The speed at which firefox has been enshittified is as impressive as it is sad.

Relevant section:

Smart Window uses ‘memories’, things Mozilla says “…it learns from your activity” to inform its responses.

You can delete memories individually, and you can set any given chat session to not use/store them.

Fine so far.

The problem? My memory list isn’t populated with things Smart Window learned since I enabled it. Oh no.

It has activity going back months. We’re talking searches and website interactions from long before I enabled this. features.

Firefox just handed that history to the AI models to plough from, without telling me upfront.

I found this the creepiest aspect of Smart Window.

Mozilla says this was a flub; it will refine the onboarding around Smart Window to limit memory formation to post-opt-in activity only. That’s obviously the right fix.

Because sharing a user’s prior browsing history with third-party AI models, silently, on feature activation, without any headset? Yeah, a bit icky – but that’s the price of testing features that are finished, I guess.

F*** I really dont want to change away from Firefox. Pleas be good Firefox. Please! Don't F this up.

Much like Adobe‘s Acrobat which I also have to use for work. At least from what I can tell when it suddenly summarizes a PDF. There‘s no way in hell that happens locally. But the fact that it seemingly automatically processes potentially sensitive data from customers didn‘t even do as little as raising eyebrows when I brought it up.

I used to enjoy AI a lot, and I still think the technology is really cool, but lately I'm beginning to despise it. It spreads and nestles itself into every corner of our life, and it rots whatever it touches, be it the humans that rely on it or the projects in which it's used. I see so many open source projects that are tainted with it, it's almost impossible to avoid it. It's sad. The generations that will grow up with AI will be fucked.

So sad for Firefox. I try to keep using since it’s the only solution free of Chromium, but I guess chromium will control everything only Safari will not be chromium.

There's a master "kill switch" for all AI features in Firefox now. I suggest everyone who's concerned about this kind of thing just go and turn it off, and then we need never bother each other over this again.

Waterfox. Librewolf. Zen. Floorp.

They're all good options in their own ways. Just pick one and go

Just let them shoot themselves in the foot. Get familiar with the forks. Someone at Mozilla has no idea what they're doing. You would think they would learn their lesson last AI garbage but I guess not.

Ai in browsers is stupid

Seeing AI invade open source is sad. AI slop contributions. AI integration that no one asked for.

For now Firefox derivatives are fine (I use LibreWolf), but many of those derivatives don't work on macOS because it "fails to verify that this executable is actually executable" (what does that actually mean?????????).

I had hopes for Ladybird Browser but now it's being vibe coded (rewritten in rust by ai for no reason whatsoever), and it's not ready yet anyway. Now I'm hopeful for Servo engine. It's in development but at some point it will be ready, and it bans slop contributions.

You should see how AI is being deployed in warfare. Plausible deniability is about to go through the roof.

Back in the day, you get out jail free card was on a scale of "the devil made me do it" to "I was following orders", now we get "It was AI"

OpenCode with Playwright gives you full control over what model you use, the prompts, and what it integrates with, and it promotes open weight models. The way Firefox implements this seems gimmicky, and I don't like that it persistently collects your info while browsing. Also fuck OpenAI.

One would think they'd be extra careful not to piss the users off at this point... but no.