10 ms·
Tor browser removing various Firefox AI features
- some_furry 1y agoThis is the right call for security, privacy, and anonymity tools like Tor Browser.
- aeon_ai 1y agoGenerally, this seems an obvious and correct decision for Tor. Barring integration with a locally run LLM, AI doesn't make sense for the Tor security posture - you don't want to be routing content to unintended/insecure third parties, period.
- kirito1337 1y agoand for any malicious mfs, you dont want AI in your browser.
- NoSalt 1y agoGood! I do not want nor need AI in every single aspect of my life. I mean, I've seen AI hygiene products out there. How does that even work? Don't answer that ... I know it's a marketing scheme, akin to the "HD" craze of five to 10 years ago.
- IT4MD 1y agoAgereed. 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.
- kirito1337 1y agoBruh, I think everyone knows that already but ChatGPT records your camera and audio and sends them to the US.
- yencabulator 1y agoI don't think switching planets will help much, either. Mars will get AI before it gets humans.
- bodge5000 1y agoReminds 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
- wlesieutre 1y agoLong Blockchain Corp, formerly Long Island Iced Tea Corp
- sph 1y agoI thought you were joking: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Blockchain_Corp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Blockchain_Corp.
- culll_kuprey 1y agoWhy on earth did I waste my life working of clearly the path to success is based on plastering buzzwords in irrelevant places.
- ntoskrnl_exe 1y agoI'm waiting for the day we get microwaves with an AI that turns them off once the timer reaches zero.
- bookofjoe 1y agoMine have had that for as long as they've existed.
- marcosdumay 1y agoDoes it send the zero-time notification to a cloud LLM endpoint that will send back a 10 kB JSON that instructs the oven to turn off? (Or not, how could we predict it?)
- blahgeek 1y agoActually it already exists. My microwave have a button labeled “AI” which suppose to run the microwave until it determines the food is ready.
- ekianjo 1y agoWe have had this function for dozens of years in Japan already
- kiddico 1y agoThe world has had it, you just have to buy it.
- kiddico 1y agoIf it has a humidity sensor it'll likely work, but doesn't need "AI"
- antisthenes 1y agoAny logic where you could use an if condition will be marketed (probably already is) as "AI".
- ryandrake 1y agoIt 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.
- altairprime 1y agoWho can afford to volunteer as fork maintainer for a monolithic browser codebase, though?
- ascagnel_ 1y agoThis week the GZDoom project forked into UZDoom after a maintainer force-pushed AI-generated code into the repo. Thankfully, it failed to compile and other maintainers caught it before it made it out, but the decision to fork came down pretty quickly.
- immibis 1y agoThe creator was allegedly a massive asshole for years and him randomly reappearing after a year, only to force push shitty code that didn't work, was the last straw. It wasn't just because it was AI code.
- hbn 1y agoWhat "HD craze" was there from 2015-2020?
- altairprime 1y agoHD GIFs, most likely.
- raffael_de 1y ago"HD" as a marketing buzzterm for products where "High Definition" technically doesn't make sense. Like adding 2.0 everywhere.
- hbn 1y agoThe only example of that I can remember was "HD sunglasses" but I don't recall that ever being a widespread fad. I only saw people ever joke about that. HD as far as I ever saw it used generally referred to 720p and soon after 1080p. Which is a pretty objective, non-marketing definition. And the timeframe of 2015-2020 seems way off. 1080p was pretty standard by like 2010. YouTube started streaming 4K in 2010.
- autoexec 1y ago> HD as far as I ever saw it used generally referred to 720p and soon after 1080p. I remember stuff like "HD" whitening toothpaste, HD flashlights, and HD radio
- culll_kuprey 1y ago[flagged]
- jmkni 1y agoThe HD craze was more like 20 years ago, you're getting old :)
- creaturemachine 1y agoBefore that was the prefixing everything with a lower-case i craze.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- PaulHoule 1y agoI file a ticket with Firefox whenever an unwanted dialog pops up covering content. If you tag these as being accessibility related they get bounced back and forth between a few people before getting closed and thus pour just a little bit of sand in the gears.
- slickytail 1y ago[dead]
- dblohm7 1y agoThis is wasting the time of accessibility engineers who are doing very important work. Please don't.
- FirmwareBurner 1y agoClearly they aren't doing any/good work, if they allow popups to cover content. It's literally their job to prevent stuff like this. Mozilla needs to bring in the Bobs from Office Space: "What is it you say you do here?"
