Remember when every piece of Window$ software back in the day tried to get you to add their browser bar to your web browser? I really thought that would be the peak of how awful browser add-ons could get. Guess I wasn’t dreaming big enough to imagine a boondoggle as utterly useless as an LLM integrated into a browser. I mean, I hated Clippy at the time, but never imagined anyone (even a marketing clown) would try to jam him into a web browser, and have him remember everything you did online so he could chat with you about it.
What an amazing idea to try to push users from reading articles to reading bullshit hallucinations of summaries of articles. AI really feels like the thing that’s pushing us to become the humans from Wall-E faster than any other invention right now.
2006: “Install our browser toolbar! It offers a marginally useful feature, and it definitely doesn’t slow down your browser or send all your personal data to an evil corporate overlord! Promise!”
2026: “Install our browser AI addon! It offers a completely useless feature, and it absolutely slows down your browser and sends all your personal data to an evil corporate overlord! Promise!”
Man. I so do not miss toolbars.
This used to be a filter to tell which of your friends and/or family were tech literate.
"I don’t know what they are. They just appeared! "
Agreed. I think of Wall-E often and think its vision of the future is more accurate, but Idiocracy makes for a more descriptive term to summarize it. And suddenly, I feel like I’m rehashing HS English class: “Does 1984 or Brave New World summarize society more accurately?” The premise being that in 1984, the government deliberately sought to shrink reality, whereas in “Brave New World,” individuals opted-in.
My perspective is that oligarchical wannabes are essentially giving people what they think those people want, but they’re clearly not following the ideas through to their logical conclusions. Like, AI in schools… OK… Why? Because thinking is too hard? Don’t be silly – that’s what brains do reflexively. And like, when did hard stuff get such a bad rap? IMHO, so-called friction is good, probably fundamental. This notion that everything should be all upside all the time is probably not even possible, much less desirable.
Remember when every piece of Window$ software back in the day tried to get you to add their browser bar to your web browser?
Oh god, the browser bars.
Years back, I was fixing my grandpa’s laptop, and he had one of those browser bars in his Internet Explorer. Out of habit, I disabled and removed it (since they had a tendency of installing themselves). I finished up, hung out with him and talked for about half an hour and left, and when I got back home I found my mom on the phone with him. She immediately hands the phone over to me, and he sounded uncharacteristically livid. He tells me that I “broke” his email and he can’t access it anymore. So I drive all the way back and it turns out he was using the deleted browser bar to access his email. Even after trying to explain to him that he can still access it by going to a bookmark or just typing in the URL, he insisted that I put the browser bar back on. So I do.
That was probably the last time I ever helped any family member (outside our house) with tech issues.
Oh, the horrors.
Bonzibuddy.
No Slopzilla I don’t want your AI browser Fireslop.
I think this is the perfect example of how democracy does not exist under capitalism, much less the US Empire. Lobbying modifies the political and structural basis of any enterprise. There’s no reason for Mozilla to do this, much less have a CEO that earns as much as he do, but that’s what Google want so Mozilla will comply.
Mozilla is now bigtech, at least as far as their actions go.
Never change, Mozilla. Oh wait.
“but guys you can turn it off!!!”
I turn off all AI things wherever I can. I don’t need it. It hasn’t really improved anything for me. And I’m also sick of hearing that acronym.
So what are the best browsers to use now for privacy’s sake? I’m hesitant to use Librewolf anymore even
Cmon man one single conversation with Librewolf devs could clear this up. They have a Matrix. They would never compromise on removing malicious Mozilla features!
Librewolf is just firefox, You could just change a couple settings, or use a custom CSS if you don’t likw how it looks?
