I don’t see them joining anything?
I mean, let’s be real, what major function has Mozilla implemented into Firefox that hasn’t been opt-out? And no, UI doesn’t count, I’m talking features.
The problem isn’t the existence of AI. The problem is the inescapably of it and how, under Microsoft or Google, it will harvest your data whether you like it or not. When you tell them “fuck off, leave me alone, and keep my words out of your AI’s mouth”, they’re not going to listen. Profit motive requires them to invade.
Mozilla is a non-profit, and they’ve long been very good about letting you opt out things, and listening. I’m not worried about them putting AI into Firefox, because I can be reasonably sure it will be optional, in a way I know the others won’t.
I’d rather they didn’t go chasing this car at all, to be honest, because they’re not likely to catch it, but whatever. They’re renewing focus on the browser and I’m taking that as a win.
I can’t contest the first point cause I’m not a firefox junkie, so I won’t.
What I will contest is that the existence of AI, or, deep learning, or LLMs, or neural networks, or matrix multiplication, or whatever type of shit they come up with next, I’ll contest that it isn’t problematic. I kind of think it is, inherently, I think it’s existence is not great. Mostly because it obfuscates, even internally, the processing of data, it obfuscates the inputs from the outputs, the works from the results. You can do that with regular programming just fine, just as you can do most of the shit that AI does with normal programming, like that guy who made a program that calculates the prices for japanese baked goods and also recognizes cancer, right. But I think AI is a step further than that, it obfuscates it more. I kind of am skeptical of it’s broad implementation.
For trivial use cases, it’s kind of fine, but I think maybe use cases we might consider trivial, otherwise are kind of fucked, maybe. AI summary of an article? I dunno if that’s good. We might think, oh, this is kind of trivial because the user should just not really trust what the AI says, but, as with all technology, what if the user is an idiot and a moron? They might just use it to read the article for them, and then spout off whatever talking points and headlines it gives them. I can’t really think of a scenario where that’s actually a good thing, and it’s highly possible. It might make it easier to parse an article, like that, but I don’t think that’s actually a good or useful tool, it’s just presented a kind of illusion of utility, most especially because it was redundant (we could just write a summary and have it at the top of the article, like every article on the face of the earth), and it was totally beyond our control, at least, in most circumstances.
Also, the Mozilla Foundation is nonprofit, but the Mozilla Corporation is not. The Foundation manages the Corp, which manages Firefox development. So depending on which one you’re referring to, it might be a non-profit, or it might not be. In any case, the nonprofit is a step removed from Firefox development, which I think is an important side-note, even if it’s not actually that relevant to whatever conversations about AI there might be.
Perhaps, comically, it is the perfect representation of the world as it is now: “knowledge” in people’s brains is created by consuming whatever source aligns with the beliefs that they think are theirs. No source or facts are required. Only the interpretation matters.
We already have AI in Firefox. And not gonna lie, offline (I.e. absolutely private) translations for webpages is pretty neat.
It’s really good but I do wish it supported more languages like Russian or Japanese. So far most of the times I have had to translate a page, Firefox didn’t support the language.
It’s really good but I do wish it supported more languages like Russian
It’s never too late to learn the language of enemy!
Да
This. It has held back adoption for me. I want translations in my language of choice and it’s simply not one of the very few options of languages available. AI could help with this.
Things to add to your product when you want to look hip and trendy, but dont have any real ideas how to make your product better:
- 1990s: visitor counter
- 1995: Popups
- 2000s: flash intros
- 2005: stock photography
- 2010: local weather widget
- 2015: share to social media widgets
- 2020: fullsize 4k background stock videos
- 2024: AI assistant
1995: animated gifs, , guest books, site rings!
“Under Construction” GIF
I’m not sure if you remember, but site rings were what you used instead of Google. They were useful.
And I’ve seen some guest books with lots of people at some point in my childhood, but about half a year after that everybody firmly chose in favor of hierarchical boards.
And I don’t share that hate for , it served the purpose of showing you a long line in a small space, implicitly saying that it’s secondary temporary information, a bit like on TV.
And what’s wrong with animated GIFs, animation is nice.
You forgot about blockchain and NFTs.
Remember all those IE toolbars?
