These two statements seem at odds:

AI should always be a choice — something people can easily turn off.

And later:

It will evolve into a modern AI browser

Take this Everstone, Mozilla.

The Venn diagram of Firefox users who want an AI browser is zero.

Know your customer.

Honestly none of this sounds good.

Firefox will grow into a suite of software? Why?

People just want Mozilla to make Firefox fast and modern (I.e. renders their content, follows web standards correctly, is secure)

AI and whatever else is just a distraction from the one product people want.

Again, I’m a pro (local) LLM extremist as far as the Fediverse goes, but “automated” browsers should not be shipped by default like this.

It should be a separate tool or “mode” or extension you choose to activate temporarily, with very narrow scopes. Things like “turn this webpage dark and get rid of the autoplay videos” or “filter the AI slop from these results” or “put this messy shopping site into a table for me.” Not the 100,000th implementation of an “ask me anything!” Chatbot shoved in your face like Copilot.

And FYI, we already have them. FF doesn’t need to do it:

github.com/browseros-ai/BrowserOS

github.com/ItzCrazyKns/Perplexica

Honestly, “AI” feels like a disease infecting boards and high level executives. Or perhaps more accurately, the Orions Arm definition of a Meme:

www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/47abccd6ee698

Memetic Demons are self-perpetuating patterns which use mental and social processes as their hardware and software, propagating ideas and belief systems with negative social and psychological effects.

Where - as standard totemic memes often work to attain the best for all sentients they come in contact with, or at least maintain an equilibrium (happiness vs. suffering, life vs. death), memetic demons seem to promote their own group or cause at the expense of all others. This may include any number of clever and insidious behaviors that either attack sentients external to the group or coerce the initiation of individuals reasoned to be “strong” in some regard.

Even for a company like Mozilla, once the idea is planted, it’s like they can’t think straight, and feel compelled to shove copilot into whatever their specialization is immediately.

While this is obviously not thrilling news to the fuck_ai crowd, it isn’t that bad either.

A new CEO is going to express a grand vision. In fact, we kind of hope they do lest they be weaselly caretakers who flip-flop on major initiatives.

And AI is pretty much every other word in any tech CEO’s statement right now. They get penalized if they don’t use it. I’m reading it here like, “All you big institutional donors, don’t fret we’re still in the goddamned boat with you fuckers” while at the same time saying “well turn it off if you want” - a kind of common sense statement sorely lacking in exactly this kind of statement.

So I give it a B- / C+. Not in danger yet, just needs improvement. A statement like this can’t really “win” anything so you want people to be sort of interested and kinda bored with it. Perfect.

People trust our brand.

Unspoken rest of the idea, “Let’s take advantage of that.”

I’ve stuck with Mozilla for so long despite missing a lot of things I could’ve had, you know, for freedom.

But this is not the correct course anymore. This sounds like the same AI bullshit we get shoved down our throats everywhere.

I feel like we are just collectively on the cusp of discovering a new browser and walking away from Firefox.

Just the way we all discovered Firefox back in the day and said fuck any other browser.