TL;DR: Mozilla’s translation bot on Support Mozilla (that is currently overwriting user contributions is based on the closed source, copyright infringing LLM, Google Gemini. This is in spite of Mozilla claiming that they are at the forefront of open source AI, and belies their exhortations to choose to build open source AI and data sets. Although Mozilla has experience in attracting open contributions for data sets in projects like Common Voice, Mozilla is using a closed data set to overwrite open contributions. Since (paid) Gemini queries do not train the model, Mozillians can expect to correct errors every time the bot automatically updates an article.
Google puts up a major chunk of the funding Mozzia gets in a year. If you don’t want them being the default choice in search or having your queries fed to their bots then start putting up the money to make their support no longer required.
Not really conductive as long as most funds are siphoned by the C-suite ranks. Get rid of the C-fat first, maybe even turn Mozilla into a co-op, then have the People fund it.
Their support isn’t required though, it’s desired.
Mozilla have millions of $, they are actively investing in various money making schemes (sorry, financial investment vehicles) well outwith the original scope of Mozilla.
They take the money because they want the money, they could refuse it any time they want. But they won’t, because they don’t want to. They’re not a poor FOSS project with an independent developer that needs donations to survive, stop treating them like they are.
Mozilla has created some brilliant software, but they’re leaving their original mission behind, burning goodwill with many people around the world, and setting themselves up to be shunned by the open source community the second a viable alternative pops up.
I just hope the alternative doesn’t take too long to materialize
Librewolf is my stopgap atm. We’ll see that the future holds.
Voting with your wallet doesn’t work when you are the product. They don’t care about your money when google’s will dwarf any amount individuals could hope to raise, even collectively. Nothing prevents them from just taking both your money and google’s and changing absolutely nothing.
I did. I rage-signed up for a monthly contribution to the Servo project the last time I read about something Mozilla did.
It’s too late to give (life) support. Web browsers are a dying ecosystem as it’s too complex to create competition. Why not abandon them and instead support software that does a seperatable part of what modern browsers do?
I don’t necessarily disagree on the complexity point, but I don’t think breaking up the functionality of a web browser fixes the issue.
Web browsers are one of those basic tools everyone who uses a computer relies upon. Breaking that up would not only lead to user frustration, I think it’d introduce brand new territories bad actors like Google could monopolize. Now that unified “web browsers” exist it’s incredibly difficult to ask users to stop using them. It turns from “download this program” to “download these four or five separate programs and follow this guide to learn how to daisy chain them together into a browser equivalent.”. That’s a reasonable ask for some people. Hell, it’s a reasonable ask for me frankly. But your average user isn’t going to have the time nor the patience to attempt to make that solution work.
Hopefully interoperability of seperate apps as ‘part of a web browser experince’ can be improved to help all users. However, the less technologically inclinded will have to step up and do something if they want to avoid growing frustrations from an endlessly, enshitifying browser experience.
Having a “do one thing” software design doesn’t avoid all issues of anti-competition practices, nor does it prevent anti-features. For that I’d look towards software freedom licenses (as opposed to proprietary software).
We already have software that does some seprate parts of web browsers and comes with the OS; video players, text readers and protocol specific apps. The question is, are advanced users using alternatives like Gemini protocal? Hopefully activity will lead to others entering the new communities.
Lets all go back to Gopher.
I am 100% ready to replace my browser with a blend of Usenet/RSS subscriptions, maybe sprinkle some Gemini (not the G*gle AI) atop of it. Fuck it, I might even get a library card for shits and giggles.
Man I collect library cards. At this point I’m a member of three different library systems. No joke, libraries are amazing and one of the best resources we’ve got left in this country. Go get a card man!
I thought Mozilla lost the google funding in the monopoly ruling?
Looks like it’d still a thing
https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2025/09/google-antitrust-ruling-firefox-search-deal
What’s the amount they get donated or funded? So we know how much to raise yearly.
Something around $500M and $600M yearly. And it’s around 90% of all Mozilla revenue
That’s a lot of donations!
