- cross-posted to:
- firefox@fedia.io
- hackernews@lemmy.bestiver.se
- cross-posted to:
- firefox@fedia.io
- hackernews@lemmy.bestiver.se
“It’s safe to say that the people who volunteered to “shape” the initiative want it dead and buried. Of the 52 responses at the time of writing, all rejected the idea and asked Mozilla to stop shoving AI features into Firefox.”
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Hey all, just a reminder to keep the community rules in mind when commenting on this thread. Criticism in any direction is fine, but please maintain your civility and don’t stoop to ad-hominem etc. Thanks.
Oh, the people who give them money want it.
And they value their opinion more then everyone else’s
Why not just distribute a separate build and call it “Firefox AI Edition” or something? Making this available in the base binary is a big mistake. At least doing so immediately and without testing the waters.
Just render the page, page renderer.
Cannot wait for Servo & LadyBird to take off
The more AI is being pushed into my face, the more it pisses me off.
Mozilla could have made an extension and promote it on their extension store. Rather than adding cruft to their browser and turning it on by default.
The list of things to turn off to get a pleasant experience in Firefox is getting longer by the day. Not as bad as chrome, but still.
Oh this triggers me. There have been multiple good suggestions for Firefox in the past that are closed with nofix as “this can be provided by the community as an add-on”. Yet they shove the crappiest crap into the main browser now.
So, will there be an option to disable it?
Yes, and they push it less than tab groups and PWA. This is a nothingburger.
I am not really liking AI , sure its good for somethings but in last 2 weeks i seen some very negative and destructive outcomes from AI . I am so tired of everything being AI . It can have good potential but what are risks to users experience?
Hear me out.
This could actually be cool:
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If I could, say, mash in “get rid of the junk in this page” or “turn the page this color” or “navigate this form for me”
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If it could block SEO and AI slop from search/pages, including images.
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If I can pick my own API (including local) and sampling parameters
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If it doesn’t preload any model in RAM.
…That’d be neat.
What I don’t want is a chatbot or summarizer or deep researcher because there are 7000 bajillion of those, and there is literally no advantage to FF baking it in like every other service on the planet.
And… Honestly, PCs are not ready for local LLMs. Not even the most exotic experimental quantization of Qwen3 30B is ‘good enough’ to be reliable for the average person, and it still takes too much CPU/RAM. And whatever Mozilla ships would be way worse.
That could change with a good bitnet model, but no one with money has pursued it yet.
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Doesn’t matter what the end-user wants. Corporate greed feeding into technological ignorance is gonna shove it down our throats anyway
Can I just take my Firefox Profile directory, and copy it over to LibreWolf? Does anybody know?
I wouldn’t. Part of how LibreWolf works is that it makes extensive changes to a new profile, just copying your profile over kinda defeats the object.
The best way is to export your bookmarks and cookies from Firefox (there are add-ons that can help if you don’t know how) and then import them into LibreWolf.
Also, if you use Firefox to store your passwords, you should export those too, and keep them somewhere safer. The browser’s an obvious target and LibreWolf disables password storage by default for that reason. KeePassXC is what I use but use whatever works for you.
Makes sense. But they change “just” the default settings, right? I would like to take over my existing profile if it works. To me it does not defeat the purpose, because I did a lot of custom tweaking to make it more private too. So from that perspective I am happy and that is not the reason why I change. I change because I’m fed up with the Ai integration of Firefox.
Edit: But maybe its also time for a fresh start from scratch. And rethink every detail again. I am very hesitant to make the switch right now… but it has to be done.
What about your profile, other than your bookmarks and cookies, do you want to keep?
I think ive lost hope at this point to see AI being actually useful in any application except chat gpt and code editors.
Companies are struggling how to use Ai in their products because it actually doesnt improve their product, but they really really want it to.
I have studied machine learning to an useful level. Based on that it currently looks to me that:
A fine-tuned (for specific purposes) LLM utilising RAG and high quality prompt engineering can make redundant north of 50% white collar office roles over some small number of years of further fine-tuning (post initial deployment of the AI).
But without these techniques LLM’s just aren’t accurate enough to be deployable on a large scale. Usually these techniques require a locally hosted LLM for one reason or another.
The only sized organisations that it might make sense to use these multi-billion data centres for the above purposes (to get the LLM’s accurate enough to be useful) are governments, or huge companies that can pay billions to the likes of microsoft (or OpenAI, or Anthropic or whoever is left standing) to do all of the above on a huge scale.
I might be wrong now, but even if I am not, it is such a rapidly changing technology that in three months this might be an out of date opinion.
