What I like about Mozilla's approach here is the single toggle for all current and future AI. That's a genuine concession to user agency rather than the usual whack-a-mole of about:config flags. If every new feature category got this treatment (a clear, discoverable off switch), browsers would be in a much better place trust-wise.
The deeper issue is that Mozilla needs revenue diversification beyond the Google search deal, and AI features are their bet on that. So the incentive to make the toggle hard to find or slowly degrade the non-AI experience will always be there. I'd love to see them prove that wrong.
My thought exactly! I'm grateful that Mozilla isn't hiding the features behind dark config UI patterns.
The implication is that all future AI features will be opt-out.
That's it, I would be willing to make a one time purchase for that, no subscriptions... Ok, I could maybe be convinced for a subscription if it was a low yearly one.
Pretty much impossible for Firefox to achieve 50% of market share
It feels like browsers are like old IDEs where everything is bundled in. I think it would be much better it they were more like modern code editors where people can make their own custom IDE by installing the plugins they want.
Currently, this tech is a sleeper because consumer hardware is not there yet.
Extensions, even websites, could benefit a lot from offering small models on demand and powering client-side features with them.
That is very different from a browser that embeds AI access through an API, and totally acceptable.
Maybe they're ok now but they had some really gross mistakes (?).
It's a great browser, but I always forget the default settings are super stupid. Myself and power users all have it customized to the hilt.
It takes some serious work to get a new new FireFox install working nicely.
But it should go even further; the ultimate goal should be for all Firefox users to basically look the same from the point of view of third parties and put an end to tracking in the modern Web.
> Translations, which help you browse the web in your preferred language.
Machine translation can be useful when you want to get the gist of something in a language you don't know.
> Alt text in PDFs, which add accessibility descriptions to images in PDF pages.
OCR? Okay...
> AI-enhanced tab grouping, which suggests related tabs and group names.
What is this feature even trying to do? It sounds like ill-defined trash.
> Link previews, which show key points before you open a link.
Or I could just click the 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.
This is the thing that most people are probably complaining about. Lumping the other features in with it is a distraction.
How much do these break functionality? If I spoof language, am I going to start seeing websites in German? If I spoof screen size, am I going to get weirdly zoomed websites?
It is really tiring to hear this stuff. People (rightfully) complained there was no switch. One was added. In Chrome, you can't turn off Google's ai unless you install a third party extension that hasn't yet been blocked by Google. Not a lot of companies allow disabling their garbage, but FF does.
Can't we be happy with this nice switch?
It sounds like you would want to switch off two of them and leave two of them on, no? How is that malicious compliance?
The master AI switch is for people that have moral issues with all AI, so they want all future features turned off.
(Oh, and an extension that redirects reddit links to old reddit, and RES)
- Enable pixel-perfect smooth scrolling (Linux): MOZ_USE_XINPUT2=1 (why do we still have to do this??)
- Enable: Ctrl-Tab cycles through recent used order
- Disable: "Show an image preview when you hover on a tab"
- Disable: "Use AI to suggest tabs and a name for tab group"
- Disable: "Enable Picture-in-Picture video controls"
- Disable: "Control media via keyboard, headset, or virtual interface"
- Disable: "Recommend extensions as you browse"
- Disable: "Recommend features as you browse"
- Disable: "Enable link previews"
- Homepage and new windows: Blank page
- New tabs: Blank page
- Disable: Web Search
- Disable: Weather
- Disable: Shortcuts
- Disable: Recommended stories
- Disable: Support Firefox
- Disable: "Save and autofill payment info"
- Disable: "Save and autofill addresses"
- Disable: "Ask to save passwords"
- Locations: Select "Block new requests asking to access your location"
- Notification: Select "Block new requests asking to allow notifications"
- Autoplay: Select "Block Audio and Video"
- Virtual Reality: Select "Block new requests asking to access your virtual reality devices"
- Default Search engine: DuckDuckGo
- Disable "Suggest search engines to use"
- Disable "Quick actions"
- Disable "Suggestions from Firefox"
- Disable: "Title Bar"
- Default Zoom: 110%, 120%, depending on the laptop
And I install the following extensions:
- uBlock Origin
- Privacy Badger
- Facebook Container
- Firefox Multi-account ContainerI have my browser set to request, in order, English, a different English, then a non-English language. Some sites (Android docs, Gitlab, F-Droid) will send me the non-English content; Google even preferentially does their AI translation thing instead of the original English.
