Sponsored suggestions in the address bar and advertisement telemetry are upcoming additions, but yeah, this stuff in this post has been here for a while. Every installation requires you remove it again.
Sponsored suggestions in the address bar and advertisement telemetry are upcoming additions, but yeah, this stuff in this post has been here for a while. Every installation requires you remove it again.
I just touched Windows 11 for the first time today.
The Start bar has a Widgets corner, which includes a helpful weather display but is 99% infinite news scroll.
I opened Edge to download something else, and was greeted with more news and crap.
Don’t get me wrong, Firefox is better than Edge. But Edge is the worst of the bunch by far.
Despite its reputation, Chrome looks and feels like, and in some ways is, a lighter browser. No news feed. No AI chatbot. I get that they can afford it, but the difference is still painfully palpable.
But the alt text generation already leverages a self-hosted LLM. So either Mozilla is going to cook in hundreds of extra megabytes of data for their installs, or people with accessibility issues are going to have to download something extra anyway. (IIRC it’s the latter).
We could talk all day about things that Mozilla could add out of the box that would make the user experience better. How about an ad blocker? They can be like Opera, Brave, Vivaldi, even the most ambitious Firefox fork LibreWolf.
But for some reason they went with injecting something into Firefox that nobody was asking for, and I don’t think it aligns at all with the average Firefox users needs or wants. Normies don’t use Firefox. They use a browser that doesn’t raise “switch to Chrome or Edge” messages. And if there was some subset of Firefox users who were begging Mozilla for AI, I never saw them. Where were they?
The alt text generation is done locally. That was the big justification Mozilla used when they announced the feature.
I’m talking about the non-local ChatGPT stuff.
What are they missing? So far, all they’ve added is a sidebar and a couple extra right-click menu additions. Both of these are available for all extensions.
And yet, Mozilla went for the 10% that do violate your privacy and gives your data to the biggest corporations: Google, Microsoft, OpenAI.
What happened to the Mozilla Manifesto?
If it was truly opt-in, it could be an extension. They should not be bundling this with the browser, bloating it more in the process.
AI already has ethical issues, and environmental issues, and privacy issues, and centralization issues. You technically can run your own local AI, but they hook up to the big data-hungry ones out of the box.
Look at the Firefox subreddit. One month ago, people were criticizing the thought of adding AI to Firefox. Two months ago, same thing. Look at the Firefox community. See how many times people requested AI.
Did they actually say that?
I think we need to Wait and See, to give the ad company the benefit of the doubt. And by “the ad company,” I’ll let you figure out whether I’m referring to Mozilla or Google.
Why are you applying the Wait And See philosophy to Firefox but not to Chrome?
Seems a bit… Reactionary.
Based on the content of that article, the problem is not that DRM is currently in Firefox, but the process by which DRM became mandatory in browsers to begin with.
Second ad company, if you count FakeSpot selling private data to other ad providers!
And those are probably the "anything"s they would rather not respond to.
The trouble with “wait and see” is that people will often forget what we were waiting for.
Speaking of which, do you remember FakeSpot? That was Mozilla’s first foray into directly selling private data to ad companies. At the time, a lot of people said, “they might allow it now, but let’s wait and see.”
And today, Mozilla FakeSpot continues selling data to ad companies.
It’s a shame Mozilla hasn’t added a way to put custom widgets in the New Tab Page. It’s relatively inconsequential compared to the whole Mozilla situation, but in a perfect world, I think it would be nice to have.
If it makes you feel better, donations wouldn’t go to Firefox development anyway, and they never have.
(I believe you can donate directly to SeaMonkey, and that they receive a couple million dollars in donations every year. But don’t quote me on that.)
It feels like they heard about what Bill Gates did to Paul Allen and decided to replicate it.
It’s really disheartening. Among other things, Steve fought against the firing of employees in general because Mozilla was actually turning a profit under his leadership.
Based on this and a couple Reddit threads I have since uncovered, he seems like a generally upstanding guy. And he’s on Mastodon, @stevetex@mozilla.social
I think you can add your own money into Brave to tip people extra.
And the biggest difference is…
I don’t like to speculate, but I think it was mental illness, which may have started during the CopperheadOS days (the predecessor to Graphene).
Unfortunately, that does call into question the recommendations on that page, which I already had a little worry about because Vanadium is their thing, of course they’re going to recommend it.
But I do genuinely want to know how significant of a risk this lack of isolation and sandboxing causes.
I too have a hard time telling whether the isolation features is a huge security risk or a minor one because things get too technical too quickly for me to follow.
Case in point, this website makes it sound relatively trivial just due 8 how technical it is (Ctrl+F for Firefox)
Google and Chrome both, for sure.
And Google’s definitely making Chrome worse too, but in a way that the average user won’t notice until it’s too late, ie once companies figure out how to subvert manifest v3 compatible ad blockers.