- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- technology@beehaw.org
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Fuck sake. Sick of ai being added into everything. Please dont ruin firefox
It’s remarkable really. They are competing against another browser which users have to actively go out and find, then install.
Some people are used to how chrome looks and that’s powerful glue, of course, but very few normal users (ie almost none of us in here on Lemmy) needs things beyond what both Firefox and Chrome does equally well.
The simple difference in adoption rate is this: Google pushing Chrome through people’s use of Google. Diminish the need for Google, diminish people’s discovery of Chrome.
Also, I cannot understand why they need this many people. If 5% of their workforce is 60 people, they have 1200 people employed. I can almost guarantee that Google’s Chrome team isn’t 1200 people strong.
Maybe Firefox would be better being smaller and more nimble. Maybe they should stop pretending they’re a company and start pretending they’re a foundation (which is what they are). 300 people working on a core browser seems a lot of full time people, still, and that’d be a quarter of what they are today.
Also, Mozilla’s inability to produce a simple interface for embedding Firefox is simply baffling to me. The reason so many other skin-browsers are built on chromium is that it’s a LOT easier to embed.
I speak as someone who’s run Firefox since the day it was born.
Well it was 1200 people at Mozilla, not necessarily directly working on Firefox. They have multiple products and they still need HR and lawyers and all the other support roles any other company needs.
Gonna have to pass on that one good buddy. Don’t shit up Firefox.
https://lunduke.substack.com/p/firefox-money-investigating-the-bizarre
$1B in assets, asks for donations that they funnel to political organizations.
paywall
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!
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.
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 incorporated bits and pieces with Quantum, 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.
That’s a very good way of me leaving Firefox behind…
If the past is any indication, it’ll either be off by default or you can turn it off. So maybe it isnt’ all the drama that people make it sound like.
Librewolf is a nice fork of Firefox
To go where, though? Lynx? Everything else is Chromium and that’s not much better.
To a Gemini reader. Kristall is nice. Lagrange is … interesting.
Am smelling a Firefox fork. Though if AI is anything malicious you can rest assured Debian folks would declaw it.
Librewolf. If all else fails I’ll pop my old Emacs config and browse whichever websites I can there
This is a pretty effective ad for LibreWolf
Gonna check it out. Is it foss? Didn’t find it on fdroid
Ahh, not available for androidDuckDuckGo browser is available for android
Yeah desktop only, as it stands today. As a person that only uses my phone to tide me over between PCs, I didn’t really think of mobile.
Mull is a good one for Android.
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.
Oh god dammit
Been saying the writing is on the wall for their enshittification for months. On lemmy. Every time I end up with 20+ downvotes.
Eat me. Here it comes.
Still using Firefox until it officially sucks, but if you haven’t seen it coming you’ve been willfully ignorant.
I expect a Ubuntu fork packaged with Firefox a la windows 98/IE as a paid OS in the next 5 years to try to undercut Microsoft. Or something. Idk the future.
Willfully ignorant until the end. single browser for everything will be worse for sure
oh hey it’s you! I actually thought about your comments as soon as I saw this headline. I switched from Firefox to brave a few years ago, then recently switched to waterfox as they are again independent of system1 like before. the browser itself removes a lot of unnecessary Mozilla integrations and also reverts the proton UI. maybe forks like this or Librewolf are the future for this browser?
Ah, the chromium approach.*
:D
No, I think you’re right. (I think people will strip down Firefox and those strip down versions will probably persist to be the ideal browser for years to come)
*I am aware that there is a difference here
That’s not the chromium approach. That’s the Phoenix (a fork of Netscape Navigator) approach.
Of course, Phoenix ended up becoming Firefox.
fuck firefox! it’s been full of bloat for almost 10 years now. Use Librewolf instead.
Weird to say fuck firefox and then suggest using basically just firefox instead
That’s not all of what I said
Firefox is full of tracking from advertising companies and Google now
Librewolf is Firefox without the bloat and with hardening done out of the box
Looks like I’ll need to switch to one of those browsers that only take and show characters I can type on a keyboard. Like F and U.
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’ll go when they go public.
That’s the downfall of every company
