Govts around the world should be funding all sorts of FOSS projects. I know they do to some degree but not much. It benefits the whole world and only hurts big tech.
This is what people don’t understand. Those in power, whether they’re part of the government, a wealthy CEO, or a religious leader, will do what benefits themselves if they think they can get away with it. We keep talking about powerful organizations and what they could do to benefit everyone, but fail to realize that powerful people don’t want to benefit everyone.
They only do what benefits everyone if they feel like they can’t get away with just doing what benefits themselves. It’s our responsibility to make sure they don’t think they can get away with it, and clearly strongly-worded letters and quippy signs held outside their offices for an afternoon or two isn’t enough to do that.
Firefox is just the browser, Mozilla is the organization constantly wasting money on features Firefox’s users are actively hostile to in a bid to tempt away people already using Chrome. Not the OP, but I’d be down to donate to Firefox’s development directly, but I wouldn’t want to make a donation to Mozilla hoping it would go toward Firefox, only to find out they took my money to build some new LLM integration that nobody asked for, only to sit unused for years before being quietly shuttered in favor of the new tech buzzword of the day.
I’m pretty sure you can donate to Mozilla, are you saying that donations to Mozilla don’t accomplish what we might want? I only know a little about how much Mozilla sucks so I’m ready to learn more.
There are two interlinked Mozillas: the Mozilla Foundation is what you can donate to, but the Mozilla Corporation is what develops Firefox. No matter how much you donate, that money cannot (or will not) be transferred to Firefox development.
Mozilla’s recent history includes privacy flub after financial management misstep, so here’s a few links in no particular order of severity or chronology:
Last time I tried Waterfox some sites like Twitch that actively block usage on old browsers, refused to work because the latest Waterfox release was based on a Firefox like 20+ builds behind.
Firefox was on like version 142 and the latest Waterfox download was based on build 128.
Waterfox right now is built on ESR 148, which is on par with the latest Firefox release! ESR releases will lag several versions behind, but that’s normal (even on Mozilla’s side), and I’d be kind of shocked if it was such a big gap
Edit: there was a big gap. 128 to 140 was the right jump, but Waterfox non-betas took a little less than two months to implement the change after Mozilla released it.
Well you clearly haven’t used the standard available download (non-beta/nightly release) consistently through last year. Waterfox was using ESR 128 since October 2024, kept that base until finally upgrading to ESR 140 last August. So that’s nearly a year of its base being out of date. So the user agent reported that number… sites really don’t like that since they’re looking at that for support.
Twitch only supports the last TWO versions of Firefox officially and will actively block logging in from older versions. So while you might be able to watch Twitch, if you aren’t already logged in, you won’t be able to login.
It was outdated, but only for a couple months. Firefox ESR is built to last about a year, and it was maintained with security patches up-to-date alongside Firefox Production versions 129, 130, 131, 132… all the way to 139. Only then did ESR 140 come out.
But if Twitch only supports the two most recent Firefox production versions, I guess ESR wouldn’t cut it after FF 131 came out.
Yup. Don’t use or support Ladybird, especially since it’s made by anti-inclusivity “keep your ‘political’ gender-neutral pronouns out of our READMEs” nerdbros.
Firefox’s runs locally while google’s runs on their (much more powerful) servers, for something similar to chrome’s I’d just get the deepl extension, which does the same thing just better.
You don’t have to use google translate (there are 2 other services included), and TWP doesn’t reload the page when you toggle the translate function off and on like the built in one did.
When I turned it off the translation thingy went away, so I’m not sure if it was AI all along and they were lying about it or not. Just as well, there’s an extension that works fine and it doesn’t reload the page every time I toggled it like the built in one did.
The translation is technically AI, but it’s a distant cousin to the LLMs and image generators that have repulsed so many people. (The term AI is such a broad and vague umbrella that Netflix recommendations count as AI.) And, even more notably, this is before Mozilla started marketing things as AI.
It was also a joint non-profit venture with a university, rather than today’s weird gimmicks or for-profit partnerships.
It’s less a vague umbrella and more an academic category. It just feels odd to call it vague in the same way you wouldn’t call “chemistry” vague, despite it having applications ranging from hand soap to toxic waste.
In this case, the vagueness of the term AI is abused by its fans. “Aha, you claim to hate AI, and yet…” they say. They should know better.
