86
Hang on to your Firefox! (www.newsonaut.com)
submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by inari@piefed.zip to c/technology@lemmy.world
37 comments fedilink hide all child comments
top 37 comments
sorted by: hot top new old
[-] JTskulk@lemmy.world 8 points 10 hours ago

The author mentioned someone switching from Firefox to Vivaldi because Firefox got on twitter, while Vivaldi is already on twitter. I see people make these same kind of brain-dead attacks on Firefox all the time, I don't get it. They just really want to hate Firefox for some reason. Like I heard someone say once that they switched to Chrome because they didn't like Firefox pushing AI. Are you kidding me?!

[-] Frettchen@lemmy.world 3 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

Who could be behind a hate for Firefox? Did you read it in your Google feed?

[-] Tattorack@lemmy.world 6 points 17 hours ago

I'm using a Firefox based alternative, LibreWolf.

[-] vhstape@lemmy.ml 32 points 1 day ago

I am not in the AI==bad camp because I believe in nuance. I see a lot of people shit on Firefox for integrating LLM-related features. What the blog post points out and people fail to recognize is that if Mozilla stopped maintaining Firefox, almost all of its forks would die. People make similar arguments about Canonical and Ubuntu. Would these people pay Mozilla or Canonical for their work? The corporate investors do. I'm not saying I agree with it all, but that's how it works.

[-] non_burglar@lemmy.world 8 points 21 hours ago

I see a lot of people shit on Firefox for integrating LLM-related features. What the blog post points out and people fail to recognize is that if Mozilla stopped maintaining Firefox, almost all of its forks would die.

You're misreading why people are shitting on FF. It would have been nice if Firefox had actually worked on literally any other features in the last decade, like not trashing support for PWAs. Instead, we got nothing but stupid partnerships with companies for features not one wanted, and a succession of failures in the CEO seat of Firefox.

So, yeah, I guess I don't think it"s realistic for Firefox to have ignored the LLM craze entirely, but man, they could have managed that Google money better.

[-] spongeborgcubepants@lemmy.world 1 points 17 hours ago

Aren't PWAs a niche fad?

[-] non_burglar@lemmy.world 4 points 15 hours ago

No? Most app versions of web frontends are a wrapper for a pwa (teams, zoom).

Ff dumped pwa support a while back, and it has only just come back.

[-] mannycalavera@feddit.uk 11 points 1 day ago

Would these people pay Mozilla or Canonical for their work?

I think we know the answer to this.

[-] Hakuso@scribe.disroot.org 1 points 1 day ago

Mozilla? Maybe, but they need to step it up to be worth paying. They were captured by Google supporting them for too long and need to break from the "Yes, Daddy!" dipshittery. Dumping slopboth trash into everything while my SSD replacement is 6x what it was last time I checked just makes me want to slap you. Especiallyh if it's bloody pointless, and for those who want that crap it can run via a bookmarked site or as an extenion not part of the core fucking browser.

Canonical? Fuck no! Not only is Ubuntu a complete joke, and was nearly twenty yhears ago when I tried and tossed it to go back to Slackware, but the only project they ever put out worth anything they abandoned and let it fall toa poorly supported community project making the phone OS.

[-] non_burglar@lemmy.world -2 points 21 hours ago

THEY ALREADY HAD THE MONEY FROM GOOGLE.

[-] formation@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 day ago

JavaScript developers seeing == and being confused

[-] Nalivai@lemmy.world -4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

if Mozilla stopped maintaining Firefox, almost all of its forks would die.

That's an assumption. You're severely underestimating the amount of work open source maintainers put into those things.

Would these people pay [...] Canonical for their work?

Plenty of nice distribs exist without being maintained by a corporation. Good on them, for getting to have a bunch of money of the opensource, but it's not a necessary model for the opensource projects to survive.

I see a lot of people shit on Firefox for integrating LLM-related features

And that's good, as it should be. They crammed this bullshit that nobody asked for, and reluctantly gave a button to opt out a year later, and it's still on by default. This is bad behavior regardless of your stance on it.

[-] berber@feddit.org 12 points 1 day ago* (last edited 29 minutes ago)

You're severely underestimating the amount of work open source maintainers put into those things.

Which Firefox fork is a hard fork? Which Firefox fork has a hard fork of the Gecko engine?

As far as I know, all Firefox forks are dependent on the Gecko engine, and basically have Firefox as upstream.

I would love for you to prove me wrong, but I don't believe any of these projects, though with many highly dedicated contributors, would be able to maintain active development of a web browser engine that can keep up with new modern web standards.

There is a reason the Ladybird project is taking so long to materialize and has many sponsors giving significant amounts of money.

Internet shit is hard. Firefox and their forks only work because Mozilla is fucking huge and has money to develop Firefox as part of the three big industry standard web browsers. Even though Mozilla does a lot of stupid decisions and spends the majority of their money on dumb shit, and they put dumb shit into the default Firefox that they ship, it is still excellent in many ways and the very best thing we have as a FOSS web browser. I encourage everyone to use Firefox with hardening or one its forks.

I agree with the article, and people saying "Yeah let's boycott Firefox, use [insert Firefox fork here]" every time there is a Lemmy post on a stupid decision by Mozilla are effectively not boycotting Firefox at all, or if they recommend a Chromium fork they are supporting Chrome/Google, even if they don't think they are. These forks are in essence just preconfigured and hardened Firefox/Chromium profiles with a few bells and whistles here and there.

