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Disable AI in Firefox

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Re: Disable AI in Firefox

#91

Post by dragonwriter »

prashantsengar wrote: post #84
yoavm wrote: post #46

Feels like people making a big deal out of it. You can also just, you know, not use these features. I can't remember the last time I use the "Print" dialog, the "Manage bookmarks" or the "Homepage" button. But these things don't have AI in their name, so people aren't so obsessed with removing them. IMHO just like many companies are obsessed with adding AI features, some users are obsessed with rejecting them. Both s…

And honestly it seems ironic that a lot of people on HN want Firefox to be used by everyone but don't want Mozilla to add features that the "normies" want.

A lot of people on HN do not want people to use, or want, a lot of features that “normies” want. In part because they think that “normies” desire for those features is based in substantial part on misunderstanding of the benefits and costs of the features.

Re: Disable AI in Firefox

#92

Post by ASalazarMX »

OneDeuxTriSeiGo wrote: post #31
mentalgear wrote: post #13

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).

I disabled browser.ml.enable and local translation was still working. In my case, that's all I need, but it looks like it still allows on-device transformers.

Re: Disable AI in Firefox

#93

Post by Y-bar »

panzi wrote: post #59
grep_it wrote: post #41

I'm actually not all that opposed to some of these features, but the way it's implemented is so clunky. The UI make it feel like a half baked browser extension.

"automatically group and label your tabs" is the only thing out of those that sound at all interesting to me, though I don't know how AI comes into play here. And is it all local AI?

It’s local and it tries to group the tabs based on what seems to be URL and title, and what seems to be a semantic content of the page (eg it understands to group shopping sites together).

Re: Disable AI in Firefox

#94

Post by grayhatter »

braebo wrote: post #20
sdairs wrote: 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!

Brave, The browser that brags about how they ignore consent!

Re: Disable AI in Firefox

#95

Post by grayhatter »

LetsGetTechnicl wrote: post #15
dotcoma wrote: post #2

Disable AI, disable targeted ads... What's wrong with you, Firefox ?

In their defense, they're in a bit of a precarious financial situation. Most of their money comes from Google, who happens to also be their largest competitor.

The amount of money comes from the number of people willing to use and tolerate their defaults. Surely, burning all the good will they've built up can't possibly improve that, can it?

Re: Disable AI in Firefox

#96

Post by Y-bar »

coldpie wrote: post #47
spoaceman7777 wrote: post #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 wh…

> Why do people care? It's clutter for a feature that I'm not going to use. I'm not upset it's there for those who want it, but it's also nice to be able to get rid of it.

I don’t store passwords in Firefox, nor do I use the ”Save page as”, I have never used the ”Report broken site” feature, and never activated ”Troubleshooting Mode”. I have never needed to configure network settings in my browser, and so on… As far as this discussion is concerned all these are bloat because they are not used. Seems like a strange yardstick to keep, when it cannot be properly applied, no?

Re: Disable AI in Firefox

#97

Post by latexr »

array_key_first wrote: post #80
latexr wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They're really not going to be able to dedicate resources to something as bijou as AppleScript. They don’t need to do it themselves, they could just not stifle the efforts of third-parties who do want to and have worked on it. Multiple people started on it over the years and were simply ignored by the devs.

Probably because they don't want to take on that maintenance burden. Even just letting someone do that and merging it in is opening up a whooooole can of worms.

Then they should just say so and close the open issues, instead of letting them linger for literal decades and have people waste time on them then ignore them. That’s just bad stewardship.

Anyway, the reasons are irrelevant and I’m frankly tired of explaining this to Firefox defenders. Someone asked “what about Firefox are you missing” and I responded with what it’s missing for me. Plugging your ears and coming up with excuses doesn’t move the needle. Accept it or don’t, it makes no difference. In the meantime I’ll continue being honest with my users that I would like to support Firefox but I can’t, and many of them will keep switching browsers.

Re: Disable AI in Firefox

#98

Post by Barrin92 »

rudedogg wrote: post #70
bitpush wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Mozilla could have had the no-nonsense, high performance browser backend that everyone uses to build their own browsers I agree with the sentiment, but you underestimate the level of engineering, coordination, design work, testing it is to do this. It is admirable that they even have a half-decent browser, but to compete at the top you need soooo much money and motivation.

> It is admirable that they even have a half-decent browser, but to compete at the top you need soooo much money and motivation. I’m guessing Ladybird will prove you wrong in due time

Modern web browsers are in the range of 30 million LOC, probably 50% of that is just pure implementation of web platform standards and engine work.

Do you just need to advertise stuff among content creators these days with common sense going out of the window? It'll take them a decade to catch up without any engineering funding at the level that Apple/Google/Mozilla have.

Re: Disable AI in Firefox

#100

Post by ASalazarMX »

dontlaugh wrote: post #83
mionhe wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More accurately, why WebKit was forked from khtml by Apple.

Sure. KHTML wasn’t embeddable outside KDE either until Apple made that happen.

That was always KHTML's goal, but Apple saw value in it for their business plan, just like it saw value in FreeBSD to reuse as their OS's base.
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