“Chemicals” is actually a great example. If someone said “Chemicals are coming out of that factory”, you’d rightfully cringe if a factory manager said “well actually soap is made of chemicals too”
It’s worth mentioning in my opinion though, because if someone were to say “we should ban chemicals” it’d be worthwhile to point out what that actually means.
I don’t actually think the broadness of the category is intentionally abused, it’s just that it’s an incredibly common thing to remove anything from the AI category that’s explicable.
I feel slightly more hanlons razor about it since there’s people in my city talking about and petitioning on the popular notion of banning all data centers from the state, and how it would be awful if s data center came here. I know what they mean, but it’s not what they’re trying to get the law to do, and our city already has six data centers I know of off the top of my head. The language drift is fine, but when it starts to conflate with policy it’s another issue.
And?
Because the term AI was not in vogue at the time, even though it’s clearly the same technology, it doesn’t count? It’s literally packaged under the same umbrella now.
Anyway, the big issue is still tech ppl thinking their viewpoint is the only one valid, and that every generic user will have the same exact needs as them.
Not all these arguments no.
You’re defending your position that this AI feature is not really AI so it’s ok, but the others are all bad because of the two letters of the devil.
Still AI is a marketing term, always has been. AI in the form of machine learning has been around for more than a decade, and lots of things already use that.
The knee jerk reaction of tech circles saying mozilla will sell their soul because there is no “kill switch” is so fucking dumb. Even more dumb is thinking no other users may want any of these features. Unless you work at Mozilla, and/or do product research for browsers, chances are you most likely have no idea how people will want to use these features in their day to day.
Even working on one’s own product in a company, few really understand the users needs and wants, especially tech persons.
I can guarantee you, the weird gimmick you don’t understand is crucial to some.
You’re defending your position that this AI feature is not really AI so it’s ok
I literally say “The translation is technically AI,” so no. I give reasons how the other features are different, which you seem to acknowledge a little, at least.
the weird gimmick you don’t understand is crucial to some
Can you describe how to access the gimmick and which people find it crucial? I’m pretty confident in my understanding of it and how hilariously unhelpful it is.
Being technically something implies it’s not really or to be considered apart from the group.
The “gimmick” is proposing alt text based on the image when editing PDFs. I don’t see how it’s unhelpful. I’m not into editing PDFs in firefox, but I do use it to read them.
Inciting editors to include an alt text for accessibility seems like the ideal use case for this tech. The human still has to review and approve the generated text.
Unless I missed something as I cannot try the feature now, it seems to me a great application of ai, to augment humans in their work, and to a useful cause.
Image classification and description is “old” tech now, and I already use it in my work to auto tag images for editors to find more easily later. Nothing crazy.
I think they’re desperate to make money since they’re losing userbass AND Google is probably not happy that most users change the default search engine away from them.
Does anyone really think the current administration is going to break up Google? Lina Khan almost did it but like most of the rest of this timeline we just didn’t quite get there
They either fail to get a big enough use base because their core users are not enough and they fail from a lack of funding.
Or they try to follow trends to increase their appeal and user base, and annoy their core users.
Most users don’t realize that Mozilla is doing what Google is doing with Chrome with an engineering team 1/4 the size of the chrome team. And that the grand majority of their costs are engineering related.
Browsers are expensive, and Mozilla needs to find revenue streams to pay for it.
I believe Firefox could raise a lot of money through donations. If they make it clear that Firefox donations will be solely used for Firefox development. Also ideally add a quick survey to donations to see what the “donating” userbases values are. My issue with donating to Mozilla is that it is too broad and they have many products I don’t care for.
I use Thunderbird and donate to it because I feel it’s more focused. I believe Mozilla still can use the funds for other stuff but at least I am donating for a clear project.
Firefox donations will be solely used for Firefox development
This might be a stupid question… but how much developing does a browser actually need? I get security updates and such but how much resources does that stuff really need? Full disclosure: I’m a dumb lorry driver I have no idea how these things work. Some years ago I realized I hadn’t updated my browser in at least a year, maybe two and I had no issues lol
Infinite money Google keeps trying to push shit to the standard so all other browsers end up needing significant dedicated resources to keep up or risk getting blamed for broken sites.
This is a way to see what’s in each release. The ones on the left are major releases and tend to have bigger features, and the others tend to be bug fixes.
