What's really funny about Firefox's new AI chatbot feature is you're probably *only* going to find out about it if it's by someone outraged about it on social media¹, because Mozilla snuck it in like a thief in the night.
¹ Sorry about that, by the way.
@mcc Firefox is intolerable.
Mozilla leadership has no idea what their product is or who their users are, and all their offerings will continue to rot until they replace them with people who both know and care about those things.
The only viable option is to run a fork that excises the increasingly large number of misfeatures they keep shoving in.
@mcc Yes, but it's better than nothing. I actually did completely back out the AI bullshit, but it was a 2800 line patch, and I completely get that fork maintainers don't want to maintain a diff that big.
My attempts to neutralize it in a more targeted way also caused problems, because it's all slapdash hardcoded everywhere and would cause a bunch of problems.
None of this is good. I would like a good web browser. Instead, we have The Democratic Party of web browsers.
This is a draft intended to spur discussion around the specific technical approach to removing this feature. Unfortunately, Mozilla didn’t add a compile-time flag to control this, so I went with the maximalist option and reverted *all* code related to this feature; the diff is, consequently, lar...
@mcc It's so deeply weird to see this thing appearing everywhere in the world entirely because how open the money spigot is from the ruling classes depends so heavily on it that ultimately it does not matter whether end-users even interact with it.
Like how nobody wants car alarms but they're ubiquitous because insurance demands them, except instead of loud noises it's severe erosion of reliable information-seeking on the Internet (and also there's a cult that thinks they're building god).
@mcc I’ve pretty much dumped Firefox based upon FF news and your Misadventures With Firefox.
I never reinstalled on my Mac when it received a clean install of the OS and I am migrating (it seems) to Vivaldi on iOS.
@mcc It sure does, thank you for the reminder.
I use my laptop so infrequently now, I haven’t decided if I’m going to unify with my mobile experience or not.
Pierre D🔤
mcc
Cassandra is only carbon now
PunnO)))
Don Marti
Heathen 🐈
Klara in the hidden land
Christina Jennifer
Christopher Brown
Mike
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