crazy how as soon as mozilla does good stuff nobody is there
We’re all glad to see Mozilla have a win, at least I assume so. But there’s been a lot of other much bigger decisions that have gone on recently that make us (at least me) hesitant to celebrate at the first good thing.
On the more technical side of things they are doing excellent work, it’s on the bike shedding department that the overpaid management is doing idiotic choices.
as always on these corporations
Yeah it’s like the fucking Goat thing. Mozilla fucked a goat and shocked that that’s all people remember.
I dunno, finally getting vertical tabs is not exactly making me hesitant to celebrate, quite the opposite. Someone at Mozilla must have been a portrait-mode desktop monitor user, can’t understand the years-long resistance to this otherwise.
I think its very stupid that so many people criticize mozilla for engaging in ai.
Ai is the future.
The Mozilla foundation also granted some money to ente a company that offers Google photos replacement with end to end encryption.
Anyone used Ente? How is it?
i downloaded it after the news the other day. Presently uploading >200gb of pictures.
Android App has a few quirks, not very snappy, but it looks pretty polished.
The on device ML seems to be pretty accurate once you start tagging people.
We’ll see how it handles me throwing the 200gb at it because it was already stuttering a bit when scrolling through ~15gb of pics.
I havent had the chance to spin up an immich instance yet to compare the two.
All in all, we might need to wait for a longer term user to chime in, but as of now to me it seems good enough.
Edit: 2 weeks later. I installed immich on a proxmox node with a rtx 2060 super passed through. it flies compared to ente, which is to be expected as immich isnt e2ee. I will most likely maintain both libraries for now, but Immich is definitely a more complete product.
But… Immich does this just fine, and is pretty great at it.
Options are good
This
One of these is proprietary, so one option is good
I think I’m going to wait until immich thinks so as well
Not everyone has the technical ability or hardware to selfhost immich, even just for LAN access. If I tried to teach my wife enough about docker/docker-compose to get immich set up, running, kept updated, and troubleshooting when it has problems… I would probably be limping away with a fork stuck in my leg. Could it be a fun project for people that are interested in it? Definitely, but most people want an easy cloud service that works as easily as data-gathering alternatives over something they have to maintain themselves even in the form of occasional docker-compose pull
I have self hosted immich almost a year, tried to make it the standard for my family. For me it was a pain in the ass to keep it running and available to have a smooth experience on my family. I had to rebuild it several times because of complex behavior and a few breaking changes, the iOS app is not working properly, I ended up removing it, too much time consuming.
Personally I don’t trust myself with self-hosting something as important as photos. It would probably be fine, but I’m willing to pay for someone else to manage the infrastructure.
Backups. You should be taking regular backups whether it’s you hosting or Google. If you are, there’s really very little risk.
You’ll also have the images on the phone, which should remain long enough for the images automatically stored to get into backup storage. Personally, all my images upload from my phone automatically after I’m on WiFi for 10 minutes.
Yeah, Immich has been on my radar for a number of years, but I’ve read a lot about breaking changes being a pain to deal with, and I’m a bit busy as it is right now with work and other personal projects to tinker too heavily.
Will take a closer look as I hear a stable release is planned soon.
I’ve been running mine for a year or two and don’t really mess with it at all. I think I remember those breaking changes maybe 18 months ago? Was not difficult to update, and it’s been running smooth as butter since.
Very happy Ente user here! It’s a great alternative to Google Photos and Immich (since I think photos are too important to self-host).
They have an easy guide for migrating from Google Photos (basically they can import a Takeout export directly).
https://ente.io/faq/migration/from-google-photos/
I’ve got it installed on my phone with automatic backups enabled. It had no issues with duplicates from both Takeout and the existing photos on my phone. (I even did the upload twice due to running out of space the first time, and there were no dupes). The app has a pretty similar design to Google Photos, so it feels familiar. It also supports Google’s version of “live photos”.
You can create links to share albums or individual photos, and you can also add people to your plan.
I enabled the local machine learning analysis and, while it’s not perfect, it does make for a pretty nice searching experience.
Pretty good, very responsive to feedback on Matrix/discord. Great features, love it
We already have Immich though
Okay and? Immich is good but alternatives are always good.
If I’ve learned anything from this community, it’s that having just one open source alternative to a closed source POS run by Google is not the ideal! Competition is always healthy.
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More options is good.
Yes, that’s how it works. If you do bad stuff, people leave. They are no longer around to notice if you do good stuff.
Lemmy sure loves a circlejerk about shitting on Firefox.
I love my Firefox and no amount of downvotes could change that lol
I love firefox to, but when a loved one starts hurting themselves and those around them you need to set healthy boundaries or you will be hurt.
