but unfortunately, I rarely saw any smartphones actually running this system. I feel deeply regretful about it.

> But they need to figure out a way to generate revenue rather than relying on Google

Like by trying other things? Such as a mobile OS, "read later" app, LLM service which they could embed in Firefox? People criticise Mozilla a lot for even trying, but in the same breath say they should figure out alternative income sources. What do you think they're doing? LLMs are part of the hype cycle, yes, but maybe there's still a market for them even after it's blown over?

Correct. Making core Firefox better is not going to generate revenue.

Not sure what people expect, every bold new idea (I.e. mobile OS) is chasing something. And they are trying to do it while being open.

You’d think this HN crowd has never tried to create a sustainable business reading the comments.

>Making core Firefox better is not going to generate revenue

Only because Google decide to pay more for less. Despite Firefox losing marketing share and users.

>People criticise Mozilla a lot for even trying,...Such as a mobile OS, "read later" app, LLM service which they could embed in Firefox?

But which of those did generate extra revenue? And mobile Os and LLM also happen to be CapEx intensive.

This is a local device LLM, outdated of a whole year, which is massive for LLMs, running on servers. Privacy side, there is little reason to run this on servers, a Pixel 6 could run 7B models at 5 token/s a year ago.

It's bad by incompetence, 7B models of a year ago were terribly bad. It's not privacy-first enough, as it's possible to run the AI directly in the browser, but for some reason they didnt do it.

It's unlikely that they are doing only a plain old LLM query. It's probably a more advanced setup (RAG, Page/LLM Summary Result Querying, maybe even some sort of Summarization validation checking).

Also consider accessibility for low-end devices and development countries.

I don't see any indication that they use any RAG. It still doesn't explain why they use an old model.

More recent models can run on any phone and have better quality than the model they are currently using.

> it's possible to run the AI directly in the browser, but for some reason they didnt do it.

Perhaps this is a proof of concept and they will have optional Firefox integration at a later time. Firefox uses local AI for webpage translation already.

A locally run 7B model would consume a lot of resources for most people, but it would be nice as an option.

Todat 1B models are better that the 7B models they use currently.

Not everyone has pixel 6 device, same for computer. There are still lots and lots of old device in third world countries.

Running a year old model, if it's power efficient and economically constrained makes complete sense to me.

It is overly generous to describe this as "privacy first." This looks like it's one ToS change away from being a privacy violating service.

In Apple's case, they are putting some amount of work into making their privacy claims verifiable. Good will is no longer good enough. Verifiability should be the bar for trust in 3P privacy claims.

This might be true for any run-of-the-mill service, but I do give Mozilla upfront credit as an entity and Firefox's privacy-leading track record. I haven't read the fine print, but I would be very surprised if there wasn't a robust layer of privacy/anonymisation involved. (Side note: I think the future is in-browser LLM (a la Gemini Nano), so I suspect they will eventually move there.)

Also consider that Apple has the big pockets to build their own server hardware, to claim multiple layers of privacy - but also remember that when they first introduced "differential privacy" and claimed it would be totally anonymous, privacy researchers soon found out that Apple set the epsilon so low that even after a few requests to their service, the user could be de-anonymized.

source: "Apple has boasted of its use of a cutting-edge data science known as "differential privacy." Researchers say they're doing it wrong." https://www.wired.com/story/apple-differential-privacy-short...

Mozilla's privacy-leading track record includes making Google the default search engine, running opt-in-by-default privacy-violating experiments, such as the Mr Robot fiasco[1], and opt-in-by-default collaboration with advertisers[2].

I still use Firefox, but I try to stay aware of changes, precisely because of Mozilla's privacy-leading gaffe record.

1. https://itsfoss.com/firefox-looking-glass-controversy/

2. https://www.pcmag.com/news/firefox-mozilla-data-collection-f...

If those are the only examples of privacy-tarnishing theyve done, I think that would speak for Firefox and Mozilla.

They literally have Google Analytics which sends telemetry data to Google integrated into the Firefox UI.

Can you substantiate this a bit more? Do you have a link?

https://github.com/mozilla/addons/issues/3145

Worth noting that the comment closing the issue mentions:

> You can disable Google Analytics in about:addons by setting your Do Not Track status to on.

> Again: this only affects users who visit the page with Tracking Protection on (which automatically enables DNT) or who manually set their DNT status to on.

but Firefox removed the DNT control last month (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1928087), though it kept the Tracking Protection control and privacy.donottrackheader.enabled is still available in about:config.

> Maybe we shouldn't be too critical of Mozilla for providing a privacy-first LLM service - for free. The other big privacy-first LLM provider is Apple, which requires users to have their devices/subscriptions to use, and definitely uses advanced telemetry by default.

There is a very fundamental critique here: a service being offered for free like this is being subsidized, messing with the general market dynamics that really should be making all of these tools cost way more money to begin with.

