Stephane Audic . For Hire
Michał "rysiek" Woźniak · 🇺🇦Mozilla can't imagine a web without AI.
So I imagine there soon is going to be a web without Mozilla.
Why would anyone, at this point, use Firefox over Chrome?
Diehards like me are absolutely disgusted with the AI BS Mozilla is pushing down everyone's throats, to just mention one thing. We will find a fork, or eventually hopefully a new independent browser.
Anybody else doesn't give a fsck so why would they use a cheap Chrome knock-off Mozilla made Firefox into, if they can get the real deal for free?
Well done Mozilla. You outplayed yourself.
Mozilla is the browser vendor equivalent of centrist political parties.
> We can do whatever the fsck we want because who you gonna vote for, the actual far-right?
> Also, we need to try to out-far-right the far-right because that's where the voters are!
And then there's the inevitable surprised pikachu face when people just don't choose them.
Either because they vote for the actual far-right, not the cheap centrist knock-off; or because they refuse to make a choice between shit and crap.
If you're wondering what brought this fire and brimstone angrythread about, it's these two separate but related things:
https://transmom.love/@elilla/115564272417922503
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/ai-window/
If you're wondering what the alternatives are, it's kinda grim, but my personal way forward will be:
- @librewolf for the short-to-mid term
- @servo once it matures enough to be usable (really rooting for this one!)
elilla&, famigerada travesti (@[email protected])
If you haven't cancelled #Mozilla yet, check out https://tabstack.ai/ yes that's a captcha-dodger scraper bot for "AIs". as a service. powered by the Mozilla Corporation. now you know how they're planning to make bank. oddly under-the-cover project, isn't it? not even showing in search engines. I wonder why :thaenkin:
And if you're wondering why I had not mentioned Ladybird, this is why:
https://hyperborea.org/reviews/software/ladybird-inclusivity/
https://hyperborea.org/reviews/software/ladybird-inclusivity/
squareScarletCougar 🐱@rysiek "This project is not an appropriate arena to advertise your personal politics" but it is for him 🙄 would include women also be personal politics?
Wilfried Klaebe»Using the language of neutrality to keep people out.« - yep. Using "language of neutrality" to do something that certainly cannot qualify as "neutral". I'd consider that evil.
Dźwiedziu
Jigme Datse@rysiek I may have to use something like links, lynx or something. There's really no decent mature browser that I'm aware of. Chrome, is pretty much a no go. AI is very much a no go. I guess... I could just give up on a lot of stuff I do with the web...
Filip Lachert he/him@rysiek hmm, it's on opt-in thing?
@filiplachert the first thing, the AI scraper, shows that Mozilla doesn't give a fsck about consent and preferences. Whatever is opt-in now, can at any point become opt-out, or mandatory. I am not interested in seeing where that goes.
intru@intru not touching it as long as Andreas Kling is involved:
https://hyperborea.org/reviews/software/ladybird-inclusivity/
https://hyperborea.org/reviews/software/ladybird-inclusivity/
Oblomov
Heiko@rysiek @librewolf I'm also keeping my fingers crossed for good progress on the servo front.
In the meantime, I just learned that Fedora doesn't currently package librewolf, so https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_IceCat is the most available side-stepping option in Fedora-land.
A brief web search didn't give me a clear impression how those two forks compare. Maybe someone here has insights?
cliziə
KelsonLibreWolf also has third-party repos for at least Fedora/yum/dnf and Debian/apt in addition to the Flatpak.
As for comparing the branches: IceCat is based on the ESR releases of Firefox, not the latest release, and it goes further in removing everything that might possibly touch a Mozilla server, including the add-ons catalog. (You can still download an extension manually and install it, at least!)
When I tried both out earlier this year I decided IceCat was overkill, while LibreWolf was better balanced and more up-to-date. YMMV, of course!
Carl Myrland@rysiek
@zenbrowser is a nice un-AI-ed Firefox fork with some nice ideas, at least for desktop.
(Please don't tell me they're problematic as well...)
Luckily Mozilla isn't pushing AI for Firefox Mobile yet..
@librewolf @servo
the elder sea@rysiek
Except the web isn't America, and browsers don't operate under first past the post. So I can go use someone besides chrome or Firefox. And I am.
Except the web isn't America, and browsers don't operate under first past the post. So I can go use someone besides chrome or Firefox. And I am.
Diane@alienghic
Unfortunately at the moment, even vanadium and cromite are both forked from chromium. Ironfox works as a hardened Firefox base if that's your jam. I'm hoping that Ladybird will be out soon as a proper alternative.
@rysiek
Unfortunately at the moment, even vanadium and cromite are both forked from chromium. Ironfox works as a hardened Firefox base if that's your jam. I'm hoping that Ladybird will be out soon as a proper alternative.
