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.

  • ISO@lemmy.zip
    39·
    16 hours ago

    YSK

    okay

    There’s a new initiative

    A single microblogger.
    A single patch.
    On top of main (read, nightly).

    for hard-forking firefox

    Forks, hard and soft, always existed.
    The hard ones are all half-dead maintenance wise. Not to mention the 10s of thousands of unpatched vulnerabilities, and that’s not even counting undiscovered ones in those ancient code bases.

    and creating a “base browser”

    What is libxul 🤔🙂