this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2024
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We're in a lose/lose scenario here. Google has been inserting ad-tracking and soon will be nuking ad-blockers.
Then you've got Firefox wanting to implement AI soon at the cost of employees.
Is there really anywhere else we can go before both of their shit hits the fan?
I don't think we should equate Firefox's AI plans with other ones.
Firefox's AI will be trained entirely locally with data that you choose to give it, and won't send information back to Firefox.
By the sounds of it it won't be a chatbot either, but rather an aid for finding more sources, pointing out fake reviews, assisting in (offline, local!) translation, etc.
My two main issues with AI are unethically sourced training data, and hoovering up personal information when you use it. Neither are a problem for Mozilla's AI plans. This is how AI should be done.
Well this is the thing here. We're in an era of time in technology where we DON'T want people having as much of our data. Whether it's for good or bad use, we just don't want it. How hard is that for these companies to comprehend?
The internet was fine without this sort of thing. We were fine without AI. Why complicate it at all?
Firefox is open source, bullshit can be excised if necessary
Maintaining a browser is crazy hard. If Firefox goes to shit, it would require some serious foundation to maintain a good fork.
Yes, and expensive. This is often overlooked when people just say don't worry it's FOSS. The enshitification happens slowly, and by the time there is outrage about how bad it becomes the last non intrusive fork might be several years old and take even more work to modernize. I'm not giving up all hope, but you are correct, it would be a very ambitious community undertaking to keep such a thing competitive with the plethora of evil browsers out there.
I chose my wording accurately, I never mentioned maintaining the whole browser
Librewolf
We need a federated browser.
Uh, what?
WE NEED A FEDERATED BROWSER.
Firefox needs to ship with IPFS & IPNS built in, then we'd have a Distributed web. Which is I think what you're asking for maybe?
Sure, lets do that.
Like Tor?
TOR is a forked Firefox.
You mean Tor Browser specifically.
HTTP?
Opera, Vivaldi and Brave are descent alternatives.
EDIT:
Vivaldi (based on Opera, but FOSS and not Chinese) is still good.
I didn't realize Brave inserted referral codes, TIL.
No. No they aren't.
Brave is shady af and iirc Opera got bought by some Chinese spyware company.
I only listed Opera b/c Vivaldi is based on it:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vivaldi_(web_browser)
Vivaldi is absolutely a descent FOSS product, but will agree with the Opera sentiment and have edited my post more accordingly.
I'd argue Firefox is the descent alternative.
There are a plethora of sources out there of good reasons not to use these browsers. But seriously, Firefox is an excellent browser, treat yourself to better privacy 🦊
I only listed Opera because Vivaldi's based on it, but that's about where it ends. Vivaldi and FF are the only two I use tbh.
Each of which depend on chrome and google's decisions.
Idk why you're being downvoted. All of these browsers are chromium browsers.