- cross-posted to:
- fuck_ai@lemmy.world
- firefox@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- fuck_ai@lemmy.world
- firefox@lemmy.ml
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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May I introduce you to my little friend Gemini
I guess it is time to fully switch off of firefox then. I’m not fighting my browser turning off AI features per update.
Man, I so wish mozilla was a worker owned cooperative. These string of useless CEOs would have already been shown the door
mozilla foundation is like susan comen breast cancer foundation, where the CEO takes the large chunk of donation for him/herself.
Well if Susan isn’t being compensated several million dollars a year, what incentive would she have to help cancer patients? 🫠
There are addons which can bypass AI shit.
You either die Old Mozilla or you live to see yourself become Current Mozilla.
AIMOZILLA, brought to you by the GOOGLE foundation, who also owns chrome
AIMOZILLA
Sounds like a kaiju with a sniper rifle.
So many people mentioning (inferior, in my opinion) Firefox alternatives in the comments and nobody’s mentioned Librewolf? Really? Maybe Librewolf will have to become a hard fork someday if this continues, but for now, it’s just Firefox for people who care about their data. Aside from a few justifiably aggressive default settings, I’ve never had even a hint of an issue with it.
Librewolf’s automatic cap at 60hz (anti-fingerprinting measure, I know, but annoying AF), and elements that break websites usually are the parts that turn people away. I’d rather use something like IronFox or Waterfox instead and just customize them.
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.
Ironfox is pretty much just for android, it’s essentially the Librewolf model but has less aggressive default settings.
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.
Sorry for a casual, what do you mean cap at 60hz?
I just use Firefox on Ubuntu, which fifteen years ago seemed like enough.
Which also doesn’t seem that casual, but this shit is too much to keep up with. Today my engineer dad was complaining about search engines having too many ads and I asked what he used, and he said besides Google on the one computer he uses Bing on the other.
60hz is a measure of screen refresh rate, so a cap of 60fps max, no matter the screen’s actual capabilities.
As an electrical engineering student myself, I worry about your dad lol
At some point there’ll be enough pressure for a large enough fork of Firefox and Thunderbird to exist separately from Mozilla. Keep pushing, random clueless CEO.
Just like I said in another post related to this, I hope this doesn’t kill LibreWolf, IceCat, and Waterfox.
Librewolf have put a post out a few days ago that they won’t add any AI stuff.
Waterfox is on the same page. As long as the browser doesn’t outright require it to functio0n, I think the privacy-focused forks will remain. Of course, it’s extra work to maintain divergent code, but this is worth it, IMO.
If brave is able to have their own adblock integrated into the browser by default despite Google being behind much of Chrome I think Firefox forks should be fine. Sucks everything seems to have AI these days shoved in, so it’s hard to escape whether it is Chrome forks or chromium alternatives.
i download UBLOCK origin anyways for brave, since the brave doesnt entirely block what the ublock can do.
Thank goodness.
Some of Mozilla’s AI integrations have been amazing, despite the community crying about it. Like private, offline translation (I don’t care what anybody says, this is much better than sending the contents of your web page to a proprietary Google Translate server), and enhanced screen reader functionality.
But this one puzzles me. They’re not being very descriptive, but it seems like it’s just integrating generic LLM stuff? Not really what I’m after personally. At least it’s opt-in, I guess.
Is “must make the dumbest fucking decision possible at all times” in the Mozilla CEO job description or something?
I have no CEO experience, but I’ll make stupid fucking decisions for a fifth of the salary you’re paying the current guy.
The job of a CEO is to make the line go up, and that almost always comes at the expense of the consumer and the quality of the product itself.
Is there like a petition or something we can all sign to show that literally no cunt wants this?
Uninstall it and pick a different platform. These cunts think you won’t and THATS why they don’t give a fuck. Enough people swap and oh, hey, maybe we should rethink this mistake. If not - not your problem… You already bounced.
If anyone has any suggestions for browsers hook me up, I’m running out of browsers with thier own engines to try. I don’t see much point in using, say, LibreWolf if the engine is still the same as Firefox (Gecko in this case). Maybe I’ll give NetSurf a try and pretend like it’s 1996 again.
edit i don’t see much point because doing some about:config shenanigans is nearly the same amount of work to me as switching browsers.
I’m afraid that not using Gecko or Blink may expose me to any sort of malware while visiting the web tbh
You really don’t understand what a browser engine is, do you?
