I think people are wildly overreacting. There is a new CEO and he wants to make a splash so the throws around "AI" that's it. Of course there will be AI related features in firefox, there already are! Wait and see what the actual specifics are before reacting?
Also, a small minor detail here: We're not paying for firefox! why are so many people feeling entitled? Mozilla has to do something other than beg Google to survive. Perhaps we need a fork of firefox that is sustained by donations and is backed by a non-profit explicilty chartered to make decisions based on community feedback? I don't see a problem with that wikipedia-like approach, I don't think any of the forks today have a good/viable org structure that is fully non-profit (as in it won't seek profit at all). Mozilla has bade some bad decisions recently, but they're a far cry from the world-ended outcry they're getting.
If we don't donate to Mozilla and we don't pay them money, then we have to be the product at some point. Even if they don't it to be that way, they have to placate to some other business interests.
I hope the EU also pays attention, perhaps some of their OSS funding can help setup an alternate org.
Waiting until the thing is done to voice your opinions on the thing is a very poor strategy if you want to have any influence over what the thing turns out to even be.
>>> Also, a small minor detail here: We're not paying for firefox! why are so many people feeling entitled? Mozilla has to do something other than beg Google to survive.
Because some of us have supported, donated to, advocated for, and participated in the firefox and mozilla communities over the years, and feel betrayed by the abandonment of principles, kowtowing to adtech surveillance "features", and overall enshittification of a once beloved browser that we hoped would allow for an alternative to the chrome blob, as they once were to the atrocity that was internet explorer.
It's perfectly reasonable to call out foundations and organizations that utterly abandon and fail to live up to principles. Mozilla is just a PR wing for Alphabet and whitewashing the chromification of all browsers, at this point.
Ladybug and some other alternatives will come around. I don't see any future in which Mozilla returns to principles - the people leeching off / running the foundation won't ever be interested in returning to a principled stance, but to change the brand, or pursue profit, or some other outcome that is divergent from the expectations and consideration of the original supporters. They keep trying to commodify and branch out and waste insane amounts of money on nonsense, and hire CEOs that lose the plot before they ever start the job. Mozilla is functionally dead, for whatever vision of it a lot of us might once have had.
By the time they'd have a chance to fix anything, maybe it'll be practical to have an AI whip up a new browser engine and we'll all have bespoke, feature complete privacy respecting browsers built on the fly.
I think all of firefox's alternatives depend on firefox as an upstream. firefox itself has low adaption right now. I'm all for any approach that isn't google/chrome being the only browser standards driver. This type of knee-jerking doesn't help with that goal.. I don't care so much about mozilla's past or how terrible an "ai browser" will be, as much as having viable alternatives and not having a monopoly for browser standards. a fork and alternative browsers will do nothing to help with that. Either there is an alternative to Mozilla or there isn't.
This isn't kneejerk, it's bone deep weariness of year over year of failure and corporate schlock and weasel words and trying to rebrand firefox and sucking on the google teat while pretending they have a purpose. They're doing anything and everything but seriously putting in the time and effort to distinguish themselves and be a viable competitor. All of the good stuff happens downstream; firefox development is a continual disappointment and enshittification, and they don't even profit from it. They enshittify on behalf of google and the adtech blob.
The downstream projects constantly have to tear out features the mozilla team try to jam in, for no good reason, almost like there's an arms race and the adtech blob is just trying to slip one past all the people who want simple privacy preserving software.
Unfortunately, it’s impossible to donate to Firefox development. Donations to Mozilla expressly do not got to pay for Firefox since Firefox is for-profit and they’ve decided to not accept money from users. So I guess we are already “the product.”
I liked it the few times it worked but so many times it's chosen to do things like translate Japanese into Spanish when I speak English natively and never would've chosen Spanish as the target language. It just feels convoluted and poorly implemented, like most AI features in most software.
I don't give a shit about the specifics. I don't want AI in my browser period.
Yes, AI is already in Firefox. That does not on any way make more AI any less unacceptable.
I don't want to opt out. I don't want to dismiss nags. I don't want to fuck around with internal configs and hope that the options do what they say (they often don't).
I want a browser that renders websites. That's it. Anything else is detracting from Firefox's core value proposition: being a good web browser.
I want a web browser. I do not want, need, nor am I interested in entertaining an ""AI browser"", whatever the hell that even means. I want to browse the goddamn web, not interact with "AI". We've had AI shoved into literally every conceivable corner of every piece of software. Nobody, nobody needs more AI in more places. We have ten million ways to access AI in absolutely every other program.
Just give me a fucking web browser. This is not that complicated.
Because the AI implementations they’ve already done are shit? Buttons on by default, features that are annoying to remove for normal users (the context menu ‘search with chatbot’).
It’s just garbage, get this shit out of here. Stop adding things to my window without permission and stop with the popups announcing them to me.
Anyone who seriously wants this will seek it out. Leave the rest of us alone.
1. Why would I donate to Mozilla? Mozilla hates me.
2. When Mozilla was 30% of the browser market rather than 3%, they could have easily cleaned up on donations. If they had made whatever extension transition that they thought they needed to do but while protecting all contemporary extension capabilities and not using it as a power grab to limit user control, they'd still have 30% of the market. If they hadn't made the business decision to permanently be a wonky Chrome, people wouldn't think of them as a wonky Chrome.
3. Mozilla has plenty of money. If you can't create a sustainable browser with a billion and a half dollars in the bank and a fully-featured browser, it's because you don't want to. You already have the browser, you can't whine about how complicated it is to create a browser. Pay developers with the interest. Stop paying these useless weirdo executives a fortune.
But enough about Mozilla. If you're some Bitcoin or startup billionaire, I'll ask you the same thing. Firefox is sitting right there and licensed correctly. You want people to respect you and remember you nicely when you're dead? Take it, fork it, put that same billion and a half into a trust, and save an open door to the Internet at a time when it's really needed. You've won in life, it will be easy to make people trust you if your ambition is just to do good. Steal Firefox, put it on the right track, and people will flock back to it. I know Ladybird is interesting, but a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.
Also, a small minor detail here: We're not paying for firefox! why are so many people feeling entitled? Mozilla has to do something other than beg Google to survive. Perhaps we need a fork of firefox that is sustained by donations and is backed by a non-profit explicilty chartered to make decisions based on community feedback? I don't see a problem with that wikipedia-like approach, I don't think any of the forks today have a good/viable org structure that is fully non-profit (as in it won't seek profit at all). Mozilla has bade some bad decisions recently, but they're a far cry from the world-ended outcry they're getting.
If we don't donate to Mozilla and we don't pay them money, then we have to be the product at some point. Even if they don't it to be that way, they have to placate to some other business interests.
I hope the EU also pays attention, perhaps some of their OSS funding can help setup an alternate org.