Live data from Hacker News

Disable AI in Firefox

flamedfury.com

31–40 of 161 posts

Re: Disable AI in Firefox

#31

Personally, I do not mind it if it's on-device, especially small specialised models (e.g. overview generation, audio generation, etc) with no internet access.

That was the original intent. They only recently added the "chatbot-y" kind of stuff since the infra is all already there. The main uses were for their translation tools and PDF alt-text generation (which I believe disabling ML will disable as they rely on the on-device transformer tools to do).

Re: Disable AI in Firefox

#32
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Use Brave. It’s de-googled, privacy-centric chromium with built-in uBlock-style ad/tracker blocking. Best of both worlds!

De-googled Chromium? This does not compute.

De-googled in the "we make some patches to remove things we think are hostile from Google" sense but yes: they're still completely reliant on them for engine development.

Re: Disable AI in Firefox

#33

I should figure out how to turn off ai in acrobat reader. It offers to summarize my sheet music every time I open it...

Was shocked last night seeing a quite annoying Acrobat Reader with AI commercial during the NBA game.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5M1a7zY5iVM

Re: Disable AI in Firefox

#35
This is the last I pressed the update button (I only allow notification, no automation). And will speed up the study of other browsers (like Brave, Orion). This sneaky delivery of unnecessary but questionable privacy nonsense, also pushing on you enabled, is revolting.

Re: Disable AI in Firefox

#36
Why do people care? It's nice, been using it since Nightly. And you have to actually hook it up to a service for it to do anything.

The toggle for the popup is in (as you might expect) the settings hamburger menu in the AI Panel. There's even a remove button! Lots of new things have been added to browsers over the years, and these AI features are becoming incredibly popular as more users recognize the utility (and what they actually are).

This just seems like some more anti-AI hysteria.

Re: Disable AI in Firefox

#37
post #5

I've used Firefox for 15 years and I really don't want to use Chrome. Can Mozilla just, like, make a good browser?

I think they make a pretty good browser. It is performant, supports blocking ads easily, standard compatible, customizable and recently even added support for vertical tabs. What are you missing?

Re: Disable AI in Firefox

#38

Mozilla could have had the no-nonsense, high performance browser backend that everyone uses to build their own browsers (like the recent glut of AI browsers), instead of everyone using Chromium/Blink. In the past, Gecko was really the go-to choice for this. They almost had a second shot with Servo. But they kinda really dropped the ball on the technical capability of the browser while continuing to be distracted by a…

The amount of money and research put into Chromium is nuts and it's borderline impossible to compete.

Re: Disable AI in Firefox

#39

Mozilla could have had the no-nonsense, high performance browser backend that everyone uses to build their own browsers (like the recent glut of AI browsers), instead of everyone using Chromium/Blink. In the past, Gecko was really the go-to choice for this. They almost had a second shot with Servo. But they kinda really dropped the ball on the technical capability of the browser while continuing to be distracted by a…

Time to switch to Waterfox, it's basically Firefox with the privacy features that Firefox should have by default: https://www.waterfox.net/

That doesn’t address the larger complaint your parent commenter is making that Mozilla dropped the ball on Firefox development.

Re: Disable AI in Firefox

#40
post #20
post #5

I've used Firefox for 15 years and I really don't want to use Chrome. Can Mozilla just, like, make a good browser?

Use Brave. It’s de-googled, privacy-centric chromium with built-in uBlock-style ad/tracker blocking. Best of both worlds!

Yeah I'm not at all interested in Brave, that's a dumpster fire of it's own. And that still gives control to Google by owning the defacto implementation of browsing the internet. There needs to be an actual alternative to Chrome.
Post reply on HN