they should just make it an extension people can add on instead of baking this shit into the pie
this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2025
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Fuck AI
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seriously, containers are an extension but ai is mandatory? make it make sense
i can understand this. most articles are designed in order to waste the reader's time on the site to show more ads. we can can all cry around the fire like we usually do on lemmy when ai comes up, but this was clearly caused by journalism.
my main concern however is bloated browsers. i dont want pocket, or hidden syncing and telemetry, ai and whatever the fuck goes on in the background. takes a lot less to add ecosia and enable cookies for librewolf than debloat firefox.
LibreWolf
And if that feels too locked down, WaterFox.
I want to try mobile firefox / and waterfox. But im stuck with Duckduckgo, cause it have a good bookmark system with folders and i can save it to my sd-card, no need for sync or accounts.
Its been there a while and I actually like this. You can set it up to connect to your own ML server, and it saves me a ton of time when I get assigned a support ticket with days of tier one back and forth I have to sift through.
I saw that. If you go into about:config and diisable literally everything that has 'ml' in the name you can turn this bs off. One day i'll switch browsers D= 
Also it's really funny to me that publicly all these companies are shouting "AI!" but the engineers seem to know it's really just machine learning.
edit There are also some *.ml strings you can just straight up delete.
I did the same thing. I'm happier, but I'm thinking of trying LibreWolf now.
Its a couple of toggles my friend.
Help, now can't marixst-leninist
And nothing of value was lost.
I saw that. See where it says “Remove AI Chatbot”? I clicked on that. It’s gone now.
Opt-out culture is how you get Windows. This is not normal or okay. Firefox exists just as an upstream these days.
Windows is the "ask me later" culture
But why was it there in the first place? Who asked for it?
Lots of regular users use AI
Most 'regular' users aren't using Firefox. FF has something like 5% market share — it's basically just for people techie enough to understand why chromium-based browsers are bad. I'm willing to bet that there's a significant overlap between those users and users who understand why AI is bad.
Firefox can't survive with just those users. That's why there's features that regular users like and that power users can just disable.
Sadly, I've seen one too many people asking for it.
It's the norm now. Firefox already only has 3% market share, if they don't keep up with modern features then they'll probably just die out altogether. Doesn't matter if it's popular with FOSS evangelists or the anti-AI crowd, they'll still use FF because it's better than any alternative for their purposes.
If this feature is intended for the people who want it, then it should be opt-in.
Why? Isn't it already opt-in? It doesn't force you to use it, and the button to disable it just hides it from the menu.
As much as I hate AI, I get that they include stuff like that to appease the mainstream users. I would just wish they asked me beforehand if I want these features. At least its pretty unintrusive unlike most other AI implementations right now. And they give an option to remove it, which is nice.
What mainstream users? Firefox is tiny in usage compared to Chrome, Edge, Opera, etc. And the people who do use FF use it because they have enough tech knowledge to understand why those other browsers are bad/consumer hostile.
If FF starts catering to the 'mainstream' by acting like those other browsers, they're going to end up shrinking their user base instead of growing it.
I agree. I was all about to go up in arms about it when I saw that menu but then I was immediately relieved when I saw they've put the "Remove AI Chatbot" option right below it. They know their userbase very well and know that even though some people desire AI features to play with, a lot of us find it immediately repugnant and a show stopper so I think it's an ok way to appease both, provided that the AI wasn't active in the background until we had a chance to notice this menu and disable it.
As long as they don't pull a Microsoft and increasingly try to force it down our throats when they realise that nobody wants it.
This doesn't appease mainstream users, though...
I hate to break it to you, but we live in a time where the average users uses ChatGPT or Gemini instead of Google or Wikipedia to get information. Most of my coworkers use AI at least to some degree, even the technically more advanced users.
As much as I hate this, we can‘t just ignore it as if this wouldn‘t be the case. We are already in the Dead-Internet-Times and it will only get worse unless the bubble bursts, but even then we won‘t be at a point that we were at before this all started.
