I got a copy of the text from the email, and added it below, with personal information and link trackers removed.
Hello [receiver’s name],
I’ve long dreamed about working for Mozilla. I learned how to send encrypted e-mail using Mozilla Thunderbird, and I’ve been a Firefox user since almost as long as I can remember. In more recent years, I’ve been an avid follower of Mozilla’s advocacy work, and was lucky enough to partner with Mozilla on investigative journalism in my last job.
In many ways, Mozilla was the dream – and now, as the leader of the Foundation, my job is to make my dreams for Mozilla come true. What that means, though, is making your dreams come true – for a trustworthy and open future of technology; for tech that is a tool for liberation, not limitation; and for tech that values people over profit.
So I’m reaching out to technologists, activists, researchers, engineers, policy experts, and, most importantly, to you – the people who make up the Mozilla community – to ask a simple question.
[receiver’s name]. What is your dream for Mozilla? I invite you to take a moment to share your thoughts by completing this brief survey.
Let’s start with this question:
Question 1: What is most important to you right now about technology and the internet?
- Protecting my privacy online
- Avoiding scams
- Choosing products, apps, technology, and services that I can trust
- Keeping children safe online
- Responsible use of AI
- Keeping the internet is open and free
- Knowing how to spot misinformation
- Other (please specify)
With your help, together we can imagine and create the Internet we want. Thank you for being a part of this.
Always yours,
Nabiha Syed Executive Director Mozilla Foundation
My dream for Mozilla is that it does not descend into a capitalist marionette full of silent information gathering and black-box AI widgets. If you’re going to do AI, I want it open, like training data open. Whitepaper open. I want to be able to trust the company and it’s projects and especially it’s browser.
Realistically, firefox will monetize advertising. But as long as they remain true to open source, we will have the forks to strip out the nasty bits. The normies will get less violated than elsewhere and people in the know will still have the dream browser.
This 500 million per year pay cut is going to hurt no matter what.
Nobody is going to upload this but this is the same scenario that had Brave screwing around with cryptocurrency and selling search engine results.
I want nothing to do with AI, everything is like “I want transparency” I dont want them involved at all, pissing away money buzz words.
What do you want from mozilla? an open source privacy focused browser.
An engine component separable from the UI (which was XUL and thus Firefox initial advantage that gave it popularity), deeply extensible via plugins, tunable (it would be so frigging cool to be able to turn off sections of EDIT: … what’s currently called web standards, say, drop HTML5 or JS).
What it was needed for when it was popular.
Not a Chrome alternative with a different engine.
Somehow every time I mention XUL and XULRunner people mention that one can use PaleMoon or that XUL is incompatible with some security and stability changes and so on.
I know that. I don’t mean literally XUL, I mean low-level access to the engine. Allowing it to be used for things like old Conkeror and such, or just customizing Firefox as deeply as it was possible in olden days.
But their AI helps protect privacy? The main thing it’s currently used for is offline private translation that doesn’t send data to Google’s servers.
The other main AI feature they’re working on is AI-generated alt-text for untagged images, so that blind people can better use the web.
I feel like you’re doing the classic Lemmy/Reddit thing of seeing the letters “AI” and automatically freaking out, before looking into what they’re actually doing. We aren’t talking about ChatGPT integration here…
Helping blind people use computers is a good thing.
Private, offline translation is a good thing.
If they had called these features “machine learning” instead of “AI”, it would make zero function difference, but you wouldn’t be reacting in this manner.
I feel like you’re doing the classic Lemmy/Reddit thing of seeing the letters “AI” and automatically freaking out, before looking into what they’re actually doing. We aren’t talking about ChatGPT integration here…
They asked and we think they shouldn’t waste money on it and everything they do should be optional and not bundled by default. Why do you think we didn’t understand?
People have been asking for translation in Firefox for years, they add it in a way that works well and is completely private, and people cry about it.
It IS optional and it ISN’T bundled by default.
If anything, they’re a bit annoying to enable, because you currently have to go into the settings to look for it.
I don’t think privacy or usability for blind people is a waste.
Sure, those two are ok, I guess, so long as Firefox doesn’t download models before I try using them for the first time. However, I emphatically don’t want and wouldn’t use and would be miffed if any tl;dring AI plugins weren’t optional. Mind you, we’re only here discussing this because we were asked about it and now there’s people replying as if ours are ludicrously luddite opinions that stand in the way of progress and Mozilla’s success.
If everything is an optional component the onboarding process might get pretty overwhelming for the average user
Well, la di fucking dah. You’re telling me they have to bundle the solution to make people realize they have problems that fit. I’d just like a lean browser that understands Ublock Origin is its primary concern and focus because it’s its main advantage at the moment. Bundle that if you’re in a bundling mood.
