I want my non-tech family members/friends to install Firefox not because I come over at Christmas, but because they want to. Because it's a browser that "just works." We can't have this if Firefox stays in the pre-ai era.
I know Mozilla doesn't have much good will right now, but hopefully with the exec shakeup, they will right the ship on making FF a great browser. While still staying the best foil to Chrome (both in browser engine, browser chrome, and extension ecosystem).
If you read the Mozilla and Firefox related threads over the past week, you'd think Mozilla was the scourge of the internet, worse than DoubleClick in their heyday and worse than Google's hobbling of Chrome.
That said, the AI options for Firefox are opt-in. If you don't want them, don't use them. You are correct in that this is where software is heading, and AI integration is what users will expect going forward.
Strongly disagree.
Theres no expectation of AI as a core browsing experience. There isnt even really an expectation of AI as part of an extended browsing experience. We cant even predict reliably what AI's relationship to browsing will be if it is even to exist. Mozilla could reliably wait 24 months and follow if features are actually in demand and being used.
Firefox can absolutely maintain "It just works" by being a good platform with well tested in demand features.
What they are talking about here, are opt out only experiments intruding on the core browsing experience. Thats the opposite of "It Just Works".
>I know Mozilla doesn't have much good will right now, but hopefully with the exec shakeup, they will right the ship on making FF a great browser.
Its already a great browser. It doesnt need a built in opt out AI experience to become great.
I want an application to serve me webpages and manage said webpages. It wasn't a "non-starter" for me 2 years ago when I switched off Chrome who chose to be too user hostile to ignore. It won't be a non-starter here.
>I want my non-tech family members/friends to install Firefox not because I come over at Christmas, but because they want to. Because it's a browser that "just works." We can't have this if Firefox stays in the pre-ai era.
If "it just works" is all my non-tech family needs, I'm not really gonna intervene and evangelize for Mozilla. I don't work for them (if you do, that's fair). Most browsers "just work" so mission accomplished. These are parents who were fine paying Hulu $15/month to still see ads, so we simply have different views. I'm sure they felt the same way about my pots falling apart and insisting "well, they still work".
Meanwhile, my professional and personal career revolves around the internet, and I don't want to be fighting my screwdriver because it wants to pretend to be a drill. At some point I will throw the drill out and buy a screwdriver that screws.
Why though? Seriously.
Mozilla doesn't need to play that game because they're not selling any AI.
Have you ever not understood a term or phrase on a website and had to go to wikipedia/urbandictionary/google to explain it?
Have you ever wanted to do a 'fuzzy search' of a 300 page document (where you don't know the exact string of text to ctrl-f, but want to see where they talk about a particular topic)?
Yes, I have an extension for that.
>Have you ever not understood a term or phrase on a website and had to go to wikipedia/urbandictionary/google to explain it?
I have an extension that double clicks and brings up a quick definition. If I need more, I will go to the dictionary.
>Have you ever wanted to do a 'fuzzy search' of a 300 page document (where you don't know the exact string of text to ctrl-f, but want to see where they talk about a particular topic)?
No, not really. Ctrl + F search for a dozen substrings, use table of contents if available, and I can narrow it down. This takes a few minutes.
And if I did, I'd find an extension. You see the pattern here? We solved this issue decades ago.
Yes. Firefox and Chrome already offer this.
> Have you ever not understood a term or phrase on a website and had to go to wikipedia/urbandictionary/google to explain it?
Yeah. And?
> Have you ever wanted to do a 'fuzzy search' of a 300 page document (where you don't know the exact string of text to ctrl-f, but want to see where they talk about a particular topic)?
No because I ctrl-f for that topic/key words and find the text.
These are incredibly poor AI sells...
yes, both use machine learning methods to translate pages. You're already using AI and don't realize it.
For practical purposes though I like being able to have a conversation with a language translator: if I was corresponding with somebody in German, French, Spanish, related European languages or Japanese I would expect to say:
I'm replying to ... and want to say ... in a way that is compatible in tone
I didn't expect to see ... what does that mean?
When the story says ... how is that written in Japanese?Most importantly it’s far more difficult for a bad actor to abuse language translation features than agentic browser features.
- it will pop up when it senses a webpage in a language you don't speak.
- it will ask if you want to translate it. You have options to always translate this language or to never do it.
- it will respect your choice and no pop up every-time insisting "no please try it this time". Or worse, decide by default to translate anywyay behind my back.
- There are settings to also enable/disable this that will not arbitrarily reset whenever the app updates.
There are certainly environmental issues to address, but I've accepted that this US administration is not going to address this in any meaningful way. Attacking individuals will not solve this issue so I'm not doing this. So for now, my main mantra is "don't bother me". the UX of much AI can't even clear that.
It’s so nice just to be able to ask the browser to summarize the page, or ask questions about a long article.
