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Clown graphics reminds me of the alt-right trolls who hate Mozilla for their stance on diversity and freedom. They are even late to the AI party, there isn’t a single “free as in freedom” AI around, are you aware of it?
I mean, I understand this argument, but Mozilla is still vastly superior to the alternatives. And as others have pointed out, even if Mozilla kicks the bucket, Firefox is open source and forks exist.
Mozilla has been making a lot of questionable decisions, but they are nowhere near the point-of-no-return yet. Mozilla is still a company, and companies make corporate decisions.
AI -> ADS
AIADS
AIDS
If firefox becomes worse or starts lagging behind more, I’ll stop using it. It doesn’t seem all that useful to attempt to predict 5 years into the future Firefox’s state and therefore decide to switch away now.
Only a good AI can stop a bad AI with a pun
The only thing I don’t like about Firefox (other than no PWA capability) is the ‘dark pattern’ of how when the home page loads, the first three of the six items shifts to the right after the page has started loading, and are replaced with sponsored links. So, if I go to click on YouTube when I launch Firefox, there’s a fair chance that by the time I get to click there it’ll suddenly jump over to the right and I’ll end up clicking some other link.
To me, that’s sketchy behaviour.
No PWA capability?
At least on mobile, I have multiple PWAs installed via Firefox.
Not on desktop though.
You can disable those ads though…
I don’t mind the ads. I just don’t like the ‘trickery’ of them shifting the existing shortcuts after the page has already loaded.
The only good ad is a dead ad
Check this one: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/pwas-for-firefox/ It doesn’t have super advanced capabilities of PWAs however the “pwa creators” already assume one is using Chrome etc.
Yes I’m using that. It’s fine if you only have one pc, but a pain having to set it up every time you set up another Linux install etc.
people been saying the ships been sinking since netscape. version 130 now
It has been sinking. Adtech is cyber warfare. They sold out. https://make-firefox-private-again.com/ everybody be sure to change your settings in about:config to disable that Anonym bullshit. No, we’re not the ‘product’ we’re human beings.
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This is such a braindead fucking take. Companies should explore new technology not just take a look at the current popular opinion and run with it as absolute fact. The majority of this post is literally just using AI as a boogieman, oh no they’re creating jobs that relate to AI! The company is over!!!
They saw three roles that mentioned AI and took that as absolute proof that Mozilla has “fully pointed the ship towards a future of AI and Ads”. Grow the fuck up. The internet takes money to run, ads are an inevitability so no shit a major browser company has someone managing that aspect of their browser…
I see they have fully pointed the ship towards a future of AI and Ads
oh, but they had 9 open listings for AI!!! THat’s a THIRD of the cOmPaNy’s listings!!!
Are you not aware of how big Mozilla is? https://leadiq.com/c/mozilla/5a1d88fe2400002400628c85/employee-directory
N. America: 1.5k Asia: 468 Europe: 378 Africa: 86 South Africa:44 Oceania: 25
That alone shows how insane this take is. Mozilla dipping their toes into the water with a handful of roles doesn’t mean mozilla is focused on it alone (or even at all!). Secondly, there is a lot of value that can be taken from AI (both server and client-side), without even touching the subject of generating images/video/text/etc. Things like auto-transcriptions, summaries for the seeing impaired, etc.
But then we get these posts essentially fear mongering any perceived interest as slight as it may be into AI. Absurd.
I’m ok with them chasing ethical applications of AI. I’m more tired of their half-assed efforts to chase every shiny new object over the last few years. It feels like as a non-profit, they should be comparatively immune to chasing the same transitory trends that other shareholder-owned companies are obsessed over. But it seems like for Mozilla, they have an even shorter attention span than their corporate competitors. We’ve seen them chase after crypto, metaverse, augmented reality, Firefox OS, and now AI. All of those efforts fizzled out with a whimper.
That crypto one isn’t even a project, just that they used some service to handle crypto donations for them. It is weird though that they think they can just walk into a successful space without offering anything new and still expect to get users.
It’s a shame FirefoxOS didn’t gain enough traction.
Sure, but the only way to counter AI spam in the dead internet might be to have your own local AI model to filter junk out. And that has to be with the browser.
There is also cookie consent spam, ads and newspaper “notify me” shit that probably can only be fixed with AI.
Your take is that Mozilla doesn’t think before they adopt, except people here don’t think about what not to adopt either.
