Starting with Firefox 148, which rolls out on Feb. 24, you’ll find a new AI controls section within the desktop browser settings. It provides a single place to block current and future generative AI features in Firefox.
They actually listened to the community, thats very nice.
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Can someone please put a responsible adult in charge of that damned organization?
Pepperidge Farms remembers when Firefox had a control like that to turn JavaScript on and off. The rest of you are supposed to have forgotten. Oops.
There is still NoScript, which is arguably much better than that, since it offers more granular control
I wrote myself a little plugin for firefox.
It runs nice, and I want to install it permanently. It does something I want.
Can I? No. Why? Because Firefox… Apparently I’m not adult enough to control my own browser. WTF.
I have to either get their developer build or become a developer with an account. WTF.
So I think, I don’t want their developer build, I just want this plugin— I make a mozilla plugin developer account- because apparently that’s how I’m supposed to do it- I try to create the plugin upload —
Can I? No. Why? Because they want my phone number before I can make a plugin just for myself. WTF.
So - I ask ChatGPT if there is any work around for this, can it search, I just want to run my own plugin, I don’t want the developer build, I don’t want the developer account, I just want to run my own plugin- ChatGPT says it can’t help me because I’m not adhering to Firefox’s EULA. WTF.
So I give up on the plugin - and today, I just happen to notice Mozilla silently turned on SYNC for my web history for that fucking Mozilla plugin developer account. So I guess I’m sending them everything I ever do on the web. WTF.
I go and try to find out what information they’ve stolen from me, can I find it? No. The have some link, to another link, to another link, to another link, which eventually ends up on some page where I can ask them to pretty please send me what information they stole. Why can I not see this without writing a letter! WTF.
WTF WTF WTF. I hate Mozilla.
Please let them burn in software hell.
/rant
@blaggle42 @solrize
https://www.w3tutorials.net/blog/firefox-add-ons-how-to-install-my-own-local-add-on-extension-permanently-in-firefox/There er multiple ways but yes they don’t make it easy cause the want to make the attack vector aka ( a “friend” sent you a email with the “hottest new” firefox extension ) as small as possible.
I understand what you are saying - but - if I want to install a program on my computer - I should be allowed to do so - the same with firefox — maybe it might need me doing the equivalent of sudo, entering some password - or just clicking through, “ok, yes I know, extensions can do bad things.”, “yes I really know that I shouldn’t install an extension if I don’t know exactly what it is” 10 times, but — etc…
I just don’t buy the “attack vector” argument. There are many ways to mitigate, without removing the ability.
Anyway, in a way this was a good experience - I am going to try to ditch firefox sooner than later now.
Meh, no script does that quite well, not?
No it doesn’t, you want to be able to turn off JS while it is running, and that is now impossible. Noscript stops it from running in the first place and that breaks too many sites.
That’s all well and good that they give you the ability to turn it off. What’s not changing though is that most of their focus will be on integrating AI which most people don’t want. As a result the pace of other new features being tested/implemented will probably slow significantly.
Plus, even if you can turn it off, the feature is still in the code, needing updates, etc., even if you don’t ever use it. Literal bloat.
HDR never, woo…
What features do you still need after 22 years of development?
HDR, hardware accelerated/parallelized layout engine (servo)
Also we have all seen this movie before. They launch with promises of having a choice to turn it on or off… until it’s no longer a choice.
When did Firefox take away a choice that was previously offered?
A lot of these are extensions that are folded into the main Firefox feature set, experimental features or not even related to the browser?
Pocket’s dead now.
Like another user said, where’s “open image in new tab”? (I notice you didn’t reply to them.)
Remember XUL extensions and real browser themes?
Remember when you didn’t need a developer account to make extensions and you could distribute them via your own website?
But of course, Firefox never takes away choices that were previously offered.
The “open image in new tab” context menu option, off the top of my head, it has been 1000 small things with them, no 1 outrageous removal, but tons of them that didnt make big impacts yet still annoyed people who used them.
