I owe Mozilla a thank-you. Really, I do. Maybe an Edible Arrangement? People like those. Some lil pineapples cut into stars on sticks and chocolate strawberries might brighten their day. For the note, I'm thinking something like:
Thank you for proving me exactly right. XOXO MT
Eight months ago, in the fallout of Mozilla's fumbling of a Privacy Policy update, I wrote:
Mozilla is pursuing its primary objective, which is the survival of Mozilla. Its mission statement is more than broad enough to accommodate that, and Firefox is not a real priority. The community should accept that and stop waiting for Mozilla to be the hero they deserve.
Regrettably, I was unable to take my own advice on the last part. So here we are yet again, marveling at Mozilla's dedication toward eroding decades of good will in the community they purportedly serve. To quote one of my sacred texts, it's a focus and intensity normally seen only in successes.
Back in the present, we have Mozilla doubling tripling nthing down on this direction. First, with their announcement of "AI Window," a new feature (used very loosely) coming to Firefox which seems to emulate the user experience offered by AI browsers like Perplexity's Comet or OpenAI's Atlas. In other words, instead of performing search from the address bar and interacting with websites like browsers have done since they were invented, your first interaction will be with a language model prompt, which then mediates your experience of the web.
Not to gloat, but I told you so.
The response from the Firefox community has not just been overwhelmingly negative, it is universally negative as far as I can tell. At least among users willing to post on Mozilla's forums about the issue, which is absolutely a biased sample set. I have received some comments separately in support of Firefox, but they are countable and the vast, vast minority. Mozilla's core audience hates this move. At the very least, they would want all the AI components of Firefox to be opt-in, a choice that Firefox has been unwilling to make so far, instead enabling these new features by default.
What does Mozilla do? Temper the plan? Ease up on the forced features?
Nah, they do what any good corporate PR person would tell you to do when facing public backlash: post through it.
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