This is exactly the kind of boring, unsexy feature that actually builds trust. It’s the opposite of the usual “surprise, here’s an AI sidebar you didn’t ask for and can’t fully disable” pattern.
If they want people to try this stuff, the path is pretty simple: ship a browser that treats AI like any other power feature. Off by default, clearly explained, reversible, and preferably shippable as an extension. You can always market your way into more usage; you can’t market your way back into credibility once you blow it.
It is well-known as a result of the expert reports in US v Google that generally software users do not change defaults
Whereas providing an option or a setting that the user must locate and change doesn't really mean much. Few users will ever see it let alone decide to change it
For example, why pay 22 billion to be "the default" if users can just change the default setting
Mozilla is certainly paddling upstream. Of all of the AI-integrated apps and sites that I'm subjected to, I can think of exactly two where it wasn't obnoxious and a pain in the neck to disable.
I've been toying with that for ages on and off. Finally now a paid up user due to the fact that their guesswork engine (or makey-upy machine, or your preferred name) can be easily turned off, and stays off until requested otherwise.
My problem here is this; products are designed with a vision. If you are designing with 2-3 visions it won’t be that good, if you design with one vision (AI) then non-AI version of the product will be an after thought. This tells me non-AI version of it will suffer (IMHO)
> if you design with one vision (AI) then non-AI version of the product will be an after thought
That’s like saying if a car manufacturer adds a "Sport Mode", the steering wheel and brakes suddenly become an afterthought.
Being AI-available means we'll welcome more Firefox users who would otherwise choose a different browser. Being AI-optional means we won't alienate the anti-AI crowd. Why not embrace both?
I don't agree. I think opinionated design products are much worse in general.
It's really great when your opinions are aligned with those of the designer. If they're not, you're straight out of luck and you're stuck with something that isn't really for you.
This is why I love software that gives as much choice as possible. Like KDE for example. Because I have pretty strong vision myself and I respect my tools to conform to that, not the other way around
I'm going to chime in here, I think 1. This is great and Mozilla is listening to it's core fans and 2. I want Firefox to be a competitive browser. Without AI enabled features + agent mode being first class citizens, this will be a non-starter in 2 years.
I want my non-tech family members/friends to install Firefox not because I come over at Christmas, but because they want to. Because it's a browser that "just works." We can't have this if Firefox stays in the pre-ai era.
I know Mozilla doesn't have much good will right now, but hopefully with the exec shakeup, they will right the ship on making FF a great browser. While still staying the best foil to Chrome (both in browser engine, browser chrome, and extension ecosystem).
> Because it's a browser that "just works." We can't have this if Firefox stays in the pre-ai era.
Strongly disagree.
Theres no expectation of AI as a core browsing experience. There isnt even really an expectation of AI as part of an extended browsing experience. We cant even predict reliably what AI's relationship to browsing will be if it is even to exist. Mozilla could reliably wait 24 months and follow if features are actually in demand and being used.
Firefox can absolutely maintain "It just works" by being a good platform with well tested in demand features.
What they are talking about here, are opt out only experiments intruding on the core browsing experience. Thats the opposite of "It Just Works".
>I know Mozilla doesn't have much good will right now, but hopefully with the exec shakeup, they will right the ship on making FF a great browser.
Its already a great browser. It doesnt need a built in opt out AI experience to become great.
>Without AI enabled features + agent mode being first class citizens, this will be a non-starter in 2 years.
I want an application to serve me webpages and manage said webpages. It wasn't a "non-starter" for me 2 years ago when I switched off Chrome who chose to be too user hostile to ignore. It won't be a non-starter here.
>I want my non-tech family members/friends to install Firefox not because I come over at Christmas, but because they want to. Because it's a browser that "just works." We can't have this if Firefox stays in the pre-ai era.
If "it just works" is all my non-tech family needs, I'm not really gonna intervene and evangelize for Mozilla. I don't work for them (if you do, that's fair). Most browsers "just work" so mission accomplished. These are parents who were fine paying Hulu $15/month to still see ads, so we simply have different views. I'm sure they felt the same way about my pots falling apart and insisting "well, they still work".
Meanwhile, my professional and personal career revolves around the internet, and I don't want to be fighting my screwdriver because it wants to pretend to be a drill. At some point I will throw the drill out and buy a screwdriver that screws.
>It’s just going to become an expectation that AI is in the browser.
Why? Is there evidence to back this up? Are there massive customer write in campaigns trying to convince browser companies to push more AI?
>I know a lot of people on Hacker News are hostile to AI and like to imagine everybody hates it, but I personally find it very helpful.
I love it. I love going to the AI place and knowingly consulting the AI for tasks I want the AI to perform. That relationship is healthy and responsible. It doesnt need to be in everything else. Its like those old jokes about how inventions are just <existing invention> + <digital clock>.
I dont need AI on the desktop, in microsoft office, replying to me on facebook, responding to my google searches AND doing shit in my browser. One of these would be too much, because I can just access the AI I want to speak to whenever I want it. Any 2 of these is such substantial overkill. Why do we have all of them? Justify it. Is there a user story where a user was trying to complete a task but lacked 97% accurate information from 5 different sources to complete the task?
Options are nice. They were (and poteitally will) not making it optional and if people like me weren't "hostile to Ai" they wouldn't have had to back-track with this.
I’m fine with an extension personally. And I don’t use Firefox to begin with, so I don’t particularly care what they do.
I just think the average browser user in 5-10 years will expect the AI features. And plenty of others won’t want to use those features, and that’s fine.
Considering pirating the whole internet and boiling the planet is required to summarize a single page in a mediocre manner, it’s understandable that people who knows how the sausages are made are against it.
Yeah, most of the browsers "with AI" are not existing because they're so incredibly useful. They're there because it's a hype, because their parent companies have invested billions and they need to show their shareholders it's actually being used by people. So they ram it in our faces, left right and center. They're not doing this to help us, they're helping themselves.
Mozilla doesn't need to play that game because they're not selling any AI.
Do you ever need a website you're visiting translated?
Have you ever not understood a term or phrase on a website and had to go to wikipedia/urbandictionary/google to explain it?
Have you ever wanted to do a 'fuzzy search' of a 300 page document (where you don't know the exact string of text to ctrl-f, but want to see where they talk about a particular topic)?
>Do you ever need a website you're visiting translated?
Yes, I have an extension for that.
>Have you ever not understood a term or phrase on a website and had to go to wikipedia/urbandictionary/google to explain it?
I have an extension that double clicks and brings up a quick definition. If I need more, I will go to the dictionary.
>Have you ever wanted to do a 'fuzzy search' of a 300 page document (where you don't know the exact string of text to ctrl-f, but want to see where they talk about a particular topic)?
No, not really. Ctrl + F search for a dozen substrings, use table of contents if available, and I can narrow it down. This takes a few minutes.
And if I did, I'd find an extension. You see the pattern here? We solved this issue decades ago.
> Do you ever need a website you're visiting translated?
Yes. Firefox and Chrome already offer this.
> Have you ever not understood a term or phrase on a website and had to go to wikipedia/urbandictionary/google to explain it?
Yeah. And?
> Have you ever wanted to do a 'fuzzy search' of a 300 page document (where you don't know the exact string of text to ctrl-f, but want to see where they talk about a particular topic)?
No because I ctrl-f for that topic/key words and find the text.
Even if they didn't realize it, I don't believe they were arguing that firefox and chrome didn't/wouldn't use machine learning already, rather that they just thought the use cases you provided don't really sell the cost of having a full LLM integrated into every browser install.
"AI" as it's used nowadays is unfortunately usually a shorthand for LLM. When firefox talks about "AI features", I think most people interpret that as "LLM integration", not the page-translation feature that's been around for ages.
LLMs are sequence-to-sequence like language translation models, were invented for the purpose of language models, and if you were making a translator today it would be structured like an LLM but might be small and specialized.
For practical purposes though I like being able to have a conversation with a language translator: if I was corresponding with somebody in German, French, Spanish, related European languages or Japanese I would expect to say:
I'm replying to ... and want to say ... in a way that is compatible in tone
and then get something that I can understand enough to say
I didn't expect to see ... what does that mean?
And also run a reverse translation against a different model, see that it makes sense, etc. Or if I am reading a light novel I might be very interested in
When the story says ... how is that written in Japanese?
Okay, what's the problem? The UX of Google Translate is fine
- it will pop up when it senses a webpage in a language you don't speak.
- it will ask if you want to translate it. You have options to always translate this language or to never do it.
- it will respect your choice and no pop up every-time insisting "no please try it this time". Or worse, decide by default to translate anywyay behind my back.
- There are settings to also enable/disable this that will not arbitrarily reset whenever the app updates.
There are certainly environmental issues to address, but I've accepted that this US administration is not going to address this in any meaningful way. Attacking individuals will not solve this issue so I'm not doing this. So for now, my main mantra is "don't bother me". the UX of much AI can't even clear that.
Hacker News was borderline insufferable during the 2022/23 NFT craze when all the startups, investments, and headlines were going into whatever new disruption NFTs/blockchain were allegedly going to cause.
At least with AI I do get some value out of asking Gemini questions. But I hardly need or want my web browser to be a chatbot interface.
Gambling has also proven its staying power. A low trust society and some early coin explosions will do that. I don't think its staying power is here in a healthy way, personally.
Thats not a reason for crypto being useless, anything can bribe corrupt governments to pour tax money into it.
Crypto has shown people are willing to use it as a currency for investment and day to day transactions. Its held value for a significant amount of time. The tech is evolving still and people see a lot of value in having a currency that operates outside of Governments in a decentralized way even if some people will misuse that freedom.
I'd love to live in your world for a bit... I can't imagine any future where having AI in your browser is a net positive for any user. It sounds like an absolute dystopian privacy and security nightmare.
Imagine you have an AI button. When you click it, the locally running LLM gets a copy of the web site in the context window, and you get to ask it a prompt, e.g. "summarize this".
Imagine the browser asks you at some point, whether you want to hear about new features. The buttons offered to you are "FUCK OFF AND NEVER, EVER BOTHER ME AGAIN", "Please show me a summary once a month", "Show timely, non-modal notifications at appropriate times".
Imagine you choose the second option, and at some point, it offers you a feature described as follows: "On search engine result pages and social media sites, use a local LLM to identify headlines, classify them as clickbait-or-not, and for clickbait headlines, automatically fetch the article in an incognito session, and add a small overlay with a non-clickbait version of the title". Would you enable it?
Do we have to re-tread 3 years of big tech overreach, scams, user hostility in nearly every common program , questionable utility that is backed by hype more than results, and way its hoisting up the US economy's otherwise stagnant/weakening GDP?
I don't really have much new to add here. I've hated this "launch in alpha" mentality for nearly a decade. Calling 2022 "alpha" is already a huge stretch.
>When you click it, the locally running LLM gets a copy of the web site in the context window, and you get to ask it a prompt, e.g. "summarize this".
Why is this valuable? I spent my entire childhood reading, and my college years being able to research and navigate technical documents. I don't value auto-summarizations. Proper writing should be able to do this in its opening paragraphs.
>Imagine the browser asks you at some point, whether you want to hear about new features. The buttons offered to you are "FUCK OFF AND NEVER, EVER BOTHER ME AGAIN", "Please show me a summary once a month", "Show timely, non-modal notifications at appropriate times"
Yes, this is my "good enough" compromise that most applications are failing to perform. Let's hope for the best.
>Imagine you choose the second option, and at some point, it offers you a feature described as follows: "On search engine result pages and social media sites, use a local LLM to identify headlines, classify them as clickbait-or-not, and for clickbait headlines, automatically fetch the article in an incognito session, and add a small overlay with a non-clickbait version of the title". Would you enable it?
No, probably not. I don't trust the powers behind such tools to be able to identify what is "clickbait" for me. Grok shows that these are not impartial tools, and news is the last thing I want to outsource sentiment too without a lot of built trust.
> Imagine you have an AI button. When you click it, the locally running LLM
sure, you can imagine Firefox integrating a locally-running LLM if you want.
but meanwhile, in the real world [0]:
> In the next three years, that means investing in AI that reflects the Mozilla Manifesto. It means diversifying revenue beyond search.
if they were going to implement your imagination of a local LLM, there's no reason they'd be talking about "revenue" from LLMs.
but with ChatGPT integrating ads, they absolutely can get revenue by directing users there, in the same way they get money for Google for putting Google's ads into Firefox users' eyeballs.
that's ultimately all this is. they're adding more ads to Firefox.
That last one sounds like a lot of churn and resources for little results? You're not really making them sound compelling compared to just blocking click bait sites with a normal extension somehow. And it could also be an extension users install and configure - why a pop up offering it to me, and why built into the browser that directly?
> When you click it, the locally running LLM gets a copy of the web site in the context window, and you get to ask it a prompt, e.g. "summarize this".
I'm also now imagining my GPU whirring into life and the accompanying sound of a jetplane getting ready for takeoff, as my battery suddenly starts draining visibly.
Local LLMs for are a pipe dream, the technology fundamentally requires far too much computation for any true intelligence to ever make sense with current computing technologies.
Over the last few decades I've seen people make the same comment about spell checking, voice recognition, video encoding, 3D rendering, audio effects and many more.
I'm happy to say that LLM usage will only actually become properly integrated into background work flow when we have performant local models.
People are trying to madly monetise cloud LLMs before the inevitable rise of local only LLMs severely diminishes the market.
Also it does mean something. An NPU is completely different from your 5070. Yes the 5070 has specific AI cores but it also has raster cores and other things not present in an NPU.
You dont need to run GPT5.1 to summerize a webpage. Models are small and specialized for different tasks.
That's the point. For things like summarizing a webpage or letting the user ask questions about it, not that much computation is required.
An 8B Ollama model installed on a middle of the road MacBook can do this effortlessly today without whirring. In several years, it will probably be all laptops.
But what you would want to summarize a page. If I'm reading a blog, that means that I want to read it, not just a condensed version that might miss the exact information I need for an insight or create something that was never there.
You can also just skim it. It feels like LLM summarization boils down to an argument to substitute technology for media literacy.
Plus, the latency on current APIs is often on the order of seconds, on top of whatever the page load time is. We know from decades [0] of research that users don't wait seconds.
You don't use it to summarize pages (or at least I don't), but to help understand content within a page while minimizing distractions.
For example: I was browsing a Reddit thread a few hours ago and came upon a comment to the effect of "Bertrand Russell argued for a preemptive nuclear strike on the Soviets at the end of WWII." That seemed to conflict with my prior understanding of Bertrand Russell, to say the least. I figured the poster had confused Russell with von Neumann or Curtis LeMay or somebody, but I didn't want to blow off the comment entirely in case I'd missed something.
So I highlighted the comment, right-clicked, and selected "Explain this." Instead of having to spend several minutes or more going down various Google/Wikipedia rabbit holes in another tab or window, the sidebar immediately popped up with a more nuanced explanation of Russell's actual position (which was very poorly represented by the Reddit comment but not 100% out of line with it), complete with citations, along with further notes on how his views evolved over the next few years.
It goes without saying how useful this feature is when looking over a math-heavy paper. I sure wish it worked in Acrobat Reader. And I hope a bunch of ludds don't browbeat Mozilla into removing the feature or making it harder to use.
