Let me share some fun Mozilla facts about their previous CEO who has now stepped down to “executive chairwoman” last week.
She received 6.9 million dollars in 2022 and 5 million in 2021, 3 million in 2020.
Her replacement is an executive from AirBnB and eBay. We will find out how much both of these are earning in 2025 when they release their financial statements.
They fired 60 staff and are adding AI to their flagship program to earn more money.
Ok. Mozilla was spreading itself too thin, spending resources trying to compete with multiple products against established brands that were already way ahead of them. They needed to focus down onto their core product rather than frivolously cast about.
And AI is the technology of the future, despite all the whinging and griping by commenters on the subject. It's being incorporated into the other major browsers, it's a must-have if Firefox is to remain relevant. I'm sure you'll be able to turn it off in the settings if you don't want it and if you're really concerned about getting AI cooties there'll be niche forks that are compiled without it.
And the ever increasing CEO wages and hiring of AirBnB/eBay executive as CEO? Their previous CEOs salary alone could've covered everyone of those employees fired.
I agree with you that Mozilla is spreading itself too thin. And don't get me wrong, I love Firefox and am a long time user. But they do need to understand their user base better.
They aren't going to become a sustainable business by copying more popular browsers. It's their differences from the mainstream that make them appealing as an alternative in the first place. I already don't like them foisting Pocket on me, which 100% should have remained an extension. I don't like the fact that Google is their default search engine, which goes against all their privacy messaging. I understand the reason is money, but that's kind of the definition of being a sellout isn't it? Their core values should always come first.
Fact is, those employees weren't fired for any good reason other than to hop on the latest tech trend. It's this sort of corporate "profit before people" bullshit that will erode any goodwill that people still have towards Mozilla. I couldn't give a fuck about adding a stupid AI driven chatbot to Mozilla, and neither, I imagine, do many of their current users. Honestly, I think "AI" has ruined the internet in a lot of ways already. It's already had a massive negative impact on the quality of search results, across all major search engines, because of all the low quality llm content that has been produced already, and it's only going to get worse. And you can't trust a single thing that comes out of those models, so what is even the point of them?
As fair as I am aware, Mozilla so far is only thinking about integrating AI in relatively smart ways that leverage their limited resources well. (There were some rumours a while back about using ai locally to search your history and tabs, as well as (arguable if this counts as AI, but branding is everything) on device translation)
I think the obvious worry being alluded to is the reason they had 400m in cash due to their arrangement with Google. Their primary sustenance comes from an entity actively seeking their destruction.
And AI is the technology of the future, despite all the whinging and griping by commenters on the subject.
The entire discussion is to distract ourselves from the raw truth:
Fax machines are the technology of the future.
Fax machines will outlive us all. AI and VR will reach their heyday, then wane with years and be replaced. But whatever replaces them will sit quietly in the shadow of the everlasting Fax machine.
And AI is the technology of the future, despite all the whinging and griping by commenters on the subject.
Yeah because we've never seen tech fads before heralded as the next big thing. If I could roll my eyes any harder we could harness that for power generation.
And AI is the technology of the future, despite all the whinging and griping by commenters on the subject.
You have no idea, any more than the rest of us. Like, please tell me you understand "____ is the technology of the future" has been said more times than it's ever been true.
The idea of AI is a technology of the future, but what we have growing now is not AI, not really, and this iteration can be just as big a flop as any other technology of the moment.
LLMs are what everyone dunks on, and “image generators are coming for our jobs! Think of artists! It’s not real art if a cheating machine does it!” is also a common cry.
But do any of those people even know about the new class of antibiotics a neural network trained to find patterns in protein folding discovered? Do any of them know about the accuracy of diagnosis that IBM Watson was able to make in cases of rare cancers, even when doctors didn’t see it? What about changes in weather prediction accuracy? Novel suggestions in materials science?
We are mimicking neural patterns, similar to the way our own minds work, to achieve pattern recognition and even extrapolate from them. And yeah, right now we’re brute forcing it, and we’re not even entirely sure how these relationships develop. It’s in its infancy, and growing fast.
