Browsers don’t need LLMs
Firefox 148 introduces the promised AI kill switch for people who aren't into LLMs
Submitted 1 day ago by avidamoeba@lemmy.ca to technology@lemmy.world
Comments
sturmblast@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
Ghostie@lemmy.zip 4 hours ago
Every single facet of my life doesn’t need an LLM.
sturmblast@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
Agreed
selokichtli@lemmy.ml 10 hours ago
And their telemetry metrics will tell them people overwhelmingly keep the switch on.
KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 hours ago
The only one I turned off was the sidebar, because that’s kinda dumb. The rest seem semi useful.
myfunnyaccountname@lemmy.zip 2 hours ago
Left translate on. Everything else off. That’s one of my main use cases for AI. As long as it gets me close, whatever.
flying_sheep@lemmy.ml 2 hours ago
And also neither cloud-based nor LLMs
Rooster326@programming.dev 10 hours ago
Because the vast majority don’t read release notes these days?
I have enough trouble keeping with the IRL release notes of how my democracy is falling apart. Forger checking them on my browser.
dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
You don’t have to read the release notes. It literally puts it front and center in your face the first time you launch it after this update is applied.
Rodrios@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
Because the people who turn off the AI are the same people who turn off telemetry
InternetPerson@lemmings.world 21 hours ago
“Kill switch” – oh the drama. Let’s call every simple toggle ‘kill switch’ from now on.
AngryRedHerring@lemmy.world 1 hour ago
Or maybe you should just get over your superior self and let people have fun.
Ghostie@lemmy.zip 4 hours ago
“Firefox is including an AI murder switch so that heartless users can take the life of our helpful little robot guy who just wants to see you happy. We added it because not everybody is a good person.” -Mozilla CEO.
MissingGhost@lemmy.ml 5 hours ago
THERE’S A PHYSICAL KILL SWITCH FOR TYPING IN ALL CAPS ON MY KEYBOARD, BUT I HAVEN’T ACTIVATED IT YET.
blinfabian@feddit.nl 18 hours ago
i have a violently execute switch in my room (it toggles the lamp on or off)
echodot@feddit.uk 19 hours ago
For it to be a kill switch it would have to actually terminate a rogue AI.
Earthman_Jim@lemmy.zip 12 hours ago
Yeah, call me when Firefox creates terminators that infiltrate and destroy data centers and then themselves.
SuspciousCarrot78@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
What’s worse…you could always toggle it. In fact, you could re-route it to your own local LLM.
Drama drama cheesecake drama
J92@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
The only useful thing ive found for AI is its ability to read text from an image. Which is good for taking serial numbers from a photo, and copying from an app that otherwise doesnt allow copying on phone. Thats it. A tool.
bridgeenjoyer@sh.itjust.works 7 hours ago
OCR did that for 20 years .
Nothing these slop generators do is novel or new.
BastingChemina@slrpnk.net 4 hours ago
I remember using Google translate that was doing that live on the phone camera and translating the text at the same time 15 years ago.
dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
Random aside to rant about consumer OCR.
Recently for my work I had to do some OCR stuff to get some numbers out of a document that the vendor in their infinite wisdom refused to provide in an editable/selectable form. I.e. they just slapped a .jpeg onto a page and saved it as a .pdf. (This is a separate thing that infuriates me.)
Anyway, what I’m actually here to complain about is the baffling phenomenon that every single piece of OCR software I tried ranging from open source to trials of commercial programs, to the thingy that came with one of our all-in-one printer/scanners, and everything in between is that it’s somehow still exactly as crap as the lousy OCR programs we were all struggling with in the late '90s.
I have absolutely no idea how this particular facet of technology in particular has utterly and categorically failed to make any forward progress whatsoever in literal decades. I’ve personally worked on machine vision driven pick-and-place machines capable of accurately determining the orientation of densely printed cosmetics tubes, among other items, and placing them all face up in a box several times per second. Yet somehow the latest and greatest OCR transcription algorithms still can’t tell a 5 from a 6 or ye gods forbid an S, or an L from a J, or an M from a collection of back and forward slashes, all despite being handed crisp high contrast seriffed text that’s at least 60 pixels high.
