Validating my years old decision to use Firefox
When a company considers buying Chrome because it could help them extend the reach of their product, they are fucking drunk and need to go home. This would be like buying the state of Nevada so you could put up billboards all over Las Vegas.
You know how we thought " How could chrome get any worse?" well, we have an answer.
Are these fucks stupid? Chromium is open sourced. They can do it themselves
They don’t want to buy the browser. They want to buy the brand and the users. Chrome makes up over half the browser market. Think of all the data they could extract from Chrome users. It would cost significantly more to fork chromium and grow the user base to a point where they could extract anything valuable from them, and that’s assuming they’d be successful enough to make it happen.
There is no way Google would sell Chrome. But you can bet at least a thousand engineers are working on bolting Gemini onto it right now.
There’s no way Google would voluntarily sell Chrome. Unfortunately for them, they might be forced to sell Chrome.
No, MS just wants to expand their monopoly, but “MS buying most common browser, after antitrust laws already forbid internet explorer” doesnt ring so well.
Existing userbase
I like to think if people want whatever it is OpenAI thinks browsers need AI for, the userbase will manifest itself.
Suuuuure
I’ve said this before and will say it again. The only tech companies that should be allowed to buy Chrome are Canonical and its equivalents.
Isn’t Canonical up to some crummy schemes, too?
Sure but not by at least an order of magnitude
And if you thought there was some natural end point to enshittification, here’s your evidence that there’s no such thing.
WTF? Just download it for free.
Isn’t Google going to do it themselves?
Great! Now not only can chrome eat all my system memory, it can use all my GPU memory at the same time! It’s genius!
Likely it’ll use the cloud for processing, you’ll just get really hard-to-opt-out AI features, like “prompt by default” and “AI autocomplete”, which you can only “snooze” as they’ll automatically be turned back on the moment there’s a “great new feature”, like putting a filter on by default on image generators to fool the eye that it’s made by real artists.
This can’t happen. Not because I think google is doing a wonderful job, but it’s got serious market share now. Basically a monopoly. It needs to leave the hands of for profit companies and be transitioned to a foundation.
Why connect to the Internet with it then. The browser could just make everything up on the fly.
Got questions about a medication?
Maybe you want to check up on some disease symptoms?
AI can make something that sounds vaguely plausible.
Why connect to the Internet with it then
To check if your subscription to their models is still valid of course
And send back telemetry and training data.
AKA all of your personal data, you know, just in case we need it
Why use head if you can use ChatGPT. Remove head and start working smarter.
Browsing the internet will be like playing AI Quake II, you’ll think you are in this alternate universe.
I don’t fucking understand why Lemmy is permanently stuck in 2023 with AI
Using RAG (retrieval augmented generation) results in much lower, almost negligible confabulation rates
Generally speaking, people used ChatGPT back when it first came out, had a bad experience and never fucked with it again, so their understanding of it is frozen in time. Most people know next to nothing about the current state of AI unless you’re a researcher or enthusiast. They’re completely unprepared for the actual state of the industry.
How do Sam
Conman’sAltman’s boots taste?Oh fucking -please-
This place is genuinely more insufferable than Reddit. That is actually an achievement
Whatever dude, writhe in your own ignorance
Making an assumption regarding the entirety of a social network with at least tens of thousands of users based on a single inflammatory comment (mind you, a comment that has more downvotes than upvotes)? That’s a bit of a small sample to extrapolate from, don’t you think? You should’ve probably asked ChatGPT if that’s the right call.
don’t they already have brave for that?
What does Brave have to do with it? It doesn’t even have ChatGPT’s models as an option.
it’s crypto trash
And is OpenAI somehow related to crypto?
crypto and ai are two sides of the same garbage
They’re really not. They’re completely unrelated.
Sounds like the best thing that could happen to Firefox
Mozilla spinning off control of its development to an independent group the way they did with Thunderbird would be the best thing that could happen to Firefox.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Thunderbird :
Operated by MZLA Technologies Corporation, a subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation, Thunderbird is an independent, community-driven project that is managed and overseen by the Thunderbird Council, which is elected by the Thunderbird community.
Chrome self-destructing because of stupidity like AI would only ever manage to be a close second, at best.
Has Mozilla indicated any openness to taking that approach with Firefox?
Unfortunately, Mozilla is investing a ton of money into AI, too.
Mozilla works mainly on LOCAL AI not this corporate trash like closedAI
Some of their I initiatives are good, like the built-in local translation tool we now have.
Also their initiative to recognise images and generate alt-text for screen-reader users.
My sister is blind and screen readers are close to useless on the web, so it was great to hear Mozilla is working on that.
A desperate attempt of revenue diversification.
Considering how little they invest into their core product compared to all the other shit and how much money the top brass earns despite declining market share, I don’t think they’re hurting for money that much.
They are investing a lot in their core product. Problem is that you can’t really monatize it. You want Firefox to be paywalled?
Ideally it would be financed by user donations. Probably not that realistic for a project like this, though.
You can’t finance a massive project like that with donations. This isn’t like Signal or some small project like that. Firefox is MASSIVE.
Yeah, web browsers cost hundreds of millions per year to maintain, they’re mind-bogglingly complicated and costly.
I’d really hope the Linux Foundation would help contribute towards the budget, but LF is quite pro Chromium.
I don’t think end users can even come close to funding Firefox development, unfortunately.
Look into Waterfox instead.
That really doesn’t solve the problem, like every other Firefox fork they’re completely dependent on Firefox. You can’t just make a new webbrowser just like that, and while third party developers can certainly disable some anti-features, there are limits to that and they can definitely not do the basic work that the Firefox devs do (or could do, if Mozilla had different priorities).
Mozilla will loose Google’s deal money.
Firefox, the software mainly driven by Mozilla, which is heavily investing in AI and ads ventures? That Firefox?
But, maybe “it will be different this time”, I guess.
this!
OpenAI is like a zombie stumbling around trying to infect everything. We shove it away because it’s fuckin’ gross and we want nothing to do with it, while the bosses that reanimated it are like “well fuck, we made this thing, we have to use it for something.”
Chrome or Chromium project?
