> It might be hard to believe for my younger readers, but Mozilla took on Internet Explorer that was just as entrenched as Chrome is now, and they kicked proverbial posterior! They did because they offered a better browser that respected the people who used it, and gave them agency in their browsing experience.
That is revisionist history. Firefox succeeded because MS was sitting on their hands with IE, and it was stagnating. Firefox didnt do the opposite of what IE - you could argue Mozilla was doing what MS should have been.
It wasnt about "respecting users", or "agency" but simply implemented standards properly.
And that's going to be a hard problem with Chrome because you're up against a browser that is moving very, very, fast.
Firefox was seriously a better browser, not just "implements standards better". It ran faster, it had tabs (wow!) and at one point it got Firebug which let you have a console INSIDE the browser that showed information you could print with `console.log`, I kid you not.
It was a better browser through and through, maybe because MS slept on IE or maybe not, but in the end it isn't revisionist to say they beat MS's proverbial posterior because the browser was better.
I'd also point out that IE won the title from Netscape in the first place, which was the basis for the Mozilla software set (that later spun off into firefox).
Mozilla didn't "take on" IE. Mozilla reclaimed their lost browser position. IE kicked the proverbial posterior of Netscape which both Netscape and Mozilla struggled to reclaim right up until the release of Firefox.
Firefox grew in popularity due to widespread spyware issues at the time. Much of that spyware specifically targeted Internet Explorer’s ActiveX technology, making Firefox the safest alternative browser. I had everyone I know installing it and they all liked it.
This just reminded me of the time I thought Firefox was cooked when tabs were finally added in IE7. The idea that IE was ever suddenly going to have a huge resurgence is amusing in hindsight, but it really felt like we were stuck with it for a while there.
I started using Firefox with version 1.5, as did many of my friends, and we were doing it because it was flat out better. We did not care about 'stagnating' or standards.
Mozilla has the classic problem of a non-profit that achieved its aims. I was around back in the day and my friends and I were avid evangelists of Firefox - a few cogs in the wheel of the marketing installing Firefox on school machines and getting all the elderly people to use it and so on. There were user groups and student ambassador programs and so on. It was an incredible marketing effort combined with an effort to bring standards and compliance to them into the mainstream. And it worked because they added features at a rate that IE simply did not match.
The extension ecosystem, tabs, plugins, and notably whatever effort they did behind the scenes to ensure that companies that did streaming video etc. would work with their browser all played out really well.
I think the ultimate problem is that Mozilla's mission of a standards-compliant web with open-source browsers everywhere ultimately did get achieved. The era of "Works with IE6" badges has ended and the top browsers run on open-source engines. Despite our enthusiasm at the time for it, I think the truth is that Firefox was probably just a vehicle for this, much bigger, achievement.
Now that it's been achieved, Mozilla is in the fortunate place where Firefox only needs to exist as a backstop against Chrome sliding into high-proprietary world while providing the utility to Google that they get to say they're not a monopoly on web technologies.
Mozilla's search for a new mission isn't some sign of someone losing their way. It's just what happens to the Hero of Legend after he defeats the Big Bad. There's a post-denouement period. Sam Gamgee gets to go become Mayor of the Shire, which is all very convenient, but a non-profit like Mozilla would much rather find a similar enough mission that they can apply their vast resources to. That involves the same mechanics as product development, and they're facing the same primary thing: repeated failure.
This new "please accept cookies and scripts to prove you are running Google Chrome without Adblockers" Internet does not exactly look like mission accomplished to me. And that is before we even get to the part of the Internet that goes straight to "please run this Android app so we can ask Google who truly owns your device".
If Mozilla was not busy "offering" (renamed the no-thank-you setting once again) so many "experiences" they could be doing much of the same stuff they did back in the day.
American non-profits seem to be run like corporations, with all disadvantages of it. Bloated, losing focus, growing for the sake of growth (where growth means headcount and income, not necessarily charter goals)
Mozilla did lose their way. It happened because they abandoned their core users: you. People who loved Firefox so much they practically forced it on everyone around them.
