You'd think that Mozilla has an excess of funding and has covered absolutely all needs in the browser space leading them to branch out like this... but the browser really needs a lot more hands and funding, I honestly can't make sense of this.
And Fakespot: they present themselves as a company that focuses on detecting AI-generated content from human-generated content. It sounds like they've set out to play Whac-A-Mole against the all the biggest AI companies in the world. Literally all the largest tech companies in the world are right now focused on making AI content indistinguishable from human-generated content.
I can't help think that this is an infinite money sink, and in no way improves Mozilla's browser.
> It sounds like they've set out to play Whac-A-Mole against the all the biggest AI companies in the world.
That's exactly what they're doing with the biggest ad trackers and browser vendors. A lot of Mozilla's "side-projects" are stupid and I also agree they should focus more on Firefox, but this one is pretty in line with their general mission of "we'll fight the big guys because, if we don't, nobody else will".
I'm happy for them to branch out, but it is discouraging that once every 3-4 months I run into a bug or feature I need, google it, and am taken to a bug report in their tracker from 5-10 years ago that hasn't been touched.
> but the browser really needs a lot more hands and funding
I had been using Firefox since 2002, when it was called Phoenix.
I switched to a Chromium-based browser because the performance difference was noticable enough, and I am in the browser often enough, to finally throw in the towel and switch.
They have a huge amount of money coming in from Google. Why is this going to acquisitions like this and not towards strengthening the development so that it remains competitive? Or are they, and I am not aware?
If it doesn't remain competitive on things like performance, standards compliance, etc. there are very few reasons for the average user to choose Firefox over any other browser at the moment. The privacy-focus is good, but there are other browsers that do the same on Chromium.
From my perspective Mozilla is doing a better job with their browser than Google and Apple are, that's why I use it (despite the market share, I prefer their implementation of most things compared to alternatives). Everything else is gravy.
I'm not sure that the money Mozilla spends on other things would be better spent on the browser... would it realistically close any existing gaps between their competition? Arguably they might even be better off spending it on marketing the browser than any technical metric. I'd rather this kind of thing than marketing.
> And Fakespot: they present themselves as a company that focuses on detecting AI-generated content from human-generated content. It sounds like they've set out to play Whac-A-Mole against the all the biggest AI companies in the world.
I use FakeSpot a lot, and it's less about finding AI written reviews and more about finding any fake reviews, human written or not. They don't need to try and tell if reviews are actually written by a human, just if they are authentic. A reviewer with only 1 review on their whole account will be flagged as suspicious. A reviewer with only reviews for the same company will be marked as definitely fake. It also does things like look for repeated sentiments across all reviews for a product. Sometimes it gets false positives, like a review for a chair might legitimately have 30% of users saying the phrase "super/very/really comfy" at some point in their review. But because it's repeated so much it's flagged as indicating fake reviews.
There are lots of companies working on making convincing language models. ChatGPT is pretty much already at that level for something simple like Amazon reviews. But there aren't any large AI companies working on AI that can fake looking like an authentic group of reviewers. Those are all more shady businesses without billion dollar budgets.
Sure the problem of writing a single convincing review is now solved for those shady businesses. But the really sophisticated ones were already paying humans to write the reviews before good LLM's came along. There's also the issue of sellers themselves including a card or followup email promising a small gift card in exchange for a 5 star review.
You're thinking like an engineer (functionality) and not like a businessman (assets).
You've addressed some of the assets well: the tech, product, etc.
Mozilla isn't just paying for that, they are paying for the audience. I.e. the millions of people monthly who search for authentic product information.
Mozilla may be interested in selling them another product , or revising the fakespot product – who knows?
I'm just calling attention to the assets that the business paid for and that they are worth the money paid.
Not to mention, improving the browser in the space of adblockers installed by default ( https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin... ftw! ) would remove most incentives for AI generated content in the first place. /inserts shrugging emoji
Exactly the same feeling as when Mozilla acquired Pocket and promised to opensource it. I had the feeling that it doesn't make sense and it's not what their audience wants.
>This feels like a good long term vision for Mozilla.
>The browser wars are basically over
and why is that? Oh because Mozilla hasn't put any energy into getting better or pulling back market share from the moment it started to bleed out to Chrome.
