“It’s safe to say that the people who volunteered to “shape” the initiative want it dead and buried. Of the 52 responses at the time of writing, all rejected the idea and asked Mozilla to stop shoving AI features into Firefox.”
Hey all, just a reminder to keep the community rules in mind when commenting on this thread. Criticism in any direction is fine, but please maintain your civility and don’t stoop to ad-hominem etc. Thanks.
Ad-hominem
in a way that is directed against a person rather than the position they are maintaining.
in a way that relates to or is associated with a particular person.
It’s a good thing LLM models are not people because…
If it can be proven that an LLM bot account is present on the instance masquerading as a human user, I would recommend you report the account for that reason/spam so that it can be investigated and removed per instance rule 4 after evidence is found.
Since they aren’t people, I’d say it’s pointless to reply to them with ad-hominem in the first place since it means nothing to them, and therefore reporting it would be the more effective action to take in any event.
don’t stoop to ad-hominem
At this point Ad-hominem is practically the nice name for the business model “enshitification”.
I am actually curious if gentoo community sees a noticeable increase in time for updating/installing with all these new AI features on everything.
When I want AI, I use this: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=DuckDuckGo+AI+Chat&ia=chat&duckai=1
My worry about AI built into my browser is that it’ll be turned into data mining, training, and revenue generation resulting in exploitation and manipulation of me.
My worry about AI built into my browser is that it’ll be turned into data mining, training, and revenue generation
Isn’t the AI Mozilla is talking about all run locally?
Those unhappy have another option: use an AI‑free Firefox fork such as LibreWolf, Waterfox, or Zen Browser.
And I have taken that other option.
Also: Vanadium and/or Ironfox on Android.
What I don’t get: Isn’t Vanadium Chromium under the hood?
The truth is that Chromium is really good. It has the best security and performance.
Vanadium takes that and makes changes to make it more secure and private.
I think the problem with Chromium isn’t so much that Blink or V8 is bad or anything, it’s that it’s entirely under the thumb of Google. We’re essentially being set up for another Internet Explorer scenario, only Google unlike Microsoft won’t just be sitting on their laurels. Google is an advertising company, their entire business model is the web. Google Search is the tool used to find things, and with Google Chrome being the go-to browser for a lot of people, Google essentially ends up in control of both how you access the web and what you access.
That sort of power is scary, which is why I personally avoid anything Chromium based as much as I am able to. Chromium itself is fantastic, but I don’t like the baggage it comes with.
Google search hasnt been usable for over a year.
That’s valid.
That’s also part of the reason I like Webkit. It’s in a nice spot between Firefox and Chromium when it comes to security and performance. And importantly, is not from an ad company and often passes on browser specs that would be harmful to privacy and security.
I forget what the site is called, but I saw one that nicely layed out different browser specs and gives the explanation why one of the engine developers decided against supporting or implementing it.
I just wish there was a good Webkit browser on Linux. Unfortunately, Gnome Web just feels slow and unresponsive despite good benchmarks.
Gods I wish Epiphany/Gnome Web was better. The Kagi people are working on bringing Orion to Linux, which I believe will be using WebKit there as well.
It’s kind of funny that we don’t have a solid WebKit browser on Linux, since WebKit has its roots in the KDE Projects KHTML engine for Konqueror.
I guess that kind of ties in to my anger at these massive tech companies profiting off of FOSS but doing almost fuck-all to contribute. Google opening LLM generated bug reports in FFMPEG when all of the streaming media giants are propped up by this one project is just one example. There should be some kind of tax for this, I feel. They’re benefitting greatly, and provide nothing in return.
It is.
My understanding is that you go to Ironfox to optimize for privacy and Vanadium to optimize for security.
It depends on your threat model.
Either way, both are better on both fronts when compared to default Chrome or Firefox.
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Wrong. You are both popularizing Google tech and decreasing web browser diversity when you use any chromium variety
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Are you serious? Chromium is very much mostly written by Google and the direction it takes in every way that matters is entirely controlled by Google.
