I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla
281 comments
·November 14, 2025everdrive
andy99
The existence of the features doesn’t bother me. It’s the constant nagging about them. I can’t use a google product without being harassed to the point of not being able to work by offers to “help me write” or whatever.
Having the feature on a menu somewhere would be fine. The problem is the confluence of new features now becoming possible, and companies no longer building software for their users but as vehicles to push some agenda. Now we’re seeing this in action.
cornholio
> no longer building software for their users but as vehicles to push some agenda
All companies push an agenda all the time, and their agenda always is: market dominance, profitability, monopoly and rent extraction, rinse and repeat into other markets, power maximization for their owners and executives.
The freak stampede of all these tech giants to shove AI down everybody's throat just shows that they perceive the technology as having huge potential to advance the above agenda, for themselves, or for their competitors at their detriment.
philipallstar
> All companies push an agenda all the time, and their agenda always is: market dominance, profitability, monopoly and rent extraction, rinse and repeat into other markets, power maximization for their owners and executives.
I'll bear that in mind the next time I'm getting a haircut. How do you think Bob's Barbers is going to achieve all of that?
marcosdumay
I help people that use a low-code platform at work, and their editor have a right-bar tab where one can prompt an AI, send the selected code there, or send the entire code on screen.
Although I never saw anybody reporting it was actually useful, it's tasteful, accessible, and completely out of your way until you need it.
J_Shelby_J
Hubspot has a tool for validating fields in data using regex. They have a little ai prompt that will write the regex for you. Now that is a good use for ai.
StableAlkyne
That's where I'm at with these.
I don't personally care if a product includes AI, it's the pushiness of it that's annoying.
That, and the inordinate amount of effort being devoted to it. It's just hilarious at this point that Microsoft, for example, is moving heaven and earth to put AI into everything office, and yet Excel still automatically converts random things into dates (the "ability" to turn it off they added a few years ago only works half the time, and only affects csv imports) with no ability to disable it.
wholinator2
Exactly! I honestly can't remember the last time my window start menu search bar functioned as it's supposed to. For multiple laptops across more than 5 years i have to hit the windows key three to 7 times to get it to let me type into it. It either doesn't open, doesn't show anything, or doesn't let me type into it.
I mean, c'mon, its literally called the fucking windows key and it doesn't work. As per standard Microsoft it's a feature that worked perfectly on all versions before cortana (their last "ai assistant" type push), i wonder what new core functionalities of their product they're going to fuck up and never fix.
tracker1
Gemini in Chrome reminds me of the over the top actions that MS has made with Edge to the point I just stopped using Edge though I really liked it from relatively early on. They just jumped the shark and now Google is heading down that same path rapidly.
I want to choose the extensions that go into my browser. I don't even use the browser's credential manager, and I've gotten to a point where I'm just not sure anything is actually getting better.
I will say that the Gemini answers at the top of Google searches are hit or miss, and I do appreciate that they're there. That said, I'm a bit mixed as the actual search results beyond that seem to be getting worse overall. I don't know if it's my own bias, but when the Gemini answer is insufficient, it feels like the search results are just plain off from what I'm looking for.
thih9
> I can’t use a google product without being harassed (...)
You can disable AI in Google products.
E.g. in Gmail: go to Settings (the gear icon), click See all settings, navigate to the General tab, scroll down to find Smart features and personalization and uncheck the checkbox.
cwillu
And will that work permanently, or will I have to hunt down another setting in another month when they stuff it into another workflow I don't want it in?
dgacmu
This is correct but also a little misleading: Google gives you a choice to disable smart features globally, but you end up tossing out things you might want as well, such as the automatic classification into smart folders in Gmail. It feels very much like someone said " let's design a way to do this. That will make most people not want to turn any of the features that will make most people not want to turn it off because of the collateral damage"
(I desperately want to disable the AI summaries of email threads, but I don't want to give up the extra spam filtering benefit of having the smart features enabled)
natebc
It needs to be much more granular than it is. For example: Turning that setting off also disables the (very, very old) Updates/Promotions/Social/Forums tabs in the Gmail interface. ONE checkbox in the sea of gmail options?
andy99
I have everything disabled for my personal account. For work, when I looked into it, it had to be disabled centrally by my company.