@rysiek
lj·rk@eldersea @alienghic @rysiek Ladybird has the same problem except being not corpo. Lead Dev is a serious bit, with all this "apolitical development" space going on, respecting trans folx pronouns being political of course and CoC is evil.
txt.file@ljrk do you remember when the shitstorm hit Ladybird?
Cause since a year there is
https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird/commit/627dcb90bdd23ccfa2ae210d55b474ab4a844db0#diff-eca12c0a30e25b4b46522ebf89465a03ba72a03f540796c979137931d8f92055R51 and I wonder if this is a result of the shitstorm or was there before and Ladybird browser ignored it.
Cause since a year there is
https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird/commit/627dcb90bdd23ccfa2ae210d55b474ab4a844db0#diff-eca12c0a30e25b4b46522ebf89465a03ba72a03f540796c979137931d8f92055R51 and I wonder if this is a result of the shitstorm or was there before and Ladybird browser ignored it.
@txt_file The first time I called them out was before this change, but nothing of relevance has changed. They considered "If the user does X and afterwards clicks on Y, he expects Z" to be "neutral language" and *demanded* others to follow the same style. This guide still only talks about "neutrally gendered" but that can mean a shit ton of things. It also doesn't ask to respect the pronouns of the individual (maybe I /want/ you to use neutral pronouns, whatever that means?).
Outside of that, it's still "apolitical" here, "speak proper English" there and "muh, we are so professional" corpo speak.
They claim to set "ideology aside" but themselves promote a heavy ideology. They just don't see it, because it's their opinion and therefore right, and objective and no ideology.
@ljrk thanks for the summary. I have not looked much into Ladybird in the last months.
The "let me just exclude CJK rendering web platform tests" in each monthly Ladybird video already gave me enough bad feelings. Its okay to do this for a while Now I feel actually implementing CJK rendering would have taken less time than awesomeLastname used to tell people he does not care about their languages.
awesomeLastname as username gives also negative thoughts.
The "let me just exclude CJK rendering web platform tests" in each monthly Ladybird video already gave me enough bad feelings. Its okay to do this for a while Now I feel actually implementing CJK rendering would have taken less time than awesomeLastname used to tell people he does not care about their languages.
awesomeLastname as username gives also negative thoughts.
@txt_file Ugh, I didn’t know about /that/, thx for letting me know! Yeah, CJK /is/ hard given our very anglocentric computing platform – but nowadays there’s enough prior work to make it doable. It’s just clear that this dude is effectively a white-cis-het-male-supremacist (rather a tame one) and considers everything out of the society’s norm to be unimportant. :(
Krzysztof Sakrejda@eldersea where, pray tell, did I say anything about this being about the USA (as I assume this is what you meant by "America" here)?
Same shit is happening with all sorts of centrist parties all over the place. In some of these places some of the elections might not operate under first-past-the-post either.
The point is, Mozilla thinks that they are "the only real alternative" to Chrome, much like centrist parties think they are such to alt-right.
@rysiek
You didn't, but it's where Mozilla is based and it's a very familiar political problem. Any parliamentary system shows another way, let alone ranked choice or star voting.
Centristes are functionally right wing when push comes to shove, and basically the antithesis to "don't comply in advance."
I very much agree with you, perhaps my wording was poor.
@eldersea fair enough! 
Ati@rysiek Seriously when I first realised they live solely off Google money I knew instantly that is another "AOSP based" solution. By this I mean just distraction, another Google fund troyan horse waiting to reveal its true colors and diverting our attention from real solutions. You cannot build Google alternative based on Google money directly (Mozilla), nor Google money indirectly, in a form of Google code (AOSP). Whole Mozillas "AI necessity" I guess is just to feed Google AI for Google money.
Andrew (Television Executive)@rysiek chrome broke ad-block.
@ajroach42 taking bets here when Mozilla breaks it as well.
Which is, I guess, when a truly independent hard-fork finally emerges.
FediThing 
I think that's the breaking point for a lot of people where they would stop using Firefox.
Don Marti@FediThing @rysiek @ajroach42 The built-in programmatic ads on the new tab page are going to be intereresting -- https://www.adweek.com/media/mozilla-index-exchange-first-programmatic-partner/ (as far as I know you will be able to turn them off by switching the new tab page to blank)
@dmarti @FediThing They've had ads on the new tab page for years. We've turned them off for years. New ads, new off switches.
@ajroach42 @FediThing I'll still need to check if it's making a network connection to enable ?programmatic"
("Ads will not be targeted based on [data]" and "ads will not appear in [place]" are the future tense of "ads targeted by [data] will appear in [place] after a update")
p.s. It's not just a tech nerd sort of thing, it's basic usability. Adverts are so intrusive now that it's quite hard to use the web without uBlock Origin etc. Things like YouTube are unwatchable. there are adverts longer than the clips they're attached to etc.
