And Fakespot: they present themselves as a company that focuses on detecting AI-generated content from human-generated content. It sounds like they've set out to play Whac-A-Mole against the all the biggest AI companies in the world. Literally all the largest tech companies in the world are right now focused on making AI content indistinguishable from human-generated content.
I can't help think that this is an infinite money sink, and in no way improves Mozilla's browser.
That's exactly what they're doing with the biggest ad trackers and browser vendors. A lot of Mozilla's "side-projects" are stupid and I also agree they should focus more on Firefox, but this one is pretty in line with their general mission of "we'll fight the big guys because, if we don't, nobody else will".
I'd be more convinced of this if they weren't actively collaborating with the big guys.
Smoke and mirrors more like it. They collaborate with Facebook and Google all the time. 80%-90% of their revenue comes from Google. Fighting the 'big guys' for real would mean shutting shop and never to be seen again.
As a user, Firefox feels like hobby project, but at least it's not a Google product.
I had been using Firefox since 2002, when it was called Phoenix.
I switched to a Chromium-based browser because the performance difference was noticable enough, and I am in the browser often enough, to finally throw in the towel and switch.
They have a huge amount of money coming in from Google. Why is this going to acquisitions like this and not towards strengthening the development so that it remains competitive? Or are they, and I am not aware?
If it doesn't remain competitive on things like performance, standards compliance, etc. there are very few reasons for the average user to choose Firefox over any other browser at the moment. The privacy-focus is good, but there are other browsers that do the same on Chromium.
So firefox now is.. a worse chrome reskin. I use both daily and firefox is just not that good.
Mozilla foundation is completely not interested in getting firefox fixed to have its competetive advantage back - and to be the customizable browser.
I guess they are just happy to spend money on travel and side projects -> they just boost their CV to jump ship somewhere else.
I'm not sure that the money Mozilla spends on other things would be better spent on the browser... would it realistically close any existing gaps between their competition? Arguably they might even be better off spending it on marketing the browser than any technical metric. I'd rather this kind of thing than marketing.
I like Mozilla as a company and I still use Firefox over Chrome knowing that it is objectively a worse browser and experience because I dislike Google and their business practices and i support businesses that I believe in. I am very much against the monopoly Google has over the web space and their positioning to dictate future web standards that will probably benefit their ad revenue over user experience.
I use FakeSpot a lot, and it's less about finding AI written reviews and more about finding any fake reviews, human written or not. They don't need to try and tell if reviews are actually written by a human, just if they are authentic. A reviewer with only 1 review on their whole account will be flagged as suspicious. A reviewer with only reviews for the same company will be marked as definitely fake. It also does things like look for repeated sentiments across all reviews for a product. Sometimes it gets false positives, like a review for a chair might legitimately have 30% of users saying the phrase "super/very/really comfy" at some point in their review. But because it's repeated so much it's flagged as indicating fake reviews.
There are lots of companies working on making convincing language models. ChatGPT is pretty much already at that level for something simple like Amazon reviews. But there aren't any large AI companies working on AI that can fake looking like an authentic group of reviewers. Those are all more shady businesses without billion dollar budgets.
Sure the problem of writing a single convincing review is now solved for those shady businesses. But the really sophisticated ones were already paying humans to write the reviews before good LLM's came along. There's also the issue of sellers themselves including a card or followup email promising a small gift card in exchange for a 5 star review.
You've addressed some of the assets well: the tech, product, etc.
Mozilla isn't just paying for that, they are paying for the audience. I.e. the millions of people monthly who search for authentic product information.
Mozilla may be interested in selling them another product , or revising the fakespot product – who knows?
I'm just calling attention to the assets that the business paid for and that they are worth the money paid.
Interesting, did not know this happened.
I think that's an advantage that something like this has because basically you just have to function as a critic
The browser wars are basically over, and Mozilla as an organization would benefit from a longer term vision to improve veracity on the internet.
With the ability to generate content at the cost of basically 0, figuring out what's real and not real is going to be an increasingly hard challenge.
Browser stats (as of Feb): 79.7% - Chrome 8.6% - Edge 4.8% - Firefox/Mozilla 3.9% - Safari
>The browser wars are basically over
and why is that? Oh because Mozilla hasn't put any energy into getting better or pulling back market share from the moment it started to bleed out to Chrome.