ufocia
I prefer opt-in vs. opt-out. Opt-out is pretentious and patronizing.
vidarh
The worst one w/Google is how they've highjacked long-press on the power button on Android, and you can change what it does but your options are arbitrarily limited.
null
ortusdux
My annoyance with Samsung's dedicated Bixby button factored into my switch to Pixel. The long-press highjack was disappointing.
dawnerd
I had to filter all of the AI callouts from Clickup. They have an ai button on every gosh darn ui element. By far the worst offender I’ve seen.
amarant
Clippy really is back
netsharc
Someone should write a browser extension that changes AI buttons in websites to Clippy.
Maybe I'll ask Gemini to write one...
Arisaka1
Clippy only helped with very specific products, and was compensating for really odd UI/UX design decisions.
LLM's are a product that want to data collect and get trained by a huge amount of inputs, with upvotes and downvotes to calibrate their quality of output, with the hope that they will eventually become good enough to replace the very people they trained them.
The best part is, we're conditioned to treat those products as if they are forces of nature. An inevitability that, like a tornado, is approaching us. As if they're not the byproduct of humans.
If we consider that, then we the users get the shorter end of the stick, and we only keep moving forward with it because we've been sold to the idea that whatever lies at the peak is a net positive for everyone.
That, or we just don't care about the end result. Both are bad in their own way.
Llamamoe
Clippy was predictable, free, and didn't steal your data.
jve
> Does anyone want AI in anything?
I want in Text to speech (TTS) engines, transliteration/translation and... routing tickets to correct teams/persons would also be awesome :) (Classification where mistakes can easily be corrected)
Anyways, we used TTS engine before openai - it was AI based. It HAD to be AI based as even for a niche language some people couldn't tell it was a computer. Well from some phrases you can tell it, but it is very high quality and correctly knows on which parts of the word to put emphasis on.
https://play.ht/ if anyone is wondering.
boplicity
Automatic captions has been transformative, in terms of accessibility, and seems to be something people universally want. Most people don't think of it as AI though, even when it is LLM software creating the captions. There are many more ways that AI tools could be embedded "invisibly" into our day-to-day lives, and I expect they will be.
Sophira
To be clear, it's not LLMs creating the captions. Whisper[0], one of the best of its kind currently, is a speech recognition model, not a large language model. It's trained on audio, not text, and it can run on your mobile phone.
It's still AI, of course. But there is distinction between it and an LLM.
[0] https://github.com/openai/whisper/blob/main/model-card.md
bildung
Do you have an example of a good implementation of ai captions? I've only experienced those on youtube, and they are really bad. The automatic dubbing is even worse, but still.
On second thought this probably depends on the caption language.
nerdjon
Yes and no and this is the problem with the current marketing around AI.
I very much do want what used to be just called ML that was invisible and actually beneficial. Autocorrect, smart touch screen keyboards, music recommendations, etc. But the problem is that all of that stuff is now also just being called "AI" left and right.
That being said I think what most people think of when they say "AI" is really not as beneficial as they are trying to push. It has some uses but I think most of those uses are not going to be in your face AI as we are pushing now and instead in the background.
JohnFen
This is why I use the term "genAI" rather than "AI" when talking about things like LLMs, sora, etc.
j4coh
They need to show usage going up and to the right or the house of cards falls apart. So now you’re forced to use it.
catlifeonmars
I think companies should also advertise when they use JavaScript on the page. “Use this new feature —- why? Because it’s powered by JavaScript”
cratermoon
Nobody wants what's currently marketed as "AI" everywhere.
nerdjon
I mean, that is kinda exactly what I said..
But we do have to acknowledge that AI is very much turned into an all encompassing term of everything ML. It is getting harder and harder to read an article about something being done with "AI" and to know if it was a custom purpose built model to do a specific task or is it throwing data into an LLM and hoping for the best.
They are purposefully making it harder and harder to just say "No AI" by obfuscating this so we have to be very specific about what we are talking about.
slightwinder
> Does anyone want AI in anything?
Well, if you phrase it this way, then yes, people want this. AI can be useful, and integration is beneficial. But if we are talking about the momentary hype, then no, most people are against stupidly blindly shoving AI into something and getting annoyed with it the whole time.
