Firefox will have an option to disable all AI features

But I also donate to Firefox and Thunderbird cause the forks wouldn’t exist without them.

Yes and that's a good thing

> Wasn't NPAPI mostly replaced with HTML5?

It's true that what NPAPI was used for 99% of the time is better served by HTML5. But it's not like NPAPI was limited to Flash and applets. Afair NPAPI plugins can access all native resources (which is the reason why the security sucked so much), HTML5 obviously can't. E. g. runtime code generation isn't particularly usable in WASM, so no JIT other than browser JIT for you. Then there are stuff like WebUSB/WebNFC/WebSerial that Mozilla killed. Not that they didn't have good reasons to do so, but having a native-exposing plugin system (with some friction, don't just install anything with a click) would have covered most of the use cases without being that much of a privacy problem.

If you read down in the thread, there's a good discussion about how this simply isn't true about Mozilla.

Of the fads Christophe Henry mentioned top of thread, Mozilla flat out didn't invest any resources in some of them, invested minimal resources in others (accepting donations in crypto), and modest resources in VR (which you'd expect given the browser-VR integration standards forming).

So the feeling about Mozilla being tech-ADHD comes more from folks reading their social media posts than the people who work there or watch the codebase.

Unless you can't afford the split focus. If Mozilla can do 1 thing right or 2 things half-assed, and it looks like this is the case, they should stop and focus on strengthening the core before hanging more stuff around it.

2. Shoehorn flavor-of-the-week web-based over-hyped thing into browser "natively"

3. ???

4. Profit!

If they weren't slipping on the core browser as much as they have been, there wouldn't be nearly as many shouts as there are today when they instead spend resources on chasing the latest fad.

- Start crowdfunding for features.

- Go RedHat route, offer an enterprise version with centrally managed profiles and DLP feature. Not exactly free-as-in-freedom stuff but still better than adtech.

- Get some EU bureaucrats thru a FUD session against Chrome (does it counts as FUD if it's true?), then apply for some EU funding program. Dirty and messy, still better than adtech.

None of this is particularly lucrative or clean, but I don't see how AI would bring them any __revenue__ (do not confuse with investment) at all. There are too many players there already and many of them are more established - and what Mozilla have?

- Their engineering team? Maybe.

- The browser engine? Completely irrelevant (and that's exactly the problem).

- Their userbase? The userbase they have left seems extremely averse to value-added features in general, and the AI kind in particular.

Then assume they focus on integrating AI into the browser, how do they monetize it next? Sell data? Then there is no reason to choose them over Google. Charge for interference? No chance to compete against established hyperscalers there and would go against their local-first selling point.

The sad truth about platform-crucial software like a web browser is that monetizing it in any way inherently reduces it's value for users. And in case of Firefox it's a pretty small margin that keeps it competitive.

> The problem is that Mozilla keeps jumping on fads instead of focusing on their browser core.

https://www.tb.pro

Funding end-user-facing FOSS is hard. An OS kernel or a DMBS can count on corporations that need new features providing funding. A browser can't. But then if small individual donations aren't enough for them (I think there's still no way to donate to Firefox directly?) they don't have a product.

Maybe hire some engineers instead?

> You want Mozilla to stop doing that? Guarantee their moneis flow.

Sure, just as soon as they sell something a privacy focused user of a browser wants. Privacy focused password management built into Firefox with paid sync or enterprise integration. Privacy focused paid email hosting, works great with Thunderbird. Had they done any of this back in the day, I'd gladly have paid for it and trusted them over smaller names or Google.

I'm sure they're getting lots of money to throw around playing with the new shiny, but that's not going to keep their users, or keep them happy.

They lost a ton of market share when the browser was slow as an old dog and chrome came on the scene, but they didn't do nearly enough to make up for it.

But still I'm just wrenched by the dissonance in what new-CEO-guy said. 5 years ago or so I reported a serious bug in pointer events. If you move the mouse less than 1px the browser 5-10% of the time Firefox reports to JS that the you moved the cursor ~400pixels up and to the right or left.

Honestly this bug isn't super high impact for the web as a whole, but anyone who uses pointer events needs to work around it by smoothing the input stream. They confirmed the bug in their tracker and there it has sat for five years with no activity while the browser behaves in violation of the contract between the user and the web platform, putting an extra stumbling block in the way of every web application that allows drawing on screen with the mouse cursor.

To me, an issue like that is the canary in the coal mine, and the canary is dead. There's only a few reasons I can think of to leave a perfectly-reproduceable issue like that sitting for five years: 1) you don't have the energy for it, probably because so many other things are on fire 2) you don't see any value in having the trust of your users. or 3) your code is so fucked up inside that there's just no hope of figuring out why a half-pixel movement triggers a mouse would do something insane like trigger a mouse event 400 pixels away.

