I’m still angry that an (optionally) AI browser isn’t the worst idea as a headline/dev direction … if you don’t read any further than the headline that is.
I do want or eventually will need some local, foss AI to deal with all the megacorp bs AI that will be just everywhere on the internets (I can’t humanly fight the increasing megacorp slop, I need/will need my own AI to help me fight and navigate it, as a freedom necessity).
Someone pls work on that, I don’t want to live in an internetless cave/woods for the rest of my life (the cave/woods is what I wish for regardless, it’s just a question of my need for internet access).But no, they decided to hammer their dicks with all the megamatacorp AIs. I mean, it’s prob marginally better than to forward ppl to sites or Chrome, but it’s not a thing that you would want publicized as a major step/direction, it’s at the very least distasteful.
Librewolf is great. Pretty much the same as Firefox without the shit.
Yeah but its a soft fork, inherently dependent on mozilla.
Mozilla is circling the drain, determined to drive away the last of its users.
“Firefox is evolving into an agentic browser, connecting devices, cloud, and AI to unlock intelligent productivity and secure work anywhere. Join us at #MozillaIgnite to see how frontier firms are transforming with Firefox and what’s next for the platform. We can’t wait to show you!”
#MozillaIgnite
Do you think this is a cry for help?
Here’s a complementary can of gasoline and blowtorch. It would be a shame if something happened to spill the gasoline on me. And then light the blowtorch. A real shame.
Ugh, even the corporate false chipper voice.
I suggest they should also bring back continuous scrolling, it makes browsing and reading easier there.
The image is nearly 10 months old!
Anyone that is not using Libre Wolf or equivalent should be to take advantage of the wonderful privacy suite.
Haven’t heard of that before 😮
I know I’m gonna get a lot of flack for suggesting this, but Vivaldi feels like what Firefox should have been. More customizability, less AI and sponsored crap. They are the only major browser offering an option for a small, reasonably sized tab bar rather than the tab bars with 3 layers of padding and more whitespace than text.
Additionally, Vivaldi doesn’t pester you with twice-a-day update pop-ups or worse, the dreaded “Restart to keep using Firefox,” it just gets out of your way like a good browser should.
On the other hand they literally built an email client into their web browser. I don’t think they’ve met scope creep they didn’t like.
I think floorp and zen are trying to be the Vivaldi of Firefox but with less…stuff.
Netscape 3 with integrated mail and news is still the best internet experience that’s ever been conceived or designed or implemented. Communicator screwed it all up less than a year later but it was the best while it lasted.
Fast forward nearly 30 years and pretty much everyone uses webmail, so building a web-based client into your browser to poorly interact with an existing web-based service seems questionable.
If I want something to do a shit job accessing Gmail’s shitty non-standard service, I can always let thunderbird do a shit job.
I tried it before, it was buggy and my tabs locked up. Also since its based on chrome, its very nerfed when it comes to powerful plugins. I didnt like it. My first impression was positive but no, it feels very bloated.
But if you like it and you feel its better than Firefox for you, thats a good thing.
Waterfox
Vivaldi is not open-source, so it shouldn’t even be considered as an option. Try !waterfox@programming.dev!
Yup go Waterfox. Truely open and a fork of Firefox. It’s the best we have unfortunately.
How does it stack up against librewolf?
Is it chromium? If yes than pass. Did everyone forgot when Google tried to use chromium to take control with this bullshit?
Good, good💯
Vivaldi is by far the best browser out there. Its customizability and tab handling is second to none. Anyone not giving it a spin are missing out. Yes, their UI is proprietary, but out of all the things to be concerned about, this aint it. They are based in Norway and made by software engineers who worked on Opera browser who out of principle just wants a good browser which is not in corporate hell.
Seriously give it a try.
I stopped using Opera more 15 years ago, shortly before they dropped their own engine.
I did like their customisation options, 20+ years ago they were the only browser supporting mouse gestures too.
But I see no reason why would I want to use what’s basically chromium, especially bcs of ad blocking.
Y’all just live with ads? (I don’t think sinkholes catch everything.)Additionally I do not want to support proprietary code if I don’t have to.
Vivaldi is by far the best browser out there
Maybe among the wheelchair bound browsers that don’t let you properly block ads.
If i cant use uBlock origin on a browser, it cant be my primaryb browser.
i use vivaldi as well. seriously!
