Too little, too late. Switched to Brave and haven’t been happier. Firefox lost the plot years ago.
Brave comes with its own branded "Leo"[1] AI assistant built into the browser lol
Firefox Getting New Controls to Turn Off AI Features
31–40 of 113 posts
Re: Firefox Getting New Controls to Turn Off AI Features
#32I'd say browsers are a pretty good way of delivering models that run locally.
Currently, this tech is a sleeper because consumer hardware is not there yet.
Extensions, even websites, could benefit a lot from offering small models on demand and powering client-side features with them.
That is very different from a browser that embeds AI access through an API, and totally acceptable.
Re: Firefox Getting New Controls to Turn Off AI Features
#33Wasn’t their translations project “pre AI”? That’s not running an LLM is it?
Most modern translation tools are language models and this was true even before the LLM chatbot explosion. The difference is they were trained on smaller (and less dubiously sourced) datasets and the output that was trained for was translations directly rather than conversations.
Re: Firefox Getting New Controls to Turn Off AI Features
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't forget an obfuscation layer to spoof things like canvas fingerprinting, installed fonts, etc. I'd pay for that.
Sure, I just want the core browser stuff and plugins, security/privacy kinda goes with that. It feels like browsers are like old IDEs where everything is bundled in. I think it would be much better it they were more like modern code editors where people can make their own custom IDE by installing the plugins they want.
Yup, providing better APIs for external bookmarks management, password management, etc would be much better than trying to provide some “one size fits all full featured built in” implementation.
Re: Firefox Getting New Controls to Turn Off AI Features
#35Too little, too late. Switched to Brave and haven’t been happier. Firefox lost the plot years ago.
Brave comes with its own branded "Leo"[1] AI assistant built into the browser lol [1] https://brave.com/leo/
Every time brave gets walked out as some good alternative I cant get past the vc / crypto coin / brave-reward holding garbage.
Maybe they're ok now but they had some really gross mistakes (?).
Re: Firefox Getting New Controls to Turn Off AI Features
#36Re: Firefox Getting New Controls to Turn Off AI Features
#37I keep meaning to make a guide "how to make firefox not suck" but I never get around to it.
It's a great browser, but I always forget the default settings are super stupid. Myself and power users all have it customized to the hilt.
It takes some serious work to get a new new FireFox install working nicely.
Re: Firefox Getting New Controls to Turn Off AI Features
#38I keep meaning to make a guide "how to make firefox not suck" but I never get around to it. It's a great browser, but I always forget the default settings are super stupid. Myself and power users all have it customized to the hilt. It takes some serious work to get a new new FireFox install working nicely.
Could you mention some of these settings? I moved to Firefox from being a Chrome user and interested to know improvements
Re: Firefox Getting New Controls to Turn Off AI Features
#39I keep meaning to make a guide "how to make firefox not suck" but I never get around to it. It's a great browser, but I always forget the default settings are super stupid. Myself and power users all have it customized to the hilt. It takes some serious work to get a new new FireFox install working nicely.
This. Since Firefox claims to be a privacy-first browser, it should, by default, use the Arkenfox settings (report spoofed values for language, screen size, fonts, and many other attributes that aid fingerprinting), and include uBlock Origin out of the box.
But it should go even further; the ultimate goal should be for all Firefox users to basically look the same from the point of view of third parties and put an end to tracking in the modern Web.
Re: Firefox Getting New Controls to Turn Off AI Features
#40If accurate, this strikes me as something like malicious compliance.
> Translations, which help you browse the web in your preferred language.
Machine translation can be useful when you want to get the gist of something in a language you don't know.
> Alt text in PDFs, which add accessibility descriptions to images in PDF pages.
OCR? Okay...
> AI-enhanced tab grouping, which suggests related tabs and group names.
What is this feature even trying to do? It sounds like ill-defined trash.
> Link previews, which show key points before you open a link.
Or I could just click the link.
> AI chatbot in the sidebar, which lets you use your chosen chatbot as you browse, including options like Anthropic Claude, ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini and Le Chat Mistral.
This is the thing that most people are probably complaining about. Lumping the other features in with it is a distraction.