It was discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46858492
I remember when every other software prompted you to install Bonzi Buddy or some other intrusive search bar. This AI push is even worse.
Thunderbird is at the moment the pinnacle of user-centered, focused and down-to-earth development of open-source software.
But when they updated the UI, they
- Added options to use to make it very close to the old layout
- Set those options for you if you had it customized like that in the previous version
Which is IMHO much better than how Mozilla handled the redesign - you can get the old style in a GitHub repo thanklessly maintained by one person[0], enable userchrome support in about:config (until they decide to take it away one day!), and enable compact mode (also gated behind about:config and called "Compact (not supported)". Oh, and remember to update the userchrome every few updates because they keep breaking it.
That's the difference between user-centric and not user-centric.
The old UI was criticized by some for being outdated, a mix of old and new styles, didn't fit well with new OS/app styles, etc. It was crap. So they update the UI and it's still crap... for other users. Damned if you do and damned if you don't.
edit: I say this MYSELF as a thunderbird user!
I don't want an "new experience" every 9 months, and having to explain it to my parents
The app has a phantom message even in empty folders that it keeps selected. Unread bubble and nothing else, an empty message. You can’t even delete it. Sometimes it persists between app restarts.
It shows unread count on a folder just because it feels like it.
It’s a long list.
I don’t buy the “oh well, kinda sort of for like 60% of mail features and possibly a read only calendar in Two Weeks”
I switched away from Thunderbird to Outlook TWO FULL DECADES AGO, and in that time they have never once given me a possibility to switch back.
Like it or not, business runs on Office/Outlook.
Give me the 1990s GUI back.
Are those the features this kill switch removes or was there a deeper issue here?
"- Translations, which help you browse the web in your preferred language.
- Alt text in PDFs, which add accessibility descriptions to images in PDF pages.
- AI-enhanced tab grouping, which suggests related tabs and group names.
- Link previews, which show key points before you open a link.
- AI chatbot in the sidebar, which lets you use your chosen chatbot as you browse, including options like Anthropic Claude, ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini and Le Chat Mistral."
And calling translation "AI" seems like deceitful retroactive rebranding. Why is machine translation suddenly "AI" now? It was never branded as such before. Is "AI" here just used to mean machine learning?
This is also perfectly in line with how the word AI was used until circa 2022. The weird thing is this narrowing of AI to only mean transformer or diffusion based neural network approaches.
And many translation approaches would even fall under that, so not sure how narrow you perceive the term to be now. How do you even define AI to include everything OpenAI calls AI but not include modern translation approaches
1: https://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/dartmouth/dartmo...
2: https://web.archive.org/web/20180507195240/https://ai.google...
show me a screenshot or link of one website or app using AI to mean machine translation from prior to 2022, AI has re-entered the lexicon covering anything from an algorithm to Sora. if anything its broadened, not narrowed in scope. me and you might mean transformer when we say AI, but the average speaker doesnt make that distinction. they call video sites "social media", so can you really be surprised they dont quite use AI correctly either?
2020: "DeepL Pro, released in March of 2018, is our latest product, now allowing subscribers to unlock the full capacity of DeepL’s AI translation technology" https://web.archive.org/web/20200429002724/https://www.deepl...
If you are asking about examples of AI being synonymous with machine translation: no, I don't think that was ever a thing. But I also don't think that was claimed
Admittedly I don't think this uses the term AI, but "deep learning" and "artificial neural network" are indeed AI, and if you follow those links in the Wikipedia article you will indeed find them described as such.
https://web.archive.org/web/20030526120130/http://www.ensta....
There are four courses:
- Expert Systems
- Machine Learning
- Artificial Evolution
- Cognition and ReasoningOption 1: Being on a tab, copying the URL of the tab, switching to the chatbot tab, pasting the URL and writing some instructions about what to do with that tab.
Option 2: Clicking on the "summarise page" button (whether from the sidebar or from right-click context menu), and having the browser pre-fill the prompt with the URL + the reader view version of the content on that page.
It's also why I really don't understand the need for a kill switch to begin with (other than pleasing annoying users), you don't need to wait for it. You can already get rid of the chatbot integration, there's a remove button already. It's also kind of annoyingly easy to misclick it, so they're just gonna remove it from those places and put it away in settings and those same annoying users will consider that a win.
This is the grudging half-measure.
Many would have preferred the updates to come with a form asking for on or off. It didn't, so they complained, and this was the answer.