Given the incredibly low bar for performance here given that apparently every single programmer involved just walked away circa about 2001, I can’t imagine that the current slop generation machines fare any better…
lolola@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 hours ago
How else do people think we were translating all that hentai before the slop generators took off
mrgoosmoos@lemmy.ca 11 hours ago
that function is just reskinned OCR, though
which I guess you could consider as AI and that it is a similar training data structure? not my area lol
I do also think that AI has some use as a search engine. I haven’t used it much for this purpose at all, but a while back there was a specific type of engineering analysis I needed to do, and I couldn’t remember the exact terms or topics to look up. chat GPT got me into the right area so I could look at the appropriate resources. in that specific scenario, it was better than a standard search engine
Of course once I found the materials I was looking for, I stopped using the chat bot and you know use those materials
ricecake@sh.itjust.works 5 hours ago
Yeah, ocr is a type of AI. The big advantage of modern techniques is that it can factor in context a bit better. It’s the same principle but a different mechanism for how you know a red hexagon with S__P on it says stop, even if the sign is dented, a letter fully fell off, it’s raining and dark.
It also means it’s sometimes wildly inaccurate, like in cases where it’s just so much more likely that it said something else. Like how on a bright sunny day, with perfect clarity, and a crisp new sign with extra good visuals, you’ll hit the breaks for a sign that’s a red hexagon that says §¥¢¶. It’s just very unlikely that that would coincidentally be on a red hexagon near the road, so it’s more likely you saw wrong and it was actually the normal thing.
azvasKvklenko@sh.itjust.works 11 hours ago
I also find LLMs decent for translating text between languages, though for serious use it still requires human review
Ensign_Crab@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
Remember when they had a “kill switch” for javascript?
flying_sheep@lemmy.ml 2 hours ago
Yeah, as long as it made any sense to browse the web without JS. These days you need at least an allow list.
SpeakerToLampposts@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
It’s available as an extension: webextension.org/listing/javascript-toggler.html
Ensign_Crab@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
Yeah. Used to be native. Like the slop kill switch currently is. Then won’t be.
Dazed_Confused@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
So while previously the translation feature was supported by an extension, now it has to be enabled through ai.
Hate it.
Kekzkrieger@feddit.org 12 hours ago
The only people that are into LLMs are scientist (which is reasonable) and tech bros.
The later just think it’s useful while for 99% of people there just isn’t a usecase.
HrabiaVulpes@europe.pub 11 hours ago
I guess I’m in both groups. I love LLMs, but then again I have academic degree in AI.
Though I must also admit - look how they massacred my boy. LLMs could be used in games to make every NPC a talkative character or work as a customer support during off-hours of small businesses… instead they are used to generate advertisements faster.
fishy@lemmy.today 5 hours ago
Having tried a game with AI NPCs, they’re fucking awful. I don’t want to sit there and have a conversation with irrelevant individuals. Give me that concise “here’s your mission and reward.”
An AI companion who can converse, comment and learn may be cool, but I definitely don’t want anything like what I’ve seen.
massacre@lemmy.world 22 hours ago
So, there’s a “bug” (though I expect to FF it’s a feature: If you individually block all of the AI features, then click on the master switch to block all AI, everything’s great. But if you revert that master switch suddenly it “forgets” all of your settings and shit is activated again.
It seems by design. And since it’s opt in, if FF “accidentally” disables the master switch (I’m betting it will eventually) you lose that extra layer of protection. OH, and I had disabled EVERYTHING in registry (about:config) before this and translations were still available. I guess it’s time for me to explore other FF-core options…
KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com 22 hours ago
Lmao, semi common design mistake? MUST BE INTENTIONAL!
massacre@lemmy.world 22 hours ago
I don’t think I’m being paranoid by saying it:
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opt-out rollout of every AI feature
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only slogging through registry to manual opt out until now
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CEO and board hell bent on monetizing and delivering features users actively do not want. I.e., enshitification
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I have seen my own AI registry changes revert already once after a patch
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piecat@lemmy.world 22 hours ago
It’s just a lazy/poor design.
