- cross-posted to:
- fuck_ai@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- fuck_ai@lemmy.world
Starting with Firefox 148, which rolls out on Feb. 24, you’ll find a new AI controls section within the desktop browser settings. It provides a single place to block current and future generative AI features in Firefox.
They actually listened to the community, thats very nice.
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All ready left that version of Firefox over a month ago.
AI “Enhancements,” fuck off.
Thanks for posting, but people will find something else stupid to complain about, because there is pretty obviously a storm of propaganda against Firefox, which I very much suspect is driven by interests that are against an open and free internet.
Blocking these features may calm some people, but in reality, none of these features were used for anything unless specifically used by the user. So the claim of it making Firefox slower or using more resources or being used for telemetry were all outright lies.
A sentiment is tried to be created that Firefox is just as bad as Chrome, Edge, Brave and Safari when nothing could be further from the truth. But even people who consider themselves IT savvy are falling for it. 🙁
I don’t think the proliferation of bad press is anything other than a chronicle of the decline of Firefox.
I’ve been ride or die with Firefox since early, and I’ve never daily driven Chrome. But I’ve had to keep Chrome installed to look at the sites that don’t play with FF. Little by little, FF get’s worse, and most of the “worst” these days are features, not bugs. Though their are plenty of bugs. They certainly deserve praise for keeping faith with ublock. And I appreciate that they respect privacy more than Alphabet.
I want Mozilla to succeed. I just remember when Mozilla made the case with the quality of their software, rather than the quality of their ethics.
Websites not playing nice with firefox is website developers fault not bothering to test. Heck, some sites even block you from using firefox even if it would work anyway (ex: some days ago i needed to use a site that said “you are using firefox, it will not work so just use chrome” when i changed my useragent to mimic a chrome browser, the site worked perfectly…that’s just dev lazyness!)
Websites not playing nice with Firefox has nothing to do with Firefox itself, and everything to do with lazy web devs only testing with chromium based browsers and maybe Safari.
I wish more people realized that using a simple policies.json file can easily transform their Firefox to behave more like LibreWolf out of the box, meaning (as someone else mentioned earlier):
- telemetry disabled by default
- AI features disabled by default
- uBlock Origin enabled out-of-the-box
It is sad (and funny) that people are calling Mozilla and Firefox shady but then installing Firefox-based “forks” from random 3rd parties. I wonder how many people realize that “forks” like LibreWolf are not patching the spooky AI or telemetry source code out of the browser at all, they are pretty much just shipping Firefox with their opinionated custom configurations and a different branding.
And as always… There is no actual “AI” being used here.
It’s especially hilarious how translation programs, which have existed for decades, are suddenly considered “AI”. Likewise with all of “AI”.
It’s also pretty funny how mad people get about translations, image classification, grouping… These are just like basic 101 programs with zero “AI” involved. Not much to get mad about.
Agreed that it’s not really AI, but forcing a thing that doesn’t really do what is promised and uses a lot of energy to do it might might be something to be irritated about.
None of what is considered ‘AI’ is actually AI, it’s just a rebrand of machine learning tech that has been around for a few years now (and is genuinely useful in certain circumstances). It’s all ‘AI’, only the generative AI is worth getting mad about.
Ffs, i dont know what browser to use anymore.
Firefox forcing native ai tools down our troath is just too nasty.
Librewolf being so anti ai, using claude in it freezes the page and they seem unwilling to fix it.
Try Waterfox.
Librewolf being so anti ai, using claude in it freezes the page and they seem unwilling to fix it.
For real? That sounds like an endorsement to me.
I prefer my browser doesn’t police what sites do and do not run.
Also, a site that you don’t use, not being useable. Has zero effect on you. Marking this as a positive seems rather petty.
It’s not that LibreWolf deliberately blocks Claude. One of their anti-fingerprinting techniques messes with it.
“That sounds like an endorsement” referred to how they don’t want to waste their time or weaken their privacy tools just to make the slop machine work.
Personally, I’m going to continue using Zen Browser… Mozilla is too shady, but at the same time, I don’t want to give Google any more power!
That’s all well and good that they give you the ability to turn it off. What’s not changing though is that most of their focus will be on integrating AI which most people don’t want. As a result the pace of other new features being tested/implemented will probably slow significantly.
Plus, even if you can turn it off, the feature is still in the code, needing updates, etc., even if you don’t ever use it. Literal bloat.
Don’t forget adding additional surface area for security vulnerabilities. Does the off switch prevent a zero day attack via that code? Of course not.
The feature would likely need to be enabled to take advantage of such vulnerability in said feature.
At least these features won’t introduce any novel security holes! /s
HDR never, woo…
What features do you still need after 22 years of development?
HDR, hardware accelerated/parallelized layout/browser engine (servo)
Since “AI” doesn’t exist, anything can be “AI”.
For example, a translation program is not “AI”.
But people do want features like translation regardless of how they’re dishonestly marketed.
To be fair, their reduced focus and the potential pace improvement through LLM assisted coding might cancel each other out. I wouldn’t be surprized if the resulting pace change is net zero or better.
That said: I like Firefox local translations, but haven’t found a use case for its other AI features yet.
the potential pace improvement through LLM assisted coding
Have we actually seen any evidence that LLM’s increase the pace of coding? Because in most of the reports I’ve seen there is no measurable difference even when users feel like they’re faster
I can get LLM to write prototypes and demos in the background while I am working on other parts of the code at the same time.
with the right prompt, I can generate and scaffold documentation pages, which I may not have time to do so.
Things are happening in the background and I get more done.
I feel like I am faster?
Feeling like you’re faster just because you can generate easy, boilerplate code doesn’t actually mean you’re faster if it spits out junk or takes longer to debug/integrate that code, or if tasks require more complex work that LLMs are bad at.
