@tante That's exactly what Firefox was supposed to be - a stripped down alternative to the previous browser/mail client/kitchen sink who's name I don't remember. Just the basics, with non-essential functionality delivered through extensions. It didn't take them long to lose their way.

@tante I have stopped using Firefox. Tired of the nonsense. Will reconsider if they do this.

@tante this sounds great to me as a user. But they’re not doing it for the user. The main problem is that the browser is free. No one’s paying for a browser. They’re doing all this nonsense to earn some money. There’s very little they can do to earn money and not piss off users.

All the extensions you propose assumes that these features appeal to some users and those users would bring money for Mozilla. It’s obviously not true. More likely they hope to sign something similar to default Google search with some AI provider (maybe with multiple). For that to work they need to provide some concrete numbers. They can’t do that with opt-in extensions. They can with “this is how many users we have” even if none of them wants these features.

@adarsh

@tante Absolutely. They lose market share over serious CVEs. IT security at work issued a total ban on it after an issue about 6 months ago. Not a social/rules ban, a complete ban - Traffic, site, programs, even the uninstaller all blocked. Not sure how cross cost-centre it was, but forbidden for potentially tens of thousands of workstations.

@tante this is actually a brilliant idea!

@tante I recently found the @Waterfox project. Your toot is pretty much a description of that Firefox fork

@tante we need another phoenix

@tante this guy shood be CEO

@tante @vmstan but then they can't force it on people to appease their investor overlords

@tante Wait.. wasn't there a browser that tried something like this about 20 years ago? Strip out everything and push them into plugins so the user could choose their own level of bloat?

What was it called, again?

Oh, right... Firefox.

@tante With this, they could also be the SINGLE, ONLY company in the world with this approach, as opposed to cramming it into everything like everyone else. It could be a selling point. (okay maybe not in the eyes of AI brainwormed investors)

But the powers that be haven't thought of the product in the last 15 years.

@tante @inthehands after 30 years on netscape/ firefox … finally done. :-(

@tante They should make a clean Gecko Engine that we can build a new Netscape and better browsers.

@tante Sadly they are from US, and are touched by this stupid AI cult.

Firefox still miss basic sandbox, that chrome have for a decade, and is still one of the reason security minded peopl tend to avoir it for their personal use.

@tante Indeed…

@tante you can't do 'AI' as opt-in, then no one would use it, because it's annoying and provides dangerous output and bad outcomes.

Oh....

@tante Mozilla needs to fix its personality issues before delivering a Firefox we can trust again. And I doubt it will.

@tante Use #Librewolf or #BraveBrowser instead.

Brave is my favourite, can be hardened very easy and is super smooth in handling.

@tante Mozilla fired the Servo team that were doing this

@tante it would also probably be pretty sobering how many people actually go out and manually add those features if they're not shoved in your face by default.

@tante Waterfox is what you need.

@tante At first I thought this was a satire post...

Firefox should really strip down the browser to the core, make that performant and secure.

Lol, that's literally why they initially developed Firefox. I guess everyone has forgotten Mozilla browser and the bloatware that it used to be. Firefox was supposed to be the minimal, lightweight version with the bloat stripped out. But Mozilla forgot that ages ago...

Offer people all the slop extensions in the world and see who will download them.

They'd have like ten downloads a year. I think companies like these know that no one will willingly accept stuff like that being shoehorned in and jammed into everything it can't actually do and that's why they have to force it on us.

@tante which was kinda the idea when Firefox started as Phoenix over 20 years ago

@tante They certainly should - from a users point of view. From a commercial point of view, though, they must traffick unwanted shit to users, preferably in a way that cannot be avoided.

That used to be ads, via Google, but Google recently pulled the plug. So now they are shipping unwanted AI shit instead, for AI investors who want to be TechBro NextGen. And those certainly will suffer no switch to live (sorry, couldn't resist).

@tante i get the impression they *have* done a ton of work already to make the core performant and secure, that was what quantum and webrender were about. but then they laid off a bunch of people and didn't seem to have anything else major on their roadmap until LLMs came along.
as for why LLMs can't just be an addon yeah, they almost certainly could if they wanted; a lorem ipsum generator could stand in (disabled) for chat and summaries etc in a vanilla install.

@tante this could also lead to third party projects switching from chromium to firefox as a base. imagine a world where the ram crisis doesn’t matter because apps aren’t based on electron anymore and people remember that 16gb should be insane overkill for displaying text and images.

@tante great idea. I would sign a petition in that direction. And I think a lot of others would too.