@tante This just means that Firefox is absolutely definitely down the drain.

@tante

Mozilla's new MBA/CEO, who knows nothing about the open source field, and its board aren't trying to grow the company into just another shitty AI thing, it's trying to bury the promise of a non-enshittified browser and Internet.

@tante For Firefox to survive, Mozilla has to die.

@tante @catsalad one long thought the EU should fund and maintain software suite.
OS, office, browser.

Then I look at some other government projects and the bubble bursts …

@tante super easy, barely an inconvenience: find a white guy that does the libertarian, <probably-but-hard-to-confirm white supremacy and xenophobia and misogyny and etc while claiming to be a victim when called out for it> thing that the VCs love, and they'll fund his stupid project to the moon

or maybe we take a radically different approach and build something simpler, less advertiser-y, maybe something named after a small rodent who like to burrow holes and dig tunnels

@tante count me in as part of the communications team.

@tante landlord CEO 💀

@tante Funding has always been the problem and it's what has caused Mozilla to burn user trust for decades. They employ 750 people and have a $200 million wages bill.

They're trapped being funded by their main competitor and always flailing around trying to find an alternative source of funding.

@tante there is Waterfox, I hope they remove that 'AI' nonsense.

@tante @Vivaldi is right there...

@tante as a start, everybody disable automatic updates to Firefox. It CAN be done with a few simple lines of JSON. I got tired of their "better idea" updates nobody ever asked for breaking everything all the time. And some updates people loudly said they didn't want.

@tante AI is the new "Cyber". Everyone uses it, everyone wants it, Everyone has it and no one actually knows what it means....

@tante consider supporting the Servo project. A long term strategic bet on a new FOSS browser engine. Started as a project at Mozilla. https://servo.org/

@tante yay, another techbro on his knees ready to take the full load of AI directly to the face.

@tante Forks already exist that remove the crap - LibreWolf is one. There's a few others as well.

@tante
Yeah I completely agree. Yesterday I spent some time looking at the current popular forks (especially on mobile) and there's good options - just the inevitable "4 out of 5 will probably slowly die".
Would be nice with a serious player.

@tante I had a fascinating chat with @Patricia a while ago about what it would cost to fork and maintain a viable browser. I don't remember the numbers but is was less than $60M per year I think. Easily within the budget of the EU or any national govt that values digital sovereignty. Also achievable by subscription I think.

https://distributedfutu.re/episode68.html for the podcast (and transcript)

@tante librewolf is a good start. it's a fork that purges all ai stuff. a bit agressive on the fingerprinting hardening though.