Google released Chrome with a massive advertising campaign, reaching even to television. They put ads for Chrome on the world's biggest web properties. It was packaged in installers. Not to say it wasn't a good browser - but it wasn't obviously better than Firefox. This marketing campaign bought them a ton of marketshare.
Mozilla's response, instead of sticking by Mozilla evangelists, nearly all of whom were power users, was to decide that the browser was too complicated for its users. It needed to be more like Chrome. It needed to be the browser for the proverbial grandma. So they axed features (like Panorama), configurability, and extensibility, alienating everyone who really cared. Only they didn't have the marketing heft of Google, so they didn't get Grandma, either.
Ever since then they've been panicking and grasping at straws and shoving in shovelware like Pocket in obviously vain attempts to regain what they had. And they never will, until they make people like you and me LOVE Firefox again.
The biggest problem with mozilla is they are trend chasing instead of finding a niche.
The AI stuff is the perfect example. Are there people who like AI? Certainly. Will they use firefox? Probably not.
At this stage firefox is the anti-establishment choice. That crowd hates AI. Betting on AI might make sense if you are chrome. It doesn't make sense if you are firefox.
I use Firefox to access ChatGPT. I wouldn't want AI suggestions or slop appearing on random pages.
The idea that LLM have been successful and useful for significant things is naturally confused with the idea LLMs needed to bolted on to literally anything.
Brendan Eich was the Director of Mozilla. This is the guy who invented Javascript in 10 days, at Netscape, and then co-founded Mozilla, and became the technical lead. He was Chief Architect of Mozilla, then CTO of Mozilla Corporation, then CEO. He made Firefox great. This was when Mozilla was in its heyday, and passed IE in marketshare.
Then he was fired in 2014 because a bunch of people went crazy that he made a $1,000 political donation for a California ballot proposition that had nothing to do with computers.
This sent a signal that Mozilla doesn't reward technical improvements to its software — it rewards following political trends.
Brendan Eich then went on to develop a browser (a set of Chromium patches, rather) with cryptocurrencies, NFTs, LLM integrations, and all other trend-chasing junk. I'm not sure Firefox would be any better with him in the team - it'd probably be worse.
Mozilla is a search traffic vendor with one client, not a combination of the EFF and the FSF. That's their behavior and motives in a nutshell. How big of a fraction of the Google traffic comes from power users? How would they find an alternative? Those are the questions the (rational) high-paid execs at Mozilla ask about us.
Google once already has decided that certain Web property brings in too little traffic, and shut it down, which was probably the largest blunder in their history, burning immense amounts of goodwill. They shut down Google Reader.
It attracted a relatively narrow audience, but that audience was special: active and future founders, CEOs, CTOs, VPs of engineering, blogosphere and YouTube celebrities, etc. Each of these disgruntled users communicated their disappointment to hundreds and thousands of other, less affluent users. Most of them, once in positions of engineering power, now would think twice before relying on something from Google.
Same with Firefox. It may serve a relatively more narrow audience, but it's not necessarily the same kind of audience, on average, which Chrome or Edge or even Safari serves.
I think I disabled "Use AI to suggest tab group names" and "enable link previews" in settings (not about:config), and I don't really see any AI anywhere else? I can add/remove some chat thing from the sidebar, but you can just remove that button and you don't need to use it. It's like any other feature one may choose to not use.
I now see there's also a "Create alt texts automatically" for pdfjs. This actually seems one of the more useful AI features I've seen. But I've never noticed it exists as I don't need this accessibility feature. You can disable it in the pdfjs (no about:config needed).
In short, Firefox is not forcing anyone to use AI and ways to disable it are not that obfuscated.
I think something people should take a hard look at is Firefox's crypto libraries. Firefox's implementation of cryptography in NSS is fundamentally in the browser. Chrome works with the OS. One could argue which implementation is better, but as a user, it's really helpful to have Firefox laying around from time to time. For all sorts of reasons.
Opting out of "AI" is performative and pointless for companies to support. "AI" has been woven throughout most of the tech products we use for decades at this point. We're in a brief period where people are noticing the new crop of AI features, but AI is an implementation detail that will disappear into the background. Even just looking at modern transformer-based language models, most of it is happening in the background and not visible.
