This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Im super happy to see so many upvotes for this most excellent browser!
Remember when they had a "kill switch" for javascript?
It's available as an extension: https://webextension.org/listing/javascript-toggler.html
Yeah. Used to be native. Like the slop kill switch currently is. Then won't be.
"Kill switch" – oh the drama. Let's call every simple toggle 'kill switch' from now on.
i have a violently execute switch in my room (it toggles the lamp on or off)
What's worse....you could always toggle it. In fact, you could re-route it to your own local LLM.
Drama drama cheesecake drama
For it to be a kill switch it would have to actually terminate a rogue AI.
So, there's a "bug", though I expect to FF it's a feature: If you individually block all of the AI features, then click on the master switch to block all AI, everything's great. But if you revert that master switch suddenly it "forgets" all of your settings and shit is activated again.
It seems by design. And since it's opt in, if FF "accidentally" disables the master switch (I'm betting it will eventually) you lose that extra layer of protection. OH, and I had disabled EVERYTHING in registry (about:config) before this and translations were still available. I guess it's time for me to explore other FF-core options....
Lmao, semi common design mistake? MUST BE INTENTIONAL!
I don't think I'm being paranoid by saying it:
opt-out rollout of every AI feature
only slogging through registry to manual opt out until now
CEO and board hell bent on monetizing and delivering features users actively do not want. I.e., enshitification
I have seen my own AI registry changes revert already once after a patch
It's just a lazy/poor design.
Instead of each setting having its own bit with one 'override' bit, they just set override by setting each bit.
I'd say you're being generous calling it poor design. It's actually reverting to "default" on settings when you uncheck instead of storing individual bits and honoring those. Why not revert to opted out - OK, that may be lazy to use a single template, but that's not the way some of their other "master" options work. And I've been a FF user since it's first releases, so this isn't some Mozilla hate. And I won't be going to anything Chromium and because of inertia I may just stick to FF.
It's also crazy that I have been manually configuring away from AI since it wasn't even opt out... it was forced in. Most aren't going to do that and Mozilla knew it going in. And I've already seen those registry settings revert once. Since this control option literally should have been the first feature for AI delivered and their entire AI push has an untrustworthy stink, I'll say it again: I await a future release bumping the setting back "on". "Oopsie! you can just turn it back off or wait for the next patch" after Mozilla and their partners collect their information across millions of users that aren't paying attention.
I, the laziest man possible, have been motivated to switch already. Waterfox is working just fine.
Iceraven is my go to Android browser, librewolf on desktop.
Mozilla has released so many self-described AI features in the past few years, but this is the only one that has:
I hope Mozilla learns their lesson. I doubt they will, but I hope.
To be fair people liked the translation feature too
Ssshhh don't say that too loud or the "no one wanted this" crowd may hear you. They would be very scared if they could read.
In the original announcement that they added translation, they didn't call it AI. They didn't even call it machine "learning" or machine translation there.
They just called it local, automated translation.
Maybe you should take your own advice about reading, and double-check my comment ;)
TWP does it better.
TWP dumps your pages to google translate, no thanks. FF is on device
sadly I’ll likely support them through any shitty decisions they make as they are the only viable non-chromium alternative these days.
I get they’re chasing the buck and trying to stay relevant, but uhhhh… if they could be less Steve Buscemi-teen about it, that’d be great.
I strongly believe that the EU should fund Mozilla, or a fork of Firefox.
Gecko is the only viable competitor to Blink/WebKit, and it is needed
Govts around the world should be funding all sorts of FOSS projects. I know they do to some degree but not much. It benefits the whole world and only hurts big tech.
That prospect becomes less and less likely the more government is bought and paid for by Big Tech.
This is probably common knowledge to you and many others, but it bears repeating: You cannot donate to fund the development of Mozilla Firefox.
Google can, unfortunately.
I recommend Waterfox
They have pledged to not fill their browser with AI slop features.
Last time I tried Waterfox some sites like Twitch that actively block usage on old browsers, refused to work because the latest Waterfox release was based on a Firefox like 20+ builds behind.
Firefox was on like version 142 and the latest Waterfox download was based on build 128.
Waterfox right now is built on ESR 148, which is on par with the latest Firefox release! ESR releases will lag several versions behind, but that's normal (even on Mozilla's side), and I'd be kind of shocked if it was such a big gap
Edit: there was a big gap. 128 to 140 was the right jump, but Waterfox non-betas took a little less than two months to implement the change after Mozilla released it.
I like playing around with them occasionally, but I only use local models. I cannot stand all the cloud stuff in general and with the way neural nets work you can get as good or better results out of a smaller/more narrow model and the same applies to LLMs.
The massive models the big companies are putting out there are generally just bad. Even if it can occasionally give you accurate output, for whatever it is you are asking it to do, it uses way more power and resources than reasonable and you could have found what you were looking for with a simple web search.
I feel like it's essentially a superfuled semantic search.
I can put in multiple issues and symptoms and it spits out a websearch that mostly applies to my reported issue.
I've already switched over to LibreWolf a month or two ago. Clean, simple, and it just works.
Does it come with an equivalent to uBlock? Can you port over your bookmarks from firefox?
I personally don't HATE ai but I don't want it in my browser or email or anything like that. I have a local llm I use for random stuff all the time but I don't need or want a company viewing everything I'm doing, adding buttons in places I'm likely to accidentally push, or training their shit on my dumb behavior. ai has destroyed much of the Internet already to the point that you almost need to use an llm in order to get any useful information during a search. Otherwise you're just filtering through ai generated webpages with the highest seo possible.
