Can an expert explain this - https://aussie.zone/post/6869951
Comparing brave and base Firefox is unfair IMO. Brave is security hardened out of the box, where as Firefox is a general purpose browser and has telemetry in the form of crash reports and the like (which can be turned off). It can be hardend well through arkenfox, or using a fork like Librewolf. Comparing Firefox and chrome is better imho.
Firefox has many built-in anti fingerprinting flags (such as letterboxing, RFP, font limiting, and many more} which when combined with ublock origin are unbeatable. A baked-in content blocker like that of braves loses because it isn’t extensible. This website compares on only default settings which aren’t representative of the extent each browser can be taken but useful nonetheless: https://privacytests.org/
The website you mentioned is created by Brave Developers
Incorrect. It is created by someone who is associated with brave, but not a directly created by Brave. I am sure the tests is accurate (at least per test), but the testing criteria could be biased. It’d just be weird to the end up with Librewolf and Mullvad as a clear winner if the intention was to favor brave browser.
A baked-in content blocker like that of braves loses because it isn’t extensible.
In what way? I use(d) Firefox since the very first Firebird days, and Netscape Navigator before it, and I’m practically married to uBO (don’t tell my wife!). That said, Brave’s ‘shields’ blocker is just skinned uBO with some tweaks. It can add custom cosmetic filtering rules, additional adblock format filter lists, disable or enable JS (globally or per-site) and has built in fingerprint resistance. Aside from the differing UI, I genuinely can’t think of anything overtly missing as such.
I’m stated that because I know baked in features must wait for browser updates to get fixes (not talking about block list updates but the core itself). I also was basing it off a comment I read (can’t find sadly) on the limitations of implementing a ublock-style blocklist into brave. And thirdly, I have seen no mention of anything like ublock’s blocking modes (block 3rd party scripts/frames). Can you quickly select an element to block in brave?
I might have considered using brave as a 2ndary browser if it werent for the ceo’s politics (spending thousands to support anti-lgbt legislation) which I feel are antithetical to privacy.
And thirdly, I have seen no mention of anything like ublock’s blocking modes (block 3rd party scripts/frames). Can you quickly select an element to block in brave?
You can enter as many custom filter rules as you like, with adblock syntax support. You can select an element to block, yes.
Here is a graph the illustrates the block efficiency of ublock+Firefox compared to other browsers with/without ublock. https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-best-on-Firefox
Despite the URL name, it shows bare browse Brave and Firefox+ublock compare at blocking 3rd party ads/trackers. It looks like this was updated November of last year.
Brave isn’t represented anywhere on the graph? Unless I’ve misunderstood you. That’s a comparison of Firefox with various ad blockers, and uBO with and without CNAME unclocking enabled. Brave also uncloaks CNAMEs, so that’s one place they are equal. Chromium based browsers do lack some abilities compared to Firefox, however. I have daily driven Firefox since the first day, but Brave and Blink/Chromium based browsers are undeniably faster at rendering (unfortunately).
Look at the bottom of the graph. Each grouping is per browser.
I didn’t realize Lemmy hated AI so much. Pretty much every post in this thread is bashing the idea. I’ve found AI to be very useful personally, I use it almost every day. It helped me code a VBA macro from scratch with 0 experience. This tool is saving me and my team hundreds of hours per year. It’s also great just as an improved search engine.
AI is useful, we’re just tired of seeing it stuffed everywhere
I think the focus is more on how it’s the new buzzword that companies are chasing and that most have a solution looking for a problem.
I like how Kagis search AI works. It gives a link to all of the sources it scraped from.
Especially since AI is already in Firefox, the offline translation feature uses local NMT models.
While we resourced mozilla.social heavily to pursue this ambitious idea,
How many people do you need to administer a Mastodon instance? I’m pretty sure infosec.exchange is like one dude.
Didn’t they have acustom ui though? Also their moderation is pretty strict
Unfortunately Mozilla’s brand new CEO is a McKinsey ghoul: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chamberslaura/
She spent 2 yrs at McK 20+ yrs ago - hardly a personality-defining milestone, given how a lot of business students start their career in consulting.
I mean that’s pretty standard for a McKinsey ghoul:
- Step 1: go to an ivy league college, get a business degree
- Step 2: work for McKinsey for a few years as an associate
- Step 3: get a job at a McKinsey client leapfrogging everyone else into management/c-suite
- Step 4: hire McKinsey to bring their arrogant children into your org and screw things up
Everything about her subsequent career has been going from one upper management/c-suite role in a tech company to another. This is not the resume of a person who should be running a nonprofit that controls the most important open source project on the internet. But beyond that just look at what she’s done in her one month at Mozilla:
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- Massive round of layoffs
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- “Focus on {buzzword}” where {buzzword} in this case is AI
That’s straight out of the McKinsey playbook.
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Laura will be protected from all scrutiny just because she is a woman
Lol what, no. It’s because she’s for all intents and purposes the CEO, and better yet, an overly paid CEO. When’s the last time you’ve seen the CEO getting their comeuppance?
