in its first iteration, it strips all AI shit, doesn't just disable it; the hero went through the source tree and patched it by hand!
it differs from LibreWolf and friends as there's an intention to hard-fork the thing (LW should be based on basebrowser) and let the abomination that is the mozilla shell-game-corp of today behind, thus returning to the original idea behind creating mozilla, best described by the dude who gave us the thing:
In my humble but correct opinion, Mozilla should be doing two things and two things only:
- Building THE reference implementation web browser, and
- Being a jugular-snapping attack dog on standards committees.
- There is no 3.
mastodon thread: https://mastodon.social/...
the patch repo: https://codeberg.org/...
firefox repo: https://github.com/mozilla-firefox/firefox
build instructions: https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/...
the only thing missing's how to apply the patch. it's as simple as going to the firefox source folder and applying the patch file with:
patch -p1 < the.patch
and then proceed with ./mach build.
this was my first time building firefox from source and it wasn't half as bad; about 30ish minutes on an i7-870 in the background without any excessive load that woulda made the system unusable.
Right. Let me know if in 5 years there is a steady team of people still working on this. Any programmer can grab the source code and make a few modifications and release it. However it takes a lot of effort/dedication to maintain something for the years needed to be good/useful.
The first step is NOT announcing that you are doing this though. Writing announcements are easy, I've seen many over the years. Only a few have turned into a real large project.
You're most definitely wrong here because the first step is to announce something like this because a project like this requires gathering a significant number of contributors.
They're trying to hard fork Firefox, which means they are trying to take on the engineering efforts of hundreds of full time engineers who are browser development experts. To keep up with bugs, web standards, security patches, and performance. Nevermind new feature development.
I'm pretty pessimistic about it tbf.
Well, it builds and runs, and according to their new post on Mastodon a group of people have reached out and tested the patches and there is additional work done. That's beyond just an announcement in my book. How many real large projects have you seen where nobody took the first step?
It's not wrong tho. There's a new initiative. That's all what one-person-or-more projects are when they begin, before they gain any traction.
And, so far, they are showing lots more than all the other wannabes and nobodies who complain the same on the internet but don't deliver.
It's not wrong tho. There's a new initiative.
Hence my point: announcing "a new initiative" doesn't denote an actual amount of demonstrated momentum, but it certainly connotes it.
And, so far, they are showing lots more than all the other wannabes and nobodies who complain the same on the internet but don't deliver.
Dude, it's a patch on top of main that removes Firefox's tepid, trivially disabled AI features. What do you mean "lots more"? lmao this is tantamount to a strongly worded letter about Firefox's inclusion of LLM tools.
Dude, a strongly worded letter does not change any code.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tantamount
My point if you didn't get it is that this has basically the same effect as expressing strong disagreement – inasmuch as it's extremely likely this won't see any meaningful usage or development and will quickly fizzle out.
Source: worked two years on a FOSS project vastly less important, complex, dangerous, and time-sensitive than a web browser.
Source 2: Obviousness.
YSK
okay
There's a new initiative
A single microblogger.
A single patch.
On top of main (read, nightly).
for hard-forking firefox
Forks, hard and soft, always existed.
The hard ones are all half-dead maintenance wise. Not to mention the 10s of thousands of unpatched vulnerabilities, and that's not even counting undiscovered ones in those ancient code bases.
and creating a "base browser"
What is libxul 🤔🙂
It's part of what powers Pale Moon & Basilisk.
Isn't that a bit much?
We should unify them into one standard that fits everyone's usecases.
That's too many!
We should summarize them into one standard that everyone follows.
(psssst, so was I paraphrasing :p)
- OP links to the author's Mastodon toot ✅
- The author is hard-line anti-AI ✅
- The author uses Codeberg ✅
- The author proved definitively that a bunch of Mozilla code is feature creep ✅
Now this is the kind of project I could get behind. I know the author says they have no long-term project goals currently, but I hope the FOSS community rallies around this one.
the author is the co-dev of cwtch with a proven track record of shipping product. as they state, it's impossible for any one dev to take on a product of this magnitude but I'm cautiously optimistic about this thing being in a position to gain contributors at this point.
All it's missing is that "reality show judge in wonder" meme template I've seen sometimes.
wait it's McMahon in the template?
I'm not that well versed in those meme galleries the younglings use these days to even know to search for it, I just know it when I see a meme that uses it.
How are they going to maintain the hard fork when something like 95+% of all engineering efforts that support LibreWolf and similar come from the Firefox engineering team?
Mostly mundane stuff like security patches, performance fixes, and web standards features and updates make up the bulk of the engineering efforts.
I just use Firefox and disable the AI. Every step further away from the source is just going to add bugs that i never want to see. All this posturing for feels with the second place browser isn't going to stop Google from controlling the Internet anyway.
I was on Firefox. Decided to try LibreWolf. I respect the privacy work they do, but it was annoying for me.
I found Zen Browser and I'm really happy with it.
Oh hell yes. Ladybird turned me off for a bunch of reasons, one of them being their embracing AI for development.
I'm so here for this. Brb, got some compiling to do
Where did SJL say she intended to maintain a hard fork?? She just said she went through to see how many LoC she could remove that were only there to power AI features. That reads a lot like someone doing this out of curiosity on a free afternoon. Am I missing some context for the mastodon thread?
When binaries are available through WinGet & Flathub, I'll be interested.
Gotta start somewhere! Best wishes 👍
Unfortunately browsers are some of the most complex, security focused, and demanding software projects in existence. Without a foundation and funding, any attempt to hard fork is going to have issues eventually unless you're cool with slop code.
@sarahjamielewis@mastodon.social and rewrite in rust? or just keep it cpp?
In my humble but correct opinion, Mozilla should be doing two things and two things only:
Building THE reference implementation web browser, and
Chromium already has that covered
Being a jugular-snapping attack dog on standards committees.
Firefox has almost no market share thus it has no real say in standards
There is no 3.
I don't see this going very far tbh, good luck but yeah
You do understand that Mozilla (previously Netscape Navigator) is older than Chromium right? Chromium doesn’t have a reference implementation of the web already covered, Chromium is trying to embrace extend and extinguish the current web in favor of its own paradigm. Chromium is just today’s Internet Explorer.
You do understand that Mozilla (previously Netscape Navigator) is older than Chromium right?
Yes, I used Netscape Navigator, what does that have to do with being a 'reference browser'?
Chromium is just today’s Internet Explorer.
Well no because Internet Explorer wasn't open source and couldn't be forked
I'm using reference browser to mean a base browser of sorts that others build upon, Chromium clearly has that covered:
I get the feeling you mean 'reference browser' as some sort of left wing progressive hippie browser that is funded with magical money that drops out of the air (or in reality mainly open source devs working in their spare time for pennies (if that))
Chromium is in no way a "reference implementation web browser".
And yet what?
No matter how much you think the world licks the boots of Chrome, Chromium is still not a reference implementation. Heck, Dillo is not a reference implementation and it has three orders of magnitude more justification for being so!
go to feed...
go to feed...
"There's a new initiative" is doing a fuck of a lot of lifting from "someone on Mastodon said they're going to try".
save