Mozilla has released so many self-described AI features in the past few years, but this is the only one that has:
- been requested by the community
- received broad critical acclaim
I hope Mozilla learns their lesson. I doubt they will, but I hope.
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 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 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
Funding FF? Maybe. Funding Mozilla? No way, not with my money.
Why?
Firefox is just the browser, Mozilla is the organization constantly wasting money on features Firefox’s users are actively hostile to in a bid to tempt away people already using Chrome. Not the OP, but I’d be down to donate to Firefox’s development directly, but I wouldn’t want to make a donation to Mozilla hoping it would go toward Firefox, only to find out they took my money to build some new LLM integration that nobody asked for, only to sit unused for years before being quietly shuttered in favor of the new tech buzzword of the day.
Browsers don’t need LLMs
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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.
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?
It comes with ublock installed by default, it also defaults to having certain features enabled by default like clearing cookies on browser exit, letter boxing enabled, and webgl disabled. This may or may not hamper your usage of the browser, but you can enable/disable this stuff via the settings.
You can also go to the Firefox extension marketplace and install extensions natively.
It is the same browser so yes to both of your questions
Do you know its it’s the same on android?
There is no LibreWolf for Android, there is IronFox tho
Got it. Thanks
Like the other commenter said, there isn’t a LibreWolf for android, but I am using IronFox and it’s been fine. I don’t see a huge improvement or anything, but I don’t see any degradation either. So, so far it’s been a fine alternative.
Thanks
And their telemetry metrics will tell them people overwhelmingly keep the switch on.
Because the vast majority don’t read release notes these days?
I have enough trouble keeping with the IRL release notes of how my democracy is falling apart. Forger checking them on my browser.
Because the people who turn off the AI are the same people who turn off telemetry
You don’t have to read the release notes. It literally puts it front and center in your face the first time you launch it after this update is applied.
The only one I turned off was the sidebar, because that’s kinda dumb. The rest seem semi useful.
And also neither cloud-based nor LLMs
People overwhelmingly kept autosave off. People just don’t like changing settings. I’m hoping Mozilla knows this.
EDIT: Typo
Interesting read, thanks.
Because OOBE is better than tinkering. Normies will stay on OOBE. We either tinker or move to another project.
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
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CEO and board hell bent on monetizing and delivering features users actively do not want. I.e., enshitification
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I have seen my own AI registry changes revert already once after a patch
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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.
Wow some people really hate AI huh. Did a robot kill your father or something?
The only useful thing ive found for AI is its ability to read text from an image. Which is good for taking serial numbers from a photo, and copying from an app that otherwise doesnt allow copying on phone. Thats it. A tool.
OCR did that for 20 years .
Nothing these slop generators do is novel or new.
I remember using Google translate that was doing that live on the phone camera and translating the text at the same time 15 years ago.
Random aside to rant about consumer OCR.
Recently for my work I had to do some OCR stuff to get some numbers out of a document that the vendor in their infinite wisdom refused to provide in an editable/selectable form. I.e. they just slapped a .jpeg onto a page and saved it as a .pdf. (This is a separate thing that infuriates me.)
Anyway, what I’m actually here to complain about is the baffling phenomenon that every single piece of OCR software I tried ranging from open source to trials of commercial programs, to the thingy that came with one of our all-in-one printer/scanners, and everything in between is that it’s somehow still exactly as crap as the lousy OCR programs we were all struggling with in the late '90s.
I have absolutely no idea how this facet of technology in particular has utterly and categorically failed to make any forward progress whatsoever in literal decades. I’ve personally worked on machine vision driven pick-and-place machines capable of accurately determining the orientation of densely printed cosmetics tubes, among other items, and placing them all face up in a box several times per second. Yet somehow the latest and greatest OCR transcription algorithms still can’t tell a 5 from a 6 or ye gods forbid an S, or an L from a J, or an M from a collection of back and forward slashes, all despite being handed crisp high contrast seriffed text that’s at least 60 pixels high.
Given the incredibly low bar for performance here given that apparently every single programmer involved just walked away circa about 2001, I can’t imagine that the current slop generation machines fare any better…
I have tried some of the popular LLMs a few months back when I had to digitise an old policy document from which only an old scan still existed. I had trouble reading it.
The results varied wildly. OpenAI was really poor at it while Gemini got it right completely. I was quite impressed. ABBYY FineReader is supposed to be the best non-LLM software for OCR, but it doesn’t come near the performance of Gemini
How else do people think we were translating all that hentai before the slop generators took off
OCR kinda sucked lmao
that function is just reskinned OCR, though
which I guess you could consider as AI and that it is a similar training data structure? not my area lol
I do also think that AI has some use as a search engine. I haven’t used it much for this purpose at all, but a while back there was a specific type of engineering analysis I needed to do, and I couldn’t remember the exact terms or topics to look up. chat GPT got me into the right area so I could look at the appropriate resources. in that specific scenario, it was better than a standard search engine
Of course once I found the materials I was looking for, I stopped using the chat bot and you know use those materials
Yeah, ocr is a type of AI. The big advantage of modern techniques is that it can factor in context a bit better. It’s the same principle but a different mechanism for how you know a red hexagon with S__P on it says stop, even if the sign is dented, a letter fully fell off, it’s raining and dark.
It also means it’s sometimes wildly inaccurate, like in cases where it’s just so much more likely that it said something else. Like how on a bright sunny day, with perfect clarity, and a crisp new sign with extra good visuals, you’ll hit the breaks for a sign that’s a red hexagon that says §¥¢¶. It’s just very unlikely that that would coincidentally be on a red hexagon near the road, so it’s more likely you saw wrong and it was actually the normal thing.
Ackshually… Stop signs are octagons!
I also find LLMs decent for translating text between languages, though for serious use it still requires human review
I, the laziest man possible, have been motivated to switch already. Waterfox is working just fine.
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.
For years and years I’ve been using this extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/yesscript2/
Yeah, as long as it made any sense to browse the web without JS. These days you need at least an allow list.
all you have to do is click on Settings > AI Controls. You’ll then see a very bold and prominent option called ‘Block AI Enhancements.’
I don’t see it on mobile though.
On Android or iOS? I’m pretty sure the iOS app is just a re-skinned Safari, isn’t it?
Are you on FF148?
Supposedly. Says 148 in About.
I can’t see it either.
I’m on 147.0.4 but there’s no option to update it on play store.
How can I update it to 148?Pretty sure this is about desktop. Mobile doesn’t have the same kind of features, if at all. Does Mobile have anything else besides local translation?
And immediately blocked.
I’m not against AI, I use it, but I want to be using it on my terms, not have it shoved into everything I use.
I kept the auto translate on. It’s the only thing I can think of that I want to just have happen.
?
I started using Zen Browser, it’s a fork of FF. Sick of this Mozilla nonsense
WaterFox
So while previously the translation feature was supported by an extension, now it has to be enabled through ai.
Hate it.
I’m going to unblock telemetry just long enough for them to see me hit this kill switch
Oh good they’ve protected me from the evil AI that they chose on their own to introduce. I am immensely thankful
Come on this is pathetic, They’re the ones that cause the problem in the first place. They don’t get credit for correcting their own messes.