Let's not just sit back and go "Oh well, they lost nothing they could do" shrug. They built their tech in such an obtuse and opinionated way it's impossible to integrate anywhere else, milked their millions selling off customer data to Google via the default search interface, burned the money on private jets and shockingly overpaid low-talent low-vision executives. Burned engineering talent on a VPN service no one asked for just because it's a good money making scam if you advertize it on the right podcasts, made huge parts of their deep engineering teams redundant.
To be perfectly honest the only good long term vision for Mozilla is an empty office or a landfill. Their existence under the current management doomed the internet back to the IE6 era of browser variety. Firefox the browser would be way better off if Mozilla the company didn't exist.
Baffles me they have any good will left at all from people who care about the internet. This company will literally do anything else than work hard on their browser.
>and why is that? Oh because Mozilla hasn't put any energy into getting better or pulling back market share from the moment it started to bleed out to Chrome.
Could and should Mozilla have done better? Yes. "Any energy?" is uncalled for, however.
There was the entire Quantum rewrite for significant performance boosts (around the time Chrome started getting called out for bad perf). There's containers, anti-tracker tech, and a big privacy push.
There is much more they could have done, and my outsider opinion is that Mozilla the organization lost its way and focused too much money and effort on things that don't matter, but it's not like they pulled an IE6 and abandoned Firefox.
Is any of this actually evidenced somewhere? I'm not aware of Mozilla ever using private jets, and the last time I checked their executive compensation it was on the lower side of average for corporations with their footprint and financials.
Maybe there are facts or sources that you aren't presenting, but this as-is just comes off as a screed.
Spend money on everything except browser development (>$5 billions!).
Market share down the drain.
Use the market share as an argument for a lost cause and spend money on everything except Browser development.
Ladybird - a browser spearheaded by one person - will expose Mozilla of what it is.
Google has and had major distribution advantages for Chrome; same with Apple/MS and their browsers.
I've gone back and forth between FF and Chrome a few times and since the big FF perf improvements several years ago, I don't understand why Chrome is still seen as a wildly better product except for residual Google goodwill among the tech crowd. FF has had much much much more reliable session management / sync for me for years now.
This demonstrates that you have absolutely no clue what you're talking about.
OK, I'm not a fan of Firefox anymore but this isn't the case. They undeniably worked very, very hard and poured a lot of money into the revamp of Firefox.
Desktop is a better market to compare anyway, if including Edge. Is Microsoft even trying anymore on mobile?
Google Chrome 66%
Safari 12%
Edge 11%
Firefox 6%
https://radar.cloudflare.com/adoption-and-usage shows distribution of requests to Cloudflare by user agent:
Chrome 29.1%
Chrome Mobile 27.1%
Mobile Safari 11.4%
Chrome Mobile Webview 6.5%
Firefox 5.7%
Edge 4.4%
Facebook 3.5%
Safari 3.3%
That's silly. More than once, browsers have had more marketshare than chrome. IE's highest marketshare makes chrome look silly in comparison.
Now, is not the same as "what will happen".
Getting themselves into a deeper hole is unlikely to help, imo.
But IMO everyone is chasing Chrome or just using their engine now. Their engineering team is apparently 10x that of Mozilla.
And, back when Chrome was rolling out they used their dominant position online very aggressively. Google sites worked best in Chrome, period. Chrome was pushed on google. Google tech demos, similar to Microsoft ones, worked best in or only in Chrome. Android was a big Chrome advantage too. Chrome was heavily advertised, pushed as an install bundle in things like Adobe.. I'm not disagreeing Mozilla made some poor decisions but I don't think they had much of a chance regardless.
You're just not going to compete well for market share.
Safari has 34.6% share in the US: https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/all/united-s...
If it had been branded as a new "reading list" feature native to Mozilla I don't think it would have caused a stir.
I use Vivaldi now for two reasons: One, it is better than Firefox Mobile, and two, I like the ergonomics of its bookmarks and reading list sync.
Having the ability for the browser to be a suite isn't crazy.
I imagine Mozilla's thinking there was that they should position the feature so that people who already use Pocket will realize that Firefox isn't adding a separate reading list (like the Safari one nobody uses), but rather that you can just sign into your existing Pocket account in Firefox, and see your existing Pocket reading-list.