Personally, I would prefer for apps to safely open up for any kind of integration, and AI being just one automation of many, whatever one prefers. It's so annoying for everything being either a walled garden, guarding every little bit they can grab; or having apps open, but so limited in what they actually can do, that you are basically forced to the walled gardens.
giancarlostoro
I do want AI for some things but I actively go out of my way to find it, I dont want AI forced everywhere its like cryptominers you are forced into wasting compute energy resources you never asked to waste but much worse at least cryptominers are limited by your hardware, in this case you have an entire datacenter churning just until you can click “Disable” on the model.
RansomStark
In firefox yeah! I use it often.
I have it connected to a local Gemma model running in ollama and use it to quickly summarize webpages, nobody really wants to read 15 minutes worth of personal anecdotes before getting to that one paragraph that actually has relevant information, and for finding information within a page, kinda like ctrl-f on steroids.
The machine is sitting there anyway and the extra cost in electricity is buried in the hours of gaming that gpu is also used for, so i haven't noticed yet, and if you game, the graphics card is going to be obsolete long before the small amount of extra wear is obvious. YMMV if you dont already have a gaming rig laying around
rpdillon
The default AI integration doesn't seem to support this. The only thing I could find that does is called PageAssist, and it's a third-party extension. Is that what you're using?
RansomStark
My mistake, I left a step out. Use openwebui with ollama. Openwebui is compatible with the firefox sidebar.
So grab ollama and your prefered model, install openwebui.
Then open about:config
And set browser.ml.chat.provider to your local openwebui instance
Google suggests the you might also need to set browser.ml.chat.hideLocalhost to false. But i dont remember having to do that
distances
Something like this I wouldn't mind, privacy focused local only models that allow you to use your own existing services. Can you give a quick pointer on how to connect Firefox to Ollama?
RansomStark
Use openwebui with ollama.
Openwebui is compatible with the firefox sidebar.
So grab ollama and your prefered model.
Install openwebui.
Connect openwebui to ollama
Then in firwdox open about:config
And set browser.ml.chat.provider to your local openwebui instance
Google suggests the you might also need to set browser.ml.chat.hideLocalhost to false. But i dont remember having to do that
andrewmutz
The web is extremely user-hostile. The necessity of ad blockers is just one example of this. Social Media feed algorithms that maximize engagement at the cost of mental health and political unrest are another
I think there is a ton of potential for having an LLM bundled with the browser and working on behalf of the user to make the web a better place. Imagine being able to use natural language to tell the browser to always do things like "don't show me search engine results that are corporate SEO blogspam" or "Don't show me any social media content if its about politics".
glenstein
I believe there are good targeted tasks. One Chrome plug-in called 'Tweeks' is a reimplementation of Grease monkey user scripting where you can make changes by posing natural language to an LLM that changes the page for you. It was posted here in hn the other day. [0]
Also I believe some agentic tasking can make sense: scroll through all the Kindle unlimited books for critically acclaimed contemporary hard sci-fi.
But stapling on a chat sidebar or start page or something seems lacking in imagination.
cwillu
I don't want imagination in my existing tools. I don't want the designers of my tools sneaking into my toolbox and fucking with shit in the middle of the night.
transcriptase
Nobody wants anything from Mozilla except Firefox/Thunderbird to be high-performance alternatives to Chrome/Outlook with fewer restrictions on extensions.
That’s it. The rest is just activism and kids playing in a sandbox with non-profit money to pad out their resume with whatever topical keywords might land them their next gig.
railka
I am a regular Firefox user; it is literally the tool I use most often during my working hours. I like it more than Chrome.
Firefox is steadily losing market share, and any attempts to do something about it are met with negativity. The 2-4% of users who use it care about their privacy. But they are not being deprived of it; the AI tab is optional, and no one is removing the regular tab. (Of course, it would be better if they allowed the integration of local models or aggregators, such as Openrouter, Huggingface...)
Meanwhile, developers continue to ignore Firefox, testing only Chromium browsers. Large companies are also choosing the Chromium engine for their browsers.
Perhaps if they implement this functionality conveniently, more average users will use Firefox.