I got enough installed once to fill the whole screen.
Ugh…please don’t remind me.
I miss guest books tbh
They would be abused by spam bots in an instant, even before you could write your own “welcome to my guestbook” post.
So you’ve never had one of those bot blocking capcha things?
And yet Microsoft added a weather (and bullshit) widget to windows in like 2020
I suppose many people were already using a third-party Aero widget for weather forecast since Windows 7.
I know I did.
visitor counter
I actually liked those.
flash intros
These could be used to create right atmosphere.
local weather widget
Back then I hated those, but maybe showing local weather on desktop is not such a bad thing.
share to social media widgets
Hate. Hate. Hate.
It really grinds my gears. Why does my bank insist on installing an app to approve transactions, and why does that app have a huge background video playing every time i open it? It really should consist of an MFA code generator.
2015: share to social media widgets on porn sites
How about, and run with me on this, Mozilla stops trying to be Microsoft and Google and instead just provides the cleanest, most barebones-yet-privacy-oriented browser? Will they ever have market dominance? No, and they never will even with AI tools. Fuck AI and what it’s doing to the planet and fuck all of the capitalists enshittifying The Last Browser.
We need a new Foundation willing to develop a fork.
A browser could be top dog if it was just less shitty than the others, like the Brother printers, that print without bloatware and mob tactics of HP.
We want a browser that just browses.
But what about AI ? It has to be everywhere! Somebody please think about adding AI to Firefox! I need it to do ???
/s
At this point the only thing that could save Firefox is a rewrite
In Rust, right?
RIGHT?!?
No! Not again!
uggggggggggh. I’m using Firefox because chrome is really going too far with it’s manifest v3 garbage killing decent adblockere and Firefox is basically the only non chromium based option. Please for the love of everything that is holy. Just. Make. Your. Browser. Better. Don’t need ai gimmicks. Definitely don’t need to lay people off. You need to get back on track. Holy heck. This is the worst.
AI will be great for translation of webpages locally instead of sending content over the wire
I can get behind this if everything is processed locally. Let my computer do the computing and stop harvesting my data, internet
Firefox already has that as a built-in feature on desktop version.
If the only use case is translation, that’s probably not a good business case.
That’s not the only use case. It could read a 400 page pdf locally and summarize it for you, answer questions and find which slide the data you want is on.
The use cases are only limited by how powerful the AI is
My brother, I weep with you and agree with angrily gritted teeth at all your words.
its* manifest v3 garbage.
FUCKING NO MOZILLA YOU WERE OUR LAST FUCKDAMN HOLDOUT
they sold out to google and other advertising trackers a long time ago. Librewolf
Gonna have to pass on that one good buddy. Don’t shit up Firefox.
why the fuck would I need an AI in a browser? 0 fucks given for this “feature”. firefox is devolving into an edge.
Nowadays we are supposed to need AI everywhere. I’m waiting for my AI bidet so that I can chat with it when I do my business.
“What is my purpose?”
“You wash my asshole when I poop”
“Oh my god”
Edge? Think Clippy.
“It looks like you are browsing porn. Can I help?”
That could be useful… Find more X person/stuff…
I think an AI that finds porn across the entire web that meets specific search criteria or is like an example would be a hit.
You already have AI in Firefox - local translations for example. Developing local AI aligns perfectly well with Mozilla’s goals, but it seems people panic as soon as they see the two letters together.
Desperate to gain marketshare, fucking samsung to apple. I hate it and I have no other options left after Firefox is enshittified
Theoretically I can imagine AI in the browser to be awesome to combat AI on the web. Let the AI wars begin!
You really have no fuckdamn naive your statement is. You don’t want an AI war and we cannot avoid one.
I know there is currently a massive PR campaign for a power grab to consolidate control over AI software. They want to control the means of generation. Only MozillAI can save us from King GhAIdorah!
Sorry I’m upsetting you. I know we’re entering an acceleration of technology at a time where our institutions globally are in an absolutely horrendous state. People on all sides are brainwashed as hell. The AI watchdogs are insane as well. What’s left but gallows humor? I do hold out some hope though.
You cannot upset me more than the current common misunderstandings that everyone has about AI already does.
