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Comment by braiamp | Hacker News Reader

> The problem is that Mozilla keeps jumping on fads instead of focusing on their browser core

No, the problem is that Mozilla needs money if they want to stop leaning off Google, and people are simply too blind by their hatred of AI that doesn't figure out that Mozilla needs money. What is giving shit loads of money right now? A-fucking-I. If their investors portfolio doesn't include AI on their products, nobody will give them even a second look, much less the funds they need. Mozilla isn't jumping on fads, it's jumping towards were money is.

You want Mozilla to stop doing that? Guarantee their moneis flow. Otherwise, you are a consumer of a free product and you don't get to decide how the free product gets financed. Luckily for you, they haven't decided to make _you_ the product.

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And how exactly is the AI going to give Mozilla money? I mean not investor money, but actual profit? By alienating their moat userbase (privacy-minded technies)? Because if not for the AI haters, nobody would care about Firefox __at all__.

Funding end-user-facing FOSS is hard. An OS kernel or a DMBS can count on corporations that need new features providing funding. A browser can't. But then if small individual donations aren't enough for them (I think there's still no way to donate to Firefox directly?) they don't have a product.

By selling the default LLM slot, exactly the same way they sell the default search engine slot.

Mozilla could instead stop giving all the google money to a CEO who only knows how to say "me too! AI too!"

Maybe hire some engineers instead?

Mozilla has plenty of engineers. I wouldn't underestimate the degree to which the engineers themselves are pushing for AI features. After all, they are working at a nonprofit organization for below-market wages, and will at some point need to brush up their resume for the next gig. Browser development is cool, but FAANG doesn't hire for browser dev, they hire for AI.

By working on AI-whatever, the engineers have a reason to stay at Mozilla, and will have a "desirable" skillset when they eventually leave. That's something a CEO would need to take into account.

A-fucking-I doesn't make the product better. Mozilla constantly runs in every direction other than what their core users want or need.

> You want Mozilla to stop doing that? Guarantee their moneis flow.

Sure, just as soon as they sell something a privacy focused user of a browser wants. Privacy focused password management built into Firefox with paid sync or enterprise integration. Privacy focused paid email hosting, works great with Thunderbird. Had they done any of this back in the day, I'd gladly have paid for it and trusted them over smaller names or Google.

I'm sure they're getting lots of money to throw around playing with the new shiny, but that's not going to keep their users, or keep them happy.

They lost a ton of market share when the browser was slow as an old dog and chrome came on the scene, but they didn't do nearly enough to make up for it.

Interestingly, Proton does a lot of what you're talking about: email hosting, password management, cloud storage, docs and spreadsheets. The only thing they don't have is their own browser.

Proton started banning journalists and political dissidents, so they're a joke now.

They have some of that. Password sync is free for example though. (If private enough for you) and they have email relay and vpn as a paid feature

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