You want AI in your browser? Just add <your favourite spying ad machine> as a “search engine” option, with a URL like
https://chatgpt.com/?q=%25s, with a shortcut like
@ai. You can then ask it anything right there in your search bar.Maybe also add one with a URL with some query pre-written like
https://chatgpt.com/?q=summarize this page for me: %sas
@aisor something, modern chatbots have the ability to make HTTP requests for you. Then if you want to summarize the page you’re on, you do Ctrl+L Ctrl+C @ais Ctrl+V Enter. There, I solved all your AI needs with 4 shortcuts without literally any client-side code.ai can be good as long as you don’t let it think for you. i think the problem is taking resources from development and building into a browser would could just be a bookmark to a webpage.
why don’t they just instead put vivaldi’s web panel sidebar into firefox so you can just add chatgpt or whatever as a web panel. i think that would be infinitely more useful (and can be used for other sites other than ai assistants).
ai can be good as long as you don’t let it think for you
Unfortunately, there’s too many people already doing that, with not so clever results!
If it increases accessibility for those with additional requirements then great but we know that’s not even in its top 10 reasons for being implemented
Don’t they already have that last thing you mentioned?
it’s an addon but not baked in (not to the point like vivaldi where you can add any web panel as a url and have it display in the sidebar)
Those unhappy have another option: use an AI‑free Firefox fork such as LibreWolf, Waterfox, or Zen Browser.
And I have taken that other option.
Also: Vanadium and/or Ironfox on Android.
What I don’t get: Isn’t Vanadium Chromium under the hood?
It is.
My understanding is that you go to Ironfox to optimize for privacy and Vanadium to optimize for security.
It depends on your threat model.
Either way, both are better on both fronts when compared to default Chrome or Firefox.
The truth is that Chromium is really good. It has the best security and performance.
Vanadium takes that and makes changes to make it more secure and private.
Yes. Chromium isn’t bad in itself though.
Wrong. You are both popularizing Google tech and decreasing web browser diversity when you use any chromium variety
Vandium is all about not standing out from the crowd. You use it to not make a statement and hide your activity within the majority of useragents. If you want to make a statement that’s great, but you should only do it when you’re ok being fingerprinted.
Who says I’m “making a statement” by using firefox? That’s not the goal at all.
I didn’t mean that in a negative way. All I meant was that using a non-chromium browser to help move the needle is a privacy tradeoff. I keep both vandium and ironfox installed and use them at different times for different things.
Google tech
Chromium is open-source. It doesn’t belong to Google or anyone else.
Are you serious? Chromium is very much mostly written by Google and the direction it takes in every way that matters is entirely controlled by Google.
This still doesn’t mean Google has some kind of ownership for it. Nobody stops you from forking it and taking it into a different direction.
I mean technically, yes. However the sheer amount of LoC chromium has and the costs of actually hard forking (and properly maintaining it) makes it quite difficult. That’s why right now we only have the choice of Firefox based browsers and Chromium, then hopefully a good third contender being the Ladybird browser in the future.
You could also go build a house (or even a cabin) with your own two hands, but most people typically go and buy one or pay for one to be built for them instead.
It actually does. You’re still supporting a browser monoculture unless you change it so radically that it makes no sense to call it a fork anymore
A fork is great, but the more a fork deviates, the more issues there are likely to be. Firefox is already at low enough numbers that it’s not really sustainable.
My two biggest issues with a fork are: a) timely updates, they take a bit longer than the main version, and b) trust issues, I don’t trust most forks.
Then Mozilla should start listening to their users instead of driving them away. I know I stopped using Firefox after being a regular user since launch because the AI nonsense became the last sta straw.
Then Mozilla should start listening to their users instead of driving them away.
I think the hope is to get more people in than losing them. But with Ai nobody will stay forever, because the time someone else makes a better Ai tool, they switch. Because Mozilla loses personality and uniqueness and start getting replaceable. … just like employees who are forced to use Ai instead their own work and knowledge.
Yes but we shouldn’t let perfect be the enemy of good.
What do you mean by “we shouldn’t let perfect be the enemy of good”? Why should I use a browser which is actively anti-user when there are better alternatives out there?
There aren’t better alternatives, and the ai shit is all easy to disable.
ai shit is all easy to disable
Users don’t have to disable it. Just give them a browser where they’re not enabled by default!
To my knowledge that literally only exists in the form of a Firefox fork like Librewolf. Which takes more effort to switch to than simply disabling a couple values in config.
There aren’t better alternatives
They are literally mentioned in the article:
Those unhappy have another option: use an AI‑free Firefox fork such as LibreWolf, Waterfox, or Zen Browser.
- https://manualdousuario.net/en/mozilla-firefox-window-ai/.
Well, the first two essentially are Firefox and the latter is very immature to the point that I doubt you could reliably use it. It’s in beta.
