How about, and run with me on this, Mozilla stops trying to be Microsoft and Google and instead just provides the cleanest, most barebones-yet-privacy-oriented browser? Will they ever have market dominance? No, and they never will even with AI tools. Fuck AI and what it’s doing to the planet and fuck all of the capitalists enshittifying The Last Browser.
We need a new Foundation willing to develop a fork.
A browser could be top dog if it was just less shitty than the others, like the Brother printers, that print without bloatware and mob tactics of HP.
We want a browser that just browses.
But what about AI ? It has to be everywhere! Somebody please think about adding AI to Firefox! I need it to do ???
/s
At this point the only thing that could save Firefox is a rewrite
In Rust, right?
RIGHT?!?
No! Not again!
FUCKING NO MOZILLA YOU WERE OUR LAST FUCKDAMN HOLDOUT
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why the fuck would I need an AI in a browser? 0 fucks given for this “feature”. firefox is devolving into an edge.
Nowadays we are supposed to need AI everywhere. I’m waiting for my AI bidet so that I can chat with it when I do my business.
“What is my purpose?”
“You wash my asshole when I poop”
“Oh my god”
Edge? Think Clippy.
“It looks like you are browsing porn. Can I help?”
That could be useful… Find more X person/stuff…
I think an AI that finds porn across the entire web that meets specific search criteria or is like an example would be a hit.
You already have AI in Firefox - local translations for example. Developing local AI aligns perfectly well with Mozilla’s goals, but it seems people panic as soon as they see the two letters together.
Desperate to gain marketshare, fucking samsung to apple. I hate it and I have no other options left after Firefox is enshittified
Theoretically I can imagine AI in the browser to be awesome to combat AI on the web. Let the AI wars begin!
You really have no fuckdamn naive your statement is. You don’t want an AI war and we cannot avoid one.
I know there is currently a massive PR campaign for a power grab to consolidate control over AI software. They want to control the means of generation. Only MozillAI can save us from King GhAIdorah!
Sorry I’m upsetting you. I know we’re entering an acceleration of technology at a time where our institutions globally are in an absolutely horrendous state. People on all sides are brainwashed as hell. The AI watchdogs are insane as well. What’s left but gallows humor? I do hold out some hope though.
You cannot upset me more than the current common misunderstandings that everyone has about AI already does.
I don’t think you understand the implications of undetectable AI to shift social conversation or the kind of world that those AI owners want to create.
That might actually be the kind of thing where open source AI could help. At least I hope. To detect bias, lies or AI powered filtering / sorting of content.
Ok so this is one of the naive thoughts that makes me upset.
The open source community can’t even make a distro of linux that is out of the box functional for everyday users and you think somehow they are going to be able to outcompete billion dollar companies that can afford the best gear and devs?
Look, I bought in heavy to open source early on in the 90s, and have done my best to go open source for every tool I can, but the simple fact is that even the ‘best’ open source projects are severely lacking in aspects and YOU CAN’T TRUST DEVELOPMENT OF AI TO THAT.
Compare The Gimp to Photoshop. It isn’t even close, why? Because Adobe has a fucktonne of cash to throw at their projects and they have clear direction and motivation.
I don’t like it
I’d prefer a fully open source world
But it isn’t going to happen, and open source AI will always lag behind corporate AI, and considering how fast it has been developing, even being 3 months behind renders a tool useless as an AI detector.
We aren’t prepared for this and 90% of what everyone on the internet says about AI is poorly informed and full of confabulation, and WORST of all, when you try and explain this to them they get antagonistic.
We have already seen the threat AI can pose in 2016 with Cambridge Analytica helping to hand trumpty dumpty the election by using AI to focus target vulnerable facebook groups.
AND THAT AI WAS A FUCKING INFANT compared to what we have now.
It’s going to be so bad and almost none of you have the slightest clue.
Honestly, most of what Cambridge analytica did was blackmail, illegal spending, and collusion between campaigns that were legally required to be separate.
Much of the data processing/ml was intended as a smoke screen to distract from the big stuff that was known to work and consequently legislated against. The problem is that they were so incompetent that the distraction technique was also illegal.
Maybe the machine learning also worked, but it’s really not clear.
See, THIS is the criticism of AI I can actually empathize with, I might even agree with it somewhat
So to recap, your choices are
-
One of 70 flavors of Chromium including the “privacy centric” Opera who run Chinese loan shark gangs for some reason, Edge which is Microsoft Chromium and aside from hardware acceleration capabilities is pretty meh, and Brave which despite operating their own separate search engine index are one of the most likely to sell your data and/or kidneys
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Rapidly Enshitifying Firefox
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Safari - no comment
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Whatever the fuck Gecko is…
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Tor Browser (for people with infinite time to wait for pages to load, or maybe just drug dealers)
RE: point 1, I’m a fan of Vivaldi, a privacy-focused highly modified chromium build developed by former Opera developers who were disillusioned by the direction that company went in.