Opting out of AI would be like saying that you don't use JavaScript because you don't like the moral position of the guy who wrote it. That's a reasonable moral position to take (I totally get not wanting to use LLMs for reasons of copyright, art, or even just capability), but a completely unreasonable technical position to take, functionally impossible.
Why does Mozilla not give you a convenient opt out? Because it's hard, low impact, and functionally no-one wants it.
I think it's unfortunate that everything gets called AI, but people are clearly upset by the LLM stuff, which has not been around for decades. Also, it's still pretty easy to disable JS AFAIK so that comparison kind of proves the point that this should be an option.
I really don't get folks who defend tech paternalism - where features are pushed on users because "daddy knows best".
prefs.js is modified by browser itself. And it contains lots of stuff by default already.
You can store your custom preferences in user.js file - Firefox will copy those to prefs.js at startup.
From your link:
The user.js[1] file is optional. If you have one whenever the application is started it will overwrite any settings in prefs.js with the corresponding settings from user.js.
Mozilla suggests policies [1] (which, in turn are capable of default-setting or enforcing most prefs and has proper release notes) and has removed a bunch of pages that previously recommended directly editing prefs.js or shipping user.js (which had been changed in backwards-incompatible ways before when the parser was swapped).
The latest quagmire is Firefox adding a completely optional AI sidebar? Seriously, some people are impossible to please. Just don’t open it if you don’t like it…
Sometimes, there's a butler in there who seems absentminded and can only remember things up to a few thousand words. He once stacked all your dishes in the refrigerator and dumped all the food into the sink.
Other times, there's a demon in there who seems hellbent on destroying the innocence of your children and ripping apart your family. He once gave your children snuff films and instructions to build a bomb.
Just don't open the door if you don't like it... Some people are impossible to please.
No. There is a lot more than that. The AI stuff appears in places in the UI where other things used to, like in right-click menus and when you are entering text into fields. And it's not opt-in. It's on by default. Unless you are willing to search for how to turn it off and open the non-GUI about:config stuff and modify raw settings in a text table (with no descriptions or help text next to them) then you can't even turn it off. Also, the AI stuff takes up disk space.
What killed Firefox was Electron. There, I just said it.
XUL was very good, but then it was no more. And as soon as it was gone, Electron apps appeared. It's a tragedy. Mozilla had everything to be in that place instead, with a better product.
Once that was gone, Firefox became just another browser, doing what any browser does. It's still very good, and my first choice, but damn I miss XUL.
“A user-agent is software that performs communication or interaction with another system on behalf of the user, historically stemming from earlier messaging systems, and literally meaning 'the user’s representative actor'.”
I guess everyone would agree that web browsers would come to our mind when we hear "user-agent" in general context. After years of forward and backward evolution of web extensions, AI powered web browsers inevitably will move forward the meaning of the term "user-agent" and deliver the value it actually promises.
Together with the advance of "browser-use" optimized local LLMs, current M4 powered Macbook Air can provide enough juice to aid users' web browsing needs. I believe soon AI hubs installed at homes, or cloud based private AI inference engines will become much more accessible offerings to help with mobile browsers as well. Overall, I think it's ridiculous to criticise Mozilla for introducing optional AI features on Firefox.
This sounds like a marketing shpiel rather than a prediction. I think the primary value offered by AI browsers will be to the AI vendors - as they will have far more control over user behavior as well as far better ability to surveil and monitor for marketing purposes.
Due to the mobile revolution Mozilla has been doomed as a significant player, no matter what they did.
There was one shot however, "Firefox OS" on mobile. Of course they gave up early when they should have been investing in it continuously and plugging that google money away into an endowment instead of leadership salaries. Had they done that they'd at least have a chance now.
That reminds me that their new tab grouping feature is the first one to really impress me and immediately enter my workflow in… years? Probably since either reader mode or auto-translate first dropped.
Highly recommend everyone check it out. Handily trounces all the tab management extensions I’ve tried over the years on FF and Chrome
I wasn't aware people were still using Mozilla after they changed their terms a year ago in a user-adversarial way. That's when I dropped them and never looked back myself. They basically removed a line in their terms saying they will never sell your information to third parties. It's gone now. So they will. And with this announcement with AI, they're just jumping on the 'get as much information from the user as possible and sell it'.
