Of all the unnecessary AI integrations; firefox is the one I am least concerned or annoyed about. I will however be disabling anything AI related they introduce.
The presence of the code itself is a threat. There's no good reason it shouldn't be an extension, beholden to all the same "security" restrictions other extensions are.
No kidding. I had to create a Google Doc document to remember all the little things that I have to clobber in Firefox to make it behave reasonably. Here is an excerpt of how I clobber the defaults:
- Enable pixel-perfect smooth scrolling (Linux): MOZ_USE_XINPUT2=1 (why do we still have to do this??)
- Enable: Ctrl-Tab cycles through recent used order
- Disable: "Show an image preview when you hover on a tab"
- Disable: "Use AI to suggest tabs and a name for tab group"
- Disable: "Enable Picture-in-Picture video controls"
- Disable: "Control media via keyboard, headset, or virtual interface"
- Disable: "Recommend extensions as you browse"
- Disable: "Recommend features as you browse"
- Disable: "Enable link previews"
- Homepage and new windows: Blank page
- New tabs: Blank page
- Disable: Web Search
- Disable: Weather
- Disable: Shortcuts
- Disable: Recommended stories
- Disable: Support Firefox
- Disable: "Save and autofill payment info"
- Disable: "Save and autofill addresses"
- Disable: "Ask to save passwords"
- Locations: Select "Block new requests asking to access your location"
- Notification: Select "Block new requests asking to allow notifications"
- Autoplay: Select "Block Audio and Video"
- Virtual Reality: Select "Block new requests asking to access your virtual reality devices"
- Default Search engine: DuckDuckGo
- Disable "Suggest search engines to use"
- Disable "Quick actions"
- Disable "Suggestions from Firefox"
- Disable: "Title Bar"
- Default Zoom: 110%, 120%, depending on the laptop
Yes, Betterfox all the way in + few custom settings.
I am still in position where I need to put some small pipeline to automatically download latest + merge my stuff and deploy, but even if it's manual every month or two it's not too bad.
Did not know about 'user.js', thanks! I guess creating a document that lists all my overrides was the first step. Now I have to figure out how to create a user.js that works on Linux, Macos, Windows, and maybe Android?
But I think you have to add every Meta domain into that container manually. The other one sounds like it's got them all already put into their own container. Convenient if you one day decide to set up an account on Instagram but never used it before, and forget to add it to the container.
Image preview is slightly slower and has noticeable latency, compared to the text popup that is almost instantaneous.
And it is more visually distracting. I hate UI features that interfere with my workflow. I hate most UI animations. I turned animations off on my Android phone, and now the thing just flies.
Nah, Privacy Badger is different. PB doesn't use ad blocker lists and comes with its own special features like replacing tweets with click-to-activate placeholders. And if you want to block all ads, PB works well in combination with ad blockers.
A coworker (hi Robert!) created his own version of Firefox that doesn’t suck, with sane defaults and keyboard centric: https://github.com/glide-browser/glide
Pretty impressive project, and it’s really nice to use, I would recommend to give it a try
This. Since Firefox claims to be a privacy-first browser, it should, by default, use the Arkenfox settings (report spoofed values for language, screen size, fonts, and many other attributes that aid fingerprinting), and include uBlock Origin out of the box.
But it should go even further; the ultimate goal should be for all Firefox users to basically look the same from the point of view of third parties and put an end to tracking in the modern Web.
> report spoofed values for language, screen size, fonts, and many other attributes that aid fingerprinting
How much do these break functionality? If I spoof language, am I going to start seeing websites in German? If I spoof screen size, am I going to get weirdly zoomed websites?
I have my browser set to request, in order, English, a different English, then a non-English language. Some sites (Android docs, Gitlab, F-Droid) will send me the non-English content; Google even preferentially does their AI translation thing instead of the original English.
Then for some web sites it won't matter and display the dominant language of the country that you're accessing from. My Firefox sends US English as the only preferred language, but a ton of US tech companies default to showing web sites in Japanese without a way to change it because I access them from Japan. It's pretty typical of American companies that don't understand localization and accessibility.
