Hey, we have the evil Microsoft empire :) Or the Apple alternative.
Maintaining a browser engine including patching the latest vulnerabilities when someone points Mythos at your code is a really hard problem, my feeling is you need a certain size of organization and funding as your table stakes.
Someone should convince the EU to look into funding a new browser, maybe.
What if the EU bought some big chunk of Mozilla, something like Mozilla EU, and then ran it? Would the US then cry out against EU buying US companies and start to fund Mozilla?
American here. We'd bitch, piss, and moan about the EU buying US companies. We wouldn't fund Firefox though, we'd be more likely to give a huge government contract to facebook to reskin chrome or some other stupid shit.
The leaders could, for example, have made AI opt-in. If it's popular, maybe make it the default for new installs later on. Instead we had to go a few versions from "now with AI" to "now with an AI off button" because they got enough negative user feedback.
I don't mind experiments, but if you're the "we put you back in control" browser then please build an "off" switch in from the start.
Again: Would it have made a measurable difference? Or is it just moaning from a small core? Not saying the core is not important, but I don't think Fx can survive on only us.
not at the current employee and costs. But do they need to do that? Do they need to produce new products (and pay the cost to do so)?
Why can't they be lean and mean? Focus purely on browser experience without any BS, without any upsell? And there are volunteers out there that willingly contribute code/fixes for free.
I like having containers for different parts of my life built into the browser. I liked relay for quite a while (moved on to other setups). I like syncing between devices and the ability to push something from my phone to my computer on another continent currently with two taps.
Yeah they have rolled out a lot of nonsense I don’t care for, but they have also rolled out a lot of features I regularly use and enjoy. You can’t please everybody, but ultimately I’m glad it’s not “just a lean browser.”
If they truly wanted to be mean and lean and focus on the browser experience they would need to throw away their pride and port the browser from gecko to blink. I think they are too prideful to do that though.
> AI is however a potential avenue for raising money.
How? By selling the position of preferred model? They can do that without implementing it in a way that means people who don't want it at all have to jump through hoops to opt-out.
Being able to turn AI summaries and such off by default was the final reason I started paying for Kagi. I know they use ML in the background no matter what, but as long as I get links to resources relevant to my search, that I can read/judge/summerise as needed, first and foremost, how they produce that list is not the issue.
You are not the target audience, that’s pretty much it. You can be very against AI, try to turn it off on Kagi, avoid Google AI summaries, discard ChatGPT/Claude, but billions of people still use them. At this point it has been argued so much that it’s kinda pointless.
People seem to enjoy to be told stuff and don’t really care about sources if the said content is somewhat correct.
In the real world, in the same line as the article suggests, there was a brief time when the "puts you back in control" browser needed you to change the following about:config settings to disable the force-pushed ai:
Look, I absolutely agree it sucks they didn't deliver the opt-out/in interface day one, it was obvious people would want it, and yes, it's not the first time they've blundered.
At the same time, they did listen to the feedback and deliver. It now has a genuinely good interface for it where you don't have to opt out of everything, but can opt-in where you want it. It's not just a big off button, it's a general out-out including new features, but that then exposes individual opt-ins if you want for each feature. Most other browsers won't respond at all. Firefox is still by far the best browser out there for people who care about their privacy.
Especially on HN, Firefox just gets so much more hate than software that is way more user hostile for much less bad behaviour. I'm not saying we shouldn't hold it to a higher standard when that is what it's selling itself on: clearly we can't allow "not as bad" to let it slip into worse and worse, but at the same time, I don't understand how the narrative seems to trend towards "they are essentially the same as google" when that is so clearly not true (to be clear, not saying you are saying that in this post, just that's the vibe of HN's commentary as a whole).
People are mad because Mozilla refuses to listen to users until backlash becomes a threat to the company. They keep pushing users to the limit and only pull back slightly when the screaming gets too loud.
People are mad because Mozilla is clearly and unashamedly trying to boil the frog and doesn't seem to even be interested in hiding that fact.
People are mad because Mozilla is speed-running SV software-shittifying strategies without even doing us the dignity of pretending they aren't.
That is true - Firefox is definitely held to a higher standard here and elsewhere. They marketed those values to us. So the criticisms, in my opinion, are definitely justified. And no, they aren't listening to their users.
