[heavyset_go]

The absolute reactionary response to anything Mozilla does is quite the something to watch, I've never seen another company held to the same standards.

If you read the Mozilla and Firefox related threads over the past week, you'd think Mozilla was the scourge of the internet, worse than DoubleClick in their heyday and worse than Google's hobbling of Chrome.

That said, the AI options for Firefox are opt-in. If you don't want them, don't use them. You are correct in that this is where software is heading, and AI integration is what users will expect going forward.

[1gn15]

Just so everyone else knows, the complaining is by definition reactionary.

> In politics, a reactionary is a person who favors a return to a previous state of society which they believe possessed positive characteristics absent from contemporary society.

But I guess HackerNews is infamous for being conservative, so it's not too surprising.

[thisislife2]

> I've never seen another company held to the same standards.

The only "standard" expected from them is the same as any other for-profit company - "stick to your stated values and don't be duplicitous". For example, Apple, Meta, Microsoft are all lambasted here when they claim to "respect" user privacy and their products do the opposite.

Also, you should note that unlike these BiGTech that make multiple products and services, the company behind Firefox (and Thunderbird) makes only a few products and earns 100's of millions of dollars in annual revenue from it (some here in HN say they currently make more than a half a billion dollars a year now!). That's a lot of money. And yet, most of their products continues to be "shitty" (i.e. subpar). That's why they are losing user base. Instead of really improving their core product, the company just continues to seek new avenues of creating revenues. That's the "MBA CEO mindset" that everyone here in HN usually complain about. Do you want a browser that's faster and light on resources, or a browser that would display even more ads to you right in the browser? (Guess what Firefox prioritised?). Every user of Firefox can already avail ChatGPT (or some other AI service) if they want to. The only reason to embed it onto Firefox is to just make extra money by violating user privacy (we all know AIs are now personal data harvesters), without adding any real value to the browser.

Now, consider the opensource philosophy they espouse. Again, with the 100's of millions of dollars they have in hand, Gecko, the rendering engine of the browser is still not a truly modular piece of code that can be easily used in other projects. And that's by design (this is why most of the browsers that use the Firefox-Gecko codebase are just Firefox clones with superficial changes to the UI and config). If I remember right, Nokia spent considerable effort to try and reuse Gecko (make it modular?) - https://web.archive.org/web/20180830103541/http://blog.idemp... - and Sailfish OS now uses that fork in its mobile browser. (It was only when Mozilla feared that they were losing the mobile browser war that they decided to offer Gecko as a hacky modular codebase for only the Android platform, to be used as webviews or create other browsers. Similar options for Desktop platforms still don't exist).

Isn't all that a valid criticism, whether you are a capitalist or an opensource developer?