And this explanation is very likely to be entirely hallucinated, or worse, subtly wrong in ways that's not obvious if you're not already well versed in the subject. So if you care about the truth even a little bit, you then have to go and recheck everything it has "said".
Why waste time and energy on the lying machine in the first place? Just yesterday I asked "PhD-level intelligence" for a well known quote from a famous person because I wasn't able to find it quickly in wikiquotes.
It fabricated three different quotes in a row, none of them right. One of them was supposedly from a book that doesn't really exist.
So I resorted to a google search and found what I needed in less time it took to fight that thing.
And this explanation is very likely to be entirely hallucinated, or worse, subtly wrong in ways that's not obvious if you're not already well versed in the subject. So if you care about the truth even a little bit, you then have to go and recheck everything it has "said".
It cited its sources, which is certainly more than you've done.
Just yesterday I asked "PhD-level intelligence" for a well known quote from a famous person because I wasn't able to find it quickly in wikiquotes.
In my experience this means that you typed a poorly-formed question into the free instant version of ChatGPT, got an answer worthy of the effort you put into it, and drew a sweeping conclusion that you will now stand by for the next 2-3 years until cognitive dissonance finally catches up with you. But now I'm the one who's making stuff up, I guess.
No, I'm not "fully converted." I reject the notion that you have to join one cult or the other when it comes to this stuff.
I think we've all seen plenty of hallucinated sources, no argument there. Source hallucination wasn't a problem 2-3 years ago simply because LLMs couldn't cite their sources at all. It was a massive problem 1-2 years ago because it happened all the freaking time. It is a much smaller problem today. It still happens too often, especially with the weaker models.
I'm personally pretty annoyed that no local model (at least that I can run on my own hardware) is anywhere near as hallucination-resistant as the major non-free, non-local frontier models.
In my example, no, I didn't bother confirming the Russell sources in detail, other than to check that they (a) existed and (b) weren't completely irrelevant. I had other stuff to do and don't actually care that much. The comment just struck me as weird, and now I'm better informed thanks to Firefox's AI feature. My takeaway wasn't "Russell wanted to nuke the Russians," but rather "Russell's positions on pacifism and aggression were more nuanced than I thought. Remember to look into this further when/if it comes up again." Where's the harm in that?
Can you share what you asked, and what model you were using? I like to collect benchmark questions that show where progress is and is not happening. If your question actually elicited such a crappy response from a leading-edge reasoning model, it sounds like a good one. But if you really did just issue a throwaway prompt to a free/instant model, then trust me, you got a very wrong impression of where the state of the art really is. The free ChatGPT is inexcusably bad. It was still miscounting the r's in "Strawberry" as late as 5.1.
Sure. Let's solve our memory crisis without triggering WW3 with China over Taiwan first, and maybe then we can talk about adding even more expensive silicon to increasingly expensive laptops.
> Imagine you have an AI button. When you click it, the locally running LLM gets a copy of the web site in the context window, and you get to ask it a prompt, e.g. "summarize this".
That pretty much sums up the problem: an "AI" button is about as useful to me as a "do stuff" button, or one of those red "that was easy" buttons they sell at Home Depot. Google translate has offered machine translation for 20+ years that is more or less adequate to understand text written in a language I don't read. Fine, add a button to do that. Mediocre page summaries? That can live in some submenu. "Agentic" things like booking flights for an upcoming trip? I would never trust an "AI" button to do that.
Machine learning can be useful for well-defined, low-consequence tasks. If you think an LLM is a robot butler, you're fundamentally misunderstanding what you're dealing with.
For any mildly useful AI feature, there are hundreds of entirely dangerous ones. Either way I don't want the browser to have any AI features integrated, just like I don't want the OS to have them.
Especially since we know very well that they won't be locally running LLMs, everyone's plan is to siphon your data to their "cloud hybrid AI" to feed into the surveillance models (for ad personalization, and for selling to scammers, law enforcement and anyone else).
I'd prefer to have entirely separate and completely controlled and fire-walled solutions for any useful LLM scenarios.
Most users are entirely ignorant of privacy and security and will make choices without considering it. I don’t say that to excuse it but it’s absolutely the reality.
I'd pay a monthly subscription fee for this. All the service would need to do to get my money is guess which words that already exist on the page I will be interested in and show me those words in black-and-white type (in a face and a size chosen by me, not the owner of the web site) free of any CSS, styling or "innovative" manner of presentation.
Specifically, the AI does not generate text for me to read. All it does is decide which parts of the text that already exists on the page to show me. (It is allowed to interact with the web page to get past any modal windows or gates.)
Of all the AI features added recently, local translations is one that I would be OK with being enabled by default. It's useful, and its value proposition is much less dubious.
I don't like how translation is only unavailable when the browser "thinks" the whole site is in a particular language. What if there's a single sentence that's not? Or if it guesses the site's language incorrectly? No translation for you.
We need more control over the feature. Even just the ability to select text, right click, and have a "Translation" menu would be huge. Looks like there is such a feature, but it doesn't let you pick the language pairs, which is the most basic requirement of translation.
My version of Firefox (146.0 on Debian) has exactly this. If I select a sentence and right-click, I get the menu item "Translate selection to <LANGUAGE>". In the resulting box, I can change the language pair - but the defaults that I have seen were also reasonable.
before Firefox put it in the browser, the kinda finicky extension (which I still have installed) does in fact have this feature. highlight a work and you can translate specific passages.
I had to use it a couple times recently in Firefox on Android, and it's a nice thing to have.
The UX is not polished, and not responsive. No indicator that translation is happening, then the interface disappears for the translation to materialize, with multisecond delays. All understandable if the model is churning my mobile CPU, but it needs a clear visual insicator that something happening
What about voice to text, text to voice, alt text generation for images that dont have them. Search suggestions, auto correct, malicious website detection.
Those are all features using AI and features I consider to be useful
I'm glad to see some mozilla employees standing their base in the comments. That guy trying to make the point that Mozilla was wasting resources chasing trend only for an employee to say it was a few people checking it out while 1000 people continued work on the normal stuff is nice to see.
The non mozilla people in that thread are so petty. Maybe it'd be better to have them go use another browser and stop dragging down firefox's reputation.
Firefox should release a separate build - "base", "core", "classic" - clearly, I am not a marketing person, but idea behind it, that this is only a browser without any extra features added. No "AI", no studies, no account sync. Only bare minimum browser, that allows user to do their internet things and, if they ever desire, will install all extra bells and whistles as extensions. No need to agree to any EULA either (remember, that it was added to Firefox?). And, the best part, all existing users will still keep using the same old Firefox version, no surprises for them. Now, I assume that someone will tell me, that this version already exists and is called ESR :)
That's silly. It's still entirely possible as there are plenty of great extensions that don't require XUL and Firefox, which is still almost entirely XUL, can be hacked on locally to reduce surfaced features all the way down to a window with an addressbar and nothing else by examining that XUL and using userChrome.css to alter it.
I'm pretty sure ESR is a different thing, but yeah, that sounds like a good idea. I think it even should be relatively easy, insofar as that a lot of the non-base functionality is in built-in extensions?
This feels less like an “anti-AI” stance and more like a trust and control issue.
For browsers especially, users have very different threat models and performance expectations, and “always on” AI features blur that line quickly.
An explicit opt-out makes sense, but I wonder if the more important question is whether these features can be implemented in a way that’s truly local and auditable.
If users can’t clearly understand where data goes and what runs on-device, toggles become a necessary safety valve rather than a preference.
I haven't paid close attention, but as far as I can tell, Mozilla has mostly invested in local AI for tasks such as translation, summarization, and organization. As long as that's the case, I don't see any particular safety or privacy risks; if it works without an Internet connection, it's probably OK.
Are you sure? I see a huge spike in CPU when I long-click on a link to see the preview and summary. This is the newest summarization feature, not the older one with the chatbot on the side.
I actually saw the “summarize this page” feature in the right-click menu today and clicked on it out of curiosity. The box that appeared had a “remove AI features” button which I accidentally clicked. Now the feature is completely gone and I don't know how to get it back. (Don't really care much, wasn't planning on using that feature anyway, just giving feedback on my first impression)
Forcing everything into a plug-in is architecturally more complex, and less performant... I'm imagining proxying from native code through JavaScript APIs, then back to native code for LLM operations and context storage. But might lead to creation of some new AI extension APIs.
So now we're debating compile-time feature flags vs run-time, and the overhead of running/maintaining multiple build configs. And picking good names for each... "Firefox Pro with AI" vs "Firefox Lite for Engineers". This isn't what Mozilla needs to be focusing on right now, imo.
Sync is the only feature you listed which is arguably a core feature, in that it makes sense to build into the browser to be able to sync as much of the browser's settings and data as possible for the user. Everything else --- Hello, Pocket, and LLMs --- can and should sink or swim as extensions which the user must seek out and install if they provide sufficient value.
You won't find much relating to Pocket or Hello in the OSS project. I predict a lot of the new AI functionality will stay out too. So not core functionality.
Normal users will be fine if they will see two big squares side by side as an installation step: „with AI“ and „without AI“, where the former will just install and enable the plugin. Explicit choice is better than opt-out, and it’s not going to be something people frequently change their mind about, so another switch can be buried in settings.
We want "normal" users to use Firefox, not to push it to a smaller niche with more force. Even though I don't like or use this "AI thingy", it should be equally easy to use and equally easy to disable.
If Firefox can provide a more anonymized gate to these providers and guarantee that prompts are not used for training, this would be a net win for people who want to use AI but doesn't know better, i.e. the "normal" users.
Hardly. Hundreds of millions of "normies" want a browser that just "gets rid of ads and spam and stuff". If ff can be that go-to browser, they have hundreds of millions of potential users.
Was actually looking for somebody mentioning this bit. Admittedly, one of the few regular Firefox users. Yet, as a regular Firefox user, this much ranting about something that can be turned off with a click, is kind of annoying. The stuff that's been added so far ("Allow AI to read the beginning of the page and generate key points", "Solo AI Website Creator", "Sidebar AI chatbot") is incredibly easy to disable. Been in advanced, beta, dev releases for a while.
Edge has a larger market share (4%-7% depending on who you ask)
Firefox has (2%-6%, similar issue). Firefox mostly scores well among Wikimedia users and tracking. (High as 15% recently) Firefox barely even registers with Mobile users (0.5%-1.5%).
And. They both pale in comparison to Chrome (56%-69%) and Safari (14%-24%) in terms of user base / market share. People can argue and rant about Firefox doing something, yet they're arguing about 2%-6% of the WWW users currently.
Could someone summarize the problem with Firefox's AI features?
At least when I last checked (months ago), none of those features that involve communicating with external servers would work unless you configure them to (i.e. provide credentials to an LLM provider).
> Anything that makes it easy to accidentally send local data elsewhere is a privacy issue.
How is it "easy" if nothing is sent unless you configure the AI?
What I'm asking is: If I do a brand new profile, default configuration, how can any AI related feature send anything that is of privacy concern? If you don't set up an LLM provider, it has nowhere to send to.
I may be wrong, which is why I'm asking in the thread. So far, no one has shown what the problem is.
Mullvad browser doesn't have an option to disable all AI features because it doesn't have any.
(The Mullvad guys took Tor browser for its resistance to fingerprinting and removed the connection the Tor network. You don't need Mullvad VPN to use the browser)
If the responses are sponsored, it seems the value drops dramatically.
I want the AI agent to act more like a fiduciary, an independent 3rd party acting in my best interest. I don't need an AI salesman interjecting itself into my life with compromised incentives.
Us “AI hostile users” are this way partially because we know that our desires do not align with those funding these tools.
OpenAI was already taking steps to integrate ads, amd Grok shows how much we should be trusting AI as some impartial 3rd party. The goal was always about control and profiting off of said control. Pretty much the antithesis of hacker mindsets.
Is there a reason such a thing couldn't present a bunch of neutral options, but with affiliate links that provide revenue back to Mozilla?
(I mean, that could still steer it toward places that have affiliate programs, but if you're running a local AI tool to help you search for these things that seems like something you should reasonably be able to toggle on and off/configure in a system prompt/something.)
What we’ve seen from other companies is exactly what you mention. Unfair ranking and promotion of items with affiliate links or the highest payouts for them. Changing incentives compromise the integrity of the results.
I think Facebook did a study that making options opt-in means only a tiny tiny percentage of users will ever activate them. People never look around in settings.
I suppose if - after you click away the popup that says "Thank you for loving Firefox"(1) - a popup shows that says "Hey, hey, look at me, look we have this new feature, it'll blow you away. Do you want to enable it?" would be obnoxious but satisfies the idea of "opt-in".
If it's off be default it will stay off unless the user is somehow made to try it. Default opt-in is one option to do that, the simplest one, but it's not the only one. The rest require explaining clearly what the user will get out of enabling it ... and that often is difficult to do succinctly, or convincingly. So shovelling it down everyone's throat it is.
> making options opt-in means only a tiny tiny percentage of users will ever activate them
Why exactly should I, a user, care about this? I don't want useless crap shoved in my face, period. I don't care that people might not turn on someone's pet feature if they don't enable it by default.
I still don't want to use an "AI browser". I don't want to use a browser where all or most development effort goes into "AI features" that I need to disable. I want a browser where the development effort goes into making it better at browsing the web.
Is there a fork of firefox where you have all the same core functionality and support for extensions but with all the mozilla services (pocket, safe browsing, forced crap on the new tab page, any AI service, etc...) removed?
Why is that? I remember seeing that Zen strips out the Firefox telemetry.
Librewolf is nice but breaks a lot of stuff, sites that use webrtc or canvas related things, lots of banking sites refuse to load, and some other issues I can't remember.
I think it's a good idea to mitm yourself and look at what exactly your browser is up to. We should be careful about just accepting and repeating hearsay when such claims are pretty easy to verify yourself.
This would be useful for many people who want to avoid AI features being forced on them by every piece of software imaginable. Hopefully, a centralized kill switch like this will also make it easy for Firefox forks such as Zen and Floorp to let users enable AI features if they want to without changing about:flags.
I'm not sure why people still believe this, especially developers. We're starting to literally just build AI into everything... you're not even going to know what's AI and what's not. The phase of labeling everything with cute little sparkles is starting to end and AI is going to be used similarly to external libraries.
If you don't like AI you need to seek legislation and pressure your local politicians. It's the only way to stop it.
>If you don't like AI you need to seek legislation and pressure your local politicians. It's the only way to stop it.
Yup. So we're screwed for up to 3 years. Maybe much less depending on nature or the result of certain hot topic issues.
That might be a minor factor why we seem to be speedrunning everything in 2025. Get ahead of the crash, of the legislation, of the wool coming off the common citizen's eyes.
Wait, what? Vivaldi is open source? Now I am confused and really not sure what was the reason I ignored it for so long. Was there something iffy with Linux desktop integration?
Quite surprised at Vivaldi. Considered that as Opera spiritual successor including any possible feature, will've been one of the first browsers adding AI.
That’s what turned me off of Chrome. It will 100% have me migrate if it happens again. I’m not freely giving my attention away for even more people to shove crap in my face.
I can't imagine any reasonable use case for having AI tightly integrated into a browser (or an operating system, for what it's worth). Why not make a browser plugin or a web page or an app? I don't get it.
