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I’m using a Firefox based alternative, LibreWolf.
I love Firefox. It’s great!
I am not in the
AI==badcamp because I believe in nuance. I see a lot of people shit on Firefox for integrating LLM-related features. What the blog post points out and people fail to recognize is that if Mozilla stopped maintaining Firefox, almost all of its forks would die. People make similar arguments about Canonical and Ubuntu. Would these people pay Mozilla or Canonical for their work? The corporate investors do. I’m not saying I agree with it all, but that’s how it works.I see a lot of people shit on Firefox for integrating LLM-related features. What the blog post points out and people fail to recognize is that if Mozilla stopped maintaining Firefox, almost all of its forks would die.
You’re misreading why people are shitting on FF. It would have been nice if Firefox had actually worked on literally any other features in the last decade, like not trashing support for PWAs. Instead, we got nothing but stupid partnerships with companies for features not one wanted, and a succession of failures in the CEO seat of Firefox.
So, yeah, I guess I don’t think it"s realistic for Firefox to have ignored the LLM craze entirely, but man, they could have managed that Google money better.
Aren’t PWAs a niche fad?
No? Most app versions of web frontends are a wrapper for a pwa (teams, zoom).
Ff dumped pwa support a while back, and it has only just come back.
JavaScript developers seeing == and being confused
Would these people pay Mozilla or Canonical for their work?
I think we know the answer to this.
THEY ALREADY HAD THE MONEY FROM GOOGLE.
Mozilla? Maybe, but they need to step it up to be worth paying. They were captured by Google supporting them for too long and need to break from the “Yes, Daddy!” dipshittery. Dumping slopboth trash into everything while my SSD replacement is 6x what it was last time I checked just makes me want to slap you. Especiallyh if it’s bloody pointless, and for those who want that crap it can run via a bookmarked site or as an extenion not part of the core fucking browser.
Canonical? Fuck no! Not only is Ubuntu a complete joke, and was nearly twenty yhears ago when I tried and tossed it to go back to Slackware, but the only project they ever put out worth anything they abandoned and let it fall toa poorly supported community project making the phone OS.
if Mozilla stopped maintaining Firefox, almost all of its forks would die.
That’s an assumption. You’re severely underestimating the amount of work open source maintainers put into those things.
Would these people pay […] Canonical for their work?
Plenty of nice distribs exist without being maintained by a corporation. Good on them, for getting to have a bunch of money of the opensource, but it’s not a necessary model for the opensource projects to survive.
I see a lot of people shit on Firefox for integrating LLM-related features
And that’s good, as it should be. They crammed this bullshit that nobody asked for, and reluctantly gave a button to opt out a year later, and it’s still on by default. This is bad behavior regardless of your stance on it.
You’re severely underestimating the amount of work open source maintainers put into those things.
Which Firefox fork is a hard fork? Which Firefox fork has a hard fork of the Gecko engine?
As far as I know, all firefox forks are dependent on the Gecko engine, and basically have Firefox as upstream.
I would love for your to prove me wrong, but I don’t believe any of these projects, though with many highly dedicated contributors, would be able to maintain active development of a web browser engine that can keep up with new modern web standards.
There is a reason the Ladybird project is taking so long to materialize and has many sponsors giving significant amounts of money.
Internet shit is hard. Firefox and their forks only work because Mozilla is fucking huge and has money to develop Firefox as part of the three big industry standard web browsers. Even though Mozilla does a lot of stupid decisions and spends the majority of their money on dumb shit, and they put dumb shit into the default Firefox that they ship, it is still excellent in many ways and the very best thing we have as a FOSS web browser. I encourage everyone to use Firefox with hardening or one its forks.
I agree with the article, and people saying “Yeah let’s boycott Firefox, use [insert Firefox fork here]” every time there is a Lemmy post on a stupid decision by Mozilla are effectively not boycotting Firefox at all, or if they recommend a Chromium fork they are supporting Chrome/Google, even if they don’t think they are. These forks are in essence just preconfigured and hardened Firefox/Chromium profiles with a few bells and whistles here and there.
Why would anyone waste enormous amount of energy making a new engine, when forked Gecko works and you can backport Mozilla’s updates to it. Same way with Linux, everyone uses Linux kernel because it exists.
When/if those project die, that’s when you’ll start seeing replacements, and at some point the best or most popular will be seen as mainstream and will be a focus point of all the enthusiasts. Like Firefox now.
There is absolutely no reason to believe that a corporation is required to have a good opensource project, just because right now a corporation maintains this specific one.These forks are in essence just preconfigured and hardened Firefox
That’s also not true for a lot of the projects. Forks maintain their own code, porting new updates from Mozilla’s stuff, but they aren’t require to port everything, and that’s the big reason to use them.
Use Zen Browser if you still want Firefox based browsing with the better ergonomics; No AI, tracking or telemetry included.
Or Librewolf
Is it FOSS?
It is
I’ll have to check it out!
How is this different to Firefox? Vertical tabs, containers (workspaces), tab previews (glance).
Looks interesting but I can’t figure out what makes this different to what I can already do in Firefox.
It is different in that it breaks every few releases. Otherwise Firefox is sufficient if vertical tabs is the aim. I used zen for over a year before I just got tired of the constant breaking.
Zen devs were incredibly bad about messing with my workflows that I had setup for Zen. So much so that I eventually just stopped updating the app and moved back to Firefox to let them get their goals together.
I use Zen for small things like research and whatnot, but Firefox will always be the only browser I use for serious stuff like banking and bills.
