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@rysiek@mstdn.socialAnd what would these standards be, pray tell, @mozilla ?
Keeping in mind that you are including services that told people to eat rocks or put glue on a pizza?
> 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.
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/firefox-news/ai-services-on-firefox/
/via @alxd
As #Mozilla is busy adding AI crap to #Firefox, I would like to point out that it's about 13 years since they removed the #RSS button from default Firefox GUI, and six years since RSS support was completely dropped from Firefox.
Thus making feeds invisible and impossible to discover for most web users.
RSS/Atom/JSON feeds are an immensely useful and important tech that can help solve the content discovery problem *without* going through gatekeepers. 
But obviously not a priority for Mozilla.
This is another in a long string of bad decisions based on what #Mozilla *thinks* users want or expect from #Firefox.
And in a lot of these cases it feels like it's basically hype-chasing after Chrome. 
End result of this ingenious strategy is the dismal market share of Firefox today. Because to a lot of people it's just a "shitty Chrome".
Instead, Mozilla could *lead* and do things no other browser vendor could or would, as these would undermine the vendor's parent company's business model.
@rysiek I never kept track of the various Firefox forks (IceCat, IceWeasel, Ice-something-something)... is there one that is actively maintained, not-distro-specific and tracks the Firefox release schedule for security patches et al while cleaning the codebase from the Mozilla-Corp-induced mishaps like this AI stuff?
@hisham_hm not that I know of. Browser maintenance is a huge undertaking that requires proper funding, support structure, and so on.
And there are very few people, institutions or organizations that would fund that kind of effort.
Mozilla is basically sucking the air out of that small room at this point, I feel.
@rysiek @hisham_hm I use icecat, but it’s LTS only.
@ArneBab yeah, I should try it out. Still, it's not an independent project, right? It relies on Firefox for security patches etc.
@rysiek Also I know the person who updated the Icecat build in Guix on the last LTS update of FF.
I see him when I look into the mirror 
(it’s just updating the version number in the Guix recipe, hoping dearly that the build will just work, and if it does, sending the patch to the guix mailing list)
@igalia @hisham_hm
@woody oh yeah, I vaguely remember coming across it a while ago. I should start following it more closely.
@hisham_hm: I use LibreWolf. It seems to be a decent fork, with uBlock Origin included (I’ve replaced it with uMatrix as it is more effective for me).
I personally hope that we will have an alternative browser engine someday. We can always dream, no?
@slavistapl @hisham_hm @rysiek does it support JPEG XL?
@oblomov: didn’t checked this out, so I can’t tell whether JPEG XL is supported
@slavistapl @hisham_hm @rysiek if it's your daily driver, just going to https://jpegxl.info/ will tell you if it does or not. (Might need to set image.jxl.enabled true in about:config, I know it's necessary in Firefox Nightly that is usually compiled with it, but with the feature disabled.)
@oblomov: I checked this out, and while JXL is not enabled by default in Librewolf, for sure it is supported.
@slavistapl @hisham_hm @rysiek
OK, I'm sold, trying LibreWolf now.
@hisham_hm @rysiek I don't think there is so far. there's LibreWolf which adds some privacy-preserving tweaks (but from what I've read, some of them come at cost of ease of use/convenience high enough that I'm reluctant to use it), and a bunch of small forks that have quite different goals from the one you're asking about, as far as I can tell.
I feel like someone might come up with one soon, though, if Mozilla continues on their current track.
@hisham_hm @rysiek I've been using Librewolf (and Mull for android) for a long time now and I'm very happy with it. It does have some more privacy settings out of the box which can sometimes break websites - webgl for example I think is disabled by default, but those can be tweaked I believe.
@hisham_hm @rysiek One interesting project I once faced is Pale Moon, you should try it out. It's kinda continuation of the legacy Firefox, XUL addons, built-in RSS and modern cipher suite. I think it's also more lightweight, without all that Mozilla crap such as AI, Pocket, EME. There's even a Windows version, which I installed on Win7 VM to bridge with outer world, to replace broken IE. Unfortunately, it's incompatible with so-called "web extensions", at least there's a Legacy uBlock Origin for ad-blocking. Nice project IMO.
@rysiek see, we don't want the browser to be bloated, which is why we removed useful features like feed discovery and auto-update, and added useless crap like “AI” and “privacy preserving” ads.
@rysiek also the reason why Firefox doesn't have JPEG XL support enabled by default yet.
