Firefox

I have said this before: what are they supposed to do? I don't want external AI, I don't want google lens in my browser, I don't want a lot of what they are doing.

But Firefox is in between a rock and hard place. To the average user not having those things is seen as being behind and old. They are told every day how great AI is, and how useful it is.

So what does Mozilla do?

I've used Firefox since the Netscape era. I used Firefox before it reached 1.0. I supported it when it was way slower than IE or Chrome. I will not support this.

You know they could've just made official extensions for these? Good thing I'm on ESR so I won't receive these until I move to a fork.

It's such a shame to see the difficulty Mozilla has to find a viable business model. I understand the reactions here and agree it's appalling, but at the same time, what can they do? AFAIK they rely on Google to pay for the search engine integration. That already sucks, and is a serious existential risk. So they need to diversify, which I think is what they're attempting to do here: let companies pay for being the default "lens", LLM, weather service, etc. From a business perspective this makes a lot of sense, to reduce the risk of depending on one customer.

It doesn't help that the c-level are just as greedy as you'd expect for any random company, raking in the millions, and arguably are doing a really bad job by being reactionary only, and then choosing the course of action that alienates the traditional user base. I don't really see any good way out of this other than radically changing their business model, e.g., going full non-profit, and move to a subscription model for revenue. But that's extremely risky as well. I would definitely pay a subscription for a Firefox where the primary focus is stability, safety and speed, as opposed to new features. But, there's also a limit to what I'd be willing to pay, $1 a month seems like a no brainer, but $5 would feel steep.

Long story short, they're in a tough spot, I feel for them.

just use librewolf people.

Ew, wtf

If you just want regular Firefox without Mozilla's bullshit grab Waterfox.

If you're the more paranoid type then grab LibreWolf. It comes with a lot of privacy centric tweaks out of the box and is what I personally have used for over a year now.

And I dunno maybe try Floorp if you feel fancy. I've never personally used it however.

I literally cannot explain how excited this makes me. I can't, because that'd require me to be in any way exited by any of this, as opposed to annoyed that'll I'll have to disable yet more useless bloat that doesn't belong in a web browser. And apparently waste disk space on a local LLM I won't be using, because, you know, I can fucking read on my own just fine.

We really, really, really need a third party browser that isn't a Firefox or Chrome clone. This duopoly is a downward spiral.

K.I.S.S.

YOU'LL NEVER GET ME TO USE AI

Holy hell fuck Mozilla

Welp, so long Firefox. It has been a good run all those years.

that's it im going from firefox to mullvand browser all.of they ai is shit