AI is like human genitalia. I only like it when I’m in the mood for it, and I don’t want it shoved in my face at any other time.
chef’s kiss
They just can’t help themselves, eh?
They’re not perfect, but having a real alternative engine matters more than people realize.
Then use Waterfox.
That’s why I use Internet Explorer 7
Me too
What’s wrong with IE11?
LibreWolf looks good these days.
As there seems to have been recent confusion about this, just a quick “official” toot to then pin: we haven’t and won’t support “generative AI” related stuff in LibreWolf. If you see some features like that (like Perplexity search recently, or the link preview feature now) it is solely because it “slipped through”. As soon as we become aware of something like this / it gets reported to us, we will remove/disable it ASAP.
Can it sync my password and history from Mozilla’s servers? I’d switch in a heartbeat.
Yep. Is basically a firefox stripped from junk. Just remember is very stick on privacy, if something is not visible or some pics don’t upload, you just have to enable the site permission from the icon in the navigation bar.
That’s excellent! I’ll have to investigate how to make work with profiles-sync-daemon on my system. Then it’s a definite conclusion! Thank you.
“Firefox is evolving into an agentic browser, connecting devices, cloud, and AI to unlock intelligent productivity and secure work anywhere. Join us at #MozillaIgnite to see how frontier firms are transforming with Firefox and what’s next for the platform. We can’t wait to show you!”
#MozillaIgnite
Do you think this is a cry for help?
Here’s a complementary can of gasoline and blowtorch. It would be a shame if something happened to spill the gasoline on me. And then light the blowtorch. A real shame.
Ugh, even the corporate false chipper voice.
Librewolf is great. Pretty much the same as Firefox without the shit.
Yeah but its a soft fork, inherently dependent on mozilla.
Mozilla is circling the drain, determined to drive away the last of its users.
Who cares if it’s a soft fork as long as it’s open source? The point is to keep the fork clean and if Mozilla fails, the community can just take it over.
Dunno how pale moon is doing nowadays, but forks either follow the bigger principles of the base project or wither into obscureness if the base project changes underlying technologies.
Librewolf is just a set of patches on top of Firefox.
There are no developers.I know what it is, I was just saying that the community would take over Firefox if need be.
Not really.
Mozilla spends many millions a year on devs for their browser.
If they stop doing that, LibreWolf won’t have any patches or updates.
The community is t going to take over from mozilla.
I’m not saying it would be easy, but that’s the whole point behind open source. We’d have to at least try.
What’s the migration process like?
Pretty much transparent.
I’m still angry that an (optionally) AI browser isn’t the worst idea as a headline/dev direction … if you don’t read any further than the headline that is.
I do want or eventually will need some local, foss AI to deal with all the megacorp bs AI that will be just everywhere on the internets (I can’t humanly fight the increasing megacorp slop, I need/will need my own AI to help me fight and navigate it, as a freedom necessity).
Someone pls work on that, I don’t want to live in an internetless cave/woods for the rest of my life (the cave/woods is what I wish for regardless, it’s just a question of my need for internet access).But no, they decided to hammer their dicks with all the megamatacorp AIs. I mean, it’s prob marginally better than to forward ppl to sites or Chrome, but it’s not a thing that you would want publicized as a major step/direction, it’s at the very least distasteful.
It’s a fucking infection is what it is.
Even HomeAssistant, which is literally meant to be the open source alternative to all the big tech megacorp enshittification, is now vibe coding their server core and most major plugins, as I found out recently.
They’re also censoring discussion about it on their forums, when I tried bringing it up- everything hidden as ‘off topic.’
A complete betrayal of their users, imo.
Also AI could theoretically do an even better job at ad blocking and also block other annoying shit like autoplay videos and html5 popups (fuck any web dev that uses them without a user click prompting the popup, they are like the old style popups that were a cancer on the early web, only marginally better because they don’t try to bomb your browser/system like they occasionally would do back then).