Can you do the same on Windows? Is it tucked away in settings on macOS? Can you disable it on Google? Can you disable it anywhere else? Why are you the most vocal about the integration that is literally the easiest to turn off? You need two clicks to do it right now, you're gonna need at least three once this kill switch is in settings.
I would've been equally outraged about Windows becoming an "agentic OS" if I had been a Windows user. I don't like what Apple is doing to my phone and laptop, but at least they haven't promised to make the iPhone an "AI phone".
More than one thing can be bad at a time, and right now, this conversation is about Mozilla. We can have a conversation about other bad things some other time.
Again, look at my comment history. I'm not discussing AI-as-a-whole because as you've pointed out it's not the topic of this discussion. I'm discussing how trivial it is to turn off as opposed to literally anywhere else, and that's not even discussing the provider choice you don't get anywhere else.
There's a whole section in macOS/iOS settings titled "Apple Intelligence and Siri" with ChatGPT being the only option, and you're seemingly happy with that compromise. Yet here you are complaining about an integration that's even easier to turn off and allows you to pick between 5 providers. There is literally no way of triggering it that doesn't immediately show you the "turn it off" button as it is right now (as in before this update reaches me).
I also invite you to go to firefox.com right now and find me a single mention of AI, since you for some reason are imagining that it is being advertised as an "AI browser".
If you read my comment again, it might occur to you that no, I'm not happy with what Apple is doing to iOS and macOS:
I don't like what Apple is doing to my phone and laptop
Is mozilla.com OK? If so, here you go: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/leadership/mozillas-next...
Firefox will grow from a browser into a broader ecosystem of trusted software.
Firefox will remain our anchor.
It will evolve into a modern AI browser and support a portfolio of new and trusted software additions.
* Mozilla has a track record of forcing unwanted changes on its users. What with Pocket, data collection and telemetry defaults, sponsored links throughout the UI, all the good stuff.
* The enduring users are more likely to want to revert any Mozilla default the moment it's introduced. (This is why Firefox has disproportionately many projects to un-Mozilla the thing: Arkenfox, BetterFox, LibreWolf, Waterfox...)
This is from the annoying (sure hope so!) sporadic Firefox user who was actually pleased by the news. Honestly, I saw it and though: wow, Mozilla giving the tiniest part of control back to the user, that's actually good! Short-lived as the excitement was, in these fading moments of Firefox I'd like to see more of this and less of the user-hostile thing please.
If I were to draw a line, I'd say AI is anything with a transformer model powering it.
As exhausted by 'AI' as I am, translation is one of the things neural networks (and especially transformers) have been constantly improving SOTA on.
It tokenized your input, fed it into a model, then ran the model. Literally the same thing as any other local AI software. Except the model was for translation.
If it wasn't because I find myself using the AI-sidebar all the time I would probably have shared your opinion.
I guess it's just quite convenient to have it separated from the "regular" tabs and their history.
I use Claude code, so I understand that paradigm; I don't grok this though. Is it any different then going to a web page i.e. gemini.google.com and typing your query there?
Could this side bar have been a "search bar" at the top? Now that I say it out lou, adding them to the 'search providers' isn't a bad idea.
Generally speaking I am against this being shoved at us, but I find it as a useful tool in a limited number of areas.
I'm using linux, so there are no official desktop apps I could use instead. Had there been, perhaps I'd have had a different opinion about the AI sidebar.
> I wonder what sort of user testing made them decide that what Firefox users really need is a chat bot in the site bar
I answered:
> If it wasn't because I find myself using the AI-sidebar all the time I would probably have shared your opinion.
Perhaps they did actually test it. Perhaps the majority is like me and find it useful.
> Then you can install an AI extension.
As mentioned I didn't know that I'd like this feature. I wouldn't have reached for such an extension.
It's obvious that you don't want this functionality - which you can now easily disable. What if the majority of the users actually like this? Or the majority either like it or are not the slightest bothered by it? Is it not a good addition overall then?
When i saw this i expected something more... integrated, but when i tried it with a local LLM (using koboldcpp) after enabling the option to show localhost as an option (it is hidden by default for some reason) all it did was to local whatever webpage was running on the localhost URL (even though koboldcpp also provides an OpenAI compatible endpoint, which is what i expected Firefox to use to provide its own UI). It seems to have some sort of heuristic to find the input box where you type in queries and autofills that with the page text or parts of it (if you have it selected) and that's all.