I know a lot of people on Hacker News are hostile to AI and like to imagine everybody hates it, but I personally find it very helpful.
Why? Is there evidence to back this up? Are there massive customer write in campaigns trying to convince browser companies to push more AI?
>I know a lot of people on Hacker News are hostile to AI and like to imagine everybody hates it, but I personally find it very helpful.
I love it. I love going to the AI place and knowingly consulting the AI for tasks I want the AI to perform. That relationship is healthy and responsible. It doesnt need to be in everything else. Its like those old jokes about how inventions are just <existing invention> + <digital clock>.
I dont need AI on the desktop, in microsoft office, replying to me on facebook, responding to my google searches AND doing shit in my browser. One of these would be too much, because I can just access the AI I want to speak to whenever I want it. Any 2 of these is such substantial overkill. Why do we have all of them? Justify it. Is there a user story where a user was trying to complete a task but lacked 97% accurate information from 5 different sources to complete the task?
Options are nice. They were (and poteitally will) not making it optional and if people like me weren't "hostile to Ai" they wouldn't have had to back-track with this.
They’re still very compelling as a user.
They’re still very compelling as a user.
I just think the average browser user in 5-10 years will expect the AI features. And plenty of others won’t want to use those features, and that’s fine.
The confidence with which people say these things...
s/AI/NFT and I've heard this exact sentence many times before.
At least with AI I do get some value out of asking Gemini questions. But I hardly need or want my web browser to be a chatbot interface.
Crypto has shown people are willing to use it as a currency for investment and day to day transactions. Its held value for a significant amount of time. The tech is evolving still and people see a lot of value in having a currency that operates outside of Governments in a decentralized way even if some people will misuse that freedom.
Where is this happening?
Black market goods? Of course.
Avoiding taxation? Absolutely.
Day to day purchases? Not that I've seen.
But as a protocol it has legs and is still used under the hood in projects.
Cryptokitties was always the best monetisation use case for NFTs, and its still going.
Imagine you have an AI button. When you click it, the locally running LLM gets a copy of the web site in the context window, and you get to ask it a prompt, e.g. "summarize this".
Imagine the browser asks you at some point, whether you want to hear about new features. The buttons offered to you are "FUCK OFF AND NEVER, EVER BOTHER ME AGAIN", "Please show me a summary once a month", "Show timely, non-modal notifications at appropriate times".
Imagine you choose the second option, and at some point, it offers you a feature described as follows: "On search engine result pages and social media sites, use a local LLM to identify headlines, classify them as clickbait-or-not, and for clickbait headlines, automatically fetch the article in an incognito session, and add a small overlay with a non-clickbait version of the title". Would you enable it?
but.. why? I can read the website myself. That's why I'm on the website.
Do we have to re-tread 3 years of big tech overreach, scams, user hostility in nearly every common program , questionable utility that is backed by hype more than results, and way its hoisting up the US economy's otherwise stagnant/weakening GDP?
I don't really have much new to add here. I've hated this "launch in alpha" mentality for nearly a decade. Calling 2022 "alpha" is already a huge stretch.
>When you click it, the locally running LLM gets a copy of the web site in the context window, and you get to ask it a prompt, e.g. "summarize this".
Why is this valuable? I spent my entire childhood reading, and my college years being able to research and navigate technical documents. I don't value auto-summarizations. Proper writing should be able to do this in its opening paragraphs.
>Imagine the browser asks you at some point, whether you want to hear about new features. The buttons offered to you are "FUCK OFF AND NEVER, EVER BOTHER ME AGAIN", "Please show me a summary once a month", "Show timely, non-modal notifications at appropriate times"
Yes, this is my "good enough" compromise that most applications are failing to perform. Let's hope for the best.
>Imagine you choose the second option, and at some point, it offers you a feature described as follows: "On search engine result pages and social media sites, use a local LLM to identify headlines, classify them as clickbait-or-not, and for clickbait headlines, automatically fetch the article in an incognito session, and add a small overlay with a non-clickbait version of the title". Would you enable it?
No, probably not. I don't trust the powers behind such tools to be able to identify what is "clickbait" for me. Grok shows that these are not impartial tools, and news is the last thing I want to outsource sentiment too without a lot of built trust.
meanwhile, trust has only corroded this decade.
sure, you can imagine Firefox integrating a locally-running LLM if you want.
but meanwhile, in the real world [0]:
> In the next three years, that means investing in AI that reflects the Mozilla Manifesto. It means diversifying revenue beyond search.
if they were going to implement your imagination of a local LLM, there's no reason they'd be talking about "revenue" from LLMs.
but with ChatGPT integrating ads, they absolutely can get revenue by directing users there, in the same way they get money for Google for putting Google's ads into Firefox users' eyeballs.
that's ultimately all this is. they're adding more ads to Firefox.
0: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/leadership/mozillas-next...