This is technology considered the holy grail of computing. We have been chasing this concept since the 1940s. There are a million sci-fi stories about it and there are a million more attempts to make it work before one really stuck.
And now we’re at the beginning of it being practical and you think we’re just gonna go “eh it’s a wet fart like the Virtual Boy. Oh well, let’s make some new phones or something”?
No. This is literally the technology of the future. Within your lifetime (assuming you live a reasonable while longer) there will come a point when you won’t be able to buy a CPU without some type of neural engine in it.
And yes, people will (and already are) do horrific shit with it. It will fuck over a large portion of the white collar economy; a portion of which were told to go into the careers they did because they’d be safe from automation. “Get a degree and you’ll be safe!” they told us! Now they tell us “you better work at two different targets to make that payment, should have studied a trade!”
So the reason for skepticism and animosity is almost certainly the fear of being replaced; but look at how far these AI models have come in the last month alone. We’re already in “this is changing the future” territory and those things are just getting started.
Dude. Take a chill in the bathtub and touch grass. AI is never taking my job, since it's physical labor since I removed myself from the computer industry 15 years ago. But as someone who studied AI and LISP (which was mired in the previous AI craze), it's not actually wrong to have animosity and be skeptical about the current AI. we're literally using the same techniques than we did 30 years ago. We've invented nothing new since the last AI fad. What is driving this craze is the brute force approach of massive parallel processing, not actual innovation.
There's been some minor refinement, so it's not exactly identical, but to use a metaphor... We've using more Lego bricks and different colours now to build our castles, but they're all still lego bricks. Nothing has fundamentally changed.
... and you should know by now that tech industry is funded by hype machine, so temper your expectations. Current machine learning techniques are limited and inefficient, it's not actually really a solvable problem with the current approach.
TLDR; LLMs are a super far cry from actually being "intelligent" and calling it AI is the equivalent of calling a wheeled electric self balance board a "Hoverboard".
This is technology considered the holy grail of computing.
This shit is just analog computing though, right? Like at it's base, we're just reproducing analog computation in a digital environment and then we're framing that in a million different ways, like we've been doing since the seventies. We've actually had this shit since the first computers, which were analog. The whole reason we moved to digital, though, is because the results were easier to break down, parse, and we had control over every step of the process to confirm it was correct, and it was going to be correct every time. A clearer sense of limitations and constraints, basically.
Now I'm not entirely against analog computing as a matter of fact, right, in fact I think it can be pretty cool if we recognize it for what it is, but at the same time I can't help but think that the level of hype around it is fucking insane. Primarily because it's not easily controllable or reproducible. Not in the sense that we're gonna somehow invent a rogue AI that will kill us all, or whatever garbage, but in the sense that, while you can get easily reproducible results (such is the nature of computation), it is very hard to control what the output is of a given neural network. You can process loads of information extremely quickly, but, like, what use is that if I don't know whether or not the solution is correct, or if it's just a kind of ballpark figure? That's the main issue.
Again, fine if we recognize it, but I don't think we're really close at all to just like, randomly inventing a rogue consciousness. We're not anywhere close to that, from what I've seen. We're still barely good at image recognition and generation in an actually complicated environment, and even then it's still pretty hard to get what it is that you specifically want, partially because the hype is driving so much development at this point, and the implementation is bunk and, again, kind of uncontrollable. Venture capital jumping down this thing's throat has partially blocked it's airway, as I see it. Still a useful technology, potentially, but a million stupid tech demos and image generators for nonsensical memes that we can flood everyone with is the dumbest shit imaginable, and even dumber than that is the level of venture capitalists I see that want to somehow monetize that.
