where is this AI bloat exactly? I use Firefox every day and see no difference
Mozilla is no longer about making a great browser. Mozilla is about making sure their Google bucks come in each year without fail. They don’t work for consumers anymore – they work for Google.
Throughout the years, the market share of Firefox has shank and shank and their C-Suite has continued giving themselves raises.
Mozilla Inc. has been very sick for a long time. It’s a shame that one of the last pieces of honest competition for web browsers belongs to them, because I’m not sure how much longer they will be able to shamble on like this.
As somebody who is out of the loop a bit here, how is Morzilla making money through Googhe?
Instead of trying to get Google money, I actually wish they would offer a monthly/annual/lifetime membership as the cost of not enshittifying to stay in business. And then severing ties with Google as a company.
A lot of tech companies are holding onto unsustainable business models from 10 years ago to make their products at a loss or “free,” and it’s forcing them into AI, oligarchy, or being beholden to oligarchs. End users paying a fair price to own the products they use is a better alternative than this because it puts the power back in our hands as opposed to tech bros and shareholders.
People won’t pay for that. Or, at least, not enough people.
We literally saw this play out with media. Everyone hated cable tv. Suddenly we had netflix (2.0) where we can “pay for what I want”. Except… then everyone got in on that because apparently we want things beyond Netflix Original Pictures and whatever they could get cheap out of Korea.
And now? “Ugh, there are juts so many services. I need like twelve. I wish there was one big bundle of everything”.
Not exactly the same but a premium browser (that, again, isn’t going to make anywhere near enough money to fund development) would be dropped even faster than the guy whose patreon is still “pay one dollar per episode”
Much like electricity, lazy boards seek the path of least resistence. What’s easier, building a world-class browser and properly marketing it and maintaining profitability, or just setting your default search engine to “Google.com” and cashing the massive check?
At this point, there’s very few people even left at Mozilla that could even reverse the trend. Go back and look at their past few years. Other than some minor activity to Firefox, almost all their initiatives are little side missions that last for a few years and then are sunset.
Stuck like Pocket, Mozilla Social, Firefox Send, Firefox OS, etc. The list goes on and on. They invest heavily in some flash in the pan initiative and then ax it off a few years later.
Do you have to enable the feature first? Because I’m on v141 and I don’t see this feature. Complaining about a useless and draining feature that you yourself enabled is a special kind of stupid tbh.
Bro, several users have taken to the Firefox subreddit, this is definitely worthy of being the most upvoted post on Lemmy rn
This is sarcastic right lol
Because people seem to have a special hate boner for Firefox on here.
And please don’t call me bro.
Edit: hate not hat
There’s a lot of negativity from certain users/communities on software/services that are mostly good but have imperfections. I rarely if ever see any recommendations for alternatives that actually make sense when this happens.
Firefox and Proton are two very common targets. Sure, they are both not perfect, but they are both offering a solution that does not enrich the current oppressive market leader and they do a pretty solid job at it.
Yes, flaws deserve to be criticized, but there’s such a thing as too much.
It’s tiring.
That sums it up pretty nicely.
Demon tech
Why does Mozilla think we want AI integrated in your browsers ??
Firefox really does seem to have lost the plot… they don’t seem to go five minutes without slamming their dick in another drawer. It starts to look like they’re in to it.
I never trusted them. Who would ever set up a nonprofit owned by a for profit company if not to decieve people?
I do appreciate the Open Sourced GECKO engine, though. I like Waterfox.
a nonprofit owned by a for profit company
It’s the other way around, the foundation owns the corporation.
Still feels like the corporation is the one making decisions though.
i think they may be referencing the fact that huge amounts of money have been given to them by google?
I was actually wondering why it felt like my Firefox was dying, possible could align with this.
TBH despite I don’t like this specific idea, nor use Firefox directly, I do like the usage of local inference vs sending your data to thirdparty to do AI.
They just needed to do it OPT IN, not OPT OUT.
It is though.
then why the fuck is this newsworthy? ugh. Why is there such a huge hateboner for firefox lately?
A lot of people would rather sit around and tear down the progress being made around them for being imperfect, than pitch in to help change things for the better.
I really don’t get it either.
It’s not like it’s a paid product either.
Literally no one on this green earth asked for this shit. In fact, we’ve been pretty direct about how much we don’t want it.
It’s exhausting.
Well, stupid people want it and they do use it when its shoved in their face. Like how samsung updated and BLATANTLY made their peice of shit AI button TAKE OVER THR POWER BUTTON so when you try to turn off your phone little old granny gets confused that an ai agent pops up and starts recording you. Absolutely infuriating and I wish torture on whoever implemented that shit.
It’s not a new updated it’s been that way for years.
No my s23 has no bixby buttons. Just power and 2 volume. Samsung DELIBERATELY updated so the POWER BUTTON activated their shitty agent. Only software shutdown was avilable until I changed.
Getting a linux phone when this dies. Fuck samsung.