Local translation of websites so you don't have to tell Google about all the sites you want to read that are not in your language. Firefox's address bar that learns what you type most often and moves those items higher in the autocomplete list. There are plenty of great cases for AI very tightly integrated in the browser. That you haven't thought very hard about it or even bothered to see what AI Firefox has already had for ages (Awesomebar was about 15 years ago) is precisely why you don't "get it."
Is it just as easy to make an extension that runs a local AI translation model? Translation would benefit from having a community continuously updating and tuning local models for languages.
If it was an extension it would be nice if people could fork it with other models. Just like their AI Tab Grouping feature would be much better forked with a deterministic non-AI grouping system.
You and a few others. Now it's well over 100 million who have it. We didn't make the back button an extension even though we could have. There's good reasons for making some features default and high on that list is "most people would use it and find it valuable for everyday browsing" which well covers web page translation.
I see it as 100 million who didn't care enough to find a translation extension. Which is fine. Most people stay on the same 20 sites, after all (and some of those even have built in translation tools).
>We didn't make the back button an extension even though we could have.
The back button isn't even a KB of extra data and and I'd put navigation as the primary job of a web browser.
I'm not against a built in translator, but it's a strange comparison to a back button.
On a slight tangent, I think there's an under talked about boon yo machine translation: it's widely agreedbti be a comoromise and not a source of truth. That wariness has been missing as of late.
You can choose not to use bookmarks, remove the bar reserved for it, and it’s taking up kilobytes in the background. Can’t say the same about shoving an LLM in a browser.
But sure, I’m much closer to the extreme of “make bookmarks a plug-in” than “make everything a default”.
i don't even want the code present on my machine, only being held back by a checkbox that may or may not be correctly respected. this is what extensions we invented for.
its funny how multi-account containers is a such a killer feature of firefox (that none of the other browsers are able to implement, as far as i remember) but its kept as an extension and they never seem too bothered about promoting it either
> We've been calling it the AI kill switch internally. I'm sure it'll ship with a less murderous name, but that's how seriously and absolutely we're taking this.
Honestly, is anybody reading what's getting written anymore? If it gets taken seriously it would ship with an enable-AI button, not the other way round.
I love threads about Mozilla. New CEO says he's not going to remove adblockers, people suspect him for planning to remove adblockers. Mozilla says they'll add a killswitch for all AI features (so that the tiny but vocal anti-AI minority will be happy), and people blame them for not having it as an enable-switch.
Whatever they do, they simply cannot win. I'm personally starting to suspect the main issue with Mozilla is its users.
Mozilla has a recurring problem with being unable to provide the simple, obvious right answer.
When they re-wrote Firefox for Android, they were unable to give the simple, obvious answer to the effect of "yes, we understand extensions are a core feature of our browser and we plan to fully support extensions on Fenix and won't consider it done until we do". Instead, they talked about whitelisting a handful of extensions, and took three years from shipping Fenix as stable before they had a broad open extension ecosystem up and running again.
Earlier this year Mozilla couldn't provide the simple, obvious response of "we will never sell your personal information". Instead, they tried to make excuses about not agreeing with California's definition of "selling personal information".
A few days ago, we find out that their new CEO can't clearly and emphatically say "we would never take money to break ad blockers, because that goes against everything we stand for".
Now, they seemingly can't even realize that having a "kill switch" calls into doubt whether they actually know what "opt-in" means.
Even when they're trying to do the right thing, they're strangely afraid to commit to doing the right thing when it comes to specifics. They won't say "never" even when it should be easy.
> Even when they're trying to do the right thing, they're strangely afraid to commit to doing the right thing when it comes to specifics. They won't say "never" even when it should be easy.
Honestly, and it's hard for me to say this: I've come around. I still use and love Firefox, but emotionally I'm detaching from it, because fundamentally: all the other FOSS I use is an actual, factual, open source project. And Firefox the browser is FOSS, but Firefox the corporation isn't, and the problem is the corporation seems to be in charge, not the project, which means all their priorities are to make money and drive donations, not what's best for the user necessarily. It means all their communications are written in Corporatese, with vague waffling about everything they're asked and non-committal statements because the next quarter might demand they about-face, as they've done numerous times.
I love the browser. I increasingly find myself disillusioned with the business entity that rides on it's back, and frankly wish it would sod off. Take the money they're getting, and give it to the people actually building the product. Defaulting AI features to off costs Firefox absolutely nothing and they still won't do it, because of this irrational FOMO that has gripped the entirety of the executive class in charge of seemingly every business on earth. It's pathetic, and it lacks vision.
I can put up with a lot of friction and cruft as long as the foundations are solid amd I feel a product is moving in the right direction. I moved off chrome when it became crystal clear that Chrome was not even pretending to compete on User experience anymore, even in it is still the best browser in some regards.
I hate that I feel to be having déjà vu here. My needs are simple and I’m surrounded by software wanting to inflate itself more and more. And being hostile about it, to boot.
> simple, obvious answer to the effect of "yes, we understand extensions are a core feature of our browser and we plan to fully support extensions on Fenix and won't consider it done until we do". Instead, they talked about whitelisting a handful of extensions, and took three years from shipping Fenix as stable before they had a broad open extension ecosystem up and running again.
That answer is not as obvious to me as you claim it is. I don't use any browser extensions except 1password, which I would have no reason to use on a phone (at least assuming Android has builtin password manager functionality like iOS does).
I think you overestimate what fraction of people care about extensions.
I use Firefox on Android perhaps entirely because it supports uBlock Origin and my other extensions.
I would guess that of people that would ever go out of their way to use a non-Chrome browser on Android, the fraction who care about extensions is pretty significant.
On a different tack, I feel like I went out of my way to use Firefox (and Firefox Focus) on iOS and was thankful they had them during a time where everything had to use the safari renderer. IIRC Firefox Focus even had an ad-block extension that worked on safari
I am speaking from only my personal experience, but I would say the vast majority of Firefox users are using Firefox to avoid Chrome and Chrome likes. That being said I would say they are then more likely and inclined to also utilize extensions.
I think the correlation of people using extensions and people disabling telemetry is pretty high. I do both myself. Even a decent password manager requires one (though not on android because it has an API for that). On android I do use others obviously.
Always appreciate people citing real data! I honestly would not have been able to guess one way or the other but unfortunately most comments are kind of hip firing in random directions that are impossible to keep track of, so it helps to keep these discussions grounded.
I you can’t take the time to install a new tool. You don’t need it. And I think that’s a great mindset to have with not just software, but when approaching life.
I keep lean and only look for an extension or install amd app when it’s clear what problem I have and want to solve.
> New CEO says he's not going to remove adblockers, people suspect him for planning to remove adblockers.
New CEO says they've run the numbers and decided to not kill adblockers, leading to people asking why exactly they were running those numbers (if it was an actual ideological commitment, the numbers wouldn't matter).
> Mozilla says they'll add a killswitch for all AI features (so that the tiny but vocal anti-AI minority will be happy), and people blame them for not having it as an enable-switch.
Yes, opt-in vs opt-out is kinda an important distinction. And you're assuming that opposition is a "tiny but vocal", which - especially among people bothering to use firefox - seems unfounded. Which brings use neatly to,
> Whatever they do, they simply cannot win. I'm personally starting to suspect the main issue with Mozilla is its users.
Well, yes. If you build a userbase out of power users and folks who care about privacy and control... then you have a userbase of power users and folks who care about privacy and control. If Mozilla said up front that they were only interested in money and don't care about users, then fair enough, but don't go trumpeting how you fight for the user and then act surprised when the user holds you to that.
The creator of VLC has publicly noted dollar amounts they could raise if they either sold or compromised VLC, but it came and went without controversy. OBS Studio, 7-Zip, Notepad++, and Nextcloud have all published offers they've received and declined, or quoted per-install payment figures. In fact, it's practically a rite of passage for open source projects to talk about the value of their work in terms of what they could monetize but choose not to.
Communicating about what you're knowingly rejecting is a point of pride, not a confession. But since there's no such thing as an OBS, or Nextcloud, or VLC Derangement syndrome, nobody grabs the pitchforks in those cases.
There is a difference between "FYI, we're rejecting a ton of money for us, that's how serious we are about not selling out" and "We ran the numbers, and on balance, taking these 30% more money doesn't seem like the right thing to do because it would be against our stated mission statement".
The second one doesn't sound like real conviction.
Thank you for directly addressing my point! I disagree but I respect your prioritization of of substance. I agree that notionally there's a difference but (1) they never said they "ran the numbers", (2) there are other good reasons for having access to that data that don't involve selling out, and (3) this all hinges on squinting and interpreting and projecting, and splitting the difference on linguistic interpretation is about as weak as circumstantial evidence can possibly get.
Real argument: "they said they're doing "privacy preserving" ads, look at this post where they announce it". Real argument "they say they're putting AI in the browser, I don't like that. Here's the statement!" Real argument: " they purchased Anonym and are dabbling in adtech, here's the news article announcing the acquisition!"
Not real argument: "They said they didn't want to take money to kill ad blockers but if you squint maybe it kinda implies they considered it, at least if you don't consider other reasons they might be aware of that figure." At best it's like 0.001% circumstantial evidence that has to be reconciled with their history of opposing the Manifest changes. If reading tea leaves matters so much, then certainly their more explicit statements need to matter too.
The thing that's unfortunate here is I would like to think this goes without saying, but ordinary standards of charitable interpretation are so far in the rear view mirror that I don't know that people comfortable making these accusations would even recognize charitable interpretation as a shared value. Not in the sense of bending over backwards to apologize or make excuses, but in the ordinary Daniel Dennett sense of a built-in best practice to minimize one's own biases.
> At best it's like 0.001% circumstantial evidence that has to be reconciled with their history of opposing the Manifest changes. If reading tea leaves matters so much, then certainly their more explicit statements need to matter too.
Their history is less relevant now because it's a fresh CEO that came up with this statement on his first day. New leaders often means a change in direction and this is a worrying sign. Also the number he quoted is far too explicit. Doing something like that would instantly move Firefox to be the absolute worst browser possible considering even advertising- and tracking-loaded crap like Chrome and Edge don't go that far.
Clearly they have been running the numbers and clearly he feels fine talking about it which is a pretty strong departure of previous values.
Of course I'd not continue using Firefox in this case, and I'm sure it would get widely forked. I found it pretty shocking.
The other examples don't reassure me one bit because they're not the same teams and in many cases they were simply external pushes like offers that were rejected. Here it's a different team that already has been changing direction for the worse recently (e.g. PPA, purchasing Anonym), and came up with this without external pressure. There's also plenty of situations where FOSS projects did go full evil.
Anyway I don't really have any better options than firefox and I'm sure that it would get heavily forked if they started siding with the advertisers, but it is worrying to me especially coming from a new leader on his very first day. Not only because it's about ads. Just because it removes user freedom of choice completely if they were to enforce this.
> The creator of VLC has publicly noted dollar amounts they could raise if they either sold or compromised VLC, but it came and went without controversy. OBS Studio, 7-Zip, Notepad++, and Nextcloud have all published offers they've received and declined, or quoted per-install payment figures. In fact, it's practically a rite of passage for open source projects to talk about the value of their work in terms of what they could monetize but choose not to.
In all of those examples, the devs note that people have reached out to them, unprompted, to try and get them to sell out. That's materially different from a company proactively looking into the payoffs of selling out. The only question is whether the latter is what's happening; I'm having trouble tracking down the actual thing that was said (I think in an interview?).
Please stop calling people deranged for expecting Mozilla to do the right thing without dissembling. Having your previous such comment flagged and killed should have been sufficient reminder to you that you're behaving inappropriately for this forum.
Take a look at Graham's hiearchy and see if you can move up the ladder from tone policing. Were any of my examples: VLC, 7-Zip, Nextcloud incorrect? Let me know and I'll thank you your good faith effort to be responsive to substance.
> Well, yes. If you build a userbase out of power users and folks who care about privacy and control...
Is that their core user base, or just the vocal user base online? Only 5-10% of their user base have UBO installed (FF has almost 200 million users, extension store reports ~10 million UBO installs).
Firefox isn't LibreWolf, it's user base are just average people, not much different than that of Chrome, Safari, or Edge.
I don't know how to rigorously verify who their actual users are on the ground, but it seems like that's at least nominally their target; https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/ says,
> Firefox: Get the gold standard for browsing with speed, privacy and control.
I hadn't actually seen that when I wrote "power users and folks who care about privacy and control", but that's even mostly the same words, let alone intent.
But they've never done this. There is a very vocal group of Firefox power users but the browser has always targeted a general audience, marginalization by Chrome over the years not withstanding.
If you have any ambition to regain some of that market share listening to the average vocal Hackernews or Reddit commenter, who is not the median user, even just among the current ~150 million users is not a good idea.
I am fine with it being a disable-button, as long it's persistent once set.
What I honestly fear is that while AI-features are disabled, popups inviting me to enable them again. That, or them auto-enabling them on every update like sometimes has happened with `browser.ml.enable` flag on `about:config`.
> New CEO says he's not going to remove adblockers, people suspect him for planning to remove adblockers
It's because he has obviously been thinking about it. That $150M number didn't just come out of nowhere. Someone at Mozilla modelled this. The resulting analysis made it into the CEO's mind so far he even mentioned it without being asked.
This is something that's unthinkable to most of the Mozilla users. That's why it's so shocking.
It's like your son making dinner conversation like "hey I was thinking, if I would sell drugs at school I'd make at least 500$ a week! But don't worry I'm not going to do that!".
Yep no doubt FF users cut from a slightly different cloth than those who choose GAMS browsers.
But as an old-school Firefox user, with a slieu of mobile extensions installed and a healthy cynicism about our swan dive into the dark sea of AI ... I have no problem at all with the statements from Mozilla. Outsiders can argue all day about intent, it's the actions that count.
I am happy with the situation. Firefox still allows me to customize my userChrome, remove features I don't like and it even has vertical tabs. It supports uBlock origin, runs great in Android. It's a really good browser. I don't think there's a problem with complaining; What I find unfair is the reaction when Mozilla finally does the right thing.
It’s easy to bash Mozilla because it is failing. Their usage share is a statistical error, and most of it comes from being shipped with Ubuntu. Firefox badly needs a value proposition beyond not being Chromium-based.
I agree, but there's nothing more frustrating than another niche user group imagining that the reason for this failure is Mozilla lacking to address their obscure requests, while Mozilla's real goal is to create a browser for everyone. The truth is that this goal is borderline impossible, and all these double standards (can't count the times I've heard "I'm tired of Firefox, moving to Chrome!") surely aren't helping.
The anti-AI people think they are in the majority. They could be, but I suspect that's not the case. I would be surprised if many in the anti-AI crowd could even point to the specific features of the devices and software they use daily that fall under the "AI" umbrella. Meanwhile, regular people are increasingly turning to chatbots instead of search engines. It seems clear we are at peak hype, but this stuff is here to stay.
Mozilla has lost the trust of its users by making decisions that their userbase doesn't approve of repeatedly, and then partially walking them back after the backlash.
That's not the fault of their users, at least not directly. If you want to argue that Firefox users are stifling innovation or trying to steer the product in a direction that would threaten the future viability of Firefox/Mozilla, I would be open to hearing that argument out even though I don't think that's the issue.
Mozilla is the equivalent of a petrostate in the tech sector. They have a bunch of revenue coming in that they didn't really earn, and they have no idea what to do with it to improve their current condition. To me, that's the core issue.
