Mozilla is in the sweet spot of basically being the only available browser that isnt chrome, that has adblocking.
and they are doing everything in their power to fuck it up by chasing this bullshit AI trend thats already dying on the vine.
On one side, its great that forks exist that strip out a lot of the bullshit. On the other hand if main Firefox dies or goes too far into the deep end, there’s no way those forks can take its role
I don’t really mind AI features where it makes sense. That being said, as someone else commented, this should have been a plugin.
I’ll add on top of that: this should have been a plugin wholly developed by Mistral. Mozilla should stop spending time and money on side features and focus on the browser and its engine. It still is way slower than any chromium based browser, lacks features that have been standard on chromium for years (eg. HDR video playback) and it’s way less efficient on battery than the competition.
Complaining about Firefox doing this and groveling on “I’m good, I’m on <random fork>” is spitting upwards: even the most modified forks like Zen still rely on Mozilla’s aging engine.
Exactly. The Blender foundation has stated that it is a tool by humans and for humans, so no AI functionality is planned. However, there are still MCP extensions and the like. There’s nothing stopping anyone from using AI with Blender, but the Blender Foundation funding goes to core development. Not sure why Mozilla isn’t doing the same. If I really want a LLM controlling a browser, playwright-cli works fine anyway.
It still is way slower than any chromium based browser, lacks features that have been standard on chromium for years
I don’t think its slower at all. Most of the time same if not faster. Maybe it depends on where you go?
Features in chromium are often there because they are going their own way and not being standard, is that Mozillas fault?
HDR video is in Firefox, HDR images is experimental. Personally I don’t care, why would I watch videos in a browser that I think should have HDR?
I will agree that Mistral should have done the lifting, and Firefox need not be working so hard on adding AI. However, if they don’t people on the other side of the fence will complain that Chrome gets all the AI, why is Firefox so lazy?
Firefox actually picked up on good improvements at around the same they started with the AI stuff. Tab groups and vertical tabs were something people wanted forever and they implemented excellently. Firefox does have HDR.
I don’t know if firefox is slower than chromium in benchmarks or something but it’s certainly not noticeable to me in real usage.
By all means criticize AI features, but please don’t lie about everything else.
I am on the latest version of FF on Linux and I don’t have HDR working, not on YouTube, nor on standalone players like Jellyfin. Yes my display is HDR and Wayland+gnome is exposing HDR properly to games and Helium (chromium fork).
Since some govt and utilities sites only work on “chrome” (borked even with user agent switcher set to chrome+win on FF) I had to get this other browser, and the speed difference is noticeable on most sites, even tho theoretically FF should be faster since its stripping a lot of crap with uBlock Origin.
Tried flatpak’d Brave and also runs snappier than FF.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/HDR#Firefox
Brave
Always amusing you people gravitate to the cryptoscam browser.
Kindly fuck off
LOL very mature! Have a nice day, friend
yeah no thanks. luckily librewolf strips this shit out.
or you can just turn it off from settings
Or they can stop trying to force it through their users throat and just accept that the biggest part of their users don’t want it.
I mean, they do give a single toggle that disables every AI feature (new and old) at once… I think that’s pretty good
But why isn’t it a toggle that turns these features on instead?
It’s bullshit that we’re expected to constantly opt-OUT of these features that we supposed want. If we wanted them, we would turn them on.
and you can go back and re-enable just a bit you actually do want… like the on-device translations, while keeping the main switch ‘off’ so there’s no new surprises.
deleted by creator
What happened to just making a damn good browser
Money
The translation feature has been very useful, though it’s not an LLM. Still a neural network though. Saves me from going to google translate when browsing websites in e.g Russian (drive2.ru or whatever turns up in google search every so often when looking up obscure information on some cars and european oils that bitog forums don’t see as much).
It entirely depends on what the AI does and if it’s opt-in, opt-out, or forced on you. Opt-in local AI with sensible features is actually a good thing IMO.
i love the on-device translate. sometimes it can be a little off-the-mark, but overall it works pretty well. it’s a great addition to firefox.
It is a language model.
