Even though the title suggests this piece is about Firefox, most of it is bashing at Google. The author’s main reason for leaving Firefox seems to be that… others have left Firefox?! That, and the quintessential mention of “AI is now in Firefox” that all these articles seem to repeat.
estimator7292|3 months ago
Have you considered that maybe, possibly, people don't want AI in their browser? Or that people consider having AI shoved at them an untrustworthy action? That maybe of Mozilla wants to spend all the time and money to shove AI, they're probably a) doing it for gross and untrustworthy reasons like spying on us or b) by spending all this money on AI, Mozilla is (still) not focusing resources on anything productive or valuable that any user wants.
lukan|3 months ago
" but such is the direction being taken by Mozilla that I am not anxious to sit idly by and constantly keep an eye out for new hidden privacy and AI features to turn off with obscure checkboxes. "
But here I can attest at least, that nowdays firefox after a fresh install shows a banner saying they collect data by default. And when you click that, you get directly to the options to turn it off. It is just, that I also don't trust that with those toggles now everything is switched off, or if there is a hidden other toggle or there will be one shipped with the next update.
TurboSkyline|3 months ago
But you can apply the same argument to everything, right? Any piece of software could be taking actions that it doesn’t disclose. Any toggle could assure the user that their settings are respected but not actually change anything. So how do you then trust running _any_ code on your computer?