- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- technology@beehaw.org
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i thought mozilla new CEO would be better but heck no, sounds like i’ll be hoping around in webkit browsers
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
oh good firefox. Wonder what other browser i can use, oh wait…
Can someone just make a minimalist browser that isn’t chrome/firefox based?
Unfortunately none. Developing a rendering engine that can handle css, html, javascript, while also rendering a website in the exact same way as Chrome and Firefox is a huge tasks, and not something a hobby programmer can whack out in a few weeks. Thats the reason why even Microsoft abandoned their own rendering engine, because things did always look and work different in IE.
Unfortunately none.
This is not true. Pale Moon, Ice Weasel, Librewolf…
Developing a rendering engine that can handle css, html, javascript, while also rendering a website in the exact same way as Chrome and Firefox is a huge tasks
It doesn’t have to be from scratch. Not even Apple did this with Safari (they based in on KHTML, the rendering engine of KDE’s Konqueror.)
librewolf is a firefox fork, anything thats a fork of firefox/chrome is automatically not counted, because it is inherently bulkier than the original (though maybe more secure)
Unless it’s pissandshittium of course.
anything thats a fork of firefox/chrome is automatically not counted
Says who?
because it is inherently bulkier
How is “being bulkier” relevant at all? But let’s just go down that route and say that a fork does not necessarily end up in a bulkier product. A dev team could decide to fork, then remove unwanted features from the original project; which is what’s happening with Librewolf as far as I know (e.g. no Pocket bs.)
Finally, let’s remember that both Safari and Chrome have their roots on Konqueror’s KHTML rendering engine. By your metric, we should be saying that they don’t count either; because they’re “(definitely) bulkier forks” of KHTML.
Says who?
says me, the one who made the original comment.
How is “being bulkier” relevant at all? But let’s just go down that route and say that a fork does not necessarily end up in a bulkier product. A dev team could decide to fork, then remove unwanted features from the original project; which is what’s happening with Librewolf as far as I know (e.g. no Pocket bs.)
now you just have a patched together, disjointed, mess of a browser, on top of a second dev team, who now needs to unpatch it together, re patch it together, and then somehow repackage that. It’s just hopeless. It’s like trying to turn a full size pickup into a small lightweight town car. It’s just not going to happen.
Finally, let’s remember that both Safari and Chrome have their roots on Konqueror’s KHTML rendering engine. By your metric, we should be saying that they don’t count either; because they’re “(definitely) bulkier forks” of KHTML.
It’s worth noting that when a fork is building on top of something, there is a point where the original roots are no longer present, or no longer significantly present. It’s like saying that android is linux. Which doesnt stop the charts from displaying android separately to linux, or chromeos for that matter. Even if it did i don’t like the browsers because they’re too bulky so it’s not like it influences my opinion anyway lol.
says me, the one who made the original comment.
Then it’s a weak argument without real support.
now you just have a patched together, disjointed, mess of a browser, on top of a second dev team, who now needs to unpatch it together, re patch it together, and then somehow repackage that. It’s just hopeless. It’s like trying to turn a full size pickup into a small lightweight town car. It’s just not going to happen.
You are assuming way too much. As if Apple and Google did all this with KHTML. Which lead us to:
It’s worth noting that when a fork is building on top of something, there is a point where the original roots are no longer present, or no longer significantly present.
And what’s your point by saying this? What does it matter if the roots “disappear,” if the product is good enough for competition?
Even if it did i don’t like the browsers because they’re too bulky so it’s not like it influences my opinion anyway lol.
What bulky browsers don’t you like?
Then it’s a weak argument without real support.
I mean yeah, but it’s my opinion on the matter. Even then my original claim is based on the fact of something being an active fork of another browser. Which is still going to line up with my point just fine.
You are assuming way too much. As if Apple and Google did all this with KHTML. Which lead us to:
assuming too much if you think modern applications are programmed/designed well. Ultimately no matter what you do, having a product be around for a decade, let alone multiple of them, is going to incur substantial tech debt, and significant feature creep. There is nothing you can do about this. It happens in EVERY industry. In fact the only thing that helps to prevent this is an almost religious and fervent dedicated to pure minimalism when it comes to what your software is doing. Look at something like DWM for example.
And what’s your point by saying this? What does it matter if the roots “disappear,” if the product is good enough for competition?
My point is that beyond a certain point, a fork is no longer a fork, but more like a competing piece of software. You see this all the time, look at android or chromeos. Technically “based” on linux, but so far gone that almost nobody considers it linux, i only ever see it mentioned in jokes. Something like prism which is a fork of poly, which is a fork of multimc is starting to get to the point where it’s more of an alternate piece of software, than a direct fork. It’s twice independently maintained, it’s feature set is focused differently.
If you need more examples why dont we have a look at a COW filesystem? When you make a change to a file, a fork is created, and that change is then saved on that forked path, so now you have multiple different versions, throughout the chronological history of that fork. If you have auto-deletion enabled for old forks, as you should, at some point you will have “orphaned” forks. Which no longer represent in anyway the original file, but exist as an independently separate instance of that file, in a different state. It’s a similar idea, in a different scale, on a different system. There is also a point where it no longer exists as a fork, but as an implementation on top of that original piece of software. How that’s defined is a little more complicated though.
It’s a little bit philosophical, and semantical, but my point is simple, if your piece of software exists as a fork on top of another piece of software, you don’t get to call yourself “faster” or “leaner” or “more optimized” than the original. Your base browser is still a piece of shit, you’ve taken a bad car, and repainted it, now it looks a little bit better. But it’s still a shit car. You turn a beater into a race car by completely stripping it to bits, at a certain point, it’s not really a fork anymore. In the same way that putting a body on a different frame isn’t the same as the original.