But yeah, in the end that probably wasn't nearly as important as getting people who didn't already use Pocket to see the reading list as "Firefox's reading list" rather than some channel-partner bloatware encroachment.
A happy medium would probably have been if the Firefox reading list was its own skin of Pocket, and synced using your Firefox Sync account, without needing to create a separate Pocket account; but when you first went to use it, it would ask if you want to sign into your Pocket account; and if you do, then your Pocket account would be merged with your Firefox Sync account, because "Pocket Sync is now part of Firefox Sync."
The objective of AI like LLMs is to create output indistinguishable from human output, should it reach that stage - generated text have no telltale signs of being AI output - then it would be impossible to tell from human output.
https://scatter.wordpress.com/2018/03/13/thoroughly-pizzled-...
A group of people who are receiving manufactured products of an automatic factory that they don't want get a chance to fill out a feedback form and write "the product was thoroughly pizzled" as a deliberate neologism to confuse the computer. The factory sent a representative who asked what this meant and they defined it as "unwanted".
[1] Pizzle is a Middle English word for penis, derived from Low German pesel or Flemish Dutch pezel, diminutive of pees, meaning 'sinew'. The word is used today to signify the penis of an animal, chiefly in Australia and New Zealand.
[2] Interestingly, it is used in medical slang (Dictionary of medical slang -Jacob Edward) and it is defined as exhausted, or to its point:
~ Pizzle chewer ... A female who relieves a male of his phallic tension by fondling the instrument in her mouth.
~ Pizzle-grinder ... 1. A butcher. 2. A prostitute.
~ Pizzle honker ... A prostitute who satisfies her patrons by manual friction.
~ Pizzle warmer . . . The pudendum muliebre, esp. the vagina.
~ Pizzled . . . Exhausted physically or mentally.
So I guess you could say that Pocket is a Fizzled[3] Pizzle.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizzle [2] https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/166295/etymology... [3] Fizzle: To finish slowly in a way that is disappointing or has become less interesting & There is often an initial indication of interest, but then it fizzles out and no cash materialises. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/fizzle
Right now, if Mozilla doesn't think Firefox is central to its mission and if they're giving up the fight in browser wars (as many in this thread suggest) ..
... I don't see that it has any relevance left. It has income, it has a CEO paid a few $m, aaand ... that's it?
I'd like to see Firefox spun out (together with Firefox-related revenue streams), and then let Mozilla (the rest of it) do whatever they want.
Except Firefox is the golden goose.
(Ffx user here, I'm using it for dev, browsing and mobile (ffocus), ie. everything that doesn't require chrome).
> Browser Extensions: We collect the following data when you use Fakespot’s Browser Extensions and may link it to your personal identity in order to effectively market our products and services to you and others:
Contact Info
Identifiers
Usage Data
Application Search History (e.g. not your Google/Bing/other search engine history)
Purchases
Diagnostics
See if you can even find it: https://www.fakespot.com/
Meanhwhile there are 3 links to the chrome extension, and two to the app.
There are 1,000's of issues firefox needs to improve, from integrating native gnome-keyring support, to performance, to porting to rust, to...
Let me PM or run Mozilla for a year. We won't buy any more companies, and we're going to focus on engineering.
There's plenty to improve. On Android there's the whole extension mess (and tons of other quality of life improvements), on desktop Firefox could use some proper PWA support (even Safari has that implemented well now), Spidermonkey is still the slowest mainstream Javascript engine out there, and Chrome's process sandboxing has some features that Firefox is yet to implement if at all. Firefox users on Gnome on Linux are a subset of a subset of a subset, that's hardly important, but "Firefox is slower than all the other browsers" is.
Mozilla cares more about their charity programs than they do about their browser (that's why you can't directly donate to Firefox, only to Mozilla). Maybe this acquisition is a way to add a new revenue stream, though I doubt it'll matter much because I've never seen AI detection that actually works. I hope this was a smart move, but I fear this will end up as one of those buttons everyone disables in the default toolbar, like Pocket has become.
Mozilla has also fired 250 people during the pandemic, so somehow coming up with the money to buy a company feels a little jarring when dev capacity still hasn't recovered.