Needs to cease to exist at this point. It is part of the cancer.
Firefox must add one single button in settings to disable all AI nonsense at once. It can be on by default, but if user turns this off - it must be kept off.
I guess Mozilla also wants to jump on the AI bandwagon.
Out of the five options available, only one is European (the one I am using). What I don't like is how I cannot add my own custom endpoint. What if I run Mistral locally (with Ollama, for example) and want to use that?
Also, I really do think there should be a fat warning about uploading data from browser to a third party. Yes, every bloody time. Not everything the browser shows is publicly available data. There are people who are going to break the law with this tool (ie. using PII with LLM), and the people who are damaged are going to be innocent third parties who didn't opt-out or opt-in anything.
The BS with not being easily able to disable a feature like this is probably to deter, or because 'user studies' showed people don't want to disable it. Well, fuck that. It isn't rocket science to have a checkbox which just deals with these values in about:config.
> Out of the five options available, only one is European (the one I am using). What I don't like is how I cannot add my own custom endpoint. What if I run Mistral locally (with Ollama, for example) and want to use that?
Set up your preferred self-hosted web interface (OpenWebUI or whatever, I haven't looked into this for a while), point it at ollama, and then configure it in Firefox:
browser.ml.chat.provider = http://localhost:3000/
At home I point this at Kagi Assistant, at work I point it to our internal GenAI platform's chat endpoint.
Mozilla love re-enabling stuff you've explicitly turned off a hundred times. Terrible hamburger menus, threaded messages in thunderbird. I've seen it so many times.
Another user said this, but I'm going to echo it -- Firefox opened up the LLM chat sidebar one time. I closed it. It's stayed closed. It hasn't asked me to open it again. I don't understand the hatred for something you can just _not use_. People will use it if they want to. Firefox also has a very tiny market share in comparison to other browsers.
I can't speak for everyone but the fact that it appears suddenly at all is rather annoying. It's like a blast of cosmic rays aimed right at my Error-Producing memory. You can tell me that I won a billion dollars and the solution to the Kryptos puzzle and I would still seethe over forgetting the what band I was about to look up.
That said Firefox is pretty good at obeying its own "Recommend me new features" option.
I wish there was a way to fund nothing but Firefox development without the rest of the bloated mess that is Mozilla getting a cent from me. I don't want their moronic CEO who is chasing trends like this LLM idiocy to get a fucking dime while the browser itself is starved of money and resources. Fuck, I'm more than happy to pay a monthly subscription fee for FF, and I'm sure I'm not the only one, just look at something like Kagi!
I'm still a happy Firefox & Thunderbird user because ultimately it's still the only one that has at least a modicum of respect for its users, but all the recent AI pushes is making me annoyed with Mozilla because it's just so pointless.
Citation definitely needed. ChatGPT has almost a billion users.
I do agree with the main point that this should be easy to turn off, but let's not pretend that everyone hates AI as much as the average HN nerd.
Also, you could argue that Firefox's only remaining users are the average HN nerd and therefore it shouldn't pursue AI, but that's exactly the problem.
Yeah, that claim killed all credibility of the author for me. I firmly believe that if making your point requires you to invent some statistics that clearly don't pass the smell test, it's time to accept that your point may be wrong.
Putting the flags in Firefox just seems logical not "Hostile Design". Yes, there could be an easier way to turn it off, such as a menu item, but the flags need to be there first before the menu entry can exist.
The author claims to be an "IaaS engineer", surely, he can figure out how to write a firefox plugin, that can do what he wants, and use that to help non-technical users, and if it becomes popular enough will probably effect the change he wishes to see.
Its not just that each new "feature" is unnecessarily difficult to disable, and already active-with-privacy-side-effect by the time you notice.
Most new "features" are by now covered by an existing setting and/or policy. Yet I recognize a pattern of introducing new "but did you opt out of THIS NEW thing?" or "but did you opt out of VERSION TWO of this previously rejected thing?" setting/policy. It has become unsafe to upgrade to new Firefox releases, because each one will disrespect previous user choice in another unexpected way.
