Technology

Could be worse, seriously. Safari is not a bad browser and WebKit is the only engine since years that can keep up with chromium. I get that it is annoying to have leas freedom on iOS, but I also appreciate the increased security[1] and quality of life that comes with it.

[1] yes, I am aware that open source software tends to be more secure, as it can be reviewed by all. However, Android by default is way less secure than iOS, unless you use GraphiteOS or similar.

I bought an old Pixel 7a with (new) case for less than $179 USD and put Graphene OS on it. Definitely cheaper than buying youself a new iPhone, and installation is easy af.

There are some good iOS browsers.

At the moment, I use Orion (from Kagi) and Narrow32. Quiche Browser is good, DuckDuckGo is fine.

Discoverability on iOS is awful though. The store is just packed with SEO spam and corporate slop on top of all the passion projects or "benevolent" ones.

As someone who uses waterfox but hadn't heard any of this news, that was a rollercoaster. But consider me relieved.

Impressive how management can blindly ignore their own core pricipals.

it's in settings > general

Yeah, you have to enable a setting. I think it links you to it when you run into it. Much more of a turn off to me is not being able to use my camera in it, so I have to use a different browser for video calls.

I refuse to use any services that make use of DRM on principle. They're defective by design.

The problem is that they're pushing it without any way for those of us who really don't want that crap to strip it out of the browser. I don't want all this ai garbage, never asked for it, and am harassed at every corner by every fucking company thinking it's somehow going to change the world.

Sure, Mozilla allows you to turn off some of these features, but I've already had it reenabled in updates after previously disabling it. Further, many of the settings are buried in about:config, which is not a user-friendly way to make those changes. At best, these functionalities should be opt-in and presented as addons that can be installed, rather than being a core part of the browser that cannot be removed.

I'll try to give an out-of-the-loop answer to this, if that helps. Concerning "AI" tools, I think the chunk of people who don't want it included in the browser on any level come in one or both of two forms. One is a moral opposition -- for example, a pro-environmental or pro-artist stance. I don't think those need much explanation, but feel free to say otherwise.

The other is in my opinion is in response to exhaustion. Pro-"AI" features have proven themselves to be untrustworthy at nearly every turn with thoughtless or downright irresponsible implementations. A worthwhile use-case is the exception rather than the norm and It's tiring to have to constantly check if this time I want it on or not. As a result of opt-in-by-default changes to privacy policies or account settings, my trust in any site or app publishing an "AI" implementation has been broken and it's nice to have options I don't have to worry about wherever I can get them. I found it irritatingly tone-deaf that Mozilla wasn't considering a kill-switch with their first swing at this.

If it seems unreasonable or hard-to-understand, I think taking a step back and looking at the broader software industry rather than just Mozilla will help.

Firefox is not the devil, but "ideologies aside", the basic idea is:

1. (Just like microsoft), They could have just decided to put it in one of the "many" variant of the product, name it FoxAI, let the users decide and call a day. Instead, they've chosen to force a very heavy component like that on the main version out of blue.

2. Switched or not. Now, you'll have 'way' more bloat on a browser, who should be focused on speed and performance.

3. The whole thing about AI on free stuff is to get as much data as possible to train. You have to trust them to switch it off completely.

You can even disable these features if you do not like them at all

As a smart person said:

BETTER IT NOT EXIST AT ALL

If I went to a restaurant, they placed a hot steaming stinky turd sandwich on my table and then went “oh, but you don’t have to have it”, I still wouldn’t fucking eat there.

Why should we be okay with the Turd Sandwich that is ~~crypto being served by Brave~~ LLM features served by Mozilla being opt-in???

-gwl@lemmy.blahaj.zone

Mozilla is still the only company maintaining an alternative to Chromium (there's also webkit if you count Apple). Without Firefox you can't have Librewolf or other alternatives.

Mozilla is not perfect but people really need to stop treating them in a purely binary fashion (you are either horrible or are perfect).

You can criticize Mozilla for the direction they are taking with Firefox, but also you can argue that being a hardcore privacy-centric browser will kill interest for Firefox even faster.