Mozilla is developing a built‑in AI assistant for Firefox that will be offered as a third browsing mode alongside Normal and Private tabs. They’re calling it “Window AI.” Details are still scarce.

“It’s safe to say that the people who volunteered to “shape” the initiative want it dead and buried. Of the 52 responses at the time of writing, all rejected the idea and asked Mozilla to stop shoving AI features into Firefox.”

  • ashx64@lemmy.world
    37·
    12 hours ago

    The truth is that Chromium is really good. It has the best security and performance.

    Vanadium takes that and makes changes to make it more secure and private.

    • Leon@pawb.socialEnglish
      1·
      1 hour ago

      I think the problem with Chromium isn’t so much that Blink or V8 is bad or anything, it’s that it’s entirely under the thumb of Google. We’re essentially being set up for another Internet Explorer scenario, only Google unlike Microsoft won’t just be sitting on their laurels. Google is an advertising company, their entire business model is the web. Google Search is the tool used to find things, and with Google Chrome being the go-to browser for a lot of people, Google essentially ends up in control of both how you access the web and what you access.

      That sort of power is scary, which is why I personally avoid anything Chromium based as much as I am able to. Chromium itself is fantastic, but I don’t like the baggage it comes with.

      • ashx64@lemmy.world
        2·
        1 hour ago

        That’s valid.

        That’s also part of the reason I like Webkit. It’s in a nice spot between Firefox and Chromium when it comes to security and performance. And importantly, is not from an ad company and often passes on browser specs that would be harmful to privacy and security.

        I forget what the site is called, but I saw one that nicely layed out different browser specs and gives the explanation why one of the engine developers decided against supporting or implementing it.

        I just wish there was a good Webkit browser on Linux. Unfortunately, Gnome Web just feels slow and unresponsive despite good benchmarks.

        • Leon@pawb.socialEnglish
          2·
          29 minutes ago

          Gods I wish Epiphany/Gnome Web was better. The Kagi people are working on bringing Orion to Linux, which I believe will be using WebKit there as well.

          It’s kind of funny that we don’t have a solid WebKit browser on Linux, since WebKit has its roots in the KDE Projects KHTML engine for Konqueror.

          I guess that kind of ties in to my anger at these massive tech companies profiting off of FOSS but doing almost fuck-all to contribute. Google opening LLM generated bug reports in FFMPEG when all of the streaming media giants are propped up by this one project is just one example. There should be some kind of tax for this, I feel. They’re benefitting greatly, and provide nothing in return.