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Comment by lenerdenator | Hacker News Reader

Mozilla's beginning to lose its way.

There are far too many "luminaries" in the tech industry who've had the last 20 years of "must create value!" go to their heads, even in the FLOSS space.

When profit motive does not exist (and it shouldn't in FLOSS) then you need to stick to things like the UNIX philosophy and KISS (keep it simple, stupid) in order to create good software. Trends mean nothing when you're in this mindset.

It's Firefox. It's a browser. It does browser things; namely, it sends HTTP requests, possibly executes JavaScript, and renders the resulting computed data on a screen as HTML. It does not need to have AI integrated. At best, AI should be a downloadable extension.

If the group's leadership cannot comprehend this, then they need to be removed immediately and blacklisted from leadership at future organizations in the future.

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> Mozilla's beginning to lose its way.

Beginning?

> If the group's leadership cannot comprehend this, then they need to be removed immediately and blacklisted from leadership at future organizations in the future.

You have no power to do this. They would have to remove themselves, or Google would have to make a phone call.

Or just watch its market share erode until it vanishes from the charts. You picked "beginning" too, and indeed it started when they betrayed the power-users userbase they had (the one that installed FF on their mum's computer and actively promoted it) to be more like the oh-so-successful Chrome (which was pushed with dark patterns like being bundled with AV updates). Personally, it made me go to the "old" Opera (Opera 12) until it got "Chromified" and sold to China.

They have consistently been doing the opposite of what the majority of their userbase expect from them (Pocket, paid sites forced to the "Speedial" page,...). To me, the only remaining value of FF is being up-to-date with web shena^H^H^H^H^H standards.

A FOSS project shouldn't be focused on succeeding; they should be focused on doing the right thing. No little compromises or play-on-words on your values. And if that means less funding, too bad, but so be it.

> You have no power to do this.

Never said I did.

>They would have to remove themselves, or Google would have to make a phone call.

That's what happens when you have bad governance at FLOSS projects.

This is an opinion, yet you state it like fact. While I'm hesitant to want any AI features in my browser, what a "browser" does isn't necessarily a settled debate.

> This is an opinion, yet you state it like fact.

No, the market states it like fact. 15 years ago FF was the belle of the ball. Now it has minuscule market share and is looking at an uncertain future.

> While I'm hesitant to want any AI features in my browser, what a "browser" does isn't necessarily a settled debate.

That's a fairly concise definition I gave, unless I'm responding to Diogenes.

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