DeusExMachina
I am not a Firefox user, but I am baffled by the fact that every time I see news about it is because its developers are trying to push something that users dislike. All the comments I read always highlight how they keep wasting time and money instead of working on more important things.
My impression is that this is the reason why they keep losing market share. I never see any positive news about Firefox or Mozilla, and the browser has nothing that would make me switch.
Firefox gained market share because people recommended it and installed it on the computers of friends and family. They seem to have stopped, and its developers don't seem, from the outside, to be interested in doing anything to bring that back.
shawnz
Here are some of the things that make Firefox the best browser for me:
- An extension system more powerful than Chrome's, which supports for example rich adblockers that can block ads on Youtube. Also, it works on mobile, too
- Many sophisticated productivity and tab management features such as vertical tabs, tab groups, container tabs, split tabs, etc. And now it also has easy-to-use profiles and PWA support just like Chrome
- A sync system which is ALWAYS end-to-end encrypted, and doesn't leak your browsing data or saved credentials if you configure it wrong, like Google's does, and it of course works on mobile too
- And yes, LLM-assisted summarization, translation, tab grouping, etc, most of which works entirely offline with local LLMs and no cloud interation, although there are some cloud enabled features as well
benatkin
Amen. Friends don't let friends use Firefox in the manner prescribed by Mozilla in its current state. It's horrid.
I have LibreWolf and Chrome installed, but not Firefox, and I like part of Firefox in spite of, not because of, the rest of Mozilla. I'd be interested in Ladybird except they threaten to use Swift.
zgk7iqea
Firefox should commit more to correctly implement web standards - not even gradients render correctly. A lot of the users are oddballs with strange configurations that break everything. No wonder devs optimize for chrome.
CjHuber
I don’t know. I‘m always a bit appalled that getting privacy in firefox requires you to disable so many flags in the user.js or use something like arkenfox. It feels kind of dishonest of them that they don‘t surface those settings when they‘re enabled by default. Of course there is librefox, but still I feel like there shouldn’t even have to be reason for an extra fork like that.
Kwantuum
I've had to stop using FF as my development browser because it chokes on large source maps. I used to find lots of issues in our web app that were only ever tested on chromium browsers. I don't anymore because the devtools are unusable past a certain point.
tcoff91
It’s losing market share because it doesn’t keep up with supporting the latest web standards.
dymk
They’re losing market share because they’re not bundled with {OS of choice} / not heavily pushed on you when you visit a Google property
ryandrake
And because they are wasting their time on these side quests that could have been spent improving the actual browser.
wpm
Which standards and are they actually standards or just some “draft” slop from Google?
thsbrown
I 100% agree. It's funny to me that for a website that's focused on people and companies creating new things, people here can be extremely hostile and jaded to the idea.
The pessimism can get old.
phantasmish
I would have loved to see them leverage their browser to make a distributed social network, back when they had enough market share to attempt such a thing.
An open slack-alike also seems like a good fit for them.
Alas, they have tons of cash but little capacity to do anything useful.
rollcat
Mozilla has started so many incredibly ambitious projects: Firefox OS, Rust, Servo/Stylo, Quantum... A slack-alike would at best give them a +1 against killedbygoogle.com.
Yep, a federated social network is indeed an ambitious problem, perhaps Mozilla would've been well-suited to tackle it. The problem is not the tech or scope, but timing. 15 years ago everyone was happy to be on FB / Twitter. 10 years ago, Microsoft just bought LinkedIn; Google tried, then killed off a network with 500k DAU; all of that time, there was little space for a new contender.
Mastodon only took off because Twitter went to shit real fast; still most people flocked to mastodon.social, because they heard Mastodon was good, but had no idea what federation is, or why it's important. MAYBE that would've been the perfect timing for Mozilla to launch their own ActivityPub platform.
lukan
"but had no idea what federation is, or why it's important"
Maybe the ideal technical solution would not require them to know?
benrutter
Agreed! I think it should be a huge red flag to folks at mozilla, that there are several forks of Firefox that mostly just take out tracking and AI features from the browser.
aquova
I see this sentiment a lot, but I never agree with it. Sure, some of their projects seem very odd for them to lead, but given that they are completely reliant on their competitor for cash -- a revenue source that has been threatened several times by anti-trust cases against Google -- they should be looking to branch out. Firefox alone won't pay the bills, so they need to try and find some other revenue source. Plus, Chrome has essentially won. Not necessarily for any engineering reason, at least not these days, but from continued momentum of being the market leader. Sitting around quietly isn't going to get people to switch, they do need to find some way to distinguish themselves apart from Chrome, which again leads to these misc features being thrown out there.