You’re free to send your data to google or deepl instead of using Firefox’s included AI translate. You know, privacy, no AI in the browser, choose one.
“We’ve decided to focus our efforts on AI and advertising. Please tell us why you think that’s a good idea!”
There’s nothing wrong with using an LLM for offline private language translation. It literally preserves privacy by not simply sending all that data to a Google translation server.
There’s nothing wrong with using offline image recognition to aid in helping blind people know what’s on their screen.
As for their “advertising” - you should look up what they actually did. It completely preserves privacy while at the same time not completely destroying the economic model that content creators rely on. It’s a good thing. With any luck, regulators will enforce it.
My question is, who asked?
I have many opinions about machine learning and its current position in technology, but expressed none of it in the comment. In case you missed it, the point I was trying to make is that this is a bullshit survey with obviously loaded questions and foregone conclusions, uninterested in gathering impartial feedback or addressing concerns.
What do you mean who asked? People were complaining about lack of proper translation in Firefox for a long time. People were definitely asking. Google translate was (and still is) one of the most downloaded Firefox extensions.
And if you’ve ever used or seen someone use a screen reader on websites, you’ll know it’s awful. So Mozilla are right to focus on making the web better for blind people.
Yes, I’m aware most people aren’t blind, but that doesn’t mean those people should receive zero accomodation. Part of Mozilla’s mission statement is making the web accessible. That’s in their ‘mandate’, if you will. If people don’t want an accessible web, I’m sure there are browsers out there that make zero accomodations for the disabled.
And the survey is not written in a way to direct you towards answers that Mozilla wants. Did you even look? They give plenty of room to criticise.
Nice strawman, bro. I never said a damn thing about screen readers or translators, good or bad. And yes, I’ve read and filled out the entire survey. It doesn’t become a good survey just because it’s biased towards your personal views.
It’s not a strawman. You complained about Mozilla’s AI… That is Mozilla’s AI.
You asked who asked for this stuff… I told you.
It’s not biased towards “my views”. It doesn’t seem to be biased at all. Which questions do you take issue with? Can you elaborate?
What’s your issue with offline translation, or better screen reader functionality? That’s what Mozilla’s AI does, and you clearly have an issue with Mozilla’s AI. I’m giving you the opportunity to say what’s wrong about it (and so is Mozilla).
Well, you have the option to elaborate otherwise. Huge effort to normalize this survey.
“Would you like to see us leverage AI to help address societal issues such as racial justice, climate justice, gender justice, etc.?”
Absolutely fucking not.
Found the person who only reads headlines!
Nice assumption, dingus. I filled out the survey (it’s a terribly written survey) and sent it in before even writing that comment.
Embrace RFC 8890 (“The Internet is for End Users”) as a guiding principle for all Mozilla client app design and for the organization as a whole:
https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8890.html
Specifically, delete item 9 from the Mozilla manifesto and replace it with “follow RFC 8890”. That’s not supposed to be an anti-business stance, but rather, a recognition that the commercial side of the internet has the resources to look after its own interests, and Mozilla should be on the user side, rather than trying to straddle both sides.
Shame their AI question didn’t have a “my biggest concerns is companies chasing the AI buzzword with no tangible benefit”
right? mozilla, you gotta focus on making a good web browser right now. not a more gimmicky web browser
I think the offline language translation is a neat feature in a browser
Private, offline language translation is not “no tangible benefit”.
Neither is alt-text generation for images to assist blind people in searching the web. That’s a massive feature.
E: idk whether you’re down voting because you don’t want privacy or because you don’t like blind people lol
Fuck the blindies, being all uppity with their scepters and shit
I agree that’s basically what I out in the text box underneath the AI multi-select options. “We don’t want yet another annoying AI search feature or chatbot! We want a focus on useable features and security!”
I’m not anti-ai, but all signs point to the who thing stagnating, I don’t see what mozilla could contribute in the current climate.
Just make a better browser… you literally pioneered RUST
deleted by creator
The result of the whole thing was project quantum. Firefox includes lots of Rust code. Servo was never intended to be a product, it always was a research platform.
Thankfully, development of Servo has been revived, and it’s now fully independent of Mozilla. I believe it’s now being stewarded by the Linux Foundation of Europe, with a lot of contributions from Igalia.
Yup, that’s when I lost the remaining hope I had for the project.
Make and maintain the best browser. The end.
I asked them to support JPEGXL by default.
