Hey @peter
You developed Gecko and you have shared my posts before.
My political activism group Stop Gen AI and @alexia both keep lists of Gen AI-free software.
I tend to recommend LibreWolf and Tor Browser, which are both, as you probably know much better than I do, forks of Firefox and great grandchildren of the versions of Firefox with Gecko you were directly a part of.
Whereas Alexia and some other devs are concerned that with the Gen AI fuckery Mozilla is into these days (none of us trust the new Firefox AI "killswitch" at all) will make it difficult for the developers of Firefox forks to continue to keep Gen AI out of their browsers.
As, to the best of my knowledge, all currently supported web browsers for modern endpoints use either Firefox or Chrome/Chromium "upstream," and we know how evil Google is... There may be a need for a new web rendering engine from scratch that is led by a team that takes a principled stance against Gen AI and overall privacy violations.
I have no idea how willing or not you're able to work on web engine development again, but at the very least, you would be able to advise me about how to find people who can develop a new web engine.
Obviously, we keep this FOSS and probably license under GPL.
But I was thinking of a Kickstarter campaign and a donation page (donationware) on the project's website to generate funds for developers so they can afford to work on this.
There's probably a massive demand among people who know how dangerous Gen AI is for there to be a new web engine completely independent of Mozilla and Google, that takes a strong stance against LLM vomited code and Gen AI software features from the very start.
I'm tagging @librewolf @tor
My new interview blog with Alexia, which briefly mentions the Gen AI web engine problem: https://stopgenai.com/anti-gen-ai-heroes-alexia-keeps-a-list-of-ai-free-software/
My successful Kickstarter campaign for Technofascism Survival Guide, which is still taking "late pledges." The description gives you a good idea of my mindset about technology without needing to support my campaign: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/kimcrawley/technofascism-survival-guide/
Alexia's Starlight Network and No AI List:
https://starlightnet.work/
https://noai.starlightnet.work/
Stop Gen AI and our Gen AI avoidance guide:
https://stopgenai.com
https://stopgenai.com/how-to-avoid-gen-ai/
My portfolio, I'm a cybersecurity consultant, writer, and educator, but not a dev:
https://kimcrawley.com
Share! Let's see if others are interested in the project.