Instead of each setting having its own bit with one ‘override’ bit, they just set override by setting each bit.
massacre@lemmy.world 22 hours ago
I’d say you’re being generous calling it poor design. It’s actually reverting to “default” on settings when you uncheck instead of storing individual bits and honoring those. Why not revert to opted out - OK, that may be lazy to use a single template, but that’s not the way some of their other “master” options work. And I’ve been a FF user since it’s first releases, so this isn’t some Mozilla hate. And I won’t be going to anything Chromium and because of inertia I may just stick to FF.
It’s also crazy that I have been manually configuring away from AI since it wasn’t even opt out… it was forced in. Most aren’t going to do that and Mozilla knew it going in. And I’ve already seen those registry settings revert once. Since this control option literally should have been the first feature for AI delivered and their entire AI push has an untrustworthy stink, I’ll say it again: I await a future release bumping the setting back “on”. “Oopsie! you can just turn it back off or wait for the next patch” after Mozilla and their partners collect their information across millions of users aren’t paying attention.
1984@lemmy.today 14 hours ago
Im super happy to see so many upvotes for this most excellent browser!
tyrant@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I personally don’t HATE ai but I don’t want it in my browser or email or anything like that. I have a local llm I use for random stuff all the time but I don’t need or want a company viewing everything I’m doing, adding buttons in places I’m likely to accidentally push, or training their shit on my dumb behavior. ai has destroyed much of the Internet already to the point that you almost need to use an llm in order to get any useful information during a search. Otherwise you’re just filtering through ai generated webpages with the highest seo possible.
hector@lemmy.today 1 day ago
Search pages, they removed easy answers to questions from the search pages, the summaries just list part of the question and then… and you either have to click on those websites, usually garbage webistes written to hit those results not be useful, restating the question every which way, saying the same questions in different ways to hit the results, they will keep restating different forms of a question in different manners; then they will explain in exhaustive detail why someone would want to know the answer to that question, then give you a two sentence answer buried deep in the page if you can even find it.
Almost all of them written by machines, and ai themselves. But the only answer on the search page is now the AI summary, it’s presumably their way of forcing us to use it.
Rolder@reddthat.com 1 day ago
I’m curious, what do you use that local LLM for?
tyrant@lemmy.world 1 day ago
My typical reason is I need to sound less casual than I am in professional emails. Or I’ll ramble. I don’t copy paste but I’ll write an email in my normal tone, let the llm look at it and then fix it up. I’ve also used it to help me find new books when I’m in a draught. List ones I like and it’ll spit out suggestions. Today I couldn’t figure out a website issue so I copied and pasted the html and it generated a snippet of css for me that fixed the problem.
eli@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I’ve already switched over to LibreWolf a month or two ago. Clean, simple, and it just works.
Sunflier@lemmy.world 17 hours ago
Does it come with an equivalent to uBlock? Can you port over your bookmarks from firefox?
picsou@jlai.lu 12 hours ago
It is the same browser so yes to both of your questions
eli@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
It comes with ublock installed by default, it also defaults to having certain features enabled by default like clearing cookies on browser exit, letter boxing enabled, and webgl disabled. This may or may not hamper your usage of the browser, but you can enable/disable this stuff via the settings.
You can also go to the Firefox extension marketplace and install extensions natively.
wax@feddit.nu 1 day ago
Feels a bit snappier too, but that could just be the clean profile
uhmbah@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
Do you know its it’s the same on android?
UnfortunateShort@lemmy.world 1 day ago
There is no LibreWolf for Android, there is IronFox tho
eli@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Like the other commenter said, there isn’t a LibreWolf for android, but I am using IronFox and it’s been fine. I don’t see a huge improvement or anything, but I don’t see any degradation either. So, so far it’s been a fine alternative.
NihilsineNefas@slrpnk.net 13 hours ago
That’s nice, still uninstalled out of principle.
JamBandFan1996@lemmy.ml 12 hours ago
What did Mozilla do?
ricecake@sh.itjust.works 40 minutes ago
blog.mozilla.org/…/mozillas-next-chapter-anthony-…
The root of the current discussion.
