I don’t think pushing users from one platform you own to another platform you own is a great way to avoid the ban lol

Seems to me this is just a way them to have a second round of headlines about how the evil west is blocking their social media – first for banning TikTok, then for Lemon8, as if they aren’t in fact being banned at the same time.

By that logic, Mozilla could as well stop developing their browser.

They shouldn’t stop developing their browser, and I’d never advocate for that. I’d have to go to Chromium, yuck.

It has dropped to a marketshare to like 2.5% […], maybe about 5% if we’re generous. That’s less than the ratio of Linux users. So I’d argue it’s for tinkerers, too.

I never said it wasn’t for tinkerers, just that they need to attract people that aren’t. And how does this move harm tinkerers? Not only can you tinker with this extension (such as by pointing it towards a local Ollama instance), but it’s optional. You don’t have to install it. What’s anti-power user about developing this extension?

I’d also disagree massively with the idea of “well, they have a low market share, so they should forget about attracting more people and focus on tinkerers”.

When you have a low userbase, you should seek to grow it, not simply double down on a small amount of people that already use your software anyway – especially not when, let’s be honest, the tinkerer crowd on Lemmy and niche Reddit subs are the most fickle and hard to please bunch in the world. Mozilla could do everything they ask and that crowd would still complain.

Doubling down on a tiny amount of people is fine when you’re Rolls Royce or Bugatti, and you can charge any amount of money to a small amount of people, but that strategy won’t work for Mozilla. They need broad appeal, and they won’t get that if they’re lacking things that average people have come to expect.

Linux in the 90s and very early 2000s was impossible to use for any normie. Distros started focussing more on the average person rather than simply appeasing tinkerers who already use their software, and they’ve benefitted from that approach greatly – desktop Linux has never been in a better state! Why shouldn’t Mozilla do the same?

Yes, you could research local LLM tools, find Ollama, see if it’s trustworthy, install it, configure it, research which model to use, download that, then run it. Or you could let Mozilla do the hard part for you.

The typical browser user does not go searching for GitHub projects.

Don’t get me wrong, lots of tinkerers will do the above, and they still can. But this is a more user-friendly way for the average person.

I use an Ollama-based program on my PC called Alpaca (available on Flathub for any Linux users reading this), and it’s pretty great and straightforward, but even that is more fiddly than simply installing a Mozilla extension.

And yeah I’ve tried Mozilla’s offline translation, it’s pretty great, I’m sure they’ll expand the language list in time.

I genuinely don’t know what people expect from Mozilla.

People simultaneously want them to give up their search engine payments, but also get angry at them for trying to make revenue any other way.

Web engine development costs hundreds of millions per year. It’s a phenomenally complex and expensive endeavour, with no obvious path to revenue unless you hoover up user data, which Mozilla doesn’t want to do.

Thank you. At least someone lives in the real world.

Whether Lemmy users like it or not, this is becoming an expected feature now, and Firefox shouldn’t be exclusively chasing people on Lemmy who already use Firefox.

And I’d rather have it be implemented in a way that’s pretty private, with the option of tying in a locally installed LLM (although it’s a bit convoluted to do right now by the looks of it), and the entire thing be an optional extension, than it forced upon me.

I mean it’s not like China was open and allowed competition from western companies.

I don’t know which company you’re referring to, but I think it’s pretty damn likely that China also classifies them as a military company too.

I fail to see the hypocrisy that you appear to be implying.

Not just Google. There was a performance “bug” in Windows Defender a while back that specifically harmed Firefox. It had been reported but Microsoft took 5+ years to fix, and Mozilla did the bulk of the sleuthing and proposing fixes themselves.

Now, whether MS were intentionally crippling a competitor’s browser in the beginning when the bug surfaced (which coincidentally was around the time Edge was relaunched as a chromium browser), there’s no way to know.

But after a certain point, a software company with a market cap in the trillions loses any benefit of doubt I’d give them in scenarios like this where it benefits them not to find a solution. And 5 years is far beyond that point.

Unfortunately for Firefox, they didn’t really have the money for a lawsuit against a juggernaut like Microsoft.

It would be more simple to call some things basic, but it’ll never happen for the same reason food and drinks places have started drifting away from calling things “small, medium, large” and towards the much more stupid “Regular, Large, Extra-Large”. Starbucks goes even more pretentious with it.

You’d be more likely to have something extremely dumb like Premium (shit-tier), Premium Pro (midrange), Premium Ultra (actually premium).

You see they’re bots if you open their profile and read some subtext.

Do you see it clearly marked in your feed if one of the bots posts something, shares something, or comments something?

That’s a genuine question - I don’t actually know. But it should be marked very clearly without having to open the profile, because people generally don’t do that.

Americans seem get really weird with the whole ancestry thing. There appears to be a desire to look into your family history and find something “exotic”, which basically seems to mean non-English - I imagine because that’s perceived as the ‘default’ ancestry, so-to-speak.

Honestly, who the fuck cares? What difference does it make? Nationalities aren’t Skyrim races. You don’t get special abilities. It makes no difference whether your ancestors were British/Irish/Spanish/French/whatever.

E: This is obviously not intended as a hateful statement, people. You have to understand that the rest of the world doesn’t care about this, so we’re confused when we look to the US and see them take it so seriously. We’re especially puzzled when Americans say “I’m Irish” because their great great great uncle bought a pint of Guiness in the 1870s. It’s an alien concept to the rest of the planet.

I am so tired of people, especially people who pretend to be computer experts online, completely failing to understand what Moore’s Law is.

Moore’s Law != “Technology improves over time”

It’s an observation that semiconductor transistor density roughly doubles every ~2 years. That’s it. It doesn’t apply to anything else.

And also for the record, Moore’s Law has been dead for a long time now. Getting large transistor density improvements is hard.