In a memo sent to employees Mozilla says it wants to bring “trustworthy AI into Firefox”. To help it do this sooner it’s merging its Pocket, content, and AI/Ml teams.
Yeah, I'm not sure this is the "renewed focus" we're looking for, chief
this post was submitted on 14 Feb 2024
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"trustworthy AI"
Why? Why can't we have even a single decent browser? Servo is my last hope.
I'd never heard of Servo before this, but judging from the website it's nowhere near a GUI offering. The work they're doing on the engine looks solid (to me as not-a-developer) but it's a telltale sign that there are no UI screenshots on their landing page. So, not an alternative to Firefox yet.
Because, as pointed in the page, Servo is being developed as a(n embeddable) Rendering Engine, not as a full blown end user Browser.
Its alternatives are not Chrome, Safari or Firefox, but Webkit, Blink and Gecko
There's an example GUI called Servoshell, but it is more of a testing ground and example on how to embed the engine in an app than a serious alternative to anything currently in the market.
Already this kind of work is difficult and daunting. Adding to it a full GUI would make it completely impossible for the current size and financial backing Servo has.
Big words aside it just means that Servo wants to be only one of the parts that compose a real browser: the one that takes HTML, Javascript, WASM and translates them into the things you see on your monitor. All the user facing functionality are left to the devs of the app that embed it.
Thanks for the big word elaboration! 👍
While it's not an alternative right now, I think Servo's focus on being embeddable might help it in the long run. A big issue with Gecko is that it was difficult, if not impossible to embed. It'd be nice to see something like Vivaldi that runs on Servo.
Oh, that's fair. I'm not complaining about the work being put into a new browser engine, and there is definitely space for improvement over the ones we have.
Vivaldi, though? I'd vastly prefer an open source browser, and maybe one with less baggage than Vivaldi has — but I'll look forward to any GUI implementation of Servo, when and if, etc.
I was more talking about Vivaldi feature-wise, FWIW. There's features I'd like from Vivaldi that don't have a close equivalent to Firefox, not even from its forks (tab tiling's my go-to example), and maybe in the distant future, there'd be a browser like it running on Servo.
Hmm. Now there's an idea for developers. Some kind of modular compatibility standard.
Obviously not. Building a modern browser engine from scratch is an immense undertaking, so it's definitely possible that it will never be usable as a replacement for every day webbrowsing. But for now I won't give up hope :)
I want them to make an untrustworthy AI so that I can post funny conversations online for internet clout.
Would probably be more useful.
Yes, focus on your main thing. It's the thing that makes you matter. I want your browser to stay competitive.
In a memo sent to employees Mozilla says it wants to bring “trustworthy AI into Firefox”. To help it do this sooner it’s merging its Pocket, content, and AI/Ml teams.
That's pretty concerning. It could go either way but I assume they are going to try to shove more sponsored content in an effort to further monetize Firefox in spite of getting hundreds of millions of dollars a year in donations. Maybe I'm just cynical about Mozilla though.
The actual news is "renews focus on AI bullshit".
I want an API to control firefox with ny own text gen open source AI. Locally and offline.
Cool, I'm liking this new Mozilla already! ...NOT!!!
And this only just after they enabled a whole raft of add-ons in their mobile browser that have already stripped away so much shit from my daily browsing experience.
I switched last year when Google entered their new phase of ad tracker evil and I bet I wasn't the only one. Feels to me like Firefox fucked with the money and they're being brought to heel.
What? They're laying off people working on a metaverse platform, mozilla.social, and other assorted products nobody cares about. They're doing exactly what everyone said they should do, slimming down and focusing on Firefox
As long as they keep working on Firefox, and Thunderbird, I'm happy.
If they lost funding, hopefully those with some extra disposable income can donate a little (a recurring $5 to $15 monthly contribution is probably more appreciated than a one time $50 or $200 donation - it provides for stable long term stability, instead of sporadic unpredictable funding levels).
https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/ has a Donate button
https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/ has a Donate button
They finally woke up
I hope to be optimistic too but I'd hold on to the cheers for a bit still personally
Well seems like it might be time to switch browsers soon, anyone got any suggestions?