Though what I’d really like to see is a DOM designed to serve the user’s will rather than the webdevs’.
Yes, this is exactly what I meant, smart blocking (especially since nowdays ads are “content”), and at some point in the future when services (eg banks) will force you to go through their ultra-processed & upsalesy AI chat for everything you could just send in your own AI to deal with their bs AI trying to monetise everything.
Pretty sure the translate feature is using local ai, which I think is great! Its not as accurate as others, but a lot more trustworthy at least
You will never guess who already did that.
Oh, qewl, that is almost what I meant if they pivot that way.
(Something seems familiar with this, but can’t even decide if I heard about it before or not. If it would integrate in the everyday browsing experience without too much extra external data, this could eventually be the help I spoke about.)
free bottom surgery :3
Well, I still haven’t seen any AI in my Firefox and I’m planing on using it until I will.
Hold your click for at least one second on any link and it will show a preview of the link and suggest you to use AI to describe it
Solution:
about:config > browser.ml.enable = falseI genuinely thought you said “hold your dick for at least one second”
Time to pull out a hammer
STOP! HAMMER TIME!
Can’t touch this.
Haha 😄 funny you.
Settings > scroll down to “General” > look at the options under “Enable link previews”. You can turn the previews off altogether or just turn off the AI part
This is a defence only until it isn’t - although thank you for the tip.
That’s how Windows has been going for years - adding more and more crap and make it all default enabled, and people are like “Oh just turn it off bro.”
Then every update adds more unwanted options that get increasingly difficult to turn off, or randomly turn themselves back on, and before you know it we’ve reached a point where every new install soon needs an entire checklist to go through to make things actually usable again.
That is not how life should be. I want something that respects me by default, and if it wants me to try a feature I might find even slightly objectional, I should have to explicitly opt-in and say YES.
Firefox is setting a precedent by moving in this direction, and they’ve showed their hand. There’s only more where this came from, and I won’t tolerate it, even if I can turn it off.
When the Firefox terms and conditions drama happened some months back, that was the push I needed to switch to Librewolf. It’s a Firefox fork with privacy-respecting settings out of the gate, no sponsored content, no ads, uBlock pre-installed, and absolutely zero AI. If you’re a Firefox user, I recommend you try it too.
Yeah, you can also opt out of your planet being demolished to build the intergalactic highway, the form is in the basement.
Incidentally, most of the new llm bullshits are on by default and can’t be turn off in the settings, you need to go to about:config and search for .ml to do so (not to be confused with .ml instance of lemmy which you also can’t easily opt out of). Obviously this settings aren’t synchronised between instances by “synchronise all settings” thingy which they need my personal info for, why would it, so you need to do it every time. Also also they sometimes revert back with major updates, because obviously they are.In my opinion this is one of the main issues. All those features should be disabled by default, and only the user decide if they want to enable them!
But they are doing the opposite.
Thanks I already did that, but it still ticks me off that I had to find out they added this while using the browser. This shit should be off by default.
So it’s entirely optional, you only encounter it by interacting with the browser in an atypical way, and the thing it does is a thing that AI is actually pretty decent at (summarizing text)? Sounds like they couldn’t stop themselves from joining the dick hammering bandwagon, but decided not to hit it too hard.
entirely optional
No, it’s on by default, it has access to everything you’re browsing and doing fuck knows what with it, and you need to know that it is doing it and unless you’ve read it somewhere you don’t know that it’s there.
thing that AI is actually pretty decent at (summarizing text)
That’s so not true it’s not even funny.
I mean yeah, it could be worse, everything could be worse. Still, not good, not good at all.
This isn’t my wheelhouse so take it with a grain of salt, but an argument against link summarizers that I’ve heard is that it takes views away from websites that could be generating revenue for themselves. Instead an LLM scraped their content and fed a summary directly to the user.