If they had listened to their users they would have delivered what every users wants - just a browser. Not some kind of "platform" stuffed with lot of unwanted crap that makes it bloated and introduces possibly new unnecessary attack vectors in it (both malicious and / or privacy exploits). All those additional crap that every new management wants in Firefox should have been a browser extension or a plugin, instead of being bundled into the core browser. When a user installs / updates Firefox, they could be asked if they want to install any of these new feature available as an extension / plugin. That keeps the browser lean, transfers the choice completely to the user and is genuinely respectful of the user. The current way of force bundling everything into the browser, making it bloated, and then pretending that "users can opt-out" is not just arrogance but also misleading (to be polite) as it is common knowledge among software firms that most people often never change the default settings.
Think about it ... if every of these controversial features - Pocket, ads in address bar or home page, AI etc. etc. - had been made available as user opted extension or plugin, would there ever have been any controversies? The installation data itself would provide a feedback of how much the users actually care about these features, and provide unique insights to the management into the kind of user base that it has (which the article is spot-on about).
(Note that I know that some of these features are indeed implemented as an extension. But not as user controlled ones as they cannot be completely uninstalled. All the user can do is disable it (turn "off or on"). Why? It is stuff like this that makes it harder to trust claims of caring about user Privacy.)
People had to raise hell to get that, while being made fun of by their CMs on social media. Even the opt-out is full of silicon valley dark patterns. Whoever is calling shots about the product at Mozilla doesn't have your best interests at heart.
What are those dark patterns? It's an off button, it works, and it does not get back on. It's the polar opposite of the "maybe later, I'll ask again every week and reset the setting in your back" unfortunate norm that plagues a lot of major proprietary software/service.
"You can turn it off" is not in the same category of "would you like to turn this on?" or even "do you want this in the first place?"
Opt-out is not consent, nor is it respect.
Opt-out is a dark pattern, period. Opt-out is forcing something onto users and hoping they don't go out of their way to disable it. It is the same as "maybe later".
The only correct move would be remove the option, remove all AI code, and move it into extensions. If the extension security policies, and other restrictions, don't allow all the things they want to put in, then GOOD, they don't go in.
I think Mozilla is still mostly made up of tech-optimist people, so they were open and interested in ai from day one. I highly doubt there was any malicious intent.
And those are some of the better named config options. Some are pretty opaque, as are their values (and often poorly documented). You can tell there isn't an edict to make config options highly accessible
They KEEP adding utter cancerous garbage to the homepage/new tab page. I recently installed Firefox from scratch for a coworker who was having chrome-only issues(yes, they do exist!) and was blown away by how insanely gross the default settings are now. It’s straight up adware junk bullshit
Good for you. The point is that a lot of Firefox users actively didn't want these sorts of features enabled and pushed on them. That was clear and obvious to anyone paying attention to general reactions to unsolicited AI helper tools, going back decades. For Mozilla to turn this on without any respect for those users’ preferences was a huge mistake that they keep making over and over again.
More specifically: they chose Firebox because it doesn't have those kind of features. If the just wanted a (sorta-kinda) open-source browser filled with all the latest hype features they would've simply used Chromium.
Using Firefox is a political choice. People use it because it's one of the few remaining traditional browsers which isn't a tentacle of Big Tech. Chasing the competition and adding the stuff your users are actively trying to avoid isn't going to work.
You're complaning that the browser that "puts you back in control"
... put you back in control of which AI features you want to enable/disable? How horrible!
What? They didn't make these 10 distinct features one single all-or-nothing button? They let you switch them on or off individually?? How dare they?!?
What? They shipped new features to the browser...turned on?!? Instead of spending all those development hours and then...hiding them behind a setting by default?
I need "AI" in my browser, so I don't use the AI features. No data was sent anywhere. No 4 GB model was downloaded. Nothing happened, except for a popup saying "hey, by the way, if you want to do X, just press this button here". It's just UI elements. No AI-related code runs, no data is sent to AI companies unless you directly tell the browser to do that.
Imagine if Firefox shipped a brand new GPU-accelerated compositor, improved hardware video decoding and WebGL/WebGPU. You people cry about why they didn't add a big "disable GPU features" button? And that they dared to enable this by default?
You either missed the point or deliberately missed the point.
The issue was they shipped AI features built into everything and the only way to switch them off was to "about:config" a bunch of settings, they shouldn't have shipped it without the off switch and "Open about:settings and then disable things manually" isn't control for the average user.
I know what the point is. But what I don't get is why people are expecting hiding certain features and buttons should be a first-class setting. Again, they're just UI elements, they don't do anything until you tell them to.
The user has the choice to not use these features. It's not like Firefox was sending data to AI companies by default. But if you want to completely make them disappear, so you can live in your fantasy world where LLMs were never invented, then yes, that's a niche personal preference and an advanced customization. That's why it goes under about:config.
