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drnick1today at 2:23 PM3 repliesview on HN

The open source community will start taking Firefox seriously again when all the AI shit is removed for good and real improvements to performance and privacy are made.

Despite all the posturing about "respecting your privacy and freedom," the stock configuration of Firefox is trivially fingerprintable. At the very least, a privacy-focused browser should adopt the Tor patches and report standardized spoofed values for hardware components and disable by default all privacy invasive anti-features like WebGL. This isn't difficult to do, but illustrates the gap between empty promises and what is actually delivered.


Replies

freedombentoday at 3:04 PM

I'd definitely love to see them take some steps, but at the points where a minor increase in privacy leads to a much worse UX for average people (aka, "why doesn't this site work in FF, FF sucks!" because they don't know they have to enable something). If Firefox becomes a browser that is harder to use then it will only ever be used by the extremely small niche of people that care about that. That will only further lead to more "not tested on Firefox" web development. I already have to have Chrome available on my machine because of sites like Ramp.com and Mailgun that don't work on Firefox, and that would only get worse.

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fwiptoday at 3:04 PM

Unfortunately, the guys in charge at Mozilla are clearly enamored with AI. They like it so much (and value users so little), that they'll let it write the whole damn PR blog post about company strategy.

plagiaristtoday at 2:58 PM

I am going with the Waterfox / Librewolf forks