This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
"Kill switch" – oh the drama. Let's call every simple toggle 'kill switch' from now on.
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.
Iceraven is my go to Android browser, librewolf on desktop.
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.
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
TWP does it better.
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.
Funding FF? Maybe. Funding Mozilla? No way, not with my money.
Yeah I really hope there will be some way to tie donations directly to FF development.
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.
Yeah ofc they are chasing the buck.
It's either they find alternatives revenue streams or we no longer have Firefox as a viable alternative anymore.
Browsers development is crazy engineering heavy, and thus, expensive.
It's a shitty situation all around.
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 think they’re desperate to make money since they’re losing userbass AND Google is probably not happy that most users change the default search engine away from them.
Does anyone really think the current administration is going to break up Google? Lina Khan almost did it but like most of the rest of this timeline we just didn’t quite get there
Yeah it's a catch 22.
They either fail to get a big enough use base because their core users are not enough and they fail from a lack of funding.
Or they try to follow trends to increase their appeal and user base, and annoy their core users.
Most users don't realize that Mozilla is doing what Google is doing with Chrome with an engineering team 1/4 the size of the chrome team. And that the grand majority of their costs are engineering related.
Browsers are expensive, and Mozilla needs to find revenue streams to pay for it.
I believe Firefox could raise a lot of money through donations. If they make it clear that Firefox donations will be solely used for Firefox development. Also ideally add a quick survey to donations to see what the "donating" userbases values are. My issue with donating to Mozilla is that it is too broad and they have many products I don't care for.
I use Thunderbird and donate to it because I feel it's more focused. I believe Mozilla still can use the funds for other stuff but at least I am donating for a clear project.
Firefox donations will be solely used for Firefox development
This might be a stupid question.... but how much developing does a browser actually need? I get security updates and such but how much resources does that stuff really need? Full disclosure: I'm a dumb lorry driver I have no idea how these things work. Some years ago I realized I hadn't updated my browser in at least a year, maybe two and I had no issues lol
Infinite money Google keeps trying to push shit to the standard so all other browsers end up needing significant dedicated resources to keep up or risk getting blamed for broken sites.
I've already switched over to LibreWolf a month or two ago. Clean, simple, and it just works.
Feels a bit snappier too, but that could just be the clean profile
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
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.
