Firefox Forcing LLM Features

Mozilla sure is going out of their way to alienate their remaining users. This is going to be Pocket 2.0.

Who asked for this? Who wants it? Certainly not the Linux / open-source crowd, and they're just about the only ones who are keeping Firefox alive.

If there's anybody from Mozilla or the Firefox dev team in this thread, I'd be interested to hear the thinking behind this addition.

There's a checkbox on whether you want to use it or not in the settings page, does this not change these settings?

I don't feel opposed to them changing the browser in principle--certainly there have been many improvements to web browsers over the years. Is privacy the concern here?

They're all easily disabled in the GUI itself. The article is exaggerating, the closest argument is that it enables itself by default when it first updated which is fair, but they're easy to disable within the menu itself.

They’re opt-out and can be disabled in the settings or fully disabled in about:config. Definitely annoying but not enough to make me switch to a Chromium based browser.

I understand why Mozilla have started implementing these features, it seems to have more mass market appeal than not - look at how popular “AI” powered browsers have become. But boy does it not add extra effort removing these features every time there’s a new roll-out and it’s not done the best way IMO. I feel as if these features would go down better if Mozilla actually notified the user that they’re available and then offered whether to enable them or not (could have them enabled by default for new users). That way you’re still giving a choice, but in a more respectful manner. If anyone is interested I’ve gutted all the more obscene stuff out of Waterfox and have instead left the useful ones such a ML translation, which is opt-in. Related: I feel like onboarding is a lost art, more software should bring back software wizards and UI tours. Feels like you somehow have to intuitively know how something works (unlikely) or do a web search on how to use everything instead of having it shown to you nicely.

What is your favorite Firefox alternative?

That's disappointing. If they can do EME-free builds, they can do LLM-free builds. This isn't a 'tricky issue'

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2014/05/reconciling-mozillas-missi...

The built in LLM translation is great. I'm leaving that enabled. It's useful and it's a perfect application for local LLM to be better than the equivalent corporate services.

I disable a ton in default FF and even run the unbranded versions so that it's not trialware (FF branded builds all expire when their baked in add-ons CA TLS certs expire). But the LLM translation? That's finally a good feature.

It isn't clear what browser.ml.chat and browser.ml.pageAssist are associated with in terms of features. Does anyone know? I tried disabling all shown in the write-up and local LLM translation still seems to work so I assume it's something else.

Where can I find these LLM features in Firefox?

>Alternatives # There are a few projects that are forks of firefox with these features removed.

>I would think most non technical users would just use a different browser.

I would think they would list one or two of them under the “alternatives” section…?