I kinda expected it instead to use the API endpoint, have its own chat UI, provide MCP tools for accessing and manipulating the page's content, let you create reusable prompts, etc. The current solution feels like something you'd throw together in a weekend at most.
Then there's also people, like me, who just want the browser to browse the web. I don't want link preview (annoying feature), Firefox isn't my PDF viewer, I don't have that many tabs that I need to group them and I don't use AI chatbots.
So having a single button to disable all of these features is pretty great. I still want a Firefox Lite, that just does browsing and allows me to add the few extension I want to whatever feature I believe is missing.
The translation feature should be entirely offline and actually predates the AI everything push. I think it's a great feature.
Do you have a preferred way of blocking domains from appearing in search results? I think there's a limit of only five for some reason.
Paying for Kagi which lets you promote/demote/block domains to your heart's content.
Also, their ai makes copilot look good.
It's not perfect, but it works, and unlike Chrome you can have full ad blocking with uBlock Origin.
Only truly independent browser engine left. Firefox is entirely independent on google, but unlike its competitors this dependency is through direct cash payments.
While I do not think that the gap narrowed when measured in CPU-cycles, it's just not very noticable when Firefox doesn't feel slow.
If (1) was all that mattered we would all be using the Preso engine version of Opera right now.
The feature I would really want here is a switch that blocks AI summaries, overviews, etc. on any websites you browse.
Eg here's a list
https://github.com/laylavish/uBlockOrigin-HUGE-AI-Blocklist#...
browser.translations.select.enable
dom.text_fragments.enabled
privacy.query_stripping.strip_on_share.enabled
devtools.accessibility.enabled
https://searchfox.org/firefox-main/source/layout/printing/ns...
The latter, especially, seems helpful.
`privacy.query_stripping.strip_on_share.enabled` to remove "Copy clean link". I would rather it just did that clean link thing automatically, but I don't actually care about clean links -- it's just annoying having two "copy link" next to each other (especially with one which is greyed out 99% of the time!)
As an aside I think it's only matter of time before this is done without query params and instead each share link is generated just for you.
dom.text-recognition.enabled
browser.search.visualSearch.featureGate
extensions.formautofill.addresses.enabled
extensions.formautofill.creditCards.enabled
widget.macos.native-context-menus
Putting:
#context-sendimage { display:none!important; }
in that file works for me.
Yes it does.
I think that's a good workaround, but I'll have to re-enable it when I actually need to print something.
So, the most effective path here for y’all to be heard is not flipping the switch off yourself (do so anyways!) — anyone who cares at this stage has probably opted out of being counted already, after all — but instead to ensure that news of this switch spreads to absolutely as many non-tech people as possible. Don’t argue that they should run some script that shuts off their metrics and phone home and updates. Just convince them to shut off the AI and explain that this is why their browser got slow about a year ago! They’ll flip off the switch gleefully, their phone-home will count them, and y’all will have the strongest possible impact on the telematics graphs at Mozilla.
I already ran the disable process manually on the computers I have friends and family IT duties towards, so I’ll go back and do the AI switch to be sure it’s counted next week. Yes, this is a crap way to be heard. But making a mark on feature opt-out graphs is probably the only hope we have left to get their executive leadership to stop drowning the browser for its own good.
But current Firefox users could probably temporarily turn on telemetry, activate the kill switch, and turn telemetry back off. Just make sure you wait long enough to ensure the information is sent
There'll be so much noise in that signal it'll be almost useless. You can't differentiate it from anything else. For all anyone knows it happened because the word Firefox was in the top story on hacker news
Here's my thinking: There's 100 users getting updates. There's 40 users sending telemetry with AI enabled There's 10 users sending telemetry with AI disabled
So we have 50 people not sending telemetry and using or not using AI. If we assume more likely but not overwhelmingly more it's 30 people.
So we end up with 40+20 with AI, and 10+30 without?
When you disable telemetry you are declaring you don't want to be tracked.
Still, AI services cost money they probably want to check usage since money talks.
Gee. If only there was a way to collect users opinions on things. Welp.. guess we have to live with subtly spying on everything they do with our software.
Most people who are vocal aren't representative of users.
Many vocal people aren't even users.
Don't get me wrong, I turn off telemetry, but you're acting like it's easy to get that information. You act like people don't scream when Firefox prompts people with surveys. You act like there isn't bias in survey takers.
If you just pretend everything is easy we'll just end up reinventing the same evils we're trying to fight today. Unfortunately most evils are created from good intentions. I hear there's an entire road paved that way
It is, relatively speaking.
