It's real, and I saw it first on, appropriately enough, Firefox 130.0 (64-bit) from mozilla-flatpak 1.0 installed in the Linux (Beta) environment of ChromeOS 128.0, Google's laptop ecosystem more closed off from the world than Android.
Rumor is circulating that Firefox now has an AI chatbot feature integrated as a Firefox Labs experimental feature. Even if this is untrue, Mozilla has been following the enshittification bandwagon for so long now (more than a decade) that it's perfectly believable they will do it.
This is why I haven't called Firefox the best Web browser since 2012. It's merely the least bad major browser, and like every other major browser maker, Mozilla is hell-bent on making Firefox worse for users.
I say this not to say that Google Chrome is better than Firefox but to say that something is *deeply sick* at Mozilla and that Mozilla is failing us at a deeply critical moment¹.
¹ That is, Google this year simultaneously trying to one, add ad-blocker-blockers to YouTube; and two, demanding the right via Manifest v3 to pre-approve every single adblock rule uBlock Origin wants to add. It's not very subtle that they're intending to use the second thing to enable the first.
I really need to stress that at this point, Firefox is much more aggressively and maliciously adware than Google Chrome, and this is *even given* that Google Chrome is trying to prevent you from being able to run an effective adblocker. Google Chrome and Firefox will both send information about your browsing to advertisers via a backchannel, but Chrome will warn you first. Chrome has features that drive you toward sites with ads but does not have ads *in the address bar*
https://mastodon.social/@onelson/113098330602369680
@mcc I would like to know the secrets of your ad-free search bar ways.
$ firefox --version
Mozilla Firefox 129.0
$ freebsd-version
13.3-RELEASE-p4
$
@mcc For this second thing, yes, it's been real for several months or years now, and while it can't be excised it can be disabled.
Go to preferences, then to "search", then under "Address bar", disable search suggestions from sponsors. You can also search within preferences for "sponsor" to hit the other ad-related settings.
@quirk Sometimes you get "The Godfather Part II," and sometimes you get "New Coke."
“We created a self-opening fridge with an AI camera that tracks what you put in and take out.”
Please for the love of any and all deities I am PROSTRATE on the floor begging you for fair energy prices and accessible public transport I do not need a fridge incorrectly guessing what is in my 17 Tupperware containers and refusing to open because I haven’t paid my monthly £24.99 subscription of “Fridge Door Lock Plus”
If you have to change your behavior to conform to any computer software program, then the program is not artificial intelligence, only artificial like the rest of any software library. This is another reason why today's "AI" is nothing more than the currently popular digital snake oil cure-all tonic expiring in the 19th Century.
I'd say ask the "AI," but you'd have to do more fact-checking on its answers than an ill-informed essay on lunar eclipses, defeating the whole purpose of asking it.
This makes me feel a lot less hardcore about my blank charcoal keycaps. https://hackaday.com/2024/02/14/inputs-of-interest-the-svalboard-could-be-your-salvation/
What the actual fuck The Verge?! You have over 500 partners who need access to my "essential" cookies?
I mean, thanks for showing me the numbers on how insane data sharing is, but really? And those are the ones I can't opt out of?
Do they count like every employee as a partner, or is my data really being shared with hundreds of other businesses?
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