This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
This is getting so sad and pathetic that it's getting really funny 😅
Mozilla is still being paid by Google so they can continue to exist and make sure Google won't be sued for monopoly behaviors, is it not?
If so, is it fair to assume that Google is just paying them to piss off the user base so that everyone will use chrome anyways?
If not, them why the fuck has Mozilla been doing everything to be hostile to it's users, for years now?
Mozilla try not to anger their user base with their new features challenge (impossible)
Yesterday I was nicely prompted to accept their ToS to continue using their service.
No mention if it was FF Relay, Mozilla acc or just Firefox.
Because I didnt want to blindly accept anything I went into the about:config page and disabled the banner.
Honestly: Fuck that.
The speed at which firefox has been enshittified is as impressive as it is sad.
...and we'll all suffer as climate change increases. None of this shit is worth frying for.
Dont worry the US and Israel are starting WW3 as we speak we will all be dead before then any way
Relevant section:
Smart Window uses ‘memories’, things Mozilla says “…it learns from your activity” to inform its responses.
You can delete memories individually, and you can set any given chat session to not use/store them.
Fine so far.
The problem? My memory list isn’t populated with things Smart Window learned since I enabled it. Oh no.
It has activity going back months. We’re talking searches and website interactions from long before I enabled this. features.
Firefox just handed that history to the AI models to plough from, without telling me upfront.
I found this the creepiest aspect of Smart Window.
Mozilla says this was a flub; it will refine the onboarding around Smart Window to limit memory formation to post-opt-in activity only. That’s obviously the right fix.
Because sharing a user’s prior browsing history with third-party AI models, silently, on feature activation, without any headset? Yeah, a bit icky – but that’s the price of testing features that are finished, I guess.
I'm willing to give them a pass since this was a development build and while someone probably should've thought of it, it's the kind of bug that can happen. If this was the public release it would be a lot more outrageous.
Finding out about this gives me some extra questions, though.
There’s also an option to bring your own LLM, with fields for model name, endpoint, and API token available for entry when the manual option is enabled. However, the page itself warns local models may not work correctly.
It looks like there's an option for people to self-host too. You won't have to send your history to someone else's computer.
If it's anything like how they handled the AI sidebar, this option is going to get hidden before it hits production.
F*** I really dont want to change away from Firefox. Pleas be good Firefox. Please! Don't F this up.
waterfox a better balance between firefox & LibreWolf
Librewolf is exactly the same browser with all the security features dialed to 11 and all the AI removed.
And it breaks sooo many sites.
Waterfox, is Firefox that just works.
And it breaks sooo many sites.
No it doesn't. I use Librewolf and this common refrain is FUD.
I used it for almost a year.
It took me ~2 months to find, understand, and tweak settings until I stopped running into issues with sites at least one every couple weeks.
I've been using Librewolf for about a month now, today I ran into the first problem, a website was blank but that fixed itself when I closed the tab and opened it again. I've been very happy with it so far. Sad to hear you ran into troubles.
I tried Librewolf for a while and found it to be a bit too much for me when all I really want is Firefox without AI. The privacy options are probably great but not for me.
Just installed waterfox. First impression is that I am super happy to be bock to the previous Firefox theme - it takes less space and looks nicer in my opinion. Seems promising. Thanks for the recommendation! :)
I used to enjoy AI a lot, and I still think the technology is really cool, but lately I'm beginning to despise it. It spreads and nestles itself into every corner of our life, and it rots whatever it touches, be it the humans that rely on it or the projects in which it's used. I see so many open source projects that are tainted with it, it's almost impossible to avoid it. It's sad. The generations that will grow up with AI will be fucked.
So sad for Firefox. I try to keep using since it’s the only solution free of Chromium, but I guess chromium will control everything only Safari will not be chromium.
Seeing AI invade open source is sad. AI slop contributions. AI integration that no one asked for.
For now Firefox derivatives are fine (I use LibreWolf), but many of those derivatives don't work on macOS because it "fails to verify that this executable is actually executable" (what does that actually mean?????????).
I had hopes for Ladybird Browser but now it's being vibe coded (rewritten in rust by ai for no reason whatsoever), and it's not ready yet anyway. Now I'm hopeful for Servo engine. It's in development but at some point it will be ready, and it bans slop contributions.
