As part of Mozilla’s 25-year-long dedication to ensuring a healthy, safe and trustworthy internet for all, we have learned that when you’re part of a technology movement designed to change society for the better, results don’t happen overnight. In reflecting back on this past year, it can be easy to focus on the challenges and how much work is still ahead.
We learned this when we built Firefox as an alternative to bigger, more dominant players in the web browser market. We saw an opportunity to provide a more trustworthy, privacy-protecting browser based on open source software and robust community engagement. Open source remains one of the most powerful tools for transparency and collaboration, but scaling it to meet today’s challenges is a complex and ongoing process. We know this work isn’t easy. It’s iterative, collaborative, and sometimes messy — but it’s essential to creating a better digital future.
We’re pushing to make Firefox not just intuitive, but a browser that leads by example in user empowerment and privacy — a vision that’s evolving with each step forward. Firefox empowers users with tools that prioritize privacy, choice, and usability while adapting to the evolving web with AI advancements and assistive technologies. As a leader in advocating for an open, accessible internet, we are committed to building a browser you can trust — one that protects your data and puts you in control.
As a complement to Firefox, we have increased our attention on advertising – the business model of the web. This year we acquired Anonym, a platform that enables advertisers and platforms to provide relevant ads without tracking users or seeing data linked to specific individuals. We’re also internally testing technology dubbed Privacy-Preserving Attribution (PPA) that uses cryptographic techniques to maintain the privacy of users while enabling advertisers to see aggregated data on ad performance. The advertising industry isn’t going anywhere. Our goal is to offer a privacy-preserving alternative.
We’re always exploring ways to join with other practitioners to broaden the open source ethos and practices within the larger technology world. Artificial intelligence is in our scope and we’ve made some progress with that in the past year, but we’re only getting started.
As part of Mozilla’s 25-year-long dedication to ensuring a healthy, safe and trustworthy internet for all, we have learned that when you’re part of a technology movement designed to change society for the better, results don’t happen overnight.
Contributing to an Open Source AI movement
This is a big moment for open source and many of our experiences from the past are relevant. There’s a power imbalance in the AI industry, much like there was in the software world of the 1990s. A few big companies control the technologies in a market that is nearly impossible to break into without significant financial and other resources for computing power. AI systems today are black boxes, and we don’t know what the systems are doing and how they are making decisions. We’ve seen how closed systems, based on secrecy, are not better for people’s safety and security online, and AI is no different — in fact it’s less trustworthy with greater consequences.
Closed AI systems not only make it hard to evaluate and trust them, but also mean fewer developers are able to participate in building AI applications of their own, greatly deterring innovation. Open source and free software are about freedom, access and the ability to collaborate and create the online world we all want.
Expanding the Open Source ecosystem
Mozilla is actively working for more open source standards and community. We explored the progress the industry has made in our Trustworthy AI Report and partnered with others to call for standards ahead of the Open Source Initiative (OSI)’s creation of the first Open Source AI definition. We’re empowering developers with our Responsible Computing Challenge and funding startups through Mozilla Ventures, the Mozilla Technology Fund and the Data Futures Lab.
Looking to the year ahead, I want us to do more and do it faster. We will continue to bring open source products to market, protect user privacy and support open source AI development. My current sabbatical will continue through part of next year, and I am eager to see all that happens at Mozilla during this time.