So now this new CEO guy comes along and says "we've lost people's trust." Wow, I think to myself, he really gets it!" Then he says: "to get trust back, our top priority will be working on AI features." WHAT THE FUCK WHYYYYY!?!?

Did you not literally just say you recognized that you had lost people's trust? Did you think that people didn't trust you because you hadn't tasked every engineer that wants to be able to get a promotion to work on AI!?

The thing is most of the forks are still using some/all of the on device ML models, they're just not advertising them as AI. From Waterfoxs announcement of "Not using AI*"

>The asterisk acknowledges that “AI” has become a catch-all term. Machine learning tools like local translation engines (Bergamot) are valuable and transparent. Large language models, in their current black-box form, are neither.

https://www.waterfox.com/blog/no-ai-here-response-to-mozilla...

Zen:

> Based on Firefox, Zen also inherit its translation features

https://docs.zen-browser.app/user-manual/translate

While that may describe a few people, I don't think it fairly characterizes the backlash at all.

I want to love on Firefox. I've been using it since before it was "Firefox." I've championed it among co-workers and friends tirelessly. But over time, Firefox has become more and more unlovable, getting softer on privacy, altering settings in updates, foisting 'experiments' off on us, and now this AI nonsense.

I'm part of a large makerspace and have watched their market share dwindle among the nerds. Virtually no one is left.

True. But crypto is bad publicity and everyone knows it. At that point it's no better than going out wearing a swastika sign (sorry, Poe's law triggered) and saying it's an ancient Buddhist symbol.

> No, what FF is doing is implementing features like Translate (an ALREADY opt-in feature[0]) and semantic search

Did you read my comment? The problem is that this takes focus away from the browser core. Why did they kill Servo? Were are XUL API replacements that were promised? The AI fluff could have been an extension - and that would keep everyone happy.

> It feels off-mission.

Than he doesn't need to talk about it at all. Unless that's a vibe check that's it. Somebody already posted an xkcd of it, I'm just doubling: https://xkcd.com/463/

> We're eating our cake and what, complaining that the baker's hands aren't made of gold?

Unfortunately it's pretty hard to define where "hand aren't made of gold" stops and "gotta call a HAZMAT decontamination team" starts.

> Meanwhile we're just attacking the last line of defense against Google (Chromium) taking over the internet?

The thing is: Google started as "don't be evil" as well. It didn't lasted because of inherit incentives issue. And so if Mozilla is the last line of defense it'd better have some distinguishing features other than "we are not google". Because if they keep focusing on "average user" (btw it's my firm belief that the said user doesn't exist outside management's heads) their incentives wouldn't be any different.

> So what do we privacy maximalists care? The forks give us exactly what we want.

That's what I'm doing personally. But the forks barely have resources to remove the crap, yet alone implement new features.

If you shove it into people's faces, they will have knee jerk reaction and hate it.

If the AI industry didn't desperately try to push it in every possible way in desperate bid to be profitable and it was just a thing that slowly gets better and is value added, not a nagging push, there would be far less of that.

But companies like MS have idea of consent of average rapist and will not even give option "no, I don't want copilot in teams", there is only "add it now" or "remind later"

Well, I guess it does use more energy than every existing data center, driving up costs for basic electronic components and thereby making every electronic device more expensive.

And I guess the results aren't quite as good, but if you squint and don't really care about art on a human level and just want to clap like a seal at the pretty pictures then it's enough.

And I guess economic forces will mean that some of them will lose their jobs when their bosses realize that they can get away with only needing half as many prompt artists.

But hey, at least we don't have to pay humans to make art anymore. How glorious that our Silicon Valley gods have delivered us from the hell of creating economic incentives for humans to express themselves to other humans.

Yeah, those screaming, "indoctrinated" artists are so impolite and crazy, aren't they? Don't they realize what we've done for them? We made the automatic art machine! They'll never get to make art again!

I wonder what that might mean!

And so far, we can assume that AI in Firefox will be like all the other stuff people don't care about, just optional, a button here, a menu-entry there, just waiting for interaction, but not harmful.

I know so many people who made that same argument, if you can call it that, about smartphones.

I recently listened to a podcast (probably The Verge) talking about how an author was suddenly getting more purchases from his personal website. He attributed it to AI chatbots giving his personal website as the best place to buy rather than Amazon, etc. An AI browser might be a way to take power away from all the big players.

> And it's not for a lack of trying, the results are just not what I need or want, and traditional browsing (and search engines, etc.) does do what I want.