Do we have a web browser that uses Servo engine yet?
Not even remotely close yet unfortunately.
Most website do not run on servo
Is there a way to verify that? I did run Servo months ago and some pages did render without issues. Others not but that wasn’t enough for me to draw such a conclusion. I remember Mozilla pushed for https://webcompat.com/ so wondering if this can be used to see the pace of change.
Recently I go fucking annoyed by Mozilla that I rage-contributed (monthly payment) to Servo.
Mozilla is such a shit show.
The first ( without the ) is making me go crazy haha
God I’m happy to not be the only one. I read the thing the times trying to figure out where it was closing it
#Error
Cant wait for servo to be functional asap so we get a real alternative that is free and open source
It renders… so what is missing for you to use it?
Most of the websites dont work
Addressed earlier in https://lemmy.world/post/39884328/20912060
contrast with vivaldi explicitly taking a no ai stand in the browser.
But also not open source.
True. Still, afaik, they haven’t done anything shady.
They also haven’t written a browser. It’s an apples and oranges comparison. There are plenty of Firefox derivatives that don’t have all the bloat that Mozilla, et cetera, is putting into there. That’s not the point. The point is how controlled they are by one of their competitors, namely Google.
There are only three main browser makers. Chrome by Google Firefox by Mozilla and WebKit/Safari now maintained by Apple but derived from Linux’s K desktop environment web engine. There are a lot of wrappers written around these, but at the end of the day, there’s still just the three.
The one real interesting bright spot though that I’m looking forward to is servo. Originally started by Mozilla, but now completely free of them. It’s not yet in a daily driver’s state, but it’s looking to be quite interesting.
Out of curiosity, how are Konqueror and Falkon relates to the big three?
Their websites say they use KHTML or KDEWebkit (Konqueror) or QtWebEngine (falkon). Are these downstream adaptations of apple-WebKit?
Judging by the QtWebEngine page, it doesn’t explicitly say it, but I think it is based on chromium.
Konqueror is a bit harder to figure out. Maybe QtWebKit. Is this also Chromium?
Apple’s WebKit (WebCore+JavaScriptCore) was originally a fork of KHTML/KJS. They shared at the beginning but not very well. They eventually opened up their source and made changes that were more friendly to other developers. A lot of browsers and embedded renderers use WebKit, now, besides Safari and KDE based ones.
Google forked WebCore for Chromium. I don’t think they share a codebase, anymore. Edge, Opera and many embedded renderers use Chromium.
Anyway, I just think it’s interesting that most every browser out there is descended from KHTML.
Yes, they are both WebKit, though largely irrelevant. Personally, I’m a daily KDE user. I did install falkon out of Curiosity for a short while. But neither it or konqueror are generally in any distributions base install. Including KDE neon.
They are usable, so long as you don’t use any sort of add-ons.
Falkon is based on Qt web. So it is also WebKit.
Correction Falkon and Qt web engine are indeed chromium. Konqueror alone then would be WebKit
I wish Firefox was better integrated into KDE. Whenever I open a link in a different app, Firefox opens the link but stays in the background where it seems like it should come to the foreground.
Yes, that and the GTK window decorations are a slight annoyance as well.
Time to switch to LibreWolf or something else.
Can I use that to sync passwords, history, etc. between phone and PC in some way of form, even if self-hosted?
I’ve been on librewolf for years, and as long as I’m running the FlatPak version, all Firefox extensions work. Having said that, you do have a few options to sync. One is using your Firefox account (I don’t suggest you do because of Mozilla’s BS over the past year or so, but you would be sharing way less stuff this way). In my case, the only thing I want synced in browsers is the bookmarks, so I use floccus extension in every browser, floccus app in android, and host them all in a self-hosted linkwarden instance. I hope that helps.
Sigh. At this rate I can see a day where I end up switching to WebKitGTK’s MiniBrowser as my main rather than having it as a “secret” backup.
