Does anyone want AI in anything? I can see the value of navigating to an LLM and asking specific questions, but generally speaking I don't want that just running / waiting on my machine as I open a variety of applications. It's a huge waste of resources and for most normal people is an edge case.
The existence of the features doesnât bother me. Itâs the constant nagging about them. I canât use a google product without being harassed to the point of not being able to work by offers to âhelp me writeâ or whatever.
Having the feature on a menu somewhere would be fine. The problem is the confluence of new features now becoming possible, and companies no longer building software for their users but as vehicles to push some agenda. Now weâre seeing this in action.
It's a problem in the software industry today that is bigger than AI, probably the greatest controversy in software marketing.
Part of the model of products like Adobe's Creative Suite [1] is that they are always adding new features -- and if you want people to keep renewing their subscription you want them to know about new features so they feel like they are getting more out of their product.
Trouble is using a product like that is like walking out of the Moscone Center and getting harassed by mentally ill people and addicts or like creating an account in Tumblr and getting five solicitations for pig butchering and NFT scams in DM in the first week -- you boot up the product, spend 20 seconds looking at the splash screen, then you have to clear five dialog boxes that you might not have time to deal with right now. Sometimes I open up a product because I have to do a task I have to do but don't really want to do and feeling a lot of stress and I just don't need to deal with any bullshit when I am under the gun.
I've seen Adobe trying gentler methods to point out new features in Lightroom, such as a filter that can automatically weed out photos where people have their eyes closed. It takes a lot of UX work to do that though.
Personally I'd like it a lot better if the nagging started after I finished a task, if I was feeling satisfied with the product and now relieved that the task is over that's a moment when I'd be receptive to learning more about the product.
[1] And also a lot of "free" software, it's not just money-grubbing, but the model of always rolling updates.
I just finished listening to the first episode of "Acquired" on Google and it ended with Google pushing Google Plus into everything in an effort to compete with Facebook in social networking. It really hampered all their other offerings.
https://www.acquired.fm Acquired podcast does long (2 4-hour episodes on Google) episodes on various companies, mostly tech but recently Trader Joe's
Do they talk about Trader Joeâs illegal union busting and attempts to get the national labor relations board disbanded ?
> no longer building software for their users but as vehicles to push some agenda
All companies push an agenda all the time, and their agenda always is: market dominance, profitability, monopoly and rent extraction, rinse and repeat into other markets, power maximization for their owners and executives.
The freak stampede of all these tech giants to shove AI down everybody's throat just shows that they perceive the technology as having huge potential to advance the above agenda, for themselves, or for their competitors at their detriment.
1. AI is generating a lot of buzz
2. AI could be the next technology revolution
3. If we get on the AI bandwagon now we're getting in on the ground floor
4. If we don't get on the AI bandwagon now we risk being left behind
5. Now that we've invested into AI we need to make sure we're seeing return on our investment
6. Our users don't seem to understand what AI could possibly do so we should remind them so that they use the feature
7. Our users aren't opting in to the features we're offering so we should opt them in automatically
Like any other 'big, unproven bet' everyone is rushing in. See also: 'stories' making their way into everything (Instagram, Facebook, Telegram, etc.), vertical short-form videos (TikTok, Reels, Shorts, etc). The difference here is that the companies put literally tens or hundreds of billions of dollars into it so, for many, if AI fails and the money is wasted it could be an existential threat for entire departments or companies. nvidia is such a huge percentage of the entire US economy that if the AI accelerator market collapses it's going to wipe out something like ten percent of GDP.
So yeah, I get why companies are doing this; it's an actual 'slippery slope' that they fell into where they don't see any way out but to keep going and hope that it works out for them somehow, for some reason.
> All companies push an agenda all the time, and their agenda always is: market dominance, profitability, monopoly and rent extraction, rinse and repeat into other markets, power maximization for their owners and executives.