And so I have to ask, right, if I want a robot to sort through the different colors of little plastic beads, right, do I get a large language model on that, or do I just run a pretty basic and more efficient algorithm that just narrows the parameter of beads to a certain color, as recorded by the camera, and then that's it? Do I want to translate a sentence with AI, or do I want to just manually run a straight word to word conversion that maybe changes based on a couple passes I'm gonna run at it to check whether or not it contextually makes sense with something like a markov chain? Trick question, they are both the same approach, AI has just done it in a way where I could apply a kind of broader paintbrush to the thing and get my results a little faster and with a little less thought even if I have less control over it.
Mozilla has long been the most ethical player in this space (while still producing SOTA ML). All of their datasets/models are open source and usually crowdsourced. Not to mention, their existing work is primarily in improving accessibility.
ALSO, the other half of this story is that Firefox is becoming the primary focus again. Everybody's freaking out about the AI stuff but that's because they're only reading the headlines. The programs they've shut down are things like Hubs (Mozilla's metaverse platform), the VPN, and the sensitive data scrubber (which was using a third party service anyway).
As a software developer I am huge supporter of Mozilla's developer initiatives from Manifest V2 implementation to MDN. But it's also important to be realistic Mozilla has long had major money problems, and not the kind that giving them more would fix.
I don't think this is a money making move. The previous CEO was absolutely overly focused on monetization and this move is a step away from that. I should've addressed this more explicitly in the above comment but even for the players who actively monetize, AI is a money incinerator.
The Lunduke shit again? The one that takes offense to money being donated to support "politics" i.e abortion rights?
Take a look at the other trash he posts on his reddit profile. That blog is not a trustworthy source, by any stretch, and it's sweetly ignoring that he's not looking at Mozilla's spending alone, but of 3 separate entities that exist under the umbrella of the Mozilla Foundation.
I don't know anything about him, but the criticism of them spending money on donating to other charities rather than focusing on making Mozilla's core projects sustainable IMO is correct.
The answers to both of those things depends very heavily on the details. I think focusing on their main products is a good thing, but adding AI sounds like one of those likely terrible decisions. We definitely need privacy friendly & open source based AI though, in all areas, so I hope this is Mozilla pushing for something sensible here.
You're right. Mozilla is the devil. Everyone go to the better option in Silicon Valley for web browsing....
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Her replacement is an executive from AirBnB and eBay. We will find out how much both of these are earning in 2025 when they release their financial statements.
Can you tell me what they were doing at either of those companies, or what they've been doing at Mozilla since they were hired there? Have you done any actual research into this, at all, are you just assuming that because you saw two shitty companies on the resume, they must be a champion of those shitty companies?
It’s really good but I do wish it supported more languages like Russian or Japanese. So far most of the times I have had to translate a page, Firefox didn’t support the language.
This. It has held back adoption for me. I want translations in my language of choice and it’s simply not one of the very few options of languages available. AI could help with this.
So frustrated to see how this conversation is playing out. This is exactly what people have been asking for but all anybody can seem to see is "AI" in the headline.
This pivot is about refocusing on:
The Browser
Privacy
Ethical AI
This seems like a much better position for Mozilla to operate from, particularly because they've excelled at producing ethical SOTA ML for YEARS before ChatGPT. In all, this seems far more forward looking than the previous strategy of "make weird little web tools to make money maybe" and it's an absolutely massive untapped niche, that they already have the talent to tap into. If we punish the players best positioned to shift the industry standard away from extreme and exploitative data collection, we will end up in exactly the Orwellian AI hellscape that we're all so afraid of.
It is a better position and FF is going to be even better because of it. We need more options than just chromium. Open web standards dont stay open when everyone congregates.
No one asked for the shitty LLMs masquerading as AI. However, an AI that can do specialized things to help people out in day to day tasks would be great.
Could we just have the AI part separately? I want an AI that can help me around the house by learning all my books and documents in case someone needs a specific photo of the babies or maybe needs to know a derivation of greens theorem or a recipe for kombucha.
The AI is claimed to be local.. Did you know that even local AIs are able to contact the internet again? So without knowing a local LLM system might execute some HTTPS calls for you, without knowing.
Except its open source. So it would last all of 4 seconds before being called out. Those HTTPS calls are a separate service the LLM will access not a part of the LLM itself.