I'm also now imagining my GPU whirring into life and the accompanying sound of a jetplane getting ready for takeoff, as my battery suddenly starts draining visibly.
Local LLMs for are a pipe dream, the technology fundamentally requires far too much computation for any true intelligence to ever make sense with current computing technologies.
And whatever accelerator you try to put into it, you're not running Gemini3 or GPT-5.1 on your laptop, not in any reasonable time frame.
I'm happy to say that LLM usage will only actually become properly integrated into background work flow when we have performant local models.
People are trying to madly monetise cloud LLMs before the inevitable rise of local only LLMs severely diminishes the market.
You dont need to run GPT5.1 to summerize a webpage. Models are small and specialized for different tasks.
An 8B Ollama model installed on a middle of the road MacBook can do this effortlessly today without whirring. In several years, it will probably be all laptops.
Plus, the latency on current APIs is often on the order of seconds, on top of whatever the page load time is. We know from decades [0] of research that users don't wait seconds.
well, 2/3 is admirable in this day and age.
For example: I was browsing a Reddit thread a few hours ago and came upon a comment to the effect of "Bertrand Russell argued for a preemptive nuclear strike on the Soviets at the end of WWII." That seemed to conflict with my prior understanding of Bertrand Russell, to say the least. I figured the poster had confused Russell with von Neumann or Curtis LeMay or somebody, but I didn't want to blow off the comment entirely in case I'd missed something.
So I highlighted the comment, right-clicked, and selected "Explain this." Instead of having to spend several minutes or more going down various Google/Wikipedia rabbit holes in another tab or window, the sidebar immediately popped up with a more nuanced explanation of Russell's actual position (which was very poorly represented by the Reddit comment but not 100% out of line with it), complete with citations, along with further notes on how his views evolved over the next few years.
It goes without saying how useful this feature is when looking over a math-heavy paper. I sure wish it worked in Acrobat Reader. And I hope a bunch of ludds don't browbeat Mozilla into removing the feature or making it harder to use.
Why waste time and energy on the lying machine in the first place? Just yesterday I asked "PhD-level intelligence" for a well known quote from a famous person because I wasn't able to find it quickly in wikiquotes.
It fabricated three different quotes in a row, none of them right. One of them was supposedly from a book that doesn't really exist.
So I resorted to a google search and found what I needed in less time it took to fight that thing.
It cited its sources, which is certainly more than you've done.
Just yesterday I asked "PhD-level intelligence" for a well known quote from a famous person because I wasn't able to find it quickly in wikiquotes.
In my experience this means that you typed a poorly-formed question into the free instant version of ChatGPT, got an answer worthy of the effort you put into it, and drew a sweeping conclusion that you will now stand by for the next 2-3 years until cognitive dissonance finally catches up with you. But now I'm the one who's making stuff up, I guess.
Judging by your tone and several assumptions based on nothing I see that you're fully converted. No reason to keep talking past each other.
I think we've all seen plenty of hallucinated sources, no argument there. Source hallucination wasn't a problem 2-3 years ago simply because LLMs couldn't cite their sources at all. It was a massive problem 1-2 years ago because it happened all the freaking time. It is a much smaller problem today. It still happens too often, especially with the weaker models.
I'm personally pretty annoyed that no local model (at least that I can run on my own hardware) is anywhere near as hallucination-resistant as the major non-free, non-local frontier models.
In my example, no, I didn't bother confirming the Russell sources in detail, other than to check that they (a) existed and (b) weren't completely irrelevant. I had other stuff to do and don't actually care that much. The comment just struck me as weird, and now I'm better informed thanks to Firefox's AI feature. My takeaway wasn't "Russell wanted to nuke the Russians," but rather "Russell's positions on pacifism and aggression were more nuanced than I thought. Remember to look into this further when/if it comes up again." Where's the harm in that?
Can you share what you asked, and what model you were using? I like to collect benchmark questions that show where progress is and is not happening. If your question actually elicited such a crappy response from a leading-edge reasoning model, it sounds like a good one. But if you really did just issue a throwaway prompt to a free/instant model, then trust me, you got a very wrong impression of where the state of the art really is. The free ChatGPT is inexcusably bad. It was still miscounting the r's in "Strawberry" as late as 5.1.
They basically already have this feature: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/use-link-previews-firef...
Especially since we know very well that they won't be locally running LLMs, everyone's plan is to siphon your data to their "cloud hybrid AI" to feed into the surveillance models (for ad personalization, and for selling to scammers, law enforcement and anyone else).
I'd prefer to have entirely separate and completely controlled and fire-walled solutions for any useful LLM scenarios.
That pretty much sums up the problem: an "AI" button is about as useful to me as a "do stuff" button, or one of those red "that was easy" buttons they sell at Home Depot. Google translate has offered machine translation for 20+ years that is more or less adequate to understand text written in a language I don't read. Fine, add a button to do that. Mediocre page summaries? That can live in some submenu. "Agentic" things like booking flights for an upcoming trip? I would never trust an "AI" button to do that.
