in its first iteration, it strips all AI shit, doesn’t just disable it; the hero went through the source tree and patched it by hand!
it differs from LibreWolf and friends as there’s an intention to hard-fork the thing (LW should be based on basebrowser) and let the abomination that is the mozilla shell-game-corp of today behind, thus returning to the original idea behind creating mozilla, best described by the dude who gave us the thing:
In my humble but correct opinion, Mozilla should be doing two things and two things only:
- Building THE reference implementation web browser, and
- Being a jugular-snapping attack dog on standards committees.
- There is no 3.
mastodon thread: https://mastodon.social/@sarahjamielewis/116994970688711387
the patch repo: https://codeberg.org/basebrowserproject/organization
firefox repo: https://github.com/mozilla-firefox/firefox
build instructions: https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/contributing/contribution_quickref.html
the only thing missing’s how to apply the patch. it’s as simple as going to the firefox source folder and applying the patch file with:
patch -p1 < the.patch
and then proceed with ./mach build.
this was my first time building firefox from source and it wasn’t half as bad; about 30ish minutes on an i7-870 in the background without any excessive load that woulda made the system unusable.
Forking is easy. It’s maintaining the fork and getting people to use it that is the hard part.
Monocultures rarely end well.
YSK
okay
There’s a new initiative
A single microblogger.
A single patch.
On top of main (read, nightly).for hard-forking firefox
Forks, hard and soft, always existed.
The hard ones are all half-dead maintenance wise. Not to mention the 10s of thousands of unpatched vulnerabilities, and that’s not even counting undiscovered ones in those ancient code bases.and creating a “base browser”
What is libxul 🤔🙂
- OP links to the author’s Mastodon toot ✅
- The author is hard-line anti-AI ✅
- The author uses Codeberg ✅
- The author proved definitively that a bunch of Mozilla code is feature creep ✅
Now this is the kind of project I could get behind. I know the author says they have no long-term project goals currently, but I hope the FOSS community rallies around this one.
the author is the co-dev of cwtch with a proven track record of shipping product. as they state, it’s impossible for any one dev to take on a product of this magnitude but I’m cautiously optimistic about this thing being in a position to gain contributors at this point.
All it’s missing is that “reality show judge in wonder” meme template I’ve seen sometimes.
I think you mean the one with Vince McMahon. He’s a piece of shit, but I can see what you’re getting at!
wait it’s McMahon in the template?
I’m not that well versed in those meme galleries the younglings use these days to even know to search for it, I just know it when I see a meme that uses it.
I just use Firefox and disable the AI. Every step further away from the source is just going to add bugs that i never want to see. All this posturing for feels with the second place browser isn’t going to stop Google from controlling the Internet anyway.
I was on Firefox. Decided to try LibreWolf. I respect the privacy work they do, but it was annoying for me.
I found Zen Browser and I’m really happy with it.
Oh hell yes. Ladybird turned me off for a bunch of reasons, one of them being their embracing AI for development.
I’m so here for this. Brb, got some compiling to do
In my humble but correct opinion, Mozilla should be doing two things and two things only:
Building THE reference implementation web browser, and
Chromium already has that covered
Being a jugular-snapping attack dog on standards committees.
Firefox has almost no market share thus it has no real say in standards
There is no 3.
I don’t see this going very far tbh, good luck but yeah
Chromium already has that covered
And that’s the problem.
Chromium is in no way a “reference implementation web browser”.
and yet…
And yet what?
No matter how much you think the world licks the boots of Chrome, Chromium is still not a reference implementation. Heck, Dillo is not a reference implementation and it has three orders of magnitude more justification for being so!
I guess it’s not technically a reference if you’re just forking off it.
You do understand that Mozilla (previously Netscape Navigator) is older than Chromium right? Chromium doesn’t have a reference implementation of the web already covered, Chromium is trying to embrace extend and extinguish the current web in favor of its own paradigm. Chromium is just today’s Internet Explorer.
You do understand that Mozilla (previously Netscape Navigator) is older than Chromium right?
Yes, I used Netscape Navigator, what does that have to do with being a ‘reference browser’?
Chromium is just today’s Internet Explorer.
Well no because Internet Explorer wasn’t open source and couldn’t be forked
I’m using reference browser to mean a base browser of sorts that others build upon, Chromium clearly has that covered:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromium_(web_browser)#Browsers_based_on_Chromium
I get the feeling you mean ‘reference browser’ as some sort of left wing progressive hippie browser that is funded with magical money that drops out of the air (or in reality mainly open source devs working in their spare time for pennies (if that))