Zen is better these days, but the fact I can’t get rid of the spaces crap really irks me. I don’t need it, and don’t want it, but it is a “core part” of their ethos so I am stuck with it. I just renamed it to … and stopped worrying about it as much. Still recommend giving it a shot for smaller stuff, but definitely not banking and the like.
I had a similar experience when I tried it a few years back
still breaks. I’m not a fan of it.
I do like Floorp though. slightly bit more customization, fairly solid Japanese dev team that doesn’t release something until everything is rock solid so you know updates aren’t going to break anything. I can’t even recall the last time Floorp broke if ever.
When I tried floorp a few years back, it never even felt in a working condition. Probably much better now, but the second I tried any of the customizations, things seemed to break and get stuck. Firefox has been solid for me since before it was Firefox.
I stick with zen because of spaces. I have a few, e.g. common browsing, work or serious topics, finances, shopping. Each of them I assigned default containers that they will run. And each if them have different pinned tabs related to the spaces.
It’s been so long since I switched that I honestly forgot how Firefox base is. I think before I switched I used sideberry to do all that spaces thing but zen is more integrated feeling.
There’s just something that hits it for me that it’s indispensable for me.
I’ve been contemplating the switch in the past few days. How long have you been using it? What are some pain points that you had?
Been using zen browser for quite some time. I use a session saver add-on and that one works weirdly due to how Zen has spaces and how that works. The way I understand zen’s spaces is like they are browser sessions that can be run simultaneously. Each of them have their own pinned tabs for example, can have default containers they open in, on top of the universal whole browser pinned tabs they call essentials tabs; that’s limited to 12 for now.
Sideberry and tree style tabs might not work as you expect because of the changes the zen team made
Just use Waterfox instead
Waterfox is nice
librewolf is even better
Sandboxing it also good practice
Firefox is our last best hope for browser engine diversity
Browser engine diversity died a decade ago. As soon as Google helped extend the standards, making browser engines the overengineered mess of today,xyou can barely get past basic html and js without a multi-million-dollar company/orgnization.
We need to start anew. You can do simpler with the same capabilities, if you drop the right “features”.
Only on Firefox on my W10 LTSC IoT desktop PC I’ve only used Firefox app on my android phone.
I just use Floorp with my linux and windows installs. on OpenBSD my options are a bit more limited so I need to either try to compile Floorp for it or find something else (if there even is anything else)
Hell Floorp is even on Haiku. It’s a rock solid firefox fork made by a Japanese dev team that doesn’t release/update until things are absolutely rock solid. I can’t even recall the last time floorp broke, if it ever has. good browser, always my go to FF fork.
There is zero reason to not use both. The are supposedly a FOSS organization yet they alienate FOSS users.
They alienate people who can’t cope with change - but change is needed if Firefox doesn’t want to disappear into irrelevance. They need to have as many communication channels open as they can, and they need to implement features that might pull in new users. They actually go out of their way to make sure new features are optional, so that legacy users can keep their experience, but even implementing the possibility of using LLMs in the browser (which is pretty much a standard thing in browsers nowadays) made these FOSS users screech like harpies - it’s not like implementing a side view window (they already had those) that integraties a few API calls was a huge investment in manpower or resources. This behavior extends to the vast majority of FF forks.
I was using Librewolf, Zen Browser and Waterfox (on Android) before. Their immature screeching made me switch back to Firefox after many years. Privacy-wise i am pretty sure the loss of Librewolf’s features are more than compensated by being part of a much larger group of people with my browser / extensions choice.
Their immature screeching made me switch back to Firefox after many years.
Can you elaborate on this a bit? I’ve been using Librewolf for a while now and while I understand they take a sort of hardcore stance on the privacy stuff and its at times a bit annoying, I haven’t had any major issues with actually using it. Though I did download Waterfox recently and have been meaning to give it a go, seems a bit more chill.
Anyway, I’m unaware of any “immature screeching” (mainly because of my own ignorance, not disputing that this hasn’t happened, just looking for more information), could you expand on that?
Their stance regarding LLM code is simply not sustainable, because in the foreseeable future discerning between human written code and LLM code will become impossible. Every tool that can identify LLM code is at the same time the tool used for adversarial training.
In the end, it is not important where the code came from. What counts is that people who submit code take responsibility for their code, regardless of how it was created - because you won’t be able to filter for LLM code, but you can filter for quality.
What is their stance regarding LLM code?
I tried to find it myself, but all I could find is about them removing AI features from the browser. I admit, I’m not the best at using interwebs searches these days (also most of the search engines suck ass anyway), so it might be just me not finding the correct thing.
Nah, Vivaldi still has a much better anti-ai stance. Runs faster and still loads uBlock. This will likely change soon, but I’m not rushing to Firefox until I need to. Firefox is funded by Google anyway.
Vivaldi is:
- Chromium-based and thus funded by Google
- Proprietary, meaning any claims about what it’s doing under the hood are unprovable
Addons on google too
Firefox is funded by Google anyway.
That sounds like Firefox only exists because Google/Alphabet pays for it.
In reality Firefox/Mozilla have made a deal to make Google the default search engine on the default home page.
That would be a pretty stupid business decision to not have free money, what are they gonna do? Have Bing as the default search engine?
Firefox could develop (or pay for someone else to develop) a search engine that doesn’t require google or bing’s search indexes.
Firefox does only exist because Google pays for it. Google is Mozilla’s single greatest financial contributor. They’re essentially keeping a competitor on life support to avoid breaching antitrust laws. Essentially, the argument is that as long as Firefox exists, Google isn’t a monopoly.
However, at any time, Google could simply stop paying, and Firefox would quickly die. Laws change.
Google, Facebook, Microsoft are the biggest donors.
“Dont throw the baby out with the bathwater”