Most infuriating is when they do it based on GeoIP. So what I'm in Istanbul currently, I know maybe a dozen words in Turkish. But no, and also they insist on having broken language switchers.
Likewise. The main thing I change is enforcing separate address bar and search box. It takes a lot of configuring to make the address bar stop being "smart" (i.e. never send things I type there to a search engine even if they're not valid URLs), and I can't even remember what options I used to fix it.
I am tired of turning features off. At this point I just want a boring browser that handles html/css/js, bookmarks, tabs (should sleep inactive tabs), plugins (for my chosen password manager and ad blocker), and page zoom. Those are the only features I actually use regularly.
That's it, I would be willing to make a one time purchase for that, no subscriptions... Ok, I could maybe be convinced for a subscription if it was a low yearly one.
Sure, I just want the core browser stuff and plugins, security/privacy kinda goes with that.
It feels like browsers are like old IDEs where everything is bundled in. I think it would be much better it they were more like modern code editors where people can make their own custom IDE by installing the plugins they want.
Yup, providing better APIs for external bookmarks management, password management, etc would be much better than trying to provide some “one size fits all full featured built in” implementation.
In the parallel universe where Firefox defaults to ai features being off, there's a snarky comment like yours about why it isn't on by default.
It is really tiring to hear this stuff. People (rightfully) complained there was no switch. One was added. In Chrome, you can't turn off Google's ai unless you install a third party extension that hasn't yet been blocked by Google. Not a lot of companies allow disabling their garbage, but FF does.
> Not a lot of companies allow disabling their garbage, but FF does.
>
> Can't we be happy with this nice switch?
I want my tools to keep working the way they have been working. I don't want to be paranoid that "garbage" (as you put it), or any other controversial changes, are going to be slipped into my tools while I'm not looking.
There is something to be said about that. Firefox does keep inserting it's 'helpful features' like Pocket on users, which is very annoying.
My point is just that everyone is so critical of Firefox, when the alternative is disproportionately, orders of magnitude worse for the user.
I'd rather bash on minor Firefox grievances when it's the #1 browser, not when it's losing/lost the browser war and it's our last chance at browser engine diversity.
Most of the features in the article are already opt-in. It's not like Firefox just automatically translates articles against your will, for example.
Mozilla is mainly responding to inflammatory comments like yours by adding additional toggles to disable any sort of trace in the UI about those features even existing.
I think the parent comment is snark. They're saying that since many Firefox users are saying "Let me turn off AI features, please!" for features they don't want at all, and few to no Firefox users are saying "Let me turn on AI features!" because few to no Firefox users want AI features in the first place, Mozilla is making AI features opt-out to "satisfy" the "want" of turning off AI features.
I'm worried that this will require yet another config change on top of the already-ridiculous pile. (A listing was discussed 3 months ago at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45696752 )
That's the third-best design they could have. Second-best would be having a toggle to turn on AI. Best would be going back to building a browser and leaving out the AI entirely, or putting it in some other product that they only consider funding after they get back to 50% market share for the browser.
This is a good start, but there is still no way to remove what is sure to be tremendous bloat caused by these features. I would prefer if we could opt to install (or not install) them to begin with.
I remember when they removed the compact UI mode because it was "too much effort" to maintain. But I guess all this crap that no one asked for is fine, right?
I think for Firefox to be successful in breaking free from google funding is to make gecko easily embeddable in other apps, ala WebKit / electron / etc. I think it would get more funding from a wider variety of independent parties that way. Unfortunately they seem to have gone in the opposite direction... Although I am sure they have their reasons.
They used to be gross, alright. Probably still are.
There was a PR campaign ("on their behalf" ? :] ), posting on certain websites in the first year of their launch or so.
(This was before the fraud in which Brave were taking donations in the name of someone else, without anyones consent.) It involved posting things like "Come home, white man" and other dog-whistles on image-boards along with the brave-lion logo imagery on a consistent, regular basis.
There's probably archives of these threads and people calling out they were very obviously automated and calculated. Who else at this point would even care to do it for them?
