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Mozilla Commits Suicide With Slop That Users Dislike and Never Asked for
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Rodrigo Ghedin ☛ Reply to Anil Dash, re: I know you don’t want them to want AI, but
Anil likened criticism of AI features in Firefox to the adoption of tabs in browsers. That feels strained to me — tabs keep the focus on web pages; generative AI and chatbots do not.
I’d offer a different analogy I think is closer: Mozilla’s stance on embedding AI in Firefox is like a hypothetical early‑2010s push to bake the era’s major social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Flickr) directly into the browser. Or, for that matter, any application other than reliably displaying and interacting with web pages and applications, which is what most people (everybody?) expect from a web browser.
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Mozilla ☛ Rewiring Mozilla: Doing for AI what we did for the web [Ed: Mozilla is drunk, stoned, or both. It seems to be doing anything it can to piss off remaining Firefox users.]
AI isn’t just another tech trend — it’s at the heart of most apps, tools and technology we use today. It enables remarkable things: new ways to create and collaborate and communicate. But AI is also letting us down, filling the internet with slop, creating huge social and economic risks — and further concentrating power over how tech works in the hands of a few.
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Hackaday ☛ So Long, Firefox, Part One
It’s likely that Hackaday readers have among them a greater than average number of people who can name one special thing they did on September 23rd, 2002. On that day a new web browser was released, Phoenix version 0.1, and it was a lightweight browser-only derivative of the hugely bloated Mozilla suite. Renamed a few times to become Firefox, it rose to challenge the once-mighty Microsoft Internet Explorer, only to in turn be overtaken by Google’s Chrome.
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Mozilla ☛ Mozilla Localization (L10N): Localizer spotlight: Robb [Ed: Volunteering for a company that, like in Japan, will replace him with slop or use him to train sloppy bots]
About You
My profile in Pontoon is robbp, but I go by Robb. I’m based in Romania and have been contributing to Mozilla localization since 2018 — first between 2018 and 2020, and now again after a break. I work mainly on Firefox (desktop and mobile), Thunderbird, AMO, and SUMO. When I’m not volunteering for open-source projects, I work as a professional translator in Romanian, English, and Italian.