This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
So sad for Firefox. I try to keep using since it’s the only solution free of Chromium, but I guess chromium will control everything only Safari will not be chromium.
Much like Adobe‘s Acrobat which I also have to use for work. At least from what I can tell when it suddenly summarizes a PDF. There‘s no way in hell that happens locally. But the fact that it seemingly automatically processes potentially sensitive data from customers didn‘t even do as little as raising eyebrows when I brought it up.
If your company has an enterprise/privacy agreement with Adobe, it might be considered addressed, similar to the millions of companies using Microsoft 365 and Sharepoint.
If, OTOH, it's a "free" feature of Adobe, it could be eating your company's data without constraints.
If the latter, let us know your company's name so that we can avoid it.
Relevant section:
Smart Window uses ‘memories’, things Mozilla says “…it learns from your activity” to inform its responses.
You can delete memories individually, and you can set any given chat session to not use/store them.
Fine so far.
The problem? My memory list isn’t populated with things Smart Window learned since I enabled it. Oh no.
It has activity going back months. We’re talking searches and website interactions from long before I enabled this. features.
Firefox just handed that history to the AI models to plough from, without telling me upfront.
I found this the creepiest aspect of Smart Window.
Mozilla says this was a flub; it will refine the onboarding around Smart Window to limit memory formation to post-opt-in activity only. That’s obviously the right fix.
Because sharing a user’s prior browsing history with third-party AI models, silently, on feature activation, without any headset? Yeah, a bit icky – but that’s the price of testing features that are finished, I guess.
I'm willing to give them a pass since this was a development build and while someone probably should've thought of it, it's the kind of bug that can happen. If this was the public release it would be a lot more outrageous.
Finding out about this gives me some extra questions, though.
There’s also an option to bring your own LLM, with fields for model name, endpoint, and API token available for entry when the manual option is enabled. However, the page itself warns local models may not work correctly.
It looks like there's an option for people to self-host too. You won't have to send your history to someone else's computer.
If it's anything like how they handled the AI sidebar, this option is going to get hidden before it hits production.
The speed at which firefox has been enshittified is as impressive as it is sad.
thier revenue entirely dependent on google, you can see why, they got lazy and dint spend time developing thier browser.
...and we'll all suffer as climate change increases. None of this shit is worth frying for.
Dont worry the US and Israel are starting WW3 as we speak we will all be dead before then any way
Donald Trump is the most environmentalist president ever. With oil prices as they are, can you imagine how much less oil we're burning?
lol no. We still burn the same amount only now the robber baron oil execs get paid triple.
Nah, it's just imperialist billiards, big vs little.
It's all part of "the great game" the west has been playing against Russia in the middle east for over a century.... The middle east is where America does it's proxy wars.
World wars are only a risk if a white European country is attacked. Horrendous isn't it.
So like Ukraine?
F*** I really dont want to change away from Firefox. Pleas be good Firefox. Please! Don't F this up.
Librewolf is exactly the same browser with all the security features dialed to 11 and all the AI removed.
unfortunately forks depend on FF, and chrome to survive.
And it breaks sooo many sites.
Waterfox, is Firefox that just works.
It only breaks sites because RFP is on by default and some greedy sites dont like RFP. You can just turn it off and use a good user agent mask (if you care about fingerprinting)
I tried Librewolf for a while and found it to be a bit too much for me when all I really want is Firefox without AI. The privacy options are probably great but not for me.
Just installed waterfox. First impression is that I am super happy to be bock to the previous Firefox theme - it takes less space and looks nicer in my opinion. Seems promising. Thanks for the recommendation! :)
It might be easier to soften Librewolf than harden Firefox, but fair point.
If you're a relatively normal user and you still want to use LibreWolf, I would recommend:
Most of this is easy to find, especially thanks to the LibreWolf menu
Yeah it's all just in the GUI to enable and disable what you don't want.
I don't get what people are complaining about with LibreWolf being "too hard". Like it's 1 minute clicking through menus and you're done. 5 minutes if you need to read and search things up real quick.
But LibreWolf, ublock installed by default, and then set up containers. Just pure bliss.
It broke youtube for me yesterday and mind you I’m a web developer and I didn’t know what broke it exactly to turn it on/off.
It fixed it self today though.
That was almost certainly YouTube breaking itself. They do a lot of public A-B testing without notifying the user of anything, even if it could break functionality.