Let's not just sit back and go "Oh well, they lost nothing they could do" shrug. They built their tech in such an obtuse and opinionated way it's impossible to integrate anywhere else, milked their millions selling off customer data to Google via the default search interface, burned the money on private jets and shockingly overpaid low-talent low-vision executives. Burned engineering talent on a VPN service no one asked for just because it's a good money making scam if you advertize it on the right podcasts, made huge parts of their deep engineering teams redundant.
To be perfectly honest the only good long term vision for Mozilla is an empty office or a landfill. Their existence under the current management doomed the internet back to the IE6 era of browser variety. Firefox the browser would be way better off if Mozilla the company didn't exist.
Baffles me they have any good will left at all from people who care about the internet. This company will literally do anything else than work hard on their browser.
Leaning hard into delivering content that you can "trust" would be an interesting direction for Mozilla. I suspect that will put some crosshairs on Mozilla as an organization, though. While that would be good for users, there will be folks who don't like the idea of spotting fake content or doing any labeling of content...
The browser wars are over because Firefox lost them by spending all the time patting themselves on the back about how much better they were than the competition, wasting their money on stupid stuff like this instead of improving their browser.
Getting themselves into a deeper hole is unlikely to help, imo.
Normally I'd say... "They'd better write it in the bylaws that Mozilla isn't allowed to buy any more companies" but a system for identifying fake content on the web might (unlike all the other Mozilla acquisitions such as the thoroughly pizzled Pocket) improve the web browsing experience.
On a separate note, there is a chance this could be futile.
The objective of AI like LLMs is to create output indistinguishable from human output, should it reach that stage - generated text have no telltale signs of being AI output - then it would be impossible to tell from human output.
Right now, if Mozilla doesn't think Firefox is central to its mission and if they're giving up the fight in browser wars (as many in this thread suggest) ..
... I don't see that it has any relevance left. It has income, it has a CEO paid a few $m, aaand ... that's it?
I'd like to see Firefox spun out (together with Firefox-related revenue streams), and then let Mozilla (the rest of it) do whatever they want.
Except Firefox is the golden goose.
(Ffx user here, I'm using it for dev, browsing and mobile (ffocus), ie. everything that doesn't require chrome).
Cool product, but I'm actually concerned about privacy using a tool like FakeSpot. Their privacy policy is extremely broad and includes handing over purchase history and search history on shopping websites to the extension authors:
> Browser Extensions: We collect the following data when you use Fakespot’s Browser Extensions and may link it to your personal identity in order to effectively market our products and services to you and others:
Contact Info
Identifiers
Usage Data
Application Search History (e.g. not your Google/Bing/other search engine history)
Purchases
Diagnostics
As much as I love Firefox, let's not lie about the state of affairs: "We are joining a company that develops one of the most popular browsers in the world in Firefox with a lineage that dates back to the origins of the internet." no you are not, Firefox is nowhere near one of the most popular browsers. It's essentially a non-player in the browser space, and while the people working for Mozilla are still meaningfully contributing to standards bodies, the browser itself is basically irrelevant in the global market. I wish it wasn't, but the good old days of "we beat IE" are long gone, and FF did not step up to Chrome, nor to the Chromification of the rest of the browser landscape. It just threw ideas at the wall in the hopes that something would end up being a revenue stream while Firefox languished. Quantum was the right move, except they should have kept making moves. You don't win by being "pretty decent", you win by doing things people didn't realize they needed their browser to do, and doing all the things they do know they need to do better than the competition. It's been drastically down hill since Chris Beard left.
I’m hoping that Mozilla has a secret plan to extend Fakespot beyond just shopping and to become the killer app for distinguishing all AI generated content. May not even be possible to achieve, but that would be a worthy goal for Mozilla.
How do they expect to lead in identifying fake content when the problem is intractable if adversaries are even somewhat competent?
You can collect heuristics which may work here and there to stay ahead in this cat and mouse game, but when adversaries use AI models properly, there is no way to differentiate.
I'm saddened by the sudden and intermittent disappearance of ReviewMeta, which prided itself as not inserting affiliate links into their site/extension. Reading this news leads me to believe that this is a perfect fit in accordance with Mozilla's overall mission, making this a good outcome for something that could've easily been exploited by a bad actor making the acquisition.