Of course Apple is also doing similar things, but for Mozilla to be doing it is quite frustrating.

I do agree with your sentiment on cost, especially regarding exploding co2 emissions for LLMs, but it sounds like you're putting the blame mostly on Mozilla for what is market dynamics in capitalism, with most of the contenders being heavily VC-funded, and where Mozilla maybe just tries to signal that "AI" can be done responsibly also. If they don't try, people will blame them for "being late to the game/out of touch/ irrelevant" - so better to do it according to your principles and in-time I think.

people will blame anyone for anything.

mozilla is a non-profit so doesn't need to respond to market signals.

it would do a lot more and a lot more sustainably if it focused on the core mission of its browser.

but these costly "big swings" justify outrageous compensation packages for its executives and so it lets its browser wither.

> it would do a lot more and a lot more sustainably if it focused on the core mission of its browser.

Some numbers to put things in perspective: https://untested.sonnet.io/notes/defaults-matter-dont-assume...

FF is still a solid choice, privacy-wise (with some manual tweaking), but just in the past few years 80-90% of their revenue came from adtech partnerships, so expect a series of rug pulls like the recent ones.

> so expect a series of rug pulls like the recent ones.

I think it's rather the other way around; i.e. it is you that should lower your expectations from a free tool provided by a non-profit company.

Unless I misunderstood your comment completely I think we’re saying the same thing:)

Being a non-profit that does not have a share-price, I'm curious if you have evidence for validity of your assessment of "big swings resulting in compensation packages".

I can offer a rationale that I hope that will be interesting. Evidence is more effort than I'm willing to invest in a random internet conversation. I hope that's okay. I don't mean to cause offense, but neither do I like having an interesting discussion shutdown.

Executive leadership compensation tends to be based on, - the size/prospects/complexity of the company - the compensation received by executives in similar roles at other companies - the amount/type of oversight by the board

This incentivizes executives to increase the complexity of their role in order to justify greater remuneration. The classic example is turning a widget factory into a widget financial services provider. In this case, by behaving like Silicon Valley companies chasing the latest fad the executive leadership of Mozilla get to demand the same remuneration packages.

I don't think this is relevant here.

Mozilla's executive compensation is famously disconnected from any realities -- economic, industry fad, or otherwise.

Orbit by Mozilla is a product of the non-non-profit Mozilla Corporation [1], not the non-profit Mozilla Foundation.

[1]: https://orbitbymozilla.com/terms

It's a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation. As far as I can tell this is (like most complicated things in life) purely a tax dodge.

> mozilla is a non-profit so doesn't need to respond to market signals.

No? They, just like every other entity, will have to achieve it's investors goals using the least amount of costs possible.

It just happens to be the case that Mozilla's investor's goals aren't more money.

For example, if a non-profit wants to build a bridge to a small island to provide the children of that island access to the mainland's schools; that non-profit would still be very susceptible to market signals regarding the most cost-efficient materials for bridge-building.

It is precisely because of current market signals that this move is a bad move for Mozilla. If GPUs were a dime a dozen and an AI engineer cost a thousand times less to employ than a browser engineer, Mozilla offering an LLM service would be a lot less objectionable than in the current economy.

> No? They, just like every other entity, will have to achieve it's investors goals using the least amount of costs possible.

The Mozilla Foundation is funded by donors not investors. The fiduciary duties of non-profit directors do not have to include using the least amount of costs possible.

The Mozilla Foundation's stated goals are "to advance the vision of the future of the internet and technology".

You might reasonably argue that this means copy catting every other product by slapping AI on itself, but I would counter that this actually demonstrates a lack of vision.

Fair enough. However, first of all, it's still in beta. They’re likely using it to gather feedback on its performance. Also, there’s nothing on the site that says it will remain free. Considering Mozilla has introduced paid services like VPN, and given the cost of running LLMs, it’s unlikely it will stay free.

Also consider that some free use, for example 5 summaries per hour or whatever, is a pretty basic offer for any kind of software, not just LLMs.

Offering beta services for free is industry standard and legit, as are free capped tiers, I do not see an issue there.

Honestly, I'm all on board for a privacy-minded company like Mozilla to offer paid services like VPN or email aliases. They have earned their trust, and if paying means contributing to the sustainability of their mission and the open internet, than that's even sweeter.

Does Orbit not work with Firefox Developer Edition? I had the browser open, but after downloading the extension it didn't seem to detect it or install it.

Does open source not itself severely mess with free market dynamics by having billions and billions of dollars of work being done for free?

There is a fundamental difference between a "regular" foss project and a "free" service in this sense.

Once a foss project has been written, the cost of one additional user is almost zero (some small amount of bandwidth to obtain the package).

