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:
- Building THE reference implementation web browser, and
- Being a jugular-snapping attack dog on standards committees.
- 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.
“There’s a new initiative” is doing a fuck of a lot of lifting from “someone on Mastodon said they’re going to try”.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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 🤔🙂
There are now sixteen competing standards.
- OP links to the author’s Mastodon toot ✅
- The author is hard-line anti-AI ✅
- The author uses Codeberg ✅
- The author proved definitively that a bunch of Mozilla code is feature creep ✅
Now this is the kind of project I could get behind. I know the author says they have no long-term project goals currently, but I hope the FOSS community rallies around this one.
the author is the co-dev of cwtch with a proven track record of shipping product. as they state, it’s impossible for any one dev to take on a product of this magnitude but I’m cautiously optimistic about this thing being in a position to gain contributors at this point.
I just use Firefox and disable the AI. Every step further away from the source is just going to add bugs that i never want to see. All this posturing for feels with the second place browser isn’t going to stop Google from controlling the Internet anyway.
I was on Firefox. Decided to try LibreWolf. I respect the privacy work they do, but it was annoying for me.
I found Zen Browser and I’m really happy with it.
How are they going to maintain the hard fork when something like 95+% of all engineering efforts that support LibreWolf and similar come from the Firefox engineering team?
Mostly mundane stuff like security patches, performance fixes, and web standards features and updates make up the bulk of the engineering efforts.
Forking is easy. It’s maintaining the fork and getting people to use it that is the hard part.
Oh hell yes. Ladybird turned me off for a bunch of reasons, one of them being their embracing AI for development.
I’m so here for this. Brb, got some compiling to do
Where did SJL say she intended to maintain a hard fork?? She just said she went through to see how many LoC she could remove that were only there to power AI features. That reads a lot like someone doing this out of curiosity on a free afternoon. Am I missing some context for the mastodon thread?
Person with no business spearheading the effort makes a fork no one is going to use before abandoning the idea on 3 months
It’s systemd all over again.
Monocultures rarely end well.
Unfortunately browsers are some of the most complex, security focused, and demanding software projects in existence. Without a foundation and funding, any attempt to hard fork is going to have issues eventually unless you’re cool with slop code.
Gotta start somewhere! Best wishes 👍
Saving this thread so I know who to fund when I finally get all that money
@sarahjamielewis@mastodon.social and rewrite in rust? or just keep it cpp?