Who has expressed a desire for Firefox to become "an AI browser"?

Because that's the source of the complaints. I don't want to use an "AI browser", kill switch or not. If this "AI browser" dies because of their mission to destroy community goodwill, good. I'm sick of giving the benefit of the doubt every time they royally fuck up. This situation where they're the steward of the only non-Google browser is not tenable, something needs to change.

▲ prmoustache 38 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Is it so hard to understand that the features person A wants are not necessarily the same as person B yet a company/foundation would be interested in providing a complete featureset for both A and B?

I don't need themes nor having my url bar serving search. I am not interested in an AI agent in my browser yet I welcome traduction features, do I have to shit on every company developping a software that has some features because I don't want them?

I am much more pragmatic: are these features easy to ignore/disable, do they largely increase the resources needed (disk, memory, cpu) even when not used, do these introduce bloat, etc.

I wasn't interested in pocket, I was just using a combination of firefox forks or disabling it on the devices I was using. That is the whole point of open source software.

▲ godelski 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

  > This situation where they're the steward of the only non-Google browser is not tenable, something needs to change.

So what, you're going to help Google shove the knife in deeper? Idk man, seems like a bad way to fight Google.

But honestly it just feels like you didn't even read my comment. I'm sorry that it's a lot, but I'm petty sure people can handle 10-30 seconds of reading. I even said it doesn't matter if Mozilla is evil. How do you turn that into me giving them the benefit of the doubt. I'm literally just arguing that there's slim pickings and to not help our bigger enemy to kill their enemies. It doesn't matter if their enemies ate evil, you're just helping the bigger evil get bigger and consolidate power. I'm saying "there's more important problems right now, not be fucking dumb and get distracted or before you know it you'll lose your head"

▲ mort96 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Letting Mozilla torpedo the only non-Google browser is also a bad way to fight Google. It's looking bleak. The only hope is that Mozilla dies and someone more serious picks up the mantle. Not sure who that would be though.

▲ glenstein an hour ago | parent | next [-]

They're not torpedoing it. It's a bizarre fatalistic tone that got manufactured in comment sections.

They spend more on developing the browser now than they ever have in their history, and they remain the most successful independently financed browser in the history of ever. Other major browsers have to be financed by trillion dollar companies based on independent revenue streams.

The predicament right now is that AI might displace search, which is a problem if you make money from search licensing. It's not yet clear what the new normal is going to be in an AI first paradigm. But what is clear is that doing nothing means the world will pass you by when everything changes.

▲ godelski 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

But that's not what happened. That's not the context of the thread. The battle was won. So celebrate. The war may not be over but it's not like we lost.

  > someone more serious picks up the mantle.

Let's cross that bridge when/IF we get there. But until then, maybe don't set the stage for them to take up that mantle. If all we do is complain then obviously they'll just learn to ignore us.

So don't sour the victory, it'll cost you the war

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mort96 3 hours ago | parent [-]

No battle has been won. Firefox's market share is dwindling, and they're going full steam ahead with turning Firefox into an "AI browser". Yes, they are adding an option to turn off AI features, but I don't want to use an "AI browser with AI features disabled", I want to use a normal web browser. Mozilla is not delivering that.

Note that just not bogging down Firefox with AI features is not enough here. Firefox market share has been going downhill for most of my life, long before they appointed this new AI-crazed CEO. I don't know what the solution is, but it's clear that it's not Mozilla.

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prmoustache 17 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

> Firefox market share has been going downhill for most of my life

Firefox market shares are the best of any non OEM device[1] and is beating competition from a number of OEM browser (like Samsung's one on mobile) and is fairly competitive compared to the desktop version of Safari (only 1% below on desktop market share).

Yes market share have been going downhill but mostly because they were abnormaly high in late 90's early 2000's due to:

- the inertia of being born from the ashes of Netscape, which was the default browser at the beginning of eternal september.

- it had its highest market share at a time when its strongest competition was Internet Explorer: a magnet for malwares.

So its market shares are quite good actually. Note that Opera (and now Vivaldi) never got close despite being appreciated by many.

[1] yes it comes with many linux distro but it is sold with virtually zero device.

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glenstein an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

This narrative gets endlessly repeated in comment sections despite not even pretending to align with the factual record. The side bets era from roughly 2020-present did not retroactively cause the market share losses from 2010-2015.

The problem with this revisionist history is that it's completely helpless to address the actual dynamics that led to the rise of Chrome, and attempts to tell the entire story in terms of add-ons tweaks to the Firefox user interface, even though that has nothing to do with the change in market share. The major drivers were the world's most visited website pushing a new browser and preloading it as a default on billions of mobile devices. Mozilla could have executed perfectly and still been sidelined.

But a few bad new cycles in the early 2020s crystallized a negative attitude that perfectly fed the hedonic skepticism of Internet comment sections, and so an echo chamber emerged of people reinterpreting that history as if purchasing Pocket or running a VPN somehow retroactively caused all the market share change.

Nobody's ever bothered to like look at the factual timeline, but once they hear it repeated enough they get confident enough to repeat it themselves and on and on the snowball goes.

	▲	manphone 20 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		That may even be true, but many commenters here are saying these things because they actually happened to them and then they switched off of Firefox because it pissed them off. (Myself included) So when you say this is a comment or narrative it’s the commenters you’re talking to and you’re talking past them in a way that is confusing. I’m telling you that I hated the Firefox changes and I finally turned to another fork. This has nothing to do with a narrative.