> You act like people don't scream when Firefox prompts people with surveys.
Surveys without proper response and adjustments aren't passing feedback, it's political theatre. People groan about surveys because it takes time and rarely shows results reflectant of the responses.
We know the system is broken. Hard to shame us into thinking we're the ones who broke it.
> You act like there isn't bias in survey takers.
You act like statisticians don't spend half their field accounting around bias.
>we'll just end up reinventing the same evils we're trying to fight today.
Let's have the old evils dealt with before worrying about creating new evils who happen to do the exact same thing as the "old evils" (spoilers: they are the same picture).
As a complete contrast, there's a lot more enthusiasm over Valve surveys.
Nope, just hopeful, for me anyways. I already intend to migrate friends & family away from it next year, because from a prosocial standpoint they’re going to be more miserable over time as that sub-2% market share starts breaking banking and government sites, and whatever nostalgia I have for olde Firefox has no place in what’s best for those who depend on me. Regardless, I’m still hopeful that somehow concrete numbers might dissuade Firefox from being daft, or I wouldn’t have bothered commenting on this post at all! If they get the memo, then everyone I’m being prosocial towards benefits, and we all get to invest our limited time and energy into something more interesting and useful for the world than switching browsers.
(Yes, I recognize this is an unlikely outcome, no need to try to shoot my hopes out of the sky like a clay pigeon, I’m well aware that their wings are made of melting wax, etc, etc.)
Telemetry was never about user preferences but all about justifying what you were going to do anyway.
Firefox for Android has been killing it for me with the latest ux updates, I didn't expect major improvements there and was pleasantly surprised.
What I have always had with any firefox based browser on android is erratic behavior in text field. Most of the time it works well but sometimes on some commenting systems my input is duplicated/multiplicated/garbled, trying to select where you want to insert words in the middle of the sentence sometimes becomes impossible, always resetting to the beginning of the text field, etc.
On some websites it only rarely happens, on some it is much more regular. Never understod why but when I want to edit a comment I have to resort on a regular basis to copy the full comment to a note app, edit the text, and replace it in its entirety in the text field.
Super annoying but still less annoying than using a chrome based browser with no way to remove ads and have a bit of privacy control.
I'm sorry, but we'll never get corporations to do what we want if we don't throw them the smallest bone when we get our way. You need positive reinforcement too, not just negative. If it's all negative they just stop caring and you get companies lot Google who just don't give a shit anymore.
And yes, there are some AI features I like and I want in the browser. I get a lot of utility out of translation as well as semantic search of my history. I don't want agents in my browser but get, Firefox is giving us choices.
Look, no one needs to like Firefox, but let's also be honest, it's the best we got right now. Google, Apple, and Microsoft are shoving agents down our throats and putting us in walled gardens that are getting harder and harder to break from. I don't care what flavor of chromium you use, Google is still using it to control the way the web works. Everyone loves to say how chromium is has greater coverage of standards but never takes a second to question who sets those standards.
I'm sorry guys, that's the state of things now. You can't fight Google by switching to chromium. It's still their vehicle to eat the internet. Our choices right now are Safari, Firefox, and maybe ladybird. It's slim pickings and nothing is close to perfect. At this point it doesn't even matter if Mozilla is evil, because at least they're the enemy of our enemy. Google is keeping them on life support to avoid monopoly claims but how long will they need that?
So what, we're just going to hand the keys of the kingdom to the guys selling artisian turd sandwiches because what, there isn't enough mayo on your ham sandwich? Because you don't like ham?
We got a win. Celebrate. Take the break from being cynical. There's bigger battles to fight and there'll be more tomorrow. Take the night off and don't be a sore winner
Thanks for staying positive. I like Firefox, I think it's a very nice holdout against adware.
Firefox is the artisan turd sandwich. They are burning dev time on features barely anyone asked, while bleeding market share for last decade
Got a source for that? HackerNews is *not* representative of the average browser user.
Well they are far from perfect but experience has shown that everybody else is worse.
Do you think Google doesn't have your data because you don't use chrome? Do you think Google doesn't gave your data because you don't use Google search? Do you think Google doesn't have your data because you don't use Android? Do you think Google doesn't have your data because you don't use Gmail? Do you think Google doesn't have your data because you don't use YouTube?
I hate to break it to you but you don't even have to use Google products for Google to have data on you. Facebook isn't the only one with tech like "Facebook pixel". You visit any website with ad sense and Google has your data. There's very little you can do on the internet that doesn't result in Google grabbing your data.