The AI inclusion seems like the same reason everyone else is adding AI, they don't want to be left behind if or when it's viewed as an essential feature.
probably_wrong
> Chrome has essentially won. Not necessarily for any engineering reason, at least not these days, but from continued momentum of being the market leader.
Ah, how the young forget... Mozilla became popular precisely due to their willingness to challenge the market leader at the time [1], namely, Internet Explorer. Going against the market leader should be in their DNA. The fight is not lost just because there's a market leader. If anything, Mozilla is currently losing the battle because the leadership doesn't believe they can do it again.
I'm fine with Mozilla diversifying their income, but I'm not fine with Mozilla sacrificing their browser (the part we desperately need the most) in the name of a "Digital Rights Foundation" that, at this rate, will lose their seat at the negotiating table.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#/m...
rollcat
> Mozilla is currently losing the battle because the leadership doesn't believe they can do it again.
I do not believe that this is the case. Their #1 revenue source is Google. The moment they start regaining any foothold?
Imagine just collecting that amount from Google as tax, and funding Mozilla publicly.
BearOso
The amount of money they get from Google is vastly more than it takes to hire a few dozen people full-time to develop a web browser and email program.
People in the organization are trying to use what's left of the name recognition and all that money to benefit their own initiatives.
gr4vityWall
> they should be looking to branch out. Firefox alone won't pay the bills, so they need to try and find some other revenue source
They probably would've achieved enough to sustain Firefox development in perpetuity if they invested most of Google's money in a fund.
pfortuny
> Plus, Chrome has essentially won. Not necessarily for any engineering reason, at least not these days, but from continued momentum of being the market leader.
s/Chrome/Internet Explorer/g
Nobody has won until the match is over, and history has a very long tail.
abdullahkhalids
There is no possible way to compete against a competent trillion dollar organization that knows how to build a good browser, and exploits its global monopoly position in search to advertise their browser.
It doesn't matter if Firefox became better. There is simply not enough differentiation potential in the core browser product to win by being better. Its all marketing.
I just wish Mozilla sold some stickers/themes as proxy donations and became largely independent.
CamouflagedKiwi
I see the point, but them following the leader on this does not seem like a recipe for success. They aren't going to be as good at AI as OpenAI's browser, and their users are going to be less bought into it. I would have hoped they'd have learned their lesson from things like FirefoxOS but I guess not...
debugnik
> kids playing in a sandbox with non-profit money
Nitpick: Firefox is developed by Mozilla Corp., not the non-profit.
perch56
Mozilla Corp is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation. Tomayto, tomahto.
genter
I'm not opposed to activism, I'm just opposed to their activism which goes against what the Mozilla Foundation stands for. Obviously what I think the foundation stands for (a freely accessible web) and what it actually stands for are two different things, but I like my rose tinted glasses.
brazukadev
Activism and kids playing at Mozilla was a long time ago.
notepad0x90
I think "nobody i know" and nobody are different things. Mozilla wants more firefox users. there are "AI browsers" and ai integrated browsing is becoming more and more the norm. Mozilla is doing the right thing here, the features are there but unobtrusive. But down the road, I fully expect Mozilla to do whatever they have to do to remain in the game. Their small market share is hurting the entire internet, they can't afford to become a browser for retro-techo-luddites or something.
isodev
> "AI browsers" and ai integrated browsing is becoming more and more the norm
Not really, outside influencers looking to capture the next hot thing (like Mozilla) and tech-bros, there is no living soul on this planet that wants or is trying to normalise AI browsers.
tgsovlerkhgsel
I would love AI in the browser, as long as it is offered, not aggressively pushed in my face, is privacy friendly (i.e. ideally client side but at the very least I need to understand what is sent off the device, how it is used, and it should only be sent when I actively trigger the feature).