UltraGiGaGigantic@lemmy.ml 1 day ago
I, the laziest man possible, have been motivated to switch already. Waterfox is working just fine.
avidamoeba@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
all you have to do is click on Settings > AI Controls. You’ll then see a very bold and prominent option called ‘Block AI Enhancements.’
hector@lemmy.today 1 day ago
I just opened setting on a firefox tab, clicked on the three lines in the upper right, and the settings. There is not AI controls in there, and searching settings didn’t pull up any ai thing.
This is like when I tried to take gemini off of my phone, it’s hidden, instructions online didn’t work, the links didn’t exist on my phone. It’s still on there, but hasn’t turned itself on multiple times when I somehow swiped or hit something as it did a year ago or so a bunch.
It should be opt in not work to opt out and we hid the way to do that.
Kissaki@feddit.org 12 hours ago
Pretty sure this is about desktop. Mobile doesn’t have the same kind of features, if at all. Does Mobile have anything else besides local translation?
Ep1cFac3pa1m@lemmy.world 1 day ago
On Android or iOS? I’m pretty sure the iOS app is just a re-skinned Safari, isn’t it?
Ulrich@feddit.org 1 day ago
Are you on FF148?
jjlinux@lemmy.zip 13 hours ago
Too little too late.
dsilverz@calckey.world 1 day ago
@avidamoeba@lemmy.ca @technology@lemmy.world
The problem still remains: why's this thing "opt-out" and not "opt-in"? Why not make it an official, totally optional (as in voluntarily wanting to have it and, only then, proceeding to have it) plug-in or extension that the user (let us remember the meaning of "User Agent": an agent acting on behalf of the user, not a piece of software who's become "the user") could install at any moment, out of their own will?
I'm far from being an anti-AI person, I myself use those clankers on a daily basis. However, I use them because I want to, while I still want to, not because they were pushed unto me.
Mechanisms of "opt-out" where there should be an "opt-in" is a form of dark pattern.
In fact, the very concept of "opting-out" is a dark pattern per se, because it implies something pushed unto a person, something from which they were "allowed" the "right to leave".
Yeah, it's awesome to have means of "opting-out" from something, but having an "opt-out" mechanism in place doesn't mitigate the very fact that it was coercively pushed unto the person beforehand and didn't require explicit consent from the person unto which the thing was pushed.
Speaking of "consent", situations like these are not that much different from the dark pattern "Yes / Not now" we've been seen everywhere: in certain scenarious, this insistence and disregard for explicit consent would verge the criminal (e.g. harassment), but suddenly it's "okay" when corporations (and the State itself) do it.
If, say, a situation where someone is being harassed and, only after having started to harass, the harasser offers the harassed a means to leave the harassment, does this make the harasser less of a harasser? Because that's the same absurd logic behind the corporate advocacy whenever it's said "oh, but Mozilla is offering an opt-out, you can always turn off 'sponsored shortcuts' (that is, after having been faced by the shortcut from a Jeff Bezos corp as you proceeded to open a new tab for accessing the opting-out settings, but that's totally okay), 'sponsored wallpapers', and the 'Anonym tracking', and now you can, check this out, you can turn off the clankers, too! Wow, isn't that such a cute corp, the corp with the cute fiery fox mascot?".
Not to say how it's gonna end up cluttering the upstream with (more) binary blobs, adding to the Sisyphean struggle that WaterFox, IronFox, LibreWolf, Fennec, among other Firefox forks, have been experiencing upon trying to de-enshittificate the enshittificated and de-combobulate the combobulated.
"Mozilla needs to make money". Yeah, yeah, because the very fundamental, immutable principle of cosmic existence boils down to "there's no such thing as a free lunch", amirite? After all, "money" is clearly within the table of elementary particles alongside quarks and gluons, isn't it? And Mozilla needs to make money... We had a tool for that: it's called donations.brokenwing@discuss.tchncs.de 1 day ago
Also, the kill switch does not fully remove the AI slop. Remember to uncheck perplexity from the search engine list, and also uncheck AI suggested tab group name.
flamingo_pinyata@sopuli.xyz 1 day ago
The Translation feature seems to be classified under AI. Idk what technology does it actually use, but it’s done locally on device
Naia@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 day ago
I like playing around with them occasionally, but I only use local models. I cannot stand all the cloud stuff in general and with the way neural nets work you can get as good or better results out of a smaller/more narrow model and the same applies to LLMs.
