RE: https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/115737483111161917

I'll elaborate. I believe we're in an AI bubble. AI companies are pushing the overton window on AI discourse. They want the most extreme anti-AI sentiment to be "Sure, it's an overhyped technology right now but there will be reasonable applications down the road". I want to see pushback on this. It doesn't matter if I can disable some AI feature in the settings. The fact that Mozilla is jumping on this bandwagon is deeply disappointing to me.

@Gargron i guess i don't see how contributing to google's browser monopoly is an improvement

@Gargron mozilla's new ceo is an idiot addicted to buzzwords. alas. google, with blink, has the sway to bake LLMs into some web API and make it impossible for **anyone** to make a browser without "AI" deeply built in. and they have a massive financial incentive to do so since they've invested a jillion dollars into training their own models

@Gargron there's reasonable application now. I learned something in my 23andme and Genomind DNA reports via LLM (pro models only; the others aren't very good in my testing), that no healthcare professional ever told me and I have worked with dozens. Remember: I absolutely HATE all software by default. And to my shock, I didn't hate this... but I really really wanted to.

@Gargron that said 100% there is a bubble and a gold rush mentality. But this, unlike cryptocurrency, which is grifters and crime and gambling to the bone, does have real practical uses. If you want to hate something, hate cryptocurrency. It's so much more dangerous.

@codinghorror @Gargron i was regularly reassured that cryptocurrency was very useful in african countries where banking was unreliable or inaccessible

@eevee @Gargron I don't disagree with any of that, but how does supporting Firefox, the second browser also funded by Google, help with this? Vivaldi arguably has more practical distance from Google's control (not saying they have a *lot*, but they have some), since they have independent funding and could hypothetically fork. Is the idea that the engine technology itself is the issue, then everyone should be using … Epiphany, I guess?

@eevee @Gargron I don't know if that is actually the case in practice, but who knows, maybe the current regime will make all banking in the US unreliable or inaccessible..

@glyph surely there's a bit of a distinction between "google individually employs most of the chrome team" and "google pays mozilla for a service"

vivaldi isn't even a rounding error. they have no weight to throw around and certainly not enough manpower to actually hard-fork and maintain a browser engine

@eevee Is there? I can’t think of any way in which Firefox has meaningfully acted as a check on Google’s power as a result or any way that it would negatively impact Google if everyone stopped using Chrome and started using Firefox. Chromium is already open source and that seems like the most realistic counterpressure on their own behavior

@eevee like the only thing I can even think of where the actual browser engine tech was at issue is EME, where firefox folded immediately, and I can’t blame them for doing so because they have no power

@eevee this is not asked rhetorically as a dunk, I am not an ignoramus in this area but I am not *super* closely following the ins and outs of frontend tech debates. to the extent that I have it seems like there’s a lot of smoke without much fire (I remember digging through the relatively recent privacy-preserving telemetry stuff and not being able to figure out why anyone cared) but if I have missed something I would love to correct my view

@eevee I guess I should say something about why I think *my* position is worth talking about at all here:

Among the possibilities, two outcomes seem likely to me:

1. Mozilla's "AI strategy" ends up pissing off their entire user base so much that a large plurality leave for other alternate browsers, finally cementing their irrelevance permanently.

2. It works OK and they continue to limp along at … oh. hm. At this point in the toot I looked up where Firefox's marketshare actually is right now

@eevee Sorry, I guess it is not actually worth talking about, I didn't realize that they'd fallen below measurement-error thresholds in every major browser survey in 2022. I was thinking that if the AI failure were the proximate cause of their final doom that might serve as a more useful lesson for the industry than whatever hypothetical bulwark they were supposedly providing against chrome, but I didn't know the doom already happened 😬

@glyph well that's, uh, not an encouraging takeaway

i don't know what happened honestly. i mean a big part of it is that chrome and safari come default on phones and a lot of web traffic is to phones. but somehow chrome just became the default on computers as well despite not actually being preinstalled on any

firefox is a good browser — a better browser! — but they don't have ads on the front page of google dot fucking com every day i suppose

@eevee Mozilla management just kinda lost the plot. It's an OK browser, but it's mostly coasting on a few very marginal features and falling behind on everything else. It won a pretty large marketshare on the strength of being a substantially better browser, the other browsers massively improved in terms of performance and reliability, and now it just isn't a good enough browser to be worth the switching friction

@eevee Chrome is pre installed on Windows computers as Microsoft Edge, which is more or less the same browser

I think Chrome also took the enterprise managed deployment market more seriously than Firefox did, and rolled out quality of life features for IT mass rollouts earlier, so it got shipped on corporate work computers

@eevee @glyph I think they lost a ton of market share in the early to mid 2010s due to performance issues at a time when Google still had a TON of goodwill and Chrome felt snappy and fast, and a lot of SV-based early adopters who are culturally influential if not big in numbers switched and told their friends to as well. Quantum in 2017 fixed perf at the cost of limiting the plugin ecosystem, which pissed off power users without getting a lot of people back.

@yildo i mean specifically chrome. edge is tracked separately in browser stats

@glyph what i find most frustrating is that firefox mostly makes headlines when its own users are really mad at it, usually for doing something chrome is already way past doing, so the impression is just always negative. i love firefox and i am desperate for them to give me an excuse to foist it on people. instead i get "wow firefox is bad because it's doing AI" and meanwhile i opened chromium today for the first time in a while and there's an "ai mode" button IN THE ADDRESS BAR

@eevee as someone who loves Firefox I can see how that would be pretty annoying and seem extremely unfair. at the same time, I don't think even most remaining Firefox users love it? They're accepting worse rendering performance, worse graphics performance, fewer APIs and so on so they *won't* get an "AI mode" button. And then Mozilla's corporate strategy is "don't fix the other stuff, but DO put in the AI button" and given what the remaining user population is like, their reaction is predictable