I don’t think you understand the implications of undetectable AI to shift social conversation or the kind of world that those AI owners want to create.
That might actually be the kind of thing where open source AI could help. At least I hope. To detect bias, lies or AI powered filtering / sorting of content.
Ok so this is one of the naive thoughts that makes me upset.
The open source community can’t even make a distro of linux that is out of the box functional for everyday users and you think somehow they are going to be able to outcompete billion dollar companies that can afford the best gear and devs?
Look, I bought in heavy to open source early on in the 90s, and have done my best to go open source for every tool I can, but the simple fact is that even the ‘best’ open source projects are severely lacking in aspects and YOU CAN’T TRUST DEVELOPMENT OF AI TO THAT.
Compare The Gimp to Photoshop. It isn’t even close, why? Because Adobe has a fucktonne of cash to throw at their projects and they have clear direction and motivation.
I don’t like it
I’d prefer a fully open source world
But it isn’t going to happen, and open source AI will always lag behind corporate AI, and considering how fast it has been developing, even being 3 months behind renders a tool useless as an AI detector.
We aren’t prepared for this and 90% of what everyone on the internet says about AI is poorly informed and full of confabulation, and WORST of all, when you try and explain this to them they get antagonistic.
We have already seen the threat AI can pose in 2016 with Cambridge Analytica helping to hand trumpty dumpty the election by using AI to focus target vulnerable facebook groups.
AND THAT AI WAS A FUCKING INFANT compared to what we have now.
It’s going to be so bad and almost none of you have the slightest clue.
See, THIS is the criticism of AI I can actually empathize with, I might even agree with it somewhat
Honestly, most of what Cambridge analytica did was blackmail, illegal spending, and collusion between campaigns that were legally required to be separate.
Much of the data processing/ml was intended as a smoke screen to distract from the big stuff that was known to work and consequently legislated against. The problem is that they were so incompetent that the distraction technique was also illegal.
Maybe the machine learning also worked, but it’s really not clear.
Fuck sake. Sick of ai being added into everything. Please dont ruin firefox
You were the Chosen One! It was said that you would destroy the Sith, not join them! Bring balance to the browsers, not leave it in darkness!
I want a upvote for sharing, down vote the concept button. I hate it.
As much as I hate it, think it’s a terrible part for a free, open, and secure web; it’s probably a solid business move based on the hype.
Votes are meant only to increase or decrease visibility, especially on Lemmy where karma doesn’t exist.
still, it’d be nice to have a “upvote, but fuck this content” button
gotta add emoji reactions on posts
The “upvote good, downvote bad” mentality needs to die. As others have said, the arrows are to promote/reduce visibility of content. Whether you agree with the content of the post should be irrelevant.
People have been saying some variant of this at least as far back as Slashdot in the late 90s. Nobody has come up with a viable way to change peoples habits.
Instead of fighting it, what can we do knowing that this is how it works?
New idea I’ve just come up with, we make it so, before upvoting or downvoting something, you have to press a button, and then wait at least a minute, or, better yet, solve a captcha, and then you don’t even have to have accounts anymore and that takes about a minute. The only people upvoting or downvoting will be those who are really reflecting on what it is that they’re doing, or the people who are really really committed and pissed off about something. I’m sure the latter won’t happen like, ever.
That’s precisely how it’s being used now though. People don’t want things they don’t like to be seen, so they downvote.
Obviously. I’ve just got two emotions about the content I want to show.
I think maybe that’s exactly how people are using it, it’s just that most people aren’t thinking “oh, well, this post made me a little mad or uncomfy, but I like the content and discussion that it’s spurned, so I’ll toss it an upvote”. I think most people are more inclined to go “THIS POST MADE ME MAD! GRUG DOWNVOTE!”. It doesn’t even really not make sense, it would be kind of insane to spend like, even just a minute, thinking consciously about every single upvote or downvote you make, it would take a million years for anyone to ever upvote or downvote anything, and a lot of people would just not engage unless they were really committed, which doesn’t necessarily map to their level of discernment, but might just instead map to how mad people could get over a given thing. Plenty of people could get mad enough about a thing to sit through a minute long wait period to downvote something.
Think of the up vote button more as a “this information is worth spreading” button than “I like or agree with this content”.
