- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
You must log in or register to comment.
It’s remarkable really. They are competing against another browser which users have to actively go out and find, then install.
Some people are used to how chrome looks and that’s powerful glue, of course, but very few normal users (ie almost none of us in here on Lemmy) needs things beyond what both Firefox and Chrome does equally well.
The simple difference in adoption rate is this: Google pushing Chrome through people’s use of Google. Diminish the need for Google, diminish people’s discovery of Chrome.
Also, I cannot understand why they need this many people. If 5% of their workforce is 60 people, they have 1200 people employed. I can almost guarantee that Google’s Chrome team isn’t 1200 people strong.
Maybe Firefox would be better being smaller and more nimble. Maybe they should stop pretending they’re a company and start pretending they’re a foundation (which is what they are). 300 people working on a core browser seems a lot of full time people, still, and that’d be a quarter of what they are today.
Also, Mozilla’s inability to produce a simple interface for embedding Firefox is simply baffling to me. The reason so many other skin-browsers are built on chromium is that it’s a LOT easier to embed.
I speak as someone who’s run Firefox since the day it was born.
Well it was 1200 people at Mozilla, not necessarily directly working on Firefox. They have multiple products and they still need HR and lawyers and all the other support roles any other company needs.
Could we just have the AI part separately? I want an AI that can help me around the house by learning all my books and documents in case someone needs a specific photo of the babies or maybe needs to know a derivation of greens theorem or a recipe for kombucha.
That’s much more than an LLM. I get where you’re going, and I legitimately want it as well, assuming it’s local of course. But we aren’t there yet.
deleted by creator
Weird to say fuck firefox and then suggest using basically just firefox instead
deleted by creator
That’s a very good way of me leaving Firefox behind…
To go where, though? Lynx? Everything else is Chromium and that’s not much better.
To a Gemini reader. Kristall is nice. Lagrange is … interesting.
Librewolf. If all else fails I’ll pop my old Emacs config and browse whichever websites I can there
Am smelling a Firefox fork. Though if AI is anything malicious you can rest assured Debian folks would declaw it.
Librewolf is a nice fork of Firefox
If the past is any indication, it’ll either be off by default or you can turn it off. So maybe it isnt’ all the drama that people make it sound like.
I hate that they are laying people off. I do however want to use some machine learning powered adblock, for those harder to block ads. otherwise I don’t feel like every app needs an AI assistant. It’s bad for the Internet generally and for the power grid.
In theory, that sounds amazing.
In practice, it will most likely need to send the contents of your browser to some third-party server. No, thanks.
(Unless it’s crowdsourced, like the first person to visit a page gets dinged, but then the next persons just downloads the set of rules instead of uploading content.)
Privacy preserving federated learning is a thing - essentially you train a local model and send the weight updates back to Google rather than the data itself…but also it’s early days so who knows what vulnerabilities may exist
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!
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.
“Under Construction” GIF
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.
You forgot about blockchain and NFTs.
deleted by creator
I suppose many people were already using a third-party Aero widget for weather forecast since Windows 7.
I know I did.
Remember all those IE toolbars?
I got enough installed once to fill the whole screen.
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.
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.
This surprises people? Mozilla has always been Mozilla’s biggest enemy.
90% of these comments didn’t even read the article. Its local only, and doesn’t even send data to mozilla.
Yet…
Why would Mozilla make AI so they could steal personal information when they already own the browser that gives the information to the AI
The AI is claimed to be local… Did you know that even local AIs are able to contact the internet again? So without knowing a local LLM system might execute some HTTPS calls for you, without knowing.
Except its open source. So it would last all of 4 seconds before being called out. Those HTTPS calls are a separate service the LLM will access not a part of the LLM itself.
Well it’ll be fun trying to find a replacement that doesn’t small use anything made by Google, like Opera does.
Librewolf, Pale Moon and Iceweasel.
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.
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
-
Rapidly Enshitifying Firefox
-
Safari - no comment
-
Whatever the fuck Gecko is…
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.
deleted by creator
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)/¯
deleted by creator
-
And I’m still waiting for them to open source Pocket. Silly me.
I’m still waiting for them to make it an optional extension… oh wait.
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.
Willfully ignorant until the end. single browser for everything will be worse for sure
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
That’s not the chromium approach. That’s the Phoenix (a fork of Netscape Navigator) approach.
Of course, Phoenix ended up becoming Firefox.
Guess it’s time to get off the internet.
There’s always trusty Lynx!
Looks like I’ll need to switch to one of those browsers that only take and show characters I can type on a keyboard. Like F and U.
