So in your warped little world, people supporting Firefox over a browser made by an ad company are the direct cause of Firefox now focusing on AI?
I think it’s more that the Firefox/Mozilla community is relatively small and has a self imposed echo chamber.
For example, when discussing mobile browsers on Android, it’s a fact that Chromium based ones have significantly better security then those based on Firefox for Android. It sucks, but it’s true.
Whenever that’s brought up, downvotes follow.
Whether, or not, that echo chamber is so large that includes Mozilla leadership, I can’t speak to. But I wouldn’t be surprised.
I think they were commenting on how people seem to be zealots for Firefox on Lemmy, despite having some (reasonable) flaws. Despite this news, I’d bet a lot of them will continue. Not a pro-Chrome stance by any means.
(I had to block the Firefox and Linux subs day 1 because of how much anti-Chrome/ anti-Windows I saw).
It literally states it will be local only and not send data to third parties or even Mozilla. But go off.
It’s funny. I’m using a different browser that gets shit on constantly on here despite being really solid. I always see posts on here about having to use addon ABC cause XYZ stopped working, or faking the browser to look like Chrome, so sites work with Firefox.
I just eat my popcorn, open my add-on free browser, and surf ad free and problem free. People here REALLY try to justify Firefox. It’s not a shit browser by any means, but damn do you have to tweak it to get it to run right.
Been saying the writing is on the wall for their enshittification for months. On lemmy. Every time I end up with 20+ downvotes.
Eat me. Here it comes.
Still using Firefox until it officially sucks, but if you haven’t seen it coming you’ve been willfully ignorant.
I expect a Ubuntu fork packaged with Firefox a la windows 98/IE as a paid OS in the next 5 years to try to undercut Microsoft. Or something. Idk the future.
oh hey it’s you! I actually thought about your comments as soon as I saw this headline. I switched from Firefox to brave a few years ago, then recently switched to waterfox as they are again independent of system1 like before. the browser itself removes a lot of unnecessary Mozilla integrations and also reverts the proton UI. maybe forks like this or Librewolf are the future for this browser?
Ah, the chromium approach.*
:D
No, I think you’re right. (I think people will strip down Firefox and those strip down versions will probably persist to be the ideal browser for years to come)
*I am aware that there is a difference here
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.
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!
This is how you lose. I only use FF. I will switch to another browser if they enshittify with AI.
Vivaldi recently posted this -vivaldi-wont-allow-a-machine-to-lie-to-you.
See also vivaldi community
That was an empty answer.
I assume there’ll be some niche little fork for the die-hards for whom clicking a button in the settings to turn off the features they don’t like isn’t enough.
