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.
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.
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.
All the freaking time?
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.
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.
It’s there for me. It seems like they took away the “View image” option, which would open the image in the same tab rather than a new one?
Are you talking about Microsoft?
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.
HDR never, woo…
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.
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.