Perhaps if they made decisions like this more often in recent times there would be more people there when they do good stuff.
Edit: Cool to see someone botting this thread as well. I have now watched on three separate occasions someone vote up on mine and others comments only for a vote down to be applied within 10 seconds - 5 minutes in lockstep each time. This was in the first 15 minutes of the comment being posted.
2nd Edit. I’ve watched it happen 8 times now actually. I wonder what the odds are that over the course of ~2 hours there is exactly 8 people who agree and exactly 8 who don’t who keep showing up within moments of one another.
You mean like isolating cookies?
Like integration state partitioning for the entire browser context, user-controllable?
Like adding vertical tabs?
Like background wallpaper options for new tab independent of themes?
Like site translations?
Like working on tab groups?
Like working on tablet UI options?
Like … okay I’ll stop.
Like with red traffic lights vs green traffic lights, always keep in mind that your brain does not want to actively notice/recall things going well. It’s when things are annoying/interrupting that you remember.
All I intend to say is that if I left when Mozilla thought it was a good idea to have an advertising company become involved in the development of their products and started tracking users without their consent (even if less invasively than cookies) with PPA, then surely I am not the only one who left.
This is a company that has previously sideloaded an extension into the browser without user permissions because of a marketing deal they made with a television show. As a result, I’m afraid im less concerned with the not-yet implemented features they may be working on or the features they have in place when there are a litany of other browsers available which don’t fuck around with user permissions and privacy for advertising deals.
If I wanted a browser for tab grouping and UI stuff, I’d move to vivaldi, but at the moment firefox just doesn’t seem to have the best UI or the best security and both of those are directly related to Mozilla’s choices.
You are certainly entitled to your opinion and it is valid, but I think that my criticisms are also valid and are not baseless.
Oh for sure criticism is valid, but it’s funny how people always forget all the actual good stuff being added, too.
In general, not just Firefox-specific. People constantly forget how while Google search results have gone to shit, empyrical analysis showed that it went to shit more for other search engines (meaning if anything Google got comparatively better, but of course everyone got worse across the board, too). People constantly forget over all their little issues how some countries, including mine, have swapped >50% of their energy (from ~0%) to green energy in just 10 or so years. It’s too easy to see only the negative things.
Like adding vertical tabs?
Having fucked an entire ecosystem of UI-modifying plugins, seven years prior. Still not matching the functionality of that decades-running, userbase-driven experimentation. I want my goddamn multi-row tabs back.
Mozilla doesn’t get kudos for tiny improvements as if they cancel out huge blunders. Killing vertical tabs by killing XUL also severely limited DownThemAll, and they spent a year ignoring pleas from the guy that gave their browser and their browser alone the best download plugin to-date. He eventually managed to “just rewrite!” and claw most functionality back from Chrome’s tightassed tool-kit. Most authors did not. Most authors had not, since the browser fucking launched. I can barely remember how much functionality I’ve lost, thanks to Mozilla refusing to respect plugin devs and formalize any lasting API. The best bits did come back, thanks to other authors who also missed those features… until they too burned out and fucked off.
But hey! Mozilla also made some clever tweaks inside the only software project that advertises their true passion for smartphones I mean chat I mean crypto I mean AI I mean $nextbigtrend, so it’s squaresies.
Vertical tabs? I’ve been using an extension for that so I didn’t even notice. Is that already on the main release or still on the nightlies?
Sorry for asking here but a DDG search just turns out a bunch of pages telling you how to get them with extensions, which I already do.
Its still experimental, (in nightly), and a bit unpolished so id stick with the extensions for now
No clue. I doubt it’s a conspiracy, though. Just seems like a controversial take.
Certainly possible but I’m sure the odds are astronomically low. After I saw this happen 3 times I started refreshing every minute and each time there was a change, both counts had increased, and this happened 8 times in a row. I could see a distribution happening of something like a vote up at minute 2, vote down at minute 3 vote up at minute 12, vote down at minute 20, etc, but this was - vote up and vote down at minute 5, same thing at minute 11, same thing at minute 16, etc, 8 times concurrently (the minutes listed here are an example, I wasn’t tracking exact time between events).
Im pretty sure you’re seeing a pattern where there isnt one, your post is just controversial
I reported their comment for suspected downvote manipulation earlier and requested the admins investigate the votes. Now I came back and 10 of the downvotes were slashed off of it. So it seems like those ‘astronomically low odds’ turned out to be at least partially correct. Otherwise why would the admins have slashed 10 downvotes from the post. It feels like the odds that 10 people had a change of heart are more astronomically low than the more likely reason which is that they got their votes slashed and their accounts banned by the admins due to an investigation finding them to be downvote bots or downvote trolls.
crazy how as soon as mozilla does good stuff nobody is there
One good thing will not outweigh ten bad ones.
Also, is this post on Mastodon? How’s Mozilla’s instance doing? I hope well. /s
One good thing doesn’t even outweigh one bad one. What do you call someone who tells 99 truths and one lie?
A liar.
It’s the same here; there’s an asymmetry between doing what’s right and betraying someone’s trust. When Mozilla can demonstrate consistent integrity, maybe I’ll stop using a fork.
With introduction of even more AI services to Firefox I wanted to express that to me it does seem like Firefox is missing with development of features. This sentiment is echoed by a lot of people in my social bubble of technologists, ethicists and other people with same priorities as what one could think are values which Firefox was built on.
