DangerousPie

Silly take. Chrome does extremely well on Windows because every Google site, from search to Youtube to Gmail to Docs nudges people to install it. Without that 99% of people would just stay on Edge.

Firefox as "just a browser" that is entirely dependent on funding from its main competitor just isn't a future-proof solution. That's why they keep on trying to come up with new revenue streams.

Congratulations, you have discovered the concept of shoplifting!

I had a look at what it actually does in the Firefox settings and all it seems to do is to disable one AI feature flag, change the default search engine, and then set a few other flags that are changes that you may or may not want to make, unrelated to AI. Not sure you want to run a 3rd party shell script just to do that…

They also demonstrated how this could be used to silently find out someone’s phone number and then hijack a TFA validation call from an app like WhatsApp to take over their account with no user interaction.

It's still better than <span> or <div> though, isn't it? Which is what most people are using right now...

How are you expecting to run an entity with developers, support, and operations without any leadership?

I don't know if you have ever worked in a larger team that lacked someone to make decisions, take responsibility and set a strategy, but in my experience that is almost always a disaster.

They have cut back on those a lot now, haven't they?

Aren't they just piggybacking on Mozilla's work though? The point is to make the work that Mozilla is doing sustainable, not to pay someone else to ship a slightly modified version of it.

Or in slightly less fatalistic words: In any entity with more than 1-2 employees you need someone to make decisions and be accountable for them. The normal solution is to have a director/CEO for this. You may be able to get away with paying them slightly less than market rates if they are doing it for a good cause, but if you want someone competent you will need to pay them a relatively high salary to compete with other employers.

Expecting Mozilla to somehow function without a CEO, unlike pretty much every other charity in the world, is just not reasonable.

Interesting article, but picking Johnson and Cummings's handling of Covid as a positive example is a very odd choice, given their falling out and the numerous corruption allegations and parliamentary inquiries into their actions since then.

Sounds like all of this could be solved by not manually paying your rent at the last minute?

They are also available as part of their excellent (and free) The Intelligence podcast. Always worth a listen.