I'll bear that in mind the next time I'm getting a haircut. How do you think Bob's Barbers is going to achieve all of that?
> All companies push an agenda all the time, and their agenda always is: market dominance, profitability, monopoly and rent extraction, rinse and repeat into other markets, power maximization for their owners and executives.
But if users really wanted agenda-free products and services, then those would win right? At least according to free market theory.
That's where I'm at with these.
I don't personally care if a product includes AI, it's the pushiness of it that's annoying.
That, and the inordinate amount of effort being devoted to it. It's just hilarious at this point that Microsoft, for example, is moving heaven and earth to put AI into everything office, and yet Excel still automatically converts random things into dates (the "ability" to turn it off they added a few years ago only works half the time, and only affects csv imports) with no ability to disable it.
AI in everything does make shareholders happy while fixing bugs in Excel does not.
Exactly! I honestly can't remember the last time my window start menu search bar functioned as it's supposed to. For multiple laptops across more than 5 years i have to hit the windows key three to 7 times to get it to let me type into it. It either doesn't open, doesn't show anything, or doesn't let me type into it.
I mean, c'mon, its literally called the fucking windows key and it doesn't work. As per standard Microsoft it's a feature that worked perfectly on all versions before cortana (their last "ai assistant" type push), i wonder what new core functionalities of their product they're going to fuck up and never fix.
> Does anyone want AI in anything?
I want in Text to speech (TTS) engines, transliteration/translation and... routing tickets to correct teams/persons would also be awesome :) (Classification where mistakes can easily be corrected)
Anyways, we used TTS engine before openai - it was AI based. It HAD to be AI based as even for a niche language some people couldn't tell it was a computer. Well from some phrases you can tell it, but it is very high quality and correctly knows on which parts of the word to put emphasis on.
https://play.ht/ if anyone is wondering.
Automatic captions has been transformative, in terms of accessibility, and seems to be something people universally want. Most people don't think of it as AI though, even when it is LLM software creating the captions. There are many more ways that AI tools could be embedded "invisibly" into our day-to-day lives, and I expect they will be.
To be clear, it's not LLMs creating the captions. Whisper[0], one of the best of its kind currently, is a speech recognition model, not a large language model. It's trained on audio, not text, and it can run on your mobile phone.
It's still AI, of course. But there is distinction between it and an LLM.
[0] https://github.com/openai/whisper/blob/main/model-card.md
Do you have an example of a good implementation of ai captions? I've only experienced those on youtube, and they are really bad. The automatic dubbing is even worse, but still.
On second thought this probably depends on the caption language.
ML has been around for ages. Email spam filters are one of the oldest examples.
These days when the term "AI" is thrown around the person is usually talking about large language models, or generative adversarial neural networks for things like image generation etc.
Classification is a wonderful application of ML that long predates LLMs. And LLMs have their purpose and niche too, don't get me wrong. I use them all the time. But AI right now is a complete hype train with companies trying to shove LLMs into absolutely anything and everything. Although I use LLMs, I have zero interest in an "AI PC" or an "AI Web Browser" any more than I have a need for an AI toaster oven. Thank god companies have finally gotten the message about "smart appliances." I wish "dumb televisions" were more common, but for a while it was looking like you couldn't buy a freakin' dishwasher that didn't have WIFI and an app and a bunch of other complexity-adding "features" that are neither required or desired by most customers.
The AI tools can be an amazing upgrade over normal search boxes. I rarely let Claude write any code, but I get a lot of value out of pointing it at an unfamiliar repo and asking it to track down which files contain the code Iâm looking for and to summarize how the pieces fit together.
There are also a lot of subtle AI tools that arenât in-your-face LLM prompts that flatter you with âExcellent question!â. Itâs great having my photo library automatically annotated so I can search for things like âmooseâ and it will bring up that picture of the moose we saw, rather than me having to remember what year it happened and scroll through photos until I find it.
Yes and no and this is the problem with the current marketing around AI.
