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.

  • Telorand@reddthat.com
    23·
    16 hours ago
    • OP links to the author’s Mastodon toot ✅
    • The author is hard-line anti-AI ✅
    • The author uses Codeberg ✅
    • The author proved definitively that a bunch of Mozilla code is feature creep ✅

    Now this is the kind of project I could get behind. I know the author says they have no long-term project goals currently, but I hope the FOSS community rallies around this one.

    • yuman@programming.devOP
      8·
      16 hours ago

      the author is the co-dev of cwtch with a proven track record of shipping product. as they state, it’s impossible for any one dev to take on a product of this magnitude but I’m cautiously optimistic about this thing being in a position to gain contributors at this point.

      • Telorand@reddthat.com
        3·
        14 hours ago

        I think you mean the one with Vince McMahon. He’s a piece of shit, but I can see what you’re getting at!

        • lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
          1·
          14 hours ago

          wait it’s McMahon in the template?

          I’m not that well versed in those meme galleries the younglings use these days to even know to search for it, I just know it when I see a meme that uses it.