Machine learning can be useful for well-defined, low-consequence tasks. If you think an LLM is a robot butler, you're fundamentally misunderstanding what you're dealing with.
Specifically, the AI does not generate text for me to read. All it does is decide which parts of the text that already exists on the page to show me. (It is allowed to interact with the web page to get past any modal windows or gates.)
> any user
We need more control over the feature. Even just the ability to select text, right click, and have a "Translation" menu would be huge. Looks like there is such a feature, but it doesn't let you pick the language pairs, which is the most basic requirement of translation.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/website-translation has the text: "A new Translate selection feature has been added starting in Firefox version 128, that enables you to highlight and translate selected text."
Edit: Sorry, I misread the comment to say that there was no such menu item. Edited to reflect this.
The UX is not polished, and not responsive. No indicator that translation is happening, then the interface disappears for the translation to materialize, with multisecond delays. All understandable if the model is churning my mobile CPU, but it needs a clear visual insicator that something happening
Those are all features using AI and features I consider to be useful
EDIT: Oh, I've found a context menu item-list.
The non mozilla people in that thread are so petty. Maybe it'd be better to have them go use another browser and stop dragging down firefox's reputation.
I should have to manually install this AI stuff.
Have recommended extension sets ([uBlock, Sponsorblock], [Containerise, Sideberry, Decentraleyes], [AI translation + Dictionary/Thesaurus]).
Make me want to use your AI features, don't just slap them on my face wishing I'll do more than get mad and try to get rid of them.
Forcing everyone to by default use AI isn't freedom. I might as well just use Chrome.
A large percentage of users, particularly Firefox users , don't want this AI stuff built in.
Where does this AI even run. Does it have to make an API requests to send all of the webpages I view somewhere else ?
Is it even my computer anymore, my browser, or am I sharing it with people who want to extract more money from me.
As is Google forced me to view often incorrect AI summaries when I have no interest in them.
Do I want the only real Chrome competitor to also force bad ai content in my face ?
Language models are like Hello, Pocket, and Sync. Core browser features one and all that must silently run by default unless explicitly disabled.
Normal users install Chrome.
If Firefox can provide a more anonymized gate to these providers and guarantee that prompts are not used for training, this would be a net win for people who want to use AI but doesn't know better, i.e. the "normal" users.
Edge has a larger market share (4%-7% depending on who you ask)
Firefox has (2%-6%, similar issue). Firefox mostly scores well among Wikimedia users and tracking. (High as 15% recently) Firefox barely even registers with Mobile users (0.5%-1.5%).
And. They both pale in comparison to Chrome (56%-69%) and Safari (14%-24%) in terms of user base / market share. People can argue and rant about Firefox doing something, yet they're arguing about 2%-6% of the WWW users currently.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers
https://radar.cloudflare.com/reports/browser-market-share-20...
https://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php
https://kinsta.com/browser-market-share/
https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share
https://www.statista.com/statistics/545520/market-share-of-i...
"All AI features will also be opt-in"
That way, the users who want them can download them, and the users who don't, don't.
I want the AI agent to act more like a fiduciary, an independent 3rd party acting in my best interest. I don't need an AI salesman interjecting itself into my life with compromised incentives.
OpenAI was already taking steps to integrate ads, amd Grok shows how much we should be trusting AI as some impartial 3rd party. The goal was always about control and profiting off of said control. Pretty much the antithesis of hacker mindsets.
(I mean, that could still steer it toward places that have affiliate programs, but if you're running a local AI tool to help you search for these things that seems like something you should reasonably be able to toggle on and off/configure in a system prompt/something.)
I suppose if - after you click away the popup that says "Thank you for loving Firefox"(1) - a popup shows that says "Hey, hey, look at me, look we have this new feature, it'll blow you away. Do you want to enable it?" would be obnoxious but satisfies the idea of "opt-in".
(1) https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1791524 - I still remember how icked I was seeing this popup.
If it's off be default it will stay off unless the user is somehow made to try it. Default opt-in is one option to do that, the simplest one, but it's not the only one. The rest require explaining clearly what the user will get out of enabling it ... and that often is difficult to do succinctly, or convincingly. So shovelling it down everyone's throat it is.
Why exactly should I, a user, care about this? I don't want useless crap shoved in my face, period. I don't care that people might not turn on someone's pet feature if they don't enable it by default.
At least when I last checked (months ago), none of those features that involve communicating with external servers would work unless you configure them to (i.e. provide credentials to an LLM provider).
Was I wrong? Have things changed?
Getting to the discussion at hand, which of those pings are AI related? I didn't say FF isn't making network calls.
How is it "easy" if nothing is sent unless you configure the AI?
