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.
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.
How do you disable it?
I gotta admit, I don’t really mind AI as long as it doesn’t exist anywhere in any amount
Sometimes when I can’t find an answer online I’ll ask the DDG AI assistant. It’s disabled on my PC so I have to ask on a mobile device.
It still gives me answers that don’t make sense. It’s still an LLM, Siri with a tad more oomf.
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.
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.
- 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 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
accept that the biggest part of their users don’t want it.
Where did you find this data?
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.
Mozilla choosing Mistral for Firefox Smart Window feels like a rare AI partnership that actually fits the product. Privacy, zero data retention and multilingual models are a much better match for Firefox than turning the browser into another Big Tech AI funnel.
Why do almost all your comments sound like AI
IMO nothing in that comment sounds particularly AI generated.
Maybe not AI, but that specific comment does read like marketing copy. Then again, there is that list of three in there. That, plus just sounding like marketing, it could be AI. But I also concede that we, people that is, think in patterns of threes, so that’s not a strictly an AI behavior, but I can see how someone could reach that conclusion.
Thanks. 🖖
Because they are an AI simp
As long as this is opt-in (i.e. disabled by default), then sure. Otherwise, I’ll just have to find a new browser.
ive been seeing screenshots of the new vibe coded new tab replacement that are totally broken and the redesigned ui has overly rounded components that cover up text components and hard coded “ai” purple gradients that are nearly impossible to turn off with going into about:config…
So I have low expectations of this going well and seeing that second option in my future.
first thing i did when deved updated to the ‘new’ look (157)…
search for ‘nova’ in about:config
turn off the new rounded gradient shit.
Mozilla can fuck right off with that forced ai horse shit.
Waterfox is the way.
Try librewolf
No
As long as it’s easy to turn off, I’m okay with it.
I’m not. I’ve donated to Mozilla before but I won’t ever again if this is how they’re choosing to spend their money.
It’s still code bloat. A lot of these new “features” should have been plug-ins.
@reddig33 @mintiefresh I think a local translate is useful, better than sending it all to the web.
This isn’t abput local translate, we already have it.
@MrSoup It doesn’t matter, it is relevant because it uses a local AI so if you switch off all AI then you won’t ever see it.
You should have to download it is the point. It shouldnt come in the base browser package. Its bloat.
Is it just open weights again?
@eicker How do I make the AI Chatbot sidebar fullscreen? The chatbot itself couldn’t answer this, suggesting press f11.
