If you just want regular Firefox without Mozilla’s bullshit grab Waterfox.
If you’re the more paranoid type then grab LibreWolf. It comes with a lot of privacy centric tweaks out of the box and is what I personally have used for over a year now.
And I dunno maybe try Floorp if you feel fancy. I’ve never personally used it however.
Be warned that if you use librewolf you will have to deal with corpo accounts asking you to verofy the account a lot more ,like having to use a phone number where you didnt have to do that before.
I have said this before: what are they supposed to do? I don’t want external AI, I don’t want google lens in my browser, I don’t want a lot of what they are doing.
But Firefox is in between a rock and hard place. To the average user not having those things is seen as being behind and old. They are told every day how great AI is, and how useful it is.
So what does Mozilla do?
We have different distributions of Firefox at least. Dunno how feasible it would be for them to release and support a stripped down version. I’m gonna guess it’s not as I would assume a lot of these integrations come with sponsorship money.
You know they could’ve just made official extensions for these? Good thing I’m on ESR so I won’t receive these until I move to a fork.
just use librewolf people.
How will they be dealing with this?
librewolf has always disabled all the ai stuff.
Ew, wtf
I’ve used Firefox since the Netscape era. I used Firefox before it reached 1.0. I supported it when it was way slower than IE or Chrome. I will not support this.
that’s it im going from firefox to mullvand browser all.of they ai is shit
Welp, so long Firefox. It has been a good run all those years.
What will you move to?
I don’t know yet. Going to give Librewolf a try.
Will sync work for that? I needs muh sync.
Holy hell fuck Mozilla
We really, really, really need a third party browser that isn’t a Firefox or Chrome clone. This duopoly is a downward spiral.
It’s not possible thanks to ever increasing web bloatware. A single person or group of freetime programmers cannot implement that much bloatware without using existing ones. We need a new protocol but it will not gonna happen because it wouldn’t be profitable.
Cant wait for ladybird!
YOU’LL NEVER GET ME TO USE AI
Seems like a silly statement. I mean we do not have real AI, so you basically are saying “I will not use predictive algorithms” which seems counter intuitive to using a computer at all.
Its abundantly obvious that nowadays when somebody mentions AI they mean generative AI for text, images, and so on.
OK, that changes nothing about what I said. Do you have a point?
I quite obviously meant it doesn’t matter how much they integrate Gemini into the browser, I’m not touching it.
I, again quite obviously, am not saying I’m not going to use any predictive algorithm ever made.
If this is confusing to you, consider consulting a doctor.
You said or op or whoever, I will not use AI. Now you are saying in a browser and if it is gemini.
Point is I think the problem is corporations, the training, the privacy, etc.
Predictive algorithms could be useful eveb in a browser, generative ai could be helpful with spotting phishing, confusing ads, spelling, orgnization and layout, but it’s all about who made it, who controls it, and how much energy it consumes.
That is my point, the issues surrounding computing are not just because it is called “ai” and I think it should be said as such.
@NewNewAugustEast @kadup
@Vivaldi
I am definitely going to be called a chill, but I truly and honestly love the thing I’m going to talk about, I’m not just “blowing steam”If you want a great, User-Configurable browser without any AI garbage, give Vivaldi a try
Here is the CEO giving a clear stance against generative AI
https://vivaldi.com/blog/keep-exploring/
And here is a more general explanation of what and how they as a company is working towards a better future for the web
https://vivaldi.com/for-a-better-web/My own experience with the browser is that it feels like what people expect Firefox to still be:
A User-focused, configurable and customizable, feature-rich web-browser that puts the user first and foremost.
Want the tabs at the bottom?
That’s a setting.
Using Vivaldi on Linux in a Window-manager with server-side(or no) decorations?
Don’t worry, that’s in the Settings.
Want a keybinding that opens a predetermined set of tabs?
That’s possible with a command chain.
Want to set alt+tab to cycle tabs?
The keybinding page in the Settings is one of the best I’ve ever used with the ability to bind multiple keybindings to the same action (or multiple actions using command chains)And as if that wasn’t enough, the CEO spends some of his time on Mastodon, and has answered questions directed to the Vivaldi account
OK, I’m a fanboy.
Vivaldi is probably the only Chromium based browser I would consider. It is my alternative when I am not using Firefox. Yeah it is pretty good.
I will say, like I mentioned about Firefox, if you scroll down in the comments you will find people saying Vivaldi will fade to obscurity without implementing some kind of AI.
Frankly I appreciate Vivaldi’s stance: it isn’t ready yet, too many issues and problems to add agents into our ecosystem.
By the way Vivaldi is like a swiss knife: you can take notes, email, calendar, tasks, so much stuff! On the other hand it often chokes on updates and the sync is less then perfect.
translation: ask user again in 3 days
I literally cannot explain how excited this makes me. I can’t, because that’d require me to be in any way exited by any of this, as opposed to annoyed that’ll I’ll have to disable yet more useless bloat that doesn’t belong in a web browser. And apparently waste disk space on a local LLM I won’t be using, because, you know, I can fucking read on my own just fine.
K.I.S.S.
