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.

  • bluGill@fedia.io
    35·
    16 hours ago

    Right. Let me know if in 5 years there is a steady team of people still working on this. Any programmer can grab the source code and make a few modifications and release it. However it takes a lot of effort/dedication to maintain something for the years needed to be good/useful.

    • pmk@piefed.caEnglish
      8·
      12 hours ago

      But the first step of all that is someone starting it. Without that first person nothing will ever happen. It might succeed, or not, but someone trying is a good thing regardless.

      • bluGill@fedia.io
        10·
        12 hours ago

        The first step is NOT announcing that you are doing this though. Writing announcements are easy, I’ve seen many over the years. Only a few have turned into a real large project.

        • douglasg14b@lemmy.world
          2·
          3 hours ago

          You’re most definitely wrong here because the first step is to announce something like this because a project like this requires gathering a significant number of contributors.

          They’re trying to hard fork Firefox, which means they are trying to take on the engineering efforts of hundreds of full time engineers who are browser development experts. To keep up with bugs, web standards, security patches, and performance. Nevermind new feature development.

          I’m pretty pessimistic about it tbf.

        • pmk@piefed.caEnglish
          3·
          11 hours ago

          Well, it builds and runs, and according to their new post on Mastodon a group of people have reached out and tested the patches and there is additional work done. That’s beyond just an announcement in my book. How many real large projects have you seen where nobody took the first step?