To the Firefox development community:
I started using Firefox... well, before it was Firefox. In the early browser wars, I was a devotee of Netscape. After high school, … (διαβάστε περισσότερα)
To the Firefox development community:
I started using Firefox... well, before it was Firefox. In the early browser wars, I was a devotee of Netscape. After high school, Firefox became a thing, and I was an early adopter. For years I eagerly spoke of the glories of the open source browser, and even when Chrome came around with its "new hotness", I stuck with Firefox. It was, I reckoned, just better.
However, something has happened which has shaken my faith in the browser - and in the Mozilla foundation entirely. As the whole internet screams "WE DO NOT WANT AI", as Valve gets endless kudos from its userbase and a reputation as "the only good monopoly" because it forces its game listings to have disclaimers if AI touches games in any way, and as it becomes known that ChatGPT is pushing teens to suicide...
Mozilla has decided "hey we want that in our browser!"
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
This is the greatest betrayal of a userbase I can imagine. LLMs are the antithesis to the open-source, "you can see what goes into it" mindset that Firefox has had for over 20 years. It is bloat. It is built on plagiarism - by default, all LLMs are built by scraping huge amounts of data that their designers do not own.
Thankfully, there IS a branch of Firefox that does not use AI - the Waterfox project - and I will be turning my attention there. But mark my words - by deciding that the last holdout against putting AI in everything SHOULD put AI in it, you have soured an incredible amount of the goodwill that you have built up.
My personal recommendation: Fire the idiot who made this decision and replace him with ANYONE who has a modicum of sense in the Foundation.
As a last comment, I will say that I am ending it here because I believe this says enough of what I am thinking and feeling at the moment; if I was to say everything it would be approximately 90 pages long and be 35% obscenity by volume, and I don't think the forum rules allow that. Good evening, and may Mark Surman stub his toe every 129 seconds for the rest of his life.
