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Hang on to your Firefox! (www.newsonaut.com)
submitted 5 days ago* by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 32 points 5 days ago (4 children)

I am not in the AI==bad camp because I believe in nuance. I see a lot of people shit on Firefox for integrating LLM-related features. What the blog post points out and people fail to recognize is that if Mozilla stopped maintaining Firefox, almost all of its forks would die. People make similar arguments about Canonical and Ubuntu. Would these people pay Mozilla or Canonical for their work? The corporate investors do. I'm not saying I agree with it all, but that's how it works.

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  • [–] 11 points 5 days ago (1 child)

    I see a lot of people shit on Firefox for integrating LLM-related features. What the blog post points out and people fail to recognize is that if Mozilla stopped maintaining Firefox, almost all of its forks would die.

    You're misreading why people are shitting on FF. It would have been nice if Firefox had actually worked on literally any other features in the last decade, like not trashing support for PWAs. Instead, we got nothing but stupid partnerships with companies for features not one wanted, and a succession of failures in the CEO seat of Firefox.

    So, yeah, I guess I don't think it"s realistic for Firefox to have ignored the LLM craze entirely, but man, they could have managed that Google money better.

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  • [–] 11 points 5 days ago (2 children)

    Would these people pay Mozilla or Canonical for their work?

    I think we know the answer to this.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 days ago

    Mozilla? Maybe, but they need to step it up to be worth paying. They were captured by Google supporting them for too long and need to break from the "Yes, Daddy!" dipshittery. Dumping slopboth trash into everything while my SSD replacement is 6x what it was last time I checked just makes me want to slap you. Especiallyh if it's bloody pointless, and for those who want that crap it can run via a bookmarked site or as an extenion not part of the core fucking browser.

    Canonical? Fuck no! Not only is Ubuntu a complete joke, and was nearly twenty yhears ago when I tried and tossed it to go back to Slackware, but the only project they ever put out worth anything they abandoned and let it fall toa poorly supported community project making the phone OS.

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  • [–] -4 points 5 days ago* (1 child)

    if Mozilla stopped maintaining Firefox, almost all of its forks would die.

    That's an assumption. You're severely underestimating the amount of work open source maintainers put into those things.

    Would these people pay [...] Canonical for their work?

    Plenty of nice distribs exist without being maintained by a corporation. Good on them, for getting to have a bunch of money of the opensource, but it's not a necessary model for the opensource projects to survive.

    I see a lot of people shit on Firefox for integrating LLM-related features

    And that's good, as it should be. They crammed this bullshit that nobody asked for, and reluctantly gave a button to opt out a year later, and it's still on by default. This is bad behavior regardless of your stance on it.

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  • [–] 16 points 5 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 child)

    You're severely underestimating the amount of work open source maintainers put into those things.

    Which Firefox fork is a hard fork? Which Firefox fork has a hard fork of the Gecko engine?

    As far as I know, all Firefox forks are dependent on the Gecko engine, and basically have Firefox as upstream.

    I would love for you to prove me wrong, but I don't believe any of these projects, though with many highly dedicated contributors, would be able to maintain active development of a web browser engine that can keep up with new modern web standards.

    There is a reason the Ladybird project is taking so long to materialize and has many sponsors giving significant amounts of money.

    Internet shit is hard. Firefox and their forks only work because Mozilla is fucking huge and has money to develop Firefox as part of the three big industry standard web browsers. Even though Mozilla does a lot of stupid decisions and spends the majority of their money on dumb shit, and they put dumb shit into the default Firefox that they ship, it is still excellent in many ways and the very best thing we have as a FOSS web browser. I encourage everyone to use Firefox with hardening or one its forks.

    I agree with the article, and people saying "Yeah let's boycott Firefox, use [insert Firefox fork here]" every time there is a Lemmy post on a stupid decision by Mozilla are effectively not boycotting Firefox at all, or if they recommend a Chromium fork they are supporting Chrome/Google, even if they don't think they are. These forks are in essence just preconfigured and hardened Firefox/Chromium profiles with a few bells and whistles here and there.

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  • [–] -2 points 5 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

    Why would anyone waste enormous amount of energy making a new engine, when forked Gecko works and you can backport Mozilla's updates to it. Same way with Linux, everyone uses Linux kernel because it exists.
    When/if those project die, that's when you'll start seeing replacements, and at some point the best or most popular will be seen as mainstream and will be a focus point of all the enthusiasts. Like Firefox now.
    There is absolutely no reason to believe that a corporation is required to have a good opensource project, just because right now a corporation maintains this specific one.

    These forks are in essence just preconfigured and hardened Firefox

    That's also not true for a lot of the projects. Forks maintain their own code, porting new updates from Mozilla's stuff, but they aren't required to port everything, and that's the big reason to use them.

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