TechTakes

2368 readers

23 users here now

Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.

For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

dgerard@awful.systems

137

Firefox browser falls to AI. What do we do now? (pivot-to-ai.com)

submitted 3 weeks ago by dgerard@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems

96 comments fedilink hide all child comments

where ‘absolutely not’ means ‘maybe later’

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c40irxnC_qM&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video
https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20251223-firefox-browser-falls-to-ai-what-do-we-do-now - podcast

time: 9 min 39 sec

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] AllNewTypeFace@leminal.space 16 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Presumably, if Firefox version N breaks ad-blocking, someone can make a hard fork of version N-1. Security patches, upgrades to OS support and things like new CSS/HTML features can be cherry-picked or reimplemented to it, though Firefox updates in general will not be admitted, as it’s a hard fork (in the way that LibreOffice or MariaDB is). At worst, Firefox will actively make it hard to do this, closing their source or changing their licence to one which prohibits it, requiring any updates to be reimplemented clean-room style, which will slow things down, though if the alternative is actively enshittified, it’s the least-bad option.

[–] sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 12 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

The good news is it generally isn't necessary to reverse engineer browser behavior when writing a browser. Since it's mostly fairly standardized, there's a decent test suite, and the major browsers are all open source.

Though this comes with some caveats:

There are exceptions like the CSS viewport spec which was reverse engineered from an iphone.
There are a lot of specifications because browsers have been around for decades and Chromium keeps implementing stuff, and it can be hard to find enough programmers to write all of them / catch up from a fresh start
This is a somewhat unstable situation; if we lose even a single major browser engine it's easy to imagine Chrome maybe not bothering with standardization and just telling people to read the blog posts and code.
Web pages will do nonsense like break themselves if you provide a User-Agent string they don't like. Mozilla has an ongoing compatibility effort where they sometimes have to override the UA string for specific pages. So less popular browsers are already playing from a disadvantageous position.