When you have a position in the project called "CEO" and that person has the ability to hand down edicts of what he or she sees the project as being, that's when you get into trouble, especially in free software. We've seen this way of developing software co-opted by major companies who have turned otherwise good projects - Chromium and AOSP immediately come to mind - into vendor lock-in and spyware by some suit who has been told he needs to create value.
The thing they can do to win is to start acting like they maintain a free/libre open-source software project. It should be completely fine for Mozilla to make a grand total of $0.00 off of Firefox.
Think of Linux (specifically the kernel) or Python. Sure there's a person whose opinion holds more weight than everyone else's (at least for the kernel), but they typically focus on delivering general guidance to a group of people who are free to create features on their own and present those to leadership. If it's quality and fits what the general purpose of the project is, it gets merged into the trunk, and released with everything else.
That needs to be how Mozilla handles Firefox at this point. If some working group of contributors wants to start an implementation of GenAI in Firefox, let them do so and let the community hash it out. If the community doesn't feel the need to create it, well, then Firefox won't have it... and that's fine.
So many of these free software projects try to do too much and change what the core output of the project is in the process, and they lose sight of what the project is.
>Whatever they do, they simply cannot win. I'm personally starting to suspect the main issue with Mozilla is its users.
A lot of people remember the Mozilla of old, and are just completely depressed at the state of where it has ended up over the last 10 years. They were once a non-profit founded to promote the web and put users first. Now it's just this weird zombie company monetizing the work and good will of a prior generation of engineers that cared about that mission.
This seems like a cultural mismatch more than anything. Mozilla makes software that human people use and human people use normal language rather than avoiding the non-profitable aggravation associated with emotive language that a company employee might be used to.
Look at the point that op made instead of the tone: the AI feature should be opt-in not opt-out.
That's a good point. Let's talk about that. It seems like it's a simple thing to do to show good faith that this won't be a normal corporate AI push.
Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I think you're right, and I think the reason for it is because Google has historically had an extremely effective astroturf marketing team for Chrome
Citation for what really? That the anti-AI movement is a minority? Just ask around you "have you used AI today?" and I'm pretty sure you'll see what I mean. I don't have a horse in this game and I'm not an AI fan, but the numbers speak for themselves so much that the mere question is odd.
The anti-AI ‘movement’ is a minority like all partisans are a minority. You shouldn’t be comparing them to passive consumers but to enthusiasts who actively demand ‘AI’ in their browser/Paint/Notepad.
We don't really have reasonable PM's though. Or rather, they are being paid to be unreasonable. They are ignoring everyone because the CEO 5 levels uo wants it.
And then others wonder why customers are frustrated.
Literally every other browser and most tech companies are shoving AI down users throats. Firefox isn't missing the boat by neglecting AI, they're missing it by being an alternative which reminds us how nice things can be without it.
The past 15 years has been a slow decline while they were trying to prove some relevancy outside of their core product. With mobile browsers being locked down a decline was going to happen anyways but if they stuck to their guns at least they wouldn't have wasted a bunch of money and maintained more of their base.
Who knows, their position sucks, but they're not going to win anyone by being the worst AI focused browser which happens to have an off switch.
Also as one of the major players, Vivaldi already made a stand against AI and forcefully including (agentic) AI in the web browser: https://vivaldi.com/blog/keep-exploring/. It's a Chromium based browser with a lot of nice features and deep customization options: https://vivaldi.com/
No, it wouldn't. Because the average user might actually want the features, and if you default to "no" without asking people even once, the users who want it won't find it.
That's why it should ask - once. And offer a "FUCK OFF NEVER ASK ME AGAIN" button rather than "Ask me again later".
> If it gets taken seriously it would ship with an enable-AI button, not the other way round.
Like the one described in the subsequent toot?
> All AI features will also be opt-in. I think there are some grey areas in what 'opt-in' means to different people (e.g. is a new toolbar button opt-in?)...
I was about to use a quote to show you that "no, it's not like what is described in the thread", but you included the salient bit in the second quote, yourself.
It's not a gray area, and "opt-in" isn't something to be weasled-worded around. If the browser has the capability, I don't want it. I want to be able to add it with a plugin, and that's it. Plugins should have full control to whatever is necessary (same as adblock stuff; plenty of security but enough "user beware" to allow truly useful utilities). And AI features should all be plugins. Separate ones, if I had my way, but bundles if that makes more sense. I do not and will not need AI to browse. It's an enhancement. The core product (or at least ONE OF the products offered) should allow me to do without the enhancement. And opt in if I want to. There's nothing gray there, and I'm so fucking sick of mozilla trying to pull this "we disagree with common terminology" horseshit.
What about it? If it's output is generated by the manipulation of tensors and weights, it doesn't belong in my browser. It's not there to because I need to browse, it's there because I want to read content that is not in a language that the content provider has supported for me. I could feed those network responses right into a separate, non-browser app and have it translate stuff for me, if I wanted. Why should I be required to download and ignore your translation feature, when I could just as easily not have it included in the first place?
And, if I'm being honest, "translation" is the only feature I would even consider splitting the builds for. At least in that feature I can see why a "default" version of the browser might benefit more people than not by including it. But that doesn't mean that a "clean" version shouldn't be provided. Build the core app, and then include as many plugins as you think "average users" will benefit from in the "default" version. I don't mind being the minority, I just don't think it's inappropriate to ask for only what I need instead of "all the bullshit you want to force me to have".
> Why should I be required to download and ignore your translation feature, when I could just as easily not have it included in the first place?
This seems like special pleading. The browser (and any software package) is full of features that some people use and others don't. Just off the top of my head, these include: the password manager, PDF viewer, dev tools, and the extensions store. Each new SKU that the vendor has to provide is additional effort to build and test, and the result is that it's more expensive to produce the product. Moreover, it makes it harder for users to discover new features what they might want (oh, you wanted view source, you needed Firefox developer edition).
On the specific case of translation, I don't really see much of a distinction between "I need to browse" and "I want to read content that is not in a language that the content provider has supported for me". In both cases, I want to get the content on the site and I'd like the browser to help me do it.
> I don't mind being the minority, I just don't think it's inappropriate to ask for only what I need instead of "all the bullshit you want to force me to have".
And you can have that by building it yourself. It's open source software. What you're really asking for is for Mozilla to build a version of the software that has only the features you personally want.
lol. I didn't ask for SKUs, I asked for plugins. I wouldn't mind the dev tools, and PDF viewer being plugins too. Again, include those plugins in the default download, just let me have a download that doesn't include them. Modularity to the bone, packaging for the masses. It really is that easy.
But, sure, I need to go build it myself because I had the gall to ask "can't I just have the parts I need?"
> lol. I didn't ask for SKUs, I asked for plugins. I wouldn't mind the dev tools, and PDF viewer being plugins too. Again, include those plugins in the default download, just let me have a download that doesn't include them. Modularity to the bone, packaging for the masses.
This is in fact you asking for two SKUs, one with all the plugins (what you call the "default download") and one without ("let me have a download that doesn't include them.")
As for "really is that easy", as usual, it's easy in some cases and not others. To the extent to which things are already modular and developed separately, then yes, it probably is easy. To the extent that things are not currently modular, then it's separate engineering effort to make them so. In some cases that effort might be small (e.g., the new module is all in HTML/JS) and in some cases that effort might be large (e.g., there is extensive C/C++ code that needs to interface with the browser core). I don't know how much about Firefox's AI features to know which category they fall into. But it's almost certainly not zero effort in any case.
The difference between this and "will have an option to enable AI features" shows what the development resources will be focused on. I mean, f** JPEG XL support; we have a bigger investment fish to fry
I don't understand why it's so difficult (impossible?) with Firefox to use your own private AI server (that's not running on localhost). With Brave it's pretty easy.
This is exactly the kind of boring, unsexy feature that actually builds trust. It’s the opposite of the usual “surprise, here’s an AI sidebar you didn’t ask for and can’t fully disable” pattern. If they want people to try this stuff, the path is pretty simple: ship a browser that treats AI like any other power feature. Off by default, clearly explained, reversible, and preferably shippable as an extension. You can always market your way into more usage; you can’t market your way back into credibility once you blow it.
It is well-known as a result of the expert reports in US v Google that generally software users do not change defaults
Whereas providing an option or a setting that the user must locate and change doesn't really mean much. Few users will ever see it let alone decide to change it
For example, why pay 22 billion to be "the default" if users can just change the default setting
Mozilla is certainly paddling upstream. Of all of the AI-integrated apps and sites that I'm subjected to, I can think of exactly two where it wasn't obnoxious and a pain in the neck to disable.
Kagi. Zed. That's it, that's the list.
Apple's Preview is my favourite. It uses AI to allow you to copy text from images. And that's it.
> Kagi
I've been toying with that for ages on and off. Finally now a paid up user due to the fact that their guesswork engine (or makey-upy machine, or your preferred name) can be easily turned off, and stays off until requested otherwise.
My problem here is this; products are designed with a vision. If you are designing with 2-3 visions it won’t be that good, if you design with one vision (AI) then non-AI version of the product will be an after thought. This tells me non-AI version of it will suffer (IMHO)
> if you design with one vision (AI) then non-AI version of the product will be an after thought
That’s like saying if a car manufacturer adds a "Sport Mode", the steering wheel and brakes suddenly become an afterthought.
Being AI-available means we'll welcome more Firefox users who would otherwise choose a different browser. Being AI-optional means we won't alienate the anti-AI crowd. Why not embrace both?
I don't agree. I think opinionated design products are much worse in general.
It's really great when your opinions are aligned with those of the designer. If they're not, you're straight out of luck and you're stuck with something that isn't really for you.
This is why I love software that gives as much choice as possible. Like KDE for example. Because I have pretty strong vision myself and I respect my tools to conform to that, not the other way around
> This is exactly the kind of boring, unsexy feature that actually builds trust.
Though not so much trust as an option to enable AI features would build.
The trust is built by not enabling this by default, and by not burying the "kill switch" somewhere in settings that non-power users will never find.
Currently disable switch is right next to AI chat bot settings. It’s pretty on your face.
Worse yet, burying in settings where they give a big disclaimer that they can (and often are) reset when the browser updates.
saying "trying to slow down, I promise" doesn't magically make your blatant advert not spam
edit: the original post ended with words to the tune of "Totally unrelated, but I run [insert newsletter here]... "
Edited and removed.
Why? Why kowtow to people who don't care about your wellbeing or long term success?
> It’s the opposite of the usual “surprise, here’s an AI sidebar you didn’t ask for and can’t fully disable” pattern.
They literally shipped an AI sidebar nobody asked for.
I find it a nice feature.
I'm going to chime in here, I think 1. This is great and Mozilla is listening to it's core fans and 2. I want Firefox to be a competitive browser. Without AI enabled features + agent mode being first class citizens, this will be a non-starter in 2 years.
I want my non-tech family members/friends to install Firefox not because I come over at Christmas, but because they want to. Because it's a browser that "just works." We can't have this if Firefox stays in the pre-ai era.
I know Mozilla doesn't have much good will right now, but hopefully with the exec shakeup, they will right the ship on making FF a great browser. While still staying the best foil to Chrome (both in browser engine, browser chrome, and extension ecosystem).
> Because it's a browser that "just works." We can't have this if Firefox stays in the pre-ai era.
Strongly disagree.
Theres no expectation of AI as a core browsing experience. There isnt even really an expectation of AI as part of an extended browsing experience. We cant even predict reliably what AI's relationship to browsing will be if it is even to exist. Mozilla could reliably wait 24 months and follow if features are actually in demand and being used.
Firefox can absolutely maintain "It just works" by being a good platform with well tested in demand features.
What they are talking about here, are opt out only experiments intruding on the core browsing experience. Thats the opposite of "It Just Works".
>I know Mozilla doesn't have much good will right now, but hopefully with the exec shakeup, they will right the ship on making FF a great browser.
Its already a great browser. It doesnt need a built in opt out AI experience to become great.
>Without AI enabled features + agent mode being first class citizens, this will be a non-starter in 2 years.
I want an application to serve me webpages and manage said webpages. It wasn't a "non-starter" for me 2 years ago when I switched off Chrome who chose to be too user hostile to ignore. It won't be a non-starter here.
>I want my non-tech family members/friends to install Firefox not because I come over at Christmas, but because they want to. Because it's a browser that "just works." We can't have this if Firefox stays in the pre-ai era.
If "it just works" is all my non-tech family needs, I'm not really gonna intervene and evangelize for Mozilla. I don't work for them (if you do, that's fair). Most browsers "just work" so mission accomplished. These are parents who were fine paying Hulu $15/month to still see ads, so we simply have different views. I'm sure they felt the same way about my pots falling apart and insisting "well, they still work".
Meanwhile, my professional and personal career revolves around the internet, and I don't want to be fighting my screwdriver because it wants to pretend to be a drill. At some point I will throw the drill out and buy a screwdriver that screws.
I totally agree. It’s just going to become an expectation that AI is in the browser.
It’s so nice just to be able to ask the browser to summarize the page, or ask questions about a long article.
I know a lot of people on Hacker News are hostile to AI and like to imagine everybody hates it, but I personally find it very helpful.
>It’s just going to become an expectation that AI is in the browser.
Why? Is there evidence to back this up? Are there massive customer write in campaigns trying to convince browser companies to push more AI?
>I know a lot of people on Hacker News are hostile to AI and like to imagine everybody hates it, but I personally find it very helpful.
I love it. I love going to the AI place and knowingly consulting the AI for tasks I want the AI to perform. That relationship is healthy and responsible. It doesnt need to be in everything else. Its like those old jokes about how inventions are just <existing invention> + <digital clock>.
I dont need AI on the desktop, in microsoft office, replying to me on facebook, responding to my google searches AND doing shit in my browser. One of these would be too much, because I can just access the AI I want to speak to whenever I want it. Any 2 of these is such substantial overkill. Why do we have all of them? Justify it. Is there a user story where a user was trying to complete a task but lacked 97% accurate information from 5 different sources to complete the task?
>but I personally find it very helpful.
Options are nice. They were (and poteitally will) not making it optional and if people like me weren't "hostile to Ai" they wouldn't have had to back-track with this.
then you can install an extension.
I’m fine with an extension personally. And I don’t use Firefox to begin with, so I don’t particularly care what they do.
I just think the average browser user in 5-10 years will expect the AI features. And plenty of others won’t want to use those features, and that’s fine.
Considering pirating the whole internet and boiling the planet is required to summarize a single page in a mediocre manner, it’s understandable that people who knows how the sausages are made are against it.
We need some regulation on them for sure. They should be paying for the content they train on and use in their search results.
They’re still very compelling as a user.
> this will be a non-starter in 2 years.
Why though? Seriously.
Yeah, most of the browsers "with AI" are not existing because they're so incredibly useful. They're there because it's a hype, because their parent companies have invested billions and they need to show their shareholders it's actually being used by people. So they ram it in our faces, left right and center. They're not doing this to help us, they're helping themselves.
Mozilla doesn't need to play that game because they're not selling any AI.
Do you ever need a website you're visiting translated?
Have you ever not understood a term or phrase on a website and had to go to wikipedia/urbandictionary/google to explain it?
