I got a copy of the text from the email, and added it below, with personal information and link trackers removed.
Hello [receiver’s name],
I’ve long dreamed about working for Mozilla. I learned how to send encrypted e-mail using Mozilla Thunderbird, and I’ve been a Firefox user since almost as long as I can remember. In more recent years, I’ve been an avid follower of Mozilla’s advocacy work, and was lucky enough to partner with Mozilla on investigative journalism in my last job.
In many ways, Mozilla was the dream – and now, as the leader of the Foundation, my job is to make my dreams for Mozilla come true. What that means, though, is making your dreams come true – for a trustworthy and open future of technology; for tech that is a tool for liberation, not limitation; and for tech that values people over profit.
So I’m reaching out to technologists, activists, researchers, engineers, policy experts, and, most importantly, to you – the people who make up the Mozilla community – to ask a simple question.
[receiver’s name]. What is your dream for Mozilla? I invite you to take a moment to share your thoughts by completing this brief survey.
Let’s start with this question:
Question 1: What is most important to you right now about technology and the internet?
- Protecting my privacy online
- Avoiding scams
- Choosing products, apps, technology, and services that I can trust
- Keeping children safe online
- Responsible use of AI
- Keeping the internet is open and free
- Knowing how to spot misinformation
- Other (please specify)
With your help, together we can imagine and create the Internet we want. Thank you for being a part of this.
Always yours,
Nabiha Syed Executive Director Mozilla Foundation
Prolong your browser for as long as necessary and explore the possibility of using the internet without any web browsers. Firefox is a last stand of competition, and without choice there might as well not be browsers at all.
Is it wise to have such a complex everything-app with no end in sight? (more like, no end in site)
Embrace RFC 8890 (“The Internet is for End Users”) as a guiding principle for all Mozilla client app design and for the organization as a whole:
https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8890.html
Specifically, delete item 9 from the Mozilla manifesto and replace it with “follow RFC 8890”. That’s not supposed to be an anti-business stance, but rather, a recognition that the commercial side of the internet has the resources to look after its own interests, and Mozilla should be on the user side, rather than trying to straddle both sides.
“We’ve decided to focus our efforts on AI and advertising. Please tell us why you think that’s a good idea!”
Found the person who only reads headlines!
Nice assumption, dingus. I filled out the survey (it’s a terribly written survey) and sent it in before even writing that comment.
There’s nothing wrong with using an LLM for offline private language translation. It literally preserves privacy by not simply sending all that data to a Google translation server.
There’s nothing wrong with using offline image recognition to aid in helping blind people know what’s on their screen.
As for their “advertising” - you should look up what they actually did. It completely preserves privacy while at the same time not completely destroying the economic model that content creators rely on. It’s a good thing. With any luck, regulators will enforce it.
My question is, who asked?
I have many opinions about machine learning and its current position in technology, but expressed none of it in the comment. In case you missed it, the point I was trying to make is that this is a bullshit survey with obviously loaded questions and foregone conclusions, uninterested in gathering impartial feedback or addressing concerns.
What do you mean who asked? People were complaining about lack of proper translation in Firefox for a long time. People were definitely asking. Google translate was (and still is) one of the most downloaded Firefox extensions.
And if you’ve ever used or seen someone use a screen reader on websites, you’ll know it’s awful. So Mozilla are right to focus on making the web better for blind people.
Yes, I’m aware most people aren’t blind, but that doesn’t mean those people should receive zero accomodation. Part of Mozilla’s mission statement is making the web accessible. That’s in their ‘mandate’, if you will. If people don’t want an accessible web, I’m sure there are browsers out there that make zero accomodations for the disabled.
And the survey is not written in a way to direct you towards answers that Mozilla wants. Did you even look? They give plenty of room to criticise.
Nice strawman, bro. I never said a damn thing about screen readers or translators, good or bad. And yes, I’ve read and filled out the entire survey. It doesn’t become a good survey just because it’s biased towards your personal views.
It’s not a strawman. You complained about Mozilla’s AI… That is Mozilla’s AI.
You asked who asked for this stuff… I told you.
It’s not biased towards “my views”. It doesn’t seem to be biased at all. Which questions do you take issue with? Can you elaborate?
What’s your issue with offline translation, or better screen reader functionality? That’s what Mozilla’s AI does, and you clearly have an issue with Mozilla’s AI. I’m giving you the opportunity to say what’s wrong about it (and so is Mozilla).
