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[–] 277 points 8 months ago (64 children)

Mozilla has released so many self-described AI features in the past few years, but this is the only one that has:

  • been requested by the community
  • received broad critical acclaim

I hope Mozilla learns their lesson. I doubt they will, but I hope.

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  • [–] 111 points 8 months ago (25 children)

    sadly I’ll likely support them through any shitty decisions they make as they are the only viable non-chromium alternative these days.

    I get they’re chasing the buck and trying to stay relevant, but uhhhh… if they could be less Steve Buscemi-teen about it, that’d be great.

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  • [–] 81 points 8 months ago (5 children)

    I strongly believe that the EU should fund Mozilla, or a fork of Firefox.

    Gecko is the only viable competitor to Blink/WebKit, and it is needed

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  • [–] 23 points 8 months ago (3 children)

    Funding FF? Maybe. Funding Mozilla? No way, not with my money.

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  • [–] 3 points 8 months ago (1 child)
  • [–] 17 points 8 months ago

    Firefox is just the browser, Mozilla is the organization constantly wasting money on features Firefox's users are actively hostile to in a bid to tempt away people already using Chrome. Not the OP, but I'd be down to donate to Firefox's development directly, but I wouldn't want to make a donation to Mozilla hoping it would go toward Firefox, only to find out they took my money to build some new LLM integration that nobody asked for, only to sit unused for years before being quietly shuttered in favor of the new tech buzzword of the day.

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  • [–] 39 points 8 months ago (3 children)

    This is probably common knowledge to you and many others, but it bears repeating: You cannot donate to fund the development of Mozilla Firefox.

    Google can, unfortunately.

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    I'm pretty sure you can donate to Mozilla, are you saying that donations to Mozilla don't accomplish what we might want? I only know a little about how much Mozilla sucks so I'm ready to learn more.

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  • [–] 4 points 8 months ago* (1 child)

    There are two interlinked Mozillas: the Mozilla Foundation is what you can donate to, but the Mozilla Corporation is what develops Firefox. No matter how much you donate, that money cannot (or will not) be transferred to Firefox development.

    Mozilla's recent history includes privacy flub after financial management misstep, so here's a few links in no particular order of severity or chronology:

    Each of these are a little rabbit hole on their own.

    Would you like to know more?

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  • [–] 17 points 8 months ago (4 children)

    The ladybird devs are currently in the process of switching language again from Swift to Rust, using LLMs.

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  • [–] 13 points 8 months ago (3 children)

    Yup. Don’t use or support Ladybird, especially since it’s made by anti-inclusivity “keep your ‘political’ gender-neutral pronouns out of our READMEs” nerdbros.

    On the other hand, Servo is coming along nicely.

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago (2 children)
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  • [–] 13 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (7 children)

    I recommend Waterfox

    They have pledged to not fill their browser with AI slop features.

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  • [–] 7 points 8 months ago* (5 children)

    Last time I tried Waterfox some sites like Twitch that actively block usage on old browsers, refused to work because the latest Waterfox release was based on a Firefox like 20+ builds behind.

    Firefox was on like version 142 and the latest Waterfox download was based on build 128.

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  • [–] 15 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

    Waterfox right now is built on ESR 148, which is on par with the latest Firefox release! ESR releases will lag several versions behind, but that's normal (even on Mozilla's side), and I'd be kind of shocked if it was such a big gap

    Edit: there was a big gap. 128 to 140 was the right jump, but Waterfox non-betas took a little less than two months to implement the change after Mozilla released it.

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  • [–] 4 points 8 months ago (3 children)

    I have used it for twitch for years without issue. I also have ublock origin with twitch adblock.

