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Also don't forget mozilla staff told users firefox already had AI and it is search autocomplete.
Hey Mozilla, people aren't mistaking basic substring match with an environmental-killing data hogger slop machines.
I'm one of the people who actually likes the (e.g. DDG) AI overview for searches. Mainly because it cites its sources.
It allows me to bypass the SEO'd shit factories that make regular search useless.
Having said that, I'd seen that context menu option too and cringed.
I have the ddg ai for on demand. But I remember the good old days when it would still provide you and answer summary box but without using generative AI
@deadbeef79000 You... you know these things can make up their sources, right? LLMs are notorious for making sh!t up, and it's gotten worse in later models with seemingly little the companies running this tech can do because it's more of a feature than a bug of LLMs.
They weren't made to be search engines, they're not, they're as I said, probabilistic mimicry machines. When you use it like a search engine, you're only querying its database of scraped stuff with a good chance it'll pull something out of its ass to try and give you the answer you want to hear, not actually searching the internet. These models aren't built to be accurate, they're built to be plausible. They generate what the algorithm deems what you want to hear, not the truth.
So not only are you using a machine as a search engine that was not built to be one and can generate random bullsh!t, you're also consuming a lot more energy and power to do so.
The only reason people are trying to use LLMs is as you said, to bypass Google's deterioration (or at least one of its many factors of deterioration), which is an issue that's only cropped up in the last few years. If Google didn't enshittify, we wouldn't be in this mess, and using LLMs is not going to fix that, especially as these LLMs inevitably enshittify themselves since LLMs are super unprofitable.
Yes, it means I can go to the sources.
Or at least, the overview is useful for finding terms to refine the search.
I'm ignoring the rest of your wall of text, because you're first sentence was condescending.
I was wondering why there were so many people tagging others in this thread, it is not normally what I see on Lemmy, so I had a look at the instances people were posting from, as well as where this thread was posted.
It was quite impressive.
Oop created this thread using Mastodon, the thread is located on an mbin instance, other mastodon users posted in it, and here I am reading it and posting in it from Lemmy.
Really cool that it works this well!
Adding for anybody that wants to disable it all:
user_pref("browser.ml.enable", false); // general switch for machine learning features in Firefox, though it might only apply to some of them, https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1971973#c11
user_pref("browser.ml.chat.enabled", false); // AI Chatbot (https://docs.openwebui.com/tutorials/integrations/firefox-sidebar/#additional-about-settings)
user_pref("browser.ml.chat.sidebar", false);
user_pref("browser.ml.chat.menu", false); // remove "Ask a chatbot" from tab context menu
user_pref("browser.ml.chat.page", false); // remove option in page context menu (https://github.com/mozilla/policy-templates/issues/1230)
user_pref("extensions.ml.enabled", false); // might only be relevant for app developers
user_pref("browser.ml.linkPreview.enabled", false);
user_pref("browser.tabs.groups.smart.enabled", false); // "Use AI to suggest tabs and a name for tab groups" in settings
user_pref("browser.tabs.groups.smart.userEnabled", false);
user_pref("pdfjs.enableAltTextModelDownload", false); // "This prevents downloading the AI model unless the user opts in (by enabling the toggle to "Create alt text automatically" from "Image alt text settings" when viewing a PDF)"
user_pref("pdfjs.enableGuessAltText", false); // (disabling this might be redundant when AltTextModelDownload is disabled)
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The frustrating part is that some people really, really like AI which is part of the reason it won’t just go away.
This right here. It's one of those situations where always asking the company to "Just listen to your users, ez, lol!" results in something that, surprisingly, quite a few people dislike.
Because yes, I'd say Most People™️ actively like AI-generated stuff, and of course there are valid use cases (like summarizing text and video content, the latter even helping with accessibility). But this in turn means that if a company listens to user input, they will shove AI into their products even if they would otherwise not be looking at doing it.
of course there are valid use cases (like summarizing text and video content, the latter even helping with accessibility)
only if you don't care about accuracy or completely made up transcription that just didn't happen.
If a majority of users want it, offering the feature makes sense, as long as you can disable it.
Yea, the uncreative shitstains who can make nothing on their own because they do not understand the first thing about hard work or art.
I am not that person but I use AI to figure out mostly computer issues that I have troubles to Google for.
