Mozilla and Firefox Going in the Wrong Direction
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OMG Ubuntu ☛ Meet Orbit, Mozilla’s Hey Hi (AI) Assistant Extension for Firefox [Ed: Mozilla keeps saying it opposes misinformation online, but here it is promoting LLM slop, which is guaranteed to introduce many falsehoods and distortions. Mozilla is a rogue company. To know what an article you need to actually read it, not rely on slop derived from it. Mozilla keeps promoting the things that it pretends to be against, including Google and proprietary nonsense, even DRM and software patents. Outsourcing to Microsoft (GitHub) and attestation is what today's Mozilla stands for. It also spies on and manipulates Firefox users. Mozilla insists that its manipulation is intended to "protect" users, but that's what every dictator says about the "populace". Firefox nowadays serves the vendor (Mozilla) and sponsor (Google) instead of the user. Browsers that become like that need to be abandoned.]
Orbit by Mozilla is a new AI-powered assistant for the Firefox web browser that makes summarising web content while you browse as easy as clicking a button. After all, why read an article to understand what it says when you can read an Hey Hi (AI) summary rephrasing the article instead?
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[Old] Scott C Richmond ☛ The web is too big, or scaling down
I started writing this post in October, when Mozilla announced that it's going to become an adtech company. I got distracted by the professoring business, and didn't finish it until now. It's not quite so salient (and, uh, a lot has happened in the world since October 5). But tech, politics, and political economy aren't remotely separate spheres in 2024.