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  • [–] 4 points 8 months ago* (2 children)

    Well you clearly haven't used the standard available download (non-beta/nightly release) consistently through last year. Waterfox was using ESR 128 since October 2024, kept that base until finally upgrading to ESR 140 last August. So that's nearly a year of its base being out of date. So the user agent reported that number... sites really don't like that since they're looking at that for support.

    https://www.waterfox.com/releases/6.5.0/ https://www.waterfox.com/releases/6.6.0/

    Twitch only supports the last TWO versions of Firefox officially and will actively block logging in from older versions. So while you might be able to watch Twitch, if you aren't already logged in, you won't be able to login.

    https://help.twitch.tv/s/article/supported-browsers?language=en_US

    There are thousands of posts about it online for Waterfox other forks.

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  • [–] 4 points 8 months ago*

    Yeah ofc they are chasing the buck.

    It's either they find alternatives revenue streams or we no longer have Firefox as a viable alternative anymore.

    Browsers development is crazy engineering heavy, and thus, expensive.

    It's a shitty situation all around.

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  • [–] 36 points 8 months ago (26 children)

    To be fair people liked the translation feature too

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  • [–] 16 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    TWP dumps your pages to google translate, no thanks. FF is on device

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  • [–] 14 points 8 months ago* (18 children)

    In the original announcement that they added translation, they didn't call it AI. They didn't even call it machine "learning" or machine translation there.

    They just called it local, automated translation.

    Maybe you should take your own advice about reading, and double-check my comment ;)

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  • [–] 4 points 8 months ago (8 children)

    When I turned it off the translation thingy went away, so I'm not sure if it was AI all along and they were lying about it or not. Just as well, there's an extension that works fine and it doesn't reload the page every time I toggled it like the built in one did.

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  • [–] 7 points 8 months ago* (7 children)

    The translation is technically AI, but it's a distant cousin to the LLMs and image generators that have repulsed so many people. (The term AI is such a broad and vague umbrella that Netflix recommendations count as AI.) And, even more notably, this is before Mozilla started marketing things as AI.

    It was also a joint non-profit venture with a university, rather than today's weird gimmicks or for-profit partnerships.

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago (5 children)

    In this case, the vagueness of the term AI is abused by its fans. "Aha, you claim to hate AI, and yet..." they say. They should know better.

    "Chemicals" is actually a great example. If someone said "Chemicals are coming out of that factory", you'd rightfully cringe if a factory manager said "well actually soap is made of chemicals too"

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago (3 children)

    Considering data centers tend to harm the local communities, yeah, I can't blame them for wanting data centers out of their community. Make sure they don't break the law to poison the air of local communities like Elon Musk's data center did. Fix the other electricity loopholes. Make sure they don't destroy local water tables. Tax them appropriately. Don't let them lie about employment opportunities... And maybe then we can talk about whether they should be built.

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    I think the part you're missing is that 1) it's my community too 2) they're not talking about AI data centers, or new data centers or anything like that, they're petitioning to ban all data centers, and 3) we have multiple data centers in the city already that no one complained about until AI data centers became a thing people felt concerned about.

    There's a major difference between the 2 square mile hyper scale AI data center that requires a nuclear reactor and a full water treatment plant to cool and the 2 acre data center that's air cooled and has no more ground pollution than any other parking lot and essentially a warehouse.
    The state government has two in the city, at least, for processing electronic tax records, applications and hosting service sites. We have a few national insurance companies that need to process all the things they process. A research university, and a web hosting company round out the list of ones I know about.

    This is my entire point about why sometimes it's really necessary to point out that what someone is referring to is only a small part of what the words they're using describe. The language being imprecise doesn't matter until someone proposes a law outlawing chemicals, shuttering all data centers, or banning AI.

    LLMs are problematic. My fancy rice maker isn't.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago (1 child)

    Touche. It is interesting that in this case, the differentiation between "AI data center" and "non-AI data center" is almost as important a distinction between "bad chemicals" and "chemicals" in general. I was previously familiar with the harm of living close to a Bitcoin mining farm, but a conventional data center, not so much.

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago

    Yeah, the conventional ones still draw a good chunk of power, and they're not clean but they're not dirty. Same as how a grocery store isn't good for the environment but you're not looking at them first for places to clean.

