Live data from Hacker News

Firefox will have an option to disable all AI features

mastodon.social

211–220 of 554 posts

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

#211

I'm going to chime in here, I think 1. This is great and Mozilla is listening to it's core fans and 2. I want Firefox to be a competitive browser. Without AI enabled features + agent mode being first class citizens, this will be a non-starter in 2 years. I want my non-tech family members/friends to install Firefox not because I come over at Christmas, but because they want to. Because it's a browser that "just works.…

I totally agree. It’s just going to become an expectation that AI is in the browser. It’s so nice just to be able to ask the browser to summarize the page, or ask questions about a long article. I know a lot of people on Hacker News are hostile to AI and like to imagine everybody hates it, but I personally find it very helpful.

then you can install an extension.

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

#213
post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

saying "trying to slow down, I promise" doesn't magically make your blatant advert not spam edit: the original post ended with words to the tune of "Totally unrelated, but I run [insert newsletter here]... "

Edited and removed.

Why? Why kowtow to people who don't care about your wellbeing or long term success?

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

#214

Could someone summarize the problem with Firefox's AI features? At least when I last checked (months ago), none of those features that involve communicating with external servers would work unless you configure them to (i.e. provide credentials to an LLM provider). Was I wrong? Have things changed?

What was your methodology in checking? I got different results using a local mitmproxy on a clean install.

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

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

#215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And this explanation is very likely to be entirely hallucinated, or worse, subtly wrong in ways that's not obvious if you're not already well versed in the subject. So if you care about the truth even a little bit, you then have to go and recheck everything it has "said". Why waste time and energy on the lying machine in the first place? Just yesterday I asked "PhD-level intelligence" for a well known quote from a fa…

And this explanation is very likely to be entirely hallucinated, or worse, subtly wrong in ways that's not obvious if you're not already well versed in the subject. So if you care about the truth even a little bit, you then have to go and recheck everything it has "said". It cited its sources, which is certainly more than you've done. Just yesterday I asked "PhD-level intelligence" for a well known quote from a famou…

Unless you've then read through those sources — and not asked the machine to summarize them again — I don't see how that changes anything.

Judging by your tone and several assumptions based on nothing I see that you're fully converted. No reason to keep talking past each other.

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

#216
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please stop calling people deranged for expecting Mozilla to do the right thing without dissembling. Having your previous such comment flagged and killed should have been sufficient reminder to you that you're behaving inappropriately for this forum.

Take a look at Graham's hiearchy and see if you can move up the ladder from tone policing. Were any of my examples: VLC, 7-Zip, Nextcloud incorrect? Let me know and I'll thank you your good faith effort to be responsive to substance. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Graham%27s_Hierarchy...

Alright, I looked at the hierarchy; I believe that

> But since there's no such thing as an OBS, or Nextcloud, or VLC Derangement syndrome, nobody grabs the pitchforks in those cases.

qualifies as name-calling.

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

#217
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd love to live in your world for a bit... I can't imagine any future where having AI in your browser is a net positive for any user. It sounds like an absolute dystopian privacy and security nightmare.

Why? Imagine you have an AI button. When you click it, the locally running LLM gets a copy of the web site in the context window, and you get to ask it a prompt, e.g. "summarize this". Imagine the browser asks you at some point, whether you want to hear about new features. The buttons offered to you are "FUCK OFF AND NEVER, EVER BOTHER ME AGAIN", "Please show me a summary once a month", "Show timely, non-modal notifi…

>Why?

Do we have to re-tread 3 years of big tech overreach, scams, user hostility in nearly every common program , questionable utility that is backed by hype more than results, and way its hoisting up the US economy's otherwise stagnant/weakening GDP?

I don't really have much new to add here. I've hated this "launch in alpha" mentality for nearly a decade. Calling 2022 "alpha" is already a huge stretch.

>When you click it, the locally running LLM gets a copy of the web site in the context window, and you get to ask it a prompt, e.g. "summarize this".

Why is this valuable? I spent my entire childhood reading, and my college years being able to research and navigate technical documents. I don't value auto-summarizations. Proper writing should be able to do this in its opening paragraphs.

>Imagine the browser asks you at some point, whether you want to hear about new features. The buttons offered to you are "FUCK OFF AND NEVER, EVER BOTHER ME AGAIN", "Please show me a summary once a month", "Show timely, non-modal notifications at appropriate times"

Yes, this is my "good enough" compromise that most applications are failing to perform. Let's hope for the best.

>Imagine you choose the second option, and at some point, it offers you a feature described as follows: "On search engine result pages and social media sites, use a local LLM to identify headlines, classify them as clickbait-or-not, and for clickbait headlines, automatically fetch the article in an incognito session, and add a small overlay with a non-clickbait version of the title". Would you enable it?

No, probably not. I don't trust the powers behind such tools to be able to identify what is "clickbait" for me. Grok shows that these are not impartial tools, and news is the last thing I want to outsource sentiment too without a lot of built trust.

meanwhile, trust has only corroded this decade.

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

#218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> New CEO says he's not going to remove adblockers, people suspect him for planning to remove adblockers. New CEO says they've run the numbers and decided to not kill adblockers, leading to people asking why exactly they were running those numbers (if it was an actual ideological commitment, the numbers wouldn't matter). > Mozilla says they'll add a killswitch for all AI features (so that the tiny but vocal anti-AI m…

The creator of VLC has publicly noted dollar amounts they could raise if they either sold or compromised VLC, but it came and went without controversy. OBS Studio, 7-Zip, Notepad++, and Nextcloud have all published offers they've received and declined, or quoted per-install payment figures. In fact, it's practically a rite of passage for open source projects to talk about the value of their work in terms of what they…

> The creator of VLC has publicly noted dollar amounts they could raise if they either sold or compromised VLC, but it came and went without controversy. OBS Studio, 7-Zip, Notepad++, and Nextcloud have all published offers they've received and declined, or quoted per-install payment figures. In fact, it's practically a rite of passage for open source projects to talk about the value of their work in terms of what they could monetize but choose not to.

In all of those examples, the devs note that people have reached out to them, unprompted, to try and get them to sell out. That's materially different from a company proactively looking into the payoffs of selling out. The only question is whether the latter is what's happening; I'm having trouble tracking down the actual thing that was said (I think in an interview?).

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

#219
post #214

Could someone summarize the problem with Firefox's AI features? At least when I last checked (months ago), none of those features that involve communicating with external servers would work unless you configure them to (i.e. provide credentials to an LLM provider). Was I wrong? Have things changed?

What was your methodology in checking? I got different results using a local mitmproxy on a clean install. https://sizeof.cat/post/web-browser-telemetry-2025-edition/

Thanks for the link - I see it's not that much more than Waterfox.

Getting to the discussion at hand, which of those pings are AI related? I didn't say FF isn't making network calls.

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

#220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When you click it, the locally running LLM gets a copy of the web site in the context window, and you get to ask it a prompt, e.g. "summarize this". I'm also now imagining my GPU whirring into life and the accompanying sound of a jetplane getting ready for takeoff, as my battery suddenly starts draining visibly. Local LLMs for are a pipe dream, the technology fundamentally requires far too much computation for any…

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.

Sure. Let's solve our memory crisis without triggering WW3 with China over Taiwan first, and maybe then we can talk about adding even more expensive silicon to increasingly expensive laptops.
Post reply on HN