Yeah I’m switch off Firefox finally. I tried Floorp it does have some the same AI stuff you have to turn off. Waterfox doesn’t have it in at all. So Waterfox it is.
For future readers, yes, Floorp is a real browser
Honestly the way they (by default) change home tab background for each visit is absolutely adorable.
All my 'puters have Water, Wolf, and Floo.
Floorp
I don’t think I will ever be able to pass past this name. It’s a name of something that sci-fi comedic cartoon will create for a passing joke.
Feels like ‘plumbus’
I actually use floorp. It’s literally the most customizable Firefox fork. It’s the only Firefox fork that allows me to have my tab bar exactly correct the way I want it.
But yeah name’s stupid. I kind of love it though. It’s so non-serious
I’m still not convinced that name isn’t an elaborate joke. Like I could download the browser and be typing this comment on it and still think “man, they went all-in on this prank”
Waterfox is my favorite for sure, very lightweight too.
Discord doesn’t like it when it comes to voice-chat in the Android app, sadly (even though I know we should all leave Discord, but Revolt and Matrix can barely hold candles to the flame of its incredibly sophisticated streaming system), but yes, I’ve been on Waterfox for some time now.
You are absolutely right ✅
Well, I still haven’t seen any AI in my Firefox and I’m planing on using it until I will.
There are a bunch of flags in
about:configyou can check as well, if you wanna be extra sure they’re turned off. Just search forbrowser.ml. There are more but this was all I could capture in one screenshot. Bold means I had to change it, which means it was on by default. That said I’m using CachyOS repos, not the direct Arch ones.
Hold your click for at least one second on any link and it will show a preview of the link and suggest you to use AI to describe it
Good I learnt something today. 😏
I genuinely thought you said “hold your dick for at least one second”
Time to pull out a hammer
Haha 😄 funny you.
STOP! HAMMER TIME!
Can’t touch this.
Settings > scroll down to “General” > look at the options under “Enable link previews”. You can turn the previews off altogether or just turn off the AI part
Yeah, you can also opt out of your planet being demolished to build the intergalactic highway, the form is in the basement.
Incidentally, most of the new llm bullshits are on by default and can’t be turn off in the settings, you need to go to about:config and search for .ml to do so (not to be confused with .ml instance of lemmy which you also can’t easily opt out of). Obviously this settings aren’t synchronised between instances by “synchronise all settings” thingy which they need my personal info for, why would it, so you need to do it every time. Also also they sometimes revert back with major updates, because obviously they are.This is a defence only until it isn’t - although thank you for the tip.
That’s how Windows has been going for years - adding more and more crap and make it all default enabled, and people are like “Oh just turn it off bro.”
Then every update adds more unwanted options that get increasingly difficult to turn off, or randomly turn themselves back on, and before you know it we’ve reached a point where every new install soon needs an entire checklist to go through to make things actually usable again.
That is not how life should be. I want something that respects me by default, and if it wants me to try a feature I might find even slightly objectional, I should have to explicitly opt-in and say YES.
Firefox is setting a precedent by moving in this direction, and they’ve showed their hand. There’s only more where this came from, and I won’t tolerate it, even if I can turn it off.
When the Firefox terms and conditions drama happened some months back, that was the push I needed to switch to Librewolf. It’s a Firefox fork with privacy-respecting settings out of the gate, no sponsored content, no ads, uBlock pre-installed, and absolutely zero AI. If you’re a Firefox user, I recommend you try it too.
In my opinion this is one of the main issues. All those features should be disabled by default, and only the user decide if they want to enable them!
But they are doing the opposite.
Thanks I already did that, but it still ticks me off that I had to find out they added this while using the browser. This shit should be off by default.
So it’s entirely optional, you only encounter it by interacting with the browser in an atypical way, and the thing it does is a thing that AI is actually pretty decent at (summarizing text)? Sounds like they couldn’t stop themselves from joining the dick hammering bandwagon, but decided not to hit it too hard.
entirely optional
No, it’s on by default, it has access to everything you’re browsing and doing fuck knows what with it, and you need to know that it is doing it and unless you’ve read it somewhere you don’t know that it’s there.
thing that AI is actually pretty decent at (summarizing text)
That’s so not true it’s not even funny.
I mean yeah, it could be worse, everything could be worse. Still, not good, not good at all.
*yet
The new CEO is an AI True Believer, and I don’t doubt this will last.