The chances of Librewolf breaking, and updating in 24 hours is basically zero. Especially if you're on Windows since it doesn't update itself, you have to choose to install the separate updater application when you install Librewolf, otherwise it just doesn't update.
https://codeberg.org/librewolf/librewolf-winupdater
https://librewolf.net/docs/faq/
How often do you update LibreWolf?
LibreWolf is always based on the latest version of Firefox. Updates usually come within three days from each upstream stable release, at times even the same day. Unless problems arise, we always try to release often and in a timely manner.
It should however be noted that LibreWolf does not have auto-update capabilities, and therefore it relies on package managers or users to apply them.
Yeah I agree it was probably a/b testing since I use ublock origin as well so I’m use to this kind of stuff.
But the point I’m trying to make that I didn’t know at that time librewolf would have settings turned on that could break some websites.
To be fair, YouTube is a giant piece of shit. On mobile, IronFox and Firefox are terrible with it, but switching to Chrome and everything loads instantly.
We all know Google is purposely slowing down non-chrome browsers.
For us, sure. For the average Joe who doesn't know about the side effects of fingerprinting, not so much.
Yeah Librewolf does go really fucking hard on security/privacy to the detriment of functionality, but the are upfront with that so you shouldn't be going in completely blind. I think Water Fox is a nice happy medium for users that don't want to fuck around with technical stuff.
Its too late, bro. You gotta break it off and start mingling with the forks.
I remember having ff and then switching to chrome because it was better, and then switching back to ff because it was better. I’m ok leaving ff again.
Waterfox. Librewolf. Zen. Floorp.
They're all good options in their own ways. Just pick one and go
Have you seen the better browsing experience? It's on Zen. It's literally on Librewolf. It's on Floorp without ads. It's literally on Waterfox. You can probably find it on Ironfox. Dude it's on Ladybird. It's a Servo original. It's on GNOME Web. You can browse on GNOME Web. You can go to GNOME Web and browse it. Epiphany has it for you.
There's a master "kill switch" for all AI features in Firefox now. I suggest everyone who's concerned about this kind of thing just go and turn it off, and then we need never bother each other over this again.
It's still opt out, not opt in because on first install that LLM garbage is enabled by default. The kill switch should've been for people that chose to try LLM garbage and found it lacking; needing an easy way to disable it all.
I won't stop complaining until Firefox makes their LLM nonsense opt-in, letting a user choose at first boot if they want that shit or not. That would be the most ethical and user respecting way to handle their LLM shit.
Ehh, it's all local models. I don't really see the harm in that. It's just new features like any other.
Or pick a Firefox fork that doesn't have the AI bullshit. Libre Wolf is great for people who take security very seriously,l. I hear Water Fox is a much closer equivalent to Firefox without AI, and also has a focus on privacy. I've also been using Iron Fox on my android with basically no issues.
With Mozilla's current track record I don't trust them to not fuck with the AI "killswitch".
My master AI killswitch was just to switch to Waterfox.
"When it comes to privacy, defaults matter."
- Mozilla
Why not remove the AI and offer them as a separate extension? That way you're happy, and everybody else doesn't have crap shoved down their throats.
You can opt out in the settings
Just let them shoot themselves in the foot. Get familiar with the forks. Someone at Mozilla has no idea what they're doing. You would think they would learn their lesson last AI garbage but I guess not.
So I feel violated and gross and I never wanna use Firefox again. I don't care if you can self host it. I don't care if it's private. Mozilla propagandists need to fucking understand that their privacy policy does not reassure me. Nor does the fact that they went back on the AI kill switch and sent my information that should've been private to someone else's computer a good thing. It is fucking bad and I hope Mozilla fucking implodes. In the rise of fascist governments and the need for privacy. This is unacceptable and I refuse to even use a third party fork of Firefox. The best feature arguably that made Firefox worth while that being syncing has been basically weaponized potentially into something evil that will be used against people. Especially as they have long since updated their policies to make sure law enforcement can gain access to your personal information anyway. I will switch to Vivaldi. Something that doesn't have money issues and makes ad revenue through search engine deals that aren't Google and Bing. Something that will sync my browser data end to end encrypted where they cannot fucking see it. Truly go fuck Mozilla.
Nor does the fact that they went back on the AI kill switch and sent my information that should've been private to someone else's computer a good thing.
when did they do that?
No thanks.
One would think they'd be extra careful not to piss the users off at this point... but no.