There was a PR campaign ("on their behalf" ? :] ), posting on certain websites in the first year of their launch or so. (This was before the fraud in which Brave were taking donations in the name of someone else, without anyones consent.) It involved posting things like "Come home, white man" and other dog-whistles on image-boards along with the brave-lion logo imagery on a consistent, regular basis. There's probably archives of these threads and people calling out they were very obviously automated and calculated. Who else at this point would even care to do it for them?
Eich got kicked out of Mozilla for his views not aligning with everyone else, so him weaponizing his own views like that isn't exactly what some would call unexpected. He might also not know the extent of which his PR goons go to promote his stuff, but come on now... the whole image is planned. There's a reason they choose to 'break a few rules' and they want their browser image to be that of a 'strong authoritative male leader' specifically. It appeals to a certain demographic also, wonder who... /s
I just think it's super fucking lame and plenty of people smell that shit a mile away. Which explains why plenty of people say "fuck no" without even knowing half of this shit.
I want my tools to keep working the way they have been working. I don't want to be paranoid that "garbage" (as you put it), or any other controversial changes, are going to be slipped into my tools while I'm not looking.
I have several thousand curated bookmarks. And I only discovered too late the new "feature". Disrupted my former flow (mark on mobile, sort/categorize on desktop)
They could have made this configurable, but no... those smart asses knew better.
I have that GitHub issue where they initially discussed it for iOS bookmarked and screenshoted, to remind myself how utterly stupid some people are. I hate every sucker involved.
Their level of acceptance for releasing a new model (AKA new language support) is to benchmark within 5% difference of Google Translate, basically proving you don't need an external party to do good-enough translations for you. It's like the coolest thing they worked on recently.
I am still in position where I need to put some small pipeline to automatically download latest + merge my stuff and deploy, but even if it's manual every month or two it's not too bad.
Mozilla is mainly responding to inflammatory comments like yours by adding additional toggles to disable any sort of trace in the UI about those features even existing.
Pretty impressive project, and it’s really nice to use, I would recommend to give it a try
That's why.
It's perfectly within your capability to plunge someone else's shit down the toilet. It's not even difficult.
Why can't you be happy with this solution? They gave you a plunger, it's not like you're clearing the toilet with your bare hands!
It's hard for me to look at Google, Win11, M$ office, and then complain about Firefox.
My point is just that everyone is so critical of Firefox, when the alternative is disproportionately, orders of magnitude worse for the user.
I'd rather bash on minor Firefox grievances when it's the #1 browser, not when it's losing/lost the browser war and it's our last chance at browser engine diversity.
As for Firefox’s Total Cookie Protection, cookies are not the only tracking vector: https://privacybadger.org/#Is-Privacy-Badger-compatible-with...
Together with Privacy Badger, Meta has no clue what you're doing on the rest of the web.
"Disable: "Show an image preview when you hover on a tab""
Maybe we need a justtheconfig.com
Image preview is slightly slower and has noticeable latency, compared to the text popup that is almost instantaneous.
And it is more visually distracting. I hate UI features that interfere with my workflow. I hate most UI animations. I turned animations off on my Android phone, and now the thing just flies.
1.
I recently made an extension to "bookmark data". It's an auto scraper, but client side.
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/lidar/eckcmnibplmme...
The user has to pick the elements so the extension knows which selectors to track across similar pages.
While developing it, I imagined a near future in which a small enough model could do that for me.
In fact, if I had the resources, I could probably train one specifically for that and use webnn or onnx or something to deliver it.
2.
I also made a quick drum beat generator https://alganet.github.io/quick-beats/
One of the things I wanted to do is improved beat detection. Several music apps have some sort of tempo detection (you tap on the desk and the microphone catches it and figures out the tempo).
While I can certainly use audio analysis to do that, it has its limits. If I wanted to detect a full drum pattern (the user taps on different objects for kick and snare, and the app fills them), something machine-learny sounds much more appropriate for the job.
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Your poke at the issue "for what? summarising web pages?" is valid though. While I don't have the resources to train those models I mentioned, the resulting weights should be fairly compatible with todays consumer hardware.
I blame the complete and utter lack of imagination of small-to-mid AI labs for the missing variety in that space.
It results in people not being very creative in imagining valid, non-shitty spammy marketing ways of using AI. They exist though.
- browser.download.dir
- browser.helperApps.neverAsk.saveToDisk
And instead of making a "google doc" a plaintext file would be better.