People aren’t shitting on Firefox, people are shitting on Mozilla and rightfully so. Mozilla has made many bad decisions, decisions that may call into question the future of Firefox and whether their decisions will compromise it as a privacy friendly browser. After all if Mozilla starts making changes which are harmful towards privacy and hard codes them into the browser, there’s no getting around that with user.js tweaks, that requires more work to fix.
Thankfully there are forks of Firefox but since those depend on the upstream from Mozilla the more they change the harder it is to undo those changes. A manifest V3 style change (which isn’t happening now but could happen in the future if they get into advertising), would be devastating, because even if Librewolf can undo those changes, it’s very likely they would have to implement their own extension distribution system because AMO would very much reject incompatible add-ons in that scenario.
So yeah people do have the right to criticize Mozilla in this regard, this trend has happened before, it will continue to happen in the future. Enshittification is a slow and ugly process, best to catch it in the early stages than to wait it out until you’re already boiling (frog boiling analogy).
This post is about how Firefox needs to be loved more and it has over 500 upvotes, I think Firefox still has plenty of circlejerk potential on Lemmy
Firefox is the one enshitting themselves not us.
Isn’t this the same as “Total Cookie Protection” that was released a while ago?
Yes and no, total cookie protection prevents cookies from loading from other sites, CHIPS is a new standard that makes it so that that is impossible* to begin with. (simpifying here but thats the idea)
*unless the browser allows it
my impression was that it was impossible already, because there was effectively a different cookie storage for every site
oh
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Privacy/Privacy_sandbox/Partitioned_cookies
CHIPS is similar to the state partitioning mechanism implemented by Firefox. The difference is that state partitioning partitions cookie storage and retrieval into separate cookie jars for each top-level site, without a mechanism to allow opt-in to third-party cookies if desired. As browsers start to phase out third-party cookie usage, there are still valid, non-tracking uses of third-party cookies that need to be permitted while developers begin to handle this change.
so this adds a setting to allow a site access to shared 3rd party cookies, when the site supports the feature?
Based on Mozilla’s documentation, it looks like CHIPS only applies to “cross site” cookies that are just accessible on different subdomains of the same site. A third party cookie could share data between a.site.example and b.site.example if it asked nicely, but not on site2.example.
If this isn’t about it subdomains exclusively, it’s not apparent to me. But it’s all pretty confusing, and CHIPS appears to be just one minor thing that Google introduced when they were creating Privacy Sandbox back in 2022. (You know, to facilitate the total removal of third-party cookies, something they eventually backtracked on anyway.)
You can embed bits of a website in other websites, that’s how 3rd party cookies exist
A toot?
The mastodon version of a post or, sadly, tweet.
It’s, uh, not the best name.
But maybe, just maybe, it more appropriately attributes correct value to a social media thing. ;)
Most people these days refer to them as posts, toots is older Mastodon linguo.
Etymologically, I think the word “tweet” was slowly being supplanted by “post” even before Twitter’s name was officially changed to X. After all, “post” is universal, and there were many uses of thingposting that go back years, even on Twitter itself.
When Twitter launched, they used “post” instead of “tweet”. Tweet was a word created by the community.
TIL - thanks!
Mastodon devs were clearly aware of the quality of text people tend to write online. It’s a very fitting term IMO.
A mastodon, like an elephant, has a trunk it can sound like a trumpet.
A toot
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One good thing doesn’t even outweigh one bad one. What do you call someone who tells 99 truths and one lie?
A liar.
It’s the same here; there’s an asymmetry between doing what’s right and betraying someone’s trust. When Mozilla can demonstrate consistent integrity, maybe I’ll stop using a fork.
How did they betray you or their mission?
With introduction of even more AI services to Firefox I wanted to express that to me it does seem like Firefox is missing with development of features. This sentiment is echoed by a lot of people in my social bubble of technologists, ethicists and other people with same priorities as what one could think are values which Firefox was built on.
Those concerns are in my opinion very valid. The machine learning models have shown to be unreliable - just some of the recent examples from AI products made by large corporations: pointing users to eat pizza with glue, providing false information about just about anything. There are a number of ethical issues yet to be resolved with usage of AI, from its intense usage of computing resources that adds up to electric grid demands. Through privacy and possible copyright violations of datasets that power the models. To an entire bag of other issues monitored by excellent resources such as AIAAIC repository.
AI/Machine learning is an amazing field with many likely applications, and yet, its recent rise to fame is characterized by failures and issues in many implementations. Personally I often don’t even see whether the application of AI is truthfully necessary, in many cases a human would do a more trustworthy and fast task of information gathering than a large machine learning model.
When we compare current state of “AI”, does it reflect what Firefox stands for? Does it reflect Mozilla’s principals?
Let’s compare.
- Principle 2
The internet is a global public resource that must remain open and accessible.