Maybe that's the problem. Why Mozilla should be large enough to do those things? I'd rather have one good browser than 20 mediocre side projects.
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=firefox+market+share&oq=fire...
The things I suspect could make a difference to Firefox marketshare are performance and transformative features.
For performance, UI latency needs to be near-zero to make it feel snappier than Chrome, and JS- and CSS-heavy pages noticeably faster than in Chrome. (Yes, pages shouldn't be so JS- and CSS-heavy, but they are, and users don't care that it's the web developers' fault. The browser that solves that problem wins.)
For features, tabs are one clear example, as were blocking popups, and session restore. Containers, adblock, Pocket integration, and Reader Mode all seem like they could have been this, but they weren't. Big features will be hit-or-miss, and will quickly be copied, but possibly a big deal for a short while.
Perf, of course, is a lot of hard engineering work, and features may be as well, in addition to being potential duds. Things like gnome-keyring feels like a relatively simple quick-win, despite being very low value compared to various other possibilities.
Personally, I thing I switched back to Firefox when they made restarting it when you have a hundred tabs retain the tabs, but not load them until you switch to them. That moved restarting the browser from a big deal to something I can just do whenever. (It was also when Quantum/Servo stuff was happening, but I think it was the tab thing that got me.)
Is Firefox-centric Mozilla still relevant in 2023? No, not really.
People also assume that x is a distraction to the goal of y, but why would it be? If it hasn't happened yet, it probably isn't going to.
At this point, they arguably lost the browser war, even if they made a great browser, it is going to struggle to win meaningful marketshare, and even then, how many people are going to subscribe to Pocket or a VPN? Nowhere near as much as what their search royalties make them, which likely isn't going to last forever in this climate.
What about if Google pulls the plug on their search partnership due to declining Firefox numbers? They're largely dependent on Google. They probably can't pay their CEO $3m salary if that goes South.
Wouldn't they get more royalties if they could attract more users to their web browser?
The idea would be a gambit that you could improve the software sufficiently that it accidentally became actually competitive with chrome.
Right now, it feels like some weird hobby project that falls short of the engineering chops that went into Chrome, and I suspect people can feel this too.
I expect better from Mozilla.
I haven't tried to build Firefox for Android in a really long time but I wonder what the level of effort would be to just track the release tags with such a patch applied (i.e. the world's shallowest fork)
Mozilla is a separate company, with separate employees, that does everything except building Firefox.
(This division was originally created to firewall off the corporate moneys donated to, and influence of corporate developers on, Firefox, from the rest of Mozilla. Back when Google was sponsoring Firefox to use Google as its search engine, their money went exclusively to Firefox Corporation, with none of that money ever going to Mozilla.)
Note that this doesn't mean that Mozilla doesn't build a web browser. Mozilla develop the engine (Gecko/Servo) that goes into Firefox; and they also co-develop some of the Gecko/Servo-based browsers used by various FOSS projects — Tor Browser, for example. This is roughly the same structure as how the open-source Chromium project (which produces its own "Chromium browser") is the basis for the closed-source Google Chrome.
Interestingly, this means that for Firefox Corporation to get features into Gecko, they have to submit PRs "upstream" to Mozilla, who might very well reject them as "only serving corporate interests at the expense of the user." This is quite unlike Chromium, where both Chromium and Chrome are ultimately steered by Google.
In 2005 they said a for profit subsidiary was for revenue flexibility. Where did you learn it was to limit corporate developers influencing Mozilla Foundation?
Google's sponsorship of Firefox continues. Most of Mozilla Foundation's revenue comes from Google through Mozilla Corporation.
Mozilla Corporation employees develop Gecko. They developed Servo until it was transferred to the Linux Foundation. They land code with no sign of Mozilla Foundation review routinely. Can you show a PR Mozilla Foundation rejected as "only serving corporate interests at the expense of the user."?
It took this massive effort 15 years ago to get Firefox onto people's computers back in the day. Mozilla kicked off the web standardization drive and transformed the Internet. That sort of thing is not feasible now because the commercial browsers are damned good.
They're either done or they have to find another way to use their resources to advance their mission. Unsurprisingly, they pick the latter.
You can collect heuristics which may work here and there to stay ahead in this cat and mouse game, but when adversaries use AI models properly, there is no way to differentiate.
