Tor browser removing various Firefox AI features

What else does Waterfox remove? Does it still support signining in with a Mozilla account to enable sync features? Would be nice to see a comprehensive list somewhere; I couldn't see anything on the Waterfox homepage or the GitHub README.

Thanks for maintaining Waterfox. For me it has been working without issues, basically Firefox but with reasonable defaults, and I don’t have to constantly look for and manually disable “features” like these.

Thank you! Downloading Waterfox now and spreading the word! This AI jamming its way into everything needs to end.

cough Avast "secure" cough dies of cringe

fr Tor did a good job

I’ve found it super nice.

Similar to the “AI should be an assistant programmer, not an independent dev”, having Claude there and being able to ask questions about specific topics while I read is fantastic. Especially for scientific papers that are outside my specialty (i.e. all of them.)

I have a Gemini sidebar, it just appeared out of nowhere one day, but I find it useful though. You can give it a URL and it can summarize it or whatever.

Didn't know about it either, until it got pushed in my face a few days ago, for whatever reason. Didn't leave a great taste in my mouth.

It was weird when it just showed up one day, but after using it a bit, I like it.

They make such strange choices though.

Like `Firefox Data Collection and Use` which includes `Send technical and interaction data to Mozilla` and some other stuff is on by default. [1]

Glean data is here [2]

Historically I don't think FF would have made that decision - now I have to periodically check what else they turned on without me asking.

I generally don't like telemetry but I really don't like telemetry that is on by default - that very much should always be a "Would you like to?" question.

[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/technical-and-interacti...

[2] https://dictionary.telemetry.mozilla.org/apps/firefox_deskto...

Maybe the Firefox team should stop doing bad things if they don’t want people saying bad things about them.

I gave up on Firefox, sadly. I still use Thunderbird (which is apparently no longer part of Mozilla), but I couldn't deal with FF and Mozilla screwing around anymore.

I switched to Orion which has been working great for me. I'm happy to pay money for my browser and be confident that the money is actually being put towards maintaining and improving the browser.

I want Firefox to succeed, I just... can't justify it.

I wonder if they'd do better by charging $10 for a compiled binary and distributing it on Linux as an AppImage. I'd be happier to pay for that than send an unrestricted donation to the Mozilla foundation. Normally I frown on unrestricted donations, but something seems really off over there.

There was a whole experiment with this "Tab Candy" thing a few years ago. And it failed and Mozilla disabled it and it got silently removed, well, almost, because a fair amount of people complained. I wouldn't be surprised if today's tab groups go the same way. Browser innovation is hard and at this point most of the innovation is in forks of Firefox, rather than Firefox itself.

>building useful features like tab groups

wow what an achievement. Vivaldi which has 1% of there budget had that feature for almost 10 years. Despite almost half a billion dollar budget almost all there good UI changes come years late being the last to add them for example profile management.

It is honestly embarrassing to compare Mozilla to companies like brave that actually created a private ecosystem without subsidization from there competitors.

Am I the only one who remembers the old tab groups that were removed before these new tab groups were added?

Edit: Ah, it seems Mozilla remembers: https://web.archive.org/web/20151112023150/https://support.m... (linking archive.org in case they take it down, this is the first copy I can find)

Any info about planned open sourcing? I have not heard about it.

I'd love to be able to open up an arbitrary web page in this sidebar. It would be super valuable for research. They can obviously do it, since the AI sidebar also loads a web page, but the functionality is locked for some reason, and vertical splitting extensions are pure jank.

I really wish Mozilla would focus on addressing some of the numerous user feature requests, rather than whatever the current trend is.

Not only that, AI providers shouldn't be a hardcoded list.

Firefox used to be the most configurable, everything plugable browser, what happened on that?

If a 1.0 was released today, would they have a hardcoded list of search engines?

Exactly. Firefox probably owes almost all of its remaining market share to its extension ecosystem, but it is rotting away in neglect.

First-party extensions are a nice way to test out ideas and features without increasing the core product's maintenance burden. I wouldn't even mind if Mozilla heavily promoted their own extensions, because it would help draw attention to the extension library as a whole.

It should if you try to fly off the radar. Not that Tor browser isn't a fucken emmentaler.

Reminds me of the story of the ice tea company that changed their name to include "Blockchain" and saw their value shoot up a few years ago

I'm waiting for the day we get microwaves with an AI that turns them off once the timer reaches zero.

What "HD craze" was there from 2015-2020?

The HD craze was more like 20 years ago, you're getting old :)

It feels like we are going to need a lot of volunteer effort to help remove all the AI garbage out of all these projects that insist on jamming AI into themselves.

Agereed. Sadly, we're on the wrong planet, my friend. AI will be shoved into every available orifice and more. It's a great tool for "them" to gather even more info on you to sell to anyone with a handful of nickels.

The last thing any of these masters of the universe will do is leverage AI to make everyone's life better.

[flagged]

The AI integrations, AFAIK, work only if you provide an API key.

Lots of nonprofits have CEO comp in the millions. Firefox is a large company with lots of employees and tens of millions of users. They have to offer compensation that is somewhat close to market rates to be able to hire people capable of managing that kind of scale. Mozilla isn't funded by individual donations and doesn't charge its users for Firefox, so what does it matter what the execs get paid?

Non-profits are headed but also staffed with the same ambititious types as for-profit businesses. If you think only Mozilla pays its CEO attractively, you are misinformed. Managerial talent costs, and non-profit CEOs, in my direct experience, use the same lateral pay package comparisons to other non-profit CEOs to justify their comp packages.

The whole point of carving out an alternate rules space for non-profits in a capitalistic economy is that some business functions are both necessary and very unlikely to be profitable.

The assumption that employees would work in non-profits at an uncompetitve wage is a widespread fallacy. In the end a non-profit is either:

1. unprofitable but so necessary it finds subsidies to continue unprofitable operations

2. breaks even

3. runs well enough to generate an operating surplus which by NP tax regs must be either distributed to employees as a bonus or put forward to organisational growth.

In any of these three revenue scenarios, underpaying critical staff is an org death spiral by loss of requisite talent.

CEOs in the US often make much more in the US than other countries, and US non-profit are not nearly immune to the larger forces responsible for that trend.

I did but I don't see FF splitting from Mozilla (by whatever mechanism) either sadly and if you lose the name it becomes hard to get adoption for the forked one - see IceWeasel.