Web browsers start with core functionality that’s very complex. Then you tack on that they’re being used for things like banking, and managing the critical details of people’s lives. That means security galore, which is hard and constant. Then you have ad people, who are also something that’s hard to defend against.
Then there’s the constant flood of new features you have to implement to keep up with Google.
Chrome has 1,000 to 4,000 people working on it. Mozzila employs about 700 to work on firefox, with maybe 1,000 additional open source developers.
It is really difficult to implement in the first place, and the standards evolve constantly. Some argue it may not be possible to build new browsers anymore
Mozilla has released so many self-described AI features in the past few years, but this is the only one that has:
I hope Mozilla learns their lesson. I doubt they will, but I hope.
sadly I’ll likely support them through any shitty decisions they make as they are the only viable non-chromium alternative these days.
I get they’re chasing the buck and trying to stay relevant, but uhhhh… if they could be less Steve Buscemi-teen about it, that’d be great.
I strongly believe that the EU should fund Mozilla, or a fork of Firefox.
Gecko is the only viable competitor to Blink/WebKit, and it is needed
Govts around the world should be funding all sorts of FOSS projects. I know they do to some degree but not much. It benefits the whole world and only hurts big tech.
That prospect becomes less and less likely the more government is bought and paid for by Big Tech.
This is what people don’t understand. Those in power, whether they’re part of the government, a wealthy CEO, or a religious leader, will do what benefits themselves if they think they can get away with it. We keep talking about powerful organizations and what they could do to benefit everyone, but fail to realize that powerful people don’t want to benefit everyone.
They only do what benefits everyone if they feel like they can’t get away with just doing what benefits themselves. It’s our responsibility to make sure they don’t think they can get away with it, and clearly strongly-worded letters and quippy signs held outside their offices for an afternoon or two isn’t enough to do that.
Funding FF? Maybe. Funding Mozilla? No way, not with my money.
Why?
Firefox is just the browser, Mozilla is the organization constantly wasting money on features Firefox’s users are actively hostile to in a bid to tempt away people already using Chrome. Not the OP, but I’d be down to donate to Firefox’s development directly, but I wouldn’t want to make a donation to Mozilla hoping it would go toward Firefox, only to find out they took my money to build some new LLM integration that nobody asked for, only to sit unused for years before being quietly shuttered in favor of the new tech buzzword of the day.
Yeah I really hope there will be some way to tie donations directly to FF development.
Maybe funding components would be better than funding mozilla. Eg: 2 engineers for Gecko
This is probably common knowledge to you and many others, but it bears repeating: You cannot donate to fund the development of Mozilla Firefox.
Google can, unfortunately.
I’m pretty sure you can donate to Mozilla, are you saying that donations to Mozilla don’t accomplish what we might want? I only know a little about how much Mozilla sucks so I’m ready to learn more.
There are two interlinked Mozillas: the Mozilla Foundation is what you can donate to, but the Mozilla Corporation is what develops Firefox. No matter how much you donate, that money cannot (or will not) be transferred to Firefox development.
Mozilla’s recent history includes privacy flub after financial management misstep, so here’s a few links in no particular order of severity or chronology:
Each of these are a little rabbit hole on their own.
Reminder that Krebs is an asshole who responds to criticism by doxxing the accounts of other security researchers.
I recommend Waterfox
They have pledged to not fill their browser with AI slop features.
Last time I tried Waterfox some sites like Twitch that actively block usage on old browsers, refused to work because the latest Waterfox release was based on a Firefox like 20+ builds behind.
Firefox was on like version 142 and the latest Waterfox download was based on build 128.
Waterfox right now is built on ESR 148, which is on par with the latest Firefox release! ESR releases will lag several versions behind, but that’s normal (even on Mozilla’s side), and I’d be kind of shocked if it was such a big gap
Edit: there was a big gap. 128 to 140 was the right jump, but Waterfox non-betas took a little less than two months to implement the change after Mozilla released it.
I have used it for twitch for years without issue. I also have ublock origin with twitch adblock.
Well you clearly haven’t used the standard available download (non-beta/nightly release) consistently through last year. Waterfox was using ESR 128 since October 2024, kept that base until finally upgrading to ESR 140 last August. So that’s nearly a year of its base being out of date. So the user agent reported that number… sites really don’t like that since they’re looking at that for support.
https://www.waterfox.com/releases/6.5.0/ https://www.waterfox.com/releases/6.6.0/
Twitch only supports the last TWO versions of Firefox officially and will actively block logging in from older versions. So while you might be able to watch Twitch, if you aren’t already logged in, you won’t be able to login.
https://help.twitch.tv/s/article/supported-browsers?language=en_US
There are thousands of posts about it online for Waterfox other forks.