“Would you like to see us leverage AI to help address societal issues such as racial justice, climate justice, gender justice, etc.?”
Absolutely fucking not.
Well, you have the option to elaborate otherwise. Huge effort to normalize this survey.
Shame their AI question didn’t have a “my biggest concerns is companies chasing the AI buzzword with no tangible benefit”
I agree that’s basically what I out in the text box underneath the AI multi-select options. “We don’t want yet another annoying AI search feature or chatbot! We want a focus on useable features and security!”
right? mozilla, you gotta focus on making a good web browser right now. not a more gimmicky web browser
I think the offline language translation is a neat feature in a browser
I’m not anti-ai, but all signs point to the who thing stagnating, I don’t see what mozilla could contribute in the current climate.
Private, offline language translation is not “no tangible benefit”.
Neither is alt-text generation for images to assist blind people in searching the web. That’s a massive feature.
E: idk whether you’re down voting because you don’t want privacy or because you don’t like blind people lol
Fuck the blindies, being all uppity with their scepters and shit
Make and maintain the best browser. The end.
My dream for Mozilla is that it does not descend into a capitalist marionette full of silent information gathering and black-box AI widgets. If you’re going to do AI, I want it open, like training data open. Whitepaper open. I want to be able to trust the company and it’s projects and especially it’s browser.
Realistically, firefox will monetize advertising. But as long as they remain true to open source, we will have the forks to strip out the nasty bits. The normies will get less violated than elsewhere and people in the know will still have the dream browser.
This 500 million per year pay cut is going to hurt no matter what.
Nobody is going to upload this but this is the same scenario that had Brave screwing around with cryptocurrency and selling search engine results.
I responded that I’d like them to build out Firefox to be a credible alternative to chrome (I personally think it is, but market share thinks otherwise).
gecko webview for android, better site isolation
I want nothing to do with AI, everything is like “I want transparency” I dont want them involved at all, pissing away money buzz words.
What do you want from mozilla? an open source privacy focused browser.
You’re free to send your data to google or deepl instead of using Firefox’s included AI translate. You know, privacy, no AI in the browser, choose one.
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No, it isn’t. It’s integrated into the browser, and running locally.
I’m just saying that if you a) want translation and b) privacy then you want c) AI in firefox. Because, you know, translation models are AI tech, figures that natural language is too fuzzy to do in other ways.
Oh, I misinterpreted what you said, I understood it the other way around, my bad. Their page about the translation tool does say it runs locally though so it’s a good thing, isn’t it? https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/features/translate/
Yes it’s a good thing and it’s more locally-running stuff that they’re investigating. Things like fuzzy search on your history, tl;dr bot, etc.
Malware site detection would be another idea, though they of course already have a non-local solution for that. Maybe, we do have to come full circle after all don’t we, a model that can give you an estimation of how likely it is that the page you’re looking at is AI slop.
But their AI helps protect privacy? The main thing it’s currently used for is offline private translation that doesn’t send data to Google’s servers.
The other main AI feature they’re working on is AI-generated alt-text for untagged images, so that blind people can better use the web.
I feel like you’re doing the classic Lemmy/Reddit thing of seeing the letters “AI” and automatically freaking out, before looking into what they’re actually doing. We aren’t talking about ChatGPT integration here…
Helping blind people use computers is a good thing.
Private, offline translation is a good thing.
If they had called these features “machine learning” instead of “AI”, it would make zero function difference, but you wouldn’t be reacting in this manner.
I feel like you’re doing the classic Lemmy/Reddit thing of seeing the letters “AI” and automatically freaking out, before looking into what they’re actually doing. We aren’t talking about ChatGPT integration here…
They asked and we think they shouldn’t waste money on it and everything they do should be optional and not bundled by default. Why do you think we didn’t understand?
If everything is an optional component the onboarding process might get pretty overwhelming for the average user
Well, la di fucking dah. You’re telling me they have to bundle the solution to make people realize they have problems that fit. I’d just like a lean browser that understands Ublock Origin is its primary concern and focus because it’s its main advantage at the moment. Bundle that if you’re in a bundling mood.
People have been asking for translation in Firefox for years, they add it in a way that works well and is completely private, and people cry about it.
It IS optional and it ISN’T bundled by default.
If anything, they’re a bit annoying to enable, because you currently have to go into the settings to look for it.
I don’t think privacy or usability for blind people is a waste.
