Thanks everyone for your active participation here. We knew this would have a lot of interest and so we’ve waited to dive into the conversation because we see some themes emerging that I’ll respond to broadly here. The main concerns I’m noting are around the license agreements we declare, our use of data for AI, and our Acceptable Use Policy. Below are a few clarifications to each of these areas.
We. Don’t. Want. AI.
Great, what other good Gecko Engine Browsers are there?
Waterfox is the safe bet, it’s basically just regular Firefox repacked with better defaults and telemetry turned off, but it isn’t harden or has add-ons included.
LibreWolf is what I switched to over a year ago, The team behind it have been pretty thorough in scraping out spyware and it comes pre-hardened out the box (but that can break more invasive websites).
They’re opt-in by default, it’s not like they’re forcing AI on you.
Even the mere existence of AI which usage is opt-in is a so called slippery slope.
Not really. Other companies forced AI to appeal to investors and look for new ways to trap consumers in subscriptions. Mozilla added free, privacy-friendly addons because people asked for it. Big difference.
We’re already seeing other companies shoehorn in chatbots into everything to try to make up for the fact that the trend didn’t really catch on.
… yet
idk why people are downvoting, it’s exactly what has happened with literally every bad policy online anywhere. They beta test it to gauge how bad backlash would be, then if it’s acceptable go ahead with it, if too much backlash just use the “oh it was just a beta! we would never do that 🥺” excuse then in 6 months try again
Edit: the Lemmy hive mind has reversed their decision. It was at +4 | -4 when I replied
Because they said multiple times they don’t plan on making it a default. From the very beginning Mozilla announced their AI extensions will not be forced on people. I don’t understand the “but what if they do” comments. “What if elon musk bought firefox?!??! It could happen!”
Also said “we will never share your data” and now they’ve removed that from the terms. I assume you’re aware that they just had a change in leadership? These decisions come from whichever is in charge. New leadership might still agree enough with it to not change it, but what about the person after, or the one after that? As they say “never is a very long time”.
I’m also not saying it will definitely happen, but my confidence in it not happening is now low enough that I switched to LibreWolf.
zen, i guess
Zen is not another browser, it is just reskinned firefox with some tweaks.
Well that’s kind of all any gecko based browser can ever be. The way gecko’s written, it’s a lot more locked into the rest of firefox than Chromium’s web engine
Too recent to trust, I feel like. Have you been using it? What do you make of it?
i haven’t. i use hardened firefox
Orion
Last I checked it was webkit based, did they change it?
Hmm, not that I know of.