I think this is a great acquisition, but I'm curious where this may give Mozilla an advantage. Do they plan on baking this into Firefox, and if so, to what degree are we willing to let the browser govern the content?
Fully automated profiling, deciding, and then advertising to as many people as possible whether you are a scammer or if a review you left is genuine. And the only method through which you can discover that you are the victim of of a false accusation is to use this product to actively and manually monitor your own content.
Both freedom of expression and automated decision-making are already quite heavily regulated in the EU today with even more and tighter rules currently the way[1]. These new regulations also happen to extensively cover the combating of fake and illegal content by online platforms.
Additionally this seems contrary to Mozilla's claim[2] of commitment to human dignity, individual expression, accountability, and most of all: trust.
Strange thing to be investing in for any other reason than to make it disappear, which I don't think is the plan. Money would have been better spent elsewhere... or anywhere else, really.
There's nothing Mozilla can do to reverse Firefox's course. It's not an engineering problem, they have no reach to push anything and for ordinary people default-shipped browsers are just fine.
The real question indeed is what Mozilla really is with this reality check in mind. A type of do-good activist organization that does a lot of preaching yet fails to convert this into actual meaning or impact?
All of this made possible by "easy money". They literally do not have to do a damn thing to receive $0.5B from Google. Just keep things as-is.
As they are trying to find alternative income streams, for the first time in their history they're learning what hard money is. Generating $0.5B in the tech market by delivering an actual service/product people will pay you for...is fucking hard.
As such, it's odd that in their borrowed time they continue to give away money or do takeovers of products that do not add revenue. I guess they'll never learn.
I guess I'm in the minority in that I love Fakespot as a tool to determine the "real" review scores of products on Amazon and other online shops. I get tired of the "1000 reviews, 5 stars" that turns out to be pure garbage. Instead, I find that half of the very amazing 5 star, 10k reviews products are rated a C, D, or F.
I think it'd be great to have this integrated into the browser and be able to get a sense for what's real or "likely fake" when browsing the web of tomorrow.
I would prefer Mozilla spend effort in improving the performance of Firefox; I always switch to it and then, to my repeated dismay, always fall back to Chrome because it just feels snappier.
Instead of identifying fake content, I'm more interested in features that generate fake stats for analytics, effectively making them useless. However, not sure if the Google money would keep flowing for such efforts.
Their VPN is just reselling someone else's service, minimal effort invested while opening a mainstream service that actually provides an income stream. Seems like a solid strategy to me.
Maybe Moz is on to something here; while they're at it, how about telling apart original content from copycat sites?
But what's really interesting is, can we not put ML to good use for generating a new browser for us, given a corpus of expected renderings? Or have we managed to make web standards so fscking complicated and out of hand so as to make that infeasible?
[+] [-] WhyNotHugo|2 years ago|reply
And Fakespot: they present themselves as a company that focuses on detecting AI-generated content from human-generated content. It sounds like they've set out to play Whac-A-Mole against the all the biggest AI companies in the world. Literally all the largest tech companies in the world are right now focused on making AI content indistinguishable from human-generated content.
I can't help think that this is an infinite money sink, and in no way improves Mozilla's browser.
[+] [-] franga2000|2 years ago|reply
That's exactly what they're doing with the biggest ad trackers and browser vendors. A lot of Mozilla's "side-projects" are stupid and I also agree they should focus more on Firefox, but this one is pretty in line with their general mission of "we'll fight the big guys because, if we don't, nobody else will".
[+] [-] user3939382|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] EMM_386|2 years ago|reply
I had been using Firefox since 2002, when it was called Phoenix.
I switched to a Chromium-based browser because the performance difference was noticable enough, and I am in the browser often enough, to finally throw in the towel and switch.
They have a huge amount of money coming in from Google. Why is this going to acquisitions like this and not towards strengthening the development so that it remains competitive? Or are they, and I am not aware?
If it doesn't remain competitive on things like performance, standards compliance, etc. there are very few reasons for the average user to choose Firefox over any other browser at the moment. The privacy-focus is good, but there are other browsers that do the same on Chromium.
[+] [-] micromacrofoot|2 years ago|reply
I'm not sure that the money Mozilla spends on other things would be better spent on the browser... would it realistically close any existing gaps between their competition? Arguably they might even be better off spending it on marketing the browser than any technical metric. I'd rather this kind of thing than marketing.
