- cross-posted to:
- gaming@lemmy.zip
- cross-posted to:
- gaming@lemmy.zip
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Well, older news is: “Firefox has evolved into the first thing I uninstall when I install Fedora, or any other Linux distro for that matter”. Since the first mention of their so-called “anonymous telemetry” I began to actively avoid them. Like someone else mention, thank God for Librewolf, Mullvad and Brave (with Leo disabled).
Come on servo
Thank god for librewolf, they fix most of the new Mozilla bullshit.
They’re going to use AI to identify and block ads for me, right? Or let me set a cookie preference and automatically apply that to every page I visit?
That would be rather useful things to have AI for IMHO.
Well no. They not gonna burn ai credits on that, they need it to identify your interests and sell you ads.
something an adblocker already done, without the unneccsary extra steps.
It ain’t that easy, at least with uBlock Origin. The problem is that websites depend on many elements - ones that aren’t obvious to the human eye and experience. An AI could potentially analyze all of the content and to where it leads, then remove the undesirable elements, such as trackers. For example, when I am making a payment at an unfamiliar website, I wouldn’t know what services are key to a working transaction.
A fair bit of my browsing time is spent on figuring out how to not break a website with my adblocker - which is annoying, error prone, and not as effective as I would like.
As long as it is open source, it doesn’t matter. Forks like Librewolf will disable it.
It does matter a bit.
Librewolf devs depend on firefox development. They just rip out the stupid bits. They’re not prepared to maintain a hard fork. They could still decide to do it, but it would take more community involvement.
And a shitload of time to keep the fork relevant as web sites keep evolving.
AI and open source don’t really go hand in hand
if google is still the majority of the revenue, it will close it down the line.
Is there a Librewolf for phones? Can I somehow self-host the synchronization services?
Fennec and IronFox.
There’s IronFox
I use fennec on phone
https://f-droid.org/packages/org.mozilla.fennec_fdroid
There is a shiton of browsers for phone but this one is often updated and the icon is cute (the most important feature)
There is also Firefox Focus which us basically a stripped down fennec. I use it as my default browser with JS disabled.
Is there a fennec like on desktop? I find librewolf has changed too much for what I want out of a Firefox fork. Websites just did not run the way I expected them to and I could not be arsed to fiddle with all of the different knobs to get them to work.
Just why? AI browsers have serious security/privacy implications.
For e.g:Thank you. These are great articles.
As long as there is a easy way to disable it. And clearly communicated what they are doing. I do not begrudge mozilla trying to remain competitive with mainstream.
if they say it will be an AI-only browser somehow i doubt it.
As long as we can remove our mouths from being wrapped around the…
When talking about it earlier, they mentioned the integrated AI would be local-only… Which sounds better, but I doubt is even possible (imagine all the low-end devices attempting to generate a response or analyse the website on their 6-8-year old CPUs…).
FWIW the development is done publicly, so you can check these claims https://blog.ziade.org/2025/12/05/two-years-of-ai-at-mozilla/
Over to Waterfox then.
I don’t care if there is a way to ‘disable it’ (there won’t be) - if it’s there, it not on my PC.
You already can’t disable AI gemerated summaries on mobile.
Remember the way to disable all AI in Firefox.
about:config
browser.ml.enable -> falseIt’s very sad as I don’t think there’s a proper alternative in short term. In the end, I am afraid that I’ll have to keep using Firefox because it’s essentially the “lesser evil”,
FF was suppose to be alternative to google, until google “captured competition” by making up majority of thier revenue.
It started as an alternative to Internet Explorer and was so much better it actually overtook it.
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I’m currently running Vivaldi and it’s been fine. YouTube is even smoother.
So you switched to a Google controlled ecosystem. To no one’s surprise their own products, which intentionally run worse on competitive browsers, will work more smoothly once you use their backing software…
Google has a long history of abusing their position of power to “punish” users of other browsers and ecosystems by violating web standards, don’t use Google’s browsers or their derivatives.
This is true, however I’ve been cursed with using an iphone for a while and I had to find a decent alternative to firefox and ublock.
Unfortunately Safari is horrendous, like anything software Apple makes really, but it’s the only browser allowed to have extensions and Vivaldi is the only real alternative to it that work, as Firefox is terrible on ios.
Orion browser allows this on iPhone! You can use Firefox or Chrome add ons.
When Firefox started recording key strokes
Source? That’s news to me, and when I tried finding a source myself, all I found were extensions etc. to add that to the browser.
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Better to “send keystrokes” to Google.
WE. DON’T. WANT. THIS.
Mozilla, for the love of god, stop cramming AI into the browser when the vast majority of your users just want a privacy-respecting browser that works.
I’ve said it before, and I’ve said it again: I will not donate any more money to the Mozilla foundation until they stop cramming AI into everything, and you should too.
They might be getting money from google that tells them what to do.
Nah, Google funds them so they can point at them and say they aren’t a monopoly, directing what they do would ruin that.
Mozilla’s perfectly capable of making dumb decisions on their own, they do that plenty
¿Why not both?