What I'm asking is: If I do a brand new profile, default configuration, how can any AI related feature send anything that is of privacy concern? If you don't set up an LLM provider, it has nowhere to send to.
I may be wrong, which is why I'm asking in the thread. So far, no one has shown what the problem is.
But it also doesn't matter, because that's the kind of distinction that I've seen go back and forth elsewhere.
I agree with:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46316763
278 comments, many very angry, and no one can clearly articulate how privacy is being compromised because of the AI features.
On a project whose source is available.
Insane.
(The Mullvad guys took Tor browser for its resistance to fingerprinting and removed the connection the Tor network. You don't need Mullvad VPN to use the browser)
There are more, those are just the ones I can recall.
Waterfox, Librewolf and Mullvad Browser are worth considering.
Librewolf is nice but breaks a lot of stuff, sites that use webrtc or canvas related things, lots of banking sites refuse to load, and some other issues I can't remember.
https://sizeof.cat/post/web-browser-telemetry-2025-edition/
As for webapps breaking in Librewolf, IME those can be fixed by selectively unblocking canvas (or whatever) for the site in question.
https://youtube.com/shorts/FObvkFtr2ZU?si=U6fCphjmGcNMb5ac
Until they change this back they are not trustworthy at all.
Whereas providing an option or a setting that the user must locate and change doesn't really mean much. Few users will ever see it let alone decide to change it
For example, why pay 22 billion to be "the default" if users can just change the default setting
Kagi. Zed. That's it, that's the list.
Not a chat bot. Not an “ask ai” button, just those things.
I've been toying with that for ages on and off. Finally now a paid up user due to the fact that their guesswork engine (or makey-upy machine, or your preferred name) can be easily turned off, and stays off until requested otherwise.
That’s like saying if a car manufacturer adds a "Sport Mode", the steering wheel and brakes suddenly become an afterthought.
Being AI-available means we'll welcome more Firefox users who would otherwise choose a different browser. Being AI-optional means we won't alienate the anti-AI crowd. Why not embrace both?
It's really great when your opinions are aligned with those of the designer. If they're not, you're straight out of luck and you're stuck with something that isn't really for you.
This is why I love software that gives as much choice as possible. Like KDE for example. Because I have pretty strong vision myself and I respect my tools to conform to that, not the other way around
Though not so much trust as an option to enable AI features would build.
edit: the original post ended with words to the tune of "Totally unrelated, but I run [insert newsletter here]... "
They literally shipped an AI sidebar nobody asked for.
https://vivaldi.com/blog/technology/why-isnt-vivaldi-browser...
If you don't like AI you need to seek legislation and pressure your local politicians. It's the only way to stop it.
Yup. So we're screwed for up to 3 years. Maybe much less depending on nature or the result of certain hot topic issues.
That might be a minor factor why we seem to be speedrunning everything in 2025. Get ahead of the crash, of the legislation, of the wool coming off the common citizen's eyes.
If it was an extension it would be nice if people could fork it with other models. Just like their AI Tab Grouping feature would be much better forked with a deterministic non-AI grouping system.
>We didn't make the back button an extension even though we could have.
The back button isn't even a KB of extra data and and I'd put navigation as the primary job of a web browser.
I'm not against a built in translator, but it's a strange comparison to a back button.
On a slight tangent, I think there's an under talked about boon yo machine translation: it's widely agreedbti be a comoromise and not a source of truth. That wariness has been missing as of late.
1. Pocket/etc is not even ancient history,
2. At this point I don’t think Firefox or Mozilla ought to be taken without a truck of salt.
A bonus third :D
3. People bleeding their hearts out for Mozilla and calling others out for constantly criticising Mozilla — it’s history baby, history!
I don't use bookmarks. Should those be opt-in? What about the other 85% of the browser's features I don't use?
You can choose not to use bookmarks, remove the bar reserved for it, and it’s taking up kilobytes in the background. Can’t say the same about shoving an LLM in a browser.
But sure, I’m much closer to the extreme of “make bookmarks a plug-in” than “make everything a default”.
The supposed local-only features like translations will download at least model updates and configuration, which leaks metadata.
Honestly, is anybody reading what's getting written anymore? If it gets taken seriously it would ship with an enable-AI button, not the other way round.
Whatever they do, they simply cannot win. I'm personally starting to suspect the main issue with Mozilla is its users.
When they re-wrote Firefox for Android, they were unable to give the simple, obvious answer to the effect of "yes, we understand extensions are a core feature of our browser and we plan to fully support extensions on Fenix and won't consider it done until we do". Instead, they talked about whitelisting a handful of extensions, and took three years from shipping Fenix as stable before they had a broad open extension ecosystem up and running again.
Earlier this year Mozilla couldn't provide the simple, obvious response of "we will never sell your personal information". Instead, they tried to make excuses about not agreeing with California's definition of "selling personal information".
