After installing a new interim CEO earlier this month, Mozilla, the organization behind the Firefox browser, is making some major changes to its product

Specifically, Mozilla plans to scale back its investment in a number of products, including its VPN, Relay and, somewhat remarkably, its Online Footprint Scrubber, which launched only a week ago. Mozilla will also shut down Hubs, the 3D virtual world it launched back in 2018, and scale back its investment in its mozilla.social Mastodon instance. The layoffs will affect roughly 60 employees. Bloomberg previously reported the layoffs.

Yo, wtf. Their VPN, Relay and Monitor are basically the only Mozilla services I’d use and pay for. To me this sounds like this is the wrong direction. What do you guys think?

  • ItsComplicated@sh.itjust.works
    25·
    11 months ago

    Article quote “Mozilla will focus on bringing “trustworthy AI into Firefox.” To do so, it will bring together the teams that work on Pocket, Content and AI/Ml.”

    Does not scream privacy friendly, imo

    • Ephera@lemmy.ml
      30·
      11 months ago

      In the past, they’ve often spearheaded privacy-friendly solutions, like the translation feature in Firefox, which is already today 100% offline. It’s possible to run LLMs offline, too, for simpler workloads. For example, they could probably use an offline LLM to have that translation feature form readable sentences more often.

    • loiakdsf@discuss.tchncs.de
      14·
      11 months ago

      on the one hand i agree: trustworthy does not mean privacy. but on the other hand: ai does not necesaarily mean privacy invasion (though experience might tell us otherwise)