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.
uggggggggggh. I'm using Firefox because chrome is really going too far with it's manifest v3 garbage killing decent adblockere and Firefox is basically the only non chromium based option. Please for the love of everything that is holy. Just. Make. Your. Browser. Better. Don't need ai gimmicks. Definitely don't need to lay people off. You need to get back on track. Holy heck. This is the worst.
That's not the only use case. It could read a 400 page pdf locally and summarize it for you, answer questions and find which slide the data you want is on.
The use cases are only limited by how powerful the AI is
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.
"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 could very well be a linux build issue, it wouldn't surprise me honestly. The main telling thing for me though is that heroic uses the same if not more ram, and is actually many times more performant.
My main problem with the ram usage is that steam takes equally as long to launch as it does to boot a game, which is super annoying, not including any updates it hasnt performed yet. Heroic launches faster than my web browser does, even though its literally an electron app.
I wouldnt really care how much ram it used if i could just close it when i was done with it, and have it go away, but it's such a mess that's not really feasible.
The whole "just buy more ram" is not really a solution im a fan of. My system has 16GB. which is fine most of the time, it gets stretched sometimes, most of that ram is used by browsers, (because three different containerized browsers run simultaneously for some reason) so my idle ram quickly becomes 8GB. 8GB is still a lot of available ram though, if steam didn't use an additional gig on top of that it would only be beneficial. Maybe i'm just too jaded in general. But saying just get more ram is kind of like saying "just repair a cracked back glass on a phone" When i never wanted to have a piece of glass on the back of my phone which could get broken in the first place.
Although to preface this, i AM a linux user, and i can routinely enjoy a machine with 4GB of ram through the magic of non shit software. i3 + debian cooks. Idle ram usage under 100M is trivial when you aren't running any bloat. In fact, my server actually on average, uses less ram than my workstation. It's probably sitting at like 4GB util right now, running a handful of services, and a handful of game servers.
Unfortunately none.
Developing a rendering engine that can handle css, html, javascript, while also rendering a website in the exact same way as Chrome and Firefox is a huge tasks, and not something a hobby programmer can whack out in a few weeks. Thats the reason why even Microsoft abandoned their own rendering engine, because things did always look and work different in IE.
This is not true. Pale Moon, Ice Weasel, Librewolf....
Developing a rendering engine that can handle css, html, javascript, while also rendering a website in the exact same way as Chrome and Firefox is a huge tasks
It doesn't have to be from scratch. Not even Apple did this with Safari (they based in on KHTML, the rendering engine of KDE's Konqueror.)
librewolf is a firefox fork, anything thats a fork of firefox/chrome is automatically not counted, because it is inherently bulkier than the original (though maybe more secure)
anything thats a fork of firefox/chrome is automatically not counted
Says who?
because it is inherently bulkier
How is "being bulkier" relevant at all? But let's just go down that route and say that a fork does not necessarily end up in a bulkier product. A dev team could decide to fork, then remove unwanted features from the original project; which is what's happening with Librewolf as far as I know (e.g. no Pocket bs.)
Finally, let's remember that both Safari and Chrome have their roots on Konqueror's KHTML rendering engine. By your metric, we should be saying that they don't count either; because they're "(definitely) bulkier forks" of KHTML.
How is “being bulkier” relevant at all? But let’s just go down that route and say that a fork does not necessarily end up in a bulkier product. A dev team could decide to fork, then remove unwanted features from the original project; which is what’s happening with Librewolf as far as I know (e.g. no Pocket bs.)
now you just have a patched together, disjointed, mess of a browser, on top of a second dev team, who now needs to unpatch it together, re patch it together, and then somehow repackage that. It's just hopeless. It's like trying to turn a full size pickup into a small lightweight town car. It's just not going to happen.
Finally, let’s remember that both Safari and Chrome have their roots on Konqueror’s KHTML rendering engine. By your metric, we should be saying that they don’t count either; because they’re “(definitely) bulkier forks” of KHTML.
