to be fair, most people aren't using physical keyboards with their phones, this mostly applies to tablets (which are much less popular) and android tv (where firefox isn't even officially supported anymore)
anyway, even without that issue, the android version of firefox is kinda janky and regularly gets stuck while loading websites
bt keyboards can be absolutelly critical for some users with disabilities. most of the developing world can't afford to own several devices like a computer and a phone.
They're not adding ai to Firefox, at least that's not what the memo said, the memo said they were refocusing on Firefox (firing people who worked on their metaverse thing for example), and doing so on the side.
They specifically stated that Firefox mobile is a big focus moving fowards
One of 70 flavors of Chromium including the "privacy centric" Opera who run Chinese loan shark gangs for some reason, Edge which is Microsoft Chromium and aside from hardware acceleration capabilities is pretty meh, and Brave which despite operating their own separate search engine index are one of the most likely to sell your data and/or kidneys
Rapidly Enshitifying Firefox
Safari - no comment
Whatever the fuck Gecko is...
Tor Browser (for people with infinite time to wait for pages to load, or maybe just drug dealers)
RE: point 1, I'm a fan of Vivaldi, a privacy-focused highly modified chromium build developed by former Opera developers who were disillusioned by the direction that company went in.
Librewolf is built on Gecko, people often accredit it as a "firefox fork".
Tor Browser seems cool, it's what I use on my phone whenever I have spare time to let it load before searching things which don't require a lot of bandwidth. I'll edit the above list.
Mullvad? Is that some kind of slur? I've never heard of that but searches say it's a VPN client. ¯\(ツ)/¯
I'm starting to think FF is being deliberately run into the ground by the higher ups. It would be good to hear from some of the devs about their thoughts on all this.
I know there is currently a massive PR campaign for a power grab to consolidate control over AI software. They want to control the means of generation. Only MozillAI can save us from King GhAIdorah!
Sorry I'm upsetting you. I know we're entering an acceleration of technology at a time where our institutions globally are in an absolutely horrendous state. People on all sides are brainwashed as hell. The AI watchdogs are insane as well. What's left but gallows humor? I do hold out some hope though.
You cannot upset me more than the current common misunderstandings that everyone has about AI already does.
I don't think you understand the implications of undetectable AI to shift social conversation or the kind of world that those AI owners want to create.
That might actually be the kind of thing where open source AI could help. At least I hope. To detect bias, lies or AI powered filtering / sorting of content.
Ok so this is one of the naive thoughts that makes me upset.
The open source community can't even make a distro of linux that is out of the box functional for everyday users and you think somehow they are going to be able to outcompete billion dollar companies that can afford the best gear and devs?
Look, I bought in heavy to open source early on in the 90s, and have done my best to go open source for every tool I can, but the simple fact is that even the 'best' open source projects are severely lacking in aspects and YOU CAN'T TRUST DEVELOPMENT OF AI TO THAT.
Compare The Gimp to Photoshop. It isn't even close, why? Because Adobe has a fucktonne of cash to throw at their projects and they have clear direction and motivation.
I don't like it
I'd prefer a fully open source world
But it isn't going to happen, and open source AI will always lag behind corporate AI, and considering how fast it has been developing, even being 3 months behind renders a tool useless as an AI detector.
We aren't prepared for this and 90% of what everyone on the internet says about AI is poorly informed and full of confabulation, and WORST of all, when you try and explain this to them they get antagonistic.
We have already seen the threat AI can pose in 2016 with Cambridge Analytica helping to hand trumpty dumpty the election by using AI to focus target vulnerable facebook groups.
AND THAT AI WAS A FUCKING INFANT compared to what we have now.
It's going to be so bad and almost none of you have the slightest clue.
Honestly, most of what Cambridge analytica did was blackmail, illegal spending, and collusion between campaigns that were legally required to be separate.
Much of the data processing/ml was intended as a smoke screen to distract from the big stuff that was known to work and consequently legislated against. The problem is that they were so incompetent that the distraction technique was also illegal.
Maybe the machine learning also worked, but it's really not clear.
You already have AI in Firefox - local translations for example. Developing local AI aligns perfectly well with Mozilla's goals, but it seems people panic as soon as they see the two letters together.
How about, and run with me on this, Mozilla stops trying to be Microsoft and Google and instead just provides the cleanest, most barebones-yet-privacy-oriented browser? Will they ever have market dominance? No, and they never will even with AI tools. Fuck AI and what it's doing to the planet and fuck all of the capitalists enshittifying The Last Browser.
We need a new Foundation willing to develop a fork.
The paradox of tech right now "we are going to build the most complex technology known to man into our product in the next 12 months. Are we hiring record numbers of people to get it done? No. We fired a bunch of people and everyone else will just have to be extremely hardcore."
I bet I know much more on the topic than you, but please enlighten me on which part of this is complex?
The core concepts of DNNs are taught in high-school, and putting them together can done by a Bachelor student. Shit, people often advise writing a NN libraries as a good learning exercise when picking up a new programming language.
I think mathematically illiterate people assume that incredible results necessarily imply complexity, but that's simply not the case here. Or the idea that unknown things are necessarily complex, maybe.
The main reason DNNs are popping up is because we finally have the hardware for it. And the second reason is that tech companies have the resources (both financial and in terms of available data) to throw at it.
They're refocusing on Firefox and continuing the ai stuff they were already doing. They fireded people who were working on fediverse and metaverse platforms. Did you even read the article?
