Sarah Jamie Lewis is fed up with Mozilla's direction and has started building Base Browser, a hardened Firefox fork that strips out AI integrations entirely rather than just disabling them. The scope is massive: removing AI features required patching 1,605 files and deleting 852,297 lines of code totaling 37MB. She and a small team compressed this down to under 1MB using git's irreversible-delete flag and custom Python scripts. The current version is based on Firefox 153 ESR and removes user-hostile features at the source code level, which Lewis sees as necessary because these integrations are becoming deeply woven into Firefox's core and account for an increasing percentage of the total codebase. She's realistic about the odds—acknowledging that funding and developer capacity probably aren't there to maintain this long-term unless multiple fork projects pool resources. Lewis is also hedging her bets by reducing reliance on browsers altogether. She's experimenting with offline readers for OpenZIM files to handle basic web tasks without a full browser, moving to standalone desktop applications where possible instead of web apps, and using feed readers to access online services. These aren't solutions she loves—they're defensive measures against what she calls "slop-dominance." The real problem, as she sees it, is that fighting just to stay in place isn't enough. She got into programming to build things that matter, not to spend her life grinding down the past and reheating it as something soulless. The deeper frustration is about vision. The early 2000s Firefox movement imagined browsers as tools for creation and sharing, not just consumption—something closer to what experimental browsers like Amaya and Flock tried to do. Web standards have since become saturated with commercial interests, and maintaining a quality, secure browser requires serious funding with strings attached. Lewis is exploring alternative approaches: building minimal browsers around protocols like Gemini and RSS that haven't been polluted by modern web standards. She doesn't claim this is the future, but maybe it could be *a* future. What she's certain about is that the web needs something new, and she's still trying to figure out what that looks like.