They’ll remove the options to turn it off, and make it full of the AI features, with no opt-out or opt-in
This isn’t my wheelhouse so take it with a grain of salt, but an argument against link summarizers that I’ve heard is that it takes views away from websites that could be generating revenue for themselves. Instead an LLM scraped their content and fed a summary directly to the user.
It’s more of a concern with google summaries that show up at the top of search results because it completely removes the need to click on any of the websites it pulls from. Ideally a link summary just lets you figure out which link you need without clicking on and looking at each one.
Thanks for adding that detail, makes sense. I was thinking the link previews were yeah more like the google results. Hover over and not have to go to the site.
Do people making that argument also find ad blockers even ten percent as horrible as this? They both ultimately have the same effect, which is your web browser not maximizing someone else’s profits by denying them a revenue opportunity.
I’d be curious if the link summarizer in Firefox runs a model locally or calls some remote API. Most current machines ought to be able to run an appropriate LLM model for that task.
That’s a good question. I’d personally argue that it’s different in that the adblockers are not an inbuilt part of Firefox, they’re made by extension developers. This is built right into the browser.
you only encounter it by interacting with the browser in an atypical way
Leaving my pointer on a random place that happens to be a link is atypical? I don’t think it is. I had this pop up to me a couple of days ago and I didn’t even understand what could’ve triggered it, I was wondering if I clicked something or pressed a key unconsciously.
and the thing it does is a thing that AI is actually pretty decent at (summarizing text)
Pretty decent? Just passable, if the text is about some run-of-the-mill topic.
Doesn’t do that for me. I have to hold left click on a link for over a second to trigger it.
And yeah, pretty decent. It can produce a basically summary of a fair amount of text pretty quickly and generally accurately. It’s not an expert wordsmith, it won’t give a deep and thoughtful analysis of the poem you pointed it at or anything, but that’s not the use case. The use case is “give me the key bullet points of this article so I can decide if I should give it more attention.”, and it does that job pretty well.
generally accurately
This is absolutely, demonstrably, documentedly not true. It is accurate sometimes, and sometimes it shows you absolute bullshit. When will it be accurate? Who knows. So you can use it only when you don’t care about the truth, in which case why even bother, just imagine the article said what you wanted it to say and be done with it
Holding my click on a volume slider triggered the feature so it quickly became really annoying
It doesn’t.
Installed Firefox from the Mint repos. It does.*
*Source: Me, just tried it.
Well, mine doesn’t. I’m not going to search how to enable it. I will just keep using the best browser there is and donating to Servo.
It does if you have a default install
Arch Linux package maintainers seem to have disabled it by default unless I did something and forgot
The article does say that we should always be able to turn off the AI part.
free bottom surgery :3
I could never not use zen or the similar browsers
Looks nice but how’s the ad blocking performance? I’m currently using Librewolf with ublock origin and a pi-hole and I basically never see ads anymore
you’ll have about the same experience with zen+ublock, all told. obviously there’s more advanced privacy features you’ll lose, but your advertising experience will be about the same, nearly if not identical
Wow 👏
I just use uBlock Origin with Zen and I never see ads. Not sure if it works on Youtube or any other streaming sites as I do not use any of them.
Woow! Really.
ublock does work nicely in YouTube, never had any problems BTW I use Orion
Waterfox it is.
Long ago, the Four Fox Nations lived together in harmony. Then everything changed when the Firefox Nation attacked.
Haven’t heard of this before 😮
A hundred years passed and my brother and I discovered the new developer, a script kiddy named Aang. And although his python skills are great, he has a lot to learn before he’s ready to save anyone. But I believe Aang can save the world.
Given python is air what are water, ice, blood, fire, lightning, combustion, earth, metal, and energy?
Ok, let’s do this:
Air = Python Water = Javascript Ice = Typescript Fire = Java Lightning = Groovy Combustion = Kotlin Earth = C++ Metal = Rust Spirit = Assembly
there is a mobile waterfox too now
Does it have ublock?
It has browser extensions, and you can install uBlock through that, so yes
It’s the only browser I have on my phone, it works beautifully.
I just got Waterfox this morning. Pretty dope
Waterfox is Firefox.
I’m holding out for EarthFox
Save us
LadybirdServo, you’re our only hope.Too bad it’s made by someone who promotes ‘great replacement’ theory and stands with fascists.
Since the comment you were responding to was edited to strike out “Ladybird” and write “Servo” instead, would you mind editing your comment to clarify you are talking about Ladybird and not Servo?