Well, from version 151 there is now a setting to turn all the built-in AI off. So people in some part of Mozilla disagreed with your position sufficiently to provide a setting.
PS: I do actually find Google's ai thing in the search useful now and again, so no fantasy world.
This attitude is exactly why Mozilla is failing. Total contempt and ignorance of the users that are the core of Firefox’s user base. If someone doesn’t want to use AI features, that’s not “living in a fantasy world”. And if Mozilla had any respect for its users, they would have realized the need to make this sort of thing a first class setting. Pretending that their core users are delusional freaks who only deserve “niche” settings is exactly why they are rapidly losing that audience.
You're missing the point. If someone doesn't want to use AI features, they can just NOT. USE. THEM. That's it. Just don't press the AI button. Is it that hard? Would you say Mozilla is deleting all your data because there's a "Delete cookies and history" button in the menu? You can just NOT. PRESS. THE. BUTTON.
The master AI switch doesn't actually change whether the browser uses AI features - it never does unless you specifically run them. What it does is hides them from the user, pretending they don't exist.
Browsers that don't respect their users' choices about using AI do things like automatically download large models in the background, integrate cloud-based speech recognition and synthesis as an API available to any website and make the default search engine which they also own show LLM slop above actual results.
Another article in the same vein is this one, criticizing the increasing role of former special officers people in military planning roles: https://secretaryrofdefenserock.substack.com/p/the-triumph-o..., seeing it as catalyzing a lot of destruction of US military capabilities.
My father has commented to me about the weird warrior/war-fighter phrasing that came into vogue in the late 90’s. He remembered as a young soldier in the early 80’s not hearing those terms at all, but during a stint in the National Guard in the years before 9/11 he started hearing that sort of phrasing all the time.
It stuck him as vaguely undemocratic or even slightly barbaric. More suited to some caste in the Middle Ages than a modern all volunteer force of citizens-soldiers.
I think warfighter crept into the lexicon for somewhat understandable reasons, likely because of the increasing frequency of joint operations (i.e., operations involving more than one branch of the military working together) after Vietnam, combined with the long-standing military tradition whereby members of any given branch take great offense if you refer to them using the wrong professional label (i.e., soldier, sailor, ~crayon-eater~ marine, airman, space cadet). That is, we can't just call all of them soldiers because only members of the Army are soldiers, so if for example you call a mixed group of marines and soldiers "soldiers", the marines will make their displeasure known to you, aggressively and in no uncertain terms.
When you're talking about DoD stuff all day long and frequently need to refer generically to the mixed personnel involved in a joint operation, warfighters beats saying Soldier-Sailor-Marine-Airman-Spacecase. All the other alternative phrases for the concept of "person employed by the military in one of the five combat arms branches" are variations on "member" and tend to sound clunky or be overly verbose, like "service member" or "member of the military." Try saying "service members" 50 times per day. Trust me, it gets old fast.
And frankly I don't see the problem with warfighter. Fighting wars is quite literally what they do, and pretending otherwise does a disservice to the truth and risks papering over the deadly seriousness of their work. Warfighter is also quite distinct from "warrior," which carries connotations of a specifically aggressive and barbaric flavor of professional violence purveyor. Like you say, it sounds like some atavistic hereditary soldier caste for whom violence is a sacred vocation joyfully undertaken rather than a solemn duty carried out only with great reluctance and forbearance.
But even that peace keeping will involve active combat, unless the mission fails or the force involved is so capable ot deters opponent. You dont want to end up like the blue helmets in lebanon and more like nordbat in kosovo.
> When you're talking about DoD stuff all day long and frequently need to refer generically to the mixed personnel involved in a joint operation, warfighters beats saying Soldier-Sailor-Marine-Airman-Spacecase. All the other alternative phrases for the concept of "person employed by the military in one of the five combat arms branches" are variations on "member" and tend to sound clunky or be overly verbose, like "service member" or "member of the military." Try saying "service members" 50 times per day. Trust me, it gets old fast.
If only you hadn't found the perfect word in your description of the "problem": they are "personnel".
"personnel" is too broad though as it could include all of the civilian support staff, admin staff, contractors, etc. Sometime you do want a term to collectively include all of these people, but sometimes you want to just refer to the ones actively doing the military bits and not the support bits.
People need to be bigger on efficacy. If it worked, we'd see evidence of it. No one's bringing that evidence forward and frankly its questionable if US officers are better than their international peers.
