Addressing the usual few complaints folks always bring up:
* This is from the separate independent team that works on Thunderbird, not Firefox, so there isn't any resource contention happening there
* Thunderbird is revenue positive, and this potentially gives that team another revenue stream to be even more self-sustaining through charging companies
* Businesses definitely want to control the AI they're using (especially with RAGs of their own data) instead of just throwing it at their LLM vendor and hoping for the best
People on HN are fond of asserting that their own POV is the only one. Imagine that there is such a thing as a person in charge of choosing technologies for organizations, and that you're such a person. That's who this is for.
1. Potential donors get upset that they can't make directed donations to specifically support Firefox or Thunderbird rather than the whole kit-and-kaboodle
2. Separate entity spun up to focus on Thunderbird only. Now you can support Thunderbird development directly.
3. New separate entity is now in the business of extensible AI clients?
EDIT: I went back and read the launch announcement [1]. I'll concede it does say "will also allow us to explore offering our users products and services that were not possible under the Mozilla Foundation" which could mean anything, really. And this development was funded by a Mozilla grant, importantly not by Thunderbird donors. I'm still struggling to not see this as a distraction from the core mission. I wish they'd spun up a new entity instead.
It's a crazy crowded space. Any entry into this field looks like a "me too" product driven by FOMO instead of being motivated by (a) serving customer needs, (b) serving social needs, or (c) making money. (All of which are fine with me) It will get 0.5% market share -- and I'm supposed to get excited?
If you lived in New York City you might think there are Duane Reades coast-to-coast but there are not. If you are based in the Bay Area you see billboards that are very different from anywhere else. I'd say the viewpoint is a lot like this famous artwork
but maybe instead of the rest of the US being 1/5 of the vertical space it is 1/25 of the vertical space. Problem is most customers do not live in the bay area and most web browser users do not live in the bay area and most web developers do not live in the bay area. Based in the Bay Area they can hop in their cars and drive the longest 40 miles in America to get to Google and Facebook's headquarters so Mozilla is talking to those people all the time and not talking to the rest of us.
We don't get costly signalling to show they care about the rest of us, we don't even get cheap talk.
They probably think René Girard is deep because they are surrounded by people who think René Girard is deep. If Mozilla wants to be relevant and not just an also-ran it needs to "think different" like the other 99.9% -- it's not that hard if you change your location.
Really the EU needs to apologize for those damned cookie popups and invest in a privacy-first browser. Whether that is "fully fund Firefox" or "fully a fund a Firefox fork" or pick up another browser engine or start a new one.
I see the warning lights flashing: a few years back web sites that didn't work with Firefox were few and far between, this weekend I bought tickets for a comic book convention and they took my money but didn't give me a ticket because the site didn't work with Firefox. I use Firefox as my daily driver so all the projects that I work on work with Firefox; the rest of my team doesn't give a damn and if you lose me another site will become Chrome-only.
> Really the EU needs to apologize for those damned cookie popups and invest in a privacy-first browser.
I love them. They are not mandatory, only shady websites that rather sell users information than providing a barely functional homepage. Yes the popups suck, but I'm very happy that this exposes the behavior and priorities of the industry.
It is insane to see very ordinary web sites that have 100 trackers but part of that is that the advertising economy gives everyone the incentive to screw each other with the backdrop that of course the metrics do not match across the funnel because people fall out as you go down the funnel —- but if you have 100 trackers they can’t all be lying in a coordinated way.
> the EU needs to apologize for those damned cookie popups
The EU didn’t make these mandatory. They’re a form of malicious compliance, executed so that the common perception is that these laws are there to get in the way of regular folks.
Most websites shouldn’t require cookie pop-up. They do because they’re spying on you in some way and need to notify you of that.
> Really the EU needs to apologize for those damned cookie popups and invest in a privacy-first browser.
You clearly misunderstand when they are required and how they are legally required to work, the key points (as I take them) that are often misunderstood are:
* They are not about cookies, but any persistent identifier
* If a identifier is needed for your core functionality (ads/tracking is not a core functionality) and not misused for other purposes you do not need consent
* It is required to be as easy to decline as it is to consent
* Not consenting is not allowed to degrade or gate the content
* Even if you consent to tracking/cookies you should be allowed to withdraw that consent
Frankly I feel having to clear modal dialogs is like getting a lobotomy. I don’t ever want to see one. I don’t want to ever be asked “click on the traffic lights”. I don’t want to have to clear 1, 2, 3 or 4 more modals asking for my email address on a blog.
I want “respect DNT or go to jail”
GDPR normalized enshittification, turned it from something that was unambiguously evil to something that was required, virtuous even.
I could care less personally if you track me or not but if you pop up a meaningless distraction in my face there is no limit on how much I want to hurt you and blowing our your kpis and wrecking your analytics by disabling your tracking it is the least I can do. We need to resist the Google Economy that wants to divert 99% of your attention to worthless trash.
It also made people realize that they are tracked like crazy (there are regularly memes about this for example) - before people reacted to this fact like you were sharing a conspiracy theory.
