Robin Osborne (@rposbo)

Folks, she brought a whole plate of spaghetti to the broadcast center to do her headshot. She then houses that spaghetti.

Mattia sips on an espresso during his.

Truly the heroes we need during these times.

02.01.2026 13:46 👍 4145 🔁 798 💬 54 📌 158

That’s me…

01.01.2026 17:58 👍 2 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0

Firefox is my web browser of choice. It does a lot of things right. In particular, with the uBlock Origin add-on, it’s got the best ad blocking you can get on desktop and Android. Firefox is run by a charity, Mozilla. Unfortunately, the AI bros have found their way to the top of Mozilla. And over the past year, Firefox has been adding as much chatbot garbage as they can get away with. In January, Mozilla AI product lead Jolie Huang posted about a great new extra feature in Firefox: [_Mozilla_] > after an initial soft launch, we’re gradually rolling out the AI Chatbot access to everyone. They seeded the comments with Mozilla employees being really excited about the feature! The astroturf didn’t work. The users were not happy. A lot of users pointed out the obvious thing — if you want to add a chatbot to Firefox, why not make it an … add-on? You could do all the chatbot stuff in Mozilla with add-ons. So people could _opt in_ to using the chatbot. If you cared about user choice. Finally this month, Mozilla got a new CEO, Anthony Enzor-Demeo. Anthony is a product manager with an MBA, not one of those _programmers_. What’s Anthony’s vision for Firefox? [_Mozilla_] > It will evolve into a modern AI browser. Enzor-Demeo’s already done deals with Perplexity, and he’s got AI plans for the next three years. Enzor-Demeo did a puff piece interview with the Verge, where he floated the idea of blocking ad blockers in Firefox. You could sure make money that way! [_Verge_] > He says he could begin to block ad blockers in Firefox and estimates that’d bring in another $150 million, but he doesn’t want to do that. Enzor-Demeo has been running the Firefox team for the last year. The AI stuff is his doing. And we’ve experienced his attitude to user consent. When Anthony says he definitely won’t do something, he means “maybe later”. So we should expect Firefox to break the adblockers some time next year. Firefox has heard the backlash to the CEO’s comments — that is, everyone hates this. So they sent Jake Archibald, a Developer Relations guy — a job title that means PR damage control — to reassure us that Mozilla’s going to make AI opt-in! And they’ll put in an AI kill switch! Now, you might think for two seconds and go “if it’s opt in … why do I need a kill switch?” And you’re right to think that! Because here’s Jake asking, well, what does opt-in _mean, really,_ when you _think_ about it? [_Bluesky_ _,__archive_] > I’ve spoken to a lot of folks about what counts as opt-in. Some say a toolbar button that does nothing until pressed is opt-in. Some say the only acceptable opt-in is a build-time flag that would need manually compiled. So it’s a grey area. That’s the words of a guy you need to watch your drink around. Well, if you don’t like all this rat poop in your food, you can just pick it out! There’s a pile of browser settings. They’re in the hidden settings, under about:config, which Firefox warns you not to touch. You search on “browser.ml” and you disable them all. So guess what Mozilla did? When you update Firefox, tt re-enables the AI! And if you disable the AI again, it re-enables it again next update! Choose correctly, user! Jake also made out he didn’t know about the AI switching itself back on with every update. He’s lying. The users have been yelling about it for months. He knows. Meanwhile, Firefox updates, and deploys another new AI feature — “Use AI to suggest tabs.” A perfect dumb AI feature, when you have no idea what to do with the chatbot and make up something to solve a problem that doesn’t exist. But guess what? Firefox _defaults it to enabled!_ Very opt-in! [_Bluesky_] Firefox has fallen to AI brain rot. But David — what can we do? Is there something we can use instead of Firefox or Chrome? No. Your alternatives all suck. There’s two browser engines that work — Chrome and Firefox. They’re your choices. Anything Chrome-based has bad adblocking, because Google made it that way. Look up Manifest v3, which Google added to Chrome to sabotage ad blockers. The least-worst of the Chrome reskins is Vivaldi, which has no AI. It has its own adblocker, but it’s not as good a blocker as FIrefox with uBlock Origin. And Vivaldi’s not open source. But they’re relatively non-evil. I’m going to get a bunch of gullible fools recommending Brave. Brave was founded by Brendan Eich, the inventor of JavaScript, after he was kicked out of Mozilla for being a massive homophobe. Brave is into weird cryptocurrency nonsense and I’ve written up their dodgy behaviours in the past. Brave also has a whole webpage about how much they love AI. So Brave is not the non-AI option. Stop recommending people use Brave. [_Brave_] Some bozo’s going to say Ladybird, which is an unfinished experimental browser that doesn’t work. Project leader Andreas Kling has a number of bad opinions, like his endorsement of the white replacement conspiracy theory. [_Twitter_] But almost as bad, Andreas Kling vibe-codes Ladybird with Copilot. Yeah, Ladybird’s going to go great. Feel the _vibe shift_. [_YouTube_] Servo’s another unfinished experimental browser. Servo is progressing well, but it doesn’t work yet either. Send them some money. But they’re not a browser yet. [_Servo_] So what I’m actually going to do is stay on Firefox until the AI is intolerable. Then I’ll move to one of the spinoffs. If you cannot tolerate the AI in Firefox, there’s a lot of good and noble spinoffs of Firefox, like Librewolf and Waterfox, or IronFox on Android. All of these three have stated very loudly they’re not using generative AI. They don’t have the resources to run a whole browser engine, so they still depend on Firefox. But they seem pretty nice. On my phone, I stick to Firefox with uBlock Origin. It’s the best mobile browser with ad blocking. Even gets the YouTube ads. If you watch Pivot to AI with uBlock Origin, feel free to drop me some pennies if you have any. * _Video_ _—_ _Podcast_ ### Share this post: * Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) Facebook * Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window) LinkedIn * Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window) Reddit * Click to share on X (Opens in new window) X * Click to share on Mastodon (Opens in new window) Mastodon * Click to share on Bluesky (Opens in new window) Bluesky * Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window) Email * ### Like this: Like Loading... ### _Related_