It's worth noting that when a fork is building on top of something, there is a point where the original roots are no longer present, or no longer significantly present. It's like saying that android is linux. Which doesnt stop the charts from displaying android separately to linux, or chromeos for that matter. Even if it did i don't like the browsers because they're too bulky so it's not like it influences my opinion anyway lol.
now you just have a patched together, disjointed, mess of a browser, on top of a second dev team, who now needs to unpatch it together, re patch it together, and then somehow repackage that. It’s just hopeless. It’s like trying to turn a full size pickup into a small lightweight town car. It’s just not going to happen.
You are assuming way too much. As if Apple and Google did all this with KHTML. Which lead us to:
It’s worth noting that when a fork is building on top of something, there is a point where the original roots are no longer present, or no longer significantly present.
And what's your point by saying this? What does it matter if the roots "disappear," if the product is good enough for competition?
Even if it did i don’t like the browsers because they’re too bulky so it’s not like it influences my opinion anyway lol.
I mean yeah, but it's my opinion on the matter. Even then my original claim is based on the fact of something being an active fork of another browser. Which is still going to line up with my point just fine.
You are assuming way too much. As if Apple and Google did all this with KHTML. Which lead us to:
assuming too much if you think modern applications are programmed/designed well. Ultimately no matter what you do, having a product be around for a decade, let alone multiple of them, is going to incur substantial tech debt, and significant feature creep. There is nothing you can do about this. It happens in EVERY industry. In fact the only thing that helps to prevent this is an almost religious and fervent dedicated to pure minimalism when it comes to what your software is doing. Look at something like DWM for example.
And what’s your point by saying this? What does it matter if the roots “disappear,” if the product is good enough for competition?
My point is that beyond a certain point, a fork is no longer a fork, but more like a competing piece of software. You see this all the time, look at android or chromeos. Technically "based" on linux, but so far gone that almost nobody considers it linux, i only ever see it mentioned in jokes. Something like prism which is a fork of poly, which is a fork of multimc is starting to get to the point where it's more of an alternate piece of software, than a direct fork. It's twice independently maintained, it's feature set is focused differently.
If you need more examples why dont we have a look at a COW filesystem? When you make a change to a file, a fork is created, and that change is then saved on that forked path, so now you have multiple different versions, throughout the chronological history of that fork. If you have auto-deletion enabled for old forks, as you should, at some point you will have "orphaned" forks. Which no longer represent in anyway the original file, but exist as an independently separate instance of that file, in a different state. It's a similar idea, in a different scale, on a different system. There is also a point where it no longer exists as a fork, but as an implementation on top of that original piece of software. How that's defined is a little more complicated though.
It's a little bit philosophical, and semantical, but my point is simple, if your piece of software exists as a fork on top of another piece of software, you don't get to call yourself "faster" or "leaner" or "more optimized" than the original. Your base browser is still a piece of shit, you've taken a bad car, and repainted it, now it looks a little bit better. But it's still a shit car. You turn a beater into a race car by completely stripping it to bits, at a certain point, it's not really a fork anymore. In the same way that putting a body on a different frame isn't the same as the original.
What bulky browsers don’t you like?
it's not like i've literally named them or anything.
assuming too much if you think modern applications are programmed/designed well. Ultimately no matter what you do, having a product be around for a decade, let alone multiple of them, is going to incur substantial tech debt, and significant feature creep.
I still don't understand what this has anything to do with "forking makes a product bulkier," the original claim. At most, what you're saying is that the fork will have its own set of tech debt. But that doesn't make it bulkier by default. Again, a fork of Firefox without the Pocket and "experiments" crap will be lighter.
My point is that beyond a certain point, a fork is no longer a fork, but more like a competing piece of software.
Well, yeah, isn't that the point of forking? I still don't see why a forked browser being "yet another competing browser" is a bad thing. It's the opposite!
if your piece of software exists as a fork on top of another piece of software, you don’t get to call yourself “faster” or “leaner” or “more optimized” than the original.
