“Under Construction” GIF

I’m not sure if you remember, but site rings were what you used instead of Google. They were useful.

And I’ve seen some guest books with lots of people at some point in my childhood, but about half a year after that everybody firmly chose in favor of hierarchical boards.

And I don’t share that hate for <marquee>, it served the purpose of showing you a long line in a small space, implicitly saying that it’s secondary temporary information, a bit like on TV.

And what’s wrong with animated GIFs, animation is nice.

I got enough installed once to fill the whole screen.

Ugh…please don’t remind me.

They would be abused by spam bots in an instant, even before you could write your own “welcome to my guestbook” post.

I suppose many people were already using a third-party Aero widget for weather forecast since Windows 7.

I know I did.

In Rust, right?

No! Not again!

I can’t contest the first point cause I’m not a firefox junkie, so I won’t.

What I will contest is that the existence of AI, or, deep learning, or LLMs, or neural networks, or matrix multiplication, or whatever type of shit they come up with next, I’ll contest that it isn’t problematic. I kind of think it is, inherently, I think it’s existence is not great. Mostly because it obfuscates, even internally, the processing of data, it obfuscates the inputs from the outputs, the works from the results. You can do that with regular programming just fine, just as you can do most of the shit that AI does with normal programming, like that guy who made a program that calculates the prices for japanese baked goods and also recognizes cancer, right. But I think AI is a step further than that, it obfuscates it more. I kind of am skeptical of it’s broad implementation.

For trivial use cases, it’s kind of fine, but I think maybe use cases we might consider trivial, otherwise are kind of fucked, maybe. AI summary of an article? I dunno if that’s good. We might think, oh, this is kind of trivial because the user should just not really trust what the AI says, but, as with all technology, what if the user is an idiot and a moron? They might just use it to read the article for them, and then spout off whatever talking points and headlines it gives them. I can’t really think of a scenario where that’s actually a good thing, and it’s highly possible. It might make it easier to parse an article, like that, but I don’t think that’s actually a good or useful tool, it’s just presented a kind of illusion of utility, most especially because it was redundant (we could just write a summary and have it at the top of the article, like every article on the face of the earth), and it was totally beyond our control, at least, in most circumstances.

Also, the Mozilla Foundation is nonprofit, but the Mozilla Corporation is not. The Foundation manages the Corp, which manages Firefox development. So depending on which one you’re referring to, it might be a non-profit, or it might not be. In any case, the nonprofit is a step removed from Firefox development, which I think is an important side-note, even if it’s not actually that relevant to whatever conversations about AI there might be.

It’s really good but I do wish it supported more languages like Russian or Japanese. So far most of the times I have had to translate a page, Firefox didn’t support the language.

“What is my purpose?”

“You wash my asshole when I poop”

“Oh my god”

“It looks like you are browsing porn. Can I help?”

You really have no fuckdamn naive your statement is. You don’t want an AI war and we cannot avoid one.

That’s quite the bummer. But still. Saying that almost all browsers can trace their lineage to Apple and Webkit is technically correct, but it’s just a half-truth. As Apple and Webkit were once based on KHTML.

I mean yes no kinda Konqueror simply accepted a bunch of downstream patches, including a name change.

…more or less. It could for a long time use all three of KHTML, WebKit (fork of KHTML) and QtWebEngine (Blink wrapped for Qt, that is, a fork of WebKit), they recently removed KHTML support because noone was updating it and it hadn’t been the default for ages.

If they hadn’t implemented multi-engine support in the past they probably would’ve switched over to “whatever Qt provides” right-out, it’s KDE after all. Ultimately they’re providing a desktop, not a web browser. Back in the days they did decide to roll their own instead of going with Firefox but it was never a “throw project resources at it” kind of situation, there were simply KDE people who felt like working on it. Web standards were a lot less involved back around the turn of the millennium, and also new and shiny. Back in the days people thought that HTML 4.01 Strict and XHMTL would be a thing that servers actually would start to output instead of the usual tagsoup.

If you’re that kind of person right now I’ll point you in the direction of Servo. No, Firefox doesn’t use it and it’s not a Mozilla project any more, Firefox only included (AFAIK) parallel CSS handling, the rest is still old Gecko.

“It’s all KHTML”, I heard.

You have a point. But still, they could have added an “ackshually” footnote or something.

I agree, AI can be good for a browser, which is why I still have some hope. We just have to wait and see

The chromium part is still problematic. I’ll stick with the only other option until they shit the bed completely :(

That sounds nice, I’ll check it out.

Librewolf is built on Gecko, people often accredit it as a “firefox fork”.

Tor Browser seems cool, it’s what I use on my phone whenever I have spare time to let it load before searching things which don’t require a lot of bandwidth. I’ll edit the above list.

Mullvad? Is that some kind of slur? I’ve never heard of that but searches say it’s a VPN client. ¯\(ツ)/¯

Okay Mr. Robot.

Removed by mod

Privacy preserving federated learning is a thing - essentially you train a local model and send the weight updates back to Google rather than the data itself…but also it’s early days so who knows what vulnerabilities may exist

still, it’d be nice to have a “upvote, but fuck this content” button

People have been saying some variant of this at least as far back as Slashdot in the late 90s. Nobody has come up with a viable way to change peoples habits.

Instead of fighting it, what can we do knowing that this is how it works?

Obviously. I’ve just got two emotions about the content I want to show.

That’s precisely how it’s being used now though. People don’t want things they don’t like to be seen, so they downvote.

I think maybe that’s exactly how people are using it, it’s just that most people aren’t thinking “oh, well, this post made me a little mad or uncomfy, but I like the content and discussion that it’s spurned, so I’ll toss it an upvote”. I think most people are more inclined to go “THIS POST MADE ME MAD! GRUG DOWNVOTE!”. It doesn’t even really not make sense, it would be kind of insane to spend like, even just a minute, thinking consciously about every single upvote or downvote you make, it would take a million years for anyone to ever upvote or downvote anything, and a lot of people would just not engage unless they were really committed, which doesn’t necessarily map to their level of discernment, but might just instead map to how mad people could get over a given thing. Plenty of people could get mad enough about a thing to sit through a minute long wait period to downvote something.

🤦

Am smelling a Firefox fork. Though if AI is anything malicious you can rest assured Debian folks would declaw it.

Librewolf. If all else fails I’ll pop my old Emacs config and browse whichever websites I can there

To a Gemini reader. Kristall is nice. Lagrange is … interesting.

But it’s a hellishly expensive thing that seems to not attract enjoyment from current Firefox users, and seems unlikely to bring new users, and (again) seems to be prioritised over other things that could better use the money, like developers, so…

Why.