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.

  • TheTechnician27@lemmy.worldEnglish
    9·
    14 hours ago

    It’s not wrong tho. There’s a new initiative.

    Hence my point: announcing “a new initiative” doesn’t denote an actual amount of demonstrated momentum, but it certainly connotes it.

    And, so far, they are showing lots more than all the other wannabes and nobodies who complain the same on the internet but don’t deliver.

    Dude, it’s a patch on top of main that removes Firefox’s tepid, trivially disabled AI features. What do you mean “lots more”? lmao this is tantamount to a strongly worded letter about Firefox’s inclusion of LLM tools.

      • TheTechnician27@lemmy.worldEnglish
        6·
        14 hours ago

        https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tantamount

        My point if you didn’t get it is that this has basically the same effect as expressing strong disagreement – inasmuch as it’s extremely likely this won’t see any meaningful usage or development and will quickly fizzle out.

        Source: worked two years on a FOSS project vastly less important, complex, dangerous, and time-sensitive than a web browser.

        Source 2: Obviousness.

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

          If you couldn’t make bunk, don’t piss your bad luck on other people. At least they are trying. Booing projects before they lead anywhere (or nowhere) is not really helpful in our circumstances.

          Ladybird for example got their hurras (and their boos) and then went down in flames because of being fascist nutjobs. They had their chance, they blew it, but they had their chance.

          • TheTechnician27@lemmy.worldEnglish
            4·
            11 hours ago

            If you couldn’t make bunk

            I made small but meaningful contributions to a reasonably well-known project still used by millions of people.

            Maybe don’t assume I made bunk just because I have an iota of humility to acknowledge that a hard fork of a modern web browser announced by someone on Mastodon who spent a collective five hours patching main is a pipedream.