That is the first time I’ve seen South Africa listed separately from Africa
The brain-dead take is that companies should explore new technology. Without any qualifiers on it (i assume there aren’t because you didn’t add any and you applied it to ai). That’s how we’ve ended up with such a huge amount of waste, pollution and theft from small independents.
Even if we just narrow it to the field of AI, the waste and environmental damage from just this kind of tech is just absurd.
Let’s add to the downsizing ai causes, the pathetic service disruptions and inevitable decline of a company’s reputation from using such a thing and its nothing but a waste.
No, worries. We will always have forks. Mozilla wins simply by having their only competitor be Google.
The problem is they have to come up with a new source of income now that it looks like Google’s payments to be the default search engine to them are illegal.
That’s like 90% of their revenue, so they’re panicking.
They could make a web server and sell support for it.
AI + Ads = AIDS.
Just say no, kids.
So they probably scrolled through a page of job ads and cherry picked a few so they could talk smack…
You can do this with any company
I looked at their jobs list and counted 35 jobs. Of that I count 9 that are AI-related and 4 that are ads-related. The list also includes a few generic jobs like “Chief of Staff”, “Client Analytics Manager”, “Staff Test Engineer” or “Fixed-Term Social Media Trainee”.
Basically at least 1/3 of the jobs they’re advertising that have a specific team mentioned are AI or ads jobs.
You can’t do this with any company. The correct number of ads people working at Firefox is 0.
First off, keep in mind the post we’re all responding to is trying to use these listings to paint the entire focus/future of this company with a single brushstroke, as that is relevant context.
I see they have fully pointed the ship towards a future of AI and Ads
that statement right there.
Basically at least 1/3 of the jobs they’re advertising that have a specific team mentioned are AI or ads jobs.
oh, but they had 9 open listings for AI!!! THat’s a THIRD of the cOmPaNy’s listings!!!
Are you not aware of how big Mozilla is? https://leadiq.com/c/mozilla/5a1d88fe2400002400628c85/employee-directory
N. America: 1.5k Asia: 468 Europe: 378 Africa: 86 South Africa:44 Oceania: 25
That alone shows how insane this take is. Mozilla dipping their toes into the water with a handful of roles doesn’t mean mozilla is focused on it alone (or even at all!). Secondly, there is a lot of value that can be taken from AI (both server and client-side), without even touching the subject of generating images/video/text/etc. Things like auto-transcriptions, summaries for the seeing impaired, etc.
But then we get these posts essentially fear mongering any perceived interest as slight as it may be into AI. Absurd.
The correct number of ads people working at Firefox is 0.
Here you are telling on yourself. Ads, whether you like it or not, are a huge piece of how the internet funds itself. As Mozilla is essentially the second largest browser after chromium-based ones, you absolutely need someone managing how ads integrate with your browser.
For example, there is a HUGE amount of people that don’t want to mess with ad blockers and such and want a browser to protect them outright, Mozilla can do this with things like privacy-preserving attribution to protect user data while still serving ads in good faith.
Yes, it is so very easy to say FUCK ads, they don’t belong on the internet… until you want to host something and suddenly the costs can get real big real fast.
And another thing, you say “correct number of ads people working at firefox is 0”
You can’t do this with any company.
by this, do you mean cherry pick open listings by a company and pretend that those open listings are indicative of not only the companies focus but also their general distribution of efforts? Because that’s all you’re doing with this comment.
0 would mean they already have all those positions filled
Why doesn’t Mozilla move to a Wikipedia model and ask for donations? I would certainly rather donate than be served ads by Firefox.
Because the CEO of Wikipedia doesn’t get paid $2.5 million a year. She only makes $450k.
I’m OOTL, the CEO of Mozilla makes $2.5 million a year? Or am I misunderstanding it?
hahaha, “only”
in the nonprofit world, that’s damn good for what wikipedia does
Real loser, amirite? Barely makes more than a Supreme Court Justice.
Damnit. I love Firefox. What is the best alternative?
Reports of its death are GREATLY exaggerated. I would suggest continuing to simply use firefox and disable any future crap you don’t prefer.
That said librewolf which is intended to be firefox with stronger privacy settings by default that said
- Default settings break more websites
- You have to get extensions manually from for instance github because it doesn’t use mozillas addon (it can probably be enabled)
- It doesn’t use the built in password manager which is in fact privacy preserving so you have to enable it or use something else
- you don’t get syncing via firefox sync which is in fact already privacy preserving so you have to enable it if you want it
- It doesn’t remember cookies without manually adding an exception to each site this is extremely obnoxious. I’m sure its configurable though
At this time it is far easier to disable the few things that may be undesired from firefox vs turning librewolf into an acceptable option.
