Anthony Enzor-DeMeo is taking charge of one of the internet’s most important — and most complicated — companies.

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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  • katy ✨@piefed.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    37·
    1 day ago

    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.

    • eleijeep@piefed.socialEnglish
      6·
      24 hours ago

      Anyone not working in stock trading/investing who uses the term “bullish” to describe how they feel about something that’s not itself a financial market is just indicating that they are a terminally-online crypto-bro, or have been heavily influenced by the memes of that community.

      I’m not surprised a cretin like this would completely miss the USP of the company that they were put in charge of.

    • FoundFootFootage78@lemmy.mlEnglish
      1·
      16 hours ago

      I don’t think a Mozilla VPN nor Monitor could get Firefox income. When it comes to VPN’s I’m more trusting of a VPN-first company, and Monitor is something I’ve never even heard of.

      Don’t know how blocking adblockers would get Mozilla more money.

      • katy ✨@piefed.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        1·
        6 hours ago

        monitor is basically a dark web, er, monitoring service so it could be monitized but doing so is also kinda creepy, considering the whole point is to monitor breeches.

    • Voytrekk@sopuli.xyz
      4·
      1 day ago

      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.