no surprises here, Mozilla’s earlier stated goal of focusing on local, accessibility-oriented AI was just entryism to try to mask their real, fucking obvious goal of shoving integrations with every AI vendor into Firefox:

Whether it’s a local or a cloud-based model, if you want to use AI, we think you should have the freedom to use (or not use) the tools that best suit your needs. With that in mind, this week, we will launch an opt-in experiment offering access to preferred AI services in Nightly for improved productivity as you browse. Instead of juggling between tabs or apps for assistance, those who have opted-in will have the option to access their preferred AI service from the Firefox sidebar to summarize information, simplify language, or test their knowledge, all without leaving their current web page.

Our initial offering will include ChatGPT, Google Gemini, HuggingChat, and Le Chat Mistral, but we will continue adding AI services that meet our standards for quality and user experience.

I’m now taking bets on which of these vendors will pay the most to be the default in the enabled-by-default production version of this feature

this is making me seriously consider donating to Servo, the last shred of the spirit and goals of a good, modernized Firefox-style browser remaining, which apparently operates on a tiny budget (and with a whole army of reply guys waiting to point out they might receive grants which, cool? they still need fucking donations to do this shit and I’d rather give it to them than Mozilla or any other assholes making things actively worse)

thinking back to when I first switched to Mozilla during the MSIE 7-8 days and actually started having a good time on the web, daily driving Servo might not be an awful move once Firefox gets to its next level of enshittification. back then, Firefox (once it changed its name) was incredibly stable and quick compared with everything else, and generally sites that wouldn’t render right were either ad-laden horseshit I didn’t need, or were intentionally broken on non-IE and usually fixable with a plugin. now doesn’t that sound familiar?