I know an older person that I set up a computer for with uBlock Origin, and they find it so much easier to browse the web now. I'm also a bit more confident they won't pick up random malware from adverts masquerading as errors or fake news items etc.
If Firefox blocks uBlock Origin and equivalents, a lot of people would be forced to move.
Sara From Gaza 🍉🇵🇸
Vysogota> new independent browser
@rysiek unfortunately I suspect this will have to go through us nerds getting our asses off of Fedi and on some committees that are currently busy putting complexity on the web purely to aide surveillance capitalism. I am open to ideas how. 
Wait! I have an example! I bet everyone always needed to define CSS functions! You know to... To?... Well because CSS was not Turing-complete enough! (and not to put barriers to non-google browsers!!)
https://web-platform-dx.github.io/web-features-explorer/features/function/
Jean-Sébastien Guay@rysiek I am using Firefox because ad block is a security feature, and for now we can still disable all AI in Firefox (though it requires checking about 7 different settings stay disabled at every update). I agree this is not sustainable for most people. But for me it's what I prefer to do.
With how much AI has been pushed into Android, how long do you think it will take for it to be pushed into Chrome too? And probably no way to disable.
We really need another browser that respects its users.
@skylark13 I never said I would switch to Chrome or one of its forks. In fact I said the opposite multiple times. There are Firefox forks, and I intend to explore that space instead.
We really need to *fund* another independent browser. I'd like to see more activity around Verso:
https://gitlab.com/verso-browser/verso
@rysiek Sorry I misinterpreted "why would anyone use Firefox over Chrome" as you saying people should use Chrome. I understand you were more saying people *would* use Chrome. Not necessarily by choice but because there are no good alternatives once you eliminate Firefox.
@skylark13 right. And Firefox is becoming less and less of an actual alternative. By choice, simply because Mozilla insists on chasing Chrome.
Latte macchiato 
@rysiek And the great alternative is... Google Chrome? lol
@privateger I have supported Firefox since it was called Phoenix. I berated my bank 20 years ago for having a website that did not work properly on it. I moved countless people to Firefox over the years, argued for it in conference talks, articles and blogposts.
I am done. Moving to LibreWolf as soon as I have a moment. And then hoping Verso becomes a thing sooner rather than later:
https://versotile.org/
Mozilla does not deserve my support, has not deserved my support for years.
Dan Patch
SeigeA@seigea it's an insanely complex and security-critical piece of software.
There is Verso that I am looking at with some hope, but I can't say it is moving fast:
https://gitlab.com/verso-browser/verso
Edit: Verso is not maintained because it's no longer needed. Check out: https://servo.org/
David Gerard@davidgerard @seigea one can hope that new interest arises
Verso was using servo as it's engine, and recently servo released a shell for their engine, so you can download and run servo.
Though there's a crash with recent versions of gstreamer
https://github.com/servo/servo/issues/34911
There's also stuff like epiphany, konqueror or falkon.
Jinna@rysiek @davidgerard @seigea But also Verso the browser on their website is "coming soon" while their ML middleware has a website. So not super sold they even have the right priorities to be worth waiting for.
@rysiek @servo @davidgerard @seigea Yeaaah, ML leaves a window open to dish out some benefit of doubt, but then again, what is it that a browser needs the ML for? Could be they answered that already somewhere in a way that's completely sane, but felt icky enough to not dig deeper. And Servo has already seemed icky due to other factors. Not much light to be had out there. Edit: ick withdrawn, confused it with Ladybird. Careful hope to be had!
And if Samsung Web & Safari are beating Firefox, then what does it actually matter what we're building for non-phones in terms of market share. Well it matters to me, but probably not to anyone looking at browser share for what to test in. Bleh.
> what is it that a browser needs the ML for?
Firefox' built-in auto-translate (working directly on-device, no calling home) was a gamechanger for me, for example.
@rysiek @servo @davidgerard @seigea Yes, that's a decent reason, didn't realize it was local. Haven't used it that much lately since I can't pull it up on a phone on demand to translate something I type in but definitely has enabled in the past browsing plenty of German-only websites quite efficiently! I should try to get it on my phone somehow to try as an interactive translator, all the big name ones either suck for phrases And idioms or are missing Finnish completely.
Nath@rysiek The Verso web browser is not maintained because it's not needed anymore. Please read the note on the readme in the Github repo: https://github.com/versotile-org/verso
Instead you can follow @servo engine / web browser, which is in active development.
https://servo.org/
@roipoussiere oh I was wondering about that! Thank you so much!