Why can't the menu entry be created alongside the flags? Surely if it's too complicated, then creating a plugin would also be too complicated for someone who doesn't work at Mozilla and doesn't know the codebase?
bitpush|3 months ago
That is revisionist history. Firefox succeeded because MS was sitting on their hands with IE, and it was stagnating. Firefox didnt do the opposite of what IE - you could argue Mozilla was doing what MS should have been.
It wasnt about "respecting users", or "agency" but simply implemented standards properly.
And that's going to be a hard problem with Chrome because you're up against a browser that is moving very, very, fast.
embedding-shape|3 months ago
It was a better browser through and through, maybe because MS slept on IE or maybe not, but in the end it isn't revisionist to say they beat MS's proverbial posterior because the browser was better.
cogman10|3 months ago
Mozilla didn't "take on" IE. Mozilla reclaimed their lost browser position. IE kicked the proverbial posterior of Netscape which both Netscape and Mozilla struggled to reclaim right up until the release of Firefox.
thomassmith65|3 months ago
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape:
leetnewb|3 months ago
umanwizard|3 months ago
vondur|3 months ago
buu700|3 months ago
smileson2|3 months ago
MallocVoidstar|3 months ago
arjie|3 months ago
The extension ecosystem, tabs, plugins, and notably whatever effort they did behind the scenes to ensure that companies that did streaming video etc. would work with their browser all played out really well.
I think the ultimate problem is that Mozilla's mission of a standards-compliant web with open-source browsers everywhere ultimately did get achieved. The era of "Works with IE6" badges has ended and the top browsers run on open-source engines. Despite our enthusiasm at the time for it, I think the truth is that Firefox was probably just a vehicle for this, much bigger, achievement.
Now that it's been achieved, Mozilla is in the fortunate place where Firefox only needs to exist as a backstop against Chrome sliding into high-proprietary world while providing the utility to Google that they get to say they're not a monopoly on web technologies.
Mozilla's search for a new mission isn't some sign of someone losing their way. It's just what happens to the Hero of Legend after he defeats the Big Bad. There's a post-denouement period. Sam Gamgee gets to go become Mayor of the Shire, which is all very convenient, but a non-profit like Mozilla would much rather find a similar enough mission that they can apply their vast resources to. That involves the same mechanics as product development, and they're facing the same primary thing: repeated failure.
That's just life.
edelbitter|3 months ago
If Mozilla was not busy "offering" (renamed the no-thank-you setting once again) so many "experiences" they could be doing much of the same stuff they did back in the day.
RicoElectrico|3 months ago
Amezarak|3 months ago
Google released Chrome with a massive advertising campaign, reaching even to television. They put ads for Chrome on the world's biggest web properties. It was packaged in installers. Not to say it wasn't a good browser - but it wasn't obviously better than Firefox. This marketing campaign bought them a ton of marketshare.
Mozilla's response, instead of sticking by Mozilla evangelists, nearly all of whom were power users, was to decide that the browser was too complicated for its users. It needed to be more like Chrome. It needed to be the browser for the proverbial grandma. So they axed features (like Panorama), configurability, and extensibility, alienating everyone who really cared. Only they didn't have the marketing heft of Google, so they didn't get Grandma, either.
Ever since then they've been panicking and grasping at straws and shoving in shovelware like Pocket in obviously vain attempts to regain what they had. And they never will, until they make people like you and me LOVE Firefox again.
bawolff|3 months ago
The AI stuff is the perfect example. Are there people who like AI? Certainly. Will they use firefox? Probably not.
At this stage firefox is the anti-establishment choice. That crowd hates AI. Betting on AI might make sense if you are chrome. It doesn't make sense if you are firefox.
joe_the_user|3 months ago
The idea that LLM have been successful and useful for significant things is naturally confused with the idea LLMs needed to bolted on to literally anything.
Animats|3 months ago
toomim|3 months ago
Brendan Eich was the Director of Mozilla. This is the guy who invented Javascript in 10 days, at Netscape, and then co-founded Mozilla, and became the technical lead. He was Chief Architect of Mozilla, then CTO of Mozilla Corporation, then CEO. He made Firefox great. This was when Mozilla was in its heyday, and passed IE in marketshare.