Have you ever wanted to do a 'fuzzy search' of a 300 page document (where you don't know the exact string of text to ctrl-f, but want to see where they talk about a particular topic)?
>Do you ever need a website you're visiting translated?
Yes, I have an extension for that.
>Have you ever not understood a term or phrase on a website and had to go to wikipedia/urbandictionary/google to explain it?
I have an extension that double clicks and brings up a quick definition. If I need more, I will go to the dictionary.
>Have you ever wanted to do a 'fuzzy search' of a 300 page document (where you don't know the exact string of text to ctrl-f, but want to see where they talk about a particular topic)?
No, not really. Ctrl + F search for a dozen substrings, use table of contents if available, and I can narrow it down. This takes a few minutes.
And if I did, I'd find an extension. You see the pattern here? We solved this issue decades ago.
> Do you ever need a website you're visiting translated?
Yes. Firefox and Chrome already offer this.
> Have you ever not understood a term or phrase on a website and had to go to wikipedia/urbandictionary/google to explain it?
Yeah. And?
> Have you ever wanted to do a 'fuzzy search' of a 300 page document (where you don't know the exact string of text to ctrl-f, but want to see where they talk about a particular topic)?
No because I ctrl-f for that topic/key words and find the text.
These are incredibly poor AI sells...
>Yes. Firefox and Chrome already offer this.
yes, both use machine learning methods to translate pages. You're already using AI and don't realize it.
Even if they didn't realize it, I don't believe they were arguing that firefox and chrome didn't/wouldn't use machine learning already, rather that they just thought the use cases you provided don't really sell the cost of having a full LLM integrated into every browser install.
This is exactly it.
"AI" as it's used nowadays is unfortunately usually a shorthand for LLM. When firefox talks about "AI features", I think most people interpret that as "LLM integration", not the page-translation feature that's been around for ages.
LLMs are sequence-to-sequence like language translation models, were invented for the purpose of language models, and if you were making a translator today it would be structured like an LLM but might be small and specialized.
For practical purposes though I like being able to have a conversation with a language translator: if I was corresponding with somebody in German, French, Spanish, related European languages or Japanese I would expect to say:
and then get something that I can understand enough to say And also run a reverse translation against a different model, see that it makes sense, etc. Or if I am reading a light novel I might be very interested inI think it's simpler than that. AI is fast becoming synonymous with something being force fed and generally unwanted.
That’s different from an agentic browser in a few key ways.
Most importantly it’s far more difficult for a bad actor to abuse language translation features than agentic browser features.
Okay, what's the problem? The UX of Google Translate is fine
- it will pop up when it senses a webpage in a language you don't speak.
- it will ask if you want to translate it. You have options to always translate this language or to never do it.
- it will respect your choice and no pop up every-time insisting "no please try it this time". Or worse, decide by default to translate anywyay behind my back.
- There are settings to also enable/disable this that will not arbitrarily reset whenever the app updates.
There are certainly environmental issues to address, but I've accepted that this US administration is not going to address this in any meaningful way. Attacking individuals will not solve this issue so I'm not doing this. So for now, my main mantra is "don't bother me". the UX of much AI can't even clear that.
Alternatively: they’re already taking advantage of the AI features they like without at all needing “AI in the browser” and do realise it.
Because the future and market is certain, don’t you know?
> Without AI enabled features + agent mode being first class citizens, this will be a non-starter in 2 years.
The confidence with which people say these things...
s/AI/NFT and I've heard this exact sentence many times before.
Hacker News was borderline insufferable during the 2022/23 NFT craze when all the startups, investments, and headlines were going into whatever new disruption NFTs/blockchain were allegedly going to cause.
At least with AI I do get some value out of asking Gemini questions. But I hardly need or want my web browser to be a chatbot interface.
NFT was always a meme and crypto has proven its staying power.
Gambling has also proven its staying power. A low trust society and some early coin explosions will do that. I don't think its staying power is here in a healthy way, personally.
Crypto has proven that it can bribe governments into pouring tax money into it. It still hasn't shown any use.
Thats not a reason for crypto being useless, anything can bribe corrupt governments to pour tax money into it.
Crypto has shown people are willing to use it as a currency for investment and day to day transactions. Its held value for a significant amount of time. The tech is evolving still and people see a lot of value in having a currency that operates outside of Governments in a decentralized way even if some people will misuse that freedom.
[delayed]
> day to day transactions
Where is this happening?
NFT was a meme in "People are going to buy my jpeg"
But as a protocol it has legs and is still used under the hood in projects.
Cryptokitties was always the best monetisation use case for NFTs, and its still going.
I'd love to live in your world for a bit... I can't imagine any future where having AI in your browser is a net positive for any user. It sounds like an absolute dystopian privacy and security nightmare.
Why?
Imagine you have an AI button. When you click it, the locally running LLM gets a copy of the web site in the context window, and you get to ask it a prompt, e.g. "summarize this".
Imagine the browser asks you at some point, whether you want to hear about new features. The buttons offered to you are "FUCK OFF AND NEVER, EVER BOTHER ME AGAIN", "Please show me a summary once a month", "Show timely, non-modal notifications at appropriate times".
Imagine you choose the second option, and at some point, it offers you a feature described as follows: "On search engine result pages and social media sites, use a local LLM to identify headlines, classify them as clickbait-or-not, and for clickbait headlines, automatically fetch the article in an incognito session, and add a small overlay with a non-clickbait version of the title". Would you enable it?
>Why?
Do we have to re-tread 3 years of big tech overreach, scams, user hostility in nearly every common program , questionable utility that is backed by hype more than results, and way its hoisting up the US economy's otherwise stagnant/weakening GDP?
I don't really have much new to add here. I've hated this "launch in alpha" mentality for nearly a decade. Calling 2022 "alpha" is already a huge stretch.
>When you click it, the locally running LLM gets a copy of the web site in the context window, and you get to ask it a prompt, e.g. "summarize this".
Why is this valuable? I spent my entire childhood reading, and my college years being able to research and navigate technical documents. I don't value auto-summarizations. Proper writing should be able to do this in its opening paragraphs.
>Imagine the browser asks you at some point, whether you want to hear about new features. The buttons offered to you are "FUCK OFF AND NEVER, EVER BOTHER ME AGAIN", "Please show me a summary once a month", "Show timely, non-modal notifications at appropriate times"
Yes, this is my "good enough" compromise that most applications are failing to perform. Let's hope for the best.
>Imagine you choose the second option, and at some point, it offers you a feature described as follows: "On search engine result pages and social media sites, use a local LLM to identify headlines, classify them as clickbait-or-not, and for clickbait headlines, automatically fetch the article in an incognito session, and add a small overlay with a non-clickbait version of the title". Would you enable it?
No, probably not. I don't trust the powers behind such tools to be able to identify what is "clickbait" for me. Grok shows that these are not impartial tools, and news is the last thing I want to outsource sentiment too without a lot of built trust.
meanwhile, trust has only corroded this decade.
> Imagine you have an AI button. When you click it, the locally running LLM
sure, you can imagine Firefox integrating a locally-running LLM if you want.
but meanwhile, in the real world [0]:
> In the next three years, that means investing in AI that reflects the Mozilla Manifesto. It means diversifying revenue beyond search.
if they were going to implement your imagination of a local LLM, there's no reason they'd be talking about "revenue" from LLMs.
but with ChatGPT integrating ads, they absolutely can get revenue by directing users there, in the same way they get money for Google for putting Google's ads into Firefox users' eyeballs.
that's ultimately all this is. they're adding more ads to Firefox.
0: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/leadership/mozillas-next...
That last one sounds like a lot of churn and resources for little results? You're not really making them sound compelling compared to just blocking click bait sites with a normal extension somehow. And it could also be an extension users install and configure - why a pop up offering it to me, and why built into the browser that directly?
> When you click it, the locally running LLM gets a copy of the web site in the context window, and you get to ask it a prompt, e.g. "summarize this".
I'm also now imagining my GPU whirring into life and the accompanying sound of a jetplane getting ready for takeoff, as my battery suddenly starts draining visibly.
Local LLMs for are a pipe dream, the technology fundamentally requires far too much computation for any true intelligence to ever make sense with current computing technologies.
Most laptops are now shipping with a NPU for handling these tasks. So it wont be getting computed on your GPU.
That doesn't mean anything, it's just a name change. They're the same kind of unit.
And whatever accelerator you try to put into it, you're not running Gemini3 or GPT-5.1 on your laptop, not in any reasonable time frame.
Over the last few decades I've seen people make the same comment about spell checking, voice recognition, video encoding, 3D rendering, audio effects and many more.
I'm happy to say that LLM usage will only actually become properly integrated into background work flow when we have performant local models.
People are trying to madly monetise cloud LLMs before the inevitable rise of local only LLMs severely diminishes the market.
Also it does mean something. An NPU is completely different from your 5070. Yes the 5070 has specific AI cores but it also has raster cores and other things not present in an NPU.
You dont need to run GPT5.1 to summerize a webpage. Models are small and specialized for different tasks.
That's the point. For things like summarizing a webpage or letting the user ask questions about it, not that much computation is required.
An 8B Ollama model installed on a middle of the road MacBook can do this effortlessly today without whirring. In several years, it will probably be all laptops.
But what you would want to summarize a page. If I'm reading a blog, that means that I want to read it, not just a condensed version that might miss the exact information I need for an insight or create something that was never there.
You can also just skim it. It feels like LLM summarization boils down to an argument to substitute technology for media literacy.
Plus, the latency on current APIs is often on the order of seconds, on top of whatever the page load time is. We know from decades [0] of research that users don't wait seconds.
[0] https://research.google/blog/speed-matters/
It makes a big difference when the query runs in a sidebar without closing the tab, opening a new one, or otherwise distracting your attention.
> without closing the tab, opening a new one, or otherwise distracting your attention.
well, 2/3 is admirable in this day and age.
You don't use it to summarize pages (or at least I don't), but to help understand content within a page while minimizing distractions.
For example: I was browsing a Reddit thread a few hours ago and came upon a comment to the effect of "Bertrand Russell argued for a preemptive nuclear strike on the Soviets at the end of WWII." That seemed to conflict with my prior understanding of Bertrand Russell, to say the least. I figured the poster had confused Russell with von Neumann or Curtis LeMay or somebody, but I didn't want to blow off the comment entirely in case I'd missed something.
So I highlighted the comment, right-clicked, and selected "Explain this." Instead of having to spend several minutes or more going down various Google/Wikipedia rabbit holes in another tab or window, the sidebar immediately popped up with a more nuanced explanation of Russell's actual position (which was very poorly represented by the Reddit comment but not 100% out of line with it), complete with citations, along with further notes on how his views evolved over the next few years.
It goes without saying how useful this feature is when looking over a math-heavy paper. I sure wish it worked in Acrobat Reader. And I hope a bunch of ludds don't browbeat Mozilla into removing the feature or making it harder to use.
And this explanation is very likely to be entirely hallucinated, or worse, subtly wrong in ways that's not obvious if you're not already well versed in the subject. So if you care about the truth even a little bit, you then have to go and recheck everything it has "said".
Why waste time and energy on the lying machine in the first place? Just yesterday I asked "PhD-level intelligence" for a well known quote from a famous person because I wasn't able to find it quickly in wikiquotes.
It fabricated three different quotes in a row, none of them right. One of them was supposedly from a book that doesn't really exist.
So I resorted to a google search and found what I needed in less time it took to fight that thing.
And this explanation is very likely to be entirely hallucinated, or worse, subtly wrong in ways that's not obvious if you're not already well versed in the subject. So if you care about the truth even a little bit, you then have to go and recheck everything it has "said".
It cited its sources, which is certainly more than you've done.
Just yesterday I asked "PhD-level intelligence" for a well known quote from a famous person because I wasn't able to find it quickly in wikiquotes.
In my experience this means that you typed a poorly-formed question into the free instant version of ChatGPT, got an answer worthy of the effort you put into it, and drew a sweeping conclusion that you will now stand by for the next 2-3 years until cognitive dissonance finally catches up with you. But now I'm the one who's making stuff up, I guess.
Unless you've then read through those sources — and not asked the machine to summarize them again — I don't see how that changes anything.
Judging by your tone and several assumptions based on nothing I see that you're fully converted. No reason to keep talking past each other.
No, I'm not "fully converted." I reject the notion that you have to join one cult or the other when it comes to this stuff.
I think we've all seen plenty of hallucinated sources, no argument there. Source hallucination wasn't a problem 2-3 years ago simply because LLMs couldn't cite their sources at all. It was a massive problem 1-2 years ago because it happened all the freaking time. It is a much smaller problem today. It still happens too often, especially with the weaker models.
I'm personally pretty annoyed that no local model (at least that I can run on my own hardware) is anywhere near as hallucination-resistant as the major non-free, non-local frontier models.
In my example, no, I didn't bother confirming the Russell sources in detail, other than to check that they (a) existed and (b) weren't completely irrelevant. I had other stuff to do and don't actually care that much. The comment just struck me as weird, and now I'm better informed thanks to Firefox's AI feature. My takeaway wasn't "Russell wanted to nuke the Russians," but rather "Russell's positions on pacifism and aggression were more nuanced than I thought. Remember to look into this further when/if it comes up again." Where's the harm in that?
Can you share what you asked, and what model you were using? I like to collect benchmark questions that show where progress is and is not happening. If your question actually elicited such a crappy response from a leading-edge reasoning model, it sounds like a good one. But if you really did just issue a throwaway prompt to a free/instant model, then trust me, you got a very wrong impression of where the state of the art really is. The free ChatGPT is inexcusably bad. It was still miscounting the r's in "Strawberry" as late as 5.1.
Sure. Let's solve our memory crisis without triggering WW3 with China over Taiwan first, and maybe then we can talk about adding even more expensive silicon to increasingly expensive laptops.
> Imagine you have an AI button. When you click it, the locally running LLM gets a copy of the web site in the context window, and you get to ask it a prompt, e.g. "summarize this".
They basically already have this feature: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/use-link-previews-firef...
I have already clicked the all-caps button
Lots of imagining here.
> Imagine you have an AI button.
That pretty much sums up the problem: an "AI" button is about as useful to me as a "do stuff" button, or one of those red "that was easy" buttons they sell at Home Depot. Google translate has offered machine translation for 20+ years that is more or less adequate to understand text written in a language I don't read. Fine, add a button to do that. Mediocre page summaries? That can live in some submenu. "Agentic" things like booking flights for an upcoming trip? I would never trust an "AI" button to do that.
Machine learning can be useful for well-defined, low-consequence tasks. If you think an LLM is a robot butler, you're fundamentally misunderstanding what you're dealing with.
For any mildly useful AI feature, there are hundreds of entirely dangerous ones. Either way I don't want the browser to have any AI features integrated, just like I don't want the OS to have them.
Especially since we know very well that they won't be locally running LLMs, everyone's plan is to siphon your data to their "cloud hybrid AI" to feed into the surveillance models (for ad personalization, and for selling to scammers, law enforcement and anyone else).
I'd prefer to have entirely separate and completely controlled and fire-walled solutions for any useful LLM scenarios.
Most users are entirely ignorant of privacy and security and will make choices without considering it. I don’t say that to excuse it but it’s absolutely the reality.
I don't know. What if the AI can remove all junk from the page, clean it up, and only leave the content - sort of like ublock origin on steroids?