As for Mozilla, citation needed. I'm you to need evidence of this claim. I keep hearing it, but I've never seen it. I see people try to read between the lines but come on, give us some hard evidence
Because that's the source of the complaints. I don't want to use an "AI browser", kill switch or not. If this "AI browser" dies because of their mission to destroy community goodwill, good. I'm sick of giving the benefit of the doubt every time they royally fuck up. This situation where they're the steward of the only non-Google browser is not tenable, something needs to change.
I don't need themes nor having my url bar serving search. I am not interested in an AI agent in my browser yet I welcome traduction features, do I have to shit on every company developping a software that has some features because I don't want them?
I am much more pragmatic: are these features easy to ignore/disable, do they largely increase the resources needed (disk, memory, cpu) even when not used, do these introduce bloat, etc.
I wasn't interested in pocket, I was just using a combination of firefox forks or disabling it on the devices I was using. That is the whole point of open source software.
> This situation where they're the steward of the only non-Google browser is not tenable, something needs to change.
But honestly it just feels like you didn't even read my comment. I'm sorry that it's a lot, but I'm petty sure people can handle 10-30 seconds of reading. I even said it doesn't matter if Mozilla is evil. How do you turn that into me giving them the benefit of the doubt. I'm literally just arguing that there's slim pickings and to not help our bigger enemy to kill their enemies. It doesn't matter if their enemies ate evil, you're just helping the bigger evil get bigger and consolidate power. I'm saying "there's more important problems right now, not be fucking dumb and get distracted or before you know it you'll lose your head"
They spend more on developing the browser now than they ever have in their history, and they remain the most successful independently financed browser in the history of ever. Other major browsers have to be financed by trillion dollar companies based on independent revenue streams.
The predicament right now is that AI might displace search, which is a problem if you make money from search licensing. It's not yet clear what the new normal is going to be in an AI first paradigm. But what is clear is that doing nothing means the world will pass you by when everything changes.
> someone more serious picks up the mantle.
So don't sour the victory, it'll cost you the war
Note that just not bogging down Firefox with AI features is not enough here. Firefox market share has been going downhill for most of my life, long before they appointed this new AI-crazed CEO. I don't know what the solution is, but it's clear that it's not Mozilla.
The problem with this revisionist history is that it's completely helpless to address the actual dynamics that led to the rise of Chrome, and attempts to tell the entire story in terms of add-ons tweaks to the Firefox user interface, even though that has nothing to do with the change in market share. The major drivers were the world's most visited website pushing a new browser and preloading it as a default on billions of mobile devices. Mozilla could have executed perfectly and still been sidelined.
But a few bad new cycles in the early 2020s crystallized a negative attitude that perfectly fed the hedonic skepticism of Internet comment sections, and so an echo chamber emerged of people reinterpreting that history as if purchasing Pocket or running a VPN somehow retroactively caused all the market share change.
Nobody's ever bothered to like look at the factual timeline, but once they hear it repeated enough they get confident enough to repeat it themselves and on and on the snowball goes.
Firefox market shares are the best of any non OEM browser[1] and is beating competition from a number of OEM browser (like Samsung's one on mobile) and is fairly competitive compared to the desktop version of Safari (only 1% below on desktop market share).
Yes market share have been going downhill but mostly because they were abnormaly high for something that doesn't ship with the computer in late 90's early 2000's due to:
- the inertia of being born from the ashes of Netscape, which was the default browser at the beginning of eternal september.
- it had its highest market share at a time when its strongest competition was Internet Explorer: a magnet for malwares.
So its market shares are quite good actually. Note that Opera (and now Vivaldi) never got close despite being appreciated by many.
[1] yes it comes with many linux distro but it is sold with virtually zero device.
while being advertised on every single web search on the biggest search engine at the time. You couldn't miss the invitation to install it at the time as it was shown to your face several times a day if you were using google.
> it's only an OEM browser on Android
Which is the biggest computing device platform in term of market share and has been for a while. Once people had associated "internet" or "web" with "google" and "chrome" it was game over for everyone else.
Malicious compliance is no compliance, it is still malicious.
Also a fan of this feature. It's actually been around awhile but I think the Asian languages are a more recent addition.
For those that don't know what trusted types are: Simply put, it splits the string type in to unsanitised_string_from_user and safe_escaped_string where unsafe strings can not be used in function parameters that only take a safe string That's heavily simplifying of course, but it's the basic idea.
