Anthony Enzor-DeMeo is taking charge of one of the internet’s most important — and most complicated — companies.

Mozilla is in a tricky position. It contains both a nonprofit organization dedicated to making the internet a better place for everyone, and a for-profit arm dedicated to, you know, making money. In the best of times, these things feed each other: The company makes great products that advance its goals for the web, and the nonprofit gets to both advocate for a better web and show people what it looks like. But these are not the best of times. Mozilla has spent the last couple of years implementing layoffs and restructuring, attempting to explain how it can fight for privacy and openness when Google pays most of its bills, while trying to find its place in an increasingly frothy AI landscape.

Fun times to be the new Mozilla CEO, right? But when I put all that to Anthony Enzor-DeMeo, the company’s just-announced chief executive, he swears he sees opportunity in all the upheaval. “I think what’s actually needed now is a technology company that people can trust,” Enzor-DeMeo says. “What I’ve seen with AI is an erosion of trust.”

Mozilla is not going to train its own giant LLM anytime soon. But there’s still an AI Mode coming to Firefox next year, which Enzor-DeMeo says will offer users their choice of model and product, all in a browser they can understand and from a company they can trust. “We’re not incentivized to push one model or the other,” he says. “So we’re going to try to go to market with multiple models.”

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  • cecilkorik@piefed.caEnglish
    10·
    4 days ago

    Not sure how that’s any different than disabling anti-fingerprinting in Librewolf. It’s literally one switch.

    To me, the value is in the assurance that Librewolf is never going to follow any of these kind of stupid trends, the way it demonstrates they’re actually putting me first, not major websites nor themselves. It’s not about their features or configuration out of the box, it’s more about their demonstrated priorities and decision making process that gives me confidence.

    I’m not so familiar with IronFox, maybe I should check it out too, but I do know Waterfox has made a number of… questionable decisions in the past. It was literally owned by an advertising company (System1) for awhile, which was very alarming.

    • Truscape@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      61·
      4 days ago

      Ironfox is pretty much just for android, it’s essentially the Librewolf model but has less aggressive default settings.

      • cecilkorik@piefed.caEnglish
        4·
        4 days ago

        Ah, I am a 99% desktop user so that explains why I’ve never really heard of it. Sounds like a good option for my phone, not that I ever use it.