The chromium part is still problematic. I’ll stick with the only other option until they shit the bed completely :(
That sounds nice, I’ll check it out.
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Librewolf is built on Gecko, people often accredit it as a “firefox fork”.
Tor Browser seems cool, it’s what I use on my phone whenever I have spare time to let it load before searching things which don’t require a lot of bandwidth. I’ll edit the above list.
Mullvad? Is that some kind of slur? I’ve never heard of that but searches say it’s a VPN client. ¯\(ツ)/¯
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I hope the folks laid off land on their feet.
I’m starting to think FF is being deliberately run into the ground by the higher ups. It would be good to hear from some of the devs about their thoughts on all this.
The paradox of tech right now “we are going to build the most complex technology known to man into our product in the next 12 months. Are we hiring record numbers of people to get it done? No. We fired a bunch of people and everyone else will just have to be extremely hardcore.”
They’re refocusing on Firefox and continuing the ai stuff they were already doing. They fireded people who were working on fediverse and metaverse platforms. Did you even read the article?
Ugh? It’s far from complex
Okay Mr. Robot.
It’s literally a marketing term for a bunch of structured algorithms at this stage - not some sentient witchcraft
It’s definitely not sentient but to call it simple is definitely inaccurate.
I guess the point is that its complexity is overrated, but still definitely not ‘simple’.
… It is simple, the idea exists since 40y ago, it’s just being done at scale
Edit: make it 80 actually
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I bet I know much more on the topic than you, but please enlighten me on which part of this is complex?
The core concepts of DNNs are taught in high-school, and putting them together can done by a Bachelor student. Shit, people often advise writing a NN libraries as a good learning exercise when picking up a new programming language.
I think mathematically illiterate people assume that incredible results necessarily imply complexity, but that’s simply not the case here. Or the idea that unknown things are necessarily complex, maybe.
The main reason DNNs are popping up is because we finally have the hardware for it. And the second reason is that tech companies have the resources (both financial and in terms of available data) to throw at it.
This surprises people? Mozilla has always been Mozilla’s biggest enemy.
I don’t see them joining anything?
I mean, let’s be real, what major function has Mozilla implemented into Firefox that hasn’t been opt-out? And no, UI doesn’t count, I’m talking features.
The problem isn’t the existence of AI. The problem is the inescapably of it and how, under Microsoft or Google, it will harvest your data whether you like it or not. When you tell them “fuck off, leave me alone, and keep my words out of your AI’s mouth”, they’re not going to listen. Profit motive requires them to invade.
Mozilla is a non-profit, and they’ve long been very good about letting you opt out things, and listening. I’m not worried about them putting AI into Firefox, because I can be reasonably sure it will be optional, in a way I know the others won’t.
I’d rather they didn’t go chasing this car at all, to be honest, because they’re not likely to catch it, but whatever. They’re renewing focus on the browser and I’m taking that as a win.
I can’t contest the first point cause I’m not a firefox junkie, so I won’t.
What I will contest is that the existence of AI, or, deep learning, or LLMs, or neural networks, or matrix multiplication, or whatever type of shit they come up with next, I’ll contest that it isn’t problematic. I kind of think it is, inherently, I think it’s existence is not great. Mostly because it obfuscates, even internally, the processing of data, it obfuscates the inputs from the outputs, the works from the results. You can do that with regular programming just fine, just as you can do most of the shit that AI does with normal programming, like that guy who made a program that calculates the prices for japanese baked goods and also recognizes cancer, right. But I think AI is a step further than that, it obfuscates it more. I kind of am skeptical of it’s broad implementation.
For trivial use cases, it’s kind of fine, but I think maybe use cases we might consider trivial, otherwise are kind of fucked, maybe. AI summary of an article? I dunno if that’s good. We might think, oh, this is kind of trivial because the user should just not really trust what the AI says, but, as with all technology, what if the user is an idiot and a moron? They might just use it to read the article for them, and then spout off whatever talking points and headlines it gives them. I can’t really think of a scenario where that’s actually a good thing, and it’s highly possible. It might make it easier to parse an article, like that, but I don’t think that’s actually a good or useful tool, it’s just presented a kind of illusion of utility, most especially because it was redundant (we could just write a summary and have it at the top of the article, like every article on the face of the earth), and it was totally beyond our control, at least, in most circumstances.
Also, the Mozilla Foundation is nonprofit, but the Mozilla Corporation is not. The Foundation manages the Corp, which manages Firefox development. So depending on which one you’re referring to, it might be a non-profit, or it might not be. In any case, the nonprofit is a step removed from Firefox development, which I think is an important side-note, even if it’s not actually that relevant to whatever conversations about AI there might be.