Firefox browser falls to AI. What do we do now? https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/12/23/firefox-browser-falls-to-ai-what-do-we-do-now/

24.12.2025 15:23 👍 7 🔁 2 💬 0 📌 0

got my adhd upgraded to ad4k

21.12.2025 06:52 👍 2198 🔁 490 💬 27 📌 11

20.12.2025 17:50 👍 23 🔁 5 💬 0 📌 0

Ooh, yay, I got another one of those AWS Certification thingies!

Looks like I know enough about AWS AI to get a little hexagon 🎉

(Or I'm good at multiple choice exams, either one is one of my key skills anyway 🤘🏻)

Good to collect since it's been a while since I was Microsoft AI MVP backintheday!

19.12.2025 10:54 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Fast by Default After 25 years building sites for global brands, I kept seeing the same pattern appear. A team ships new features, users quietly begin to struggle, and only later do the bug reports start trickling…

Fast by Default calendar.perfplanet.com/2025/fast-by...

(I thought I recognised the author! Den gave me and Dean Hume our first attempt at practicing a Velocity Conf session on an AQA meetup crowd, way back in the 2010s)

#perfmatters #sitespeed

10.12.2025 10:54 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Referencing HTML elements inside Shadow DOM - HTMHell A collection of bad practices in HTML, copied from real websites.

Referencing HTML elements inside Shadow DOM

09.12.2025 17:28 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Traffic Modeling Using Machine Learning When I explain the difference between lab (aka synthetic) and field data to people, one of the things I mention is that the lab allows for testing under repeatable, controlled conditions. Each test…

Traffic Modeling Using Machine Learning calendar.perfplanet.com/2025/traffic...

#sitepseed #perfmatters

09.12.2025 10:54 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Speculation rules improvements - HTMHell A collection of bad practices in HTML, copied from real websites.

Speculation rules improvements

08.12.2025 17:28 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Exploring Large HTML Documents On The Web Most HTML documents are relatively small, providing a starting point for other resources on the page to load. But why do some websites load several megabytes of HTML code? Usually it's not that…

Exploring Large HTML Documents On The Web calendar.perfplanet.com/2025/explori...

#sitespeed #perfmatters

08.12.2025 10:54 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

I remember the decision of downloading a DLL was a commercial and security decision, and only an option if you literally couldn't do it yourself.. (e.g. some clever AOC or IOC framework) (early late 90s, early 00s)

07.12.2025 20:38 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Using the Ancient Evils for Debugging - HTMHell A collection of bad practices in HTML, copied from real websites.

Using the Ancient Evils for Debugging

07.12.2025 17:28 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Improve TTFB and UX with HTTP streaming If you have a statically generated website hosted on a CDN, it’s probably very fast (unless you add too much client-side JavaScript). However, for dynamically generated pages that load content from a…

Improve TTFB and UX with HTTP streaming calendar.perfplanet.com/2025/improve...

#permatters #sitespeed

07.12.2025 10:54 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Top layer troubles: popover vs. dialog - HTMHell A collection of bad practices in HTML, copied from real websites.

Top layer troubles: popover vs. dialog - HTMHell's Advent Calender kicks off

06.12.2025 17:28 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Zipcar, world’s biggest car-sharing company, to close UK operation Move by firm, owned by US group Avis Budget, will remove access to shared fleet across London at end of year

Zipcar, world’s biggest car-sharing company, to close UK operation
www.theguardian.com/business/202...

