this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2026
434 points (97.4% liked)
Technology
82940 readers
2790 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Usable addition, and the fact that it is only in-browser is actually a merit in some cases. Firefox gets a lot of hate but is way more privacy centric out of the box compared to Chrome. AI is only opt-in and you can literally customize the entire browser using about:config. Mozilla also maintains the only real competing web engine (not considering Apple's locked in ecosystem) and they are the reason browsers are open source these days.
Not to take anything away from your overall point, which I completely agree with, but this may be a bit of a stretch. All of the "AI" buttons and features are - to my knowledge - on by default. They have made it a lot easier to change that to "off by default now and in the future", which is very welcome, but "only opt-in" is, again, a bit of a stretch.
Well, yes. In so far as they’ve added a new opt in button, and it would be silly to assume every user wants it off now. Instead, users that previously installed get a “turn off AI here” button when the update happens.
I’d say that’s a good trade off.
They added dangerous bullshit that nobody wanted with no good ability to turn it off, and then, year or so later, added a switch to turn it off.
Most of the Firefox users don't want for llm to read web pages for them and group their tabs based on whatever bullshit rules it hallucinated this day. People go to Google and Microslop for this treatment.
I definitely wouldn’t call “local llm features” dangerous.
Edit: I suppose the tab grouping may not be local? Their docs don’t really specify one way or another. So I could be wrong in that one. The rest is definitely local, minus the “you have to sign in with an llm account” sidebar chat thing.
It's not on by default.
It was on my computer, on, until well after they implemented it, they allowed an opt out.
Weird. I was just setting up three Linux laptops and was asked if I wanted to turn these features on every time.
I am still on windows, I want to make the switch but my main computer broke, the cursor and the keyboard stopped working despite not being connected to the internet for years. And my backup computer the C drive is almost completely full which I have no fucking idea how that happened as I have barely done anything on this piece of shit. So I'm afraid if I try to download Linux I will end up with no computer that works. I am not a tech guy obviously.
You could try connecting an external keyboard/mouse to your main computer.
As for the backup one - how much space do you have left? You'd need between 4 and 6 GB to download a Linux ISO and around 2 MB for Rufus with which you'd build a bootable "live USB".
If you don't have even that much, grab WinDirStat to check what exactly is taking up so much space - maybe you can remove some of it.
Thanks for the help, I did buy an external keyboard and mouse despite not knowing if that works without authorizing it. Someone else told me I could take apart the back and sometimes the wire comes loose. The old one should have a lot of memory the thing is a beast.
The backup one however the c Drive is like 90 some percent full and keeps sending me messages about clearing up space but I've already done everything I can. I have no idea what is even on the C drive. I barely saved anything, 95% of my music is that my old one, and documents and whatever that's all I save.
It absolutely, positively is on by default. Moreover, it's actually quite hard to completely turn off. Even their new fancy switches are sus, but for the longest time you needed to go to about:config and switch like ten different weirdly named parameters to turn everything off.
Weird. I was just setting up three Linux laptops and was asked if I wanted to turn these features on every time.