Eich got kicked out of Mozilla for his views not aligning with everyone else, so him weaponizing his own views like that isn't exactly what some would call unexpected. He might also not know the extent of which his PR goons go to promote his stuff, but come on now... the whole image is planned. There's a reason they choose to 'break a few rules' and they want their browser image to be that of a 'strong authoritative male leader' specifically. It appeals to a certain demographic also, wonder who... /s
I just think it's super fucking lame and plenty of people smell that shit a mile away. Which explains why plenty of people say "fuck no" without even knowing half of this shit.
The moment you read “crypto mining in the browser while you browse” should be an immediate red flag that you should run away. Absolutely no need to respect him even when he was the creator of JS. So what.
Yes, many times. See all the options they keep adding for siphoning your usage data even though you already used all the previous ones to indicate very clearly that you want none of that.
The real question is whether this sets a precedent for how browsers should handle feature creep in general. Browsers have quietly accumulated telemetry, sponsored content, pocket integrations, VPN upsells — AI is just the latest.
What I like about Mozilla's approach here is the single toggle for all current and future AI. That's a genuine concession to user agency rather than the usual whack-a-mole of about:config flags. If every new feature category got this treatment (a clear, discoverable off switch), browsers would be in a much better place trust-wise.
The deeper issue is that Mozilla needs revenue diversification beyond the Google search deal, and AI features are their bet on that. So the incentive to make the toggle hard to find or slowly degrade the non-AI experience will always be there. I'd love to see them prove that wrong.
They can't afford to, or they would have. With ads in the browser, telemetry that doesn't really switch off, etc. etc. their brand value has really fallen.
It's not an LLM but it is a tiny pre-trained ML model running inside the browser. Funded by the EU and made in partnership with a few European universities as well: https://mozilla.github.io/translations/docs/
Their level of acceptance for releasing a new model (AKA new language support) is to benchmark within 5% difference of Google Translate, basically proving you don't need an external party to do good-enough translations for you. It's like the coolest thing they worked on recently.
Most modern translation tools are language models and this was true even before the LLM chatbot explosion. The difference is they were trained on smaller (and less dubiously sourced) datasets and the output that was trained for was translations directly rather than conversations.
One of the things I wanted to do is improved beat detection. Several music apps have some sort of tempo detection (you tap on the desk and the microphone catches it and figures out the tempo).
While I can certainly use audio analysis to do that, it has its limits. If I wanted to detect a full drum pattern (the user taps on different objects for kick and snare, and the app fills them), something machine-learny sounds much more appropriate for the job.
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Your poke at the issue "for what? summarising web pages?" is valid though. While I don't have the resources to train those models I mentioned, the resulting weights should be fairly compatible with todays consumer hardware.
I blame the complete and utter lack of imagination of small-to-mid AI labs for the missing variety in that space.
It results in people not being very creative in imagining valid, non-shitty spammy marketing ways of using AI. They exist though.
If accurate, this strikes me as something like malicious compliance.
> Translations, which help you browse the web in your preferred language.
Machine translation can be useful when you want to get the gist of something in a language you don't know.
> Alt text in PDFs, which add accessibility descriptions to images in PDF pages.
OCR? Okay...
> AI-enhanced tab grouping, which suggests related tabs and group names.
What is this feature even trying to do? It sounds like ill-defined trash.
> Link previews, which show key points before you open a link.
Or I could just click the link.
> AI chatbot in the sidebar, which lets you use your chosen chatbot as you browse, including options like Anthropic Claude, ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini and Le Chat Mistral.
This is the thing that most people are probably complaining about. Lumping the other features in with it is a distraction.
That's because "AI" is a bunch of unrelated stuff that happens to use LLMs. Maybe you don't agree that machine translation using a large language model is AI, but other people do.
I hate FF since some random morons decided it's a good thing on mobile to use the last used folder for bookmarks, instead of the mobile bookmarks folders.
I have several thousand curated bookmarks. And I only discovered too late the new "feature".
Disrupted my former flow (mark on mobile, sort/categorize on desktop)
They could have made this configurable, but no... those smart asses knew better.
I have that GitHub issue where they initially discussed it for iOS bookmarked and screenshoted, to remind myself how utterly stupid some people are.
I hate every sucker involved.