    They tend to be boring, and are usually not a public thing but just something owned by a company to house their computers. The only reason I know about the ones near me is I used to work at one and people would move jobs to or from other ones. (As an aside, a datacenter is a great place to nap if you like white noise).

    For a sense of scale:

    This is the site of an open AI data center. The yellow square is about 1 square mile and mostly encompasses the area they plan to/have filled.

    That angle shows more build out.

    This photo has two normal data centers in it. The yellow square is also about 1 square mile. I've highlighted the data centers in red. One is to the left of the square near the middle, and the other is down from the right side near the big piles of what looks like rocks. (Spoilers: it's rocks. They make asphalt). The sprawling complex in the upper right is a refrigerated grocery store distribution complex. The middle on the other side of the block from the asphalt is a coal power plant.

    Of the things in this picture, I'm most upset about the giant freeway interchange. Coal is shit, but it's a modern plant so it's not belching soot, just co2, and the utility is phasing it out anyway. The grocery traffic is mostly dead except between the hours of midnight and 7am when they do restocks.
    I can hear the freeway if I go outside.

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago (5 children)

    You're defending your position that this AI feature is not really AI so it's ok

    I literally say "The translation is technically AI," so no. I give reasons how the other features are different, which you seem to acknowledge a little, at least.

    the weird gimmick you don't understand is crucial to some

    Can you describe how to access the gimmick and which people find it crucial? I'm pretty confident in my understanding of it and how hilariously unhelpful it is.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago

    There enlies my point. Mozilla added a feature that is buried so deep in Firefox that you don't even know if it's actually there.

    It is there, believe it or not. I criticize these things, but I also tested it the day it arrived.

    But despite the way Mozilla buried it, the code is still there. It still makes Firefox more complex to maintain, and Mozilla still spent time and money putting it in. Imagine if Mozilla spent those resources actually trying to help people, instead of treating AI like companies used to treat blockchain: as a solution looking for a problem.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago (1 child)

    Please never develop any software for other humans without first developing any kind of compassion or empathy for others.
    You are the stereotypical nerd that doesn't understand people may have different needs than you, so I have to justify how a feature relating to accessibility can be useful...

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago

    I don't know which angle is more interesting, the fact your "compassion and empathy" started with implying people who disagree with you are stupid, or the fact that we both know that a hidden feature tangentially "relating to" accessibility isn't remotely the same as something that's crucial...

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 child)

    I tried FF translation a couple times, and it's woefully poor compared to Google's. What am I doing wrong?

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago

    Firefox's runs locally while google's runs on their (much more powerful) servers, for something similar to chrome's I'd just get the deepl extension, which does the same thing just better.

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  • [–] 29 points 8 months ago (3 children)

    Problem is Mozilla needs money and shoving AI features into shit is how you get investors these past few years.

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  • [–] 6 points 8 months ago (6 children)

    I think they’re desperate to make money since they’re losing userbass AND Google is probably not happy that most users change the default search engine away from them.

    Does anyone really think the current administration is going to break up Google? Lina Khan almost did it but like most of the rest of this timeline we just didn’t quite get there

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  • [–] 12 points 8 months ago (5 children)

    Yeah it's a catch 22.

    They either fail to get a big enough use base because their core users are not enough and they fail from a lack of funding.

    Or they try to follow trends to increase their appeal and user base, and annoy their core users.

    Most users don't realize that Mozilla is doing what Google is doing with Chrome with an engineering team 1/4 the size of the chrome team. And that the grand majority of their costs are engineering related.

    Browsers are expensive, and Mozilla needs to find revenue streams to pay for it.

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  • [–] 3 points 8 months ago (4 children)

    I believe Firefox could raise a lot of money through donations. If they make it clear that Firefox donations will be solely used for Firefox development. Also ideally add a quick survey to donations to see what the "donating" userbases values are. My issue with donating to Mozilla is that it is too broad and they have many products I don't care for.

    I use Thunderbird and donate to it because I feel it's more focused. I believe Mozilla still can use the funds for other stuff but at least I am donating for a clear project.

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