I completely disagree with you, and I think I know why you think the way you think. It seems like you assume that all forks:
Must always follow the development of the original software. Nope. Not true. It can happen, but not with all forks.
Are inherently bulkier because devs add features on top of it. Which again, it's not true for all forks. Some forks solely exist to remove crap in the original software.
Your base browser is still a piece of shit, you’ve taken a bad car, and repainted it, now it looks a little bit better. But it’s still a shit car.
Man, have you never seen TV shows about mechanics taking shitty cars and making them awesome? Yes, they strip it to pieces, and reassemble said pieces. That's part of engineering practices. It appears that you have a narrow way of seeing how software development works. Devs don't need to take in the whole "shitty project" and be resigned to deal with it. They can take the good parts, and rewrite the bad parts. And that's just one example.
it’s not like i’ve literally named them or anything.
You haven't mentioned any browser that's a fork from Firefox and that is also bulkier than Firefox. Librewolf? Bulkier than Firefox? Really?
I still don’t understand what this has anything to do with “forking makes a product bulkier,” the original claim. At most, what you’re saying is that the fork will have its own set of tech debt. But that doesn’t make it bulkier by default. Again, a fork of Firefox without the Pocket and “experiments” crap will be lighter.
I mean yeah, removing two features removes two features, that still doesn't optimize the entirety of the browser, all of the rest of the browser will behave the exact same with no difference (unless, somehow, those features are actually so badly implemented they actively impede performance) Thats like taking a corolla and removing the entirety of the interior to strip weight, and doing literally nothing else to it. It's just marginally faster now. Handles a little better maybe. Everything else is still stock though.
Well, yeah, isn’t that the point of forking? I still don’t see why a forked browser being “yet another competing browser” is a bad thing. It’s the opposite!
I dont inherently have an issue with forks, i have an issue with stuff like thorium, you forked chrome, that's great, chrome is faster than firefox by most accounts. You made it maybe 40% faster in some instances? Cool. It's still basically chrome though. They describe it as The fastest browser which, if that's true, that's great! It's still basically chrome though. The issue here is that the modern web, and the web browsers designed around it are just massively overbuilt and bloated. We're solving problems that shouldn't exist, and we're adding features that do almost nothing other than cause problems half the time. That's not a good starting point. Unless you completely rip everything out, and rebuild it. Which is inherently not what a fork is.
Man, have you never seen TV shows about mechanics taking shitty cars and making them awesome? Yes, they strip it to pieces, and reassemble said pieces. That’s part of engineering practices. It appears that you have a narrow way of seeing how software development works. Devs don’t need to take in the whole “shitty project” and be resigned to deal with it. They can take the good parts, and rewrite the bad parts. And that’s just one example.
Yes, you wanna know what they do most of the time? Completely strip it down, and then rebuild it. If you have done that with either chromium or firefox, you wouldn't be calling it a fork of chrome/firefox, and everybody would ALL over it. As far as im concerned, any fork of either of those browsers is just removing the most egregious garbage, which is a good thing, but it's still just a bad browser underneath the removed garbage.
Let's compare forks, firefox and librewolf, both browsers i have installed, and both browsers i use. As far as i can tell they're effectively the same thing. Librewolf probably has some cruft removed and some good defaults compared to firefox, but other than that, nothing inherently different.
Lets look at chrome and chromium why dont we, this is actually just the reverse, but wouldn't you be surprised to discover that i dislike chromium equally as much as chrome because they have equal design decisions? It's almost like 90% of the feature base is going to be identical between them or something!
Thorium? I've not used that one yet, i assume it's just chrome, equally annoying to use, but with the slight added benefit of having marginally less time to ponder my bad life choices in between bouts of loading heavily ad bloated sites, and JS infested messes of web design. Plus all the ram that it probably still consumes. Because it's a web browser, why wouldn't it.
I don't even where to start, but let's just say that I now see where you're coming from. You seem to have an issue with this Thorium browser, then project your perspective over other projects that are also forks. Just because one implementation sucks doesn't mean they all do.