Holy hell. I knew about the gender neutral pronouns debacle. Didn’t know there are more…
So what alternative do you suggest?
Zen Browser, open source Firefox fork
Just got it on play store, there’s an ad everytime I open it?
Zen Browser is not even on Android. The one in the Play Store is not what they’re talking about.
Are we supposed to only use products and services from people whom we agree with completely on their full set of personal beliefs?
Your comment got me thinking deeply 😮😮😮
I hate to be the one to tell you this. If you mostly agree with a fascist, maybe that’s a sign of something. And yes, shaming fascists is in fact, a good thing.
This is a pretty gnarly one to just ignore.
Yeah, great replacement isnt an “Oh well, let’s just agree to disagree” type of thing.
No, but why get behind a fascist sympathiser when a better project exists: servo.org.
Moving to a technically better project is a no brainer
I have this person tagged as a fascist so…this tracks
Mobile app? I don’t see a tag option on my desktop. I’m pretty sure I used to tag people a lot when I used that other site.
Just a bit of fascism, as a treat?
When it concerns fascism? How the fuck do you even dare to ask that question?
Yes. I can and I will. You cannot stop me, I am mad with power.
Lemmy isn’t much better.
Edit: If people don’t know what I’m referring to, this comment sums it up well.
But on Lemmy I can block the devs and all of .ml
That’s user choice baby
There is the part where moderation tools seem almost intentionally left out. This place is almost as open to manipulation as 4chan.
Remember when 4chan used to be progressive, libertarian, (uh, and racist)?
Rememver when 4chan used to be progressive
If it ever was, it had to have happened sometime in the middle of its existence, cuz it sure as hell wasn’t that when it launched and sure as hell isn’t that now.
It was before and during the time of “Anonymous the Hacker known as 4chan”.
And yeah, my point was that it was easy to manipulate into being a far-right Nazi hellhole, instead of, you know, a more progressive (but still racist) and libertarian hellhole.
Kind of was progressive, issue is that Moot thought it was a good idea to give the nazis their own place, where they begun radicalizing each other, and even planned harassment campaigns.
And even then, a lot of “4chan progressives” only learned the concept of harassment campaigns, which they turned into what many call “cancel culture”. I’m not saying that all callouts are bad, but often people don’t want to resolve it in private, the “resolve it in private” for the callouter means the other ceases all online presence after a dox threat in private, or at worst it’s being used to get rid of an annoying creator they hated. Often all with the old 4chan-style “you can lie a little bit or more as long as you manage to control the narrative” mentality. Not to mention that the right figured out they can manipulate leftists into toxic callout campaigns.
Also if you ever seen a person saying “why don’t we give a shitton of antidepressants for gender dysphoria instead of hormones?”, that was either a former 4chan progressive, or was influenced by one, since a lot of people who became “mental health positive” due to Project Chanology usually did in a very performative opposition to Scientology’s anti-psychiatry.
Alternative and progressive used to be more synonymous
And I’m pro-choice!
-creates new account and then blocks own primary-
I’m actually not sure what you’re trying to say tbh. Sorry I’m dumb.
On Ladybird, you can block yourself from supporting the devs
One of the reasons I switched to a PieFed server. I’ve been happy with the switch though, it feels generally smoother in my browser as well. That’s the beauty of the Fediverse. Even on a whole different platform, I’m still able to participate in this discussion hosted on a Lemmy server.
This is whataboutery.
Multiple things can be shitty at the same time though…
Everything is shitty, just different shades. 50 shades of shit.
How? You’re denigrating a product made by a fascist on a product made by a fascist.
What are you talking about? Any links?
I’m not disagreeing, I just haven’t heard this about Lemmy yet
.ml is a tankie instance. The main Lemmy dev is an admin on there, and is definitely a tankie.
His username is also a fascist dictator, iirc.
Eh, it’s more complicated, it’s a Haitian revolutionary and the first emperor of Haiti post-revolution. (Functionally a dictatorship)
He killed most of the remaining colonists, enforced plantation labor, and was overthrown after like 2-3 years, but a lot of haiti now remembers him mostly for abolishing slavery and there’s a lot of revisionism or justification for his worse acts.
So like its hard to know what someone who likes him knows / thinks about him.
“abolished slavery”, “enforced plantation labor”
uh… this really sounds like one of those “pick one” moments.
!meanwhileongrad@sh.itjust.works is a good resource
What about Servo?
