Mozilla is in a tricky position. It contains both a nonprofit organization dedicated to making the internet a better place for everyone, and a for-profit arm dedicated to, you know, making money. In the best of times, these things feed each other: The company makes great products that advance its goals for the web, and the nonprofit gets to both advocate for a better web and show people what it looks like. But these are not the best of times. Mozilla has spent the last couple of years implementing layoffs and restructuring, attempting to explain how it can fight for privacy and openness when Google pays most of its bills, while trying to find its place in an increasingly frothy AI landscape.
Fun times to be the new Mozilla CEO, right? But when I put all that to Anthony Enzor-DeMeo, the company’s just-announced chief executive, he swears he sees opportunity in all the upheaval. “I think what’s actually needed now is a technology company that people can trust,” Enzor-DeMeo says. “What I’ve seen with AI is an erosion of trust.”
Mozilla is not going to train its own giant LLM anytime soon. But there’s still an AI Mode coming to Firefox next year, which Enzor-DeMeo says will offer users their choice of model and product, all in a browser they can understand and from a company they can trust. “We’re not incentivized to push one model or the other,” he says. “So we’re going to try to go to market with multiple models.”
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so many people focusing on the ai part and not this part:
He’s also bullish that things like built-in VPN and a privacy service called Monitor can get more people to pay for their browser. He says he could begin to block ad blockers in Firefox and estimates that’d bring in another $150 million , but he doesn’t want to do that. It feels off-mission.
If he blocks ad-blockers on Firefox, that will be the end of Firefox. I would personally just move to a Chromium based browser that has ad-blocking allowed by default.
The biggest firefox extensions are adblockers and other tracker blockers.
Just let me turn it off if I want to, and we’re cool. Because I like the rest of Firefox.
The CEO does also mention
Controls must be simple. AI should always be a choice — something people can easily turn off
Let’s hope that is true. I’m not counting on it.
I wouldn’t mind if they added integration for ollama, but right now the feature is useless to me as they only seem to have the major commercial LLMs integrated.
No, you can access something like ‘localhost:8080’, so if you have your ollama/webui or other agent/llm listening there, FF will show that interface in the side window. Summary etc still works. You just chose ‘localhost’ as your provider.
Better search, but it looks like this: browser.ml.chat.provider http://192.168.1.83:8080/
I have used firefox for a very long time and have taken a lot of “controversy’s” with a grain of salt but this feels a bit to much like windows 11 and the you can turn it off is hitting me about the same. I may need to find an alternative but the browser space is not great. Going to likely be the projects that keep up with firefox/chrome but pull out the bs.
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