I suspect I only Google for about 1/4 of things I used to (maybe less). Why search, wade through dubious results, etc when you can just instantly get the result you want in the format you want it?

While I am a techie and I do use Firefox -- that's not a growing niche. I think AI will become spectacularly better for non-techies because it can simply give them what they ask for. LLMs have solved the natural language query issue.

I'm also wondering how much of what they come up with could be implemented as an addon instead of a core part of the browser.

Seriously, I don't get the problem here. I don't want AI in my browser either, but it is pretty simple for us who care to switch away. It's even easy for those who aren't technically skilled!

If this is what stops Firefox from drowning then I'm all for it. They are our last line of defense from a Google controlled internet. What Firefox puts in their browser isn't that critical to me (i.e. doesn't affect me) as long as it stays open source and there are forks. But Firefox dying does! So yeah, I'm gonna root for Firefox even when it does things I don't want because what I care about far more than any specific browser feature is the internet not being controlled by any single entity.

So can we make sure we're fighting the right battles?

I'm not an Apple fan (rather an Apple hater if you would), but they are a perfect example of this. First, have a top quality niche product, then go into the big waters with the vision you got from the niche - and then people will actually be willing to give up bells and whistles the product that is good enough.

Mozilla have a well-established niche with a vision, but they can't monetize without giving up the vision they have (and apparently consider opening for small direct donations or maybe even direct bug/feature crowdsourcing not worth it). So they keep jumping on every sidetrack. And keep losing even the niche they have.

Mozilla doesn't need to play that game because they're not selling any AI.

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)?

Most people don't understand how the web works.

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.

Browsers without metaverse integration will be a non-starter.

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.

I've never seen a technology so advanced be so dismissed before.

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?

> any user

> In politics, a reactionary is a person who favors a return to a previous state of society which they believe possessed positive characteristics absent from contemporary society.

But I guess HackerNews is infamous for being conservative, so it's not too surprising.

The only "standard" expected from them is the same as any other for-profit company - "stick to your stated values and don't be duplicitous". For example, Apple, Meta, Microsoft are all lambasted here when they claim to "respect" user privacy and their products do the opposite.

Also, you should note that unlike these BiGTech that make multiple products and services, the company behind Firefox (and Thunderbird) makes only a few products and earns 100's of millions of dollars in annual revenue from it (some here in HN say they currently make more than a half a billion dollars a year now!). That's a lot of money. And yet, most of their products continues to be "shitty" (i.e. subpar). That's why they are losing user base. Instead of really improving their core product, the company just continues to seek new avenues of creating revenues. That's the "MBA CEO mindset" that everyone here in HN usually complain about. Do you want a browser that's faster and light on resources, or a browser that would display even more ads to you right in the browser? (Guess what Firefox prioritised?). Every user of Firefox can already avail ChatGPT (or some other AI service) if they want to. The only reason to embed it onto Firefox is to just make extra money by violating user privacy (we all know AIs are now personal data harvesters), without adding any real value to the browser.

Now, consider the opensource philosophy they espouse. Again, with the 100's of millions of dollars they have in hand, Gecko, the rendering engine of the browser is still not a truly modular piece of code that can be easily used in other projects. And that's by design (this is why most of the browsers that use the Firefox-Gecko codebase are just Firefox clones with superficial changes to the UI and config). If I remember right, Nokia spent considerable effort to try and reuse Gecko (make it modular?) - https://web.archive.org/web/20180830103541/http://blog.idemp... - and Sailfish OS now uses that fork in its mobile browser. (It was only when Mozilla feared that they were losing the mobile browser war that they decided to offer Gecko as a hacky modular codebase for only the Android platform, to be used as webviews or create other browsers. Similar options for Desktop platforms still don't exist).

Isn't all that a valid criticism, whether you are a capitalist or an opensource developer?

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.

Forcing everyone to by default use AI isn't freedom. I might as well just use Chrome.

Normal users install Chrome.

because no one in right mind, would opt-in AI seriously. and definitely never on corporate machine

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.

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.

Waterfox, Librewolf and Mullvad Browser are worth considering.

0. https://glide-browser.app/

Getting to the discussion at hand, which of those pings are AI related? I didn't say FF isn't making network calls.

Kagi. Zed. That's it, that's the list.

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?

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

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.

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.

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.

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`.

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!".

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.

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!”

I guess we shouldn't worry though, just some random law thought that what they were doing was "selling personal data" but we shouldn't think that it was. No further explanation required.

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.

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.

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.

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.

[citation needed]

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/

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.

I'm still waiting for the polls and statistics and feature requests of this. The "without asking" is the primary problem.