[+] [-] squeaky-clean|2 years ago|reply
I use FakeSpot a lot, and it's less about finding AI written reviews and more about finding any fake reviews, human written or not. They don't need to try and tell if reviews are actually written by a human, just if they are authentic. A reviewer with only 1 review on their whole account will be flagged as suspicious. A reviewer with only reviews for the same company will be marked as definitely fake. It also does things like look for repeated sentiments across all reviews for a product. Sometimes it gets false positives, like a review for a chair might legitimately have 30% of users saying the phrase "super/very/really comfy" at some point in their review. But because it's repeated so much it's flagged as indicating fake reviews.
There are lots of companies working on making convincing language models. ChatGPT is pretty much already at that level for something simple like Amazon reviews. But there aren't any large AI companies working on AI that can fake looking like an authentic group of reviewers. Those are all more shady businesses without billion dollar budgets.
Sure the problem of writing a single convincing review is now solved for those shady businesses. But the really sophisticated ones were already paying humans to write the reviews before good LLM's came along. There's also the issue of sellers themselves including a card or followup email promising a small gift card in exchange for a 5 star review.
[+] [-] tonymet|2 years ago|reply
You've addressed some of the assets well: the tech, product, etc.
Mozilla isn't just paying for that, they are paying for the audience. I.e. the millions of people monthly who search for authentic product information.
Mozilla may be interested in selling them another product , or revising the fakespot product – who knows?
I'm just calling attention to the assets that the business paid for and that they are worth the money paid.
[+] [-] Mistletoe|2 years ago|reply
Interesting, did not know this happened.
[+] [-] asldkfjaslkdj|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] agilob|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amelius|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] waveBidder|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AtlasBarfed|2 years ago|reply
I think that's an advantage that something like this has because basically you just have to function as a critic
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] samstave|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bcx|2 years ago|reply
The browser wars are basically over, and Mozilla as an organization would benefit from a longer term vision to improve veracity on the internet.
With the ability to generate content at the cost of basically 0, figuring out what's real and not real is going to be an increasingly hard challenge.
Browser stats (as of Feb): 79.7% - Chrome 8.6% - Edge 4.8% - Firefox/Mozilla 3.9% - Safari
[+] [-] whywhywhywhy|2 years ago|reply
>The browser wars are basically over
and why is that? Oh because Mozilla hasn't put any energy into getting better or pulling back market share from the moment it started to bleed out to Chrome.
Let's not just sit back and go "Oh well, they lost nothing they could do" shrug. They built their tech in such an obtuse and opinionated way it's impossible to integrate anywhere else, milked their millions selling off customer data to Google via the default search interface, burned the money on private jets and shockingly overpaid low-talent low-vision executives. Burned engineering talent on a VPN service no one asked for just because it's a good money making scam if you advertize it on the right podcasts, made huge parts of their deep engineering teams redundant.
To be perfectly honest the only good long term vision for Mozilla is an empty office or a landfill. Their existence under the current management doomed the internet back to the IE6 era of browser variety. Firefox the browser would be way better off if Mozilla the company didn't exist.
Baffles me they have any good will left at all from people who care about the internet. This company will literally do anything else than work hard on their browser.
[+] [-] jzb|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blacksmith_tb|2 years ago|reply
1: https://kinsta.com/browser-market-share/
[+] [-] robocat|2 years ago|reply
https://radar.cloudflare.com/adoption-and-usage shows distribution of requests to Cloudflare by user agent:
No idea where commenter is getting their stats from.[+] [-] recursive|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] b112|2 years ago|reply
That's silly. More than once, browsers have had more marketshare than chrome. IE's highest marketshare makes chrome look silly in comparison.
Now, is not the same as "what will happen".
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] wodenokoto|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fafzv|2 years ago|reply
Getting themselves into a deeper hole is unlikely to help, imo.
[+] [-] kjkjadksj|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PaulHoule|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unethical_ban|2 years ago|reply
If it had been branded as a new "reading list" feature native to Mozilla I don't think it would have caused a stir.
I use Vivaldi now for two reasons: One, it is better than Firefox Mobile, and two, I like the ergonomics of its bookmarks and reading list sync.