I think it's legitimate to worry even about how the funding occurs for those comparatively small costs: the costs of running GitHub (subsidized by M$) and distribution repositories.

But with an LLM service, or any other service which does not run locally, the cost of one additional user is very real. It has to be paid by someone.

I’m not a market fundamentalist, I just don’t like players dumping huge piles of cash in ways to get around market dynamics (especially for AI summaries, which is the computer equivalent of speed reading lessons)

At least open source can outlive the entities that create the thing, and in theory is more about sharing process rather than trying to stomp out smaller players.

> messing with the general market dynamics that really should be making all of these tools cost way more money to begin with.

Prices have been dropping very rapidly due to technological progress. I feel like a lot of threads recently have had people confused about costs because they either are stuck on prices they learned about 6-12 months ago, or because they're failing to project further rapid reductions of price (I can't predict the future myself, but I'm not gonna bet on inference prices stabilizing all of a sudden.)

I mean, it definitely costs more than FREE. But I think it's closer to free than many commenters realize, and continuing to go that direction faster than many commenters realize.

A very similar service is https://duck.ai/ from DDG.

Definitely like DuckDuckGo - I have recently moved from Google to DDG as I noticed it serves the same, and even better plus privacy-first, results. Yet what you provide is not quite the same: An AI Chat Website vs a Browser Extension (Orbit).

When the Bing API went offline a short while back, the DDG website was a blank page. No fall back, nothing. A Bing wrapper with ‘trust us’ privacy marketing.

How often does the Bing API go offline? Meanwhile, every single google search I carry out includes, right at the top, 'AI' generated nonsense which is sometimes wildly inaccurate. DDG never does that.

> How often does the Bing API go offline?

That’s not the point.

Use any search engine in a terminal to strip the shit. Welcome to Hacker News.

All this costs money though and the eventual question is if you aren’t paying for it then who is?

Privacy-first generally entails designing the service on a technical level to be unable to leak personal data. A promise not to store your data is not sufficient.

> The other big privacy-first LLM provider is Apple, which requires users to have their devices/subscriptions to use, and definitely uses advanced telemetry by default.

By definition then, Apple's is most certainly not privacy first by any stretch of mental gymnastics.

That is always how this stuff works. Capture people with nice features and a friendly approach and then rug pull. There is zero chance I ever use this BS. I don't trust Apple either. I do not want LLM integration period because no corporation can ever under any circumstance be trusted with privacy in regards to it.

[flagged]

Agreed, I also often get that feeling of a double standard.

Mozilla's problem for me is they wasted their market dominance by hiring grifters as their leaders and allowed bad actors to come in.

I have nothing to base it off other than the results, but someone with a tinfoil hat would wonder if Google chose or influenced the choice of Mozillas leadership to allow Chrome to grow by destroying it from the inside. They were already basically bankrolling the whole company so it's not a big stretch.

I didn't have the impression that HN was fine with all those things. Supposing it was, wouldn't it be ok to continue criticizing Mozilla, while also criticizing the bad behaviour of the others?

> Mozilla only problem is being transparent about telemetry.

It's far from that: https://untested.sonnet.io/notes/defaults-matter-dont-assume...

(I still think FF is one of the best choices privacy wise, it's just that we don't have that many choices left)

> HN is fine with tracking, smartphones, and every surveillance capitalist trick in the book

(meta comment, thinking aloud here, feel free to skip) You might be conflating two different groups of users, each vocal about different subjects. That said, there's a big group of people on HN, who just enjoy being annoyingly contrarian. Then some people derive pleasure from pointing out some "moral fallacy" on whatever they perceive as the opposite part of their political/ideological spectrum ("you think my flashlight app collecting fingerprinting data from your phone is evil? well, your browser doesn't block all cookies by default you hypocrite!"). Life's too short for psychoanalysing the orange site, so I'll stop here.

You're assuming there is a single HN hivemind. In reality different companies cater to different audiences with different values, and you'll hear from a different subset of HN users on each topic.

Mozilla users care more about privacy than e.g. Microsoft or Google users do, so when Mozilla adds tracking to one of their products, they get more criticism from their users than their competitors would. This isn't unexpected or hypocritical of those users.

>HN is fine with tracking, smartphones, and every surveillance capitalist trick in the book,

You must be reading a very different HN to mine. Every single submission that reach front page has comment against all the thing you stated. With little to no support for it.

Ads are all evil and there shouldn't be any has been the theme in just a very recent thread.

HN in general is not fine with tracking and surveillance. But this is irrelevant for Mozilla specifically, as most companies/projects are not selling themselves on high privacy and rescuing the internet. They are making goal and promises which they repeatedly fail to reach, and people are outcalling them for this. And the worst part is, they are not even not holding up to their own standards, they even ignored and broke them multiple times, and people remember.

There’s also Leo from Brave: https://brave.com/leo/

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