Bixby was not llm based, originally, and sometimes updates will rewrite a user’s custom settings. For instance, I had a galaxy on which I made pushing the power button three times turn on the flashlight. An update occurred that overrode that setting by deleting it and turned on five presses to call 911. I ended up accidently calling 911 at 3am (accompanied by a blasting alarm sound) trying not to wake someone by turning on the light.
Bixby was not llm based
I’m not really sure how that really makes any difference though. I’m not defending their decision I’m just saying that it’s been around for a while now.
I’ve just pressed my power button five times and it does call, what I’m assuming is, emergency number. It’s the wrong one for my country (genius Samsung) so God knows what that would actually do, but it doesn’t auto call I have to actually press the call button. Maybe they received some user feedback?
Seems a bit pointless given the fact that I have to press the button five times to call the emergency services but their phone number is only three digits long.
That’s goofy as hell that the emergency number isn’t localized. I think the idea that pressing a physical button 5 times quickly is faster than having to look at the phone and select options. Idk, though, I don’t use it.
The kinds of people who want that switched to Google Chrome years ago. Only people who care more about software freedom than convenience are still using Firefox today.
Like how samsung updated and BLATANTLY made their peice of shit AI button TAKE OVER THR POWER BUTTON
Was that part of OneUI 7? I’m so glad I never installed that downgrade.
Yes, it was forced on me. I have updates disabled too. Pieces of shit.
It was. I’m struggling to find anything that was an actual improvement in the UI. Most of the changes were trivial and change for change’s sake; but some were awful, and none are clearly better.
It’s not their AI (Bixby). It’s Gemini. But yes.
Pretty sure this goes back to the second to last Note. It’s been a thing for years now
Power button became the bixby or google assistant button. It’s annoying as hell
Holy shit I had no idea until I read your comment. I thought “surely they will have respected all of my opt outs”. I guess this is my last samsung phone lol
You can rebind it
Mozilla has stopped working on developing and improving their products, and is now entirely focused on adding trendy terms and garbage, to feed money to their C*Os.
They in the last year or so added built in vertical tabs , much better hardware support for decoding video on Linux, continue to support manifest v2 and high quality ad blocking. Have increased performance and memory usage.
In the last 7 years performance is night and day different as is multiple process performance and switched away from unmaintainable old broken addon system.
They also created one of the premiere programming languages which is making in roads in the Linux kernel.
All right, but apart from the vertical tabs, better video decoding, support for manifest v2, high quality adblocking, increased performance, and the useful programming language, what has Mozilla ever done for us?
The aqueducts?
Oh. Aqueducts? Shut up!
@michaelmrose @swordgeek I 100% agree that Mozilla is important but it’s also clear that currently their is not enough business to keep Mozilla going. I don’t blame them for trying to make a Business , i blame them for not following their former values. You can make a business and still mostly follow values ( look for example to GOG ).
And what i don’t like the most is the change from opt in to opt out. Every new feature most users don’t want. You can argue that they know this and make it harder and harder to turn off those new “features” . The last time it was hidden in a sub menu in the settings ( switching off sending data to their ad service ) now it’s hidden in about:config.
I guess next time you need 3rd party patches and compile the browser yourself to switch a “feature” off.I would argue that it’s a bit easier to still follow your values if your business consists of mostly selling games.
Literally no one on this green earth asked for this shit.
This is why I use the version of Firefox that does not update.
Maybe check out LibreWolf. It’s Firefox except with good defaults. Otherwise, it’s exactly the same
Awful Idea? Anal Intrusion? Actually Irrelevant?Activating Idiocy? Adding Incompetence?
Altogether Imbecilic
Arrived in the Idiocracy?
Abominable intelligence
Absent Intelligence
According to the article, this is mainly for grouping tabs with a suggested name. Talk about backwards. Use AI to process the top websites on the Internet and create groups and/or logic to group them by keywords (cluster analysis), then save the small data structure in Firefox so it can group most websites instantly, using kilobytes of ram in the process; don’t try to do this on everyone’s device ffs.
Besides the heat and battery problem, this also means that the GUI is going to be non-deterministic, suggesting groups differently day-to-day based on the slight differences of input and the whims of the LLM. Burn it with fire.
Oh, so that’s what the fuck it was. I was wondering why my tabs were getting grouped without any logic or reason. Impressive ability to make everything actively worse
I don’t think the centralised approach works either. If you bake that grouping metadata of individual popular pages into Firefox you have an issue with keeping it current if page content changes. And you have a difficult trade-off between covering enough pages vs not blowing up the size too much. And the approach can’t work for deep web pages, e.g. anything people can only see when logged in.
Ignoring all that: The groupings you could pre-process would be static and determined over some assumed average user behaviour, not an actual cluster of a specific users themes. You take some hardcore Warhammer 40k fan, and all his tabs on minis and painting techniques and rulebooks and fan media, and apply the static grouping then it all goes into “Warhammer”. However if you ran it locally it might come up with “Painting” “Figures” “Rules” “Fanart” or whatever. It would produce a more fine grained clustering for someone who is deep into a specific niche interest, and a more coarse grained one otherwise.