Having the ability for the browser to be a suite isn't crazy.
[+] [-] worrycue|2 years ago|reply
The objective of AI like LLMs is to create output indistinguishable from human output, should it reach that stage - generated text have no telltale signs of being AI output - then it would be impossible to tell from human output.
[+] [-] blowski|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] activiation|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] senko|2 years ago|reply
Right now, if Mozilla doesn't think Firefox is central to its mission and if they're giving up the fight in browser wars (as many in this thread suggest) ..
... I don't see that it has any relevance left. It has income, it has a CEO paid a few $m, aaand ... that's it?
I'd like to see Firefox spun out (together with Firefox-related revenue streams), and then let Mozilla (the rest of it) do whatever they want.
Except Firefox is the golden goose.
(Ffx user here, I'm using it for dev, browsing and mobile (ffocus), ie. everything that doesn't require chrome).
[+] [-] applecrazy|2 years ago|reply
> Browser Extensions: We collect the following data when you use Fakespot’s Browser Extensions and may link it to your personal identity in order to effectively market our products and services to you and others:
https://www.fakespot.com/privacy-policy[+] [-] TheRealPomax|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] purpleidea|2 years ago|reply
There are 1,000's of issues firefox needs to improve, from integrating native gnome-keyring support, to performance, to porting to rust, to...
Let me PM or run Mozilla for a year. We won't buy any more companies, and we're going to focus on engineering.
[+] [-] qzw|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ve55|2 years ago|reply
You can collect heuristics which may work here and there to stay ahead in this cat and mouse game, but when adversaries use AI models properly, there is no way to differentiate.
[+] [-] kivlad|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nbar1|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] krono|2 years ago|reply
Both freedom of expression and automated decision-making are already quite heavily regulated in the EU today with even more and tighter rules currently the way[1]. These new regulations also happen to extensively cover the combating of fake and illegal content by online platforms.
Additionally this seems contrary to Mozilla's claim[2] of commitment to human dignity, individual expression, accountability, and most of all: trust.
Strange thing to be investing in for any other reason than to make it disappear, which I don't think is the plan. Money would have been better spent elsewhere... or anywhere else, really.
[1]: A Europe fit for the digital age https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-...
[2]: Mozilla Manifesto https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/
[+] [-] dahwolf|2 years ago|reply
Firefox market share has been tanking for 13 years(!) straight. Already 6 years ago the CTO of Mozilla concluded that Chrome had won:
https://andreasgal.com/2017/05/25/chrome-won/
There's nothing Mozilla can do to reverse Firefox's course. It's not an engineering problem, they have no reach to push anything and for ordinary people default-shipped browsers are just fine.
The real question indeed is what Mozilla really is with this reality check in mind. A type of do-good activist organization that does a lot of preaching yet fails to convert this into actual meaning or impact?
All of this made possible by "easy money". They literally do not have to do a damn thing to receive $0.5B from Google. Just keep things as-is.
As they are trying to find alternative income streams, for the first time in their history they're learning what hard money is. Generating $0.5B in the tech market by delivering an actual service/product people will pay you for...is fucking hard.
As such, it's odd that in their borrowed time they continue to give away money or do takeovers of products that do not add revenue. I guess they'll never learn.
[+] [-] frabcus|2 years ago|reply
"This add-on is not actively monitored for security by Mozilla. Make sure you trust it before installing."
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/fakespot-fake...
[+] [-] candiddevmike|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jmann99999|2 years ago|reply
Does the HN community still view it as a trusted source to make better buying decisions?
[+] [-] dudeinhawaii|2 years ago|reply
I think it'd be great to have this integrated into the browser and be able to get a sense for what's real or "likely fake" when browsing the web of tomorrow.
[+] [-] noisy_boy|2 years ago|reply
Instead of identifying fake content, I'm more interested in features that generate fake stats for analytics, effectively making them useless. However, not sure if the Google money would keep flowing for such efforts.
[+] [-] tivert|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jdiff|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dblohm7|2 years ago|reply
That service is what earns them non-Google revenue.
[+] [-] tannhaeuser|2 years ago|reply
But what's really interesting is, can we not put ML to good use for generating a new browser for us, given a corpus of expected renderings? Or have we managed to make web standards so fscking complicated and out of hand so as to make that infeasible?