LLMs are known for being a black box. Depending on our definition of “open and accessible”, LLMs can be a very free resource or a completely inaccessible black box of math.
- Principle 4
Individuals’ security and privacy on the internet are fundamental and must not be treated as optional.
It’s clear that LLMs pose a privacy risk to Internet users. LLMs pose risk in at least two ways - because the data they are trained on sometimes contains private information due to negligent training process. In this case users of a learned model can possibly access private information. The second risk is of course usage of 3rd party services that may use information to infringe on privacy of users. While Mozilla in blog assures that “we are committed to following the principles of user choice, agency, and privacy as we bring AI-powered enhancements to Firefox”, it’s unclear how supporting such services as “ChatGPT, Google Gemini, HuggingChat, and Le Chat Mistral” helps protect Firefox user privacy. Giving users choice should not compromise their safety and privacy.
- Principle 10
Magnifying the public benefit aspects of the internet is an important goal, worthy of time, attention and commitment.
In my opinion in the process of designing AI functionalities on top of Firefox there was no evaluation on how those functionalities can benefit the public. There are a number of issues as mentioned above with the LLMs, they can be dangerous and work in detriment to users. Investing and supporting in technology of this type may lead to terrible consequences with little actual benefit.
In addition Mozilla claims:
- We are committed to an internet that elevates critical thinking, reasoned argument, shared knowledge, and verifiable facts.
I argue that AI models are the opposite to that. AI output is not verifiable. They are working against sharing knowledge by making seemingly accurate information that turn out to be false.
I ask Mozilla to reevaluate impact of AI considering all of those points. I ask on behalf of myself as well as many users that I see on Fediverse being greatly worried and frustrated with AI changes added on top of Firefox. There is certainly a lot of potential greatness that could be done with AI, but those steps must be taken responsibly.
Im glad you decided to copy-paste an overly padded ream of text instead of forming your own opinion, but sure.
P.2 All ai models used in firefox currently are fully open source.
P.4 Those models are also ran completely locally. That linked blog refers to an OPT-IN experiment that lets you choose what model you want to use, including non-privacy respecting ones, but this is left up to the user.
P.10 The two ai features currently in firefox are alt-text generation for blind people and privacy-respecting page translation, i think youd have a hard time justifying why those arent useful.
Im glad you decided to copy-paste an overly padded ream of text instead of forming your own opinion
I endorse it. Even if I didn’t, you asked, and do you received an answer.
P.4 Those models are also ran completely locally.
Wrong.
None of the models provided by Mozilla as defaults are run locally. They are all run on their own respective providers’ clouds.
P.2 All ai models used in firefox currently are fully open source.
Also wrong.
Even if we ignore the fact that Mozilla only allows you to connect to third parties that are running something in a black box, there is no such thing as open source AI, as far as I have seen. The models are always closed source black boxes. If you have downloaded a binary and cannot compile it yourself, you are not using something that is open source.
P.10 The two ai features currently in firefox are alt-text generation for blind people and privacy-respecting page translation
Which was not being discussed in the linked post. The fact you are trying to veer off topic from “how has Mozilla betrayed you” to “this particular other thing has not betrayed you” is unhelpful.
Just ask Seamus (the bridge builder) what people remember him for.
the comment is going “grrr ai” i was pointing out that the ai features currently in firefox (translation and alt-text) are local and privacy respecting. You cant just ignore things that dont fit your opinion.
second, that chatbot thing you’re crying about is OPT IN AND only in nightly, let you choose any chatbot available online, not just the ones they named, and on top of that it most likely will never make it into a non-nightly release, because theyve decided to make that kind of ai feature an extension instead.
Also, when i say that a model is open source, i am referring to the binary being downloadable and the model weights being freely available.
You clearly saw the word “ai” and decided that mozilla was as bad as google, without looking into it at all.
the comment is going “grrr ai”
You asked how Mozilla betrayed users, so let’s focus on that. I don’t care about the ways they haven’t betrayed users, in the same way I don’t care about how Seamus built a bridge.
second, that chatbot thing you’re crying about is>>> only in nightly
No, it’s in Firefox 130. I know this because I use Firefox.
it most likely will never make it into a non-nightly release
LOL
Also, when i say that a model is open source, i am referring to the binary being downloadable
This is not what open source means. If that’s the case, Microsoft Windows is open source. Go nuts.
You clearly saw the word “ai” and decided that mozilla was as bad as google, without looking into it at all.
People aren’t blindly saying all AI is bad. They were pointing at a specific thing. Do not strawman.
- Principle 2
Meanwhile me with my Freezed Firefox version…
“So what crazy stuff is going to be discussed in arkenfoxe’s Github repo this time?”
This useless feature for what ? They implemented this because Google forcing them to do so I guess.
