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AI! CLICK HERE FOR YOUR AI CHATBOT. HEY DID YOU KNOW YOU CAN ACCESS AN AI CHATBOT? ITS RIGHT HERE. GO ON, CLICK IT. CLICK IT IDIOT. DO IT.
When I upgraded Firefox today, it prompted me to take a usage survey. Most questions were asking for my feelings on AI in the browser. I selected strongly disagree.
Is this electoralism
Revolutionary movement to seize Firefox when?
Seize (Fork) Firefox (the means of production) then develop it for the proletariat!
I have no evidence or experience in web dev, but my thoughts on user feedback surveys are that they don’t actually care what people think and they exist to manipulate the data to prove whatever they already plan to push.
Hopefully it’s an anti-AI faction running the survey
OOTL what did Firefox do?
So this is how I find out. This sucks balls.
Usually, I pride myself in having nuanced opinions. When generative AI was gaining ground and hype, and receiving pushback mainly from artists, I was sceptical, but optimistic. “Maybe this technology can be useful”, I thought, not eager to discard a tool only because people could use it badly.
Now, I can say that I hate what “AI” has become and that I hope that this bubble bursts before it can grow any larger. Not only it’s yet another huge useless drain for energy and water, but it’s actively fucking up yet another project that I care about. I get that Firefox wants to stay competitive, but it’s the worst watching it divert its limited resources towards useless AI and not to other much more needed areas.
Mozilla also announced some time ago that they were getting into the ad business. All of this really shows that at the end of the day they’re just another company, you don’t see many free software developers go ”noooo we have to put ads and AI into our Linux distro!”.
Yeah, I’ve been following it’s enshittification for some time, but idk, this AI stuff really struck a nerve with me. With ads, I can somewhat understand that they want to make their business more sustainable, which sucks for the end user, but at least it provides a way for Firefox not to die and we could leave the work to its numerous forks to not be shit. But the AI stuff is really nonsense, not useful at all, just a way for the company to follow the hype of the AI bubble, instead of making itself sustainable.
I can only hope that turning off the AI stuff at a code level is something sustainable and easy. I’ve used Librewolf for some time now and it sucks knowing that this will only add work for the project to remove Mozilla’s new shiny toy from the code.
Edit: maybe I’m just coping is all lol
Modern AI Browser
THIS MEANS NOTHING FUCK YOU
Reject Modernity
Oh no I’m a reactionary
Iirc, when this post was made in February: they quietly removed the “we won’t sell your data” clause in their EULA. After some backlash, they backpedalled “we won’t sell your data if you don’t want us to” so it became like an obscured opt out or something like that.
More recently, Mozilla’s new CEO is pro AI, wants to shift Firefox into an “AI powered browser”
They’re pushing AI features again
We just need something that keeps activitypub, gemini (protocol not AI), gopher, rss and like html 1.1 in one window. Maybe with like a RSS reader styled chronological sidebar.
!
I have been toying with the idea of building something like that.
Like almost an “everything-but-the-web” internet browser. (obviously not everything, but yeah, similar subset of protocols to what you listed.)
Just vibe code it. Can’t be that hard, right? I heard Firefox might be able to help you with that now.
But honestly, I love it. Maybe we need a protocol for webrings or curated lists so you also don’t need to search to find more interesting content.
I feel dangerously confident that using Python, QT and some libraries I could make one with my village idiot level skills in coding.
