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101

What’s next for Mozilla? (techcrunch.com)

submitted 10 months ago by alyaza@beehaw.org to c/technology@beehaw.org

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one passage of note:

Where does all of this leave the Firefox browser. Surman argued that the organization is very judicious about rolling AI into the browser — but he also believes that AI will become part of everything Mozilla does. “We want to implement AI in a way that’s trustworthy and benefits people,” he said. Fakespot is one example of this, but the overall vision is larger. “I think that’s what you’ll see from us, over the course of the next year, is how do you use the browser as the thing that represents you and how do you build AI into the browser that’s basically on your side as you move through the internet?” He noted that an Edge-like chatbot in a sidebar could be one way of doing this, but he seems to be thinking more in terms of an assistant that helps you summarize articles and maybe notify you proactively. “I think you’ll see the browser evolve. In our case, that’s to be more protective of you and more helpful to you. I think it’s more that you use the predictive and synthesizing capabilities of those tools to make it easier and safer to move through the internet.”

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[–] onlinepersona@programming.dev 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

The majority of the opensource community won't rally behind any browser other than Firefox or one of its soft forks. Firefox is alive by virtue of being the only fully opensource alternative to Chromium with a different webengine. If Firefox and Mozilla died, these are the possible outcomes I see:

Majority of FF users jump to Chromium and never jump back, Chromium becomes the only opensource browser the majority knows of
- government does absolutely nothing and that's that
- government (most likely EU) decides to do something like
  - start developing their own browser
  - fund a firefox fork or another opensource alternative
  - take away chromium from google due to the marketshare (now a monopoly)
FF users and devs disperse to either
- pick some Firefox soft fork to make that the new FF, a new foundation is established focused solely on the browser
- start a new browser from scratch with a new foundation focused solely on the browser
a new browser is started that Google then pays to act as the new excuse not to have Chromium taken away from them due to being a monopoly (aka we're back at square 1)

Except the first option where the government does fuck all and a new Mozilla+Firefox clone, it sounds like a win to me. No?

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[–] smeg@feddit.uk 2 points 10 months ago

Even if something were to happen then it would take significant time, meanwhile the vast majority of Firefox users start using Chrome or its derivatives.