- hombre_fatal 1y agoWell, what are examples of these popups? Just because a modal window exists doesn't mean it's bad for accessibility.
- marcosdumay 1y agoHum... Pretty much so. Unless it's a real emergency or the contents don't make sense until you do something, every modal window is an accessibility problem.
- rectang 1y agoSo is the appearance of any modal window something that justifies filing tickets with Firefox? It doesn't sound like that's PaulHoule's motivation anyway — he knows that these tickets are not going to be fixed, just closed — the point is to "pour just a little bit of sand in the gears".
- ekjhgkejhgk 1y agoI mean, I wouldn't trust them if they didn't.
- goalieca 1y agoAs a long-time firefox user (since the very earliest days of phoenix), I have to say: focus on open standards and delivering a faster and more secure browser. Make runtimes like electron out of your engine. DO shit that matters. Forget pocket, AI, and all that other junk. That is not your mission!
- teekert 1y agoThe Mission is to make enough money to keep existing.
- acka 1y agoGNU Emacs doesn't make money, yet it exists. And yes, it contains a web browser. You can launch it using `M-x eww RET`.
- chaboud 1y agoI wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Emacs is a spreadsheet, photo editor, toaster oven, or hair stylist. For the right people, it’s a desert-island app.
- kirito1337 1y agoSo Do I. EMACS is multi
- randmeerkat 1y agoGNU Emacs actually self funds from the essence of the universe. You can launch that feature with the command `C-x b r r r`
- squidbeak 1y agoIf it pisses off the people who use it, its existence will be irrelevant.
- FirmwareBurner 1y ago
- ourguile 1y agoVery good news, this would have raised a major red flag for me if I went to use their browser and saw any AI integrations.
- BeetleB 1y agoThe AI integrations, AFAIK, work only if you provide an API key.
- icepat 1y agoYes, however it still means that the browser is phoning home to somewhere. To be able to make use of that API key, it has to send some data out. Is that data routed over TOR? Does it even matter given that an API key can be used to deanonymize you?
- BeetleB 1y agoMy understanding (and this may have changed), is that you have to initiate the AI features each time (e.g. clicking on "Summarize This"). But yes, your point is valid. For Tor, if you enter an API key, you could be identified. Still, does the Tor Browser prevent you from installing addons which are no more secure than these AI features? It didn't years ago - not sure if that's changed.
- unethical_ban 1y agoIf you don't put in an API key, does it try to connect?
- icepat 1y agoI don't want to have to ask questions like this when using a browser that is intended to anonymize me
- barbazoo 1y agoDidn’t know Firefox had an “AI sidebar” https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/ai-chatbot https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/ai-chatbot Seems to be unconnected to any model and off by default.
- thrance 1y agoDidn'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.
- janwl 1y agoI’m used to all browsers adding features that I don’t want every few months. I just disable them and forget about them.
- tyre 1y agoI’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.)
- callamdelaney 1y agoHave you heard of tabs?
- SpecialistK 1y agoHave you heard of the HN guidelines? > Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
- callamdelaney 1y agoI'm curious, why did you call out behaviour which goes against the guidelines, with behaviour that goes against the guidelines?
- MrAlex94 1y agoJust an FYI for anyone who is interested, I’ve also been doing the same for Waterfox. Mozilla have taken into consideration doing things locally, such as tab organisation and the likes (one would assume pre-GPT era and with regard to features not utilising LLMs this would’ve been branded as ML functionality) but I’m not fully convinced this still won’t open up potential security issues in the future[for users of AI browsers]. For Tor users this seems even more of an issue as one would expect nation-state actors targeting undesirables would look for any potential weak spot to exploit. Separately I suppose this brings into light how utterly crazy it seems having AI features in the browser chrome versus limited to the website content process/sandbox. It seems like a privacy and security nightmare and now everyone and their gran are releasing “AI browsers”, even the Firefox-based ones inspired by browsers such as Arc and Dia which seem like absolute privacy nightmares. Seems like slick branding and marketing gets you a pass today when in the past such egregiousness would receive a load of flack cough Avast “secure” browser cough… Either way good job to the Tor team, I sympathise with how much extra load this adds to each rebase.
- alimbada 1y agoWhat 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.
