Also, power users are the ones who will find and change the setting - that's pretty much what being a power user means. Picking defaults that work for novices makes sense, even if that's slightly more inconvenient for me.
I think this whole discussion is based on an assumption that changing the default is part of an agenda to get rid of middle-click-paste entirely. I don't think it is.
Not unlike Firefox, Gnome has a lot of hidden options which aren't exposed in the regular settings UI. There has been an option to control 'primary paste' for 9 years, and it's exposed in Gnome tweaks. There's no obvious reason that changing the default means the option will be removed entirely.
A web page with Javascript can see & send off something you paste into a text box as soon as it appears. So if you accidentally paste some confidential information, like a password, that's a security hole even if you notice and delete it straight away. This happens even for totally innocent reasons, like search-as-you-type.
Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V copy and paste is not such a big issue because far more people are familiar with it, and it requires more deliberate actions on both sides (copying and pasting). So you're less likely to accidentally copy something around that you didn't mean to.
> So if you accidentally paste some confidential information
So nothing like a "large security hole" that needs to be fixed, right?
I mean at this point, "SSH is a large security hole because people may enter their password while someone looks at their keyboard". I wouldn't consider that a reason to remove SSH.
There's nothing particularly wrong with it, but developing a browser engine and keeping up with new web standards is quite a bit of work. And web developers won't all test on a browser with 2-3% market share, so there's more risk of sites not rendering quite right because the engine is different.
I doubt AI agents are going to greatly accelerate the development of something as big and complex as Servo. It seems more realistic that Firefox would be built around either Blink (from Chromium) or Webkit to lean on Google/Apple.
I agree with all the people saying it would drive a lot of the remaining users away, and I hope they don't do it. But I'm not remotely surprised that they considered following what their biggest competitor (Chrome) already did.
Because Chrome was built by the world's biggest advertising company. If the World Wildlife Fund started selling ivory to pay the bills, would that not be surprising?
That analogy doesn't really work, though: Mozilla's goal is not specifically to fight against online advertising. Ad-blocking is connected to their goals, definitely, but they clearly have to make compromises, and I'm not that surprised that they'd think about that one.
Why? They have ample free cashflow. They haven't had money problems in 10 years. If they're worried about Google withdrawing support they should save money in an endowment, not do things to help Google.
That's not really accurate: Firefox peaked somewhere around 30% market share back when IE was dominant, and then Chrome took over the top spot within a few years of launching.
FWIW, I think there's just no good move for Mozilla. They're competing against 3 of the biggest companies in the world who can cross-subsidise browser development as a loss-leader, and can push their own browsers as the defaults on their respective platforms. The most obvious way to make money from a browser - harvesting user data - is largely unavailable to them.
I would rather firefox release a paid browser with no AI, or at least everything Opt-In, and more user control than to see them stuff unwanted features on users.
I used firefox faithfully for a long time, but it's time for someone to take it out back and put it down.
Also, I switched to Waterfox about a year ago and I have no complaints. The very worst thing about it is that when it updates its very in your face about it, and that is such a small annoyance that its easily negligible.
Throw on an extension like Chrome Mask for those few websites that "require chrome" (as if that is an actual thing), a few privacy extensions, ecosia search, uBlacklist (to permablock certain sites from search results), and Content Farm Terminator to get rid of those mass produced slop sites that weasel their way into search results and you're going to have a much better experience than almost any other setup.
My understanding is that all the big AI companies are currently offering services at a loss, doing the classic Silicon Valley playbook of burning investor cache to get big, and then hope to make a profit later. So any service you depend on could crash out of the race, and if one emerges as a victorious monopoly and you rely on them, they can charge you almost whatever they like.
To my mind, the 'only just started' argument is wearing off. It's software, it moves fast anyway, and all the giants of the tech world have been feverishly throwing money at AI for the last couple of years. I don't buy that we're still just at the beginning of some huge exponential improvement.
My understanding is they make a loss overall due to the spending on training new models, that the API costs are profit making if considered in isolation. That said, this is based on guestimates based on hosting costs of open-weight models, owing to a lack of financial transparancey everywhere for the secret-weights models.
I'm sure they would love to. They've been trying to make their own app store (Galaxy Store) a thing for over a decade. But cutting ties with Google would mean no Google Apps and no Google Play Store, and that would probably be catastrophic for them.
> we give up on the tools that companies use. UX, user research, graphic design, marketing and similar roles are pretty absent from these communities
Some of the bigger open source communities, like GNOME, do some amount of these things. But I think very few people are excited enough about user studies or marketing to do them as a hobby, unlike writing code. It's hard to see how you could beat Google/Apple/Microsoft at their own game like this without a lot of money. Red Hat is probably the biggest company that might be interested in this, but still about 2 orders of magnitude smaller than the giants.
I think this whole discussion is based on an assumption that changing the default is part of an agenda to get rid of middle-click-paste entirely. I don't think it is.
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