I just wanted to see some concrete stats given how much everyone is implementing it and hyping it up, as anecdotal evidence is easily biased by shiny new toy syndrome.
There are some concerns but yes, development generally accelerates: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.03156
They meant with the cleaning up after it.
we present a systematic literature review of 37 peer-reviewed studies published between January 2014 and December 2024
So they AI summarized other people’s work.
Most studies are exploratory (64%) and methodologically diverse, but lack longitudinal and team-based evaluations.
And later acknowledge there are major gaps in methodology. I wouldn’t be linking to this as proof of accelerated dev imho.
What ive read, and what is accurate according to my experience, is that its very fast for creating smaller pieces of code, like scripts, foundations, docs etc. So with a small context, its great.
As soon as you start to ask it to add features to a larger code base, it will mess things up and add code that is not necessary, and add extra complexity. And it will now be slower to use Ai than before, because now you are spending time iterating and correcting, and you may not even get a working solution at all.
Thats my experience with Ai.
I think it does speed things up, since it can generate syntax quickly, but its not very good code and leads to a big mess. Eventually you want to rewrite from scratch yourself.
But I think it helps for sure. The alternative to find all syntax yourself and write it correctly is very time cons unik, although you also gain a much better understanding by doing that.
I’ve already moved several family members away from Chrome, Firefox etc
Waterfox, while sharing a basic codebase, doesn’t have any of this bullshit and runs like a dream.
Also we have all seen this movie before. They launch with promises of having a choice to turn it on or off… until it’s no longer a choice.
Are you talking about Microsoft?
When did Firefox take away a choice that was previously offered?
The “open image in new tab” context menu option, off the top of my head, it has been 1000 small things with them, no 1 outrageous removal, but tons of them that didnt make big impacts yet still annoyed people who used them.
Actually now that I checked my Firefox, it’s still there? I’m on version 147.
Since when is “open image” gone for you? Are you sure it’s not the site blocking you? Many do that these days, but FF still has the option. There are some addons that can circumvent sites trying to block you (part of the functionality of https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/search_by_image/ for instance)
I partially misremembered, it was “View Image” and I updated the above post with details.
A lot of these are extensions that are folded into the main Firefox feature set, experimental features or not even related to the browser?
Pocket’s dead now.
Like another user said, where’s “open image in new tab”? (I notice you didn’t reply to them.)
Remember XUL extensions and real browser themes?
Remember when you didn’t need a developer account to make extensions and you could distribute them via your own website?
But of course, Firefox never takes away choices that were previously offered.
Didn’t people generally hate pocket’s forced integration? Anyways I’ve never said that they’ve never removed features nor was disagreeing that what you said isn’t generally true. It’s just that the list posted has a lot of examples that aren’t exactly a removal of a Firefox feature which hurts the argument being made. There’s more than enough reasons as you mentions to make a case for it.
Like another user said, where’s “open image in new tab”? (I notice you didn’t reply to them.)
I don’t see where’s the relevance in pointing out that I didn’t reply to another user’s post when I’m in agreement with them.
Relax man, let’s have a civil discussion that doesn’t devolve into sarcasm.
Pocket was originally an extension before Mozilla forced integration and bloated it into something it wasn’t. The “something it wasn’t” part, Stories, is still Firefox bloatware but without the Pocket label.
“Open image…” is still there. If you’re not seeing it anymore, it’s sites taking it away from you. (I notice you didn’t check before getting outraged.)
I did check. It’s not there.
This happened quite often for various UI settings etc. Often there were technical reasons for removing the option (e.g. rewrites where they dropped features with low usage), but it is a real thing.
You were always able to turn it off, now it’s easier.
You haven’t seen this movie before with Firefox. All the ad stuff and sponsoring integrations like Pocket were always very easy to turn off.
What’s not changing though is that most of their focus will be on integrating AI which most people don’t want.
I agree that AI chatbots are absolutely useless and have no place in a browser, but out of the three ML features in the screenshot, one is great for blind people, and another one is great for making the web more multilingual, so their usefulness is quite self-evident. Regarding ethics, at least for the last one it’s using a local model, and was trained using open-source datasets.[1]
What makes so-called “AI” bad is not the amount of users that can benefit from it, but how useful it is to the people that do use the feature, which usually means having experts tailor machine learning unto a single purpose.
I personally use the translation feature at least once a week when looking at news article that are not in English, and now I’m using a lot to translate Japanese webpages to plan a holiday there, so I’m very happy that Mozilla has invested time abd collaborated with universities to make this feature, I wish other people were less flippant about it just because it has “AI” in its name.
[1] https://hacks.mozilla.org/2022/06/training-efficient-neural-network-models-for-firefox-translations/
It seems pretty clear to me that despite the ambiguity of the term AI, people are specifically railing against LLMs, not ML. It also seems clear to me that the new Firefox direction as announced by their CEO is to incorporate more LLM specifically into the browser.
Disabled. By. Default.
They plan waste $130 million on AI bullshit. Imagine a fraction of that invested into the actual browser. I can’t even eat as much as I want to vomit.
One more gotcha in the AI booster arsenal: wrong model, wrong prompt, not enough agents, just don’t look at it. While none of those things addresses the actual issues of watching everyone piss away their money into the pit for no reason other than psychosis.
Waterfox is a great alternative
I mean, there is a single button to disable all AI
Librewolf as well!
So I can use AI to group my tabs but I can’t even group tabs in the first place on mobile? Epic prioritization
Hell year more slop
Hey let’s do the thing no one wants because our management is incompetent.
I mean this was announced months ago. I remember I think it was about a month ago there was articles on here talking about it and I specifically went on both blue sky and Mastodon and roasted Firefox for making this decision.