I experience little breakage with Librewolf, and when I do, maybe 75-85% of the time it is because the site only works with Chromium. I get extensions directly through the browser, I have not enabled anything as far as I am aware. And of course you can configure the cookie clearing. I quite like it, there are (in my case at least) not many exceptions you need to add before it works quite smoothly, but of course that depends on your usage.
I use plain old firefox there are few sites that require chromium. I have noticed that enhanced tracking protection and adblock can both break some sites. Whether it makes sense to turn them off or use a different site depends on the site.
There really isn’t one. The closet would be Konqueror with KHTML and one of Mozilla’s discarded projects called Servo (which is a beta project now run by the Linux Foundation). The rest are Chrome in a wig and Safari.
FYI: KHTML became Safari that became WebKit that became Chrome.
There is also this which might be viable in the future, https://ladybird.org/
The lady bird dev is a musk fellating tech bro
EDIT: I can’t remember where I learned this, but I swear someone on lemmy had shown some tweets that were showing support for the musk era changes and were in some way endorsing web3 garbage. Take everything anyone says on the internet with a grain of salt.
There was a comment thread a month ago about the attempted refusal to use gender neutral language because that’s political: “This project is not an appropriate arena to advertise your personal politics.”
It’s not the same thing, but it does match the pattern. Still take everything with some salt though.
That much I certainly remember and is easily verifiable, I wish I had a source for the musk support though.
That sucks but if it’s open source it doesn’t matter imo
Andreas Kling? How so?
Well fuck. There goes that one.
We’ll see how it goes in a few years. I did forget about it so thanks for reminding me about it.
Im using LibreWolf. Its a fork of firefox. For me its the perfect balance between compatibility and privacy friendliness.
Is it a true fork, or is it a project that follows the Firefox tree and builds a customized browser from it?
The difference being, if it’s a true fork, they have to do all their own browser engineering starting at the time it was forked off. That sounds like a monumental effort.
Project fork
Strange, because they say it’s a “custom version” of Firefox. That normally means it’s a custom build, not a true fork.
I started using librewolf about a month ago but I’ve (unfortunately) switched back to Firefox because of multiple compatibility issues.
Edit: I should add that I switched from Firefox to Fennec (a fork of Firefox) on my phone and that has been working fine.
Someone should ship librewolf with less stupid defaults
They do, its called Firefox.
Which is what I suggested they continue to use but for those who are concerned about privacy by default I would still suggest something in between.
Forks of it.
Fireforks
I love it too. No chance I’m changing any time soon
All browsers are either based on Chrome or Firefox. There’s no alternative.
All browsers are either based on KHTML or Netscape. There’s no alternative.
You see that’s a sort of weird way of looking at it?
Well, there’s Chromium and then there’s Chrome.
Doesn’t Safari use a different codebase? It’s not available on non-Apple platforms, but it’s good to know that there are still engineers working on a different codebase.
Chrome is definitely a fork of Safari in a way. Or more accurately, Blink is a fork of Webkit.
So really, all modern browsers are either forks of KHTML / KJS or are based on the Mozilla codebase. But, at least right now, there are 3 separate engineering teams working on 3 independent codebases. Which hopefully will mitigate some of the issues you get when one company completely controls a software “ecosystem”.
Google Chrome! It’s nice that it syncs with my existing Google account instead of needing a new one, plus it has updates built in!
And it blocks adblockers! I can’t know what to spend my money on without ads!
My copy hasn’t started doing that
Are you paid by Google? That’s what we’re trying to escape by using Firefox.
I’m gonna go with failed attempt at satire.
Shit, i ruined the joke
Not like anyone else is reading it as satire. If everyone misses the point, that’s on the writer.
🤮
As I notice this comment is satirical, unlike the (currently) 49 plebeian downvoters, I feel my massive genius brain undulating and pressing upon my skull.
A few days ago there was a thread that was talking about fingerprinting.
I started playing with cover your tracks by the EFF.
https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/
It turns out that Firefox was routing all my browser DNS traffic around my pi-hole. (It is called DNS over HTTP or DOH)
I had no clue.
That’s supposed to keep you from being monitored by bad actors over public Wi-Fi, iirc.
Makes sense. It really needs to be a network dependent setting.
My user.js has over 400 lines now and is almost the same as Arkenfox’ user.js.
The tech world is steaming Full Ahead toward an inflatable Gibraltar.
