If I was Mozilla CEO I know exactly what I would do. I would double down on the users.

Immediately put out a press release that Mozilla will not for as long as I’m in charge make one single dime selling user data. Put in our very corporate charter that we are required to collect as little data as possible to make our products work. Also make a public promise that any AI features which aren’t 100% local will require a very big opt-in and we will try to avoid shipping any such things at all.

Focus on speed. Chrome started getting market share in the first place because they advertised it could render a web page in under 100ms. So that’s what I would shoot for. Screw everything else, the main rendering parts of the browser should be fast, threaded, and stable.

Part of that would be to include some script selection processes in the browser itself. This would partially be like an ad block but more like a priority system. Right now you go to a news website and there’s a good chance you’re pulling tens of megabytes of JavaScript that tracks everything and actually runs a fucking auction in your browser where advertisers are bidding on the right to show you an ad. This does not help the user. So I would focus on developing a system that identifies what JavaScript code renders the bulk of the web page and what is for things like ads, the add code goes dead last. That way the content of the page loads very quickly.

Then I would basically license ublock origin and include that functionality in the browser itself. I would throw Dev time at optimizing the hell out of that. And that would be one of the questions asked at first run, do you want to block advertisements? If user says yes then ublock is enabled. That alone will probably get a shit ton of users, because it will do the same thing as Chrome did years ago, just make the experience of web surfing better.

I would stop reinventing the UI every two years.

I like Roku. Their products have so far had the best functionality.

If they go through with their current plans to turn half the home page into an ad, I’m probably gonna try and sell mine (better to drive down the overall market with more supply).

I pay for a number of streaming services, and I pay extra so I don’t have my time wasted with ads. I don’t want ads in my home. If the device I purchased to bring me ad-free TV is going to itself show me ads, then as far as my needs go it’s no longer fit for purpose.

Honestly the more I think about this the more I think Chromium has become actively harmful to the Internet overall.

The problem isn’t Chromium itself. The problem is that we’re going back to the old days of Internet Explorer, where every popular site is optimized for Internet Explorer (including its non standard quirks) and thus other browsers don’t render it right. And some websites would detect a non-IE useragent and just refuse to load.

The problem is the dependence. Google announces that MV2 is going away and suddenly 5 other ‘independent’ browsers (which are all just Chromium reskins) say ‘yeah it’s going away, sorry too bad so sad but there’s absolutely nothing anyone can do about it our hands are tied’. No one company should have this much control over the browser ecosystem, not even Google. (or these days, especially not Google since they seem to embrace their shedding of the ‘don’t be evil’ mantra).

I think there’s an opening, but it requires resources. A good web rendering / javascript engine isn’t a weekend project. But I think it’s worth the effort to make a new one. And like Chrome’s origins, it should be focused on speed and efficiency.

I say that as a student of history-- used to be IE for normies and Firefox (with a ton of extensions) for nerds. Then Chrome came along, and could often render a page in under 100ms. So everyone (nerds and normies) adopted it. Only now it’s full of Google bloat, web pages cram megabytes of javascript bullshit (to the point that if you hit a major news site, your browser is literally running a live auction in javascript to see who wins the pleasure of showing you an ad), plus a ton of tracking crap. So unfortunately javascript isn’t going away, but a new rendering engine is necessary.

Ah that’s awesome!!! I’d seen that output before but never saw the story of its input.

Why not? It’s what the rest of the browser world is doing… :P

‘Google’s dumping MV3 support, guess we have to dump it also, too bad so sad guess there’s nothing at all to be done here’.

Jokes aside- I agree giving up (in any regard, including proxy-side filtering) is the wrong answer. But the more I’m thinking about this, the more I’m convinced that the current essentially Internet-wide reliance on Chromium (with a small carve-out for WebKit) is a real problem that needs urgent attention.

Mozilla’s the obvious choice but they seem determined to piss off their users with UI rewrites and blow all their cash on literally everything other than browser development.

Sad thing is there’s a real opening here. I was a mainly Mozilla user years ago. I switched to Chrome because it was fast- there was a youtube ad (which actually aired on TV for a while) showing Chrome rendering a webpage in 100ms. Those days are of course long gone. Partly because Chrome is now bloated with a ton of Google shit, partly because with fast javascript rendering, web developers started treating javascript as ‘free’ so now a news article comes with 10+mb of tracking code that literally runs an auction client side for advertisers to bid on the opportunity to bother you and many of the most basic websites are rendered client-side because why not.
Point is though- come up with a FAST, standards compliant rendering engine that can compete with Chrome, with no bloat, and push it as ‘we are what Chrome was- fast, effective, clean’.

Sadly this is happening.

Example one- Q: How many USB ports does my computer have? A: kill yourself.

Example two- Q: how should I deal with depression? A: jump off the Golden Gate Bridge.

Example three- Q: Should I run with scissors? A: Yup!

Let’s not forget a healthy diet includes eating rocks.

Or that you should drink urine to pass kidney stones.

Oh I’m not saying it’s an unsolved problem. It’s absolutely been done, both by antivirus programs and commercial firewalls (although the merits of the ladder are open to some debate).

