Ariel Millennium Thornton @arielmt@computerfairi.es

Featureful Web browsers do have their uses. I'm getting lost now in https://infinitemac.org/ (specifically, their NeXT toys).

As an experimental feature, the AI chatbot sidebar is disabled by default, but it's still there, integrated in every edition of Firefox that has Firefox Labs.

Fortunately, they include an obvious clickable "Share feedback" link right next to the checkbox in the "about:preferences#experimental" page.

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.

@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."

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.

Friends, please remind your less computer-literate friends:

Despite what the email promises, your friends haven't won a Microsoft Apple UN lottery for commemorative Trump coins to spend watching lolita use breakthrough superfoods to add three inches to their tactical flashlights.

"We're sorry, but this site requires JavaScript to operate." as the only page content.

Did everyone and their mother forget how to make a blog CMS serve bog standard HTML pages beautified by CSS versions that finally became actually worth a crap back when logo floor reflections were cool?