The hatred is partly fuelled by people in the open source community getting really riled up when they find out some open source projects are developed by organizations that need to earn money and pay their employees, be it Red Hat, Canonical, GNOME, Mozilla, or anything else. Female leadership will tend to push people over the edge.
In addition to the usual rage-fuelled misogyny of open source forums, there is however also valid concern out there. It can be difficult to hear through the noise.
Mozilla’s job listings provide some insight to what many consider to be a red flag for the way forward. To work on FireFox, they are looking for:
Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Gen AI
Senior Director of Product, Firefox Growth
Principal Product Manager, Generative AI
Senior Software Engineer - Layout (CSS and ICU4X Support)
Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Gen AI
Staff Full-stack Engineer - Generative AI
Senior Front End Engineer, Gen AI
Senior Front-End Engineer, Firefox
Front-End Engineer, Firefox
Staff Software Engineer - Credential Management
Staff Software Engineer - Release Engineering
Senior Front-End Software Engineer, New Tab
For fairness I include every position, highlighting in bold the ones I think are likely to do more harm than good. This is not the direction I want FireFox to take, and I believe Mozilla are misguided to try to place themselves as the ethical AI actor. That said I’m not 100% against it all of the time - I do think the local in-browser machine translation feature of newer releases is great. But I don’t think I want much more than that, and even this feature should probably have been an optional plug-in.
In short, I think the legitimate criticism boils down to:
Buying into the AI hype
Flirting with “more ethical” ads and tracking, rather than being unquestionably on the user’s side of just blocking it all
Doing too many things nobody asked for, arguably while not paying enough attention to FireFox
Appearing distant from the community and unresponsive to its preferences
Paying company leadership too much
I don’t really buy into point 3 personally. I use FireFox every day and it’s by far the best browser I have ever had. It never gives me any problems at all, and password sync with Android is really useful. I wish it would support JPG XL, but that’s pretty much it in terms of complaints on my end.
I really wanted Mozilla to solve the unintrusive ads problem. A couple of years ago it seemed they were the only ones barely capable of working with it and not being destroyed.
But it looks like I overestimated them. They seem to be getting destroyed.
The hatred is partly fuelled by people in the open source community getting really riled up when they find out some open source projects are developed by organizations that need to earn money and pay their employees, be it Red Hat, Canonical, GNOME, Mozilla, or anything else. Female leadership will tend to push people over the edge.
In addition to the usual rage-fuelled misogyny of open source forums, there is however also valid concern out there. It can be difficult to hear through the noise.
Mozilla’s job listings provide some insight to what many consider to be a red flag for the way forward. To work on FireFox, they are looking for:
For fairness I include every position, highlighting in bold the ones I think are likely to do more harm than good. This is not the direction I want FireFox to take, and I believe Mozilla are misguided to try to place themselves as the ethical AI actor. That said I’m not 100% against it all of the time - I do think the local in-browser machine translation feature of newer releases is great. But I don’t think I want much more than that, and even this feature should probably have been an optional plug-in.
There’s also some former empolyees voicing valid concerns.
In short, I think the legitimate criticism boils down to:
I don’t really buy into point 3 personally. I use FireFox every day and it’s by far the best browser I have ever had. It never gives me any problems at all, and password sync with Android is really useful. I wish it would support JPG XL, but that’s pretty much it in terms of complaints on my end.
I really wanted Mozilla to solve the unintrusive ads problem. A couple of years ago it seemed they were the only ones barely capable of working with it and not being destroyed.
But it looks like I overestimated them. They seem to be getting destroyed.