Not sure if there’s such a thing as a “good” AI company but I gather this is one that achieved its position via shady practices and is privately funded to serve ultra-wealthy interests.

Perplexity AI has attracted legal scrutiny over allegations of copyright infringement, unauthorized content use, and trademark issues from several major media organizations, including the BBC, Dow Jones, and The New York Times. According to separate analyses by Wired and later Cloudflare, Perplexity uses undisclosed web crawlers with spoofed user-agent strings to scrape the content of news websites who disallow or explicitly block web scraping.

Promoting companies like this is part of the more fundamental issue with Firefox’s funding model. The Mozilla Foundation uses Firefox as a cash cow by doing deals with devils (chiefly Google), putting some of the money back into Firefox while the rest goes toward activities the foundation sees as forces for good. You might call that irony or ingenuity, or both, but we’re stuck with it absent roughly five million users pitching in 50 bucks every year, at least based on current development costs.

Bravo to whoever’s responsible for screenshots being added to the release notes. So much quicker to understand what the descriptions are referring to.

The avatars aka “profile-specific badge” is an important new aspect because, at least in Windows, there was previously no way to tell which taskbar icon correlated to which profile. The only way to address that annoyance was via a somewhat obscure feature to change the Firefox program icon (changing the taskbar icon alone doesn’t work as it doesn’t persist on opening the program), and that only worked by having a separate Firefox install for each profile.

Looks like the old Profile Manager might still be the go for advanced users (e.g. new UI appears to lack ability to set the folder).