I guess Google got so fucked up that even adding reddit to a prompt doesn't yeld a good result. And if you didn't add "reddit", results are all over the place and you still fail to find an answer. Fuck quora, who dafuck uses quora? Never saw a good answer there like ever.
And then there is chatgp that gives you options and so far it's been quite on point at least for me.
My guess would be it is general Google entshittification rather than superiority of LLMs. People want answers for their questions and Google is failing to provide any good info for past 5 years.
Google has the answers, they just don’t care if you see them through the majority of sponsored content (ads).
I switched to Kagi last year. Even pulling results from google’s indexes it gives far more relevant results than google simply because it doesn’t force in any semi-related a sponsored results.
SEO killed the useable web and AI is killing the open web.
I feel bad for people who never got the chance to learn things in the golden age of the internet. It was so easy.
grow a goddamn spine and listen to your users. People do not like these features and expect better from you
This might shock you but Firefox is trying to appeal to people who are not already firefox users.
An additional shocking revelation of which you seem to be unaware is that a lot of people do find value in these chat bots.
I do mostly kind of agree with you. Yes Gen AI is over-hyped. Yes their is a dangerous investment bubble. Yes I wish Firefox would just focus on being a great browser.
Yeah this is a feature we have because mozilla listens to their users.
This is tough to swallow for most of us - I hate this crap except for a minority of ultra-narrow use cases - but the general population of users loves AI. They want more of it.
This might shock you but Firefox is trying to appeal to people who are not already firefox users.
No they aren't. They are trying to appeal to investors and advertisers.
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/advertising/index-exchange-partnership/
... and what, pray tell, do advertisers and investors desire?
The same thing they always want: Surveillance, behavior tracking, and avenues to advertise.
Yes, but they want more users to surveil and track.
Sure, but Mozilla doesn't care about that. They only care about the short-term gains they can get by milking those advertisers and investors.
If Mozilla cared about bringing in more users, they would do things that users want, instead of what they have been doing for the past decade or so.
Users love AI chat bots.
*citation needed
This might shock you but Firefox is trying to appeal to people who are not already firefox users.
Fuck them if they want the opposite of what firefox users want. Stop fucking chasing whoever isn't already on board with your current offering by fucking over your current users.
Firefox isn't really viable with it's current user base. Mozilla is circling the drain really.
It could have been viable with the user base that they had years ago, and it probably could be viable today, but Mozilla keeps throwing away all of their goodwill so that they can keep paying absurd salaries for shitty executives.
I absolutely agree that mozilla has squandered it's strong position from a decade ago.
... the series of "strategic" decisions that have been unsuccessful is embarrassing really.
That said, the "shitty executives" narrative is reddit edge lord stuff. Any large successful project is going to need well paid experienced executives. Of course you can judge them harshly in hindsight, but it's naive to assume they're making poorly informed decisions.
Like in your other comment suggesting there's no evidence that users love chat bots - you can absolutely guarantee that mozilla has conducted some market research indicating that it's a feature set that will attract more users.
Of course you can engage in supposition that such an assertion is incorrect, you can even predict that it will ultimately be another failure.
However, it's hubris to suggest that your own assessment of the market is more accurate than mozilla's - exactly the kind of hubris you're accusing mozilla of.
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Generative AI CAN be privacy sensitive, if you use local models. Most of them are too big to do that though, so AI is almost always the biggest fucking security hole possible.
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i had a bunch of AI BS disabled from a prior paste into my user.js so i actually got jumpscared with an unlabeled entry in my context menu. i decided to dig into about:config to find anything else under browser.ml. and set to false or blank it out.
@Eeveecraft @mozilla @firefox When they started adding all that crap, I tried & just kept using Librewolf. Still firefox based, but I don't see all that new bloat anymore. It just sucks there isn't LibreWolf on android.
Ironfox is similar
What about Fennec on Android?
@Eeveecraft @mozilla @firefox What are you talking about? Mozilla saw that everyone was going to their browser to get away from Google, so naturally they did the intelligent thing and became more like Google. I mean, it makes perfect sense, right?
There is a setting in about:config to completely disable it, but I'd recommend that you switch to a fork like LibreWolf on PC or IronFox on Android to ensure stuff like that will be disabled to begin with even if later updates would turn it on.
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I find this very useful, I wouldn't normally click in articles just read the title, so at least now I can read a summary.
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this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2025
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