The Firefox translation is “oldschool” ML, but it is the same family of stuff that chat-tuned LLMs sprouted from.
On principle I only want a pure FOSS program. I wouldn’t want to use a binary-only browser even if it was a great browser with good privacy. I do use the built in Firefox translate feature but I’ve been wanting to get around to seeing where its model comes from. The Mistral stuff is completely proprietary except for the final weights as far as I can tell. I’d rather resist that since I want to be able to build and modify it myself.
The Mistral stuff is completely proprietary except for the final weights as far as I can tell
Same as most open weight models. There are very few truly open source models, particularly if your definition requires distributing the whole training dataset.
I’d rather resist that since I want to be able to build and modify it myself.
I hope you’ve got some damn beefy hardware then. Even small models are a pain to train from scratch. You CAN still fine-tune it or train with LoRA.
Same as most open weight models. There are very few truly open source models, particularly if your definition requires distributing the whole training dataset.
Yes exactly. Open weight is like a compiled binary. Misleading terminology made that sound desirable.
I hope you’ve got some damn beefy hardware then. Even small models are a pain to train from scratch. You CAN still fine-tune it or train with LoRA.
It’s ok I can manage without AI.
How do you disable it?
about:config
browser.ml.enable => false
Settings -> AI Controls
path a: toggle “block AI enhancements” which turns them all off and blocks future ones by default. You can scroll down and enable specific ones if you like even with block on
Path b: scroll down and disable the specific ones you don’t want
I gotta admit, I don’t really mind AI as long as it doesn’t exist anywhere in any amount
I don’t really mind AI as long as it lives in a https://ai.megacorp.bs/, and I have to go there to use it, and it stays there.
As long as this is opt-in (i.e. disabled by default), then sure. Otherwise, I’ll just have to find a new browser.
ive been seeing screenshots of the new vibe coded new tab replacement that are totally broken and the redesigned ui has overly rounded components that cover up text components and hard coded “ai” purple gradients that are nearly impossible to turn off with going into about:config…
So I have low expectations of this going well and seeing that second option in my future.
first thing i did when deved updated to the ‘new’ look (157)…
search for ‘nova’ in about:config
turn off the new rounded gradient shit.
Ok.
But why?Mozilla execs got an angry phone call from their sugar daddies at Google demanding they drive off the last remaining FF users (allegedly)
It doesn’t say anything about how this works. “No data retention” suggests that data is going to a server that’s processing it but then not retaining it. That’s bad, this type of feature should run entirely on the client.
Also, there’s a proprietary AI model doing the work, even if inference is in the client. It says “open weight” but that’s like letting people download a program as a compiled binary, the exact opposite of what FOSS is supposed to mean. It’s an open/free model only if the training data and algorithms are also public, not just the trained weights.
Issue is that local AI hog vram, are slow and small models. Or if you don’t have a compatible GPU, it uses the CPU which is even slower.
If AI is the future, I really hope it’s local, but with the equipment people have at home, local AIs are a non-starter.
IMO it’s enough to justify not shipping those AI features at all but I guess that’s where FF execs disagree.
I don’t trust any feature that uses the word “AI.”
Ideally, such things should be transparent to the user. As in features that are useful without having to understand the underlying programming mechanisms.
Take FF’s local translation. That’s an immensely useful feature. No one cares that it uses a language model or about any of the details, because it just works well enough, and is useful enough to stand on its own as an advantage over Chromium.
…If they have to brand a feature to make it appealing, that’s a bad sign. Otherwise why TF would I want expensive tab sorting or things like that?
They should stop doing that, instead
tbh i would not mind it that much if its local LLM or if its opt-in (opt out as bare minimum)
i also wonder if they are gonna use this for the built-in translator (if you think about it technically most translator software are AI,DEEPL uses a hybrid between LLMS and NMT IIRC. )Mozilla can fuck right off with that forced ai horse shit.
Waterfox is the way.
Try librewolf
No
Ok then
Oh yeah, great, sounds awesome. Can I get in line now to not use it?
about:config
browser.ml.enable => false