It’s more of a concern with google summaries that show up at the top of search results because it completely removes the need to click on any of the websites it pulls from. Ideally a link summary just lets you figure out which link you need without clicking on and looking at each one.
Thanks for adding that detail, makes sense. I was thinking the link previews were yeah more like the google results. Hover over and not have to go to the site.
Do people making that argument also find ad blockers even ten percent as horrible as this? They both ultimately have the same effect, which is your web browser not maximizing someone else’s profits by denying them a revenue opportunity.
I’d be curious if the link summarizer in Firefox runs a model locally or calls some remote API. Most current machines ought to be able to run an appropriate LLM model for that task.
That’s a good question. I’d personally argue that it’s different in that the adblockers are not an inbuilt part of Firefox, they’re made by extension developers. This is built right into the browser.
*yet
The new CEO is an AI True Believer, and I don’t doubt this will last.
They’ll remove the options to turn it off, and make it full of the AI features, with no opt-out or opt-in
you only encounter it by interacting with the browser in an atypical way
Leaving my pointer on a random place that happens to be a link is atypical? I don’t think it is. I had this pop up to me a couple of days ago and I didn’t even understand what could’ve triggered it, I was wondering if I clicked something or pressed a key unconsciously.
and the thing it does is a thing that AI is actually pretty decent at (summarizing text)
Pretty decent? Just passable, if the text is about some run-of-the-mill topic.
Doesn’t do that for me. I have to hold left click on a link for over a second to trigger it.
And yeah, pretty decent. It can produce a basically summary of a fair amount of text pretty quickly and generally accurately. It’s not an expert wordsmith, it won’t give a deep and thoughtful analysis of the poem you pointed it at or anything, but that’s not the use case. The use case is “give me the key bullet points of this article so I can decide if I should give it more attention.”, and it does that job pretty well.
generally accurately
This is absolutely, demonstrably, documentedly not true. It is accurate sometimes, and sometimes it shows you absolute bullshit. When will it be accurate? Who knows. So you can use it only when you don’t care about the truth, in which case why even bother, just imagine the article said what you wanted it to say and be done with it
Depends on model tuning. Basically, you can tune a model to hallucinate less, or to write more human-like, but not really both at the same time, at least not for a model you could expect most users to run locally. For this sort of application (summarizing text), you’d tune heavily against hallucination, because ideally your bullet points are going to mostly be made up of direct paraphrase of article text, with a very limited need for fluid writing or anything even vaguely creative.
Basically, you can tune a model to hallucinate less
You can tune it to hallucinate more, you can’t tune it to not hallucinate at all, and that’s what matters. You need it to be “not at all” if you want it to be useful, otherwise you can never be sure that it’s not lying, and you can’t check for lies other than reading the article, which defies the whole purpose of it.
Doesn’t do that for me. I have to hold left click on a link for over a second to trigger it.
I misunderstood the previous comments, actually, yeah, it’s not triggered the way I assumed.
The use case is “give me the key bullet points of this article so I can decide if I should give it more attention.”, and it does that job pretty well.
I’ll put aside all the other complaints I have on my mind, because we’ve both probably gone through similar discussions, I don’t want to get bogged down in yet another, and just say that I honestly can’t imagine this being such a useful or time-saving thing in the first place. Like, did it use to be a frequent problem to you to start reading an article, realise you’re not interested, and give up on it?
Holding my click on a volume slider triggered the feature so it quickly became really annoying
Good I learnt something today. 😏
It doesn’t.
Installed Firefox from the Mint repos. It does.*
*Source: Me, just tried it.
Well, mine doesn’t. I’m not going to search how to enable it. I will just keep using the best browser there is and donating to Servo.
It does if you have a default install
There are a bunch of flags in
about:configyou can check as well, if you wanna be extra sure they’re turned off. Just search forbrowser.ml. There are more but this was all I could capture in one screenshot. Bold means I had to change it, which means it was on by default. That said I’m using CachyOS repos, not the direct Arch ones.
