Comment by red_admiral
2 days ago
Respect. This is what Firefox could have been.
In the real world, in the same line as the article suggests, there was a brief time when the "puts you back in control" browser needed you to change the following about:config settings to disable the force-pushed ai:
browser.ml.enable, browser.ml.chat.enabled, browser.ml.chat.sidebar, browser.ml.chat.menu, browser.ml.chat.page, extensions.ml.enabled, browser.ml.linkPreview.enabled, browser.ml.pageAssist.enabled, browser.ml.smartAssist.enabled, browser.tabs.groups.smart.enabled, browser.tabs.groups.smart.userEnabled, pdfjs.enableAltTextModelDownload, pdfjs.enableGuessAltText
A bit of community feedback later, and we've got one big "off" button, and me wondering which footgun the executives will shoot themselves with next.
Look, I absolutely agree it sucks they didn't deliver the opt-out/in interface day one, it was obvious people would want it, and yes, it's not the first time they've blundered.
At the same time, they did listen to the feedback and deliver. It now has a genuinely good interface for it where you don't have to opt out of everything, but can opt-in where you want it. It's not just a big off button, it's a general out-out including new features, but that then exposes individual opt-ins if you want for each feature. Most other browsers won't respond at all. Firefox is still by far the best browser out there for people who care about their privacy.
Especially on HN, Firefox just gets so much more hate than software that is way more user hostile for much less bad behaviour. I'm not saying we shouldn't hold it to a higher standard when that is what it's selling itself on: clearly we can't allow "not as bad" to let it slip into worse and worse, but at the same time, I don't understand how the narrative seems to trend towards "they are essentially the same as google" when that is so clearly not true (to be clear, not saying you are saying that in this post, just that's the vibe of HN's commentary as a whole).
That is true - Firefox is definitely held to a higher standard here and elsewhere. They marketed those values to us. So the criticisms, in my opinion, are definitely justified. And no, they aren't listening to their users.
If they had listened to their users they would have delivered what every users wants - just a browser. Not some kind of "platform" stuffed with lot of unwanted crap that makes it bloated and introduces possibly new unnecessary attack vectors in it (both malicious and / or privacy exploits). All those additional crap that every new management wants in Firefox should have been a browser extension or a plugin, instead of being bundled into the core browser. When a user installs / updates Firefox, they could be asked if they want to install any of these new feature available as an extension / plugin. That keeps the browser lean, transfers the choice completely to the user and is genuinely respectful of the user. The current way of force bundling everything into the browser, making it bloated, and then pretending that "users can opt-out" is not just arrogance but also misleading (to be polite) as it is common knowledge among software firms that most people often never change the default settings.
Think about it ... if every of these controversial features - Pocket, ads in address bar or home page, AI etc. etc. - had been made available as user opted extension or plugin, would there ever have been any controversies? The installation data itself would provide a feedback of how much the users actually care about these features, and provide unique insights to the management into the kind of user base that it has (which the article is spot-on about).
(Note that I know that some of these features are indeed implemented as an extension. But not as user controlled ones as they cannot be completely uninstalled. All the user can do is disable it (turn "off or on"). Why? It is stuff like this that makes it harder to trust claims of caring about user Privacy.)
It seems to me like they are. A lot of people actually use those AI features. Particularly translate. The other I like is semantic search. Those are genuinely useful things.
When people are complaining about AI it seems vague and like they're complaining about something else not related to Firefox. What is it, the optional chatbot side window? I agree that's annoying, but it's pretty easy to go about your life not knowing it even exists. The new preview thing is annoying, but the complaints all happened when it was only translate and the chat box.
It seems like people are just complaining about AI but directing that to Mozilla. For translate I can say that they were much more ethical than most companies. They used volunteer work and have an open dataset. They don't seem to be out here stealing artists' work or scrapping the entire internet left and right, they seem to be using AI as directed useful features. Small and local models, not chatbots.
I'm not going to say Mozilla doesn't have lots of problems, it certainly does. But the outrage over this doesn't seem to be about those things. If those are the problems, any Geko browser is miles ahead of any chromium browser. Even if you use a degoogled chromium you're still giving Google control over the internet. If you have problems with Mozilla, then just be direct. If you have problems with AI, just be direct about it (it's not like there aren't a million problems there too!). But if we conflate the two we don't even give Mozilla the chance to respond to users because the feedback is meaningless. And if you expect them to "just know", well... how would they? They're not Google, they aren't monitoring every single little thing you do.
The reason people are pushing back against the Mozilla hate is because we're just tired of chrome winning. That's all that this hate has done. And if you're that passionate about AI, just go to a fork. There are plenty and you've already established yourself as a power user, so I know you know how to google. Fwiw, I like Zen, but it's not completely anti AI either.
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No one marketed luddite anti-values to you. And it's a step too far to act like anything that contradicts those wants are actually immoral
People are mad because Mozilla refuses to listen to users until backlash becomes a threat to the company. They keep pushing users to the limit and only pull back slightly when the screaming gets too loud.
People are mad because Mozilla is clearly and unashamedly trying to boil the frog and doesn't seem to even be interested in hiding that fact.