Perhaps, comically, it is the perfect representation of the world as it is now: “knowledge” in people’s brains is created by consuming whatever source aligns with the beliefs that they think are theirs. No source or facts are required. Only the interpretation matters.
You were the Chosen One! It was said that you would destroy the Sith, not join them! Bring balance to the browsers, not leave it in darkness!
We already have AI in Firefox. And not gonna lie, offline (I.e. absolutely private) translations for webpages is pretty neat.
It’s really good but I do wish it supported more languages like Russian or Japanese. So far most of the times I have had to translate a page, Firefox didn’t support the language.
It’s really good but I do wish it supported more languages like Russian
It’s never too late to learn the language of enemy!
Да
This. It has held back adoption for me. I want translations in my language of choice and it’s simply not one of the very few options of languages available. AI could help with this.
Well guys we had a good run, free and open source software is officially over
Not entirely. There is LibreWolf (Formerly IceWolf) on desktop. https://librewolf.net
Mull is apparently an Android option that’s also a fork, but I’m just installing it now, and can also say its only on FDroid.
I know man it’s a joke lol. There’s a bajillion forks of firefox that are mostly better than vanilla firefox itself. FOSS will never die.
Librewolf will die if Firefox dies. They don’t have the resources to maintain a rendering engine
Mull works well on android. Firefox login works too.
that’s a bit of an overreaction
They’ve said they want to do local AIs though. If that’s the case I’m all in.
Things to add to your product when you want to look hip and trendy, but dont have any real ideas how to make your product better:
- 1990s: visitor counter
- 1995: Popups
- 2000s: flash intros
- 2005: stock photography
- 2010: local weather widget
- 2015: share to social media widgets
- 2020: fullsize 4k background stock videos
- 2024: AI assistant
1995: animated gifs, <marquee>, guest books, site rings!
“Under Construction” GIF
I’m not sure if you remember, but site rings were what you used instead of Google. They were useful.
And I’ve seen some guest books with lots of people at some point in my childhood, but about half a year after that everybody firmly chose in favor of hierarchical boards.
And I don’t share that hate for <marquee>, it served the purpose of showing you a long line in a small space, implicitly saying that it’s secondary temporary information, a bit like on TV.
And what’s wrong with animated GIFs, animation is nice.
visitor counter
I actually liked those.
flash intros
These could be used to create right atmosphere.
local weather widget
Back then I hated those, but maybe showing local weather on desktop is not such a bad thing.
share to social media widgets
Hate. Hate. Hate.
Remember all those IE toolbars?
I got enough installed once to fill the whole screen.
It really grinds my gears. Why does my bank insist on installing an app to approve transactions, and why does that app have a huge background video playing every time i open it? It really should consist of an MFA code generator.
You forgot about blockchain and NFTs.
I miss guest books tbh
They would be abused by spam bots in an instant, even before you could write your own “welcome to my guestbook” post.
So you’ve never had one of those bot blocking capcha things?
And yet Microsoft added a weather (and bullshit) widget to windows in like 2020
2015: share to social media widgets on porn sites
Long time FF user, things really aren’t looking good for Mozilla as a whole.
as Firefox is the only browser that can’t trace its lineage back to Apple and WebKit
What a slap on Konqueror’s face.
Unfortunately, KHTML was discontinued in 2023 (according to Wikipedia)
That’s quite the bummer. But still. Saying that almost all browsers can trace their lineage to Apple and Webkit is technically correct, but it’s just a half-truth. As Apple and Webkit were once based on KHTML.
I mean yes no kinda Konqueror simply accepted a bunch of downstream patches, including a name change.
…more or less. It could for a long time use all three of KHTML, WebKit (fork of KHTML) and QtWebEngine (Blink wrapped for Qt, that is, a fork of WebKit), they recently removed KHTML support because noone was updating it and it hadn’t been the default for ages.
If they hadn’t implemented multi-engine support in the past they probably would’ve switched over to “whatever Qt provides” right-out, it’s KDE after all. Ultimately they’re providing a desktop, not a web browser. Back in the days they did decide to roll their own instead of going with Firefox but it was never a “throw project resources at it” kind of situation, there were simply KDE people who felt like working on it. Web standards were a lot less involved back around the turn of the millennium, and also new and shiny. Back in the days people thought that HTML 4.01 Strict and XHMTL would be a thing that servers actually would start to output instead of the usual tagsoup.
If you’re that kind of person right now I’ll point you in the direction of Servo. No, Firefox doesn’t use it and it’s not a Mozilla project any more, Firefox only included (AFAIK) parallel CSS handling, the rest is still old Gecko.
And text only browsers too.
I don’t really see it this way it’s just marketing. Saying “all other browsers descend from big bad corporate Apple” is scary, saying “all other browsers descend from another open source project” is meh.
“It’s all KHTML”, I heard.
You have a point. But still, they could have added an “ackshually” footnote or something.