In particular I'd also love agentic AI so I can quickly automate tasks on shitty web sites that can't be reasonably automated otherwise.
But even a free, no-signup "summarize this wall of text" would be useful.
I think the adoption of AI browsers shows that there are people who find value in this, and I think a lot more people would be interested if it wasn't getting relentlessly forced on them at every corner, making them refuse it out of principle.
zgk7iqea
Firefox is dead. You need an insurmountable amount of configuration to even make it bearable and there is non-user respecting settings and telemetry everywhere. Ads, too. It's not something you can recommend, every site is broken and Mozilla rather likes to spend it's money on [1] discouraging human translators and [2] giving people free coffee on "Browser Raves" in Berlin instead. It's a shadow of its former self.
[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/forums/contributors/717446
kburman
Mozilla has lost the plot. People support Mozilla because they want a strong, independent browser, not so staff can siphon money into side projects that exist mainly to look good on someone’s resume. Things like Transformer Lab have nothing to do with Firefox and nothing to do with the mission Mozilla claims to care about.
This isn’t innovation. Leadership keeps green-lighting trendy distractions while the browser that actually matters keeps slipping behind. And it’s happening because there’s no real oversight, no accountability, and no one willing to say “no” when someone pitches another off-brand hobby project.
Mozilla needs a reality check. Stop burning resources on experiments nobody asked for, remove the people who think this is acceptable, and refocus on the one thing that still gives the organization a reason to exist: building a great browser. Until that happens, they’re just wasting donor money and goodwill while Firefox slowly fades away.
forgotpwd16
[delayed]
berkes
I don't want AI in Firefox.
For one, because it breaks the Unix philosophy of "doing one thing and doing that well".
In that vein, I do want Firefox to develop/allow/improve an interface so that machines, amongst which AI-MCPs, can drive my firefox. And do so safely, secure, contained, etc.
So that my AI agent can e.g. open a Firefox tab and do things there on my behalf. Without me being afraid it nukes all my bookmarks, and with me having confidence in safety nets so that some other tool or agent cannot just take over my gmail tab and start spamming under my account.
Point is: I really think Mozilla and Firefox have a role to play in the AI landscape that's shaping up. But yet another client to interact with chatbots is not that. Leave that to people building clients please: do one thing and do it well.
jy14898
I don't think you can apply Unix philosophy to a (GUI) web browser, you don't use it compositionally.
nonethewiser
In fact, the web browser may be the best example of a program antithetical to the unix philosophy. It is a single program that does rendering, password management, video decoding, dev tools, notifications, extension systems, etc. Adding some new AI component is rather on-brand for browsers (whether a good decision or not).
anuramat
by this logic sockets are also non-unix
cwillu
But that's basically the promise, that the damn thing _can_ use arbitrary things compositionally.
vidarh
We're most of the way there in a sense. Programmatic control of the browsers exist with e.g. Playwright and similar.
But some niceties to e.g. allow running scripts with filtered/permissioned access within a sidebar would be nice.
JohnFen
Mozilla's gonna Mozilla.
I don't want this, but at the same time I think people are overreacting. If Mozilla remains true to their word and this is an opt-in sort of thing, it's hard for me to get too worked up about it. I can just ignore it.
_verandaguy
It's specifically been opt-out: `browser.ml.enable` is set to `true` in `about:config` in recent versions, and even disabling that doesn't get rid of the "AI assistant" option in the right-click dropdown menu.
noir_lord
browser.ml.chat.enabled set to false
browser.ml.chat.menu set to false
browser.ml.chat.page set to false
browser.ml.chat.page.footerBadge set to false
browser.ml.chat.page.menuBadge set to false
browser.ml.chat.shortcuts set to false
browser.ml.chat.sidebar set to false
browser.ml.enable set to false
browser.ml.linkPreview.enabled set to false
browser.ml.pageAssist.enabled set to false
browser.tabs.groups.smart.enabled set to false
browser.tabs.groups.smart.userEnable set to false
extensions.ml.enabled set to false
Can also use the user config override if you want to do it without having to do that every time you install FF somewhere new (put user.js in the root folder of your firefox profile).
