I’m usually a firefox defender, because usually people are blowing everything they do out of proportion, and straight up making up negatives.
That said, I don’t know what a “modern AI browser” is but I know it’s something I don’t want. Hopefully “AI should always be a choice — something people can easily turn off.” Is a serious statement.
But also, the AI features they’ve added so far have been out of my way and haven’t bothered me, and if what you’re calling for is to use chromium based browsers (gecko down stream is fine) then you are making the wrong decision for the future of the internet. Firefox, chrome, edge, and safari are the only browsers which have a snowballs chance of being accepted in corporate environments, and supporting google over Mozilla is a losing proposition.
Are they? What have they actually done to make it a bad choice? From my memory the last year or so they’ve:
Added some AI stuff that I don’t use but isn’t in my way
Added tab groups and sidebar tabs which I use constantly
Clarified some legalese that didn’t change anything but caused everyone to say the sky is falling for no reason
Refused to deprecate manifest v2
Don’t get me wrong; I’m not saying Mozilla is perfect and does everything I want. I wish they weren’t funded by google and I wish they didn’t waste so much money on executives, but not only do you need them to stand up to google by continuing to develop firefox (all the downstream gecko browsers would collapse), you need them to continue to participate in web standards committees so google doesn’t get to run away and do whatever the fuck it wants (no other non-big-tech entity has a seat at the table or would get one)
I swear there is astroturfing for anti-mozilla sentiment to undermine their importance in the ecosystem
Edit: I just remembered they are using LLM to replace human written documentation. That is the worst thing they’ve done by far :/
I’m always confused why the energy isn’t just put on pressuring Firefox publicly rather than just sitting in comments being negative and suggesting forks that critically depend on Firefox and can no way continue development without upstream.
I’m usually a firefox defender, because usually people are blowing everything they do out of proportion, and straight up making up negatives.
That said, I don’t know what a “modern AI browser” is but I know it’s something I don’t want. Hopefully “AI should always be a choice — something people can easily turn off.” Is a serious statement.
But also, the AI features they’ve added so far have been out of my way and haven’t bothered me, and if what you’re calling for is to use chromium based browsers (gecko down stream is fine) then you are making the wrong decision for the future of the internet. Firefox, chrome, edge, and safari are the only browsers which have a snowballs chance of being accepted in corporate environments, and supporting google over Mozilla is a losing proposition.
You’re not wrong but Mozilla is real busy making Firefox another bad choice among many bad choices.
Maybe it’s time to go back to BBSes. This whole internet thing kinda sucks now.
Try permanently disabling JavaScript. It will break most sites but what remains is a largely peaceful experience.
Are they? What have they actually done to make it a bad choice? From my memory the last year or so they’ve:
Don’t get me wrong; I’m not saying Mozilla is perfect and does everything I want. I wish they weren’t funded by google and I wish they didn’t waste so much money on executives, but not only do you need them to stand up to google by continuing to develop firefox (all the downstream gecko browsers would collapse), you need them to continue to participate in web standards committees so google doesn’t get to run away and do whatever the fuck it wants (no other non-big-tech entity has a seat at the table or would get one)
I swear there is astroturfing for anti-mozilla sentiment to undermine their importance in the ecosystem
Edit: I just remembered they are using LLM to replace human written documentation. That is the worst thing they’ve done by far :/
I’m always confused why the energy isn’t just put on pressuring Firefox publicly rather than just sitting in comments being negative and suggesting forks that critically depend on Firefox and can no way continue development without upstream.
Cause most of us have no way to pressure them. What am I going to do, threaten to take away the $0 I’ve paid them over the last 20 years?
But, you know, that’s exactly the reason they don’t care about our whining.