You are right. And all this Firefox bashing is helping the real bad actors.
Let's take a realistic look. I think, AI is here to stay. With a few years more AI can be an invaluable assistant of your life. I don't think the bubble will burst in a way that AI will cease to exist completely.
The important part is, that the AI has to run on your systems in your terms. Nothing you prompt should ever be transferred to anywhere. If that's the case you have control and that's okay.
At the moment Mozilla is one of the better actors. Let's not jump on the bandwagon bash everything just because they changed a sentence in the AGB, while at the same time Google is pushing manifest v3. Lets be really picky about which technology will give us or take our digital sovereignty
I'm not anti-ai at all but this sort of thing feels like a security vulnerability to me?
Any website with a malicious prompt injection on it could instruct the ai to scam the user.
Almost like xss but instead of needing malicious user-inputted js, malware targeting the ai can just be written in text so an attacker could put it in a comment or whatever.
atleast they have the option to remove it
At least it is less obvious than the way chrome is handling AI 'integrations'. Google is hamfisting AI to the point where chrome is basically a billboard.
"DOES BABY WANT GEMINI?"
"DOES BABY WANT AI MODE?"
"DOES BABY WANT AI SUMMARY FOR 2 MINUTE YOUTUBE VIDEO?"
"I see you clicked no. I'll remind baby a few days from now"
Stop using chrome
I never said I used chrome personally. My work environment demands it.
I'm in the same boat - my work uses chromebooks.
I got frustrated earlier this week, trying to remove AI suggestions from Google on my work account. It's set up in such a way that I can't opt out. Search for ways to remove AI from your results, and all the tutorials say to "Click the lab button" to disable AI.
I looked on my Google page - there is no "lab" button.
I looked up trouble-shooting for "no lab button," and attempted to follow a direct link to the controls it's supposed to provide.
Apparently, since my account is managed by a company, I don't have access to permissions... including the permission to remove AI results. Fuck.
Long story short, although I really wanted to throw my work laptop into a fire, I instead decided to change my default search engine to DuckDuckGo.
I can't escape the Google environment entirely, but at least I can still use a search engine that lets me opt out of automatically generating AI crap.
Make that shit opt in and don’t force install that crap onto my system.
So glad I switched to LibreWolf with how much Firefox is becoming another corporate platform.
It just sends the page to a site of your choosing. It's not really installing anything. Even the offline AI thing downloads the stuff afaik when you pick languages you want to use
Time for Librewolf.
And IronFox for Android :v
Have fun with the forced time zone obfuscation, messing up your scheduled messages and timestamps. !waterfox@programming.dev is where it's at.
forced
Enabled by default and "forced" are two different things. Your comment is misleading.
You have a couple of options:
- Turn off ResistFingerprinting and use something else if you want similar functionality, like CanvasBlocker
- Add trusted domains to
privacy.resistFingerprinting.exemptedDomainsin the about:config page.
I'm fine with this. It's not only optional. Is where I'd never even ick it by accident
This. It's not like it's running LLM queries behind your back. It's not even a popup. Just an option in the menu that will do nothing as long as you don't click on it.
Yeah. This is literally how LLM models should be used. Non intrusive and just a helpful way to find shit quickly related to settings or such.
My AI hate is entirely based on its exploitation of labor. Using art or otherwise to create garbage that is not paying the people who's art or work was used to create it.
An open source project using a model trained to help users with Firefox settings. What labor is being exploited here? None from my understanding.
It's just a helpful tool. Please, please. Understanding WHY you hate AI. Don't be upset about the invention of the Loom. Be upset that the benefits of the invention are going to the rich capitalist. The invention of the Loom/AI should make your life and your labor easier. You should get the same benefits while doing less work. THAT is the problem. You should hate AI because you hate capitalist modes of production.
Edit: I'm making an assumption about this feature. I would assume it's a very efficient CPU capable model to help answer Firefox questions. Maybe I'm wrong, but that's the only reasonable thing I could guess this feature would even be. Haven't looked into it though.
Don't forgot environmental hard