"What Is Your Dream for Mozilla" - Mozilla is doing a survey, and it could be a good opportunity to share some of the feedback that usually gets commented here :)
"What Is Your Dream for Mozilla" - Mozilla is doing a survey, and it could be a good opportunity to share some of the feedback that usually gets commented here :)
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.
Make and maintain the best browser. The end.
"We've decided to focus our efforts on AI and advertising. Please tell us why you think that's a good idea!"
"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.
Well, you have the option to elaborate otherwise. Huge effort to normalize this survey.
I asked them to support JPEGXL by default.
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 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.
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.
This poll is for the Mozilla Foundation. They don't make the browser. The post should probably have made that clear.
Just make a better browser… you literally pioneered RUST
They were for years, called the servo engine. Until they killed off development of course
Yup, that’s when I lost the remaining hope I had for the project.
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.
The questionnaire is about AI, race and so any genders. That's all you need to know about their focus.
Stick a fork in them. They're done.
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.
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.
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)
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
The audacity to direct you to a donations page after you fill out their survey 😂
What if the whole survey is just a ploy for donations
Always has been.
You can submit the survey without checking any of the boxes on the AI question, just FYI.
gecko webview for android, better site isolation
I responded that I'd like them to build out Firefox to be a credible alternative to chrome (I personally think it is, but market share thinks otherwise).
Prolong your browser for as long as necessary and explore the possibility of using the internet without any web browsers. Firefox is a last stand of competition, and without choice there might as well not be browsers at all.
Is it wise to have such a complex everything-app with no end in sight? (more like, no end in site)
good set of questions while trying to be non biased on certain topics.
for me, topics about privacy and misinformation matter more than ai. i would like them to lean more on helping me identify ai generated text and deepfakes as far as ai is concerned.
i also liked that mozilla study about smart cars so more of that is nice.
Besides the already sketchy AI thing, I wonder why they need to know gender & ethnicity.
Demographic questions help us better understand the Mozilla community. All questions are optional.
"To disappear"
EDIT: I don't care if you don't agree and I'm not going to reply further. If you still did not came to the conclusion that Mozilla became just a cash grab machine by yourself, then you're hopeless.
Take a minute to learn the difference between mozilla.org and mozilla.com. They are very much separate, and the .com has never pretended to not be there for the money. It's explicitly why it exists, so that the org can keep doing its thing.