Mozilla Blog

> While Firefox remains the core of what we do, we also need to take steps to diversify: investing in privacy-respecting advertising to grow new revenue in the near term; developing trustworthy, open source AI to ensure technical and product relevance in the mid term; and creating online fundraising campaigns that will draw a bigger circle of supporters over the long run

Not focusing on Firefox is what brought it to its state today, so what should Mozilla do? Focus even less on Firefox and instead on ads, AI and begging. Insane.

EDIT: As an aside, it looks like Mozilla's VC fund invested in the funding round[0] of one of the former board members[1] of mozilla.ai which is kinda weird.

[0] https://www.crunchbase.com/funding_round/credo-ai-series-b--3b7e7c13

[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/introducing-mozilla-ai-investing-in-trustworthy-ai/

Sure! When Mythos was first announced, there was an obvious prediction to make: if what Anthropic says is even remotely true, the participants will start talking over the next few months about how Mythos has been a big deal for them. Then that happened (https://blog.mozilla.org/en/privacy-security/ai-security-zero-day-vulnerabilities/, https://blog.cloudflare.com/cyber-frontier-models/, https://blogs.cisco.com/cisco-on-cisco/how-cisco-defends-against-ai-threats), so I became convinced, although I shouldn't make it sound like I ever found the idea implausible.

I might be un-convinced if someone published a clear technical explanation of what error these companies have all made. The only counterarguments I've seen so far are vague speculation about how bubble dynamics might incentivize them to say it worked great, and to me that's not persuasive.

Seems like Microsoft is just taking whatever Chromium releases and repackages it to show more ads and to make Bing the default search engine. In this case, it's just dropping support for Manifest V2 extensions, such as uBlock Origin, and moving to Manifest V3, which does not support extensions intercepting and blocking requests using blockingWebRequest.

Just three days ago, Mozilla reiterated [1] that Firefox would continue to support Manifest V2 alongside Manifest V3. So if you want a better web experience with uBlock Origin, Firefox is your only choice (or use Firefox forks that support it). While you're at it, note that "uBlock Origin works best on Firefox". [2]

[1]: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/firefox-manifest-v3-adblockers/

[2]: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-best-on-Firefox

For Greasemonkey proper (which has always only been a Firefox extension) the big pain point was Mozilla's forced migration to new extension APIs (2015: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2015/08/21/the-future-of-developing-firefox-add-ons/ ). This required a major rewrite, taking over a year, and not to add new features but rather just to not bit rot away. Then what felt like right after that, they completely deprecated classic extensions, forcing only web extensions (2017: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2017/02/16/the-road-to-firefox-57-compatibility-milestones/ ). This required an even more thorough rewrite again, and made it not difficult but actually impossible to keep all functionality.

Greasemonkey has been stable (not abandoned, but not worked on very much!) since then. No forced MV3 yet in Firefox.

Please, directly skip to the real announcement:

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/update-on-terms-of-use/

The actual content:

> [Given that the definition of "selling" in legal terms can be slippery, we must be aware of not falling in cases like the following:] In order to make Firefox commercially viable, there are a number of places where we collect and share some data with our partners, including our optional ads on New Tab and providing sponsored suggestions in the search bar. We set all of this out in our Privacy Notice. Whenever we share data with our partners, we put a lot of work into making sure that the data that we share is stripped of potentially identifying information, or shared only in the aggregate, or is put through our privacy preserving technologies (like OHTTP)

Is it local though?

I'm so confused, they have a whole page that starts with how they run everything on device[0]. But the page ends telling you how great it is that you can choose your AI service which then leads to a page where ... all the options are hosted AI providers and half the page is about you have to read their terms of service and they all invade your privacy[1]. I stupidly enabled Gemini at some point and now there's no obvious way in the UI to disable it. I can only switch to a different hosted service provider.

I searched in settings for AI, model, LLM, nada.

Whatever good things they did here they totally screwed up the comms and UI execution of it.

[0] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/firefox-ai/ai-browser-features/

[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/ai-chatbot