🤦
Enshittification continues.
I wonder when Steam will go.
i literally dont open the steam client anymore, that’s how bad it is, it regularly consumes an ENTIRE gigabyte of ram doing literally nothing in the background, the UI is buggy, messy, and just generally hard to navigate. It’s also just not a very good platform, steam doesn’t have a particularly good linux release binary.
I actually cannot stand steam anymore.
“Doing nothing” is probably downloading an update. There’s also a difference between reserved RAM and actually used one.
For example .NET applications grab RAM when they need it, but they don’t just free it afterwards if not necessary (Like it needs 1 GB, uses that, but when the work is done your task manager keeps showing 1 GB). This helps performance, if the application needs RAM again a short time later it’s already reserved and ready to go.
The whole behavior changes when Windows is low on free RAM, then applications are forced to free up their reserved RAM so you don’t start swapping too much.
Overall this means: The more RAM your system has the higher the perceived RAM usage of your system. Unused RAM is wasted RAM and it’s easy to free up some if you actually hit the limit. As long as your RAM is not full applications will happily use more and hold onto it to be more responsive.
everybody says this in response to my statement. Steam is doing NOTHING. I’ve checked, it’s not downloading an update, it’s not pre compiling shaders, it’s not caching them, it’s not doing ANYTHING. I don’t know if people just don’t understand how obscene this is, or think im just wrong.
Heroic, a launcher for both epic games, and GOG. idles similarly to steam uses a bit less ram though, launches multiple times faster, and is much more usable. And this is ANOTHER web app.
I use linux, it reports as used ram, not cached ram. Again, im not wrong. I understand the concept of caching ram, i understand the concept of actively used ram, this is not cached ram. That’s also not a very complete explanation of ram caching, ram caching helps in the event that you use that same information, that was already cached. For example, you open a game, or a project, and then close it, it’s pretty likely that some of that will be cached, so that way when you open it again, it launches quicker (particularly if you open and close it multiple times)
again i use linux, i literally hand formatted my swap partition, i understand how this works. Also generally, how swapping works, is that it actually swaps cached ram into swap, and only upon swap being filled or almost full, does it actually start to clear cached ram. This may not be the default behavior on windows though, since solidstate drives handle different these days. But this is the default on linux (configurable obviously)
The last tidbit is not quite true, it’s true to a point, your system will idle at a higher memory usage, the fundamental problem here is different, actually unused ram is wasted ram, having too much ram, does actually just waste ram. (though im sure linux would absolutely love to use it for cache) Caching everything is an obscene proposition, considering that most people don’t have a lot of ram. Chances are, if you have 16 gb of ram, and upgrade to 32, you will see a bump in max used ram, and overtime cached ram. However when we upgrade from 32 to 64 in this same scenario, you probably won’t notice a change at all, except for the outliers in the data. Though i suppose you might cache more things, but at that point it really doesn’t matter tbh.
It’s compounded by applications being heavily bloated and stupidly non performant, i would argue it matters more to have more efficient usage of ram application wise, than it would be to have better ram management OS wise. This should be fairly simple to understand why. An application using 1GB of memory, when in reality it should be capable of using as little as 250MB for instance, is the single worst form of wasted memory you can possibly create, because that memory CANNOT be used for anything else. Period, until the application is no longer running.
That said, again to reiterate my original point here, steam on idle, closed, in the background, not in the foreground, no updates, no game updates, etc… Consumes an entire gigabyte of ram. Why? Because the web front end runs at ALL times, for some reason. Steam is running an entirely separate web browser installation, 24/7 because, why not i guess? Fun fact, you used to be able to disable it under linux, and steam ram usage would drop to under 200MB.
Here’s another funny pain point of ram caching, when dedicated applications like discord, and steam, start using web backends, you compound this with software bloat, they all use a web backend, and instead of running on a single web browser like all of your tabs, they now run in THREE separate web browsers, thats THREE times the idle wasted ram, because you have three separate web browsers, all running, and all individually sandboxed. This is actually just bad ram management, inherently. It’s more secure i suppose, provides a development benefit, technically. But to the end user, and the ram itself, harms it actively.