I filled it, but there’s no avenue there to express my complete disdain for AI and how shit it can make a product. Just make everything AI optional, don’t make me download data for shit I’ll never use.
It’s opt-in already, in fact you have to go out of your way to do it. And it’s currently only used for offline, private language translation, to my knowledge.
That is a very good usecase considering the alternative is to send it to a Google translation server.
I feel like people need to actually read beyond the “Mozilla adds AI to Firefox” headlines.
Of all the things you could want from Firefox. Of all the possibilities.
The primary, only, thing you could come up with is “I don’t want privacy focused translation, because AI”
Without realizing the the grand majority of all translation tools that don’t suck have been AI driven for like 8+ years (Long, long, before LLMs of today).
This is why we can’t have nice things…
The primary, only, thing you could come up with is “I don’t want privacy focused translation, because AI”
Also this one is really tenuous to the point I’ll say fuck your interpretations of what I wrote. It should be: I don’t want ANY translation to inflate the browser. Publish them as a separate exe or a Firefox plugin. They bundle it because it’s a bunch of shit most people don’t need and would never seek /download.
Without realizing the the grand majority of all translation tools that don’t suck have been AI driven for like 8+ years (Long, long, before LLMs of today).
That’s presumptuous, I’m perfectly aware of it, but I’m not downloading the grand majority of translation tools with my browser.
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I did the same thing. I just want a product or service that doesn’t leverage AI. Mozilla’s resources are better spent improving the web.
gecko webview for android, better site isolation
The fact that there’s no option to express my anger over the environmental cost of AI is infuriating. There is no responsible or positive use of AI when it’s accelerating the destruction of our climate.
I see a textbox saying “What do you want to see from Mozilla in the future?” You could add it there, as justification for why you want them to focus less on itThere is a text box part way through, I included my more general thoughts there
(my comment was getting rambly)
There’s lot of reasons to hate AI. Spreading misinformation about renewable energy isn’t one of them
What?
He is saying that AI uses countries worth of energy by itself. Even a normal search query using AI uses orders of magnitude more energy than a traditional search query.
Literally tech companies have been buying or reserving entire power plants exclusively for training AI datasets. At least Microsoft reactivated an old nuclear plant instead of buying out coal plant energy shares.
And 90% of uses for AI are absolute dogshit corporate fluff or a shiny activity for 10 year olds to play with for 30 minutes.
There are legitimate uses like auto note taking, voice assistants, etc… But it is destroying the environment because corporations are shoving it into every possible thing they can, quadrupling the energy growth rate and straining our electrical grids and burning tons and tons more coal to do it.
you get a star
So you got this survey in an email. Was the link intended to be shared like this? Can I find the survey link somewhere on Mozilla’s own websites?
I guess I’m not totally convinced that this is an official Mozilla survey, or even if it is - I’m not sure who their target survey audience is.
So you got this survey in an email. Was the link intended to be shared like this? Can I find the survey link somewhere on Mozilla’s own websites?
The email was through their newsletter and I would have offered to forward it, if it didn’t have personal information in it. Maybe someone else who is subscribed to the newsletter can back up the claim instead?
I actually searched for the website link to put in the post body before sharing, and went through a similar thought process as yours when I didn’t find it. My reasons for sharing it anyway were:
- Sometimes these emails say to not share it further, but this one didn’t
- I see it shared already in a few places unofficially (Mastodon, Reddit, Twitter)
- It mentioned ‘Mozilla Community’ and not a more specific group, so this audience seemed appropriate
- People here might have better feedback than I could write up, so it should be a net positive for Mozilla
It would be nice if they did post about it on an official account to resolve any concerns. If it helps, it looks like “mozillafoundation.tfaforms.net” has been used for other surveys in the past and so you might find a link to that domain from an official source
edit:
their website has links to that domain based on a search of the GitHub repo
For example, the ‘Submit a product here’ link on this page: https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/
It’s also possible to submit without filling in the demographic questions if people are concerned but still want to submit
Fair enough. Thanks for the additional context.
As an unrelated point, when I searched again just now, most of the entries in the search engine were from Lemmy/Mbin, followed by Mastodon. Mostly this post and others like it
This poll is for the Mozilla Foundation. They don’t make the browser. The post should probably have made that clear.
You can submit the survey without checking any of the boxes on the AI question, just FYI.
The audacity to direct you to a donations page after you fill out their survey 😂
My brother in Lemmy, how do you think they pay their engineers?
Would you rather them try and get revenue through advertising means? Because that’s what it sounds like, no decision is a decision.
At the moment they still get money from me. Don’t know how much longer though…
What if the whole survey is just a ploy for donations
Always has been.