Before, we did not need to disable AI stuff. Now Mozilla forced us (that is those of us who don't like or use AI) into an extra step. Guess the only thing worse is being given no choice at all though.
Right now I'm switching to Chromium for Video Calls, which I hate
Icecat/Iceweasel are sane alternatives.
Unofficial binaries can be found:
https://icecatbrowser.org/download.html
Official source: https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/gnuzilla.git
I keep bumping that button on mobile and it's killing my experience.
All those arguments about agents and hallucinations kind of distracted people from noticing we've accodentally built a universal translator.
Of course it's not perfect, but I agree that we didn't had a machine translation as good before.
LLM based translation looks more convincing but requires the same level of scrutiny that previous tools did. From a workflow POV they only added higher compute costs for very questionable gains.
Youtube auto-translations are horrible indeed, and I say that as someone that has to live with the fact that Youtube decides to badly translate titles from a language I understad to Spanish because bilingual people don't exist I suppose. But that is because they use some dumb cheap model to make the translations; probably not even a Gemini-based model.
I've seen that too, but these were all dedicated translation tools and auto-translate functionality.
My benchmark is against SOTA LLMs used directly. I.e. I copy the text (or media) in question, paste directly to ChatGPT or Gemini (using the best model on basic paid tier), and ask for translation. Not always perfect, but nearly so - and they naturally ingest additional context if available - such as the surrounding text, or title/ID/URI of the document/website you're looking at, or additional explanations in the prompt - and make very good use of it. This has always been missing in dedicated tools, historically built around the mistaken assumption that translation is merely a function of input text and pair of language designators (from, to). The shorter the input, the more apparent it becomes how much context matters.
RE YouTube and such - or, like any auto-transcription in video calls I've seen - I can't explain that by anything other than service providers cheapening out on this.
> From a workflow POV they only added higher compute costs for very questionable gains.
Regarding the costs - I imagine they may be an issue at scale, but for regular use (on-demand translation of individual passages, documents, recordings), it feels like it shouldn't be that noticeable anymore. You don't need to run GPT-5 for everything, some models you can run client-side already seem decent enough, and they keep improving.
> LLM based translation looks more convincing but requires the same level of scrutiny that previous tools did.
That's fair. Ultimately, if you don't know both languages, you can only trust the translation as much as you trust the translator (human or otherwise). We'll have to get a feel for this as much as we did with Google Translate, et al. In my experience, whenever I can verify them, results from LLMs are already vastly superior to prior art.
--
Tangent, and why I started considering LLMs as solving universal translation in the first place: 6 months ago, when I needed to talk with someone with whom I had zero language overlap, I tried several well-known translation apps (notably Google and Samsung), and none could manage - but then, on a whim, I just asked ChatGPT (in "advanced voice" mode) to "play a game" where it listens in and repeats whatever was just said in language A, but translated to language B, and vice versa -- and it worked flawlessly on first try.
> This is like a restaurant that releases a new feature that they will no longer defecate in your food.
You're analogy works but you can't forget that there other restaurants. That the other restaurant not only aren't making promises to not defecate in your for but they're actively advertising how much shit they can shove in a sandwich. Even the bread is made of shit!
So thank fucking god. At least there's one place where I don't have to eat shit. The bar is so fucking low it doesn't matter if they spit in it or you find the chef's ball hairs, at least it isn't shit.
Honestly, I feel more and more every day like old-man-shaking-fist-at-clouds! Can we not just have something that works without spying, without engagement-driven shit switched on all the fucking time?
I think of the Simpsons Mr Brown meme where he's asking "Is it me that's wrong?".
I can't be the only person that thinks this way!
I don't think the AI features are used for advertising data harvesting but I'm happy to be educated if you have a source saying otherwise.
Because there would be millions of emails to support asking "why can't Firefox translate a page the same way chrome can?" from people that couldn't find the AI opt-in switch.
Absolutely not! Making someone opt-in (the horror!) would result in too much confusion and support tickets! We can't ignore those tickets and tell people to figure it out, we have to cave and turn all the bullshit on by default.
I think a lot of our problems can be explained by: corporations lacking a spine and people unwilling to learn about the computer they use everyday. It's basically unacceptable to not know how to change a tire if you own a car but clicking through some browser settings is too hard, I guess.
Even better, why was the AI feature ever added in the first place?
My problem with all software that shoves these AI features in my face, is that I don’t use features under duress.