Any good browsers that use it available yet?
still mozilla
edit: I get it, stop replying
You can’t tell me what to do :3
Not since 2020 when Mozilla laid them off. They are now with the Linux Foundation Europe and they accept donations.
Nope, Mozilla gave up on Servo in 2020. It‘s now governed by the Linux Foundation Europe.
Servo hasn’t had anything to do with mozilla for five years
Just disable the feature or use one of the great Firefox forks like Librewolf or Waterfox. Maybe even Iceweasel.
The world has really gone to shit if the cryptobrowser is our only hope
I hope enough people remain on this AI infested ghost ship that it can keep providing a base for librewolf.
OK, what happened?
“AI should always be a choice—something people can easily turn off." “It will evolve into a modern AI browser and support a portfolio of new and trusted software additions.”
How does he not get how contradictory these positions sound. Really a missed opportunity to brand themselves as the browser without AI bullshit and gain users who want to get away from that crap. Sure, they promise it’ll have an off switch, but even if that’s true, they’re still wasting a lot of their very limited budget pursuing it. Really shows where their priorities are.
Also, it’s already not true. You can turn AI off, but not in the regular settings - you need to enter about:config and search for “browser.ml”. Anything that’s only available in about:config is not “easy” for the average user, and “browser.ml” isn’t exactly an intuitive name, either.
I really hope Firefox gets forked, and ends up like OpenOffice
zipzap your wish is granted:
LibreWolf is not a fork, though. It’s a customised version of FF, so every shit they introduce has to be painstakingly removed by the LW team, provided that is even possible. (See Manifest V3 in Chrome.)
It’s literally impossible to maintain a modern browser without extreme funding and competent engineers
It’s not “literally” impossible, but it’s damn close.
LibreWolf is not a fork, though.
They duplicate the code, creating a “fork” under their control, and make independent changes to the code. That is all that is needed to satisfy the “fork” definition.
Interesting, because there is no mention of that anywhere on their website. Indeed, the workflow overview in their source repo clearly states that in order to build LibreWolf, you need the current Firefox source tree, and this is reflected in the Makefile, which fetches the Firefox source tarball associated with the same version. Nothing points to a repository they created at any prior point.
Can you link to some official statement that supports this claim?
there is no mention of that anywhere on their website.
A custom version of Firefox, focused on privacy, security and freedom.
This project is a custom and independent version of Firefox, …
LibreWolf is a free and open-source fork of Firefox, …
They take Firefox, make changes to it, then release it. As such, it is a fork. More specifically a “soft fork” since they continue to pull changes from upstream (Firefox).
EDIT: Oh I see you’re focused on the “duplication of the code” part. A bad phrasing on my part. It doesn’t matter the specifics of how they pull in the source code, it is pulled in and used as the basis for librewolf’s modifications.
They could even pull it in on first launch and compile the latest version of Firefox with their modifications for subsequent launches and it would by all means be a fork, since they are shipping a modified version.
I hope they consider making a hard fork in light of this news. I use it and it’s great. Perfect sweetspot of privacy, simplicity and “power tools”. Many people might not want the default automatic cookie clearing on exit, but you can easily disable it or, better yet, whitelist domains you want to stay logged into.
Firefox has many excellent forks already.
Theres a bazillion forks
A bazillion understaffed forks ranging from unusable because they have more tinfoil hats than developers, and unusable because the single developer doesn’t understand why remote debugging shouldn’t be enabled by default.
I tried Florp or whatever and it just kept crashing. Went back to good old FF real fast.
LibreWolf has been really solid for me
The issue is not the code, is all the infrastructure needed to develop something as heavy as a browser, which is what they have captive
Definitely we need a fork that’s independent of Mozilla with a real non profit organisation behind, and these days we also need a permanent non-profit clause.
Can you elaborate on infrastructure part? I thought dev efforts are the key issue?
waterfox has been pretty good for me
At least they seem commited to keep it a choice instead of the mandatory crap that pops up everywhere. Choice is fine, and maybe it helps to get Firefox back onto peoples computers so they keep their seat at the table when important decisions regarding the web are made.
New CEO promises to bring AI to Firefox
Mozilla names insider Enzor-DeMeo as CEO, looks to add AI features to Firefox
New CEO Enzor-DeMeo brings out hammer and cock with the promise smack Mozilla’s cock with a hammer and ruin everything.
tbf, firefox left the room years ago.