A few days ago, we find out that their new CEO can't clearly and emphatically say "we would never take money to break ad blockers, because that goes against everything we stand for".
Now, they seemingly can't even realize that having a "kill switch" calls into doubt whether they actually know what "opt-in" means.
Even when they're trying to do the right thing, they're strangely afraid to commit to doing the right thing when it comes to specifics. They won't say "never" even when it should be easy.
That answer is not as obvious to me as you claim it is. I don't use any browser extensions except 1password, which I would have no reason to use on a phone (at least assuming Android has builtin password manager functionality like iOS does).
I think you overestimate what fraction of people care about extensions.
I would guess that of people that would ever go out of their way to use a non-Chrome browser on Android, the fraction who care about extensions is pretty significant.
> Has Add-on shows the percentage of Firefox Desktop clients with user-installed add-ons.
> December 8, 2025
> 45.4%
https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/usage-behavior
Note that language packs are counted as extensions.
Some have disabled telemetry, of course, but how many? Here we can only rely on our own observations, and of all Firefox users I know, it's zero.
(I keep it enabled because I want my voice to be counted — people who have never lived in an autocracy tend to have peculiar views on this.)
I keep lean and only look for an extension or install amd app when it’s clear what problem I have and want to solve.
Honestly, and it's hard for me to say this: I've come around. I still use and love Firefox, but emotionally I'm detaching from it, because fundamentally: all the other FOSS I use is an actual, factual, open source project. And Firefox the browser is FOSS, but Firefox the corporation isn't, and the problem is the corporation seems to be in charge, not the project, which means all their priorities are to make money and drive donations, not what's best for the user necessarily. It means all their communications are written in Corporatese, with vague waffling about everything they're asked and non-committal statements because the next quarter might demand they about-face, as they've done numerous times.
I love the browser. I increasingly find myself disillusioned with the business entity that rides on it's back, and frankly wish it would sod off. Take the money they're getting, and give it to the people actually building the product. Defaulting AI features to off costs Firefox absolutely nothing and they still won't do it, because of this irrational FOMO that has gripped the entirety of the executive class in charge of seemingly every business on earth. It's pathetic, and it lacks vision.
I hate that I feel to be having déjà vu here. My needs are simple and I’m surrounded by software wanting to inflate itself more and more. And being hostile about it, to boot.
New CEO says they've run the numbers and decided to not kill adblockers, leading to people asking why exactly they were running those numbers (if it was an actual ideological commitment, the numbers wouldn't matter).
> Mozilla says they'll add a killswitch for all AI features (so that the tiny but vocal anti-AI minority will be happy), and people blame them for not having it as an enable-switch.
Yes, opt-in vs opt-out is kinda an important distinction. And you're assuming that opposition is a "tiny but vocal", which - especially among people bothering to use firefox - seems unfounded. Which brings use neatly to,
> Whatever they do, they simply cannot win. I'm personally starting to suspect the main issue with Mozilla is its users.
Well, yes. If you build a userbase out of power users and folks who care about privacy and control... then you have a userbase of power users and folks who care about privacy and control. If Mozilla said up front that they were only interested in money and don't care about users, then fair enough, but don't go trumpeting how you fight for the user and then act surprised when the user holds you to that.
Communicating about what you're knowingly rejecting is a point of pride, not a confession. But since there's no such thing as an OBS, or Nextcloud, or VLC Derangement syndrome, nobody grabs the pitchforks in those cases.
The second one doesn't sound like real conviction.
Real argument: "they said they're doing "privacy preserving" ads, look at this post where they announce it". Real argument "they say they're putting AI in the browser, I don't like that. Here's the statement!" Real argument: " they purchased Anonym and are dabbling in adtech, here's the news article announcing the acquisition!"
Not real argument: "They said they didn't want to take money to kill ad blockers but if you squint maybe it kinda implies they considered it, at least if you don't consider other reasons they might be aware of that figure." At best it's like 0.001% circumstantial evidence that has to be reconciled with their history of opposing the Manifest changes. If reading tea leaves matters so much, then certainly their more explicit statements need to matter too.
The thing that's unfortunate here is I would like to think this goes without saying, but ordinary standards of charitable interpretation are so far in the rear view mirror that I don't know that people comfortable making these accusations would even recognize charitable interpretation as a shared value. Not in the sense of bending over backwards to apologize or make excuses, but in the ordinary Daniel Dennett sense of a built-in best practice to minimize one's own biases.
Their history is less relevant now because it's a fresh CEO that came up with this statement on his first day. New leaders often means a change in direction and this is a worrying sign. Also the number he quoted is far too explicit. Doing something like that would instantly move Firefox to be the absolute worst browser possible considering even advertising- and tracking-loaded crap like Chrome and Edge don't go that far.
Clearly they have been running the numbers and clearly he feels fine talking about it which is a pretty strong departure of previous values.