I very much do want what used to be just called ML that was invisible and actually beneficial. Autocorrect, smart touch screen keyboards, music recommendations, etc. But the problem is that all of that stuff is now also just being called "AI" left and right.
That being said I think what most people think of when they say "AI" is really not as beneficial as they are trying to push. It has some uses but I think most of those uses are not going to be in your face AI as we are pushing now and instead in the background.
They need to show usage going up and to the right or the house of cards falls apart. So now youâre forced to use it.
This is why I use the term "genAI" rather than "AI" when talking about things like LLMs, sora, etc.
I think companies should also advertise when they use JavaScript on the page. âUse this new feature â- why? Because itâs powered by JavaScriptâ
Nobody wants what's currently marketed as "AI" everywhere.
I mean, that is kinda exactly what I said..
But we do have to acknowledge that AI is very much turned into an all encompassing term of everything ML. It is getting harder and harder to read an article about something being done with "AI" and to know if it was a custom purpose built model to do a specific task or is it throwing data into an LLM and hoping for the best.
They are purposefully making it harder and harder to just say "No AI" by obfuscating this so we have to be very specific about what we are talking about.
Nobody wants anything from Mozilla except Firefox/Thunderbird to be high-performance alternatives to Chrome/Outlook with fewer restrictions on extensions.
Thatâs it. The rest is just activism and kids playing in a sandbox with non-profit money to pad out their resume with whatever topical keywords might land them their next gig.
I am a regular Firefox user; it is literally the tool I use most often during my working hours. I like it more than Chrome.
Firefox is steadily losing market share, and any attempts to do something about it are met with negativity. The 2-4% of users who use it care about their privacy. But they are not being deprived of it; the AI tab is optional, and no one is removing the regular tab. (Of course, it would be better if they allowed the integration of local models or aggregators, such as Openrouter, Huggingface...)
Meanwhile, developers continue to ignore Firefox, testing only Chromium browsers. Large companies are also choosing the Chromium engine for their browsers.
Perhaps if they implement this functionality conveniently, more average users will use Firefox.
I am not a Firefox user, but I am baffled by the fact that every time I see news about it is because its developers are trying to push something that users dislike. All the comments I read always highlight how they keep wasting time and money instead of working on more important things.
My impression is that this is the reason why they keep losing market share. I never see any positive news about Firefox or Mozilla, and the browser has nothing that would make me switch.
Firefox gained market share because people recommended it and installed it on the computers of friends and family. They seem to have stopped, and its developers don't seem, from the outside, to be interested in doing anything to bring that back.
Here are some of the things that make Firefox the best browser for me:
- An extension system more powerful than Chrome's, which supports for example rich adblockers that can block ads on Youtube. Also, it works on mobile, too
- Many sophisticated productivity and tab management features such as vertical tabs, tab groups, container tabs, split tabs, etc. And now it also has easy-to-use profiles and PWA support just like Chrome
- A sync system which is ALWAYS end-to-end encrypted, and doesn't leak your browsing data or saved credentials if you configure it wrong, like Google's does, and it of course works on mobile too
- And yes, LLM-assisted summarization, translation, tab grouping, etc, most of which works entirely offline with local LLMs and no cloud interation, although there are some cloud enabled features as well
I don't understand why anyone would choose Chrome over Firefox. I get that it's performant, but it's developed by a dominant advertising company. Why would you trust Chrome if you care about your privacy?
Firefox is excellent, despite the grumbling of people who want it to have a narrower focus (which I'm not disagreeing with).
Every time I try Firefox itâs slower than Chrome or Safari. Every time. And since that never seems to improve, I suspect thatâs why its market share keeps dropping because all the fluff doesnât matter if the core feature is just worse.
Amen. Friends don't let friends use Firefox in the manner prescribed by Mozilla in its current state. It's horrid.
I have LibreWolf and Chrome installed, but not Firefox, and I like part of Firefox in spite of, not because of, the rest of Mozilla. I'd be interested in Ladybird except they threaten to use Swift.
