Since yesterday, ChatGPT stopped working in Firefox ESR 115. Yes, I know that ESR has been rebased to 128, but this is not a valid reason to force me to update if I don’t want to. And yes, even EL9 clones got Firefox ESR 128 (so I got forcefully updated by AlmaLinux), but ESR 125 is not EOL; it’s still supported by Mozilla through March 2025. Funny thing, firefox-esr has not been rebased in Debian 12, so they have 115.15.0, not 128.2.0. Finally, 128 cannot run in Windows 7, 8, and 8.1.

It’s morally wrong to stop working on a platform (here, a browser, but this applies to OSes, too) for absolutely no good reason. Your software worked just fine an hour ago, and now it doesn’t. Furthermore, when there’s a simple fix that makes it work again, this can only have one meaning: that whoever took the decision to prevent ChatGPT from keeping working under Firefox ESR 115 is a scumbag, and they deserve to die from colorectal cancer!

There are alternatives, and I’m also using Mistral, Claude, Perplexity, Copilot, and Gemini, as each one is retarded in a different way and they hallucinate differently.

A second frustration comes from the fact that, despite using the free version of ChatGPT, which means ChatGPT-3.5, I’ve been given free access for quite some time to ChatGPT-4o aka 4-turbo. I was offered a stripped-down version of ChatGPT-4 with the URLs removed, and then not removed anymore. For a couple of days, ChatGPT even searched the web to give me up-to-date information, something that normally only Perplexity and Copilot do! Unfortunately, my account is now showing “ChatGPT Auto,” which is ChatGPT-3.5, variably tuned depending on its load, so the quality of results aren’t constant, I guess. But there is no way I would pay for AI!

How to make ChatGPT work in Firefox ESR 115, should anyone else still be using it? Few people acknowledged that ChatGPT wouldn’t work for them, often polluting Reddit threads with “But it works for me!”. Not so with this thread, which points to an OpenAI forum topic stupidly captioned Can’t login! Error with Intl.Segmenter in Firefox – Unresponsive Buttons. What fucking segmenter was that?! Can’t they just say that it doesn’t do anything?! In the title, I mean, not in the body.

Either way, what you need to do is this. First, install Tampermonkey (I never thought I would need this shit). Then, add the following script to it, as described in the above OpenAI forum thread:

// ==UserScript==
// @name         Intl.Segmenter Polyfill for ChatGPT
// @namespace    http://tampermonkey.net/
// @version      0.1
// @description  Fix missing Intl.Segmenter in Firefox ESR
// @match        https://chatgpt.com/*
// @grant        none
// ==/UserScript==

(function() {
    'use strict';
    if (!Intl.Segmenter) {
        Intl.Segmenter = function() {
            return {
                segment: () => [{segment: 'fallback'}]
            };
        };
    }
})();

That was all. Fucking retards. The script itself, they say, was generated by ChatGPT! So someone debugged it down to notice that ChatGPT now requires Intl.Segmenter, which apparently does this:

A code point is not a “letter” or a displayed unit on the screen. That designation goes to the grapheme, which can consist of multiple code points (e.g., including accent marks, conjoining Korean characters). Unicode defines a grapheme segmentation algorithm to find the boundaries between graphemes. This may be useful in implementing advanced editors/input methods, or other forms of text processing.

Why locale-sensitive text segmentation wasn’t available until recently, and it’s still not available in Firefox ESR 115, puzzles me. As a result, it seems that without this shit, the text 吾輩は猫である。名前はたぬき。 cannot be segmented, as not even the period between the two sentences is identified! Well, we needed Unicode, but in 2024, Firefox ESR 115 cannot split sentences and words in Asian scripts (Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Thai, Lao, Khmer, Myanmar, etc.)! I suppose ChatGPT was doing this server-side, and now it prefers doing it in the browser. So, should I blame Mozilla instead?

But ChatGPT is indeed RetardGPT, or rather whoever wrote the web app is. So you can inject the simplest possible script to tell it to use the “fallback” method that undoubtedly means “do the segmentation on the server because this browser can’t do it,” but it cannot take this decision by itself!

UPDATE: Apparently Copilot, too, doesn’t allow you to log in on Firefox ESR 115. Screw you, Copilot! Should this happen to you, go to Bing, authenticate there, then go back to Copilot.