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Firefox will have an option to disable all AI features

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Re: Firefox will have an option to disable all AI features

#191

Post by johnnyanmac »

sigmar wrote: post #163
MisterTea wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> this will be a non-starter in 2 years. Why though? Seriously.

Do you ever need a website you're visiting translated? Have you ever not understood a term or phrase on a website and had to go to wikipedia/urbandictionary/google to explain it? Have you ever wanted to do a 'fuzzy search' of a 300 page document (where you don't know the exact string of text to ctrl-f, but want to see where they talk about a particular topic)?

>Do you ever need a website you're visiting translated?

Yes, I have an extension for that.

>Have you ever not understood a term or phrase on a website and had to go to wikipedia/urbandictionary/google to explain it?

I have an extension that double clicks and brings up a quick definition. If I need more, I will go to the dictionary.

>Have you ever wanted to do a 'fuzzy search' of a 300 page document (where you don't know the exact string of text to ctrl-f, but want to see where they talk about a particular topic)?

No, not really. Ctrl + F search for a dozen substrings, use table of contents if available, and I can narrow it down. This takes a few minutes.

And if I did, I'd find an extension. You see the pattern here? We solved this issue decades ago.

Re: Firefox will have an option to disable all AI features

#192

Post by pessimizer »

AuthAuth wrote: post #145
andrepd wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Without AI enabled features + agent mode being first class citizens, this will be a non-starter in 2 years. The confidence with which people say these things... s/AI/NFT and I've heard this exact sentence many times before.

NFT was always a meme and crypto has proven its staying power.

Crypto has proven that it can bribe governments into pouring tax money into it. It still hasn't shown any use.

Re: Firefox will have an option to disable all AI features

#193

Post by rolph »

get your non AI versions here while they last:

Index of /pub/firefox/releases/

https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/

A LITTLE HELP:

How do I revert Firefox to a previous version and keep my profile intact?

https://superuser.com/questions/1643618/how-do-i-revert-fire...

Re: Firefox will have an option to disable all AI features

#194

Post by baobun »

Saris wrote: post #164
baobun wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zen and Floorp are not obvious improvements from a privacy and control perspective. Waterfox, Librewolf and Mullvad Browser are worth considering.

Why is that? I remember seeing that Zen strips out the Firefox telemetry. Librewolf is nice but breaks a lot of stuff, sites that use webrtc or canvas related things, lots of banking sites refuse to load, and some other issues I can't remember.

I think it's a good idea to mitm yourself and look at what exactly your browser is up to. We should be careful about just accepting and repeating hearsay when such claims are pretty easy to verify yourself.

https://sizeof.cat/post/web-browser-telemetry-2025-edition/

As for webapps breaking in Librewolf, IME those can be fixed by selectively unblocking canvas (or whatever) for the site in question.

Re: Firefox will have an option to disable all AI features

#195

Post by MisterTea »

rochav wrote: post #186
sigmar wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Yes. Firefox and Chrome already offer this. yes, both use machine learning methods to translate pages. You're already using AI and don't realize it.

Even if they didn't realize it, I don't believe they were arguing that firefox and chrome didn't/wouldn't use machine learning already, rather that they just thought the use cases you provided don't really sell the cost of having a full LLM integrated into every browser install.

This is exactly it.

Re: Firefox will have an option to disable all AI features

#196

Post by CamperBob2 »

skydhash wrote: post #169
starik36 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the point. For things like summarizing a webpage or letting the user ask questions about it, not that much computation is required. An 8B Ollama model installed on a middle of the road MacBook can do this effortlessly today without whirring. In several years, it will probably be all laptops.

But what you would want to summarize a page. If I'm reading a blog, that means that I want to read it, not just a condensed version that might miss the exact information I need for an insight or create something that was never there.

You don't use it to summarize pages (or at least I don't), but to help understand content within a page while minimizing distractions.

For example: I was browsing a Reddit thread a few hours ago and came upon a comment to the effect of "Bertrand Russell argued for a preemptive nuclear strike on the Soviets at the end of WWII." That seemed to conflict with my prior understanding of Bertrand Russell, to say the least. I figured the poster had confused Russell with von Neumann or Curtis LeMay or somebody, but I didn't want to blow off the comment entirely in case I'd missed something.

So I highlighted the comment, right-clicked, and selected "Explain this." Instead of having to spend several minutes or more going down various Google/Wikipedia rabbit holes in another tab or window, the sidebar immediately popped up with a more nuanced explanation of Russell's actual position (which was very poorly represented by the Reddit comment but not 100% out of line with it), complete with citations, along with further notes on how his views evolved over the next few years.

It goes without saying how useful this feature is when looking over a math-heavy paper. I sure wish it worked in Acrobat Reader. And I hope a bunch of ludds don't browbeat Mozilla into removing the feature or making it harder to use.

Re: Firefox will have an option to disable all AI features

#197

Post by AlotOfReading »

skydhash wrote: post #169
starik36 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the point. For things like summarizing a webpage or letting the user ask questions about it, not that much computation is required. An 8B Ollama model installed on a middle of the road MacBook can do this effortlessly today without whirring. In several years, it will probably be all laptops.

But what you would want to summarize a page. If I'm reading a blog, that means that I want to read it, not just a condensed version that might miss the exact information I need for an insight or create something that was never there.

You can also just skim it. It feels like LLM summarization boils down to an argument to substitute technology for media literacy.

Plus, the latency on current APIs is often on the order of seconds, on top of whatever the page load time is. We know from decades [0] of research that users don't wait seconds.

[0] https://research.google/blog/speed-matters/

Re: Firefox will have an option to disable all AI features

#199

Post by wkat4242 »

BloondAndDoom wrote: post #177
alexgotoi wrote: post #131

This is exactly the kind of boring, unsexy feature that actually builds trust. It’s the opposite of the usual “surprise, here’s an AI sidebar you didn’t ask for and can’t fully disable” pattern. If they want people to try this stuff, the path is pretty simple: ship a browser that treats AI like any other power feature. Off by default, clearly explained, reversible, and preferably shippable as an extension. You can al…

My problem here is this; products are designed with a vision. If you are designing with 2-3 visions it won’t be that good, if you design with one vision (AI) then non-AI version of the product will be an after thought. This tells me non-AI version of it will suffer (IMHO)

I don't agree. I think opinionated design products are much worse in general.

It's really great when your opinions are aligned with those of the designer. If they're not, you're straight out of luck and you're stuck with something that isn't really for you.

This is why I love software that gives as much choice as possible. Like KDE for example. Because I have pretty strong vision myself and I respect my tools to conform to that, not the other way around

Re: Firefox will have an option to disable all AI features

#200

Post by PaulHoule »

brooke2k wrote: post #182
sigmar wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Yes. Firefox and Chrome already offer this. yes, both use machine learning methods to translate pages. You're already using AI and don't realize it.

"AI" as it's used nowadays is unfortunately usually a shorthand for LLM. When firefox talks about "AI features", I think most people interpret that as "LLM integration", not the page-translation feature that's been around for ages.

LLMs are sequence-to-sequence like language translation models, were invented for the purpose of language models, and if you were making a translator today it would be structured like an LLM but might be small and specialized.

For practical purposes though I like being able to have a conversation with a language translator: if I was corresponding with somebody in German, French, Spanish, related European languages or Japanese I would expect to say:

  I'm replying to ... and want to say ... in a way that is compatible in tone
and then get something that I can understand enough to say

  I didn't expect to see ... what does that mean?
And also run a reverse translation against a different model, see that it makes sense, etc. Or if I am reading a light novel I might be very interested in

  When the story says ... how is that written in Japanese?
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