I'd pay a monthly subscription fee for this. All the service would need to do to get my money is guess which words that already exist on the page I will be interested in and show me those words in black-and-white type (in a face and a size chosen by me, not the owner of the web site) free of any CSS, styling or "innovative" manner of presentation.
Specifically, the AI does not generate text for me to read. All it does is decide which parts of the text that already exists on the page to show me. (It is allowed to interact with the web page to get past any modal windows or gates.)
> any future
> any user
Of all the AI features added recently, local translations is one that I would be OK with being enabled by default. It's useful, and its value proposition is much less dubious.
I don't like how translation is only unavailable when the browser "thinks" the whole site is in a particular language. What if there's a single sentence that's not? Or if it guesses the site's language incorrectly? No translation for you.
We need more control over the feature. Even just the ability to select text, right click, and have a "Translation" menu would be huge. Looks like there is such a feature, but it doesn't let you pick the language pairs, which is the most basic requirement of translation.
My version of Firefox (146.0 on Debian) has exactly this. If I select a sentence and right-click, I get the menu item "Translate selection to <LANGUAGE>". In the resulting box, I can change the language pair - but the defaults that I have seen were also reasonable.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/website-translation has the text: "A new Translate selection feature has been added starting in Firefox version 128, that enables you to highlight and translate selected text."
Edit: Sorry, I misread the comment to say that there was no such menu item. Edited to reflect this.
before Firefox put it in the browser, the kinda finicky extension (which I still have installed) does in fact have this feature. highlight a work and you can translate specific passages.
I had to use it a couple times recently in Firefox on Android, and it's a nice thing to have.
The UX is not polished, and not responsive. No indicator that translation is happening, then the interface disappears for the translation to materialize, with multisecond delays. All understandable if the model is churning my mobile CPU, but it needs a clear visual insicator that something happening
Yes but local translation already is in Firefox and it's already made with some kind of AI model. Nobody complained about that.
What about voice to text, text to voice, alt text generation for images that dont have them. Search suggestions, auto correct, malicious website detection.
Those are all features using AI and features I consider to be useful
What are all the recent AI features? Because I ever only noticed the local translation, and can't find anything else by looking at the menu.
EDIT: Oh, I've found a context menu item-list.
I'm glad to see some mozilla employees standing their base in the comments. That guy trying to make the point that Mozilla was wasting resources chasing trend only for an employee to say it was a few people checking it out while 1000 people continued work on the normal stuff is nice to see.
The non mozilla people in that thread are so petty. Maybe it'd be better to have them go use another browser and stop dragging down firefox's reputation.
Firefox should release a separate build - "base", "core", "classic" - clearly, I am not a marketing person, but idea behind it, that this is only a browser without any extra features added. No "AI", no studies, no account sync. Only bare minimum browser, that allows user to do their internet things and, if they ever desire, will install all extra bells and whistles as extensions. No need to agree to any EULA either (remember, that it was added to Firefox?). And, the best part, all existing users will still keep using the same old Firefox version, no surprises for them. Now, I assume that someone will tell me, that this version already exists and is called ESR :)
For example at the moment multi-account containers is a plugin. I needed it and installed the plugin and it's fine.
It kind of sucks that this isn’t a core feature of the browser, but the AI stuff will be. At least Firefox sync is good enough to sync extensions.
Firefox should be a browser, period. It should render pages. All other features should be extensions.
That would've been possible if they didn't kill XUL.
That's silly. It's still entirely possible as there are plenty of great extensions that don't require XUL and Firefox, which is still almost entirely XUL, can be hacked on locally to reduce surfaced features all the way down to a window with an addressbar and nothing else by examining that XUL and using userChrome.css to alter it.
I'm pretty sure ESR is a different thing, but yeah, that sounds like a good idea. I think it even should be relatively easy, insofar as that a lot of the non-base functionality is in built-in extensions?
This feels less like an “anti-AI” stance and more like a trust and control issue. For browsers especially, users have very different threat models and performance expectations, and “always on” AI features blur that line quickly. An explicit opt-out makes sense, but I wonder if the more important question is whether these features can be implemented in a way that’s truly local and auditable. If users can’t clearly understand where data goes and what runs on-device, toggles become a necessary safety valve rather than a preference.
I haven't paid close attention, but as far as I can tell, Mozilla has mostly invested in local AI for tasks such as translation, summarization, and organization. As long as that's the case, I don't see any particular safety or privacy risks; if it works without an Internet connection, it's probably OK.
Summarization is using a chosen cloud-based AI provider.
Are you sure? I see a huge spike in CPU when I long-click on a link to see the preview and summary. This is the newest summarization feature, not the older one with the chatbot on the side.
Ah, didn't know they moved to local models. My comment was about the old chatbot-based feature.
I actually saw the “summarize this page” feature in the right-click menu today and clicked on it out of curiosity. The box that appeared had a “remove AI features” button which I accidentally clicked. Now the feature is completely gone and I don't know how to get it back. (Don't really care much, wasn't planning on using that feature anyway, just giving feedback on my first impression)
Have it as a stand alone plugin.
I should have to manually install this AI stuff.
Forcing everything into a plug-in is architecturally more complex, and less performant... I'm imagining proxying from native code through JavaScript APIs, then back to native code for LLM operations and context storage. But might lead to creation of some new AI extension APIs.
Then ship a FireFoxAI browser for users who want it.
Forcing everyone to by default use AI isn't freedom. I might as well just use Chrome.
So now we're debating compile-time feature flags vs run-time, and the overhead of running/maintaining multiple build configs. And picking good names for each... "Firefox Pro with AI" vs "Firefox Lite for Engineers". This isn't what Mozilla needs to be focusing on right now, imo.
With over 600 million in revenue they can afford to put up a different page for Firefox AI.
A large percentage of users, particularly Firefox users , don't want this AI stuff built in.
Where does this AI even run. Does it have to make an API requests to send all of the webpages I view somewhere else ?
Is it even my computer anymore, my browser, or am I sharing it with people who want to extract more money from me.
As is Google forced me to view often incorrect AI summaries when I have no interest in them.
Do I want the only real Chrome competitor to also force bad ai content in my face ?
The team (AND Marketing) should focus on saying it's a fast core browser with the extensions you want to make it yours.
Have recommended extension sets ([uBlock, Sponsorblock], [Containerise, Sideberry, Decentraleyes], [AI translation + Dictionary/Thesaurus]).
Make me want to use your AI features, don't just slap them on my face wishing I'll do more than get mad and try to get rid of them.
Language models are not like the Classic Theme, which can be relegated to an extension (now defunct).
Language models are like Hello, Pocket, and Sync. Core browser features one and all that must silently run by default unless explicitly disabled.
Sync is the only feature you listed which is arguably a core feature, in that it makes sense to build into the browser to be able to sync as much of the browser's settings and data as possible for the user. Everything else --- Hello, Pocket, and LLMs --- can and should sink or swim as extensions which the user must seek out and install if they provide sufficient value.
You won't find much relating to Pocket or Hello in the OSS project. I predict a lot of the new AI functionality will stay out too. So not core functionality.
You're not a normal user of Firefox then.
Normal users will be fine if they will see two big squares side by side as an installation step: „with AI“ and „without AI“, where the former will just install and enable the plugin. Explicit choice is better than opt-out, and it’s not going to be something people frequently change their mind about, so another switch can be buried in settings.
Who is a "normal" user.
Normal users install Chrome.
We want "normal" users to use Firefox, not to push it to a smaller niche with more force. Even though I don't like or use this "AI thingy", it should be equally easy to use and equally easy to disable.
If Firefox can provide a more anonymized gate to these providers and guarantee that prompts are not used for training, this would be a net win for people who want to use AI but doesn't know better, i.e. the "normal" users.
That's how normal users stay on chrome while your users leave firefox. That's how you get no users at all.
Hardly. Hundreds of millions of "normies" want a browser that just "gets rid of ads and spam and stuff". If ff can be that go-to browser, they have hundreds of millions of potential users.
Firefox has <5% of browser share, no one is a normal user of firefox.
Was actually looking for somebody mentioning this bit. Admittedly, one of the few regular Firefox users. Yet, as a regular Firefox user, this much ranting about something that can be turned off with a click, is kind of annoying. The stuff that's been added so far ("Allow AI to read the beginning of the page and generate key points", "Solo AI Website Creator", "Sidebar AI chatbot") is incredibly easy to disable. Been in advanced, beta, dev releases for a while.
Edge has a larger market share (4%-7% depending on who you ask)
Firefox has (2%-6%, similar issue). Firefox mostly scores well among Wikimedia users and tracking. (High as 15% recently) Firefox barely even registers with Mobile users (0.5%-1.5%).
And. They both pale in comparison to Chrome (56%-69%) and Safari (14%-24%) in terms of user base / market share. People can argue and rant about Firefox doing something, yet they're arguing about 2%-6% of the WWW users currently.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers
https://radar.cloudflare.com/reports/browser-market-share-20...
https://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php
https://kinsta.com/browser-market-share/
https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share
https://www.statista.com/statistics/545520/market-share-of-i...
I've been a normal user of Firefox for over 20 years.
This. My browser should be a browser and nothing more. If I want more, I should be able to use an add-on. Stop baking everything in out of the box.
Could someone summarize the problem with Firefox's AI features?
At least when I last checked (months ago), none of those features that involve communicating with external servers would work unless you configure them to (i.e. provide credentials to an LLM provider).
Was I wrong? Have things changed?
What was your methodology in checking? I got different results using a local mitmproxy on a clean install.
https://sizeof.cat/post/web-browser-telemetry-2025-edition/
Thanks for the link - I see it's not that much more than Waterfox.
Getting to the discussion at hand, which of those pings are AI related? I didn't say FF isn't making network calls.
I don't use firefox so I can't confirm, but one issue might be 15+ (?!) different config settings needed to disable AI and it still won't go away.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46095873
That's a UX issue, but I keep hearing complaints about privacy.
Anything that makes it easy to accidentally send local data elsewhere is a privacy issue.
> Anything that makes it easy to accidentally send local data elsewhere is a privacy issue.
How is it "easy" if nothing is sent unless you configure the AI?
What I'm asking is: If I do a brand new profile, default configuration, how can any AI related feature send anything that is of privacy concern? If you don't set up an LLM provider, it has nowhere to send to.
I may be wrong, which is why I'm asking in the thread. So far, no one has shown what the problem is.
I have no idea whether any of the AI features require explicit setup vs. automatically use a paid-for API somewhere.
But it also doesn't matter, because that's the kind of distinction that I've seen go back and forth elsewhere.
Mullvad browser doesn't have an option to disable all AI features because it doesn't have any.
(The Mullvad guys took Tor browser for its resistance to fingerprinting and removed the connection the Tor network. You don't need Mullvad VPN to use the browser)
https://mullvad.net/en/browser
Why not make them disabled by default, with the option to turn them on?
> Why not make them disabled by default, with the option to turn them on?
"All AI features will also be opt-in"
He said there would be both an "AI kill switch" but that it's also "opt-in". Taken together, his two statements seem a little...odd.
They could even make the AI features available as extensions, downloadable from addons.mozilla.org
That way, the users who want them can download them, and the users who don't, don't.
Because money! Seriously that's the answer to most of these questions.
Is there a business model behind actually making profit off this stuff yet? Last I looked, Mozilla is still making almost all their money from Google.
The new CEO said he views it as a monetization source. I'm not really sure how, but he apparently has something in mind I can't think of.
The chatbot can provide sponsored responses. Not sure how evident those will be, but I think it will happen. Surely is in Google's mind.
If the responses are sponsored, it seems the value drops dramatically.
I want the AI agent to act more like a fiduciary, an independent 3rd party acting in my best interest. I don't need an AI salesman interjecting itself into my life with compromised incentives.
Us “AI hostile users” are this way partially because we know that our desires do not align with those funding these tools.
OpenAI was already taking steps to integrate ads, amd Grok shows how much we should be trusting AI as some impartial 3rd party. The goal was always about control and profiting off of said control. Pretty much the antithesis of hacker mindsets.
Is there a reason such a thing couldn't present a bunch of neutral options, but with affiliate links that provide revenue back to Mozilla?
(I mean, that could still steer it toward places that have affiliate programs, but if you're running a local AI tool to help you search for these things that seems like something you should reasonably be able to toggle on and off/configure in a system prompt/something.)
What we’ve seen from other companies is exactly what you mention. Unfair ranking and promotion of items with affiliate links or the highest payouts for them. Changing incentives compromise the integrity of the results.
Huh. Somehow I'd thought those programs were platform level and not item level. Which, yeah, does explain the problem a lot more clearly.
I think Facebook did a study that making options opt-in means only a tiny tiny percentage of users will ever activate them. People never look around in settings.
I suppose if - after you click away the popup that says "Thank you for loving Firefox"(1) - a popup shows that says "Hey, hey, look at me, look we have this new feature, it'll blow you away. Do you want to enable it?" would be obnoxious but satisfies the idea of "opt-in".
(1) https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1791524 - I still remember how icked I was seeing this popup.
Don't need to run studies to understand that.
If it's off be default it will stay off unless the user is somehow made to try it. Default opt-in is one option to do that, the simplest one, but it's not the only one. The rest require explaining clearly what the user will get out of enabling it ... and that often is difficult to do succinctly, or convincingly. So shovelling it down everyone's throat it is.
> making options opt-in means only a tiny tiny percentage of users will ever activate them
Why exactly should I, a user, care about this? I don't want useless crap shoved in my face, period. I don't care that people might not turn on someone's pet feature if they don't enable it by default.
Because if this browser will have zero appeal to wider public it will die and you will have to pick between Chrome forks.
Yes, that’s the intent of the argument. If it’s so valuable , people will find it, talk about it, amd it’ll spread on its merits.
I still don't want to use an "AI browser". I don't want to use a browser where all or most development effort goes into "AI features" that I need to disable. I want a browser where the development effort goes into making it better at browsing the web.
I would pay $100 a year for a Firefox that just focused on privacy and was competitive speed and features (at rendering) with chrome.
Is there a fork of firefox where you have all the same core functionality and support for extensions but with all the mozilla services (pocket, safe browsing, forced crap on the new tab page, any AI service, etc...) removed?
Pocket has been gone for awhile now. Is it really that hard to uncheck some boxes to turn this all off?
Zen, Waterfox, Librewolf, Floorp.. For android there's Fennec, Iceraven.
There are more, those are just the ones I can recall.
For Android, Ironfox is currently the best option IMO.
Zen and Floorp are not obvious improvements from a privacy and control perspective.
Waterfox, Librewolf and Mullvad Browser are worth considering.
Why is that? I remember seeing that Zen strips out the Firefox telemetry.
Librewolf is nice but breaks a lot of stuff, sites that use webrtc or canvas related things, lots of banking sites refuse to load, and some other issues I can't remember.
I think it's a good idea to mitm yourself and look at what exactly your browser is up to. We should be careful about just accepting and repeating hearsay when such claims are pretty easy to verify yourself.
https://sizeof.cat/post/web-browser-telemetry-2025-edition/
As for webapps breaking in Librewolf, IME those can be fixed by selectively unblocking canvas (or whatever) for the site in question.
My preference is Zen (https://zen-browser.app/), but there's also LibreWolf (https://librewolf.net/) if you want a less customized fork.