Then he was fired in 2014 because a bunch of people went crazy that he made a $1,000 political donation for a California ballot proposition that had nothing to do with computers.
This sent a signal that Mozilla doesn't reward technical improvements to its software — it rewards following political trends.
All of the bad stuff in Firefox started then.
mzajc|3 months ago
tartoran|3 months ago
whatshisface|3 months ago
nine_k|3 months ago
It attracted a relatively narrow audience, but that audience was special: active and future founders, CEOs, CTOs, VPs of engineering, blogosphere and YouTube celebrities, etc. Each of these disgruntled users communicated their disappointment to hundreds and thousands of other, less affluent users. Most of them, once in positions of engineering power, now would think twice before relying on something from Google.
Same with Firefox. It may serve a relatively more narrow audience, but it's not necessarily the same kind of audience, on average, which Chrome or Edge or even Safari serves.
einpoklum|3 months ago
Here are instructions on how to disable all of it:
https://github.com/Aetherinox/firefox-telemetry-block
(and no, you can't do it with just a few checkboxes in the prefs, you have to go into the advanced pref editor and look up some stuff.)
arp242|3 months ago
I now see there's also a "Create alt texts automatically" for pdfjs. This actually seems one of the more useful AI features I've seen. But I've never noticed it exists as I don't need this accessibility feature. You can disable it in the pdfjs (no about:config needed).
In short, Firefox is not forcing anyone to use AI and ways to disable it are not that obfuscated.
killjoywashere|3 months ago
conqrr|3 months ago
danpalmer|3 months ago
Opting out of AI would be like saying that you don't use JavaScript because you don't like the moral position of the guy who wrote it. That's a reasonable moral position to take (I totally get not wanting to use LLMs for reasons of copyright, art, or even just capability), but a completely unreasonable technical position to take, functionally impossible.
Why does Mozilla not give you a convenient opt out? Because it's hard, low impact, and functionally no-one wants it.
AlexandrB|3 months ago
I really don't get folks who defend tech paternalism - where features are pushed on users because "daddy knows best".
hd4|3 months ago
https://kb.mozillazine.org/Prefs.js_file
notafox|3 months ago
You can store your custom preferences in user.js file - Firefox will copy those to prefs.js at startup.
From your link:
[1] https://kb.mozillazine.org/User.js_fileedelbitter|3 months ago
[1]: https://mozilla.github.io/policy-templates/
Aeolun|3 months ago
sfRattan|3 months ago
Sometimes, there's a butler in there who seems absentminded and can only remember things up to a few thousand words. He once stacked all your dishes in the refrigerator and dumped all the food into the sink.
Other times, there's a demon in there who seems hellbent on destroying the innocence of your children and ripping apart your family. He once gave your children snuff films and instructions to build a bomb.
Just don't open the door if you don't like it... Some people are impossible to please.
tumult|3 months ago
throwaway1389z|3 months ago
This include things like using AI to assist with rendering/processing of PDF, looking at the flags.
As a Firefox users, this seems very troubling to me.
phyzome|3 months ago
gaigalas|3 months ago
XUL was very good, but then it was no more. And as soon as it was gone, Electron apps appeared. It's a tragedy. Mozilla had everything to be in that place instead, with a better product.
Once that was gone, Firefox became just another browser, doing what any browser does. It's still very good, and my first choice, but damn I miss XUL.
suprjami|3 months ago
How do you suggest Electron makes money for OpenJS?
You can still make PWAs backed by Firefox:
https://github.com/linuxmint/webapp-manager
This has not made Linux Mint any richer.
evrenesat|3 months ago
I guess everyone would agree that web browsers would come to our mind when we hear "user-agent" in general context. After years of forward and backward evolution of web extensions, AI powered web browsers inevitably will move forward the meaning of the term "user-agent" and deliver the value it actually promises.
Together with the advance of "browser-use" optimized local LLMs, current M4 powered Macbook Air can provide enough juice to aid users' web browsing needs. I believe soon AI hubs installed at homes, or cloud based private AI inference engines will become much more accessible offerings to help with mobile browsers as well. Overall, I think it's ridiculous to criticise Mozilla for introducing optional AI features on Firefox.
