Ok.
But why?What happened to just making a damn good browser
Money
They should stop doing that, instead
tbh i would not mind it that much if its local LLM or if its opt-in (opt out as bare minimum)
i also wonder if they are gonna use this for the built-in translator (if you think about it technically most translator software are AI,DEEPL uses a hybrid between LLMS and NMT IIRC. )I don’t trust any feature that uses the word “AI.”
Ideally, such things should be transparent to the user. As in features that are useful without having to understand the underlying programming mechanisms.
Take FF’s local translation. That’s an immensely useful feature. No one cares that it uses a language model or about any of the details, because it just works well enough, and is useful enough to stand on its own as an advantage over Chromium.
…If they have to brand a feature to make it appealing, that’s a bad sign. Otherwise why TF would I want expensive tab sorting or things like that?
Mozilla is in the sweet spot of basically being the only available browser that isnt chrome, that has adblocking.
and they are doing everything in their power to fuck it up by chasing this bullshit AI trend thats already dying on the vine.
On one side, its great that forks exist that strip out a lot of the bullshit. On the other hand if main Firefox dies or goes too far into the deep end, there’s no way those forks can take its role
Even if LLMs were environmentally and socially sustainable they would still be a massive IP theft meant to make the rich even richer. Mozilla and Mistral can go eat a bag of dicks.
I don’t believe in IP, so that really doesn’t bother me much. The problem is when information gets harvested from the public and suddenly becomes someone else’s IP.
So not really theft, more like gatekeeping, but as it stands, its the same result: rich get richer, we can agree on that.
I think that IP may be a good idea on paper, but as it stands it only benefits the powerful, as in “if I pirate content I risk having my life ruined, companies fed their LLMs with everything but the kitchen sink and nothing happened”
How do you disable it?
about:config
browser.ml.enable => false
Oh yeah, great, sounds awesome. Can I get in line now to not use it?
about:config
browser.ml.enable => false
I gotta admit, I don’t really mind AI as long as it doesn’t exist anywhere in any amount
I don’t really mind AI as long as it lives in a https://ai.megacorp.bs/, and I have to go there to use it, and it stays there.
dick, hammer, … etc
I don’t really mind AI features where it makes sense. That being said, as someone else commented, this should have been a plugin.
I’ll add on top of that: this should have been a plugin wholly developed by Mistral. Mozilla should stop spending time and money on side features and focus on the browser and its engine. It still is way slower than any chromium based browser, lacks features that have been standard on chromium for years (eg. HDR video playback) and it’s way less efficient on battery than the competition.
Complaining about Firefox doing this and groveling on “I’m good, I’m on <random fork>” is spitting upwards: even the most modified forks like Zen still rely on Mozilla’s aging engine.
Exactly. The Blender foundation has stated that it is a tool by humans and for humans, so no AI functionality is planned. However, there are still MCP extensions and the like. There’s nothing stopping anyone from using AI with Blender, but the Blender Foundation funding goes to core development. Not sure why Mozilla isn’t doing the same. If I really want a LLM controlling a browser, playwright-cli works fine anyway.
It still is way slower than any chromium based browser, lacks features that have been standard on chromium for years
I don’t think its slower at all. Most of the time same if not faster. Maybe it depends on where you go?
Features in chromium are often there because they are going their own way and not being standard, is that Mozillas fault?
HDR video is in Firefox, HDR images is experimental. Personally I don’t care, why would I watch videos in a browser that I think should have HDR?
I will agree that Mistral should have done the lifting, and Firefox need not be working so hard on adding AI. However, if they don’t people on the other side of the fence will complain that Chrome gets all the AI, why is Firefox so lazy?
IMO the browser wars have been lost, and Mozilla isn’t a competent web browser anymore. 30% of sites I visit, straight up don’t function at all on Firefox. They don’t even satisfy their original mission statement of privacy focus.
I switched to Vivaldi and didn’t look back. I don’t want some LLM “assistant” scanning every webpage I visit.
I’m sorry, I call bullshit.
I’ve been using Firefox for many many years, and the only sites that haven’t worked were M$ sites explicitly coded to break on Firefox, or were using a technology that Firefox simply doesn’t implement like web serial api, which is admittedly more than one, but it’s an extreme minority.
Well, there is issues on the mobile ff (which I still use), but the desktop version has no issues (if you don’t block scripts).
I admit I didn’t have mobile Firefox in mind when I made that comment. I will point out though that iOS Firefox isn’t their proper engine, it’s essentially just safari under the hood.
- Web Serial is available now. Recently flashed an esp32
- Another site not supported is business.apple.com.
- Buuut if you switch the user-agent everything I found neccessary suddebly works ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Yeah 90% of sites that “don’t work” definitely work with a user agent change. Didn’t realize they added web serial, that’s awesome.
Yeah, if switching user agent fixes it then it just means the website developers are piece of shits not even bothering to check if the site work on gecko
- Web Serial is available now. Recently flashed an esp32
Oh, I have to teat this! It’s one of the only reasons I keep Chromium around.
Apology rejected. I’m glad you still enjoy Firefox, but I’m not lying about my experience. So many websites kept breaking constantly, and in extremely bad ways.
Things like, the final step of a 40 page government form failing, and I then need to call them and wait on hold for 90 minutes for them to fix it. Or, payments being charged, but not receiving the product; again having to call support. Or more subtle things, like specific features on websites not working, weird canvas glitches, you get the idea.