If you interrupt what I’m doing to push me to use a feature, I won’t use it. If you’re a web designer and you block the page to tell me to sign up for an account, I close the tab and vow to never create an account. If you stop what I’m doing to ask me to rate your app, I’m going to give it 1 star. Et cetera.
Now I’ll be the first to admit this is childish… it’s a flaw in my character. When I feel pushed, I push back, and software pushing me makes me irrationally angry for reasons I can’t quite articulate. In some ways I wish I wasn’t like this. But I can’t be alone. I’m certain there is a non-negligible number of people like me, and when a browser immediately shoves AI features in my face on first launch, well, the first thing I’m going to do is disable them.
The especially tragic part is that I personally find LLMs useful! And I’m at the point where I sorta want to install a Firefox extension for ChatGPT now. But the actual browser AI features were pushed on me in a way that made me feel violated, so I can’t use them on principle. Maybe in a few years I guess.
If instead these companies would just dial it back several notches, I would have had the curiosity to try these features out myself, and I’d likely be using them by now. But the way they’ve tried so hard to force them on me has destroyed my trust and now, not only am I not using whatever feature they promote, I hate their product more than I otherwise would.
Firefox isn’t actually that bad here, and now that there’s a simple kill switch, I may actually try their chatbot sidebar thing. But for companies like MS, I will never, ever, ever use any of their AI features for the reasons above. (I’ve literally uninstalled Windows now, it’s gotten so bad.)
Here’s what you do:
- Make a “what’s new” section in settings.
- Put a link in there that takes me to a webpage where I can see what’s new.
- That’s it.
Instead what always seems to happen is that I’m in the middle of trying to do something with the software and in order to do that I must close whatever popup you’re shoving in my face to tell me about the new feature. I don’t have time to read it now because I opened the software with an intention to finish a task and I don’t have time to read it now. And then later when I finally do have the time to look at your new feature? Nobody bothers actually putting that information anywhere persistent, so I guess I’m out of luck even if I care about the feature.
Updating to a new iOS version is a perfect example of this. Say there are a dozen apps that have a new feature popup on first launch when you update iOS. Imagine a typical day waking up and trying to use my phone. I have to drive somewhere so I try to put an address into Maps and have to immediately fend off the “what’s new in maps” dialog so I can type the address I need to go to. Then I want to put on the song my kid is yelling at me to play and have to fend off the “what’s new in Music” popup. Later I’m trying to respond to an important text and have to fend off “What’s new in messages”, etc etc etc.
That first day using iOS is an absolute nightmare because of this.
Now imagine the alternative: a simple badge icon in the settings app, and I tap it and see a link to “what’s new in iOS”, and guess what, it can be a fucking webpage! I can bookmark it! I can add it to my reading list and see it later! Hell, I can even share it with my friends!
But no, instead apps insist on trying to increase “engagement” with their new feature, because some PM’s promo packet wants to include “this many users used my new feature” and the only way they can think to do this is to (1) stop the user from accomplishing their task until they tap the cutesy “Got It!” button, and (2) don’t bother with persisting it anywhere, because the idea that the user doesn’t have time to check out the feature now is so foreign to these sociopaths it never even crossed their mind.
Whatever works for large numbers is what will happen.
But overall, you and I (and many) will try to push back and insist on consent.
The sign-up form with an unchecked "sign me up for your newsletter" option.
The first-run experience with a question... "do you want us to notify you of new features?"
But this is not the norm, and even if good actors get rewarded by a few childish customers, bad actors seem to get rewarded much more by a massive infusion of funds.
I'd love to hear why you say this.
one mans fact, is another ones fodder :o)
BiasScanner - Firefox Plug-In https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/bias-scanner/
It continually amazes me how people use a Google product on their desktop, as if they don't send enough data to an ad company. Actually, I'm not sure why I type this, any rational arguments are definitely not winning them over.
> It continually amazes me how people use a Google product on their desktop, as if they don't send enough data to an ad company.
I'd love to have alternatives, but which ones are there? Firefox is not an alternative; audio does not work for me as I am pulseaudio free here. On chrome-based browsers audio works fine, out of the box, so it is not my system that is at fault; it is mozilla that is at fault. I also reported this, the lazy firefox dev said all Linux users use pulseuaudio these days. Well ...
I could recompile it but compiling firefox is a pain in the ...:
https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/view/svn/xsoft/firefox...
I am not going to use a build system that is +20 years old and only exists because Mozilla is too lazy to switch to cmake or meson/ninja as primary build tool.