The massive models the big companies are putting out there are generally just bad. Even if it can occasionally give you accurate output, for whatever it is you are asking it to do, it uses way more power and resources than reasonable and you could have found what you were looking for with a simple web search.felixwhynot@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I started using Zen Browser, it’s a fork of FF. Sick of this Mozilla nonsense
echodot@feddit.uk 1 day ago
Oh good they’ve protected me from the evil AI that they chose on their own to introduce. I am immensely thankful
Come on this is pathetic, They’re the ones that calls the problem in the first place. They don’t get credit for correcting their own messes.
quantumcrop@lemmy.today 1 day ago
Iceraven is my go to Android browser, librewolf on desktop.
lemming741@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I’m going to unblock telemetry just long enough for them to see me hit this kill switch
GnuLinuxDude@lemmy.ml 1 day ago
I smashed that switch off the moment I got on ffox 148
brokenwing@discuss.tchncs.de 1 day ago
Yeah saw this morning, turned the kill switch on immediately.
hector@lemmy.today 1 day ago
Wait so where is this AI on my firefox? I haven’t seen anything, is it running by default, and what’s it doing?
How do I shut it down then? Everyone hates AI so I don’t understand what mozilla had to gain by bringing in AI, or what they had it doing in the first place?
XLE@piefed.social 1 day ago
Mozilla has released so many self-described AI features in the past few years, but this is the only one that has:
I hope Mozilla learns their lesson. I doubt they will, but I hope.
doug@lemmy.today 1 day ago
sadly I’ll likely support them through any shitty decisions they make as they are the only viable non-chromium alternative these days.
I get they’re chasing the buck and trying to stay relevant, but uhhhh… if they could be less Steve Buscemi-teen about it, that’d be great.
stoy@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
I strongly believe that the EU should fund Mozilla, or a fork of Firefox.
Gecko is the only viable competitor to Blink/WebKit, and it is needed
XLE@piefed.social 1 day ago
This is probably common knowledge to you and many others, but it bears repeating: You cannot donate to fund the development of Mozilla Firefox.
Google can, unfortunately.
KoalaUnknown@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I recommend Waterfox
They have to not fill their browser with AI slop features.
douglasg14b@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Yeah ofc they are chasing the buck.
It’s either they find alternatives revenue streams or we no longer have Firefox as a viable alternative anymore.
Browsers development is crazy engineering heavy, and this, expensive.
ElectricAirship@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
Ladybird browser looks promising!
Blisterexe@lemmy.zip 23 hours ago
To be fair people liked the translation feature too
Orygin@sh.itjust.works 17 hours ago
Ssshhh don’t say that too loud or the “no one wanted this” crowd may hear you. They would be very scared if they could read.
Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 18 hours ago
TWP does it better.
RickyRigatoni@piefed.zip 1 day ago
Problem is Mozilla needs money and shoving AI features into shit is how you get investors these past few years.
Feyd@programming.dev 1 day ago
You think VC is putting money into firefox? Wtf?
4am@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
I think they’re desperate to make money since they’re losing userbass AND Google is probably not happy that most users change the default search engine away from them.
Does anyone really think the current administration is going to break up Google? Lina Khan almost did it but like most of the rest of this timeline we just didn’t quite get there
douglasg14b@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Yeah it’s a catch 22.
They either fail to get a big enough use base because their core users are not enough and they fail from a lack of funding.
Or they try to follow trends to increase their appeal and user base, and annoy their core users.
Most users don’t realize that Mozilla is doing what Google is doing with Chrome with an engineering team 1/4 the size of the chrome team. And that the grand majority of their costs are engineering related.
Browsers are expensive, and Mozilla needs to find revenue streams to pay for it.