After installing a new interim CEO earlier this month, Mozilla, the organization behind the Firefox browser, is making some major changes to its product
Privacy aside, in my experience over a long time Brave load up and response time is significantly faster than Firefox. And Brave renders the windowing geometry and toolbars correctly on Linux, while Firefox does not. I also do not consider Mozilla free speech friendly or privacy friendly because of this:
“We need more than deplatforming”
There is no question that social media played a role in the siege and take-over of the US Capitol on January 6."
There was no ‘siege’ or ‘takeover’ of the capitol. Nobody stormed the place with guns or weapons. That is a fantasy tale. This choice of politically charged words turns the reality of the event into a fictional lie. This is all political theater. It’s a patent lie. Those who are going along with this lie to promote censorship are a wart on a worm’s rump.
A few FBI agents and FBI-paid provocateurs smashed some stuff and made some noise, then the clowns on Capitol hill who organized for and gave the orders for the FBI to do this, called it an “insurrection.” So Mozilla is promoting censorship and deplatforming based on a fake insurrection. Just. Like. The. Nazis. And. Communists. did during WWII to crack down on Jews, Gypsies, and non-Catholic Christians.
I dunno, having a free, open model made by a trusted company would be nice. I like initiatives like Mozilla Voice, this could be something similar. Probably not great if it’s replacing focus on the other things though.
I recall there being at least one content blocker that worked by heuristics instead of rulesets. Cannot remember the name, but it was clearly not as effective as conventional ones, because not all ads look the same and usually people want to block the invisible trackers as well.
100% agreed. I just hope whatever this AI they are thinking isnt about what info I should consume. What the AI think is good doesnt mean its the only info I should consume.
Specifically, Mozilla plans to scale back its investment in a number of products, including its VPN, Relay and, somewhat remarkably, its Online Footprint Scrubber
IMO these were their best products. 🙁
Going forward, the company said in an internal memo, Mozilla will focus on bringing “trustworthy AI into Firefox.” To do so, it will bring together the teams that work on Pocket, Content and AI/Ml.
I would assume they’re taking a hard look at revenue figures. I currently do use their VPN, but my impression is that it isn’t much more than a repackaging of Mullvad VPN. No idea about the other products. Is their Relay and Scrubber offering more outstanding?
Mozilla seized an opportunity to bring trustworthy AI into Firefox, largely driven by the Fakespot acquisition and the product integration work that followed. Additionally, finding great content is still a critical use case for the internet. Therefore, as part of the changes today, we will be bringing together Pocket, Content, and the AI/ML teams supporting content with the Firefox Organization.
Let’s skip the AI and give thunderbird some love instead. Then again, it’s pretty feature complete as is. Just keep it up to date to keep running and secure.
Lots of immediate hate for AI, but I’m all for local AI if they keep that direction. Small models are getting really impressive, and if they have smaller, fine-tuned, specific-purpose AI over the “general purpose” LLMs, they’d be much more efficient at their jobs. I’ve been rocking local LLMs for a while and they’ve been great as a small compliment to language processing tasks in my coding.
Good text-to-speech, page summarization, contextual content blocking, translation, bias/sentiment detection, click bait detection, article re-titling, I’m sure there’s many great use cases. And purely speculation,but many traditional non-llm techniques might be able to included here that were overlooked because nobody cared about AI features, that could be super lightweight and still helpful.
If it goes fully remote AI, it loses a lot of privacy cred, and positions itself really similarly to where everyone else is. From a financial perspective, bandwagoning on AI in the browser but “we won’t send your data anywhere” seems like a trendy, but potentially helpful and effective way to bring in a demographic interested in it without sacrificing principles.
But there’s a lot of speculation in this comment. Mozilla’s done a lot for FOSS, and I get they need monetization outside of Google, but hopefully it doesn’t lead things astray too hard.
A reminder that there are many firefox forks that exist if base firefox is adding unwanted things or you might have different wants, but sites will still “see” firefox in terms of compatibility. I’m using Librewolf with some annoyances (it doesn’t let things fingerprint to the point that it can’t even get your current time), but overall I like it.
According to the Librewolf documentation, fingerprinting can be turned off, but they recommend adding the Canvas Blocker extension in its place. That is my current setup, as I didn’t like that websites in Librewolf couldn’t get the correct time and time zone for me.
Here’s the direct quote from the Librewolf documentation:
If you don’t like the downsides of RFP, or you are not concerned about fingerprinting, you can disable RFP in the LibreWolf settings, or in your overrides. In that case consider using an extension like CanvasBlocker to retain at least a minimum amount of fingerprinting protection.
Kinda disappointing how much of the community just takes a giant 💩 on Mozilla whatever it does these days. Funding open source is super crazy hard folks. Notice that the really successful well funded projects are fueled by megacorps?
Offering constructive criticism is great but if you don’t have better ideas around how to fund an open browser without selling your soul to GOOG or MSFT then perhaps your energy might be better spent elsewhere.
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Privacy aside, in my experience over a long time Brave load up and response time is significantly faster than Firefox. And Brave renders the windowing geometry and toolbars correctly on Linux, while Firefox does not. I also do not consider Mozilla free speech friendly or privacy friendly because of this:
“We need more than deplatforming”
There is no question that social media played a role in the siege and take-over of the US Capitol on January 6."
