Submitted 2 weeks ago by 1984@lemmy.today to technology@lemmy.world
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/ai-controls/
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.
I’ll just leave this here
people (not calling you out specifically) keep suggesting Librewolf like it isn’t driving around a city in a tank. it gets the job done, sure, but most people will not tolerate its faults. Suggest something more in-between like Waterfox at least.
Suggesting Librewolf is like asking people to browse the web via Tor. it works, sure, but the inconvenience will make most people give up on gecko-based browsers and give into Google/chrome via Brave or the million other chrome-in-sheep’s-wool browsers.
Let’s recommend viable alternatives: https://www.waterfox.com/
Tor
No, it is very different from suggesting TBB or even just TB.
A few websites may have some rough edges. Some of that will come from uBlock Origin. Some will come from LW defaults like letterboxing/anti-fingerprinting.
And some websites will have issues with vanilla FF, because it’s not Chrome.
Yes, for some sites you may need to turn off a privacy setting. I have run across 2-3 such, usually an over-engineered Django or custom-coded WordPress site. 98%+ of the time, I don’t notice.
I’ve been using it for a while, and it feels almost indistinguishable from regular Firefox. Broken sites are not a common problem.
most people will not tolerate its faults
What faults?
What kind of inconviniences? I have experienced literally none - except you may need to enable DRM. That’s one then
I’d say Mullvad’s browser is more like browsing the net via TOR, but Librewolf is only about 2 steps behind it.
But yeah there are so many others that will still feel usable to someone who doesn’t think the everyone isn’t part of their threat model
more in-between like Waterfox
is that one still owned by an advertising company?
Can someone please put a responsible adult in charge of that damned organization?
Pepperidge Farms remembers when Firefox had a control like that to turn JavaScript on and off. The rest of you are supposed to have forgotten. Oops.
There is still NoScript, which is arguably much better than that, since it offers more granular control
I feel like most people here use ublock origin already so should just use that JS blocking in that instead of adding on noscript.
I wrote myself a little plugin for firefox.
It runs nice, and I want to install it permanently. It does something I want.
Can I? No. Why? Because Firefox… Apparently I’m not adult enough to control my own browser. WTF.
I have to either get their developer build or become a developer with an account. WTF.
So I think, I don’t want their developer build, I just want this plugin— I make a mozilla plugin developer account- because apparently that’s how I’m supposed to do it- I try to create the plugin upload —
Can I? No. Why? Because they want my phone number before I can make a plugin just for myself. WTF.
So - I ask ChatGPT if there is any work around for this, can it search, I just want to run my own plugin, I don’t want the developer build, I don’t want the developer account, I just want to run my own plugin- ChatGPT says it can’t help me because I’m not adhering to Firefox’s EULA. WTF.
So I give up on the plugin - and today, I just happen to notice Mozilla silently turned on SYNC for my web history for that fucking Mozilla plugin developer account. So I guess I’m sending them everything I ever do on the web. WTF.
I go and try to find out what information they’ve stolen from me, can I find it? No. The have some link, to another link, to another link, to another link, which eventually ends up on some page where I can ask them to pretty please send me what information they stole. Why can I not see this without writing a letter! WTF.
WTF WTF WTF. I hate Mozilla.
Please let them burn in software hell.
/rant
Why ask chatgpt? Did you want a fake answer?
Javascript? Y’all aren’t using text-based browsers??!?! Sellouts. \s
Meh, no script does that quite well, not?
No it doesn’t, you want to be able to turn off JS while it is running, and that is now impossible. Noscript stops it from running in the first place and that breaks too many sites.
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 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.
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 has nothing to do with Firefox itself, and everything to do with lazy web devs only testing with chromium based browsers and maybe Safari.
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!)
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):
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.
That is what Linux distributions do too.
Some people like to install Debian and configure it how they like. That’s fine. Some people like to install a distro that pre-configures Debian. That is the beauty of open-source.
How about they just... not include the LLM bullshit in the first place? Just make a browser that strictly renders text and images according to W3C standards?
When chrome came out, it was pretty much that. Super fast, very bare bones. But people loved it because of the speed and the simplicity.
Im curious how Orion will turn out. There is supposed to be an alpha for Linux coming out now this February.
When Chrome came out, a lot of us knew that letting DoubleClick have any control over access to the Internet was a bad idea. This is another part of that.
It was just Safari (WebKit) at that point.
Now, people will complain that pizzaz doesn"t load at all, because Chrome does a vaguely defined JS-thing in a opinionated way. And then they use something Chromium-based.
The only LLM here is the chatbot which nobody is being forced to use.
The fact that it's part of the browser at all is a problem. It shouldn't ever be in a browser. All it should be is a tool to strictly download and render W3C compliant text and images. Everything else should be a unique program - and no, Electron is not "unique" - it's just another copy of an awful browser.
What do you mean "they actually listened to the community"? If they'd listen to the community, there'd be NO AI whatsoever.
There is literally no “AI” whatsoever.
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”…
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.
With Firefox’s new CEO (Who is a douche canoe) I would not be at all surprised if this is the only development going in to the browser for the last two months.
They actually listened to the community, thats very nice.
No. Listening to the community would involve not polluting the browser with that shit in the first fucking place.
I think the main normie user kinda wants AI stuff? I guess most current Firefox users are some kind of nerd, but Mozilla would like to get to normie users again, which are clearly the bigger share of all users, soo…
No, they don’t. They just take whatever they get served. The only ones wanting are the ones not wanting it, the others will just use whatever they get. This move won’t get them users, if anything, they will loose and fragment their userbase even more.
Translations? Tab grouping? Link previews?
These very simple features (which have nothing to do with imaginary “AI”) are probably useful to lots of people.
The thing is, those features are older than LLMs. I don’t need firefox to tell me how to group my tabs- I’ll group them in the way I want, when I want to do so.
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.
Fuck this BS.
You don’t like having a toggle to turn off AI?
I don’t want AI in my browser. Period.
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.
Hey let’s do the thing no one wants because our management is incompetent.
Waterfox is a great alternative
Librewolf as well!
I mean, there is a single button to disable all AI
I’ve been using it on my phone for a few months as a trial run before putting it on my PCs. I like it a lot so far!
So I can use AI to group my tabs but I can’t even group tabs in the first place on mobile? Epic prioritization
Nah, there is no “AI” grouping your tabs. It’s just a grift.
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.
AI “Enhancements,” fuck off.
Hell year more slop
You mean like translations of text?
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.
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!
All ready left that version of Firefox over a month ago.
MagnificentSteiner@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
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.
northernlights@lemmy.today 2 weeks ago
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.
halcyoncmdr@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
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.
XLE@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
At least these features won’t introduce any novel security holes! /s
undu@discuss.tchncs.de 2 weeks ago
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] …mozilla.org/…/training-efficient-neural-network-…
MagnificentSteiner@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
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.
zewm@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.
Zarxrax@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
When did Firefox take away a choice that was previously offered?
TheBlackLounge@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
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.
1984@lemmy.today 2 weeks ago
Are you talking about Microsoft?
BurgerBaron@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
HDR never, woo…
catdog@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
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 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.
MysticKetchup@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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
Crackhappy@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.
technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
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.
chunes@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
What features do you still need after 22 years of development?
Verat@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
HDR, hardware accelerated layout engine (servo)