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I’m not sure where people are getting the idea that they’re talking about putting AI in Firefox.
Mozilla seized an opportunity to bring trustworthy AI into Firefox, largely driven by the Fakespot acquisition and the product integration work that followed. Additionally, finding great content is still a critical use case for the internet. Therefore, as part of the changes today, we will be bringing together Pocket, Content, and the AI/ML teams supporting content with the Firefox Organization.
emphasis mine
How do you interpret that?
This is the best summary I could come up with:
After installing a new interim CEO earlier this month, Mozilla, the organization behind the Firefox browser, is making some major changes to its product strategy, TechCrunch has learned.
Specifically, Mozilla plans to scale back its investment in a number of products, including its VPN, Relay and, somewhat remarkably, its Online Footprint Scrubber, which launched only a week ago.
Going forward, the company said in an internal memo, Mozilla will focus on bringing “trustworthy AI into Firefox.” To do so, it will bring together the teams that work on Pocket, Content and AI/Ml.
Mozilla started expanding its product portfolio in recent years, all while its flagship product, Firefox, kept losing market share.
And while the organization was often sharply criticized for this, its leadership argued that diversifying its product portfolio beyond Firefox was necessary to ensure Mozilla’s survival in the long run.
Firefox, after all, provided the vast majority of Mozilla’s income, but it also meant the organization was essentially dependent on Google to continue this deal.
The original article contains 234 words, the summary contains 166 words. Saved 29%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
At the very least I don’t feel like I need more out of Firefox than it has today. If it all goes to shit, then a free Firefox Ala chromium would do fine.
I remember what happened last time. Gradually the web will become unusable if you’re not using Chrome. That’s how it worked back in the day with Internet Explorer. Microsoft even began hooking things into IE that can only work on windows (activex controls) and then getting websites to support them.
When I first started using Linux I had to switch to Netscape 4.7 because it was the only browser available and the web barely worked. I remember thinking “well, the web sucks on Linux but I guess I can live without it.”
Not sure what to think about this.
Lots of immediate hate for AI, but I’m all for local AI if they keep that direction. Small models are getting really impressive, and if they have smaller, fine-tuned, specific-purpose AI over the “general purpose” LLMs, they’d be much more efficient at their jobs. I’ve been rocking local LLMs for a while and they’ve been great as a small compliment to language processing tasks in my coding.
Good text-to-speech, page summarization, contextual content blocking, translation, bias/sentiment detection, click bait detection, article re-titling, I’m sure there’s many great use cases. And purely speculation,but many traditional non-llm techniques might be able to included here that were overlooked because nobody cared about AI features, that could be super lightweight and still helpful.
If it goes fully remote AI, it loses a lot of privacy cred, and positions itself really similarly to where everyone else is. From a financial perspective, bandwagoning on AI in the browser but “we won’t send your data anywhere” seems like a trendy, but potentially helpful and effective way to bring in a demographic interested in it without sacrificing principles.
But there’s a lot of speculation in this comment. Mozilla’s done a lot for FOSS, and I get they need monetization outside of Google, but hopefully it doesn’t lead things astray too hard.
it refocuses on Firefox
🤩
and AI
😩
I thought they switched CEOs to focus on privacy a week or so ago?
The data privacy angle was just editorialized headlines, the CEO statement did not mention it.
Kinda disappointing how much of the community just takes a giant 💩 on Mozilla whatever it does these days. Funding open source is super crazy hard folks. Notice that the really successful well funded projects are fueled by megacorps?
Offering constructive criticism is great but if you don’t have better ideas around how to fund an open browser without selling your soul to GOOG or MSFT then perhaps your energy might be better spent elsewhere.
Train ai to I filtrate Google and kill sundar prichai.
It won’t help anyone’s bottom line but then at least sundar prichai would be dead.
I love firefox. Hate the managment
Can they just focus on the browser? I really don’t need the AI stuff.
The issue is that Firefox alone doesn’t pay the bills and I’d imagine they really want to get away from being dependent on the Google deal they have.
We don’t need AI stuff but if they can get some good funding from it, they can put more into the browser
so they build the thing that pretty much everyone is running at a loss…
how will putting AI in Firefox get them funding?
That’s not what they’re doing. They’re going to focus on two separate products: Firefox and AI.
And maybe merge the two, like adding a tldr feature to reader mode, instead of an obnoxious sidebar like a lot of browsers right now
Arguably the issue here is that Firefox pays too many of the bills, directly from its main competitor
Yeah, fair I could have worded that better. Finding better ways of funding is the goal
And sometimes, those searches will end in failure. Resulting in what we’re seeing today.
If AI stays, Mozilla would be better off to still have some irons in the fire.
Specifically, Mozilla plans to scale back its investment in a number of products, including its VPN, Relay and, somewhat remarkably, its Online Footprint Scrubber, which launched only a week ago.
I just purchased an annual plan for Monitor, partially to help Mozilla. I guess this is my thanks
Same. Wth Mozilla?
Monitor is something different than mentioned. Based on this article, that product is still good. See the correction at the bottom