AlexandrB|3 months ago
adam_patarino|3 months ago
I'm genuinely shocked people are driving around in Atlas right now, showing OpenAI how to click buttons and how to login to their bank accounts.
iris-digital|2 months ago
There was one shot however, "Firefox OS" on mobile. Of course they gave up early when they should have been investing in it continuously and plugging that google money away into an endowment instead of leadership salaries. Had they done that they'd at least have a chance now.
acomjean|3 months ago
bbor|3 months ago
Highly recommend everyone check it out. Handily trounces all the tab management extensions I’ve tried over the years on FF and Chrome
Madmallard|3 months ago
Needs to cease to exist at this point. It is part of the cancer.
Madmallard|3 months ago
butz|3 months ago
Fnoord|3 months ago
Out of the five options available, only one is European (the one I am using). What I don't like is how I cannot add my own custom endpoint. What if I run Mistral locally (with Ollama, for example) and want to use that?
Also, I really do think there should be a fat warning about uploading data from browser to a third party. Yes, every bloody time. Not everything the browser shows is publicly available data. There are people who are going to break the law with this tool (ie. using PII with LLM), and the people who are damaged are going to be innocent third parties who didn't opt-out or opt-in anything.
The BS with not being easily able to disable a feature like this is probably to deter, or because 'user studies' showed people don't want to disable it. Well, fuck that. It isn't rocket science to have a checkbox which just deals with these values in about:config.
denismi|3 months ago
Set up your preferred self-hosted web interface (OpenWebUI or whatever, I haven't looked into this for a while), point it at ollama, and then configure it in Firefox:
browser.ml.chat.provider = http://localhost:3000/
At home I point this at Kagi Assistant, at work I point it to our internal GenAI platform's chat endpoint.
jrjfjgkrj|3 months ago
when the AI tab/sidebar appeared, I just closed it. that's it. and it never appeared again. I didn't need to change any special setting.
maybe there was another dialog or two which asked me to enable AI something which I answered No and dont remember.
this article is written in bad faith, Firefox is not pushing AI at every opportunity like Edge for example
antisol|2 months ago
Mozilla love re-enabling stuff you've explicitly turned off a hundred times. Terrible hamburger menus, threaded messages in thunderbird. I've seen it so many times.
danielhlockard|3 months ago
barnabee|3 months ago
I don’t fill my house with tools and products I don’t want and I’m not willing to have them on my computer screen either.
cyberrock|3 months ago
That said Firefox is pretty good at obeying its own "Recommend me new features" option.
sensanaty|3 months ago
I'm still a happy Firefox & Thunderbird user because ultimately it's still the only one that has at least a modicum of respect for its users, but all the recent AI pushes is making me annoyed with Mozilla because it's just so pointless.
IshKebab|3 months ago
Citation definitely needed. ChatGPT has almost a billion users.
I do agree with the main point that this should be easy to turn off, but let's not pretend that everyone hates AI as much as the average HN nerd.
Also, you could argue that Firefox's only remaining users are the average HN nerd and therefore it shouldn't pursue AI, but that's exactly the problem.
cpncrunch|3 months ago
https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2025/09/17/ai-in-america...
raincole|3 months ago
However, realistically Firefox is a niche browser now and will stay so. So niche that appealing to the minority becomes a valid strategy again.
Bratmon|3 months ago
Madmallard|3 months ago
https://youtube.com/shorts/FObvkFtr2ZU?si=U6fCphjmGcNMb5ac
lofaszvanitt|3 months ago
hekkle|3 months ago
The author claims to be an "IaaS engineer", surely, he can figure out how to write a firefox plugin, that can do what he wants, and use that to help non-technical users, and if it becomes popular enough will probably effect the change he wishes to see.
edelbitter|3 months ago
Most new "features" are by now covered by an existing setting and/or policy. Yet I recognize a pattern of introducing new "but did you opt out of THIS NEW thing?" or "but did you opt out of VERSION TWO of this previously rejected thing?" setting/policy. It has become unsafe to upgrade to new Firefox releases, because each one will disrespect previous user choice in another unexpected way.
tapoxi|3 months ago