I've had to stop using FF as my development browser because it chokes on large source maps. I used to find lots of issues in our web app that were only ever tested on chromium browsers. I don't anymore because the devtools are unusable past a certain point.
I am a frontend dev and use Firefox as much as I can. But I can't use it for development. Firefox's dev tools need to be better. I use Chrome for development because Chrome has great dev tools.
I donât know. Iâm always a bit appalled that getting privacy in firefox requires you to disable so many flags in the user.js or use something like arkenfox. It feels kind of dishonest of them that they donât surface those settings when theyâre enabled by default. Of course there is librefox, but still I feel like there shouldnât even have to be reason for an extra fork like that.
I would have loved to see them leverage their browser to make a distributed social network, back when they had enough market share to attempt such a thing.
An open slack-alike also seems like a good fit for them.
Alas, they have tons of cash but little capacity to do anything useful.
Mozilla has started so many incredibly ambitious projects: Firefox OS, Rust, Servo/Stylo, Quantum... A slack-alike would at best give them a +1 against killedbygoogle.com.
Yep, a federated social network is indeed an ambitious problem, perhaps Mozilla would've been well-suited to tackle it. The problem is not the tech or scope, but timing. 15 years ago everyone was happy to be on FB / Twitter. 10 years ago, Microsoft just bought LinkedIn; Google tried, then killed off a network with 500k DAU; all of that time, there was little space for a new contender.
Mastodon only took off because Twitter went to shit real fast; still most people flocked to mastodon.social, because they heard Mastodon was good, but had no idea what federation is, or why it's important. MAYBE that would've been the perfect timing for Mozilla to launch their own ActivityPub platform.
"but had no idea what federation is, or why it's important"
Maybe the ideal technical solution would not require them to know?
I see this sentiment a lot, but I never agree with it. Sure, some of their projects seem very odd for them to lead, but given that they are completely reliant on their competitor for cash -- a revenue source that has been threatened several times by anti-trust cases against Google -- they should be looking to branch out. Firefox alone won't pay the bills, so they need to try and find some other revenue source. Plus, Chrome has essentially won. Not necessarily for any engineering reason, at least not these days, but from continued momentum of being the market leader. Sitting around quietly isn't going to get people to switch, they do need to find some way to distinguish themselves apart from Chrome, which again leads to these misc features being thrown out there.
The AI inclusion seems like the same reason everyone else is adding AI, they don't want to be left behind if or when it's viewed as an essential feature.
> Chrome has essentially won. Not necessarily for any engineering reason, at least not these days, but from continued momentum of being the market leader.
Ah, how the young forget... Mozilla became popular precisely due to their willingness to challenge the market leader at the time [1], namely, Internet Explorer. Going against the market leader should be in their DNA. The fight is not lost just because there's a market leader. If anything, Mozilla is currently losing the battle because the leadership doesn't believe they can do it again.
I'm fine with Mozilla diversifying their income, but I'm not fine with Mozilla sacrificing their browser (the part we desperately need the most) in the name of a "Digital Rights Foundation" that, at this rate, will lose their seat at the negotiating table.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#/m...
They were losing because MS bundled IE with every device. Eventually they MS lost an anti trust case against it and it opened up the market, which is before that graph begins.
Well 30 years later we are back where we started.
Chrome is where it is because it is preloaded on most phones on the planet (the other ecosystem has a different preloaded browser). The other thing is that it was advertised on the most visited page on the internet for 20 years.
Most internet users don't even use desktop/laptops, they use mobile devices and likely have no idea there is any other option than chrome.
> Mozilla is currently losing the battle because the leadership doesn't believe they can do it again.
I do not believe that this is the case. Their #1 revenue source is Google. The moment they start regaining any foothold?
Imagine just collecting that amount from Google as tax, and funding Mozilla publicly.