It was outdated, but only for a couple months. Firefox ESR is built to last about a year, and it was maintained with security patches up-to-date alongside Firefox Production versions 129, 130, 131, 132… all the way to 139. Only then did ESR 140 come out.
But if Twitch only supports the two most recent Firefox production versions, I guess ESR wouldn’t cut it after FF 131 came out.
I have used the standard available download on multiple operating systems for years without issues with twitch.
Quintessential “works for me” response. Must be a software developer.
If everyone switched from firefox to waterfox, Mozilla would kill firefox which would in turn will waterfox
Yeah ofc they are chasing the buck.
It’s either they find alternatives revenue streams or we no longer have Firefox as a viable alternative anymore.
Browsers development is crazy engineering heavy, and thus, expensive.
It’s a shitty situation all around.
Ladybird browser looks promising!
The ladybird devs are currently in the process of switching language again from Swift to Rust, using LLMs.
Yup. Don’t use or support Ladybird, especially since it’s made by anti-inclusivity “keep your ‘political’ gender-neutral pronouns out of our READMEs” nerdbros.
On the other hand, Servo is coming along nicely.
https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md
?
I watched this unfold as it happened. It kind of left a bad taste in my mouth after that.
https://hyperborea.org/reviews/software/ladybird-inclusivity/
That line is actually part of a very interesting change to the document.
https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird/commit/627dcb90bdd23ccfa2ae210d55b474ab4a844db0
To be fair people liked the translation feature too
I tried FF translation a couple times, and it’s woefully poor compared to Google’s. What am I doing wrong?
Firefox’s runs locally while google’s runs on their (much more powerful) servers, for something similar to chrome’s I’d just get the deepl extension, which does the same thing just better.
TWP does it better.
TWP dumps your pages to google translate, no thanks. FF is on device
You don’t have to use google translate (there are 2 other services included), and TWP doesn’t reload the page when you toggle the translate function off and on like the built in one did.
Those are still external services. I didn’t mention them because they carry the exact same risks
Ssshhh don’t say that too loud or the “no one wanted this” crowd may hear you. They would be very scared if they could read.
In the original announcement that they added translation, they didn’t call it AI. They didn’t even call it machine “learning” or machine translation there.
They just called it local, automated translation.
Maybe you should take your own advice about reading, and double-check my comment ;)
When I turned it off the translation thingy went away, so I’m not sure if it was AI all along and they were lying about it or not. Just as well, there’s an extension that works fine and it doesn’t reload the page every time I toggled it like the built in one did.
The translation is technically AI, but it’s a distant cousin to the LLMs and image generators that have repulsed so many people. (The term AI is such a broad and vague umbrella that Netflix recommendations count as AI.) And, even more notably, this is before Mozilla started marketing things as AI.
It was also a joint non-profit venture with a university, rather than today’s weird gimmicks or for-profit partnerships.
It’s less a vague umbrella and more an academic category. It just feels odd to call it vague in the same way you wouldn’t call “chemistry” vague, despite it having applications ranging from hand soap to toxic waste.
In this case, the vagueness of the term AI is abused by its fans. “Aha, you claim to hate AI, and yet…” they say. They should know better.
“Chemicals” is actually a great example. If someone said “Chemicals are coming out of that factory”, you’d rightfully cringe if a factory manager said “well actually soap is made of chemicals too”
I take your point. :)
It’s worth mentioning in my opinion though, because if someone were to say “we should ban chemicals” it’d be worthwhile to point out what that actually means.
I don’t actually think the broadness of the category is intentionally abused, it’s just that it’s an incredibly common thing to remove anything from the AI category that’s explicable.
I feel slightly more hanlons razor about it since there’s people in my city talking about and petitioning on the popular notion of banning all data centers from the state, and how it would be awful if s data center came here. I know what they mean, but it’s not what they’re trying to get the law to do, and our city already has six data centers I know of off the top of my head. The language drift is fine, but when it starts to conflate with policy it’s another issue.
And?
Because the term AI was not in vogue at the time, even though it’s clearly the same technology, it doesn’t count? It’s literally packaged under the same umbrella now.
