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I feel for Mozilla. Legitimately. They haven’t been having an easy go of it for years. None of their attempts to diversify their finances away from Google have panned out. They’ve bought services and shuttered them, rebranded, and replaced their management team multiple times. Actions speak louder than words, and their actions belie a lack of direction and purpose.

“Hundreds of millions of users” out of… billions of Internet users? Who’s looking out for the interests of the majority who don’t use “AI”, or who actively don’t want to? Or to put it another way, why is Firefox configured to make it easy to opt in, but not to opt out?

As a reminder, this is what you have to do if you want to disable “AI” features in the current version of Firefox:

I’d be willing to entertain Anil’s point if Firefox didn’t obfuscate these settings. But they do. This is hostile design, and it’s why Mozilla’s AI pivot has landed like a lead balloon among their supporters. Again, it’s not a good-faith choice if a person has to beware of the leopard. Someone in the valley will eventually figure out consent, but evidently not today.

Mozilla used to be above this sort of behavior. It might be hard to believe for my younger readers, but Mozilla took on Internet Explorer that was just as entrenched as Chrome is now, and they kicked proverbial posterior! They did because they offered a better browser that respected the people who used it, and gave them agency in their browsing experience. This is why their latest moves feel so hostile.

I’m Ruben Schade, a technical writer and IaaS engineer in Australia. Hi! You can shout me a coffee or send a comment here. Thanks for reading.

I’m Ruben Schade, a technical writer and IaaS engineer in Australia. Hi! You can shout me a coffee or send a comment here. Thanks for reading.

This is why takes like this one from Anil Dash feel… off, emphasis his:

To use the word people overseas think Australians say all the time but don’t: strewth! No, wait:

One of the top stories on Hacker News today was a post arguing that Mozilla shouldn’t accommodate any usage of AI in Firefox because (understandably) people were mad at Big AI companies for all the horrible things they’ve done to users and the internet and society. But I think people are ignoring the reality that *hundreds of millions of users* are using LLMs today, and they need to have tools from platforms that will look out for their interests.