- MrAlex94 1y agoYou can see here[1], I'll avoid pasting again. But yes, can still use a Mozilla account and the website is getting a refurb - I will add a third hard thing in computer science.. letting people know all the things you've actually built :') [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=43206110 https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=43206110
- godelski 1y agoI think it would help to put some of this on your site. When I land on the main waterfox page it looks like just firefox but reskinned. I'm not saying that's what it actually is (clearly it isn't) but it can help having some clarity about this. I mean it isn't like you're being shy about building off of firefox, so why not mention it?
- squidbeak 1y agoAn AI sidebar doesn't bother me. But it should be an extension, not an inescapable part of the browser.
- netule 1y agoI'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.
- pwdisswordfishy 1y agoYou can put two windows on screen at the same time, you know.
- NicuCalcea 1y agoI was looking for something like that and haven't found a good solution. I like having Claude easily accessible in the sidebar, but I'd also like to add pages like my RSS reader, calendar, maps, etc. rather than having to open them in a new tab or window.
- netsharc 1y ago> I'd love to be able to open up an arbitrary web page in this sidebar. Vivaldi has that. (When Opera got bought out by some Chinese company, one of the original founders created Vivaldi. It's Chromium-based, so Chrome extensions work, and Chrome extensions not using Manifest V3 might end up not working soon).
- sphars 1y agoIf you want to stick with Firefox, then I'd recommend Zen[0]. It has the tiling feature much like Vivaldi, among many other enhancements on Firefox. [0]: https://zen-browser.app/ https://zen-browser.app/
- belter 1y agoWhy is Firefox adding AI features?
- ajsnigrutin 1y agoPointy haired bosses heard about AI, and now you have AI everywhere.. you know, just in case, if you wanted an AI chatbot in your image resizing software or your pdf reader. Before that it was "cloud", where every app had to have a cloud-something, even if it didnd't need one.
- lenerdenator 1y agoIn theory, there shouldn't be pointy-haired bosses doing anything with Firefox. That's the entire point. Cathedral vs. bazaar and whatnot.
- nticompass 1y agoDon't forget when everyone was adding "blockchain" to their apps, regardless of what that did or meant.
- Dwedit 1y agoThe one "AI" feature that genuinely helps the user and preserves privacy is the Translation feature. (Yes, machine translation is in fact AI)
- pluto_modadic 1y agotranslation is moreso machine learning, not generative hallucinations or a chatbot
- radarsat1 1y agoit's literally the same technology as LLMs. Transformers were proposed for translation. (But I don't know what methods the Firefox translation uses. I assume it's a local model but don't even know that for sure.)
- kirito1337 1y agogoood job tor Tor is my daily browser btw. Seems about time someones does the "I use Tor btw" trend.
- chrisweekly 1y agoI hope Orion (from Kagi) gains more traction and follows through w/ open-sourcing everything. Privacy-first, 0-telemetry, performant, capable... just not OSS (yet).
- Squarex 1y agoAny info about planned open sourcing? I have not heard about it.
- chrisweekly 1y ago[flagged]
- mm263 1y agohttps://kagi.com/orion/faq.html#oss https://kagi.com/orion/faq.html#oss
- jazzyjackson 1y agoOrion is a WebKit fork which is nice to have but Linux support seems so far off (is there a modern project that builds WebKit on Linux or windows at all?) I have been satisfied with moving to Zen, a Firefox fork that behaves like the late Arc browser
- samtheDamned 1y agoGnome web is based off of webkit-gtk
- password4321 1y agoWhen I linked the nightly Windows WebKit builds last week, λigrunert (who works on it) said: > The easiest way to run WebKit on Windows is via Playwright. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45366867#45487157 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45366867#45487157
- godelski 1y agoI use it on my iPhone because I can actually get ad blocking but it is also the glitchiest browser I've ever used. Worth it for no ads, but that's kinda Apple's issue.
- cowpig 1y agoSince we're all here to complain about Firefox, I want to add that at this point I'm a firefox user out of principle, but I swear I get so many weird performance issues with firefox on ubuntu that it feels like self-flagellation in service of the gods of the free and open Internet. Unfortunately they're the kinds of problems that are really hard to submit tickets for: gradual degradation of performance over the course of a week until I kill the process and start it again, the occasional crash that I can't seem to associate with anything in particular, a bizarre bug where every once in a while firefox slows down and typing letters into any input field has a ~30 second delay... I've never cared about AI or Pocket or anything like that, I just want firefox to be reliably snappy. And I really, really don't want a browser ecosystem dominated by two for-profit companies.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- brewdad 1y agoThat last delay bit might not be a Firefox bug but rather something in the Debian/Ubuntu stack. I get that same type of freeze up about once a week. I typically have FF open but it can happen while I’m working in something else. In my case I’ve chalked it up to running Debian on a MS Surface device. I’m using the standard kernel though since the Surface kernel only adds touchscreen for my device and I don’t really want it.
