Tech TangentsI have as much interest in "browser hopping" as I do linux "distro hopping". But I have a feeling the writing is on the wall for firefox with them integrating AI nonsense.
I'm also not crazy about alt-browser options though.
From Chrome land Vivaldi seems the best poised but says this:
We will not use an LLM to add a chatbot, a summarization solution or a suggestion engine to fill up forms for you, until more rigorous ways to do those things are available.
And from the Firefox side from Waterfox seems to be the goto but says:
Waterfox will not include LLMs. Full stop. At least and most definitely not in their current form
https://www.waterfox.com/blog/no-ai-here-response-to-mozilla/
Neither of these are a line in the sand that says "We will not use AI/LLMs". It's "we won't use them, yet". "Perfect is the enemy of good" cuts both ways. The alt-browsers might be more acceptable for now, but firefox has at least added the AI kill switch.
I see this as a battle on two fronts, against AI, and against google owning the internet which I am personally more concerned about. Without firefox, I don't think the gecko engine can survive. And then google controls it all.
I'm not thrilled about mozilla pouring money into AI stuff, but if I can disable it completely I might accept that as a compromise to not use a chrome based browser.
Jean-Sébastien Guay@TechTangents I agree with everything you said. I will not use any Chrome or Chromium based browser.
I've seen Waterfox lag behind upstream Firefox quite a bit in the past. Not sure if it's still the case.
I've been trying Zen which is another fork of Firefox lately. It keeps up to date pretty well with upstream, and my understanding is they disable all AI "features" out of the box so they're opt-in instead of opt-out like in base Firefox and you don't risk them getting reenabled by an update.
LarsF@TechTangents It's the same position I'm in. Google has too strong a position as it is already and we definitely need an alternative engine.