[1] https://www.mturk.com/worker
[2] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/fakespot
[3] https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:C2WWi4...
Of course, it would be much easier for Amazon to do this, because they could look at IP addresses, purchase history, mailing address, etc. - but it's in their best interest to let the spam continue, apparently.
As if the above is not already, there's one more complication: the interested small company needs to pitch their solution as a service to the platform because in general that's the only interested party of real business value. i.e. end users would not pay for such protection or won't pay enough.
Apply it to social media impersonation and scams, Adtech scams, etc etc.
Fun stuff.
And then maybe it can begin expanding for more general use... detecting likelihood of any content being artificial... hmm I'm scared again.
Both freedom of expression and automated decision-making are already quite heavily regulated in the EU today with even more and tighter rules currently the way[1]. These new regulations also happen to extensively cover the combating of fake and illegal content by online platforms.
Additionally this seems contrary to Mozilla's claim[2] of commitment to human dignity, individual expression, accountability, and most of all: trust.
Strange thing to be investing in for any other reason than to make it disappear, which I don't think is the plan. Money would have been better spent elsewhere... or anywhere else, really.
[1]: A Europe fit for the digital age https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-...
[2]: Mozilla Manifesto https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/
Firefox market share has been tanking for 13 years(!) straight. Already 6 years ago the CTO of Mozilla concluded that Chrome had won:
https://andreasgal.com/2017/05/25/chrome-won/
There's nothing Mozilla can do to reverse Firefox's course. It's not an engineering problem, they have no reach to push anything and for ordinary people default-shipped browsers are just fine.
The real question indeed is what Mozilla really is with this reality check in mind. A type of do-good activist organization that does a lot of preaching yet fails to convert this into actual meaning or impact?
All of this made possible by "easy money". They literally do not have to do a damn thing to receive $0.5B from Google. Just keep things as-is.
As they are trying to find alternative income streams, for the first time in their history they're learning what hard money is. Generating $0.5B in the tech market by delivering an actual service/product people will pay you for...is fucking hard.
As such, it's odd that in their borrowed time they continue to give away money or do takeovers of products that do not add revenue. I guess they'll never learn.
"This add-on is not actively monitored for security by Mozilla. Make sure you trust it before installing."
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/fakespot-fake...
None of the ones I reported have had their recommended status revoked, several ones have since even been allowed to publish new versions where the same violations are still present and even a few published updates that introduced additional violations.
To Mozilla: If you want to change the world, start with yourself.
To the rest: Whenever you install or update an extension, always go through its published source first. You can get to it by right-clicking the install/download button to "save as" and then simply unpacking the xpi file.
Could you publish these publicly anywhere, so that we can do for ourselves the job that Mozilla apparently is failing to do (while claiming to)?
Does the HN community still view it as a trusted source to make better buying decisions?
I think it'd be great to have this integrated into the browser and be able to get a sense for what's real or "likely fake" when browsing the web of tomorrow.
Instead of identifying fake content, I'm more interested in features that generate fake stats for analytics, effectively making them useless. However, not sure if the Google money would keep flowing for such efforts.
(Mullvad, if you weren't aware)
That service is what earns them non-Google revenue.
But what's really interesting is, can we not put ML to good use for generating a new browser for us, given a corpus of expected renderings? Or have we managed to make web standards so fscking complicated and out of hand so as to make that infeasible?
FF is like the only remaining browser without this feature.
A cookie consent on fakespot page states mainly Fakespot and Google cookies in a surprising manner. They give two options, but none to refuse any cookies:
- ok
- do not sell or share my personal information
How are they different? From reading details, I assume no difference.
There's no way to turn off any non-necessary cookies group (shared with Meta/Facebook (!) and Google).
It will be sad to stop using FF because of this integration.
If everyone starts using Fakespot, vendors will just optimize to fool Fakespot.
It'd be funny if it wasn't so frustrating.
I’ve asked ChatGPT for product recommendations and it’s a breath of fresh air to get suggestions that are not filtered for affiliate commission potential. Let’s hope this lasts but in the meantime I doubt I’m the only one noticing that this AI content is not steering you based on the potential for profit.
So, fakespot kind of had it backwards, in a way. What we need is Humanspot to warn us away from content, AI generated or not, that has been corrupted by a human profit motive.