Sponsored suggestions in the address bar and advertisement telemetry are upcoming additions, but yeah, this stuff in this post has been here for a while. Every installation requires you remove it again.

I just touched Windows 11 for the first time today.

The Start bar has a Widgets corner, which includes a helpful weather display but is 99% infinite news scroll.

I opened Edge to download something else, and was greeted with more news and crap.

Don’t get me wrong, Firefox is better than Edge. But Edge is the worst of the bunch by far.

Despite its reputation, Chrome looks and feels like, and in some ways is, a lighter browser. No news feed. No AI chatbot. I get that they can afford it, but the difference is still painfully palpable.

But the alt text generation already leverages a self-hosted LLM. So either Mozilla is going to cook in hundreds of extra megabytes of data for their installs, or people with accessibility issues are going to have to download something extra anyway. (IIRC it’s the latter).

We could talk all day about things that Mozilla could add out of the box that would make the user experience better. How about an ad blocker? They can be like Opera, Brave, Vivaldi, even the most ambitious Firefox fork LibreWolf.

But for some reason they went with injecting something into Firefox that nobody was asking for, and I don’t think it aligns at all with the average Firefox users needs or wants. Normies don’t use Firefox. They use a browser that doesn’t raise “switch to Chrome or Edge” messages. And if there was some subset of Firefox users who were begging Mozilla for AI, I never saw them. Where were they?

The alt text generation is done locally. That was the big justification Mozilla used when they announced the feature.

I’m talking about the non-local ChatGPT stuff.

What are they missing? So far, all they’ve added is a sidebar and a couple extra right-click menu additions. Both of these are available for all extensions.

And yet, Mozilla went for the 10% that do violate your privacy and gives your data to the biggest corporations: Google, Microsoft, OpenAI.

What happened to the Mozilla Manifesto?

If it was truly opt-in, it could be an extension. They should not be bundling this with the browser, bloating it more in the process.

AI already has ethical issues, and environmental issues, and privacy issues, and centralization issues. You technically can run your own local AI, but they hook up to the big data-hungry ones out of the box.

Look at the Firefox subreddit. One month ago, people were criticizing the thought of adding AI to Firefox. Two months ago, same thing. Look at the Firefox community. See how many times people requested AI.

Your bank probably wants to make sure your account isn’t being hacked. Either they think you’re using a VPN, and they believe it could be a malicious person from literally anywhere, or they think you’re in Sweden, and they have no idea how you got there.

It’s cases like these where you might want to temporarily disable the VPN or make a special exception for your banking app, but that’s up to you.

Did they actually say that?

I think we need to Wait and See, to give the ad company the benefit of the doubt. And by “the ad company,” I’ll let you figure out whether I’m referring to Mozilla or Google.

Why are you applying the Wait And See philosophy to Firefox but not to Chrome?

Seems a bit… Reactionary.

Based on the content of that article, the problem is not that DRM is currently in Firefox, but the process by which DRM became mandatory in browsers to begin with.

Second ad company, if you count FakeSpot selling private data to other ad providers!

And those are probably the "anything"s they would rather not respond to.

deleted by creator

The trouble with “wait and see” is that people will often forget what we were waiting for.

Speaking of which, do you remember FakeSpot? That was Mozilla’s first foray into directly selling private data to ad companies. At the time, a lot of people said, “they might allow it now, but let’s wait and see.”

And today, Mozilla FakeSpot continues selling data to ad companies.

It’s a shame Mozilla hasn’t added a way to put custom widgets in the New Tab Page. It’s relatively inconsequential compared to the whole Mozilla situation, but in a perfect world, I think it would be nice to have.

If it makes you feel better, donations wouldn’t go to Firefox development anyway, and they never have.

(I believe you can donate directly to SeaMonkey, and that they receive a couple million dollars in donations every year. But don’t quote me on that.)

It feels like they heard about what Bill Gates did to Paul Allen and decided to replicate it.

It’s really disheartening. Among other things, Steve fought against the firing of employees in general because Mozilla was actually turning a profit under his leadership.

Based on this and a couple Reddit threads I have since uncovered, he seems like a generally upstanding guy. And he’s on Mastodon, @[email protected]

You assumed and misinterpreted everything you could assume and misinterpret in order to paint standard notes in the best possible light.

the old approach wasn’t very secure or scalable?

No, the older approach was more scalable, and they made it more difficult to do

95-99% of the Javascript that has ever run in your browser is open source frameworks or packages

No, I was not talking about frameworks.

Your response was so offbase and full of assumptions that I simply edited my original post.

All FOSS projects have a team of dictators…

And the Standard Notes team makes a lot of bad choices that make self-hosting harder.

“Just fork it and make your own” is a Hail Mary response… Because most people cannot.

I think you can add your own money into Brave to tip people extra.

And the biggest difference is…

• Brave sold itself on this as a feature since day one
• Brave had the audience who wanted this
• The Brave software is a known factor; what’s going to happen to Firefox is unknown.