I won’t use regular Vanilla FF. I do like Zen tho!
Is there any good alternative to FF that is cross device compatible and keep my sessions between said devices, but without me having to press anything more than “Install” or to type “apt-get install firefox”?
I hear a lot of these newer open source friendly browser, but switching between my pc/notebook/phone/tablet, is a requirement. I’d love to find something that fit that so I could switch.
^(edit: typo)
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Mozilla is over.
The money from Google was surely what killed their browser. I’m not saying there was a behind the scenes deal. They just got lazy and spent Google’s money in stupid ways instead of improving their product so that they could gain a real userbase.
Imagine if they spent that money towards just the browser (not possible, but imagine anyways), we could be in a very different place where Chrome doesn’t have 99% (or whatever it is) market share.
Firefox is a good browser, but where could they have been today if it was prioritised over paying the CEO millions for nothing? They have recently been sorta catching up, i’ve seen a lot of updates that actually include features I use, but I think it’s too late.
Time for one of the new built from the ground up browsers to shine when complete. I still stand by Firefox and recommend it, but as soon as their is an open competitor that is production ready, I’m outta here.
They have undoubtly done amazing things for the web, but their idiocy is astounding sometimes and I don’t wanna stay on a sinking ship. I’d rather use a new browser that helps keep the web secure, safe a pleasant for us all without annoyances or dumb beurocracy.
The rot has set in. There’s no getting it out, now.
It’s funny seeing the sudden surge of “copyright is awesome!” On the Internet now that it’s become a useful talking point to bludgeon the hated Abominable Intelligence with.
Have any actual court cases established that Gemini is violating copyright, BTW? The major cases I’ve seen so far have been coming down on the “training AI is fair use” side of things, any copyright issues have largely been ancillary to that.
Copyright isn’t awesome, it is useful. The whole basis of open source is built on the concept of copyright (copyleft), so alignment with copyright isn’t “sudden”, it is fundamental.
Copyrights is mostly used by big companies to fuck with the competition so they can keep a strangle hold on the consumers.
It’s a deeply flawed system not in any way to our advantage. Actually having copyright laws strengthened so they apply to AI training would instantly kill the open source scene and make certain only a handful of companies can afford to put out models.
Copyleft is built as a protection against big companies and how unfair the playing field is because of copyright laws. It’s like saying crime is a good thing because without it, we wouldn’t have a police force.
Not disagreeing with you - just saying that the legal underpinnings of open source are the copyright regime.
I’m disagreeing with the positive spin you are trying to put on it. We have cops because of crime. Having cops is a good thing (mostly) but we wouldn’t need them if there was no crime.
Why is this being downvoted so heavily?
Probably because their angle is to find opportunities to push an AI positive agenda whether copyright is involved or not.
I don’t see anything there that indicates an AI positive agenda. What am I missing?
Go take a look at their comments on their profile. Lot of AI talk there.
I’m guessing people aren’t pro copyright, but its their argument in conjunction with AI that has led to the downvotes.
🤦♂️ Thanks
Copyright can be used to in a good way. Unfortunately, its mostly used by big corporations as a battering ram to extract as much money as possible from smaller businesses and even just individuals
Nonsense, Mozilla Firefox is fine. Stop spreading bs. Please.
This isn’t about Firefox, and there are zero mentions of Firefox in the article. This is about Mozilla screwing over their volunteers by replacing their human written translations, with inaccurate machine translations written by a closed source LLM.
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Firefox Fanboys still: LEST IT NOT CHROME!
Oh no! Better delete that woke tranny Firefox and install Brave™ the Crypto AI browser.
Am I doing Lemmy right?
No, that’s reddit. Here we’re all just depressed as we watch all the good things fall apart.
Why brave lol it’s not even an option
Librewolf for now
I know. Brave is always driving negative campaigns against mozilla. This whole nothingburger seems just like yet another ambush campaign.
Also, you idiots are too stupid to recognize sarcasm.
Man, you nailed it. Plus the article is 90% nonsense.