> Businesses definitely want to control the AI they're using (especially with RAGs of their own data) instead of just throwing it at their LLM vendor and hoping for the best
Yes, agreed on that. I'm not sure I'm clear how this really helps that; I suppose it's a frontend that they don't have, but there are a bunch of those already.
It doesn't seem to help them control the _actual_ AI, i.e. the model, which still has to come from somewhere.
> Imagine that there is such a thing as a person in charge of choosing technologies for organizations, and that you're such a person. That's who this is for.
The "Announcing Thunderbolt" page actually makes this clear, the submitted URL does not. Maybe the submission should be changed to this URL instead:
I see no reason this product should exist even under the Thunderbird umbrella, especially if ANY resources under ANY Mozilla org were employed in this. This product is a distraction from their core mission in either case.
> Thunderbolt is funded through a dedicated investment from Mozilla and is being developed by a separate team focused on enterprise AI products, distinct from Thunderbird’s donation-supported consumer product work.
it is a patreon style thing, they are donation funded. I think the poster is saying that they arent being frivolous with their money like some people have a bad taste about firefox
And they're taking money donated towards Thunderbird development and spending it on random unrelated AI slop ideas that nobody asked for. You really don't see anything wrong with that?
Surely you can agree that when you open Thunderbird and are met with requests for donations, if you chose to donate, you'd expect that money to be invested in Thunderbird development, and not 10M Claude tokens to vibe code Mozilla's latest groundbreaking AI B2B SaaS idea?
It's certainly a feel good idea but the math doesn't math. Even a best case scenario donation drive would never be able to compete with search licensing revenue.
Right now if you want to look at the best case scenario, it's probably wikipedia. Wikipedia is the biggest online donation drive that exists and they get 18% of the revenue that Mozilla gets from search licensing on approximately 4,400% more global traffic. And it's a mature campaign that's been an annual tradition for decades.
I'd rather have the donation option than not have it but it has to be understood primarily as something that's just there to make users feel good. The reason they're structured the way they are is to access the search licensing revenue that gets them income they would never be able to get from just donation drives.
I agree that switching over to an exclusively grassroots sponsorship level would be impossible.
But there may be hybrid options available.
Purely conjecture. Does the Google money come with some kind of funding non-compete? If not, why not open up other funding streams. If it does, that's worrying.
The argument has always been "the org structure doesn't support donations" but the org structure is just a proxy for the intentions of the org.
Hmm, I thought the for-profit Thunderbird pro hadn't launched yet?
I know Thunderbird is for profit, but what are they profitting from without the paid service, and how much of that profit is going into this unrelated Thunderbolt AI platform, exactly?
Thunderbird currently runs entirely on donations, even though they have paid products in the pipeline.
I think a piece of software running on donations is not running off "charity". It's just a business model to not charge every user. Similar to how Twitch streamers operate, or my local theater group.
Thanks, that's helpful. This says about ~70% of the money was paid to employees, ~10% infra costs, the other ~20% various other fees and smaller expenses.
It would be interesting to have a breakdown of what part of the Thunderbird team is working on Thunderbird, Thunderbolt, or other forms of thunder.
Thunderbird (the email client) was spun off from Mozilla Corporation into a new for-profit company called MZLA Technologies. Both corps are still subsidiaries of the Mozilla Foundation. Thunderbolt is a new product from the MZLA Technologies team.
> spun off from Mozilla Corporation into a new for-profit company called MZLA Technologies. Both corps are still subsidiaries of the Mozilla Foundation
I am a happy Thunderbird user. But when I see such reorganizing and deliberately confusing naming, I assume that there is somewhere intent to deceive.
Adobe doesn't provide tools explicitly designed to enable the creation of child pornography — in fact their tools try to prevent its creation — and they don't profit from the sale of it. But, of course, Musk fanboys can be reliably counted upon to support profiteering from child sexual abuse in any form.
"Something you don't like" as a description for the deliberate sexualization of children for profit, as if it's not an objective moral harm, is telling on yourself here. Just because the loudest leaders in Silicon Valley have been trying to convince every one of their sycophants that sexually abusing kids is no big deal doesn't mean the rest of us who are normal have bought into it.
Reducing safety filters doesn't mean that it's explicitly designed for child pornography. This is like thinking free speech is designed for child pornography.
You seem to be leaning heavily on analogy, which is inherently flawed. The entire point of analogy is that you are comparing two different things without actually comparing them - just declaring them equal. It's a weak rhetorical tool for petty arguments.
I am leaning on analogy as a strategy to try and ground other's thinking about this article since I believe they do not universally hold the idea that tools should micromanage what people are allowed to do with them. I assuming that readers are able to understand how making images via traditional digital tools and via AI tools is the same thing. If I just want to share my own view it I would go on about how it is wrong to add deliberate censorship tools into tools and how letting British people force American companies to censor things is wrong.
It's a false analogy because Adobe doesn't actually create child pornography for their users. Nor do they distribute it publicly.
In the case that we're discussing, xAI is accused of using images of these girls to create and distribute child pornography.
