With the browser being such a core part of our digital reality and how we access it I find it incomprehensible to move my life and workflows over to a closed source browser by some money burning "AI" startup that might not be there in a year.
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@tante
Not the first try to put something between the user and the internet in my opinion.
Not the first try to put something between the user and the internet in my opinion.
Google inserted itself between the user and the URL and now too many people don’t know what an URL is.
Facebook inserted itself between the user and web content and now too many people don’t see content that is not in Facebook.
Twitter inserted itself between the user and news and now people still use X.
It's no longer a browser (as in letting you access the web) but a thing that increasingly starts distancing you from the writing, etc.: Why read if you can have a (probably wrong) summary? Of course you still can use it in different ways but the affordances and nudges are clear.
It's like perplexity and such: Not search engines but quite the opposite.
The browser was the platform to make the web accessible to people. "AI" browsers see the web and what's in there just as more stuff to churn through to keep you within the AI provider's ecosystem.
@tante I have a draft for a thing I'm tentatively calling "the boundaries of the operating system" where the thing that is supposed to prop up a platform for you to perform your thing ends up crossing that boundary and tries to also do the thing for you
@fasterandworse Piling on: write it please! This is a useful concept. We often refer to pieces of software as tools, and it's valuable to interrogate what makes a good tool.
@tante
@tante
@fasterandworse Finish it and publish it!
@tante ahh, the eternal challenge!
@fasterandworse Anything I can do to help you finish it?
@tante but it can't do that thing properly or without supervision so they still call it the old thing "a browser" in this case. Like a self-driving car which still has a steering wheel.
If it was actually capable of doing this stuff itself it would be something else and be called something else.
Instead we are expected to accept these limping features as revolutionary
@tante especially if one startup already discontinued a "revolutionary" browser…
@tante which browser *do* you use at the moment? I am dabbling with Zen at the moment. Firefox Base, pretty new age interface.
Only thing that sucks is that I have to keep one other browser around for these pesky websites that need widevine (for now)
@hiiaminfi Inuse Firefox with all "AI" stuff disabled
@tante checks out. My second tool of choice is currently still brave with all the AI stuff and crypto stuff disabled… for anything that requires that stupid DRM or for websites that outright break in Zen (haven’t encountered one yet though)
@tante und ZACK, schon wieder ne Blockempfehlung. Deine Tröts sind echt Gold wert ;)
That and of course: If you use one of those "AI" browsers you do despise the open web and the people who have contributed to it and keep doing it. It's kinda like willingly moving into a mall. Weird decision.
@tante Literally the only example that comes to mind of people willingly moving into a mall are in "Dawn of the dead" — and they were trying to shelter from a zombie apocalypse.
@tante this is a really good analogy
(Kinda waiting to see some digital rights person using one of those on their Macbook while telling me about how the Internet is supposed to be.)