The amount of money they get from Google is vastly more than it takes to hire a few dozen people full-time to develop a web browser and email program.
People in the organization are trying to use what's left of the name recognition and all that money to benefit their own initiatives.
> they should be looking to branch out. Firefox alone won't pay the bills, so they need to try and find some other revenue source
They probably would've achieved enough to sustain Firefox development in perpetuity if they invested most of Google's money in a fund.
> Plus, Chrome has essentially won. Not necessarily for any engineering reason, at least not these days, but from continued momentum of being the market leader.
s/Chrome/Internet Explorer/g
Nobody has won until the match is over, and history has a very long tail.
Agreed! I think it should be a huge red flag to folks at mozilla, that there are several forks of Firefox that mostly just take out tracking and AI features from the browser.
Not only several Firefox forks, but also an entirely new browser effort ought to be a wakeup call to Mozilla: Ladybird
I think "nobody i know" and nobody are different things. Mozilla wants more firefox users. there are "AI browsers" and ai integrated browsing is becoming more and more the norm. Mozilla is doing the right thing here, the features are there but unobtrusive. But down the road, I fully expect Mozilla to do whatever they have to do to remain in the game. Their small market share is hurting the entire internet, they can't afford to become a browser for retro-techo-luddites or something.
You didn't even read 6 sentences into TFA. 52/52 of the closed-beta testers of this feature want it removed.
> "AI browsers" and ai integrated browsing is becoming more and more the norm
Not really, outside influencers looking to capture the next hot thing (like Mozilla) and tech-bros, there is no living soul on this planet that wants or is trying to normalise AI browsers.
That's a ridiculous hyperbole. Translation and search alone are examples of wildly successful applications of generative AI that a lot of people actually want because it makes the experience qualitatively better. This is pretty evident if you look at normal people shifting to ChatGPT and other AI-powered search from the engines like Google. Recent AI mode in Google is a desperate attempt to stay relevant.
No, theyâre examples of misuse of LLMs - âsometimes correctâ is not a replacement for a search engine or a translator.
Remember, Google search used to actually find you things before they shifted to replacing results with âsomewhat random but reads plausibleâ AI summaries.
Another example of "nobody I know" and not nobody.
You didn't read the article, did you? This was explained very well. It also echoes sentiments expressed in any other medium or social you check. Not a single example of ânot techbrosâ actually want the stuff.
Firefox somehow fell into the hole of feature-pack in an effort to save itself.
Firefox instead desperately needs to focus on making it a high performance browser that people enjoy using for.....browsing.
They can start with fixing the spell check, which is hilariously awful for 2008. And we are in 2025.
Signed, a 20 year user.
I wish they rely more on OS features, like the built-in, system-wide spell check. I know it's a bigger task for them, since Firefox runs on multiple OSes, but maybe it's worth it. It dreads me how âun-macOSâ Firefox feels, and I guess this feeling extends to Windows, Linux and elsewhere.
Mozilla has lost the plot. People support Mozilla because they want a strong, independent browser, not so staff can siphon money into side projects that exist mainly to look good on someoneâs resume. Things like Transformer Lab have nothing to do with Firefox and nothing to do with the mission Mozilla claims to care about.
This isnât innovation. Leadership keeps green-lighting trendy distractions while the browser that actually matters keeps slipping behind. And itâs happening because thereâs no real oversight, no accountability, and no one willing to say ânoâ when someone pitches another off-brand hobby project.
Mozilla needs a reality check. Stop burning resources on experiments nobody asked for, remove the people who think this is acceptable, and refocus on the one thing that still gives the organization a reason to exist: building a great browser. Until that happens, theyâre just wasting donor money and goodwill while Firefox slowly fades away.
>refocus on the one thing that still gives the organization a reason to exist: building a great browser
Considering their existence depends on Google's money, it's to their best interest for the browser to lag behind Chrome.