Anyway, the big issue is still tech ppl thinking their viewpoint is the only one valid, and that every generic user will have the same exact needs as them.
I already addressed all of these arguments in another comment in this thread…
Not all these arguments no.
You’re defending your position that this AI feature is not really AI so it’s ok, but the others are all bad because of the two letters of the devil.
Still AI is a marketing term, always has been. AI in the form of machine learning has been around for more than a decade, and lots of things already use that.
The knee jerk reaction of tech circles saying mozilla will sell their soul because there is no “kill switch” is so fucking dumb. Even more dumb is thinking no other users may want any of these features. Unless you work at Mozilla, and/or do product research for browsers, chances are you most likely have no idea how people will want to use these features in their day to day.
Even working on one’s own product in a company, few really understand the users needs and wants, especially tech persons.
I can guarantee you, the weird gimmick you don’t understand is crucial to some.
I literally say “The translation is technically AI,” so no. I give reasons how the other features are different, which you seem to acknowledge a little, at least.
Can you describe how to access the gimmick and which people find it crucial? I’m pretty confident in my understanding of it and how hilariously unhelpful it is.
Being technically something implies it’s not really or to be considered apart from the group.
The “gimmick” is proposing alt text based on the image when editing PDFs. I don’t see how it’s unhelpful. I’m not into editing PDFs in firefox, but I do use it to read them.
Inciting editors to include an alt text for accessibility seems like the ideal use case for this tech. The human still has to review and approve the generated text.
Unless I missed something as I cannot try the feature now, it seems to me a great application of ai, to augment humans in their work, and to a useful cause.
Image classification and description is “old” tech now, and I already use it in my work to auto tag images for editors to find more easily later. Nothing crazy.
Problem is Mozilla needs money and shoving AI features into shit is how you get investors these past few years.
You think VC is putting money into firefox? Wtf?
Funnily enough, it’s the other way around: Mozilla has been dumping money into AI VC startups.
I don’t think the vietcong are doing much of anything for the past couple decades.
I think they’re desperate to make money since they’re losing userbass AND Google is probably not happy that most users change the default search engine away from them.
Does anyone really think the current administration is going to break up Google? Lina Khan almost did it but like most of the rest of this timeline we just didn’t quite get there
Yeah it’s a catch 22.
They either fail to get a big enough use base because their core users are not enough and they fail from a lack of funding.
Or they try to follow trends to increase their appeal and user base, and annoy their core users.
Most users don’t realize that Mozilla is doing what Google is doing with Chrome with an engineering team 1/4 the size of the chrome team. And that the grand majority of their costs are engineering related.
Browsers are expensive, and Mozilla needs to find revenue streams to pay for it.
I believe Firefox could raise a lot of money through donations. If they make it clear that Firefox donations will be solely used for Firefox development. Also ideally add a quick survey to donations to see what the “donating” userbases values are. My issue with donating to Mozilla is that it is too broad and they have many products I don’t care for.
I use Thunderbird and donate to it because I feel it’s more focused. I believe Mozilla still can use the funds for other stuff but at least I am donating for a clear project.
This might be a stupid question… but how much developing does a browser actually need? I get security updates and such but how much resources does that stuff really need? Full disclosure: I’m a dumb lorry driver I have no idea how these things work. Some years ago I realized I hadn’t updated my browser in at least a year, maybe two and I had no issues lol
Infinite money Google keeps trying to push shit to the standard so all other browsers end up needing significant dedicated resources to keep up or risk getting blamed for broken sites.
A conservative guess would be around 60 people.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/describecomponents.cgi
You can click around and see the bug reports they’re working on. There are a few, to say the least.
https://www.firefox.com/en-US/releases/
This is a way to see what’s in each release. The ones on the left are major releases and tend to have bigger features, and the others tend to be bug fixes.
Web browsers start with core functionality that’s very complex. Then you tack on that they’re being used for things like banking, and managing the critical details of people’s lives. That means security galore, which is hard and constant. Then you have ad people, who are also something that’s hard to defend against.
Then there’s the constant flood of new features you have to implement to keep up with Google.
Chrome has 1,000 to 4,000 people working on it. Mozzila employs about 700 to work on firefox, with maybe 1,000 additional open source developers.
My initial guess was very wrong.
It is really difficult to implement in the first place, and the standards evolve constantly.
Some argue it may not be possible to build new browsers anymore