So I think fundamentally it’s correct to cluster locally and dynamically for a usable result. They need to make it opt-in, and efficient enough. Or better yet they could just abandon the idea because it’s ultimately not that much use compared to the required inference cost.
The problem with useful suggestions like these is that they can’t be used when the MO is to shove AI into everything and anything to seem relevant, and chase the pot of cost savings at the end of the rainbow which is totally gonna turn up any day now, we think, we’re pretty sure anyway.
It does seem bizarre and woefully inefficient to run this process on-the-fly locally.
At least they offer a fix for it:
Head to about:config in a new tab, accept the risk warning, and use the search bar to find the controls.
To kill the AI chatbot feature, search for browser.ml.chat.enabled and set it to false.
To stop smart tab grouping, search for browser.tabs.groups.smart.enabled and set it to false.
They offer a fix behind a bunch of barriers? Is it not in settings with an obvious on/off toggle for the thing?
Why would they bury the option… are they being paid to include this AI feature or something…?
Just make it an official extension ffs…
I’m fine with them pulling a Pocket as long it dies in the end.
Firefox is a good example of “either you die a hero or live long enoigh to see yourself become the villian”
It’s also an example of a smaller company trying fight a mega Corp with infinite money, gained via unethical means.
People are shitting on Firefox while ignoring what they are up against.
I have no solution for their funding issue, what are they supposed to do? Charge for the browser or ads? There’s literally no other alternative and I don’t know what the solution is.
What I do know is that once FF dies and chrome fully owns the web we are well and truly fucked.
Honesty it might already be too late.
They could try asking for donations, while getting rid of the massive drains on their budget.
They could stop paying their CEO so much and hire a few more devs, refocus their identity on privacy and performance (their offline ai translation is actually really useful), and actually give people the sense that their donations will be well spent.
I could not disagree more.
Mozilla has used the most powerful cheat code in history: infinite money for free.
Google cannot let Mozilla go under or they would become an actual monopolist, triggering a lot of laws that would force them to diversifying/selling the browser.
They don’t want any of that headache so they’re pumping Mozilla full of money, making sure that they can always operate as “the other browser engine”.
The issue is that Mozilla’s management seems to be completely incapable of doing anything interesting. Instead of ensuring that Firefox is the lightest, most optimised browser on the market while also being packed full of features (or at least full-fledged add-ons, not this crap they have), they do… mostly nothing.
Their last major update was “vertical tabs”, something that Chromium-based browsers had for around a decade.
Their previous major update was integrating Pocket…
Meanwhile, PWAs still barely work, add-ons are still dependent on the website being loaded instead of working on the browser level, the whole thing still feels bulky.
Mozilla management needs to be replaced and then we might see some movement on the market.
You’re forgetting the fact that laws are currently only being triggered if said company slanders dear leader.
If Google kisses ass you best believe they would completely allow them to be a monopoly and would ignore any laws being violated
Hinging their entire future on the bet that their country gets an easily manipulated dictator, when said dictator is 80 years old already, would be extremely short-sighted from Google.
Mark my words: It will be Vance, not Trump who gets to be the first King of America.
The future is bleak.
I don’t know if Vance has a strong enough following. Trump is effectively worshipped by MAGAts, not sure Vance is capable of taking over like that.
That’s a fairly new development. And it might not last, depending on how the cheating goes next year.
So a more risk averse company might not test the waters just yet.
How does adding AI help their funding?
Are we pretending that lots and lots of people aren’t incredibly horny for AI right now?
Actual users hate AI. Shareholders love it. It’s a bubble and the business world is trying to force it everywhere they can to create a dependency.
Yep. Make the normies depend on the shitty Ai and kill the real internet. Makes me so fucking mad.
Correction: power users, such as the type on Lemmy, trend towards hating ai. That is by no means “all users” by any stretch of the term.
Nah, they’ve done studies and most people find it fucking annoying, worse, and don’t want to pay any extra for it.
The whole thing is an obvious supply side economics push.
It’s really annoying when it’s pushed in our faces everywhere. For getting a quick image of something you specify, or help with some boilerplate text it can be pretty neat.
Exactly.
People seem to think “if I don’t do X, that means nobody does X”
People are shitting on Firefox while ignoring what they are up against.
People are complaining about unnecessary bloat. That has nothing to do with them being the underdog.
Basically, Firefox only crushes a handful of elderly cats while everyone else crushes kittens by the shipload.
I have no solution for their funding issue, what are they supposed to do?
Stop updating their browser every 5 minutes. Software that already works fine does not need continuious updates that will sooner or later subtract value.
So is RHEL.
I’ll keep using LibreWolf as my main browser while keeping an eye on Ladybird with my fingers crossed.