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/we-need-more-than-deplatforming/
There was no ‘siege’ or ‘takeover’ of the capitol. Nobody stormed the place with guns or weapons. That is a fantasy tale. This choice of politically charged words turns the reality of the event into a fictional lie. This is all political theater. It’s a patent lie. Those who are going along with this lie to promote censorship are a wart on a worm’s rump.
A few FBI agents and FBI-paid provocateurs smashed some stuff and made some noise, then the clowns on Capitol hill who organized for and gave the orders for the FBI to do this, called it an “insurrection.” So Mozilla is promoting censorship and deplatforming based on a fake insurrection. Just. Like. The. Nazis. And. Communists. did during WWII to crack down on Jews, Gypsies, and non-Catholic Christians.
Mozilla can keep their voluntary fascist browser.
fuuk this AI bubble. the browser is one place where ai is not needed
I dunno, having a free, open model made by a trusted company would be nice. I like initiatives like Mozilla Voice, this could be something similar. Probably not great if it’s replacing focus on the other things though.
One feature that is currently using a trained model for local processing is Firefox Translations. There are good use for AI that can enhance privacy, but yeah the trend of slapping AI on everything because it is trendy to do so must end.
Actually I think AI in browser could potentially become a much more effective content blocker than ad blockers like ublock in the future.
I recall there being at least one content blocker that worked by heuristics instead of rulesets. Cannot remember the name, but it was clearly not as effective as conventional ones, because not all ads look the same and usually people want to block the invisible trackers as well.
You only need Bayesian filters for that IMHO.
100% agreed. I just hope whatever this AI they are thinking isnt about what info I should consume. What the AI think is good doesnt mean its the only info I should consume.
IMO these were their best products. 🙁
Ugh, god damn it.
I would assume they’re taking a hard look at revenue figures. I currently do use their VPN, but my impression is that it isn’t much more than a repackaging of Mullvad VPN. No idea about the other products. Is their Relay and Scrubber offering more outstanding?
The scrubber is also a repackage, but their relay does seem useful, as a barebones SimpleLogin/Addy.io at least
I love Firefox. Don’t screw it up, Mozilla.
Bet
I’m not sure where people are getting the idea that they’re talking about putting AI in Firefox.
emphasis mine
How do you interpret that?
Let’s skip the AI and give thunderbird some love instead. Then again, it’s pretty feature complete as is. Just keep it up to date to keep running and secure.
That interim CEO seems like they suck; I hope they don’t stay.
Apparently fakebot uses targeted advertising? I’m so glad i use Falcon browser as my alternative. None of this.
Oh for Fox’s sake!!!
How many people do you need to administer a Mastodon instance? I’m pretty sure infosec.exchange is like one dude.
Didn’t they have acustom ui though? Also their moderation is pretty strict
How is Mozilla using this ai? Or is it know yet? What are they using it for? How will ai benefit the privacy of Firefox users on the private browser?
Will Mozilla’s ai be open source?
deleted by creator
Lots of immediate hate for AI, but I’m all for local AI if they keep that direction. Small models are getting really impressive, and if they have smaller, fine-tuned, specific-purpose AI over the “general purpose” LLMs, they’d be much more efficient at their jobs. I’ve been rocking local LLMs for a while and they’ve been great as a small compliment to language processing tasks in my coding.
Good text-to-speech, page summarization, contextual content blocking, translation, bias/sentiment detection, click bait detection, article re-titling, I’m sure there’s many great use cases. And purely speculation,but many traditional non-llm techniques might be able to included here that were overlooked because nobody cared about AI features, that could be super lightweight and still helpful.
If it goes fully remote AI, it loses a lot of privacy cred, and positions itself really similarly to where everyone else is. From a financial perspective, bandwagoning on AI in the browser but “we won’t send your data anywhere” seems like a trendy, but potentially helpful and effective way to bring in a demographic interested in it without sacrificing principles.
But there’s a lot of speculation in this comment. Mozilla’s done a lot for FOSS, and I get they need monetization outside of Google, but hopefully it doesn’t lead things astray too hard.
A reminder that there are many firefox forks that exist if base firefox is adding unwanted things or you might have different wants, but sites will still “see” firefox in terms of compatibility. I’m using Librewolf with some annoyances (it doesn’t let things fingerprint to the point that it can’t even get your current time), but overall I like it.
According to the Librewolf documentation, fingerprinting can be turned off, but they recommend adding the Canvas Blocker extension in its place. That is my current setup, as I didn’t like that websites in Librewolf couldn’t get the correct time and time zone for me.
Here’s the direct quote from the Librewolf documentation:
Kinda disappointing how much of the community just takes a giant 💩 on Mozilla whatever it does these days. Funding open source is super crazy hard folks. Notice that the really successful well funded projects are fueled by megacorps?
Offering constructive criticism is great but if you don’t have better ideas around how to fund an open browser without selling your soul to GOOG or MSFT then perhaps your energy might be better spent elsewhere.
Train ai to I filtrate Google and kill sundar prichai.
It won’t help anyone’s bottom line but then at least sundar prichai would be dead.