Mozilla under fire for Firefox AI "bloat" that blows up CPU and drains battery
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I just want a web browser that's not based in the USA.
ecosia and qwant are german and french respectively :3
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ecosia and qwant are german and french respectively :3
Those are search engines though, not web browsers.
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Those are search engines though, not web browsers.
on android theyre browsers :3
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It's also an example of a smaller company trying fight a mega Corp with infinite money, gained via unethical means.
People are shitting on Firefox while ignoring what they are up against.
I have no solution for their funding issue, what are they supposed to do? Charge for the browser or ads? There's literally no other alternative and I don't know what the solution is.
What I do know is that once FF dies and chrome fully owns the web we are well and truly fucked.
Honesty it might already be too late.
Basically, Firefox only crushes a handful of elderly cats while everyone else crushes kittens by the shipload.
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ecosia and qwant are german and french respectively :3
I mean truly independent of USA code base. Everything is still relying on upstream Chromium or Firefox with superficial tweaks and gimmicks. The maintainers of LibreWolf and Fennec which are what I'm using are more like game mod devs.
If ecosia+qwant actually forked from either and broke compatibility going their own path I'd consider them non USA. I know those two are working together on a search indexer and I'm very excited about that coming to fruition because that's more what I'm talking about and eager to support.
I realise what a mammoth challenge this is
Probably needs EU funding like the search indexer. -
I love Zen.
Zen user here also. Awesome project. Beautiful and useful browsing experience.
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Why not add this features as browser extension?
Facebook Container comes to mind, they've done this before already.
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browser.ml.chat.enabled falseI hate how many of these you have to do on any new installation of Firefox.
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I just want a web browser that's not based in the USA.
RIP the old Opera before they went Chromium.
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It's definitely an issue with the culture among tech companies.
They're all regurgitating each other's shit, so whenever a bad idea gets passed around, they all jump on board.
Every ignorant, fearing for their bonus CEO: "If we dont do that, we'll get left behind!"
Feh! Feh I say!
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Are we pretending that lots and lots of people aren't incredibly horny for AI right now?
Actual users hate AI. Shareholders love it. It’s a bubble and the business world is trying to force it everywhere they can to create a dependency.
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It's also an example of a smaller company trying fight a mega Corp with infinite money, gained via unethical means.
People are shitting on Firefox while ignoring what they are up against.
I have no solution for their funding issue, what are they supposed to do? Charge for the browser or ads? There's literally no other alternative and I don't know what the solution is.
What I do know is that once FF dies and chrome fully owns the web we are well and truly fucked.
Honesty it might already be too late.
They could stop paying their CEO so much and hire a few more devs, refocus their identity on privacy and performance (their offline ai translation is actually really useful), and actually give people the sense that their donations will be well spent.
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90% of their cash flow comes from google to be the default search engine - they are probably trying to open up alternative routes of funding to reduce the risk, since it's not guaranteed that the money will keep coming due to the current lawsuit.
Right, I sympathize with that.
…But also it’s ridiculous. Like why should including a feature with “AI” in it get them VC money? Even if that’s kinda reality?
TBH they should just become a contributor to llama.cpp and market that somehow.
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I hate how many of these you have to do on any new installation of Firefox.
A space for vanilla ff experience extension, sort of like sanemacs?
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I agree with you on almost everything.
It’s like the opposite of classic ML, relatively tiny special purpose models trained for something critical, out of desperation, because it just can’t be done well conventionally.
Here i disagree. ML is using high dimensional statistics. There exist many problems, which are by their nature problems of high dimensional statistics.
If you have for an example an engineering problem, it can make sense to use an ML approach, to find patterns in the relationship between input conditions and output results. Based on this patterns you have an idea, where you need to focus in the physical theory for understanding and optimizing it.
Another example for "generative AI" i have seen is creating models of hearts. So by feeding it the MRI scans of hundreds of real hearts, millions of models for probable heart shapes can be created and the interaction with medical equipment can be studied on them. This isn't a "desperate" approach. It is a smart approach.
wrote last edited by [email protected]Fair point. Not on the semantics per se, but on taking the best approach, 100%.
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Look at the executives pay of Mozilla, there is a lot of money there to start with.
It isn't though. At the higher end the last ceo was making 7 million. That is roughly 12 enginees after compensation and everything else.. It isn't nothing but it's less than 5 percent of the employees they laid off a year ago.
Increasing executive pay is a problem but it will barely move the needle.
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Here I am using browsers like apps. Chrome is my facebook app. I do zero else with it lol.
but really, my solution works fine. Is another 200MB on your SSD really that big of a sacrifice? I have Firefox, Chrome(in a fucking container where it belongs) and Librewolf installed lol.
wrote last edited by [email protected]Even though I'm aware Google would still have a lot of my data even if I deleted everything possible, one of the main reasons I swapped (apart from the manifest V3 controversy) was the privacy problem (yes, I know, I'm still using Facebook, regardless). I haven't thought of the container aspect, though - thanks for that.
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ecosia and qwant are german and french respectively :3
wrote last edited by [email protected]Ecosia on Android is based on Chromium.
Qwant on Android is based on: Firefox for Android, which uses the GeckoView engine.Otherwise they are just search engines.
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They are all out of date, updates just take longer to arrive including security patches. Just use base Firefox and configure it as needed.
wrote last edited by [email protected]LibreWolf seems pretty fast about it. The difference is only ever a matter of a few days for routine updates.
For example, it looks like Firefox 141 with the AI stuff was released on July 22, a few weeks ago.
My LibreWolf install is 141.0.2 (edit: since updated)
My Firefox install is 141.0.3That difference is worth it to me to know that various things I don't want have been removed from the code entirely, and that I can keep a completely default install of Firefox and/or nuke and replace that install whenever necessary.
Edit to add: A few hours since posting, I checked for updates and now I'm on LibreWolf 141.0.3.
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Did a project several years where the customrr required that the server we delivered specifically for the project never use more than 50% CPU or RAM. No requirements about how fast it actually performs its intended function, just that it can only utilise half the available resources while doing it.
Probably a bleed-over from the embedded side. Spent a lot of years working embedded control systems for NASA and DoD - bare metal systems, often interrupt driven - and it was common to have 50% margin requirements. They know those systems will grow over time, and they often have lifespans measured in decades.