This is the fictional hallucination that somehow makes it into every comment section about Mozilla. So let's go through the facts one more time:
(1) They spend more on browser development now than they ever have in their history even after adjusting for inflation.
(2) The majority of things claimed to be "money sinks" don't actually cost that much or siphon resources away from core browser development with some exceptions (we'll get to those).
(3) The market share losses happened from 2010-2015, the side bets era is approximately 2020-2025. The side bets didn't retroactively cause the market share losses.
(4) The narrative that a failure to keep up/push new features drove market share losses paints a picture that's entirely zoomed in on Mozilla and ignores Google leveraging its search and mobile monopolies to muscle its browser onto the map, which likely would have happened regardless of how good Firefox was.
(5) The narrative that the browser was broken and behind is somewhat outdated - it was true in the market share loss era, but then they did the dang thing and launched a major engineering effort, fundamentally rebuilt the major parts of the browser via Project Quantum, a monumental engineering transformation that delivered speed and stability, the thing everyone asked for. It's obviously not perfect, but in terms of performance and stability its certainly good enough to be a daily driver in most cases and not in a state of tragic disrepair.
(6) Despite it being supposedly so obvious, no one can explain what missing browser feature they can add that will restore all their market share overnight.
That said, yes, there are bad things: the dabbling in adtech is bad imo ("privacy preserving ads" seems to be category error), dabbling with AI doesn't seem to have an obvious point in its current iteration, Pocket was understandable as a revenue grower but seems have been a wash and annoyed users and they didn't bother to maintain it, Mozilla nonprofits broader advocacy for privacy seems to be confusing some people, and Firefox OS genuinely did seem to have cost engineering resources at a time that they lost market share. That said, I would love if there was a 10 year old Firefox OS project right now given Google's pushing of developer certification.
So, yes, there's stuff I don't love. I don't feel like this iteration of Mozilla has the innovative spirit of, say, Opera back in its heyday, and it's not as polished as Chrome. But the comment section rhetoric has spilled over into fever dream territory and not is even pretending to map onto any coherent historical timeline, factual record, or story of cause and effect, and often contradictory in its declaration of demands.
I don't want AI in Firefox.
For one, because it breaks the Unix philosophy of "doing one thing and doing that well".
In that vein, I do want Firefox to develop/allow/improve an interface so that machines, amongst which AI-MCPs, can drive my firefox. And do so safely, secure, contained, etc.
So that my AI agent can e.g. open a Firefox tab and do things there on my behalf. Without me being afraid it nukes all my bookmarks, and with me having confidence in safety nets so that some other tool or agent cannot just take over my gmail tab and start spamming under my account.
Point is: I really think Mozilla and Firefox have a role to play in the AI landscape that's shaping up. But yet another client to interact with chatbots is not that. Leave that to people building clients please: do one thing and do it well.
I don't think you can apply Unix philosophy to a (GUI) web browser, you don't use it compositionally.
In fact, the web browser may be the best example of a program antithetical to the unix philosophy. It is a single program that does rendering, password management, video decoding, dev tools, notifications, extension systems, etc. Adding some new AI component is rather on-brand for browsers (whether a good decision or not).
> you don't use it compositionally.
I would if I could!
But that's basically the promise, that the damn thing _can_ use arbitrary things compositionally.
by this logic sockets are also non-unix
> For one, because it breaks the Unix philosophy of "doing one thing and doing that well".
I think that browsers abandoned this well before Firefox (or indeed, Mozilla) existed. These days a browser is an everything platformâperhaps ai could mitigate some of this damage.
We're most of the way there in a sense. Programmatic control of the browsers exist with e.g. Playwright and similar.
But some niceties to e.g. allow running scripts with filtered/permissioned access within a sidebar would be nice.
I want a browser with a simple set of command line options that would let me navigate to a page, save the page or some part of it, trigger any of the actions that I normally do with the menu or mouse. Then I would be able to script it without having to install huge unstable things like Playwright and similar.