Ah, I didn’t expect it to be actually used RAM. Maybe this is a Linux issue with the Steam build then? Here is my Windows 11 task manager, Steam just downloaded 10 different game updates (so did plenty of work) and is now idle:
In total 516.5 MB RAM on a machine with 32 GB (22 GB free at the moment), if there was any pressure on RAM usage it would probably go down further.
Either way, since upgrading to 32 GB RAM nearly a decade ago I haven’t had a single issue with RAM usage (While with 16 GB I actually had games in the past where I ran out of memory). So it’s no big deal as far as I’m concerned and if I’d actually run any applications that needs tons of RAM I’d quickly upgrade to 64 GB and be done with it.
The only way this would be annoying is on low-end machines, like 4 or 8 GB RAM in total, but those have plenty of issues anyway in regards to games (otherwise why would you install Steam?). On a high-end machine complaining about 1 GB of RAM is a waste of time in my opinion, there are a ton of better topics you can rage at.
it could very well be a linux build issue, it wouldn’t surprise me honestly. The main telling thing for me though is that heroic uses the same if not more ram, and is actually many times more performant.
My main problem with the ram usage is that steam takes equally as long to launch as it does to boot a game, which is super annoying, not including any updates it hasnt performed yet. Heroic launches faster than my web browser does, even though its literally an electron app.
I wouldnt really care how much ram it used if i could just close it when i was done with it, and have it go away, but it’s such a mess that’s not really feasible.
The whole “just buy more ram” is not really a solution im a fan of. My system has 16GB. which is fine most of the time, it gets stretched sometimes, most of that ram is used by browsers, (because three different containerized browsers run simultaneously for some reason) so my idle ram quickly becomes 8GB. 8GB is still a lot of available ram though, if steam didn’t use an additional gig on top of that it would only be beneficial. Maybe i’m just too jaded in general. But saying just get more ram is kind of like saying “just repair a cracked back glass on a phone” When i never wanted to have a piece of glass on the back of my phone which could get broken in the first place.
Although to preface this, i AM a linux user, and i can routinely enjoy a machine with 4GB of ram through the magic of non shit software. i3 + debian cooks. Idle ram usage under 100M is trivial when you aren’t running any bloat. In fact, my server actually on average, uses less ram than my workstation. It’s probably sitting at like 4GB util right now, running a handful of services, and a handful of game servers.
Whyyyy Mozilla? I want to love you, rally, but you wont let me.
You may be in an abusive relationship with your browser. 💔
as Firefox is the only browser that can’t trace its lineage back to Apple and WebKit
What a slap on Konqueror’s face.
And text only browsers too.
I don’t really see it this way it’s just marketing. Saying “all other browsers descend from big bad corporate Apple” is scary, saying “all other browsers descend from another open source project” is meh.
“It’s all KHTML”, I heard.
You have a point. But still, they could have added an “ackshually” footnote or something.
Unfortunately, KHTML was discontinued in 2023 (according to Wikipedia)
I mean yes no kinda Konqueror simply accepted a bunch of downstream patches, including a name change.
…more or less. It could for a long time use all three of KHTML, WebKit (fork of KHTML) and QtWebEngine (Blink wrapped for Qt, that is, a fork of WebKit), they recently removed KHTML support because noone was updating it and it hadn’t been the default for ages.
If they hadn’t implemented multi-engine support in the past they probably would’ve switched over to “whatever Qt provides” right-out, it’s KDE after all. Ultimately they’re providing a desktop, not a web browser. Back in the days they did decide to roll their own instead of going with Firefox but it was never a “throw project resources at it” kind of situation, there were simply KDE people who felt like working on it. Web standards were a lot less involved back around the turn of the millennium, and also new and shiny. Back in the days people thought that HTML 4.01 Strict and XHMTL would be a thing that servers actually would start to output instead of the usual tagsoup.
If you’re that kind of person right now I’ll point you in the direction of Servo. No, Firefox doesn’t use it and it’s not a Mozilla project any more, Firefox only included (AFAIK) parallel CSS handling, the rest is still old Gecko.
That’s quite the bummer. But still. Saying that almost all browsers can trace their lineage to Apple and Webkit is technically correct, but it’s just a half-truth. As Apple and Webkit were once based on KHTML.