And we have different ideas of software engineering. To you, features are just the things that the user can interact with. When you say things like "that's like someone stripping the interior of a Corolla and doing nothing else." Except that I was thinking, precisely, of working on the whole car, including tweaking the engine, the electrical system, the fuel pump, etc. Sounds like a lot of work? Maybe. But it's better than building a car from scratch.
including tweaking the engine, the electrical system, the fuel pump, etc. Sounds like a lot of work? Maybe. But it’s better than building a car from scratch.
that would be more of a rebuild than a fork. If your end product is more similar to the OEM car than it is to the end product. It's more like a fork. If the car is more akin to a custom built racer, than the OEM, it's a rebuild.
There are plenty of browsers. Dillo, NetSurf, surf, w3m, Lynx, Links, Via, Midori, Pale Moon although it's based on a fork of Gecko, Tunnel, qutebrowser. And there are even options for a search engine, although the only one worth considering that isn't just a layer on top of other search engines is Kagi which costs $10 a month, and I wouldn't exactly call it minimalist.
The problem is that no browser can allow you to escape the horror that is web standards & practices that have been developed over decades and are almost unchangeable, without sacrificing basic web functionality and just making it a worse experience than it needs to be at least. The fact is that practically the entire web is reliant on JavaScript, on top of HTML and CSS which take a lot more resources to utilize/display than it looks, meaning 3 interpreters constantly running that must be sandboxed to each tab you have open with a lot of overhead to manage security.
In an ideal world we'd all just be using provably-safe high-performance compiled WASM-but-stronger (from functional languages or more likely Rust or something less boiler-platey but similar), without having such a complex and fucked dependency situation*, where we wouldn't need to sandbox interpreted languages and slaughter performance. Of course, in an ideal world, we also wouldn't have to be concerned about aggressive tracking, ads, clickbait, SEO abuse, scams, or even malware, so there's not much use in imagining a reality where we actually have quality web browsing.
The actual answer to using the web without the fucked-ness of browsers is to not use a web browser at all for sites you use frequently. Use stuff like this instead.
*seriously, you can write the most basic website with JavaScript and it'll probably rely on tens of thousands of expressions of code which realistically should just be expressable in like a small page or two, you do webdev and you'll probably accidentally be implicitly committing a sacrifice to some Aztec God in order to check if a number is even or odd
Also just imagine if all of web dev was just ML/Scala/Rust/Swift/Erlang without compiling to JavaScript 🤤 That is the definition of a perfect universe
The problem is that no browser can allow you to escape the horror that is web standards & practices that have been developed over decades [...] practically the entire web is reliant on JavaScript, [...]
I've been saying it for a while: continuing to play catch is a losing move for Mozilla or for any independent browser maker.
The real move, is to switch to or at least integrate an alternate internet, something that uses a protocol that is simpler and more limited by design - just get rid of Javascript (or of "remote execution", really) and you instantly get a much leaner, much securer internet design.
I've heard pretty good things about the Gemini protocol, but IMHO they went too far too extremist into the "text internet" philosophy, and as a result is a raw downgrade from Gopher. Gopher could actually be a good option.
I'll definitely have to check out a few of those browsers at some point. It's kind of insane how much tech debt we've accrued over the years.
I think honestly we just need to start waning off half the shit we support. Minimize the amount of support required, and somehow manage to provide a smaller attack window so that way we can stop writing protections for problems that honestly shouldn't even exist to begin with. Bonus points to microsoft for creating security certs that don't do their jobs because hahafunneemalware.exe is signed by fucking oracle of all people, and i guess we should just blindly execute that file because it says it's trustworthy!
Though it would be interesting to have a sort of "web browser" which is actually just an application based on plugins for different frontends, for stuff like yewtube, we do only use a handful of sites from time to time. Plus maybe a basic web fronted for stuff that isn't JS because honestly who wants it anyway.
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.
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?
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)