@rysiek AI is simply the latest in a long line of silver bullets. Most silver bullets go astray...
@ManyRoads most "silver bullets" are not even made of silver
@rysiek it doesn't help having Windows hide Firefox when searching for Firefox. Search results are.
1 you've got Edge
2 Chrome
3 Opera
4 Firefox (below the fold)
@rysiek Not a fan of angry toots or "clowning" on anything. But I do agree with sentiment that adding those features to Firefox is a mistake.
Decided to make an account and add my feedback to https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/share-your-feedback-on-the-ai-services-experiment-in-nightly/m-p/60923/highlight/true#M21340.
Granted, I could do a better job compiling and providing arguments why it's bad idea, but I don't think I have enough energy.
I do believe that those additions go against principles Mozilla set for itself. Sadly. Perhaps in few years we may see them following Google steps of removing "Don't be evil" clause from its Code of Conduct.
@Frisk thank you for taking the time, this is really well written! I can only hope Mozilla takes it to heart.
@rysiek Thank you! No LLM used in creation of that comment ;)
And when writing it I've learned of AIAAIC initiative which wow, is pretty awesome! Strange I didn't hear about it until I started doing research/trying to find links I saw in the past. https://www.aiaaic.org/home
@rysiek FYI Mozilla employee has responded https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/share-your-feedback-on-the-ai-services-experiment-in-nightly/m-p/60923/highlight/true#M21340
To paraphrase the response it seems to me like it says: "we have made the feature adaptable to many products and market surely will figure out how to make a product that addresses your concerns"... Which is... Not great.
I don't think "we'll just support those technologies and hope they get better" is a responsible thing to do but Mozilla gonna Mozilla I suppose.
@rysiek careful with saying "end result". If you look at market share and user count in detail, the issue is elsewhere: on mobile only bundled browsers prevail.
For the details, see https://www.draketo.de/software/firefox-usercount
@ArneBab thanks for this, great resource. But it does not undermine my point. Quote:
> Compared to the time when Firefox was the one browser that challenged the atrocity that was (and is) Internet Explorer, Firefox lost about two third of its users, but now its user count seems to have stabilized.
Yeah, it's stable at 200m users, but lost 2/3rds of it's user-base. I'd still call it dismal. And it still supports my point about Firefox being used largely by people who care about privacy etc.
@rysiek Yes, Firefox is used largely by people who care about privacy.
It’s just that the userbase is stable since about 2017.
@ArneBab how much has Internet user-base grown in these 7 years though?..
Anyway, I believe we basically agree. I am with you on the need to be specific with the data.
@rysiek That’s also in the article. The problem for Firefox is: the internet user base has grown almost exclusively in the tightly controlled mobile space where only bundled browsers prevail.
And someone at Mozilla once decided to end Firefox OS.
Though it lives on as KaiOS, now Chinese controlled (in HongKong). In 2022 it was updated to the modern Gecko.
@rysiek though KaiOS doesn’t seem to be very successful:
https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/worldwide
0.15% marketshare worldwide, 0.83% in India.
Which is kind of sad, because a 2-weeks battery device with full web-app support would actually be pretty nice.
@ArneBab @rysiek KaiOS (by another measurea) has/had appreciable market share in India https://www.androidauthority.com/india-kaios-market-share-885349/
The modern FLOSS fork of FIrefoxOS is Capyloon: https://capyloon.org/ which bits of the filecoiniverse funded for a while
@ArneBab @rysiek sorry to jump in. The problem that Mozilla and subsequently Firefox has are many, but simple. The first being that the commitment to community has fallen by the wayside. Community facing tools are considered a hindrance and the people they've hired aren't interested in talking to the community or teaching the community. Couple this with the fact that so many developers don't actually dog-food the products they work on and there's a distinct disconnect between what the community wants/needs and what management prioritises. When you also consider that most of the power users either turn off telemetry or block it at DNS level, there's no way to deliver quantifiable data as to what the community wants. Tab Groups were hugely popular, floored in the panorama iteration, but popular. But was removed, only for Chrome to add them and them become a flagship feature. Still, Mozilla management refused to reconsider, even with all the votes on connect, because telemetry didn't support it. Honestly, we're part of the problem with the Mozilla too. We want a great product but aren't willing to contribute with one of the only things Mozilla will accept from us, which is telemetry. We need to, as consumers, get beyond the idea that all telemetry is bad. If more of us had it enabled, RSS would've survived as a first class feature. See I brought it back around in the end! 