- rectang 1y agoI've been a Firefox user since it launched (and a Netscape Navigator user before that). In addition to Desktop, I use Firefox on iOS with my 3-year old iPad Pro, which of late exhibits the same sluggishness that you describe after a while. It goes away if I force restart, but not if I just close tabs. I speculate that it has to do with keeping alive closed pages. Something related that I first started noticing a few months ago is that if I mistime the closing of a YouTube tab, the sound will keep playing and the only way to stop it is to force quit the app. I haven't noticed the issue on Firefox Desktop, but my MacBook Pro is reasonably beefy and maybe that helps.
- 1y ago
- hooverd 1y agoI like the Firefox AI features- they seem integrated rather than wanting to replace everything with it.
- lofaszvanitt 1y agoSIDEBAR! The invention straight from the 90s. Fucking browsers and their antiquated approach. NEW THING? Put it on a SIDEBAR! pffffffff Make the fucking old and ugly browser interface customizable. And expose this to webpages, so banks could force you to use the default view.
- glenstein 1y agoYeah, I will say I don't understand the value add here. I used to be able to have a webpage in a sidebar with Opera back in like 2009. That version of Opera, imo, is still more satisfying browsing experience to me even than modern browsers.
- wslh 1y agoIt seems like AI is the new way to lose individual control on operating systems and fundamental apps.
- lenerdenator 1y agoMozilla's beginning to lose its way. There are far too many "luminaries" in the tech industry who've had the last 20 years of "must create value!" go to their heads, even in the FLOSS space. When profit motive does not exist (and it shouldn't in FLOSS) then you need to stick to things like the UNIX philosophy and KISS (keep it simple, stupid) in order to create good software. Trends mean nothing when you're in this mindset. It's Firefox. It's a browser. It does browser things; namely, it sends HTTP requests, possibly executes JavaScript, and renders the resulting computed data on a screen as HTML. It does not need to have AI integrated. At best, AI should be a downloadable extension. If the group's leadership cannot comprehend this, then they need to be removed immediately and blacklisted from leadership at future organizations in the future.
- pessimizer 1y ago> Mozilla's beginning to lose its way. Beginning? > If the group's leadership cannot comprehend this, then they need to be removed immediately and blacklisted from leadership at future organizations in the future. You have no power to do this. They would have to remove themselves, or Google would have to make a phone call.
- astrobe_ 1y agoOr just watch its market share erode until it vanishes from the charts. You picked "beginning" too, and indeed it started when they betrayed the power-users userbase they had (the one that installed FF on their mum's computer and actively promoted it) to be more like the oh-so-successful Chrome (which was pushed with dark patterns like being bundled with AV updates). Personally, it made me go to the "old" Opera (Opera 12) until it got "Chromified" and sold to China. They have consistently been doing the opposite of what the majority of their userbase expect from them (Pocket, paid sites forced to the "Speedial" page,...). To me, the only remaining value of FF is being up-to-date with web shena^H^H^H^H^H standards. A FOSS project shouldn't be focused on succeeding; they should be focused on doing the right thing. No little compromises or play-on-words on your values. And if that means less funding, too bad, but so be it.
- lenerdenator 1y ago
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 1y ago"Mozilla has reversed course on when the protocol portion (e.g. http or https) of the URL in the URL bar is hidden since Firefox 128. We used to have logic in one of our patches around Onion Services (which are always end-to-end encrypted regardless of the application-level protocol used) to follow whatever Firefox does for https. However, with the latest changes in Firefox, this patch became a bit gnarly to apply correctly so we took a step back and thought to ourselves, why are we even conditionally hiding this from the user?"
- mmphosis 1y agobrowser.urlbar.trimURLs false to display http:// in the address bar browser.fixup.alternate.enabled false to enable adding www. and .com to urls * updated the descriptions
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 1y agoWhat are the defaults
- mmphosis 1y agoTrue is the default. False is what I set these to. I have these documented.