> Actually, I'm not sure why I type this, any rational arguments are definitely not winning them over.
Well I gave one rational argument: can't play audio on my linux box if I use firefox (by default that is). I can give many more reasons too. You seem to make the point that Google is worse, so we should also use a bad product (firefox). I think we really need better browsers in general. Firefox simply isn't one and that is Mozilla's fault. There is a reason why it went into decline. Mozilla gave up the fight - the ad-money made it weak.
Obviously I don't have any data backing me up here, but I'm going to guess that that isn't the main reason why so many people choose Chrome over Firefox.
Would second this. Mach uses Python, and the dependencies they use are a pain whenever no pre-built wheels are available. Especially so when you see that an "optional" Mach dependency for build system telemetry is what busting the configuration (not build) stage...
> mozilla is basically a google subsidiary
"Everyone" knows that Mozilla has a heavy financial reliance on Google. So are you bringing this up to suggest that Mozilla also consistently acts to benefit Google and its ad network? If so, where's the proof? If not, what's the point you're making?
> firefox telemetry is almost comparable to chrome
Comparable to Chrome what? Telemetry? Something else? What is Firefox using that data for? In the service of or against users? What's the point you're trying to make? If you're making assertions, where's the proof?
You're making a lot of imprecise comments, most of interpretations of which carry a large burden of proof, and then complaining that people are just down-voting and moving on.
Mozilla Corporation takes money from Google for search placement. That doesn’t turn it into a subsidiary. Google doesn’t own it, doesn’t run its roadmap, and doesn’t ship its code. Mozilla negotiates search deals the same way Apple does for Safari. Revenue deal ≠ corporate control.
On telemetry: you’re overstating it. Firefox ships with telemetry on, but it documents what it collects, lets users turn it off, and exposes most of it in about:config. Google Chrome ties into a much broader account system, sync stack, and ad network. Chrome doesn’t operate in isolation; it plugs straight into Google’s data ecosystem. Firefox doesn’t own an ad network to feed.
“Almost comparable” needs evidence. Comparable how? Volume? Type? Identifiability? Retention? Without specifics, the claim collapses into vibes.
The bigger difference sits lower in the stack: engine independence. Firefox runs on Gecko. Chrome runs on Blink. If you care about web monoculture, that matters more than marginal telemetry deltas. When one engine dominates, web standards start drifting toward what that engine implements. We watched that happen in the IE6 era.
As for uBlock Origin: yes, it’s a major reason people choose Firefox. But browser architecture shapes how long powerful content blockers survive. Chrome’s extension model changes (Manifest V3) restrict what blockers can do. Firefox kept the older, more capable API. That choice signals priorities.
If your argument reduces to “both collect some data, so it doesn’t matter,” you flatten meaningful differences. The question isn’t purity. The question asks who controls the engine, who sets extension policy, and who benefits from surveillance at scale.
If you think those differences don’t matter, make that case directly. But don’t blur structural distinctions into “basically the same.” They’re not.
I'm hoping the Europeans fund development to provide an alternative to Chrome.
Google search revenue represents about 75% of Mozilla's total revenue.
Google search revenue represents about 4% of Apple's total revenue.
If you think those differences don’t matter, make that case directly. But don’t blur financial distinctions into “basically the same.” They’re not.
You need to update your priors. The popular opinion is there is a reason to enable it by default. ChatGPT is the #5 most popular website in the world, more popular than Wikipedia, Reddit or Twitter. The vast majority of users want to use AI.
Here's a Firefox file [1] specifically for integrating YouTube videos into their picture-in-picture system. Your random video website won't get this treatment of course, need to be a popular one.
Here's a piece of C++ code [2] in the Firefox engine that specifically rewrites old YouTube embeds from their old HTML embed snippet to the new one. Again, your own video website will never be so deeply integrated into Firefox because it's not a top 10 website.
Firefox Readability mode makes pages more readable by removing useless stuff like videos. Unless it's a YouTube [3] or other top-N popular video website of course. YouTube videos are given special treatment because it's popular and having small integrations like this make the user experience better.
[1]: https://github.com/mozilla-firefox/firefox/blob/1f43fe5ffadd...
[2]: https://github.com/mozilla-firefox/firefox/blob/1f43fe5ffadd...
[3]: https://github.com/mozilla-firefox/firefox/blob/1f43fe5ffadd...
Firefox has so many nice things like containers but basic performance issues are still unresolved.