Sure, those two are ok, I guess, so long as Firefox doesn’t download models before I try using them for the first time. However, I emphatically don’t want and wouldn’t use and would be miffed if any tl;dring AI plugins weren’t optional. Mind you, we’re only here discussing this because we were asked about it and now there’s people replying as if ours are ludicrously luddite opinions that stand in the way of progress and Mozilla’s success.
An engine component separable from the UI (which was XUL and thus Firefox initial advantage that gave it popularity), deeply extensible via plugins, tunable (it would be so frigging cool to be able to turn off sections of EDIT: … what’s currently called web standards, say, drop HTML5 or JS).
What it was needed for when it was popular.
Not a Chrome alternative with a different engine.
Somehow every time I mention XUL and XULRunner people mention that one can use PaleMoon or that XUL is incompatible with some security and stability changes and so on.
I know that. I don’t mean literally XUL, I mean low-level access to the engine. Allowing it to be used for things like old Conkeror and such, or just customizing Firefox as deeply as it was possible in olden days.
The fact that there’s no option to express my anger over the environmental cost of AI is infuriating. There is no responsible or positive use of AI when it’s accelerating the destruction of our climate.
you get a star
There’s lot of reasons to hate AI. Spreading misinformation about renewable energy isn’t one of them
What?
He is saying that AI uses countries worth of energy by itself. Even a normal search query using AI uses orders of magnitude more energy than a traditional search query.
Literally tech companies have been buying or reserving entire power plants exclusively for training AI datasets. At least Microsoft reactivated an old nuclear plant instead of buying out coal plant energy shares.
And 90% of uses for AI are absolute dogshit corporate fluff or a shiny activity for 10 year olds to play with for 30 minutes.
There are legitimate uses like auto note taking, voice assistants, etc… But it is destroying the environment because corporations are shoving it into every possible thing they can, quadrupling the energy growth rate and straining our electrical grids and burning tons and tons more coal to do it.
I see a textbox saying “What do you want to see from Mozilla in the future?” You could add it there, as justification for why you want them to focus less on itThere is a text box part way through, I included my more general thoughts there
(my comment was getting rambly)
This poll is for the Mozilla Foundation. They don’t make the browser. The post should probably have made that clear.
My dream: mozilla.exe . Too bad it takes SeaMonkey to do mozilla better than Mozilla.
I filled it, but there’s no avenue there to express my complete disdain for AI and how shit it can make a product. Just make everything AI optional, don’t make me download data for shit I’ll never use.
It’s opt-in already, in fact you have to go out of your way to do it. And it’s currently only used for offline, private language translation, to my knowledge.
That is a very good usecase considering the alternative is to send it to a Google translation server.
I feel like people need to actually read beyond the “Mozilla adds AI to Firefox” headlines.
I did the same thing. I just want a product or service that doesn’t leverage AI. Mozilla’s resources are better spent improving the web.
Of all the things you could want from Firefox. Of all the possibilities.
The primary, only, thing you could come up with is “I don’t want privacy focused translation, because AI”
Without realizing the the grand majority of all translation tools that don’t suck have been AI driven for like 8+ years (Long, long, before LLMs of today).
This is why we can’t have nice things…
Without realizing the the grand majority of all translation tools that don’t suck have been AI driven for like 8+ years (Long, long, before LLMs of today).
That’s presumptuous, I’m perfectly aware of it, but I’m not downloading the grand majority of translation tools with my browser.
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The primary, only, thing you could come up with is “I don’t want privacy focused translation, because AI”
Also this one is really tenuous to the point I’ll say fuck your interpretations of what I wrote. It should be: I don’t want ANY translation to inflate the browser. Publish them as a separate exe or a Firefox plugin. They bundle it because it’s a bunch of shit most people don’t need and would never seek /download.
The audacity to direct you to a donations page after you fill out their survey 😂
My brother in Lemmy, how do you think they pay their engineers?
Would you rather them try and get revenue through advertising means? Because that’s what it sounds like, no decision is a decision.
At the moment they still get money from me. Don’t know how much longer though…
What if the whole survey is just a ploy for donations
Always has been.
Besides the already sketchy AI thing, I wonder why they need to know gender & ethnicity.
Because that’s a typical demographics question for any survey worth it’s salt?
There’s nothing sketchy about their AI implementation.
Private, locally-run, offline language translation that doesn’t send data to Google translation servers is a good thing. I don’t see how that’s sketchy.
Or their alt-text generation for images to assist blind people in using the web. I don’t see how that’s sketchy at all.
Demographic questions help us better understand the Mozilla community. All questions are optional.