I moved to Zen but have subsequently moved to Glide [0] which I find to have less UI fluff and the keyboard shortcuts and scriptability are excellent.
0. https://glide-browser.app/
How about we don't enable AI features by default in the first place?
It should be a plugin. Anything that isn't directly related to the core mission of a web browser should be a plugin.
Browsers don't do plugins any more. Firefox hasn't had NPAPI for almost a decade.
This would be useful for many people who want to avoid AI features being forced on them by every piece of software imaginable. Hopefully, a centralized kill switch like this will also make it easy for Firefox forks such as Zen and Floorp to let users enable AI features if they want to without changing about:flags.
Oh, this is great news!
Firefox had options for many things, until those options were removed
Where's the kill switch to remove AI from development?
I'm not sure why people still believe this, especially developers. We're starting to literally just build AI into everything... you're not even going to know what's AI and what's not. The phase of labeling everything with cute little sparkles is starting to end and AI is going to be used similarly to external libraries.
If you don't like AI you need to seek legislation and pressure your local politicians. It's the only way to stop it.
>If you don't like AI you need to seek legislation and pressure your local politicians. It's the only way to stop it.
Yup. So we're screwed for up to 3 years. Maybe much less depending on nature or the result of certain hot topic issues.
That might be a minor factor why we seem to be speedrunning everything in 2025. Get ahead of the crash, of the legislation, of the wool coming off the common citizen's eyes.
Yeah the option is called Waterfox, Palemoon, or even Vivaldi.
Vivaldi is not open source. Not quite an option.
https://vivaldi.com/source/
I think the UI code is not open source (so you can't build the browser yourself).
https://vivaldi.com/blog/technology/why-isnt-vivaldi-browser...
Wait, what? Vivaldi is open source? Now I am confused and really not sure what was the reason I ignored it for so long. Was there something iffy with Linux desktop integration?
It is not open source. Some of the backend is.
Quite surprised at Vivaldi. Considered that as Opera spiritual successor including any possible feature, will've been one of the first browsers adding AI.
I don't really care so much about that. I worry more about the CEO speaking about blocking adblockers like it's a normal business decision. Wtf
That’s what turned me off of Chrome. It will 100% have me migrate if it happens again. I’m not freely giving my attention away for even more people to shove crap in my face.
There are two things to note here:
1. Pocket/etc is not even ancient history,
2. At this point I don’t think Firefox or Mozilla ought to be taken without a truck of salt.
A bonus third :D
3. People bleeding their hearts out for Mozilla and calling others out for constantly criticising Mozilla — it’s history baby, history!
I hope Zen disables this by default, or completely removes it if that’s an option.
Such features should be disabled by default, but as a user of Zen, I really hope it'd be possible to enable AI features.
I can't imagine any reasonable use case for having AI tightly integrated into a browser (or an operating system, for what it's worth). Why not make a browser plugin or a web page or an app? I don't get it.
Local translation of websites so you don't have to tell Google about all the sites you want to read that are not in your language. Firefox's address bar that learns what you type most often and moves those items higher in the autocomplete list. There are plenty of great cases for AI very tightly integrated in the browser. That you haven't thought very hard about it or even bothered to see what AI Firefox has already had for ages (Awesomebar was about 15 years ago) is precisely why you don't "get it."
Local translations?
Is it just as easy to make an extension that runs a local AI translation model? Translation would benefit from having a community continuously updating and tuning local models for languages.
If it was an extension it would be nice if people could fork it with other models. Just like their AI Tab Grouping feature would be much better forked with a deterministic non-AI grouping system.
I had a translation extension for a good 2 years before it was built into FF
You and a few others. Now it's well over 100 million who have it. We didn't make the back button an extension even though we could have. There's good reasons for making some features default and high on that list is "most people would use it and find it valuable for everyday browsing" which well covers web page translation.
I see it as 100 million who didn't care enough to find a translation extension. Which is fine. Most people stay on the same 20 sites, after all (and some of those even have built in translation tools).
>We didn't make the back button an extension even though we could have.
The back button isn't even a KB of extra data and and I'd put navigation as the primary job of a web browser.
I'm not against a built in translator, but it's a strange comparison to a back button.
On a slight tangent, I think there's an under talked about boon yo machine translation: it's widely agreedbti be a comoromise and not a source of truth. That wariness has been missing as of late.
Sounds like a great plugin.
Honestly this should've been introduced with the new AI Features from the start, it's just shipping slightly too late to fully regain my trust.
I'll never understand why people feel so strongly about features like this and that they have to be opt-in.
I don't use bookmarks. Should those be opt-in? What about the other 85% of the browser's features I don't use?
> I don't use bookmarks. Should those be opt-in?
You can choose not to use bookmarks, remove the bar reserved for it, and it’s taking up kilobytes in the background. Can’t say the same about shoving an LLM in a browser.
But sure, I’m much closer to the extreme of “make bookmarks a plug-in” than “make everything a default”.
The bookmarks feature doesn't silently connect to their servers in the background to function.
The supposed local-only features like translations will download at least model updates and configuration, which leaks metadata.
i don't even want the code present on my machine, only being held back by a checkbox that may or may not be correctly respected. this is what extensions we invented for.
its funny how multi-account containers is a such a killer feature of firefox (that none of the other browsers are able to implement, as far as i remember) but its kept as an extension and they never seem too bothered about promoting it either
The problem with the "Trust me bro." stuff is that it only works if you are trusted and after the last decade Mozilla is anything but.
> We've been calling it the AI kill switch internally. I'm sure it'll ship with a less murderous name, but that's how seriously and absolutely we're taking this.
Honestly, is anybody reading what's getting written anymore? If it gets taken seriously it would ship with an enable-AI button, not the other way round.
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I thought this rule only applied to users commenting with each other, didn't know it applied to posted content too.
I love threads about Mozilla. New CEO says he's not going to remove adblockers, people suspect him for planning to remove adblockers. Mozilla says they'll add a killswitch for all AI features (so that the tiny but vocal anti-AI minority will be happy), and people blame them for not having it as an enable-switch.
Whatever they do, they simply cannot win. I'm personally starting to suspect the main issue with Mozilla is its users.
Mozilla has a recurring problem with being unable to provide the simple, obvious right answer.
When they re-wrote Firefox for Android, they were unable to give the simple, obvious answer to the effect of "yes, we understand extensions are a core feature of our browser and we plan to fully support extensions on Fenix and won't consider it done until we do". Instead, they talked about whitelisting a handful of extensions, and took three years from shipping Fenix as stable before they had a broad open extension ecosystem up and running again.
Earlier this year Mozilla couldn't provide the simple, obvious response of "we will never sell your personal information". Instead, they tried to make excuses about not agreeing with California's definition of "selling personal information".
A few days ago, we find out that their new CEO can't clearly and emphatically say "we would never take money to break ad blockers, because that goes against everything we stand for".
Now, they seemingly can't even realize that having a "kill switch" calls into doubt whether they actually know what "opt-in" means.
Even when they're trying to do the right thing, they're strangely afraid to commit to doing the right thing when it comes to specifics. They won't say "never" even when it should be easy.
> Even when they're trying to do the right thing, they're strangely afraid to commit to doing the right thing when it comes to specifics. They won't say "never" even when it should be easy.
Honestly, and it's hard for me to say this: I've come around. I still use and love Firefox, but emotionally I'm detaching from it, because fundamentally: all the other FOSS I use is an actual, factual, open source project. And Firefox the browser is FOSS, but Firefox the corporation isn't, and the problem is the corporation seems to be in charge, not the project, which means all their priorities are to make money and drive donations, not what's best for the user necessarily. It means all their communications are written in Corporatese, with vague waffling about everything they're asked and non-committal statements because the next quarter might demand they about-face, as they've done numerous times.
I love the browser. I increasingly find myself disillusioned with the business entity that rides on it's back, and frankly wish it would sod off. Take the money they're getting, and give it to the people actually building the product. Defaulting AI features to off costs Firefox absolutely nothing and they still won't do it, because of this irrational FOMO that has gripped the entirety of the executive class in charge of seemingly every business on earth. It's pathetic, and it lacks vision.
I can put up with a lot of friction and cruft as long as the foundations are solid amd I feel a product is moving in the right direction. I moved off chrome when it became crystal clear that Chrome was not even pretending to compete on User experience anymore, even in it is still the best browser in some regards.
I hate that I feel to be having déjà vu here. My needs are simple and I’m surrounded by software wanting to inflate itself more and more. And being hostile about it, to boot.
> simple, obvious answer to the effect of "yes, we understand extensions are a core feature of our browser and we plan to fully support extensions on Fenix and won't consider it done until we do". Instead, they talked about whitelisting a handful of extensions, and took three years from shipping Fenix as stable before they had a broad open extension ecosystem up and running again.
That answer is not as obvious to me as you claim it is. I don't use any browser extensions except 1password, which I would have no reason to use on a phone (at least assuming Android has builtin password manager functionality like iOS does).
I think you overestimate what fraction of people care about extensions.
I use Firefox on Android perhaps entirely because it supports uBlock Origin and my other extensions.
I would guess that of people that would ever go out of their way to use a non-Chrome browser on Android, the fraction who care about extensions is pretty significant.
On a different tack, I feel like I went out of my way to use Firefox (and Firefox Focus) on iOS and was thankful they had them during a time where everything had to use the safari renderer. IIRC Firefox Focus even had an ad-block extension that worked on safari
I would agree that it's probably significant. But it's probably not so high that a non-extensions-enabled Firefox for Android wouldn't be useful.
I am speaking from only my personal experience, but I would say the vast majority of Firefox users are using Firefox to avoid Chrome and Chrome likes. That being said I would say they are then more likely and inclined to also utilize extensions.
According to Mozilla's own stats, most Firefox users do not have any extensions at all:
> Has Add-on shows the percentage of Firefox Desktop clients with user-installed add-ons.
> December 8, 2025
> 45.4%
https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/usage-behavior
Note that language packs are counted as extensions.
Some have disabled telemetry, of course, but how many? Here we can only rely on our own observations, and of all Firefox users I know, it's zero.
(I keep it enabled because I want my voice to be counted — people who have never lived in an autocracy tend to have peculiar views on this.)
I think the correlation of people using extensions and people disabling telemetry is pretty high. I do both myself. Even a decent password manager requires one (though not on android because it has an API for that). On android I do use others obviously.
Always appreciate people citing real data! I honestly would not have been able to guess one way or the other but unfortunately most comments are kind of hip firing in random directions that are impossible to keep track of, so it helps to keep these discussions grounded.
But what if you weigh this by usage time? The firefoxes without extensions might be hardly ever used
I you can’t take the time to install a new tool. You don’t need it. And I think that’s a great mindset to have with not just software, but when approaching life.
I keep lean and only look for an extension or install amd app when it’s clear what problem I have and want to solve.
Why do you use 1password on non-phone devices?
> New CEO says he's not going to remove adblockers, people suspect him for planning to remove adblockers.
New CEO says they've run the numbers and decided to not kill adblockers, leading to people asking why exactly they were running those numbers (if it was an actual ideological commitment, the numbers wouldn't matter).
> Mozilla says they'll add a killswitch for all AI features (so that the tiny but vocal anti-AI minority will be happy), and people blame them for not having it as an enable-switch.
Yes, opt-in vs opt-out is kinda an important distinction. And you're assuming that opposition is a "tiny but vocal", which - especially among people bothering to use firefox - seems unfounded. Which brings use neatly to,
> Whatever they do, they simply cannot win. I'm personally starting to suspect the main issue with Mozilla is its users.
Well, yes. If you build a userbase out of power users and folks who care about privacy and control... then you have a userbase of power users and folks who care about privacy and control. If Mozilla said up front that they were only interested in money and don't care about users, then fair enough, but don't go trumpeting how you fight for the user and then act surprised when the user holds you to that.
The creator of VLC has publicly noted dollar amounts they could raise if they either sold or compromised VLC, but it came and went without controversy. OBS Studio, 7-Zip, Notepad++, and Nextcloud have all published offers they've received and declined, or quoted per-install payment figures. In fact, it's practically a rite of passage for open source projects to talk about the value of their work in terms of what they could monetize but choose not to.
Communicating about what you're knowingly rejecting is a point of pride, not a confession. But since there's no such thing as an OBS, or Nextcloud, or VLC Derangement syndrome, nobody grabs the pitchforks in those cases.
There is a difference between "FYI, we're rejecting a ton of money for us, that's how serious we are about not selling out" and "We ran the numbers, and on balance, taking these 30% more money doesn't seem like the right thing to do because it would be against our stated mission statement".
The second one doesn't sound like real conviction.
Thank you for directly addressing my point! I disagree but I respect your prioritization of of substance. I agree that notionally there's a difference but (1) they never said they "ran the numbers", (2) there are other good reasons for having access to that data that don't involve selling out, and (3) this all hinges on squinting and interpreting and projecting, and splitting the difference on linguistic interpretation is about as weak as circumstantial evidence can possibly get.
Real argument: "they said they're doing "privacy preserving" ads, look at this post where they announce it". Real argument "they say they're putting AI in the browser, I don't like that. Here's the statement!" Real argument: " they purchased Anonym and are dabbling in adtech, here's the news article announcing the acquisition!"
Not real argument: "They said they didn't want to take money to kill ad blockers but if you squint maybe it kinda implies they considered it, at least if you don't consider other reasons they might be aware of that figure." At best it's like 0.001% circumstantial evidence that has to be reconciled with their history of opposing the Manifest changes. If reading tea leaves matters so much, then certainly their more explicit statements need to matter too.
The thing that's unfortunate here is I would like to think this goes without saying, but ordinary standards of charitable interpretation are so far in the rear view mirror that I don't know that people comfortable making these accusations would even recognize charitable interpretation as a shared value. Not in the sense of bending over backwards to apologize or make excuses, but in the ordinary Daniel Dennett sense of a built-in best practice to minimize one's own biases.
> At best it's like 0.001% circumstantial evidence that has to be reconciled with their history of opposing the Manifest changes. If reading tea leaves matters so much, then certainly their more explicit statements need to matter too.
Their history is less relevant now because it's a fresh CEO that came up with this statement on his first day. New leaders often means a change in direction and this is a worrying sign. Also the number he quoted is far too explicit. Doing something like that would instantly move Firefox to be the absolute worst browser possible considering even advertising- and tracking-loaded crap like Chrome and Edge don't go that far.
Clearly they have been running the numbers and clearly he feels fine talking about it which is a pretty strong departure of previous values.
Of course I'd not continue using Firefox in this case, and I'm sure it would get widely forked. I found it pretty shocking.
The other examples don't reassure me one bit because they're not the same teams and in many cases they were simply external pushes like offers that were rejected. Here it's a different team that already has been changing direction for the worse recently (e.g. PPA, purchasing Anonym), and came up with this without external pressure. There's also plenty of situations where FOSS projects did go full evil.
Anyway I don't really have any better options than firefox and I'm sure that it would get heavily forked if they started siding with the advertisers, but it is worrying to me especially coming from a new leader on his very first day. Not only because it's about ads. Just because it removes user freedom of choice completely if they were to enforce this.
> The creator of VLC has publicly noted dollar amounts they could raise if they either sold or compromised VLC, but it came and went without controversy. OBS Studio, 7-Zip, Notepad++, and Nextcloud have all published offers they've received and declined, or quoted per-install payment figures. In fact, it's practically a rite of passage for open source projects to talk about the value of their work in terms of what they could monetize but choose not to.