I do, in fact. I get that they are typically open-source, and I also understand how ridiculously difficult it is to create one from scratch. If LibreWolf or whoever want to make privacy focused browsers based on mozilla foundation or google’s work then that’s fine and I support it, but I’m personally curious if there are any mainstream browsers that don’t have any (or minimal) reliance on google and mozilla foundation. Someone pointed me towards an engine in development Servo which looks quite interesting! Hopefully there will be a browser based on it soon.
https://www.spacebar.news/servo-undercover-web-browser-engine/
At the start of the millennium, Internet Explorer used its own Trident engine on Windows and Tasman on Mac, Opera used Presto, some embedded devices used NetFront, Netscape had Gecko, and KDE made KHTML for its Konqueror browser. Those browsers eventually faded away or adopted a competing engine to simplify development. KHTML was the basis for Safari’s WebKit, which in turn became Chromium’s Blink engine, and Netscape’s Gecko engine became the foundation for Firefox. Opera ditched its custom Presto engine in 2013 and switched to Chromium, and Microsoft Edge made the same move in 2020.
This is a danger to the open web in more ways than one. If there is only one functioning implementation of a standard, the implementation becomes the standard. The web becomes to Google what Java is to Oracle. It also means the limitations and security flaws in Chromium affect most other browsers, which became a topic of conversation with Google’s recent Manifest V3 transition.
I figured you did. It’s the guy you were replying to that seems confused.
Oh shit my bad! Leaving the info up anyway, in case anyone else is wondering why only two major engines is a bad thing for the open internet.
It would have been nice if Opera had released the source code of Presto
That’s still a fork of Firefox, isn’t it? I was hoping to find a reasonably modern browser that doesn’t rely on gecko or blink. I’d be okay with a WebKit browser but I don’t have a Mac.
Servo is the one I follow in that space
Oh good, more rust! (j/k i don’t have the feverish hatred of rust that some people seem to)
If all of the web engines enshittify, you can always
curlthe HTML/CSS/JS and hand-parse it. Might have suboptimal performance however.“Might” is doing some awfully heaving lifting there 🤣
Gonna get my news one pixel at a time just like grandpappy did on his 9600 baud.
lol if it ever gets to that point i’m just gonna go straight Lynx.
The Lynx browser is surprisingly nice.
It’s actually incredible for getting real reading done without my ADHD taking over and opening up 30 tabs of “ooh whats this?”
getting real reading done without my ADHD taking over
Maybe that’s the appeal.
It’s almost as if they are out of touch with their users. I don’t get it. CEOs are just normal people like us.
/s
But why? Be unique! Don’t just do what everyone else does!
Given what Microsoft is smoking these days, no AI would be a selling point, and Mozilla does not seem to realize they are playing with fire. Their userbase chose their product instead of using the system defaults of Chrome, Safari, and Internet Exploder. Their users, just like Lemmy, are tech-litrrate and more socially concious than the masses. If an alternative or fork appears, with sufficent support, and Mozilla does not put the breaks on their AI train, were all just going to jump ship. We do it every time a new OS is installed, there is no Firefox loyalty, only lesser evils.
It’s hard to imagine being so butthurt at a piece of now-defunct, 20-year-old software that you pretend it still is the default just so you can call it a dumb name.
I was in the trenches for that nonsense fixing stuff daily because of them. Oracles wacky tacky shit that kept their users locked to Java 7.21 for a decade past the support date. Bloated language packs and not being able to keep up with basic HTML tags… You dont know how good yall have it today.
I dont care how much MS dresses up Edge, we know its just Chrome in a poorly fitted suit. The old addage still holds true, Microsofts default browser (formerly IE, currently Edge) is the best browser to use to go download another browser.
[This concludes grumpy old tech speech]
I can absolutely get behind hating oracle. Not only was oracle always evil, they also prop java which is terrible. And now the family has gotten into MAGA propaganda. It’s an awful family and company and product.
IE hasn’t been a thing for like a decade though. The war is over. You won. You’re safe now.
I disagree with your description of edge though. It’s more like the evil version of inspector gadget. Like if he was corrupted by the oracle corporation and every gadget was turned nefarious. This kinda breaks down because chrome is also evil but whatever I still think it works.
I like that reference, im stealing it.
Of course, this is just what Firefox needs
fixing long standing issues, catching up to web standards, process isolation on mobileAI!Oh, will you look at that. I want to get scolded again for “making a big deal” out of AI in Firefox again. Where’s that jerkface who listed all the AI features at me and told me to “stop bullshitting”? Fuckwit.