In comparison, the amount of problems I’ve had in Vivaldi is zero, compared to daily. I cannot recommend Firefox to average users anymore. I think using Firefox is admirable, but it’s increasingly similar to trying to play games on Linux without Proton. Good luck.
I have not ever had any of those issues you’re describing, but it sucks that that happened to you. (If it actually did and you’re not just some paid troll to poison public opinion)
You got me. My code of honour dictates that if someone correctly calls me out, I must acknowledge it. I was paid A$10,000.00 by Vivaldi themselves to spread discord and lies on Lemmy, the most popular social media platform; for maximum outreach.
I had to take the money, though. I deeply wanted to reject it, but I had to. My pet unicorn needs rainbow replacement surgery, and my magical beasts insurance wouldn’t cover it. I can’t go on in a world without Captain Sparkles.
I can only hope the community will forgive me one day. I’ll build my renowned reputation back up, brick by brick.
Yeah I wondering if I was just lucky because I never have problems on Firefox or librewolf (which is Firefox).
Usually when I’m asked for computer help by friends or family, I can often save us both a lot of time by just asking, “you’re using chrome again aren’t you?” Or edge?
But sometimes in a great while Firefox is the “culprit” because it doesn’t let abusive sites spy on them and collect so much telemetry.
There are plenty of over-designed, heavy “Web apps” which don’t work correctly in Firefox. My college’s Web portal is one.
If you create a support ticket, they tell you to use a supported browser
You’re college Web admin sucks. I would use a jailed chromium browser in that case or have a separate cheap computer for browsing shitty websites that I “have to” use.
Yep, it does. All the websites that don’t work in Firefox also tend to suck
I’m glad you found a browser that you love, but you’re still stuck with chromium base and Manifest v3 with Vivaldi, and any further upstream abuses.
I have run ironwolf, waterfox, fennec, floorp. And several other variants of mozilla’s Firefox browser over the past two and a half years of deGoogling, and I would say that less than 2% of the sites I visit give me trouble , less than 1% actually have me falling back to using Safari if I’m on a mac, or spinning up a VM that has Vivaldi installed on it for use with a PC. .
Privacy costs. I’m now paying for my email services and self hosting several others. It’s taking me literally years to do Google 90% of my life, but it would have been I impossible if Mozilla is tech stack wasn’t mature and extremely available
Again, Vivaldi is a very sexy browser and I’m glad that you are satisfied with it, but it’s not going to meet the needs of those of us that want to be free to use full fat third party ad blockers and tracker privacy solutions.
yeah no thanks. luckily librewolf strips this shit out.
or you can just turn it off from settings
Or they can stop trying to force it through their users throat and just accept that the biggest part of their users don’t want it.
I mean, they do give a single toggle that disables every AI feature (new and old) at once… I think that’s pretty good
But why isn’t it a toggle that turns these features on instead?
It’s bullshit that we’re expected to constantly opt-OUT of these features that we supposed want. If we wanted them, we would turn them on.
and you can go back and re-enable just a bit you actually do want… like the on-device translations, while keeping the main switch ‘off’ so there’s no new surprises.
accept that the biggest part of their users don’t want it.
Where did you find this data?
Not but seriously, lots of users not only on Lemmy but also on reddit(and under news articles etc etc) made their opinion pretty clear.
(Sadly) i think it’s just a loud minority, lotta of people do use and want those (at least where i live, here people don’t know much about tech…)
It doesn’t say anything about how this works. “No data retention” suggests that data is going to a server that’s processing it but then not retaining it. That’s bad, this type of feature should run entirely on the client.
Also, there’s a proprietary AI model doing the work, even if inference is in the client. It says “open weight” but that’s like letting people download a program as a compiled binary, the exact opposite of what FOSS is supposed to mean. It’s an open/free model only if the training data and algorithms are also public, not just the trained weights.
The translation feature has been very useful, though it’s not an LLM. Still a neural network though. Saves me from going to google translate when browsing websites in e.g Russian (drive2.ru or whatever turns up in google search every so often when looking up obscure information on some cars and european oils that bitog forums don’t see as much).
It entirely depends on what the AI does and if it’s opt-in, opt-out, or forced on you. Opt-in local AI with sensible features is actually a good thing IMO.
It is a language model.
The Firefox translation is “oldschool” ML, but it is the same family of stuff that chat-tuned LLMs sprouted from.
i love the on-device translate. sometimes it can be a little off-the-mark, but overall it works pretty well. it’s a great addition to firefox.
On principle I only want a pure FOSS program. I wouldn’t want to use a binary-only browser even if it was a great browser with good privacy. I do use the built in Firefox translate feature but I’ve been wanting to get around to seeing where its model comes from. The Mistral stuff is completely proprietary except for the final weights as far as I can tell. I’d rather resist that since I want to be able to build and modify it myself.
The Mistral stuff is completely proprietary except for the final weights as far as I can tell
Same as most open weight models. There are very few truly open source models, particularly if your definition requires distributing the whole training dataset.
I’d rather resist that since I want to be able to build and modify it myself.
I hope you’ve got some damn beefy hardware then. Even small models are a pain to train from scratch. You CAN still fine-tune it or train with LoRA.
Same as most open weight models. There are very few truly open source models, particularly if your definition requires distributing the whole training dataset.
Yes exactly. Open weight is like a compiled binary. Misleading terminology made that sound desirable.
I hope you’ve got some damn beefy hardware then. Even small models are a pain to train from scratch. You CAN still fine-tune it or train with LoRA.
It’s ok I can manage without AI.
