I can see people not necessarily wanting suggestions for tab group names, but... The rest of the list is translations and alt text suggestions for images added to PDFs. The most uncontroversial AI features if ever there were any.
I really don't care for this urge to advertise "AI" everywhere. I also don't care much for the knee-jerk reaction just because someone calls something AI.
Firefox doesn't let you use alt text anywhere, except for the most ridiculously niche location.
People who want to see it when they browse webpages get nothing.
It's only if you
If Mozilla cares about accessibility, what a weird niche of a niche of a place to put it.
I'm afraid the reason for that is that is that it's the only place where Firefox has full control over the upload experience. Like, how would Firefox even be able to insert an alt text when e.g. I'm uploading a pic to Mastodon, without adding special cases for every website (which would break whenever the websites update)?
Though I wouldn't be surprised if at least some "copy suggested alt text to clipboard" feature would be added at some point.
In any case, sure it's an edge case, but it's still weird to be angry about "AI" for it. It won't even download the model if you don't use it, AFAIK.
They could be working on that, but we don't know yet.
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Alt text is an accessibility feature. Do you really want to be exclusionary to anyone who's remotely blind?
I just want a browser that loads webpages and performs well, keep this ai bullshit for add-on's and away from default installs.
Lynx remembers
Firefox protects your privacy by running AI models directly on your device, ensuring your sensitive data remains local
Good enough for me. The privacy problem with AI is when they are web services you send all your data to for processing. If that isn't happening, that problem is fully solved.
We’ll see how often telemetry about your usage patterns is sent to Mozilla after this change…
Don't they publish the source code?
Yes, they do. So, we should look into that.
Absolutely
So they don't intend on making a profit from it from data gathering, nobody asked for it, and the open source community who would otherwise donate or contributes to Mozilla are so disgusted by the whole thing tgat they are now just holding their noses and waiting for an alternative.
All of this while Google is stepping down as sugar daddy and they need all the help they can get.
Why the hell are they doing this? Is it just a case of moronic leadership and getting stuck in a negative spiral where the whole operation gets stupider and stupider with each new hire?
Well, people were at least asking for translations all the time.
Its run locally on the device. Did you even read it?
Trust me bro.
Run locally doesn't mean it isn't sending telemetry data about the inputs and outputs.
AI also doesn't mean that it has to send data to a backend. Your basis for accusing Mozilla of doing something questionable is that they put technologies to use which happen to also be used by data-harvesting companies. This is like saying they're evil, because they use programming languages or databases. It entirely depends on how these technologies are used.
It would be like saying they want to harvest data because they switched the code base to Chromium, not programming languages in general.
Ok, I disagree.
why would adding a local AI make them more likely to use telemetry data without user consent? it's not like they couldn't already have access to your entire browsing history if they wanted to
I am saying that the phrase 'run locally' does not guarantee that the data will remain local. If they don't make telemetry defaulted to off then many people will trust the 'we respect your privacy' message and assume the data is staying local without searching out an opt out setting.
I am not saying Firefox will send data if telemetry is turned off. I am saying that adding AI is associated with sneaky ways of collecting data and yes that is a reason to be suspicious about motives.
This is the FUD you were accused of and frankly it's a valid accusation. You didn't need to say this. The only purpose it serves is fear mongering
Don't be suspicious, don't be suspicious!
If they said that AI related telemetry would not exist or would be off by default I wouldn't be suspicious. Not directly making that clear and focusing on 'locally run' is why I am suspicious. Not presuming guilt, just being wary.
As long as I can disable it, I don't care.
I don't trust AI to catch all the things that interest me on the pages I visit, and I don't want to waste energy on something I won't use.
It should be disabled by default, to avoid the huge energy costs associated with running LLM's.
That AI will do that.
"The fact that we removed the promise not to sell your data from our website is pure coincidence."
So, which browser now? Please advise.
LibreWolf: every time it's forced to pick between privacy and convenience it picks privacy. If you like that, it's the browser for you.
Waterfox: if you just want Firefox with zero ability to send any data to Mozilla, without necessarily "hardening" anti-fingerprinting features, this is that. It's a downstream fork that removes all telemetry and non-local features (it removed Pocket before Mozilla did).
LibreWolf.
I feel bad for the LibreWolf devs who continue to desperately say that it's not designed to be a general use browser.
Hmmmm, should it not be recommended then? It's been my favorite no bullshit Firefox fork for a while now, but I'm open to suggestions.
I mean, I'm not a dev and I haven't dove deep into the forks in a while. I just remember that they added something to their readme on github during one of the recent "firefox is dead" cycles that said that LibreWolf's focus of privacy first makes it poorly suited as a general use daily driver.
They were getting swamped with people looking for help because the defaults caused certain sites to not function or something.
Ohhh that makes sense. Thank you!
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It's a fair question but people must remember that there are no good options if they leave Firefox: the Gecko-based (i.e. non-Chromium FOSS) alternatives like LibreWolf rely on the Mozilla team upstream to keep them secure. In a sense they're freeloading. IMO that is generally not a sustainable path to be on.
A community for discussion about Mozilla Firefox.