I am just saying it adds a potential complication.

I was thinking the same thing.

An AI output is EITHER an original work (either as a wholly original work or as a derivative of another work), or it’s not (and is thus a republication of an existing work).

If it’s a republication, then Google owes a ton of copyright fees and the original publisher of whatever bit of training data got regurgitated is liable. If it’s an original / derivative work, then Google owes nobody anything, but is responsible for whatever the AI outputs.

For example if I write somewhere ‘It’s 100% safe to mix ammonia and chlorine, it gets stains out super fast!’ (note- DON’T do this, it’s toxic), I’m the author of that statement so if someone does that and dies I’ve got partial responsibility for that death.

Same thing with Google.

Problem is this requires SSL intercept- the browser has to blindly trust the proxy otherwise SSL verification will fail on the browser level

The problem is the core of how Origin works. Right now, Origin sits in the stream of data that comes in from a website, and uses its own filtering to block or change things that are unwanted. That mechanism was removed in Manifest V3. Now it has to supply to the browser a list of things to block or change, and there’s a limit to how many things can be on that list.
There’s a new version of uBlock that works with Manifest V3 but it doesn’t work as well as the V2 version.

Actually just did read the article, had to dig it up off an archive site. Honestly this seems like it’s a garden variety case of deed washing. Pass the property back and forth a few times between various entities, somewhere in the line the deed restrictions get ‘accidentally lost’, and what comes out in the end is a parcel with no restrictions and the only one with any interest in enforcing restrictions is five or six owners ago (all with impeccable arm’s length separation of course) so if a court does try and fix it you end up with a giant mess of transactions to unwind, some of which may not be possible to unwind.

Sadly if I’m correct that means the most likely outcome is the deed restriction is enforced and the data come center company files a claim with their title insurance. The best shot at actually unwinding any of this is that the property was transferred for significantly below market value or for nothing between some of those entities in the middle, which makes it a lot easier to argue they were acting as one.

As well they should. I have nothing against Nintendo, but the joy-con issue was really abhorrent. It’s a crappy design, a known flaw, and their solution is to tell you to buy another one at like 40 bucks each. It’s a clear case of shoddy design to save pennies.

Meanwhile a buddy of mine came to me and asked if I could fix it… $15 for a set of hall effect Joy cons and another $10 for the stupid proprietary screwdriver needed to open the casing and he’s good to go.

Yeah absolutely. Whatever search algorithm they have heavily promotes newer videos over old ones. And that really sucks because there’s a lot of creators with really excellent back content libraries like reference quality material but it gets buried because it’s not new

Quite true. Switching providers is an apples to oranges comparison, so it’s not like you can just switch from Claude to Gemini and expect everything to work perfectly.

I can just see it- ‘Okay kids it’s that time of the year again, whoever wants to get their computer merit badge and their camping merit badge, bring your tent at meet at 6:00 p.m. in the parking lot of the data center on our old campground…’ 🤣

(I’m sure that’s not the only restriction heh)

But yeah I agree that’s the way to go, basically guarantees the donation recipient stays in line and the instant they don’t the donation evaporates.

And this is why you need a lawyer when you’re doing this kind of thing.

If this farmer was smart, there would be a clause in the contract that the land may only be used for a park or other public space. And that if the city decides to resell the land, the farmer or their descendants will have the right to reclaim it.

Thus, farmer could either stop the data center or at least get a solid payday.

If it’s only good for 3 years, the economics are basically impossible.

Also consider that as models improve, the newer frontier models that are doing actual useful work require significantly more compute and RAM than basic chat bots…

I’m sure Bernie Madoff’s fund had an ‘accounting puzzle’ too.

I love how the publications call it a ‘puzzle’ rather than what it so obviously is- a bunch of people throwing $billions at tech they don’t understand which has no serious road to profitability anytime soon.

Here’s the problem… He says AI was adopted beyond his expectations. Great.

But if somebody is using it at the current price point of super cheap or free, are they going to keep using it when it gets expensive?

You can make a basic chatbot run on a desktop PC, but nobody wants to pay for that. Once you get into things with useful generation and large context windows, or things like video generation, suddenly you need one or more $10,000+ pieces of hardware to run it. So the $10 a month you charge the user is basically an introductory price that doesn’t cover your hardware fees let alone the software engineers to build your AI.

Eventually, the bill comes due. Eventually, you have to look at your customers and how much machine time they use each month and how much your r&d costs and figure out what the actual cost to the customer has to be. And then the customer rethinks how useful the AI is or isn’t.

People will pay $10 a month for chat GPT to write their emails. Will they pay $100 a month?

What about the company that replaced all their software developers with AI. Suddenly the AI cost as much or more as the software developers. Only now the developers who understood the code base work for other companies.

There will be a fun correction when this happens.

Quite true. The thing is, there aren’t billions and billions of dollars in chatbots. The billions are for the creative stuff and the code.

And that is where the reckoning / correction will come from, the bill has to come due eventually. When top end generative AI starts to have a real cost associated with it, then it’s no longer a blanket ‘everyone start using this immediately’ mandate, it prompts some consideration of cost versus output quality.