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I mean technically, yes. However the sheer amount of LoC chromium has and the costs of actually hard forking (and properly maintaining it) makes it quite difficult. That’s why right now we only have the choice of Firefox based browsers and Chromium, then hopefully a good third contender being the Ladybird browser in the future.
You could also go build a house (or even a cabin) with your own two hands, but most people typically go and buy one or pay for one to be built for them instead.
It actually does. You’re still supporting a browser monoculture unless you change it so radically that it makes no sense to call it a fork anymore
Vandium is all about not standing out from the crowd. You use it to not make a statement and hide your activity within the majority of useragents. If you want to make a statement that’s great, but you should only do it when you’re ok being fingerprinted.
Who says I’m “making a statement” by using firefox? That’s not the goal at all.
I didn’t mean that in a negative way. All I meant was that using a non-chromium browser to help move the needle is a privacy tradeoff. I keep both vandium and ironfox installed and use them at different times for different things.
A fork is great, but the more a fork deviates, the more issues there are likely to be. Firefox is already at low enough numbers that it’s not really sustainable.
Then Mozilla should start listening to their users instead of driving them away. I know I stopped using Firefox after being a regular user since launch because the AI nonsense became the last sta straw.
Yes but we shouldn’t let perfect be the enemy of good.
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There aren’t better alternatives, and the ai shit is all easy to disable.
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Well, the first two essentially are Firefox and the latter is very immature to the point that I doubt you could reliably use it. It’s in beta.
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To my knowledge that literally only exists in the form of a Firefox fork like Librewolf. Which takes more effort to switch to than simply disabling a couple values in config.
Disabling it is one more thing to fingerprint me on.
It serves literally no purpose for any intelligent person.
The good is other rendering engines currently in the works.
Then Mozilla should start listening to their users instead of driving them away.
I think the hope is to get more people in than losing them. But with Ai nobody will stay forever, because the time someone else makes a better Ai tool, they switch. Because Mozilla loses personality and uniqueness and start getting replaceable. … just like employees who are forced to use Ai instead their own work and knowledge.
My two biggest issues with a fork are: a) timely updates, they take a bit longer than the main version, and b) trust issues, I don’t trust most forks.
I considered using AI to summarize news articles that don’t seem worth the time to read in full (the attention industrial complex is really complicating my existence). But I turned it off and couldn’t find the button to turn it back on.
you have to be REALLY careful when asking an LLM to summarize news otherwise it will hallucinate what it believes sounds logical and correct. you have to point it directly to the article, ensure that it reads it, and then summarize. and honestly at that point…you might as well read it yourself.
And this goes beyond just summarizing articles you NEED to provide an LLM a source for just about everything now. Even if you tell it to research online the solution to a problem many times now it’ll search for non-relevant links and utilize that for its solution because, again, to the LLM it makes the most sense when in reality it has nothing to do with your problem.
At this point it’s an absolute waste of time using any LLM because within the last few months all models have noticeably gotten worse. Claude.ai is an absolute waste of time as 8 times out of 10 all solutions are hallucinations and recently GPT5 has started “fluffing” solutions with non-relevant information or it info dumps things that have nothing to do with your original prompt.
AI is very much not good at summarising news accurately.
https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/11/05/ai-gets-45-of-news-wrong-but-readers-still-trust-it/
If you need to summarize the news, which is already a summary of an event containing the important points and nothing else, then AI is the wrong tool. A better journalist is what you actually need. The whole point of good journalism is that it already did that work for you.
I have a real journalist, but this is more on the “did you know this was important” side. Like how it’s fine to rinse your mouth out after brushing your teeth, but if your water isn’t fluoridated then you probably shouldn’t (which I got from skimming the article for the actionable information).
That should be the point but there is barely good journalism left.
How does AI mis-summarizing the (allegedly bad) journalism improve it?
It SLAMS away all the fluff.
Personally I don’t want AI anywhere.
I can think of some uses
But I’m feeling really sadistic today, and it mostly just boils down to ‘forced ‘paranoia’ larp’.
