TL;DR: Mozilla recently released AI controls for Firefox: a single control panel that lets people disable AI features in the browser or pick and choose which to leave on. On the surface, this sounds like a win for user choice in an era of AI-everything.
@yoasif I don’t get it, isn’t leaving all the toggles to us a good thing? We can control to the degree we want to use AI features or not use them at all. The important thing to note is Firefox and Gecko are the only competition to Chromium and Google’s monopoly (until Ladybird arrives at least) and Mozilla isn’t earning enough money to stay afloat with just it’s users and cuz the users aren’t enough, they need to have some mainstream appeal to attract new people (which is AI right now, although people are pretty divided on AI and the sentiment is mostly negative on some sites, every company is adopting it and that forces other companies to go along with it as well to some extent or risk dying).
At the end of the day, there’s multiple forks that does the same thing Firefox does without any AI. And Firefox should reach profitability without relying on Google money to prevent dying.
Uh what?
I can’t really respond to this before you can qualify this a bit more.
@yoasif during the Google anti trust case in the US, the majority of revenue of Firefox (I think above 80 or 90%) was due to keeping Google as the default search engine and they basically were keeping themselves afloat with that money and if a similar case were to happen, they will need to fund themselves right?
Yes - but the way Firefox monetizes itself is by selling its audience. Are you saying that you want Mozilla to partner with the AI companies in order to monetize their userbase?
@yoasif no, but if we disable all the AI features (which the people vocal about the AI features will definitely do), isn’t it fine?
How is it fine if users aren’t taking up the AI partnerships? Mozilla will get paid based on usage.
@yoasif so they get paid if the users who had it enabled use the feature. Is that not fine? People aren’t being forced to use the AI stuff in Firefox.
AI is based on theft, so Mozilla is monetizing its userbase based on theft. Are you saying you endorse this view?
@yoasif Is your government not corrupt? So are you not voting for it or doing anti government rallies for it? Do you endorse your corrupted senators, ministers and presidents? AI is here whether we like it or not.