- Seattle3503 1y agoIt makes me a little sad we only ever see FF hit the front page of HN for stuff people are angry about. The FF team building useful features like tab groups that are improving UX. But I guess if it bleeds it leads.
- Mathnerd314 1y agoThere 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.
- kmacdough 1y agoTab groups have become incredibly popular and were subsequently copied to Chrome.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- janwl 1y agoMaybe the Firefox team should stop doing bad things if they don’t want people saying bad things about them.
- add-sub-mul-div 1y agoThe point is that it's the least bad browser ecosystem and it only gets negativity whereas Chrome, Brave, etc. get mostly dickriding instead.
- YetAnotherNick 1y agoNot getting in front page is likely not better then getting on front page due to controversial thing.(AI isn't "bad", its controversial)
- surcap526 1y ago[dead]
- surcap526 1y ago[dead]
- ionwake 1y agoI dont know why anyones being defensive about firefox as if they have drawn ire for no reason at all, when in my xp they have done alot of sus stuff, and I hardly know anything about well anything.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- vee-kay 1y agoDid you know.. Mozilla get >80% of its revenue from Google, by making Google Search as default search engine on Firefox. While Mozilla pretends to be a non-profit, its CEO makes millions of dollars annually. Mitchell Baker: Stepped down as CEO of Mozilla in February 2024. Her salary for 2023 was reported to be $6.9 million. Laura Chambers: Became interim CEO of Mozilla in February 2024. Mozilla has not disclosed her salary for 2024 yet. As of October 2025, the average annual salary for employees at Mozilla in the United States is ~$115k. Not bad for a "non-profit", eh? Yup, Mozilla and Firefox are surviving (nay, thriving) due to Google. But Google's hand on the Mozilla tiller, is merely the top of the proverbial iceberg. Google has a monopoly on the browser market, encouraged by Apple Safari slipping down to <14% market share amongst the leading browsers. Google's Chrome (>71% market share) and the other Chromium forks (>9% market share: Edge ~4.5%, Samsung Internet Browser ~2%, Brave/Vivaldi/etc. ~1%) dominate the browser market. Opera (~1.75% market share) is not a Chromium fork, but it is based on Chromium Project. https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/ https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/
- noir_lord 1y agoI 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.
- bstsb 1y agothat being said IceWeasel is a particularly bad name
- noir_lord 1y agoI mean the primary image editor in open source land is Gimp (which I had to explain to an ex many years ago when she hopped on my PC) and our main open source source control system is called `git` (funnier if you are British) so open source devs have form for picking bad names :D. `Git can be a right git` is a valid sentence here.
- 1y ago
- krmbzds 1y agoThey removed privacy.resistFingerprinting.spoofOsInUserAgentHeader a while back as well. I find that suspicious.
- immibis 1y agoTor Browser? Perhaps, but their stated justification is that they were always leaking that via JavaScript and other ways, that Cloudflare was detecting the discrepancy and blocking you a lot more, that they're still spoofing just one of three values (Windows, Mac, Linux) which now matches the JS property, and that they'd like to redo it properly in the future. Seems reasonable to me.
- autoexec 1y agoTor browser's philosophy is that everyone should be fingerprinted and it's fine since they do everything they can think of to try to make that fingerprint identical to everyone else using Tor browser. This is kind of crazy since there are new fingerprinting techniques all the time and if they miss even one data point the whole game is lost. The smarter movie would be to make sure that fingerprints are unique/randomized so that even the same person looks like different people but for some reason they're confident they can account for every possible identifying metric 100% of the time.
- wartywhoa23 1y agoRegardless of what they do on the user's end, their rear end became too ugly for a tool which ostensibly provides anonymity, because it will end up on a 185.220.0.0/16 exit node way too often for any tales of decentralization to hold true.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- alganet 1y agoThis is a good announcement. Coming from a popular project, it helps educate people that AI is a threat to privacy. It's something that might not be obvious to some non-tech Tor users (journalists, activists, etc).
- Figs 1y agoSomething weird I've noticed in Firefox lately -- and been wondering if it's related to these sorts of features -- is that if I leave Firefox open for a relatively long time (e.g. a few hours) NoScript will show whatever my search engine is set to as a script injection on all pages (with a "sidebar?" note). This happens even if I do not interact with the browser during that time. If I restart Firefox, then it goes away (until a long period of time elapses again). Anyone have insight on why that's happening?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]