@sabreW4K3 Are you sure that telemetry would really tell something different when power-users were to activate it?
I’m asking, because user-count has stabilized around 2017. Since then, not many users stop using Firefox. So what they are doing seems to work.
There may be issues with Mozilla not valuing the most active users as they maybe should, because these may be evangelists who *spread* the browser and putting them off makes it hard to spread.
But user-count *did* stabilize.
@rysiek
@sabreW4K3 How do you know that the Firefox devs do not dog-food? @rysiek
@ArneBab @rysiek I use Firefox as my daily driver on everything. But of particular note is that I use it on Android. The fact that you're not returned to your previous tab if you open a private tab and go back. The fact that tabs are so easily swiped away. The fact that tabs are lost if swiped away in an unopened state. The fact that BitWarden has been broken for six months now. The fact that Find In Page hasn't been implemented in the menu refresh. The fact that extensions haven't been implemented in the menu refresh. I can go on. It's small things like that and for the menu refresh especially, it's harsh to judge as it's nowhere near ready. But these are massive quality of life things that if someone was using Firefox for Android daily, the bugs would at least be active. They're obviously better on desktop, but had they taken mobile more seriously before now, they could've been a real force and much better off. It's interesting that Firefox is reported to lag behind Vivaldi, Brave and Opera, which should never be the case.
@sabreW4K3 On mobile even the UC browser died again — after having 20% in an intermediate state.
That’s why I say that bundling is a problem. You cannot win against a bundled browser.
@ArneBab while I sympathize with the argument – yes, bundling makes it way harder to get in for competitors – the history of Firefox starts with it taking on and, arguably, winning against a bundled browser on the most popular desktop OS.
History of Chrome/Chromium is similar in that regard.
So while yes, that's a factor, it's not an end-all explanation of why Firefox is where it currently is, mobile or not.
@rysiek Firefox won against IE by challenging the bundling *in court*.
Chrome was different: it started as KDE KHTML under GPL, taken up by Apple as WebKit under GPL (after several months of complaints by KDE — up to threatening Apple with copyright litigation that would have made Safari illegal) but with so extensive changes that they could no longer be merged back.
WebKit was then used for Chrome, the Javascript engine replaced by V8.
Chrome was bundled on Android.
@sabreW4K3
@ArneBab the court case was one part of it, but Firefox got a serious user base before the court case was a thing.
Also, I believe you're talking about the EU court case? Which did not affect IE outside of EU/EEA?
I would have to double check, this is ages ago, but the way I remember is that the court case ended up not being all that important. And that Firefox won on merits, largely.
@rysiek I think back on Windows this was true in the US, too.
Back when the monopoly controls had teeth and Microsoft was threatened with being broken up.
Also yes: IE was way worse in comparison than Chrome is today.
@ArneBab @rysiek while the bundling of browsers makes it an uphill struggle, Mozilla need to make Firefox the best browser it can be. Brave having more marketshare than Firefox is down to what? Opera having more marketshare is down to what? Firefox for Android was one guy doing everything on his own for years. No matter how obvious it was that mobile would be the new marketshare, Mozilla didn't do nearly enough and now they're playing catch-up and even then, the new redesign was made by a team with an iOS fetish, so the biggest marketshare isn't even getting it's own design language.
Also, it's a no-brainer that Mozilla put out a keyboard with emphasis on privacy, but they don't do that either. Even though that would be free mindshare for their goals.
@rysiek to have a chance today, Lawmakers would have to force mobile phone providers to include a choice of browsers — as they forced Microsoft back in the day.
That said: Firefox isn’t as much better than Chrome as it was better than IE when IE was bundled on Windows.
On iOS developers were actually forced to use WebKit — until the EU made that illegal: https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/17/apple_browser_eu/
> Firefox isn’t as much better than Chrome as it was better than IE when IE was bundled on Windows.
That's my point. Arguably, in many ways, it's *worse*, simply because Google gets to throw so much more money at Chrome/Chromium.
And instead of focusing on stuff where Firefox can easily be better, as Chrome would never be allowed to implement certain things, Mozilla focuses on *checks notes* AI. 
@rysiek I would assume that those who do AI aren’t the ones who would otherwise implement something more useful.
Skills and such.
What is it you wish to see in Firefox that Chrome wouldn’t be allowed to?
(keep in mind that as long as all the monetarization stuff Mozilla is trying fails as horribly as it currently does, Mozilla also depends on Google)
@sabreW4K3