What bulky browsers don’t you like?
it’s not like i’ve literally named them or anything.
Servo in future, LibreWolf for now imo
There are plenty of browsers. Dillo, NetSurf, surf, w3m, Lynx, Links, Via, Midori, Pale Moon although it’s based on a fork of Gecko, Tunnel, qutebrowser. And there are even options for a search engine, although the only one worth considering that isn’t just a layer on top of other search engines is Kagi which costs $10 a month, and I wouldn’t exactly call it minimalist.
The problem is that no browser can allow you to escape the horror that is web standards & practices that have been developed over decades and are almost unchangeable, without sacrificing basic web functionality and just making it a worse experience than it needs to be at least. The fact is that practically the entire web is reliant on JavaScript, on top of HTML and CSS which take a lot more resources to utilize/display than it looks, meaning 3 interpreters constantly running that must be sandboxed to each tab you have open with a lot of overhead to manage security.
In an ideal world we’d all just be using provably-safe high-performance compiled WASM-but-stronger (from functional languages or more likely Rust or something less boiler-platey but similar), without having such a complex and fucked dependency situation*, where we wouldn’t need to sandbox interpreted languages and slaughter performance. Of course, in an ideal world, we also wouldn’t have to be concerned about aggressive tracking, ads, clickbait, SEO abuse, scams, or even malware, so there’s not much use in imagining a reality where we actually have quality web browsing.
The actual answer to using the web without the fucked-ness of browsers is to not use a web browser at all for sites you use frequently. Use stuff like this instead.
*seriously, you can write the most basic website with JavaScript and it’ll probably rely on tens of thousands of expressions of code which realistically should just be expressable in like a small page or two, you do webdev and you’ll probably accidentally be implicitly committing a sacrifice to some Aztec God in order to check if a number is even or odd
Also just imagine if all of web dev was just ML/Scala/Rust/Swift/Erlang without compiling to JavaScript 🤤 That is the definition of a perfect universe
The problem is that no browser can allow you to escape the horror that is web standards & practices that have been developed over decades […] practically the entire web is reliant on JavaScript, […]
I’ve been saying it for a while: continuing to play catch is a losing move for Mozilla or for any independent browser maker.
The real move, is to switch to or at least integrate an alternate internet, something that uses a protocol that is simpler and more limited by design - just get rid of Javascript (or of “remote execution”, really) and you instantly get a much leaner, much securer internet design.
I’ve heard pretty good things about the Gemini protocol, but IMHO they went too far too extremist into the “text internet” philosophy, and as a result is a raw downgrade from Gopher. Gopher could actually be a good option.
Its about time i would settle for the bare minimum at first then we can built up on it as a community
honestly, yeah.
Whyyyy Mozilla? I want to love you, rally, but you wont let me.
You may be in an abusive relationship with your browser. 💔
Fuck sake. Sick of ai being added into everything. Please dont ruin firefox
This is a pretty effective ad for LibreWolf
Gonna check it out. Is it foss? Didn’t find it on fdroid
Ahh, not available for androidMull is a good one for Android.
DuckDuckGo browser is available for android
Yeah desktop only, as it stands today. As a person that only uses my phone to tide me over between PCs, I didn’t really think of mobile.
Honestly, it sucks, but I expected hundreds in line with the other huge layoffs we’ve seen. It being 60 seems more reasonable
Lol when that airbnb fuck took over I knew things were going to go south.
That was my thought too.
Oh god dammit
Mozilla has been consistently breaking the principles that made Firefox good, yet if you criticize Firefox on Lemmy you’re downvoted like hell. Congrats. Enjoy your AI, hope it sends your queries to Yahoo for some god forsaken reason.
Have you read any of the other comments in this thread? Large numbers of people are gleefully dumping all over Mozilla, it’s the few who are trying to go against that narrative that are getting downvotes.
You enjoy your angry mob. I’ll enjoy having AI tools in my browser.
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.
Ditto. FF/Mozilla community (especially the /r/firefox mods), along with the nonsense changes to FF, are a big reason why I decided to leave FF after 20 years and use something else. At the moment, I couldn’t care less about Mozilla future.
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 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).
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.
It literally states it will be local only and not send data to third parties or even Mozilla. But go off.
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.
Why Mozilla? You had so much good faith
And they still will. I’m sure most people haven’t heard of the projects they’re getting rid of (that’s why they’re getting rid of them) and the anti-AI circlejerk is going to melt away once it rolls out and people are surprised to learn it’s actually a really useful technology.
I’m happy I use Librewolf, I get the good parts without the nonsense
Because money.
A non-profit that begs for donations has become a money making machine netting their ceos over $10m in 3 years.
And the fanboys will still eat this up. “BECAUSE IT’S NOT CHROME!1!” - their reason.
Not Chrome is an important reason however. Which makes this all the worse.
This is how you lose. I only use FF. I will switch to another browser if they enshittify with AI.
Why though? I’ve pointed out elsewhere, a browser is one of the few places an LLM makes sense. Especially if it’s local.
Which browser is not going to have AI?
Vivaldi recently posted this -vivaldi-wont-allow-a-machine-to-lie-to-you.
See also vivaldi communityWhich browser is not going to have AI?
the ones worth using, of course
Lync?
Yes, Lynx is the one I meant. Haven’t heard of it nor seen it since university in the early 90’s so I thought it would be fitting here.
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.
Ok. You’re entitled to have your own opinion, as I do.
Problem is that the anti-AI folk don’t want me to have the option to have AI in my browser of choice.
Not me, though. You want your AI browser, and I want my “dumb” browser, of course they can coexist
Ungoogled Chromium
Netscape Navigator!
