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Firefox Getting New Controls to Turn Off AI Features
- xeonmc 9mo agojustthebrowser.com
- blue_sauce_bean 9mo agoI'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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45696752 )
- comex 9mo agoIf you click through you can see that the new feature includes a single toggle to turn off all current and future AI.
- JoshTriplett 9mo agoThat'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.
- stackghost 9mo agoMarket share statistics include Chrome- and Safari-based webviews do they not? Pretty much impossible for Firefox to achieve 50% of market share
- mathnode 9mo agoOf 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.
- vpShane 9mo agoThat control would be LibreWolf, turns off the rest of the bad things too
- knowitnone3 9mo ago[dead]
- keyboardJones 9mo agoOfficial announcement: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/ai-controls/ https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/ai-controls/
- hacker_homie 9mo agotoo late.
- crabmusket 9mo agoWhy are there controls to turn off AI features, but no controls to turn on AI features?
- giantfrog 9mo agoBecause Firefox users have been clamoring for the ability to turn them off rather than the opposite.
- LoganDark 9mo agoI think they're asking why it has to be opt-out rather than opt-in.
- ryandrake 9mo agoThe likely answer is an incentive structure that rewards someone for maximizing 'number of users using AI'.
- SahAssar 9mo agoI think you misunderstand. Firefox users have wanted this to be opt-in or explicit-choice rather than opt-out. The implication is that all future AI features will be opt-out.
- ysavir 9mo agoI 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.
- denkmoon 9mo agoThose are helpfully enabled by default, you can put your feet up, Moz has you covered.
- Sabinus 9mo agoWell, I'm looking forward to the new AI features and I use the AI sidebar regularly. Thanks Mozilla
- clumsysmurf 9mo agoI would like to see them provide -AI-free builds ... just to be sure.
- bravetraveler 9mo agoSoon: "Oopsie woopsie, we changed your expressed preferences... care to try again?"
- hn92726819 9mo agoThis is expected behavior in Microsoft products, but has Firefox ever done anything like this?
- account42 9mo agoYes, 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.
- semiinfinitely 9mo agotoo late I already stopped using it
- cranberryturkey 9mo agoThe 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.
- yicmoggIrl 9mo ago> 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 My thought exactly! I'm grateful that Mozilla isn't hiding the features behind dark config UI patterns.
- thisislife2 9mo agoThey 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.
- evolve2k 9mo agoWasn’t their translations project “pre AI”? That’s not running an LLM is it?
- Macha 9mo agoMost 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.
- input_sh 9mo agoIt'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/ 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.
- chillfox 9mo agoI 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.
- stackghost 9mo agoDon't forget an obfuscation layer to spoof things like canvas fingerprinting, installed fonts, etc. I'd pay for that.
- chillfox 9mo agoSure, 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.
- WhyNotHugo 9mo agoYup, 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.
- protocolture 9mo agoIts not good enough for a fork. It needs to be a major, well maintained product, like firefox.
- QuiEgo 9mo agoSafari is 90% this, and maybe before they changed how extensions worked it was like 99% this. I weep for how close it was.
- 9mo ago
- spacephysics 9mo agoToo little, too late. Switched to Brave and haven’t been happier. Firefox lost the plot years ago.
- heavyset_go 9mo agoBrave comes with its own branded "Leo"[1] AI assistant built into the browser lol [1] https://brave.com/leo/ https://brave.com/leo/
- GCUMstlyHarmls 9mo agoEvery time brave gets walked out as some good alternative I cant get past the vc / crypto coin / brave-reward holding garbage. Maybe they're ok now but they had some really gross mistakes (?).
- eukara 9mo ago[flagged]
- yeukhon 9mo agoThe 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.
- kotaKat 9mo ago“but it’s opt in, bro, you dont have to use it” — every Brave stan
- BrendanEich 8mo agoWe never, as in not ever, offered crypto mining in the browser.
- gaigalas 9mo agoI'd say browsers are a pretty good way of delivering models that run locally. Currently, this tech is a sleeper because consumer hardware is not there yet. Extensions, even websites, could benefit a lot from offering small models on demand and powering client-side features with them. That is very different from a browser that embeds AI access through an API, and totally acceptable.
- blks 9mo agoTo be used for what? Summarising web pages?
- gaigalas 9mo agoI can give you a couple of examples: 1. I recently made an extension to "bookmark data". It's an auto scraper, but client side. https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/lidar/eckcmnibplmmemjbpdlpndlchecbgald https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/lidar/eckcmnibplmme... The user has to pick the elements so the extension knows which selectors to track across similar pages. While developing it, I imagined a near future in which a small enough model could do that for me. In fact, if I had the resources, I could probably train one specifically for that and use webnn or onnx or something to deliver it. 2. I also made a quick drum beat generator https://alganet.github.io/quick-beats/ https://alganet.github.io/quick-beats/ 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. --- 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.
- ChrisArchitect 9mo ago[dupe] Source: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/ai-controls/ https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/ai-controls/ (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46858492 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46858492)
- rc_kas 9mo agoI keep meaning to make a guide "how to make firefox not suck" but I never get around to it. It's a great browser, but I always forget the default settings are super stupid. Myself and power users all have it customized to the hilt. It takes some serious work to get a new new FireFox install working nicely.
- NoPicklez 9mo agoCould you mention some of these settings? I moved to Firefox from being a Chrome user and interested to know improvements
- drnick1 9mo agoThis. 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.
- esperent 9mo ago> 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?
- mook 9mo agoIf anything, it might unbreak things. 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.
- 9mo ago
- username223 9mo agoIf 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.
- hn92726819 9mo ago> The AI features can be disabled entirely or individually, so users can pick and choose what they want to use It sounds like you would want to switch off two of them and leave two of them on, no? How is that malicious compliance? The master AI switch is for people that have moral issues with all AI, so they want all future features turned off.
- username223 9mo agoMozilla is grouping a bunch of unrelated stuff in with the one thing people don't want.
- seszett 9mo agoThat'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.
- kmoser 9mo agoThis 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.
- account42 9mo agoI 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?
- richardboegli 9mo agoWaterfox is best way to get sane defaults.
- GuestFAUniverse 9mo agoI 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.
- hknceykbx 9mo agoSomeone needs to make an ai blocker like add blocker
- hooxinext 9mo agoHope apps follow this lead—AI should be a toggle, not a default.
- rozab 9mo agoIt's incredible that even vscode had this before Firefox. How could they misjudge their audience so badly?
- zecg 9mo agoI don't want to download the code or models for those features in the first place, Mozilla.
- butz 9mo agoFirefox should just spin up a separate "Firefox Lite" without all the "features".
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- hxorr 9mo agoI 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.
- knowitnone3 8mo ago[dead]