You can open Chrome with a remote debugging port enabled and send commands to it using the Devtools Protocol. https://chromedevtools.github.io/devtools-protocol/
Mozilla's gonna Mozilla.
I don't want this, but at the same time I think people are overreacting. If Mozilla remains true to their word and this is an opt-in sort of thing, it's hard for me to get too worked up about it. I can just ignore it.
It's specifically been opt-out: `browser.ml.enable` is set to `true` in `about:config` in recent versions, and even disabling that doesn't get rid of the "AI assistant" option in the right-click dropdown menu.
browser.ml.chat.enabled set to false
browser.ml.chat.menu set to false
browser.ml.chat.page set to false
browser.ml.chat.page.footerBadge set to false
browser.ml.chat.page.menuBadge set to false
browser.ml.chat.shortcuts set to false
browser.ml.chat.sidebar set to false
browser.ml.enable set to false
browser.ml.linkPreview.enabled set to false
browser.ml.pageAssist.enabled set to false
browser.tabs.groups.smart.enabled set to false
browser.tabs.groups.smart.userEnable set to false
extensions.ml.enabled set to false
Can also use the user config override if you want to do it without having to do that every time you install FF somewhere new (put user.js in the root folder of your firefox profile).
user_pref("browser.ml.chat.enabled", false);
user_pref("browser.ml.chat.menu", false);
user_pref("browser.ml.chat.page", false);
user_pref("browser.ml.chat.page.footerBadge", false);
user_pref("browser.ml.chat.page.menuBadge", false);
user_pref("browser.ml.chat.shortcuts", false);
user_pref("browser.ml.chat.sidebar", false);
user_pref("browser.ml.enable", false);
user_pref("browser.ml.linkPreview.enabled", false);
user_pref("browser.ml.pageAssist.enabled", false);
user_pref("browser.tabs.groups.smart.enabled", false);
user_pref("browser.tabs.groups.smart.userEnable", false);
user_pref("extensions.ml.enabled", false);
At this point, it's easier to start with a privacy-focused, AI-free fork, like LibreWolf, and turn some stuff on to stop it breaking sites that have privacy-hostile workings, like disabling that LibreWolf exclusive fingerprinting protection that many sites don't play nice with.
This is just as user friendly as the rest of the firefox configuration. I can't recommend it to anyone in good faith anymore.
So sick of all these hacks. I've been a Firefox user for decades but it's time to throw in the towel.
I added `browser.ml.chat.enabled` = `false` and `browser.ml.chat.menu` = `false` which seems to remove that right-click behavior.
You can remove it directly from the right-click menu, but that's really not my point.
Mozilla has now shoved AI down my throat as a user of Firefox. It's one thing if they want to pursue questionable business directions on a purely opt-in basis -- that's their prerogative -- and while I'll take issue with what was in my opinion one of the last bastions of the open web burning money like that, ultimately, at least they didn't force it on the user.
It's another thing when they impose it on the user base, and a user base, at that, that's probably more sensitive to having the latest trend shoved in our faces than the average browser user (I'm not saying this to sound elitist; on the contrary, I think FF attracts obstinate, almost luddite types when it comes to new technology; I think many of us just want a basic, relatively no-frills browser).
Yet features that start optional sometimes get nudged more front-and-center over time
From their history, you can expect the exact opposite. Remember the Mr robot fiasco?
I would love AI in the browser, as long as it is offered, not aggressively pushed in my face, is privacy friendly (i.e. ideally client side but at the very least I need to understand what is sent off the device, how it is used, and it should only be sent when I actively trigger the feature).
In particular I'd also love agentic AI so I can quickly automate tasks on shitty web sites that can't be reasonably automated otherwise.
But even a free, no-signup "summarize this wall of text" would be useful.
I think the adoption of AI browsers shows that there are people who find value in this, and I think a lot more people would be interested if it wasn't getting relentlessly forced on them at every corner, making them refuse it out of principle.
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