I wish people would stop talking about “AI browsers” like everyone even knows what that actually means.
At this point nothing will stop me having a visceral negative reaction to AI being added to any product after literally every single other implementation in literally every other product has been annoying fucking dogshit. It could be the best thing ever and I’d still react negatively because I never want to hear the god damn word again.
Disclaimer: very satisfied user of Waterfox talking ;)
But I believe Mozilla is making a fundamental mistake.
I believe that too, but I’m no millionaire CEO either.
Some will argue that AI browsers are inevitable, that we’re fighting against the tide of history. Perhaps. AI browsers may eat the world. But the web, despite having core centralised properties, is fundamentally decentralised. There will always be alternatives. If AI browsers dominate and then falter, if users discover they want something simpler and more trustworthy, Waterfox will still be here, marching patiently along. We’ve been here before. When Firefox abandoned XUL extensions, Waterfox Classic preserved them. When Mozilla started adding telemetry and Pocket and sponsored content, Waterfox stripped it out. I like to think that where there is want for a browser that simply respects you, Waterfox has delivered.
Long live Waterfox.
This may sound silly to say, and it probably is, but to me it’s almost impossible to imagine I could one day stop being a Firefox user. I mean, my first Web browser was Mosaic, I followed it when it turned into Netscape, which I then followed as it became Netscape, before morphing into the giant Mozilla T-Rex, and finally becoming Firefox.
Take back the Web, I believe(d) in that. Heck, I still have one of their T-Rex t-shirt dedicated by a few of its devs.
I also have a chromium-based browser (Vivaldi) but Firefox has always been home to me (edit: so seeing it moving away from what I care for is not a great feeling). I’m so glad forks like Waterfox exist because if it was not for them, for the first time ever I would not know what browser I can trust.
I first started on Mosaic and Lynx! That was a lifetime ago.
I am still using lynx, everyday. Not for everything, but for most if my news and blog reading.
It feels great to not being bombarded by the flashy, distracting JavaScript gizmo du-jour. I want to read the content, I don’t care about the AI generated picture at the of the page, or the random picture of something half related to the article.
I believe everybody should build their website to be accessible with lynx.
Accessibility isn’t just following the standards and removing the mess from the modern web, it’s also making your site accessible for the people with eyesight problems for example…
Firefox clones like librewolf and waterfox greatly increase the supply chain attack risk, but they seems more and more attractive every day
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I’m obviously not OP but the first thing that comes to mind are attacks like the one that targeted xz. Open source developers are generally overloaded between demands from the community and their regular lives, and they also lack the means and ability to check the background of everyone contributing code or vying for maintainer status. This creates the risk that somebody with bad intentions works their way into a position of some power over the code that gets merged. Bigger projects with strict governance and an active community of contributors (or funding for dedicated developers to maintain control and check outside contributions) have much smaller risk in this regard.
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We still need some organisational alternative to Mozilla. None of the privacy forks would survive Firefox going away.
Yes all the derivatives would die if Firefox went away.
I just switched to it on my android. Set as default. So far so good. Never heard of it until today.
Does anyone know about Zen browser, if they stay abstinent as well?
Thank god (And thank @zenbrowser@floss.social !)
Don’t get me wrong I hate LLMs being shoved down our throats, but I think the “Mozilla using AI” stuff is overblown. The few LLM features they’ve implemented are useful and non-intrusive. I actually think it’s a rare example of the tech being used intelligently (no pun intended).
I could not disagree more. a browser is a local piece of software to me that I use to connect to a variety of servers. It having an ai server its communicating with all the time and with access outside the add on system is not something I want. I have looked at and was not put off by other firefox “controversies” but this one is making it where it is not simply a browser anymore. which is what I want.
Well you’re in luck because the translation feature is local https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/website-translation
this does not make me happier. I can turn it off but if im going to run a local llm I rather do that as its own piece of software. Its funny because I have mentioned I would like to see a linux operating system using a local llm where its acting a bit like the change from text based to gui based operating systems. I don’t want every piece of software operating a local llm to do its job or a part of its job on my computer. Its great I can turn it off but I don’t want to be downloading an llm model with every piece of software and just turn it off for my browser and my office suite and anything else im running. Its actually worse with the browser that already has taken over so much of the application space as a kind of universal tool.
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i’ve been pretty disallusioned with Mozilla leadership
i’ve jumped back to Chrome for the time being
i’ll be moving to servo/verso as soon as it meets my needs
Check out Vivaldi’s Roadmap for 2026 😀
not AI, and still not open source either