As a Londoner, this has meant I've never needed my own car; no other option works anywhere near as well (park where you like, pay by the minute, no fuel or tax, etc). I'm really gutted... 😭

02.12.2025 14:31 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Just saw an extended version

20.11.2025 23:25 👍 195 🔁 78 💬 3 📌 11

Not sure this will be enough to persuade the Home Office to let you stay when Labour retroactively change the rules again, just like they're now doing for hundreds of thousands of people who came here legally in the last few years.

But print it just in case!

21.11.2025 13:06 👍 14 🔁 4 💬 1 📌 0

The Great Software Quality Collapse: How We Normalized Catastrophe The Apple Calculator leaked 32GB of RAM.

The Great Software Quality Collapse: How We Normalized Catastrophe

(aka, ship slow, build well, hire juniors and let them learn by making lots of small mistakes)

techtrenches.substack.com/p/the-great-...

05.11.2025 10:54 👍 3 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Using Local LLMs to Automatically Simulate APIs in ASP.NET Core MimimalAPI (English) Scott Galloway is a lead developer and software engineer with a passion for building web applications.

www.mostlylucid.net/blog/llmapi

This is a pretty clever use for a local LLM in aiding development

04.11.2025 17:28 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Playing Music Roulette with an ancient harddrive that I've networked up via a raspberryPi: luckily this one is New Order, including Blue Monday!

03.11.2025 18:39 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Less than a month to go to get your ticket and join us on November 14th.

Line up is solid, inspiration assured, and an amazing day just waiting for us all.

Join us: 2025.ffconf.org

20.10.2025 12:30 👍 3 🔁 5 💬 0 📌 0

GitHub - jmsdnns/webbol: A minimal static web server written in COBOL A minimal static web server written in COBOL. Contribute to jmsdnns/webbol development by creating an account on GitHub.

A minimal static web server WRITTEN IN COBOL

github.com/jmsdnns/webbol

Incredible. And honestly, the comments in the code is helping me understand the huge COBOL codebase I'm having to help migrate right now...

09.10.2025 09:54 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

How on Earth did Immortals: Fenyx Rising not become a total smash when released? It's fantastic! I realise it was overshadowed by Breath of The Wild, but it's like the Arcade Version of BoTW, with great humour and exploding with Greek mythology. Fave game of the moment, for sure.

29.09.2025 06:43 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Everyone going nuts over Model Context Protocol (MCP) for building an LLM-friendly interface to your API, and I'm just thinking about how much easier it was to build coffeescript API abstractions for Hubot backintheday...

15.09.2025 16:28 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

npm Author Qix Compromised via Phishing Email in Major Suppl... npm author Qix’s account was compromised, with malicious versions of popular packages like chalk-template, color-convert, and strip-ansi published.

npm Author Qix Compromised via Phishing Email in Major Supply Chain Attack
socket.dev/blog/npm-aut...

Oof... Reminds us of the importance of vulnerability scanning in the CI pipeline, and how bizarre it is to blindly rely on random people's code

09.09.2025 09:54 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

A proposal for inline LLM instructions in HTML based on llms.txt - Vercel llms.txt is an emerging standard for making content such as docs available for direct consumption by AIs. We’re proposing a convention to include such content directly in HTML responses.

A proposal for inline LLM instructions in HTML vercel.com/blog/a-propo...

Something I hadn't considered: adding helpful instructions specifically for metal-based users into HTML, without affecting meat-based users.

05.09.2025 09:54 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Getting Creative With Images in Long-Form Content | CSS-Tricks Images in long-form content can (and often should) do more than illustrate. They help set the pace, influence how readers feel, and add character that words alone can’t always convey.

Getting Creative With Images in Long-Form Content css-tricks.com/getting-crea...

Some nice examples of how to make your content more interesting to read (note too self: ease up on the text-heavy articles.. 😬)

04.09.2025 16:28 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Google Chrome at 17 - A history of our browser Chrome turns 17 this week, and it feels like a good time to reflect on how far we have come in terms of Chromes guiding principles

Google Chrome at 17 - A history of our browser addyosmani.com/blog/chrome-...

A great article to celebrate the history of the Chrome browser, which I remember totally changing my browsing experience backintheday. I hadn't appreciated how it impacted other browser development too!

04.09.2025 09:54 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

My eldest is starting 6th Form, and I'm very much enjoying seeing her A Level Computer Science work, as it's helping me remember Python 😁

(My CompSci A Level was using Turbo Pascal! Anyone remember that?!)

04.09.2025 06:11 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Robin Osborne

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