Of course I'd not continue using Firefox in this case, and I'm sure it would get widely forked. I found it pretty shocking.
The other examples don't reassure me one bit because they're not the same teams and in many cases they were simply external pushes like offers that were rejected. Here it's a different team that already has been changing direction for the worse recently (e.g. PPA, purchasing Anonym), and came up with this without external pressure. There's also plenty of situations where FOSS projects did go full evil.
Anyway I don't really have any better options than firefox and I'm sure that it would get heavily forked if they started siding with the advertisers, but it is worrying to me especially coming from a new leader on his very first day. Not only because it's about ads. Just because it removes user freedom of choice completely if they were to enforce this.
In all of those examples, the devs note that people have reached out to them, unprompted, to try and get them to sell out. That's materially different from a company proactively looking into the payoffs of selling out. The only question is whether the latter is what's happening; I'm having trouble tracking down the actual thing that was said (I think in an interview?).
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Graham%27s_Hierarchy...
> But since there's no such thing as an OBS, or Nextcloud, or VLC Derangement syndrome, nobody grabs the pitchforks in those cases.
qualifies as name-calling.
Is that their core user base, or just the vocal user base online? Only 5-10% of their user base have UBO installed (FF has almost 200 million users, extension store reports ~10 million UBO installs).
Firefox isn't LibreWolf, it's user base are just average people, not much different than that of Chrome, Safari, or Edge.
> Firefox: Get the gold standard for browsing with speed, privacy and control.
I hadn't actually seen that when I wrote "power users and folks who care about privacy and control", but that's even mostly the same words, let alone intent.
But they've never done this. There is a very vocal group of Firefox power users but the browser has always targeted a general audience, marginalization by Chrome over the years not withstanding.
If you have any ambition to regain some of that market share listening to the average vocal Hackernews or Reddit commenter, who is not the median user, even just among the current ~150 million users is not a good idea.
What I honestly fear is that while AI-features are disabled, popups inviting me to enable them again. That, or them auto-enabling them on every update like sometimes has happened with `browser.ml.enable` flag on `about:config`.
It's because he has obviously been thinking about it. That $150M number didn't just come out of nowhere. Someone at Mozilla modelled this. The resulting analysis made it into the CEO's mind so far he even mentioned it without being asked.
This is something that's unthinkable to most of the Mozilla users. That's why it's so shocking.
It's like your son making dinner conversation like "hey I was thinking, if I would sell drugs at school I'd make at least 500$ a week! But don't worry I'm not going to do that!".
How many times does a scorpion need to sting the frog for the frog to be justified in being wary of “ I definitely won’t sting you this time!”
But as an old-school Firefox user, with a slieu of mobile extensions installed and a healthy cynicism about our swan dive into the dark sea of AI ... I have no problem at all with the statements from Mozilla. Outsiders can argue all day about intent, it's the actions that count.
This is not true, and is easily verifiable for yourself.
https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/hardware
The vast majority of Firefox usage is on Windows.
Arch pkgstats (opt-in): ~64% FF, ~41% Chromium, ~17% Chrome
https://pkgstats.archlinux.de/fun/Browsers/current
Debian popcon (opt-in): 2.2% Firefox, ~10.3% Chromium
https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=firefox
https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=chromium
Flathub installs: 10kk Firefox, 10kk Chrome, 1.8kk Chromium
https://flathub.org/en/apps/org.mozilla.firefox
https://flathub.org/en/apps/com.google.Chrome
https://flathub.org/en/apps/org.chromium.Chromium
snapcraft statistics isn't public, afaik.
That's not the fault of their users, at least not directly. If you want to argue that Firefox users are stifling innovation or trying to steer the product in a direction that would threaten the future viability of Firefox/Mozilla, I would be open to hearing that argument out even though I don't think that's the issue.
Mozilla is the equivalent of a petrostate in the tech sector. They have a bunch of revenue coming in that they didn't really earn, and they have no idea what to do with it to improve their current condition. To me, that's the core issue.
The thing they can do to win is to start acting like they maintain a free/libre open-source software project. It should be completely fine for Mozilla to make a grand total of $0.00 off of Firefox.
Think of Linux (specifically the kernel) or Python. Sure there's a person whose opinion holds more weight than everyone else's (at least for the kernel), but they typically focus on delivering general guidance to a group of people who are free to create features on their own and present those to leadership. If it's quality and fits what the general purpose of the project is, it gets merged into the trunk, and released with everything else.
That needs to be how Mozilla handles Firefox at this point. If some working group of contributors wants to start an implementation of GenAI in Firefox, let them do so and let the community hash it out. If the community doesn't feel the need to create it, well, then Firefox won't have it... and that's fine.
So many of these free software projects try to do too much and change what the core output of the project is in the process, and they lose sight of what the project is.