People are mad because Mozilla is speed-running SV software-shittifying strategies without even doing us the dignity of pretending they aren't.
> it's not the first time they've blundered
It's a recurring pattern of not reading the room
Indeed, and it's on purpose.
Everyone was forced to be exposed to it. To see it. Only after that happened, did they let users disable it.
It's effectively the equivalent of a spam campaign.
People had to raise hell to get that, while being made fun of by their CMs on social media. Even the opt-out is full of silicon valley dark patterns. Whoever is calling shots about the product at Mozilla doesn't have your best interests at heart.
What are those dark patterns? It's an off button, it works, and it does not get back on. It's the polar opposite of the "maybe later, I'll ask again every week and reset the setting in your back" unfortunate norm that plagues a lot of major proprietary software/service.
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I think Firefox gets hated on more than the others because they advertise putting the user in control but in practice they seem to undermine it at every opportunity.
A browser that puts users in control should make features like AI and advertising opt-in because there is a sizeable group of people who are concerned about those things. It's meaningless if they only put users in control who agree 100% with Mozilla's ways of thinking.
After so many times of blundering in ways that are favorable to their corporate sponsors, it's hard to believe they're not doing it on purpose.
Say what you need to say: Google pays the bills over there,
it’ll never be an effective, scrappy organization again as long as that’s the case.
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The only correct move would be remove the option, remove all AI code, and move it into extensions. If the extension security policies, and other restrictions, don't allow all the things they want to put in, then GOOD, they don't go in.
I also think should be moved into extensions. However, extension security policies and other restrictions do not have to necessarily be so restrictive; there can be permissions but for extensions that you can install and uninstall by yourself it can be useful to be able to load native code .so files (since you might want to do things other than what the browser does by itself). This permission would not be made available to the official extensions, so that you can write it in C and then must compile them by yourself if you want them with native codes
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I think Mozilla is still mostly made up of tech-optimist people, so they were open and interested in ai from day one. I highly doubt there was any malicious intent.
You're complaning that the browser that "puts you back in control" ... put you back in control of which AI features you want to enable/disable? How horrible!
What? They didn't make these 10 distinct features one single all-or-nothing button? They let you switch them on or off individually?? How dare they?!?
What? They shipped new features to the browser...turned on?!? Instead of spending all those development hours and then...hiding them behind a setting by default?
I need "AI" in my browser, so I don't use the AI features. No data was sent anywhere. No 4 GB model was downloaded. Nothing happened, except for a popup saying "hey, by the way, if you want to do X, just press this button here". It's just UI elements. No AI-related code runs, no data is sent to AI companies unless you directly tell the browser to do that.
Imagine if Firefox shipped a brand new GPU-accelerated compositor, improved hardware video decoding and WebGL/WebGPU. You people cry about why they didn't add a big "disable GPU features" button? And that they dared to enable this by default?
Oh no! Mozilla downloaded a 50MB file onto my computer after I asked it to translate a page for me. Those batards!!!!
I'm not convinced anyone complaining even knows what they're complaining about. The AI features Mozilla has is pretty minimal and there's a good fucking reason they didn't add a nuke button in the beginning. Because most people like translate. The chat sidebar? Most people I know that use Firefox didn't even know it existed till I showed them. The only other model that existed at the time was a 20MB tab grouper. The complaints felt reactionary to AI (rightfully) but for some reason targeted Mozilla, the company that wasn't shoving AI down your throat
The irony here is that after enough negative user feedback, they did make that one button, as an actual button not a config option. You can still change those options if you want AI but not in the sidebar, for example.
You either missed the point or deliberately missed the point.
The issue was they shipped AI features built into everything and the only way to switch them off was to "about:config" a bunch of settings, they shouldn't have shipped it without the off switch and "Open about:settings and then disable things manually" isn't control for the average user.
And you missed the question about a GPU composition toggle.
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And those are some of the better named config options. Some are pretty opaque, as are their values (and often poorly documented). You can tell there isn't an edict to make config options highly accessible
They KEEP adding utter cancerous garbage to the homepage/new tab page. I recently installed Firefox from scratch for a coworker who was having chrome-only issues(yes, they do exist!) and was blown away by how insanely gross the default settings are now. It’s straight up adware junk bullshit
Maybe I just love downvotes, but the Firefox AI sidebar is incredibly useful and I make use of it nearly every day.
Good for you. The point is that a lot of Firefox users actively didn't want these sorts of features enabled and pushed on them. That was clear and obvious to anyone paying attention to general reactions to unsolicited AI helper tools, going back decades. For Mozilla to turn this on without any respect for those users’ preferences was a huge mistake that they keep making over and over again.
More specifically: they chose Firebox because it doesn't have those kind of features. If the just wanted a (sorta-kinda) open-source browser filled with all the latest hype features they would've simply used Chromium.
Using Firefox is a political choice. People use it because it's one of the few remaining traditional browsers which isn't a tentacle of Big Tech. Chasing the competition and adding the stuff your users are actively trying to avoid isn't going to work.
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