You only need to set
browser.ml.enabletofalse.
The article does say that we should always be able to turn off the AI part.
Arch Linux package maintainers seem to have disabled it by default unless I did something and forgot
Yeah I’m switch off Firefox finally. I tried Floorp it does have some the same AI stuff you have to turn off. Waterfox doesn’t have it in at all. So Waterfox it is.
For future readers, yes, Floorp is a real browser
Honestly the way they (by default) change home tab background for each visit is absolutely adorable.
All my 'puters have Water, Wolf, and Floo.
Floorp
I don’t think I will ever be able to pass past this name. It’s a name of something that sci-fi comedic cartoon will create for a passing joke.
Feels like ‘plumbus’
I actually use floorp. It’s literally the most customizable Firefox fork. It’s the only Firefox fork that allows me to have my tab bar exactly correct the way I want it.
But yeah name’s stupid. I kind of love it though. It’s so non-serious
It’s also a good verb. “I’ll floorp it later”. “Send me the link, I’ll floorp it to myself”.
Does it support profiles? If so, I’ll give it a floorp, just to see how it floorps.I’m still not convinced that name isn’t an elaborate joke. Like I could download the browser and be typing this comment on it and still think “man, they went all-in on this prank”
Waterfox is my favorite for sure, very lightweight too.
Waterfox it is.
Long ago, the Four Fox Nations lived together in harmony. Then everything changed when the Firefox Nation attacked.
A hundred years passed and my brother and I discovered the new developer, a script kiddy named Aang. And although his python skills are great, he has a lot to learn before he’s ready to save anyone. But I believe Aang can save the world.
Given python is air what are water, ice, blood, fire, lightning, combustion, earth, metal, and energy?
Ok, let’s do this:
Air = Python Water = Javascript Ice = Typescript Fire = Java Lightning = Groovy Combustion = Kotlin Earth = C++ Metal = Rust Spirit = Assembly
Haven’t heard of this before 😮
I just got Waterfox this morning. Pretty dope
there is a mobile waterfox too now
Does it have ublock?
It has browser extensions, and you can install uBlock through that, so yes
It’s the only browser I have on my phone, it works beautifully.
Waterfox is Firefox.
Its a fork and they can choose to include the changes they want from upstream. They’ve come out and said they’re not adding this AI bullshit. Librewolf has done the same.
So yes, base is firefox, but it’s not actually Firefox, in the same way edge uses chrome as its base (not exactly, but similar)
in the same way edge uses chrome as its base
It is much different than this. Edge is built on the Chromium engine, but that’s it. Waterfox is Firefox, as it’s shipped by Mozilla, only with some theme changes and flags disabled.
Oh, I had thought they had some control of upstream merges if its a fork. Couldn’t they choose not to include the upstream AI nonsense merges?
It’s a fork of Firefox.
It is a set of patches on top of Firefox.
I’m holding out for EarthFox
Save us
LadybirdServo, you’re our only hope.Too bad it’s made by someone who promotes ‘great replacement’ theory and stands with fascists.
Since the comment you were responding to was edited to strike out “Ladybird” and write “Servo” instead, would you mind editing your comment to clarify you are talking about Ladybird and not Servo?
So what alternative do you suggest?
Zen Browser, open source Firefox fork
Just got it on play store, there’s an ad everytime I open it?
Zen Browser is not even on Android. The one in the Play Store is not what they’re talking about.
Thanks for clarifying. As much as I love open source, I’ll still want something that can offer a similar experience on both desktop and mobile. For anyone else like me, I’d suggest Waterfox.
I suggest IronFox for Android.
Holy hell. I knew about the gender neutral pronouns debacle. Didn’t know there are more…
Are we supposed to only use products and services from people whom we agree with completely on their full set of personal beliefs?
No, but why get behind a fascist sympathiser when a better project exists: servo.org.