In all of those examples, the devs note that people have reached out to them, unprompted, to try and get them to sell out. That's materially different from a company proactively looking into the payoffs of selling out. The only question is whether the latter is what's happening; I'm having trouble tracking down the actual thing that was said (I think in an interview?).
Please stop calling people deranged for expecting Mozilla to do the right thing without dissembling. Having your previous such comment flagged and killed should have been sufficient reminder to you that you're behaving inappropriately for this forum.
Take a look at Graham's hiearchy and see if you can move up the ladder from tone policing. Were any of my examples: VLC, 7-Zip, Nextcloud incorrect? Let me know and I'll thank you your good faith effort to be responsive to substance.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Graham%27s_Hierarchy...
Alright, I looked at the hierarchy; I believe that
> But since there's no such thing as an OBS, or Nextcloud, or VLC Derangement syndrome, nobody grabs the pitchforks in those cases.
qualifies as name-calling.
> Well, yes. If you build a userbase out of power users and folks who care about privacy and control...
Is that their core user base, or just the vocal user base online? Only 5-10% of their user base have UBO installed (FF has almost 200 million users, extension store reports ~10 million UBO installs).
Firefox isn't LibreWolf, it's user base are just average people, not much different than that of Chrome, Safari, or Edge.
I don't know how to rigorously verify who their actual users are on the ground, but it seems like that's at least nominally their target; https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/ says,
> Firefox: Get the gold standard for browsing with speed, privacy and control.
I hadn't actually seen that when I wrote "power users and folks who care about privacy and control", but that's even mostly the same words, let alone intent.
Amen.
>If you build a userbase out of power users
But they've never done this. There is a very vocal group of Firefox power users but the browser has always targeted a general audience, marginalization by Chrome over the years not withstanding.
If you have any ambition to regain some of that market share listening to the average vocal Hackernews or Reddit commenter, who is not the median user, even just among the current ~150 million users is not a good idea.
I am fine with it being a disable-button, as long it's persistent once set.
What I honestly fear is that while AI-features are disabled, popups inviting me to enable them again. That, or them auto-enabling them on every update like sometimes has happened with `browser.ml.enable` flag on `about:config`.
They don't do that for any feature, no reason they'd do it for AI.
> New CEO says he's not going to remove adblockers, people suspect him for planning to remove adblockers
It's because he has obviously been thinking about it. That $150M number didn't just come out of nowhere. Someone at Mozilla modelled this. The resulting analysis made it into the CEO's mind so far he even mentioned it without being asked.
This is something that's unthinkable to most of the Mozilla users. That's why it's so shocking.
It's like your son making dinner conversation like "hey I was thinking, if I would sell drugs at school I'd make at least 500$ a week! But don't worry I'm not going to do that!".
Trust takes a lifetime to build, and a moment to break. Those “moments” are becoming more of streams of time these days.
How many times does a scorpion need to sting the frog for the frog to be justified in being wary of “ I definitely won’t sting you this time!”
Yep no doubt FF users cut from a slightly different cloth than those who choose GAMS browsers.
But as an old-school Firefox user, with a slieu of mobile extensions installed and a healthy cynicism about our swan dive into the dark sea of AI ... I have no problem at all with the statements from Mozilla. Outsiders can argue all day about intent, it's the actions that count.
Sounds like robust criticism is having an effect. Why would you not be happy with the situation?
I am happy with the situation. Firefox still allows me to customize my userChrome, remove features I don't like and it even has vertical tabs. It supports uBlock origin, runs great in Android. It's a really good browser. I don't think there's a problem with complaining; What I find unfair is the reaction when Mozilla finally does the right thing.
He didn't say he wasn't going to remove ad blockers; he said "I don't want to". No commitment or position, just a preference.
It’s easy to bash Mozilla because it is failing. Their usage share is a statistical error, and most of it comes from being shipped with Ubuntu. Firefox badly needs a value proposition beyond not being Chromium-based.
> Their usage share is a statistical error, and most of it comes from being shipped with Ubuntu.
This is not true, and is easily verifiable for yourself.
https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/hardware
The vast majority of Firefox usage is on Windows.
I am surprised. Does that imply most GNU/Linux users go out of their way to install Chromium actually? Ubuntu and Firefox have a similar market share.
No idea about most Linux users, but here's what little we know for sure:
Arch pkgstats (opt-in): ~64% FF, ~41% Chromium, ~17% Chrome
https://pkgstats.archlinux.de/fun/Browsers/current
Debian popcon (opt-in): 2.2% Firefox, ~10.3% Chromium
https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=firefox
https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=chromium
Flathub installs: 10kk Firefox, 10kk Chrome, 1.8kk Chromium
https://flathub.org/en/apps/org.mozilla.firefox
https://flathub.org/en/apps/com.google.Chrome
https://flathub.org/en/apps/org.chromium.Chromium
snapcraft statistics isn't public, afaik.
I agree, but there's nothing more frustrating than another niche user group imagining that the reason for this failure is Mozilla lacking to address their obscure requests, while Mozilla's real goal is to create a browser for everyone. The truth is that this goal is borderline impossible, and all these double standards (can't count the times I've heard "I'm tired of Firefox, moving to Chrome!") surely aren't helping.
The anti-AI people think they are in the majority. They could be, but I suspect that's not the case. I would be surprised if many in the anti-AI crowd could even point to the specific features of the devices and software they use daily that fall under the "AI" umbrella. Meanwhile, regular people are increasingly turning to chatbots instead of search engines. It seems clear we are at peak hype, but this stuff is here to stay.
The fact they need to add an “AI kill switch” is the problem.
Mozilla has lost the trust of its users by making decisions that their userbase doesn't approve of repeatedly, and then partially walking them back after the backlash.
That's not the fault of their users, at least not directly. If you want to argue that Firefox users are stifling innovation or trying to steer the product in a direction that would threaten the future viability of Firefox/Mozilla, I would be open to hearing that argument out even though I don't think that's the issue.
Mozilla is the equivalent of a petrostate in the tech sector. They have a bunch of revenue coming in that they didn't really earn, and they have no idea what to do with it to improve their current condition. To me, that's the core issue.
When you have a position in the project called "CEO" and that person has the ability to hand down edicts of what he or she sees the project as being, that's when you get into trouble, especially in free software. We've seen this way of developing software co-opted by major companies who have turned otherwise good projects - Chromium and AOSP immediately come to mind - into vendor lock-in and spyware by some suit who has been told he needs to create value.
The thing they can do to win is to start acting like they maintain a free/libre open-source software project. It should be completely fine for Mozilla to make a grand total of $0.00 off of Firefox.
Think of Linux (specifically the kernel) or Python. Sure there's a person whose opinion holds more weight than everyone else's (at least for the kernel), but they typically focus on delivering general guidance to a group of people who are free to create features on their own and present those to leadership. If it's quality and fits what the general purpose of the project is, it gets merged into the trunk, and released with everything else.
That needs to be how Mozilla handles Firefox at this point. If some working group of contributors wants to start an implementation of GenAI in Firefox, let them do so and let the community hash it out. If the community doesn't feel the need to create it, well, then Firefox won't have it... and that's fine.
So many of these free software projects try to do too much and change what the core output of the project is in the process, and they lose sight of what the project is.
>Whatever they do, they simply cannot win. I'm personally starting to suspect the main issue with Mozilla is its users.
A lot of people remember the Mozilla of old, and are just completely depressed at the state of where it has ended up over the last 10 years. They were once a non-profit founded to promote the web and put users first. Now it's just this weird zombie company monetizing the work and good will of a prior generation of engineers that cared about that mission.
This seems like a cultural mismatch more than anything. Mozilla makes software that human people use and human people use normal language rather than avoiding the non-profitable aggravation associated with emotive language that a company employee might be used to.
Look at the point that op made instead of the tone: the AI feature should be opt-in not opt-out.
That's a good point. Let's talk about that. It seems like it's a simple thing to do to show good faith that this won't be a normal corporate AI push.
Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I think you're right, and I think the reason for it is because Google has historically had an extremely effective astroturf marketing team for Chrome
... because Mozilla doesn't pay any attention to them?
so that the tiny but vocal anti-AI minority will be happy
[citation needed]
Citation for what really? That the anti-AI movement is a minority? Just ask around you "have you used AI today?" and I'm pretty sure you'll see what I mean. I don't have a horse in this game and I'm not an AI fan, but the numbers speak for themselves so much that the mere question is odd.
The anti-AI ‘movement’ is a minority like all partisans are a minority. You shouldn’t be comparing them to passive consumers but to enthusiasts who actively demand ‘AI’ in their browser/Paint/Notepad.
True, and a reasonable PM will ignore both the anti-AI and the AI-in-everything groups.
We don't really have reasonable PM's though. Or rather, they are being paid to be unreasonable. They are ignoring everyone because the CEO 5 levels uo wants it.
And then others wonder why customers are frustrated.
> the numbers speak for themselves
What numbers? Have Mozilla published any numbers showing their AI experiments have been warmly received by users?
Because they're already reneged on past promises. Trust is gone.
Literally every other browser and most tech companies are shoving AI down users throats. Firefox isn't missing the boat by neglecting AI, they're missing it by being an alternative which reminds us how nice things can be without it.
The past 15 years has been a slow decline while they were trying to prove some relevancy outside of their core product. With mobile browsers being locked down a decline was going to happen anyways but if they stuck to their guns at least they wouldn't have wasted a bunch of money and maintained more of their base.
Who knows, their position sucks, but they're not going to win anyone by being the worst AI focused browser which happens to have an off switch.
The solution for the (as of yet) small group of people who cares about these things is very simple: community driven forks.
With the bonus that you also get a set of great (and per fork different yet handy) features.
These include:
Waterfox (Firefox) - https://www.waterfox.com/
Zen Browser (Firefox) - https://zen-browser.app/
Librewolf (Firefox) - https://librewolf.net/
Helium (Chrome/Chromium) - https://helium.computer/
Ungoogled Chromium (Chrome/Chromium) - https://github.com/ungoogled-software/ungoogled-chromium
Also as one of the major players, Vivaldi already made a stand against AI and forcefully including (agentic) AI in the web browser: https://vivaldi.com/blog/keep-exploring/. It's a Chromium based browser with a lot of nice features and deep customization options: https://vivaldi.com/
Unfortunately the more interesting ones use Chromium. I wish Zen was better developed and less "aesthetic", it might be worth a shot.
No, it wouldn't. Because the average user might actually want the features, and if you default to "no" without asking people even once, the users who want it won't find it.
That's why it should ask - once. And offer a "FUCK OFF NEVER ASK ME AGAIN" button rather than "Ask me again later".
> If it gets taken seriously it would ship with an enable-AI button, not the other way round.
Like the one described in the subsequent toot?
> All AI features will also be opt-in. I think there are some grey areas in what 'opt-in' means to different people (e.g. is a new toolbar button opt-in?)...
https://mastodon.social/@firefoxwebdevs/115740500918701463
I was about to use a quote to show you that "no, it's not like what is described in the thread", but you included the salient bit in the second quote, yourself.
It's not a gray area, and "opt-in" isn't something to be weasled-worded around. If the browser has the capability, I don't want it. I want to be able to add it with a plugin, and that's it. Plugins should have full control to whatever is necessary (same as adblock stuff; plenty of security but enough "user beware" to allow truly useful utilities). And AI features should all be plugins. Separate ones, if I had my way, but bundles if that makes more sense. I do not and will not need AI to browse. It's an enhancement. The core product (or at least ONE OF the products offered) should allow me to do without the enhancement. And opt in if I want to. There's nothing gray there, and I'm so fucking sick of mozilla trying to pull this "we disagree with common terminology" horseshit.
> It's not a gray area, and "opt-in" isn't something to be weasled-worded around
How about "Translate" button?
What about it? If it's output is generated by the manipulation of tensors and weights, it doesn't belong in my browser. It's not there to because I need to browse, it's there because I want to read content that is not in a language that the content provider has supported for me. I could feed those network responses right into a separate, non-browser app and have it translate stuff for me, if I wanted. Why should I be required to download and ignore your translation feature, when I could just as easily not have it included in the first place?
And, if I'm being honest, "translation" is the only feature I would even consider splitting the builds for. At least in that feature I can see why a "default" version of the browser might benefit more people than not by including it. But that doesn't mean that a "clean" version shouldn't be provided. Build the core app, and then include as many plugins as you think "average users" will benefit from in the "default" version. I don't mind being the minority, I just don't think it's inappropriate to ask for only what I need instead of "all the bullshit you want to force me to have".
> Why should I be required to download and ignore your translation feature, when I could just as easily not have it included in the first place?
This seems like special pleading. The browser (and any software package) is full of features that some people use and others don't. Just off the top of my head, these include: the password manager, PDF viewer, dev tools, and the extensions store. Each new SKU that the vendor has to provide is additional effort to build and test, and the result is that it's more expensive to produce the product. Moreover, it makes it harder for users to discover new features what they might want (oh, you wanted view source, you needed Firefox developer edition).
On the specific case of translation, I don't really see much of a distinction between "I need to browse" and "I want to read content that is not in a language that the content provider has supported for me". In both cases, I want to get the content on the site and I'd like the browser to help me do it.
> I don't mind being the minority, I just don't think it's inappropriate to ask for only what I need instead of "all the bullshit you want to force me to have".
And you can have that by building it yourself. It's open source software. What you're really asking for is for Mozilla to build a version of the software that has only the features you personally want.
lol. I didn't ask for SKUs, I asked for plugins. I wouldn't mind the dev tools, and PDF viewer being plugins too. Again, include those plugins in the default download, just let me have a download that doesn't include them. Modularity to the bone, packaging for the masses. It really is that easy.
But, sure, I need to go build it myself because I had the gall to ask "can't I just have the parts I need?"
> lol. I didn't ask for SKUs, I asked for plugins. I wouldn't mind the dev tools, and PDF viewer being plugins too. Again, include those plugins in the default download, just let me have a download that doesn't include them. Modularity to the bone, packaging for the masses.
This is in fact you asking for two SKUs, one with all the plugins (what you call the "default download") and one without ("let me have a download that doesn't include them.")
As for "really is that easy", as usual, it's easy in some cases and not others. To the extent to which things are already modular and developed separately, then yes, it probably is easy. To the extent that things are not currently modular, then it's separate engineering effort to make them so. In some cases that effort might be small (e.g., the new module is all in HTML/JS) and in some cases that effort might be large (e.g., there is extensive C/C++ code that needs to interface with the browser core). I don't know how much about Firefox's AI features to know which category they fall into. But it's almost certainly not zero effort in any case.
lol
whatever you say
Make it a compile-time option
correct opinion
The difference between this and "will have an option to enable AI features" shows what the development resources will be focused on. I mean, f** JPEG XL support; we have a bigger investment fish to fry
I don't understand why it's so difficult (impossible?) with Firefox to use your own private AI server (that's not running on localhost). With Brave it's pretty easy.
get your non AI versions here while they last:
Index of /pub/firefox/releases/
https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/
A LITTLE HELP:
How do I revert Firefox to a previous version and keep my profile intact?
https://superuser.com/questions/1643618/how-do-i-revert-fire...