user_pref("browser.ml.chat.enabled", false);
user_pref("browser.ml.chat.menu", false);
user_pref("browser.ml.chat.page", false);
user_pref("browser.ml.chat.page.footerBadge", false);
user_pref("browser.ml.chat.page.menuBadge", false);
user_pref("browser.ml.chat.shortcuts", false);
user_pref("browser.ml.chat.sidebar", false);
user_pref("browser.ml.enable", false);
user_pref("browser.ml.linkPreview.enabled", false);
user_pref("browser.ml.pageAssist.enabled", false);
user_pref("browser.tabs.groups.smart.enabled", false);
user_pref("browser.tabs.groups.smart.userEnable", false);
user_pref("extensions.ml.enabled", false);
zgk7iqea
This is just as user friendly as the rest of the firefox configuration. I can't recommend it to anyone in good faith anymore.
whalesalad
So sick of all these hacks. I've been a Firefox user for decades but it's time to throw in the towel.
vt240
I added `browser.ml.chat.enabled` = `false` and `browser.ml.chat.menu` = `false` which seems to remove that right-click behavior.
_verandaguy
You can remove it directly from the right-click menu, but that's really not my point.
Mozilla has now shoved AI down my throat as a user of Firefox. It's one thing if they want to pursue questionable business directions on a purely opt-in basis -- that's their prerogative -- and while I'll take issue with what was in my opinion one of the last bastions of the open web burning money like that, ultimately, at least they didn't force it on the user.
It's another thing when they impose it on the user base, and a user base, at that, that's probably more sensitive to having the latest trend shoved in our faces than the average browser user (I'm not saying this to sound elitist; on the contrary, I think FF attracts obstinate, almost luddite types when it comes to new technology; I think many of us just want a basic, relatively no-frills browser).
TimByte
Yet features that start optional sometimes get nudged more front-and-center over time
null
BearOso
From their history, you can expect the exact opposite. Remember the Mr robot fiasco?
null
elAhmo
It is just a question of how long can Mozilla hold its ground with useless initiatives like this which are not what their core user base wants.
Firefox and Thunderbird, that is it. Everything else was just a ridiculous time and money sink which should've just been spent on those core products.
rs186
Unless I am horribly mistaken, using Firefox is an intentional choice by a vanishing group of people. If you are just a little bit less careful or determined, you would likely be using chrome or a chrome variant, definitely not Firefox. These users are choosing a browser that has slightly worse performance, has fewer features (e.g. WebUSB) and is seeing more problems with Cloudflare/Google captcha every day. All of this for better adblocking and full control of the browser.
Why would they want AI?
Synaesthesia
On Linux and Windows it is IMO the best browser and it's pretty good on MacOS too, although Safari is still my fave on that platform.
It's stable, got good UI and light on resources. The excellent adblocking is a huge feature.
For the average Joe user, they might want some AI features but most techy users have already got that figured out.
homebrewer
Good autoscroll too (the one you invoke by clicking the wheel). It's what made me stick to Firefox during its worst years, 4+ until relatively recently.
It has just the right acceleration curve and properly works inside nested scrollable elements.
mrits
After using Chrome for a decade I switched to firefox a few years ago when there was a headline about Google blocking ad blocker. I'm not sure whatever happened to that but I wanted no part in a company even considering it
noir_lord
They went ahead with manifest v3, as a result Firefox (and it's derivs) get full fat adblocking (Ublock Origin) and Chrome gets Ublock Lite which does the best it can with the v3 manifest limitations.
wkat4242
Welllll.. Yes and no.
If it works with my local ollama servers then yeah I don't mind it. I already use the existing AI integration sometimes (which is very basic) for translation and summarisation. It's not bad (translation is definitely better than the builtin one because it is much better at context)
But if it has to be cloud crap then no. I don't want big tech datamining my behaviour.
It's definitely not a viable way for them to make money on services when it comes to me. And I think most firefox users will feel that way. If they didn't care about such things they'd be using chrome.
Does anyone want AI in anything? I can see the value of navigating to an LLM and asking specific questions, but generally speaking I don't want that just running / waiting on my machine as I open a variety of applications. It's a huge waste of resources and for most normal people is an edge case.