Because google only pays Mozilla because of:
- Maintaining search dominance
- Preventing anti-monopoly scrutiny
They don’t want Mozilla to compete in any AI space, because there’s already a ton of competition in the AI space given how much money gets thrown around, so they don’t benefit from anti-monopoly efforts, and there’s so many models that they don’t benefit from search dominance in the AI space. They’d much rather have Mozilla stay a non-AI browser while they get to implement AI features and show shareholders that they’re “the most advanced” of them all, or that “nobody else is doing it like we do”.
They are, but that’s only for the search engine thing. Unless Google has a seat on the board.
It’s for the default search, but it also has the side benefit of ensuring a secondary browser with decent market share that’s not Chromium-based they can point to claiming they’re not a monopoly.
You should actually read their statements, rather than a headline from an article with a clear agenda. They are making these features optional and unobtrusive.
The problem is, it’s not unobtrusive.
When I right click and I instantly get an option silently added to the list that sends data to an AI model hosted somewhere, which I’ve accidentally clicked due to muscle memory, it’s not good just because there’s also the option there to disable it. When I start up my browser after an update and I am instantly given an open sidebar asking me to pick an AI model to use, that’s obtrusive and annoying to have to close and disable.
Mozilla has indicated they do not want to make these features opt-in, but opt-out. The majority of Mozilla users do not want these features by default, so the logical option is to make them solely opt-in. But Mozilla isn’t doing that. Mozilla is enabling features by default, without consent, then only taking them away when you tell them to stop.
The approach Mozilla is taking is like if you told a guy you weren’t interested in dating him, but instead of taking that as a “no.” he took it as a “try again with a different pickup line in 2 weeks” and never, ever stopped no matter what you tried. It doesn’t matter that you can tell him to go away now if he’ll just keep coming back.
Mozilla does not understand consent, and they are violating the consent of their users every time they push an update including AI features that are opted-in by default.
Their statement is “we’re incorporating AI into your browser”. What “agenda” do you think this author has? Other than informing users?
Mozilla already has limited resources. Using them to incorporate features into their browsers that their users have already made it abundantly clear they do not want, is bad.
That has not at all been our lived experience so far.
Every week it seems like there is a new AI feature snuck in that we have to tell each other about and disable.
Is “the vast majority of your users” your display name or something? I have those turned off in my client settings
Every product we build must give people agency in how it works. Privacy, data use, and AI must be clear and understandable. Controls must be simple. AI should always be a choice — something people can easily turn off. People should know why a feature works the way it does and what value they get from it.
Come on, this isn’t Reddit, at least skim the article before you start with the performative outrage.
The problem is the “AI” presence in itself. It shouldn’t be in Firefox at all, or frankly in any other software.
Also, corporations and their CEOs lie every single day, you know.
It’s not needed. Nobody is looking for AI powered shit and they will feel it in their numbers. Why invest the pennies Mozilla can invest in a technology that big monsters are developing with billions and billions of dollars and natural resources? It’s not even reasonable, like a Pocket 2.0.
Unfortunate Newsflash:
It’s smaller reddit.
The lowest common denominator consumes all. And that denominator includes not being able to read articles or apply critical thought.
It should be something that people can easily turn ON.
It is opt in, this article is click bait.
Directly from the horses mouth:
"In Firefox, you’ll never be locked into one ecosystem or have AI forced into your browsing experience. You decide when, how or whether to use it at all. You’ve already seen this approach in action through some of our latest features like the AI chatbot in the sidebar for desktop or Shake to Summarize on iOS.
Now, we’re excited to invite you to help shape the work on our next innovation: an AI Window. It’s a new, intelligent and user-controlled space we’re building in Firefox that lets you chat with an AI assistant and get help while you browse, all on your terms. Completely opt-in, you have full control, and if you try it and find it’s not for you, you can choose to switch it off."
Any articles can be a click bait. The reality is what matters.
I didnt turn on AI in Firefox myself. It just appeared there after an update and was turned on. It is not opt in but an opt out.
We’ll just ignore the fact that the chat bot menu setting randomly appeared after an update. Very opt in. The only way to kill the task it sparks is to go into about:config and kill all the browser.ml.* options.
No one here cares what Firefox says because their actions have already hurt the trust in them.
Do the processes still run even if you toggle the setting off?
Just going through settings was not enough. The process was still running. I don’t know which toggle fully killed it because I clicked everything off at once.
Except I literally had to dig through the about: config settings to turn off AI in my browsing experience. So they are already lying
I didn’t. So why is that?
Ah yes, the classic:
They must be maliciously lying instead of me using something wrong argument.
Very solid, much sound.
I can flip that around for you: “Ah yes, the classic: the user must be in the wrong, not the organisation with a history of secretly installing an extension nobody asked for”.
Few read the articles around here, like any social media. I could come with a headline that Bill Gates proposed using trans people’s brains for AI processing, Matrix style, and harvesting the water of the dead ones, a la Dune. Lemmy would eat it up.
Nnnoooooo you dumb bastards