[-] Nalivai@lemmy.world 0 points 20 hours ago

Why would anyone waste enormous amount of energy making a new engine, when forked Gecko works and you can backport Mozilla's updates to it. Same way with Linux, everyone uses Linux kernel because it exists.
When/if those project die, that's when you'll start seeing replacements, and at some point the best or most popular will be seen as mainstream and will be a focus point of all the enthusiasts. Like Firefox now.
There is absolutely no reason to believe that a corporation is required to have a good opensource project, just because right now a corporation maintains this specific one.

These forks are in essence just preconfigured and hardened Firefox

That's also not true for a lot of the projects. Forks maintain their own code, porting new updates from Mozilla's stuff, but they aren't require to port everything, and that's the big reason to use them.

[-] nkat2112@sh.itjust.works 6 points 22 hours ago

I love Firefox. It's great!

[-] toiletobserver@lemmy.world 9 points 1 day ago

Just use Waterfox instead

[-] goatinspace@feddit.org 3 points 1 day ago

Sandboxing it also good practice

[-] jjlinux@lemmy.zip 1 points 39 minutes ago

[-] eurodyne@piefed.world 1 points 1 day ago

Waterfox is nice

[-] kuiskaaja@lemmy.ml 1 points 18 hours ago

librewolf is even better

[-] MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 4 points 1 day ago

Firefox is our last best hope for browser engine diversity

Browser engine diversity died a decade ago. As soon as Google helped extend the standards, making browser engines the overengineered mess of today,xyou can barely get past basic html and js without a multi-million-dollar company/orgnization.

We need to start anew. You can do simpler with the same capabilities, if you drop the right "features".

[-] rozodru@piefed.world 2 points 1 day ago

I just use Floorp with my linux and windows installs. on OpenBSD my options are a bit more limited so I need to either try to compile Floorp for it or find something else (if there even is anything else)

Hell Floorp is even on Haiku. It's a rock solid firefox fork made by a Japanese dev team that doesn't release/update until things are absolutely rock solid. I can't even recall the last time floorp broke, if it ever has. good browser, always my go to FF fork.

[-] jjlinux@lemmy.zip 1 points 36 minutes ago

That's cool and all, but be aware that waiting for 'rock solid' could potentially leave some 0-days open without patch. There's always a trade-off.

[-] aproposnix@piefed.social 3 points 1 day ago

There is zero reason to not use both. The are supposedly a FOSS organization yet they alienate FOSS users.

[-] Wildmimic@anarchist.nexus 1 points 1 day ago

They alienate people who can't cope with change - but change is needed if Firefox doesn't want to disappear into irrelevance. They need to have as many communication channels open as they can, and they need to implement features that might pull in new users. They actually go out of their way to make sure new features are optional, so that legacy users can keep their experience, but even implementing the possibility of using LLMs in the browser (which is pretty much a standard thing in browsers nowadays) made these FOSS users screech like harpies - it's not like implementing a side view window (they already had those) that integraties a few API calls was a huge investment in manpower or resources. This behavior extends to the vast majority of FF forks.

I was using Librewolf, Zen Browser and Waterfox (on Android) before. Their immature screeching made me switch back to Firefox after many years. Privacy-wise i am pretty sure the loss of Librewolf's features are more than compensated by being part of a much larger group of people with my browser / extensions choice.

[-] HuudaHarkiten@piefed.social 4 points 1 day ago

Their immature screeching made me switch back to Firefox after many years.

Can you elaborate on this a bit? I've been using Librewolf for a while now and while I understand they take a sort of hardcore stance on the privacy stuff and its at times a bit annoying, I haven't had any major issues with actually using it. Though I did download Waterfox recently and have been meaning to give it a go, seems a bit more chill.

Anyway, I'm unaware of any "immature screeching" (mainly because of my own ignorance, not disputing that this hasn't happened, just looking for more information), could you expand on that?

[-] Wildmimic@anarchist.nexus -3 points 23 hours ago

Their stance regarding LLM code is simply not sustainable, because in the foreseeable future discerning between human written code and LLM code will become impossible. Every tool that can identify LLM code is at the same time the tool used for adversarial training.

In the end, it is not important where the code came from. What counts is that people who submit code take responsibility for their code, regardless of how it was created - because you won't be able to filter for LLM code, but you can filter for quality.

[-] HuudaHarkiten@piefed.social 1 points 22 hours ago

What is their stance regarding LLM code?

I tried to find it myself, but all I could find is about them removing AI features from the browser. I admit, I'm not the best at using interwebs searches these days (also most of the search engines suck ass anyway), so it might be just me not finding the correct thing.

[-] BigBoyShuanzee@aussie.zone 1 points 1 day ago

Only on Firefox on my W10 LTSC IoT desktop PC I've only used Firefox app on my android phone.

this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2026
86 points (93.0% liked)

Technology

87773 readers
3402 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related news or articles.
  3. Be excellent to each other!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
  10. Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots

founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
L3s@lemmy.world
enu@lemmy.world
technopagan@lemmy.world
L4s@lemmy.world
L3s@hackingne.ws