The girls are American, and the case is being heard in California. I'm not sure why you're talking about the Adobe and British people, when neither are involved.
>Adobe doesn't actually create child pornography for their users
Nor does Grok. Users have to create it themselves. I think this is the fundamental understanding others in this comment thread have had in that they think that Grok itself is doing this.
>I'm not sure why you're talking about the Adobe and British people
I have brought Adobe into the conversation as the develop a competing photo manipulation tool to Grok. I brought British people into the conversation because this article was posted to the BBC. I am disappointed to now learn that the reporter is American and is trying to advocate for such censorship.
The user doesn't create the image, Grok does. With photoshop, the user does the work, and the resulting product is a function of the user's design skills and manual effort. The distinction here is pretty obvious.
I _don't_ think it was just ego. I think it was a smart strategy because formal standardization tends to bring in complexity, and just letting folks go off on their own and document their own usage (or "flavors") ends up being Good Enough in actual practice. It sucks from a standpoint of what I personally find satisfying, to be clear. But based on what I've seen over the last 20+ years, it is the strategy that is much less likely to yield a format that gets captured by giant companies that own a hyper-corporate standardization process that eventually gets enshittified.
Thanks for responding, Anil! Like I said, I really liked the article overall.
I don't agree that the Standard Markdown effort, had it succeeded as originally laid out, would've resulted in "hyper-corporate standardization". I mean, one of the main actors was Jeff Atwood, just about the least "hyper-corporate" guy there is. And I also don't really see any possible trajectory for Markdown to get "enshittified": after all, for the most part it's just plaintext with formatting conventions that existed way before it. Even if some corporate entity had somehow badly messed it up, markdown.pl and the other pre-existing implementations would have continued to exist.
I was texting with John the other night while working on this piece, and reminiscing about my initial quibbles about the format, and I think I had been frustrated by just about everything on your list. I just need you to travel back in time to tell me to fuss more!
It took me a long time to see the variations as a plus and not a minus; as a veteran of the RSS-vs-Atom wars, I was long an advocate of Technical Correctness(tm) like any good coder. But the years since then have made me a lot more amenable to what I think of as a sort of Practical Postelism, which I guess is like applied worse-is-better, where we realize the reality is that we'll _always_ have forks and multiplicities, so we should see it as a feature instead of a bug. It's like accepting that hardware will fail, and building it into the system.
I mean, HTML itself is well specified in the streets, and infinitely different flavors in the sheets. I don't _like_ that, the part of me that writes code _hates_ that. But the part of me that wants systems to succeed just had to sort of respect it.
Ah, Anil, but have you fought the plaintext syntax wars yet?
Jokes apart, regular, standardised, visually-suggestive syntax is a key reason I've stuck with org-mode despite its limited acceptance in the world at large.
The many flavours of markdown make it /less/ portable than org syntax, in my experience. As the post below says, "Pandoc lists six different Markdown flavors as output formats." This is not great for collaboration --- now we need some sort of middleware or advanced editor to help people work with more than one syntax format. Besides, mixing syntax in the same document is a boo-boo, because parsers only work at file-level, not semantic token level.
Owing to this, at times, I go as far as to /author in orgmode, but share in markdown/ (org-export), and slurp back and forth (tangle / detangle).
This is a good call. I know it's been suggested multiple times over the years; I wonder what the rationale was for rejecting the format, or at least having the option to render a file when it's loaded. (Maybe a "display as HTML" button or the like would be required before it would be rendered.)
The overlap between these Markdown formats is actually larger than with many other formats. Possibly even larger than HTML’s overlap back when MS Explorer was the dominant browser.
> Possibly even larger than HTML’s overlap back when MS Explorer was the dominant browser.
No way. You were never left in doubt about whether a normal HTML tag would work, or whether tables were available or would become a jumbled illegible mess, or whether a line break in the source would become a space or a hard break. And that’s just the first three things that occur to me.
You have to be willingly ignoring CommonMark, these days.
I understand it doesn't have all the extensions one might hope, but to not parse the basics like the examples in the spec say is just doing everyone a disservice.
I know it seems quite absurd! I actually just added in to this piece a photo I took of the CNN screen that (I believe) was the first mention of the word "blog" that they ever put on-screen; it also has a mention of Hart's campaign. Very low-res, but the potato quality is worth it for the historical value, I think.
I actually had a digression into "worse is better", but the piece was already pushing 5,000 words, so I figured I probably was better of leaving out such a big topic. But you're right that's a larger trend that mattered. I think of it more as a triumph of Postelism in the Internet at large as more people came online, too.
* This is from the separate independent team that works on Thunderbird, not Firefox, so there isn't any resource contention happening there
* Thunderbird is revenue positive, and this potentially gives that team another revenue stream to be even more self-sustaining through charging companies
* Businesses definitely want to control the AI they're using (especially with RAGs of their own data) instead of just throwing it at their LLM vendor and hoping for the best
People on HN are fond of asserting that their own POV is the only one. Imagine that there is such a thing as a person in charge of choosing technologies for organizations, and that you're such a person. That's who this is for.
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