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.
Fuck sake. Sick of ai being added into everything. Please dont ruin firefox
So frustrated to see how this conversation is playing out. This is exactly what people have been asking for but all anybody can seem to see is “AI” in the headline.
This pivot is about refocusing on:- The Browser
- Privacy
- Ethical AI
This seems like a much better position for Mozilla to operate from, particularly because they’ve excelled at producing ethical SOTA ML for YEARS before ChatGPT. In all, this seems far more forward looking than the previous strategy of “make weird little web tools to make money maybe” and it’s an absolutely massive untapped niche, that they already have the talent to tap into. If we punish the players best positioned to shift the industry standard away from extreme and exploitative data collection, we will end up in exactly the Orwellian AI hellscape that we’re all so afraid of.
It is a better position and FF is going to be even better because of it. We need more options than just chromium. Open web standards dont stay open when everyone congregates.
No one asked for AI
No one asked for the shitty LLMs masquerading as AI. However, an AI that can do specialized things to help people out in day to day tasks would be great.
In this context or generally?
In the context of Firefox
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paywall
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.
I’ll definitely have to check out a few of those browsers at some point. It’s kind of insane how much tech debt we’ve accrued over the years.
I think honestly we just need to start waning off half the shit we support. Minimize the amount of support required, and somehow manage to provide a smaller attack window so that way we can stop writing protections for problems that honestly shouldn’t even exist to begin with. Bonus points to microsoft for creating security certs that don’t do their jobs because hahafunneemalware.exe is signed by fucking oracle of all people, and i guess we should just blindly execute that file because it says it’s trustworthy!
Though it would be interesting to have a sort of “web browser” which is actually just an application based on plugins for different frontends, for stuff like yewtube, we do only use a handful of sites from time to time. Plus maybe a basic web fronted for stuff that isn’t JS because honestly who wants it anyway.
Its about time i would settle for the bare minimum at first then we can built up on it as a community
honestly, yeah.
LoL, and I had been contemplating switching to Firefox on my phone. Fucking nope! Not gonna board a ship that has decided to follow the pack into the ice…
To be fair, I’ll take the ship at the back of the ice-kamakaze-pack over the one at the front. More time to jump ship when something better comes by.
So instead you’re using a browser by companies already in the ice?
Jumping ship means trying to go in a different direction. I’m not gonna upheave my entire online presence just to get onboard with a company who is not only going the same way, but is woefully behind in the race to go that way.
I’m using chrome on phone, because it’s basically part of the operating system, but I did like Fennec. It’s a fork of Firefox mobile with a few more privacy features (or so they advertise)
I’m just using Brave (yes, I know but it doesn’t annoy ME so I’m fine with it) which is just Chrome without the constraints.
Chromium is chrome without the constraints, Brave just has a different master holding the keys.
Not saying brave is bad btw, but chromium itself is literally the master branch for all of these different browsers
I did address that. I am fully aware of Brave’s faults. But the benefits to me outweigh the negatives. Besides which, there isn’t a browser in existence that doesn’t collect data on you. Not unless you go ahead and compile your own. So I choose the one that is blatantly not following the rules and allows me some leeway to enjoy the web the way I like. It’s also not the only browser on my phone. Chrome is obviously still here but so is Duckduckgo and I do have Firefox on here even though I never actually use it.
Chromite? Fennec? Iceraven? Lots of mobile browsers without telemetry on android.
Cromite and Fennec I’ve seen and don’t trust their security at all. Better the devil you know and all that. But Iceraven is new to me and will have to look into that one. So thanks
Just remembered Mull. Have you heard of it?
The paradox of tech right now “we are going to build the most complex technology known to man into our product in the next 12 months. Are we hiring record numbers of people to get it done? No. We fired a bunch of people and everyone else will just have to be extremely hardcore.”
Ugh? It’s far from complex
Okay Mr. Robot.
It’s literally a marketing term for a bunch of structured algorithms at this stage - not some sentient witchcraft
It’s definitely not sentient but to call it simple is definitely inaccurate.
I guess the point is that its complexity is overrated, but still definitely not ‘simple’.
… It is simple, the idea exists since 40y ago, it’s just being done at scale
Edit: make it 80 actually
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I bet I know much more on the topic than you, but please enlighten me on which part of this is complex?
The core concepts of DNNs are taught in high-school, and putting them together can done by a Bachelor student. Shit, people often advise writing a NN libraries as a good learning exercise when picking up a new programming language.
I think mathematically illiterate people assume that incredible results necessarily imply complexity, but that’s simply not the case here. Or the idea that unknown things are necessarily complex, maybe.
The main reason DNNs are popping up is because we finally have the hardware for it. And the second reason is that tech companies have the resources (both financial and in terms of available data) to throw at it.
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They’re refocusing on Firefox and continuing the ai stuff they were already doing. They fireded people who were working on fediverse and metaverse platforms. Did you even read the article?
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.
FF no !
You were the Chosen One! It was said that you would destroy the Sith, not join them! Bring balance to the browsers, not leave it in darkness!
This world blows
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.
If you don’t mind me asking What is the difference?
They’ve said they want to do local AIs though. If that’s the case I’m all in.
ew.
That’s a very good way of me leaving Firefox behind…
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.
But it’s a hellishly expensive thing that seems to not attract enjoyment from current Firefox users, and seems unlikely to bring new users, and (again) seems to be prioritised over other things that could better use the money, like developers, so…
Why.
Librewolf is a nice fork of Firefox
To go where, though? Lynx? Everything else is Chromium and that’s not much better.
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.
To a Gemini reader. Kristall is nice. Lagrange is … interesting.
