Sarah Jamie Lewis (@sarahjamielewis@mastodon.social)
mastodon.social
To follow up on this, I have pushed an initial, experimental, exploratory patch to https://codeberg.org/basebrowserproject/organization This patch removes (not just disables) many AI features from desktop Firefox including: smart windows, model chat, link previews, smart tab groups, semantic search, on device model integration (translations) etc. 1605 files changed, 98 insertions, 852297 deletions I've tested that Firefox builds, and runs, and overall doesn't complain, but it's far from complete, hic sunt dracones etc.

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:

  1. Building THE reference implementation web browser, and
  2. Being a jugular-snapping attack dog on standards committees.
  3. There is no 3.

mastodon thread: https://mastodon.social/@sarahjamielewis/116994970688711387

the patch repo: https://codeberg.org/basebrowserproject/organization

firefox repo: https://github.com/mozilla-firefox/firefox

build instructions: https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/contributing/contribution_quickref.html

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.

  • ikt@aussie.zone
    11·
    18 hours ago

    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

        • lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
          4·
          13 hours ago

          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!

            • communism@lemmy.ml
              2·
              12 hours ago

              The majority of end users run Windows. Does that make Windows the reference desktop OS?

              The most charitable interpretation of your assertion I can think of is that you just mean that Chromium-based browsers have the majority of the market share. That’s not the same thing as a reference implementation at all.

    • atomicbocks@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      9·
      15 hours ago

      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.

      • ikt@aussie.zone
        1·
        6 hours ago

        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:

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromium_(web_browser)#Browsers_based_on_Chromium

        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))