I don't think it's accidental the overlap between lack of accountability and the fact that warriors historically are a class, not a job.
Cancer treatments are really scary things. There are all sorts of impacts that we have no idea about when using drugs that fundamentally attack pieces of our own body.
My partner of many years had one of the nastiest cancers around, one with no targeted treatments. She went through an experimental combination of existing
drugs. Some of the side effects included:
* Her heart stopping during a drug infusion. This happened multiple times over the 18 months of treatment.
* Disseminated fungal infections.
* Sepis because holes were developing in her GI tract.
This is just a sampler of the horrible effects.
This was a good response. Other patients just died from the drug combination.
This is what going slowly looks like in the world of cancer treatment.
We relax ‘do no harm’ quite a bit when the alternative is certain death. People like to try stuff in order to hang on to hope. Towards the end I became convinced that she made the wrong choice to do aggressive interventions. Quality of life was very bad.
On the other hand, she gave it her all trying to survive. Hopefully that was satisfying for her.
The point of going slowly is that we make sure something works, even if it has these bad side affects. Do we try experimental drugs with worse effects so that we can find effective ones faster? There are brave souls out there who will participate in clinical trials or experimental exceptions
Typically what happens is that the new treatments with bad side effects are given to the sickest patients (who have exhausted all other mechanisms), rather than to the bravest souls with less dire current circumstances.
This makes some sense in terms of compassion and matching new experimental techniques with patients with no hope, but it skews the results highly negative because the patients are already very close to death's door. It does not provide an accurate signal for what the results would be if we gave them to less sick people.
I don't think any of this can be changed without large-scale social acceptance of greater risk in clinical trials and significant support from the government.
> It does not provide an accurate signal for what the results would be if we gave them to less sick people.
It provides an excellent signal because we want to prove that these drugs are doing something that the standard of care is unable to.
There's this sense that medicine is easy and some evil cabal are limiting health to their cronies. Most medications never get to trial for their intended indications, and most fail trials. There's no reason to believe oncology medications are somehow uniquely unlikely to go through this well-described process of failure.
That's a good article with a good point. As a caregiver impatiently waiting for Daraxonrasib, I can at least acknowledge that the institutional machinery is going as fast as it can. I've litterally witnessed a trial patient in the first cohort of a drug (that went no further) be rushed from infusion to the hospital; the trial process cannot be sped up from its current state without endangering lives.
My father's been using it since April. It's a little cumbersome and only improves overall survival rates by about two months over chemo alone, but we're hoping that it helps him remain relatively healthy until Daraxonrasib becomes available.
Thanks for that. I wasn't aware. She doesn't repond well to that regimen, so it doesn't apply to us.
We should be alright. We're on track for the expanded access program. Also, it's a long story, but she was taken off an Irinotecan-containing regimen prematurely about a year ago. In hindsight, she was clearly reaponding very well to that particular drug, so we've got that in our toolkit.
It feels to me like AI agents should be their own security principals and use access tokens generated speficically for them on the repos or orgs that they need access to. Handing an AI agent an access token "minted" for a human's account feels to me like the new "write the password on a post-it".
Not just AI agents... basically, if you cd Projects/foo, that should be it's own user (for running npm, etc) that should not have access to parent user data
(probably including github tokens, etc).
> basically, if you cd Projects/foo, that should be it's own user
Agreed. I went further and turned that into its own isolated virtual machine. The credentials problem is really annoying though. AI agents need the access in order to be useful.
As long as there’s a way to deterministically tie a model call to a human user. I think a loss of culpability is something some companies are afraid of to some extent.
Yes, we've moved from town squares to private parties - whatsapp chats, discord servers, even IRC still exists. (Bluesky is a bit of an exception but they'll need to get enough stable revenue at some point.)
Interestingly, in-person "nerd" events seem to be going just fine - LARP, D&D, board games, historical reenactment, trading card games and tournaments like M:tG, and a lot more.
Because the BBC now has to justify its licence fee to the government, so they need engagement metrics and all the rest like what proportion of X demographic they're reaching.
Back in the day, both the BBC and universities were funded by the government without the stereotype of a fresh MBA graduate in charge. Back in the day before MOOCs, the BBC produced programmes for the Open University because that was the way to get video content out to the nation.
> puff pieces about the royals
have been on the front page of the tabloids since way before the internet.
Maintaining a browser engine including patching the latest vulnerabilities when someone points Mythos at your code is a really hard problem, my feeling is you need a certain size of organization and funding as your table stakes.
Someone should convince the EU to look into funding a new browser, maybe.
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