Those concerns are in my opinion very valid. The machine learning models have shown to be unreliable - just some of the recent examples from AI products made by large corporations: pointing users to eat pizza with glue, providing false information about just about anything. There are a number of ethical issues yet to be resolved with usage of AI, from its intense usage of computing resources that adds up to electric grid demands. Through privacy and possible copyright violations of datasets that power the models. To an entire bag of other issues monitored by excellent resources such as AIAAIC repository.
AI/Machine learning is an amazing field with many likely applications, and yet, its recent rise to fame is characterized by failures and issues in many implementations. Personally I often don’t even see whether the application of AI is truthfully necessary, in many cases a human would do a more trustworthy and fast task of information gathering than a large machine learning model.
When we compare current state of “AI”, does it reflect what Firefox stands for? Does it reflect Mozilla’s principals?
Let’s compare.
- Principle 2
The internet is a global public resource that must remain open and accessible.
LLMs are known for being a black box. Depending on our definition of “open and accessible”, LLMs can be a very free resource or a completely inaccessible black box of math.
- Principle 4
Individuals’ security and privacy on the internet are fundamental and must not be treated as optional.
It’s clear that LLMs pose a privacy risk to Internet users. LLMs pose risk in at least two ways - because the data they are trained on sometimes contains private information due to negligent training process. In this case users of a learned model can possibly access private information. The second risk is of course usage of 3rd party services that may use information to infringe on privacy of users. While Mozilla in blog assures that “we are committed to following the principles of user choice, agency, and privacy as we bring AI-powered enhancements to Firefox”, it’s unclear how supporting such services as “ChatGPT, Google Gemini, HuggingChat, and Le Chat Mistral” helps protect Firefox user privacy. Giving users choice should not compromise their safety and privacy.
- Principle 10
Magnifying the public benefit aspects of the internet is an important goal, worthy of time, attention and commitment.
In my opinion in the process of designing AI functionalities on top of Firefox there was no evaluation on how those functionalities can benefit the public. There are a number of issues as mentioned above with the LLMs, they can be dangerous and work in detriment to users. Investing and supporting in technology of this type may lead to terrible consequences with little actual benefit.
In addition Mozilla claims:
- We are committed to an internet that elevates critical thinking, reasoned argument, shared knowledge, and verifiable facts.
I argue that AI models are the opposite to that. AI output is not verifiable. They are working against sharing knowledge by making seemingly accurate information that turn out to be false.
I ask Mozilla to reevaluate impact of AI considering all of those points. I ask on behalf of myself as well as many users that I see on Fediverse being greatly worried and frustrated with AI changes added on top of Firefox. There is certainly a lot of potential greatness that could be done with AI, but those steps must be taken responsibly.
Yes, that’s how it works. If you do bad stuff, people leave. They are no longer around to notice if you do good stuff.
People aren’t shitting on Firefox, people are shitting on Mozilla and rightfully so. Mozilla has made many bad decisions, decisions that may call into question the future of Firefox and whether their decisions will compromise it as a privacy friendly browser. After all if Mozilla starts making changes which are harmful towards privacy and hard codes them into the browser, there’s no getting around that with user.js tweaks, that requires more work to fix.
Thankfully there are forks of Firefox but since those depend on the upstream from Mozilla the more they change the harder it is to undo those changes. A manifest V3 style change (which isn’t happening now but could happen in the future if they get into advertising), would be devastating, because even if Librewolf can undo those changes, it’s very likely they would have to implement their own extension distribution system because AMO would very much reject incompatible add-ons in that scenario.
So yeah people do have the right to criticize Mozilla in this regard, this trend has happened before, it will continue to happen in the future. Enshittification is a slow and ugly process, best to catch it in the early stages than to wait it out until you’re already boiling (frog boiling analogy).
crazy how as soon as mozilla does good stuff nobody is there
We’re all glad to see Mozilla have a win, at least I assume so. But there’s been a lot of other much bigger decisions that have gone on recently that make us (at least me) hesitant to celebrate at the first good thing.
I think its very stupid that so many people criticize mozilla for engaging in ai.
Ai is the future.
I think people fear it being an annoying default they can’t switch off, instead of the useful supplement it currently is.
Many also fear that it will lead to misunderstanding and rampant misinformation. Which at the current trajectory is not an unreasonable fear.
If AI summarization becomes uncomfortably popular, I hope реοριe bеgiи цsing меtноds tо bгеαk iτ, whеп thегe is sомe imрoгtαиt inГогмαtiοn γоυ doи"t шαnt sцмmaгizеd, dυе tо рσteпtiаΙ foг мissrергeseпtатiοη bγ βαd sцмmагizαtiои Ьγ thе ΛΙ. ΜаγЬe sомeοηe сåп mаκе α tоοl tо do tнis αutοмаtiсаIly, siпсe it is tеdiоцs tο dø ît mаиυαIIγ.
(This comment is a demo on how that can be done.)
On the more technical side of things they are doing excellent work, it’s on the bike shedding department that the overpaid management is doing idiotic choices.
Meanwhile me with my Freezed Firefox version…
“So what crazy stuff is going to be discussed in arkenfoxe’s Github repo this time?”