You want AI in your browser? Just add <your favourite spying ad machine> as a “search engine” option, with a URL like
https://chatgpt.com/?q=%25s, with a shortcut like
@ai. Maybe also add one with a URL with some query pre-written likehttps://chatgpt.com/?q=summarize this page for me: %sas
@aisor something, modern chatbots have the ability to make HTTP requests for you. Then if you want to summarize the page you’re on, you do Ctrl+L Ctrl+C @ais Ctrl+V Enter. There, I solved all your AI needs with 4 shortcuts without literally any client-side code.Emissions. Economic problems. Goading several people into suicide.
Like, if you ship a food item with harmful bacteria in it, it gets recalled. If you have a fatal design flaw in a car, it gets recalled. If your LLM encourages people to separate from their loved ones and kill themselves, nothing fucking happens.
I think Mozilla’s base is privacy focused individuals, a lot of them appreciating firefox’s opensource nature and the privacy hardened firefox forks. From a PR perspective, Firefox will gain users by adamantly going against AI tech.
Maybe their thought process is they’ll gain more users by adopting AI while knowing they’re still the most privacy focused of the major browsers. Where have I seen this mentality before?
Spoiler
The American Democrat party often believes it can get more votes by shifting conservative, believing the more progressive voters will stick pick them because they’re still more progressive than not.
I noticed that too! I will never use it.
Can I just take my Firefox Profile directory, and copy it over to LibreWolf? Does anybody know?
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Makes sense. But they change “just” the default settings, right? I would like to take over my existing profile if it works. To me it does not defeat the purpose, because I did a lot of custom tweaking to make it more private too. So from that perspective I am happy and that is not the reason why I change. I change because I’m fed up with the Ai integration of Firefox.
Edit: But maybe its also time for a fresh start from scratch. And rethink every detail again. I am very hesitant to make the switch right now… but it has to be done.
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It depends. If it’s just for the sake of plugging AI because it’s cool and trendy, fuck no.
If it’s to improve privacy, accessibility and minimize our dependency on big tech, then I think it’s a good idea.
A good example of AI in Firefox is the Translate feature (Project Bergamot). It works entirely locally, but relies on trained models to provide translation on-demand, without having Google, etc as the middle-man, and Mozilla has no idea what you translates, just which language model(s) you downloaded.
Another example is local alt-text generation for images, which also requires a trained model. Again, works entirely locally, and provide some accessibility to users with a vision impairment when an image doesn’t provide caption.
Totally agree. Just because generally AI is bad and used in stupid ways, it doesn’t mean that all AI is useless or without meaning. Clearly if you look at the trends, people are using chatbots as search engines. This is not Mozilla forcing anything on us, we are doing this. At that point I much prefer them to develop a system that lets us use gpts to surf the web in the most convenient and private way possible. So far I have been very happy with how Mozilla has implemented AI in Firefox. I don’t feel the bloat, it is not shoved in my face, and it is under my control. We don’t have to make it a witch hunt. Not everything is either horrible or beautiful.
Everyone’s entitled to their opinion, but how can you be aware of this fact
I don’t know whether the negative reactions reflect the majority of Firefox users or are just a noisy minority. Mozilla, after all, likely has a clearer view of the whole user base.
and then still assume that nobody wants something based on a non-representative sample of 52 comments?
That bit was odd for me too. I think the author means “nobody” based on the online reactions and discussions about Firefox. And you shouldn’t take the term/word too literal. So I can understand the view at least, because that is what I am getting too. The problem is, that mostly negative opinions are discussed. And mostly from tech people, which I personally assume most Firefox users might be.
Just render the page, page renderer.
monkey paw: curls
Yes, the page has been rendered by a large webpage model based on the URL.
Doesn’t matter what the end-user wants. Corporate greed feeding into technological ignorance is gonna shove it down our throats anyway
So, will there be an option to disable it?
Yes, and they push it less than tab groups and PWA. This is a nothingburger.