A lot of people remember the Mozilla of old, and are just completely depressed at the state of where it has ended up over the last 10 years. They were once a non-profit founded to promote the web and put users first. Now it's just this weird zombie company monetizing the work and good will of a prior generation of engineers that cared about that mission.
Look at the point that op made instead of the tone: the AI feature should be opt-in not opt-out.
That's a good point. Let's talk about that. It seems like it's a simple thing to do to show good faith that this won't be a normal corporate AI push.
[citation needed]
And then others wonder why customers are frustrated.
What numbers? Have Mozilla published any numbers showing their AI experiments have been warmly received by users?
The past 15 years has been a slow decline while they were trying to prove some relevancy outside of their core product. With mobile browsers being locked down a decline was going to happen anyways but if they stuck to their guns at least they wouldn't have wasted a bunch of money and maintained more of their base.
Who knows, their position sucks, but they're not going to win anyone by being the worst AI focused browser which happens to have an off switch.
With the bonus that you also get a set of great (and per fork different yet handy) features.
These include:
Waterfox (Firefox) - https://www.waterfox.com/
Zen Browser (Firefox) - https://zen-browser.app/
Librewolf (Firefox) - https://librewolf.net/
Helium (Chrome/Chromium) - https://helium.computer/
Ungoogled Chromium (Chrome/Chromium) - https://github.com/ungoogled-software/ungoogled-chromium
Also as one of the major players, Vivaldi already made a stand against AI and forcefully including (agentic) AI in the web browser: https://vivaldi.com/blog/keep-exploring/. It's a Chromium based browser with a lot of nice features and deep customization options: https://vivaldi.com/
That's why it should ask - once. And offer a "FUCK OFF NEVER ASK ME AGAIN" button rather than "Ask me again later".
I'm still waiting for the polls and statistics and feature requests of this. The "without asking" is the primary problem.
Like the one described in the subsequent toot?
> All AI features will also be opt-in. I think there are some grey areas in what 'opt-in' means to different people (e.g. is a new toolbar button opt-in?)...
It's not a gray area, and "opt-in" isn't something to be weasled-worded around. If the browser has the capability, I don't want it. I want to be able to add it with a plugin, and that's it. Plugins should have full control to whatever is necessary (same as adblock stuff; plenty of security but enough "user beware" to allow truly useful utilities). And AI features should all be plugins. Separate ones, if I had my way, but bundles if that makes more sense. I do not and will not need AI to browse. It's an enhancement. The core product (or at least ONE OF the products offered) should allow me to do without the enhancement. And opt in if I want to. There's nothing gray there, and I'm so fucking sick of mozilla trying to pull this "we disagree with common terminology" horseshit.
How about "Translate" button?
And, if I'm being honest, "translation" is the only feature I would even consider splitting the builds for. At least in that feature I can see why a "default" version of the browser might benefit more people than not by including it. But that doesn't mean that a "clean" version shouldn't be provided. Build the core app, and then include as many plugins as you think "average users" will benefit from in the "default" version. I don't mind being the minority, I just don't think it's inappropriate to ask for only what I need instead of "all the bullshit you want to force me to have".
This seems like special pleading. The browser (and any software package) is full of features that some people use and others don't. Just off the top of my head, these include: the password manager, PDF viewer, dev tools, and the extensions store. Each new SKU that the vendor has to provide is additional effort to build and test, and the result is that it's more expensive to produce the product. Moreover, it makes it harder for users to discover new features what they might want (oh, you wanted view source, you needed Firefox developer edition).
On the specific case of translation, I don't really see much of a distinction between "I need to browse" and "I want to read content that is not in a language that the content provider has supported for me". In both cases, I want to get the content on the site and I'd like the browser to help me do it.
> I don't mind being the minority, I just don't think it's inappropriate to ask for only what I need instead of "all the bullshit you want to force me to have".
And you can have that by building it yourself. It's open source software. What you're really asking for is for Mozilla to build a version of the software that has only the features you personally want.
But, sure, I need to go build it myself because I had the gall to ask "can't I just have the parts I need?"
This is in fact you asking for two SKUs, one with all the plugins (what you call the "default download") and one without ("let me have a download that doesn't include them.")
As for "really is that easy", as usual, it's easy in some cases and not others. To the extent to which things are already modular and developed separately, then yes, it probably is easy. To the extent that things are not currently modular, then it's separate engineering effort to make them so. In some cases that effort might be small (e.g., the new module is all in HTML/JS) and in some cases that effort might be large (e.g., there is extensive C/C++ code that needs to interface with the browser core). I don't know how much about Firefox's AI features to know which category they fall into. But it's almost certainly not zero effort in any case.
whatever you say
./configure --disable-aiIndex of /pub/firefox/releases/
https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/
A LITTLE HELP:
How do I revert Firefox to a previous version and keep my profile intact?
https://superuser.com/questions/1643618/how-do-i-revert-fire...