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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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.
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.
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.
When did Firefox take away a choice that was previously offered?
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.
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.
“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.
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.
Are you talking about Microsoft?
HDR never, woo…
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.
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.
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.
I’ll just leave this here
It’s FireFox but
- no telemetry/spying-on-you
- no AI
- uBlock Origin enabled
In other words, it’s the open source browser Mozilla was always supposed to be.
Plus it’s typically not more than 12 hrs behind any FF release.Accept one of our free tanks ! They get 100 MPG and go 100 MPH over any terrain!
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 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?
Yeah pretty much
Javascript? Y’all aren’t using text only 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.
You can do it. F12->debugger->cog->uncheck “Show paused overly”, click the pause button. Very very few sites still work well that way. It just doesn’t make sense to have this functionality in a HTML5 world.
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.
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. These are just basic programs.
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.
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. 🙁
Interestingly these attacks on Firefox coincide with Chrome getting steadily worse, forcing Googles own standards and preventing plugins that block advertising, while reducing functionality for Firefox on Google/Alphabet owned sites.
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!)
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.
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.
Disabled. By. Default.
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.
Translations? Tab grouping? Link previews?
These very simple features (which have nothing to do with imaginary “AI”) are probably useful to lots of people.
Fuck this BS.
deleted by creator
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.
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!
AI “Enhancements,” fuck off.
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!