Moving to a technically better project is a no brainer
I hate to be the one to tell you this. If you mostly agree with a fascist, maybe that’s a sign of something. And yes, shaming fascists is in fact, a good thing.
This is a pretty gnarly one to just ignore.
Yeah, great replacement isnt an “Oh well, let’s just agree to disagree” type of thing.
I have this person tagged as a fascist so…this tracks
Mobile app? I don’t see a tag option on my desktop. I’m pretty sure I used to tag people a lot when I used that other site.
Just a bit of fascism, as a treat?
When it concerns fascism? How the fuck do you even dare to ask that question?
Your comment got me thinking deeply 😮😮😮
Yes. I can and I will. You cannot stop me, I am mad with power.
What about Servo?
Any good browsers that use it available yet?
still mozilla
edit: I get it, stop replying
Not since 2020 when Mozilla laid them off. They are now with the Linux Foundation Europe and they accept donations.
Nope, Mozilla gave up on Servo in 2020. It‘s now governed by the Linux Foundation Europe.
Servo hasn’t had anything to do with mozilla for five years
You can’t tell me what to do :3
Just disable the feature or use one of the great Firefox forks like Librewolf or Waterfox. Maybe even Iceweasel.
The world has really gone to shit if the cryptobrowser is our only hope
I know I’m gonna get a lot of flack for suggesting this, but Vivaldi feels like what Firefox should have been. More customizability, less AI and sponsored crap. They are the only major browser offering an option for a small, reasonably sized tab bar rather than the tab bars with 3 layers of padding and more whitespace than text.
Additionally, Vivaldi doesn’t pester you with twice-a-day update pop-ups or worse, the dreaded “Restart to keep using Firefox,” it just gets out of your way like a good browser should.
On the other hand they literally built an email client into their web browser. I don’t think they’ve met scope creep they didn’t like.
I think floorp and zen are trying to be the Vivaldi of Firefox but with less…stuff.
Netscape 3 with integrated mail and news is still the best internet experience that’s ever been conceived or designed or implemented. Communicator screwed it all up less than a year later but it was the best while it lasted.
Fast forward nearly 30 years and pretty much everyone uses webmail, so building a web-based client into your browser to poorly interact with an existing web-based service seems questionable.
If I want something to do a shit job accessing Gmail’s shitty non-standard service, I can always let thunderbird do a shit job.
Just because you force yourself to use Gmail, it doesn’t mean that Thunderbird is shit for others.
Nobody ever said it was
I tried it before, it was buggy and my tabs locked up. Also since its based on chrome, its very nerfed when it comes to powerful plugins. I didnt like it. My first impression was positive but no, it feels very bloated.
But if you like it and you feel its better than Firefox for you, thats a good thing.
Is it chromium? If yes than pass. Did everyone forgot when Google tried to use chromium to take control with this bullshit?
Waterfox
Good, good💯
Vivaldi is by far the best browser out there. Its customizability and tab handling is second to none. Anyone not giving it a spin are missing out. Yes, their UI is proprietary, but out of all the things to be concerned about, this aint it. They are based in Norway and made by software engineers who worked on Opera browser who out of principle just wants a good browser which is not in corporate hell.
Seriously give it a try.
If i cant use uBlock origin on a browser, it cant be my primaryb browser.
Vivaldi is by far the best browser out there
Maybe among the wheelchair bound browsers that don’t let you properly block ads.
I stopped using Opera more 15 years ago, shortly before they dropped their own engine.
I did like their customisation options, 20+ years ago they were the only browser supporting mouse gestures too.
But I see no reason why would I want to use what’s basically chromium, especially bcs of ad blocking.
Y’all just live with ads? (I don’t think sinkholes catch everything.)Additionally I do not want to support proprietary code if I don’t have to.
i use vivaldi as well. seriously!
The image is nearly 10 months old!
Anyone that is not using Libre Wolf or equivalent should be to take advantage of the wonderful privacy suite.
Haven’t heard of that before 😮