This happened quite often for various UI settings etc. Often there were technical reasons for removing the option (e.g. rewrites where they dropped features with low usage), but it is a real thing.
You were always able to turn it off, now it’s easier.
You haven’t seen this movie before with Firefox. All the ad stuff and sponsoring integrations like Pocket were always very easy to turn off.
Are you talking about Microsoft?
To be fair, their reduced focus and the potential pace improvement through LLM assisted coding might cancel each other out. I wouldn’t be surprized if the resulting pace change is net zero or better.
That said: I like Firefox local translations, but haven’t found a use case for its other AI features yet.
the potential pace improvement through LLM assisted coding
Have we actually seen any evidence that LLM’s increase the pace of coding? Because in most of the reports I’ve seen there is no measurable difference even when users feel like they’re faster
There are some concerns but yes, development generally accelerates: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.03156
They meant with the cleaning up after it.
we present a systematic literature review of 37 peer-reviewed studies published between January 2014 and December 2024
So they AI summarized other people’s work.
Most studies are exploratory (64%) and methodologically diverse, but lack longitudinal and team-based evaluations.
And later acknowledge there are major gaps in methodology. I wouldn’t be linking to this as proof of accelerated dev imho.
They actually listened to the community, thats very nice.
No. Listening to the community would involve not polluting the browser with that shit in the first fucking place.
I think the main normie user kinda wants AI stuff? I guess most current Firefox users are some kind of nerd, but Mozilla would like to get to normie users again, which are clearly the bigger share of all users, soo…
I’ll just leave this here
It’s FireFox but
- no telemetry/spying-on-you
- no AI
- uBlock Origin enabled
In other words, it’s the open source browser Mozilla was always supposed to be.
Plus it’s typically not more than 12 hrs behind any FF release.Accept one of our free tanks ! They get 100 MPG and go 100 MPH over any terrain!
people (not calling you out specifically) keep suggesting Librewolf like it isn’t driving around a city in a tank. it gets the job done, sure, but most people will not tolerate its faults. Suggest something more in-between like Waterfox at least.
Suggesting Librewolf is like asking people to browse the web via Tor. it works, sure, but the inconvenience will make most people give up on gecko-based browsers and give into Google/chrome via Brave or the million other chrome-in-sheep’s-wool browsers.
Let’s recommend viable alternatives: https://www.waterfox.com/
What kind of inconviniences? I have experienced literally none - except you may need to enable DRM. That’s one then
Tor
No, it is very different from suggesting TBB or even just TB.
A few websites may have some rough edges. Some of that will come from uBlock Origin. Some will come from LW defaults like letterboxing/anti-fingerprinting.
And some websites will have issues with vanilla FF, because it’s not Chrome.
Yes, for some sites you may need to turn off a privacy setting. I have run across 2-3 such, usually an over-engineered Django or custom-coded WordPress site. 98%+ of the time, I don’t notice.
I’ve been using it for a while, and it feels almost indistinguishable from regular Firefox. Broken sites are not a common problem.
most people will not tolerate its faults
What faults?
Let’s pull some obvious ones from the feature list!
- Include only privacy respecting search engines like DuckDuckGo and Searx.
- Always force user interaction when deciding the download location of a file
- Disable autoplay of media.
- Disable search suggestions and ads in the urlbar.
- Disable Firefox Sync, unless explicitly enabled by the user.
For some other ones:
- Logs you out of everything every time you close the browser.
- If memory serves, it letterboxes by default. If it doesn’t, ignore this line, I haven’t used it in a while.
I’m not saying I don’t like these features. I do. I only accept login cookies from services I host myself.
Most people will see that as an extreme annoyance the first time it happens, close the browser, uninstall it, and never try another Firefox fork again.
Most people care enough about privacy to want convenient ways to increase it. Most people do not care enough about privacy to have to log into Facebook every single time they restart their browser.
All of these are disableable, very few people will even bother looking into how to disable them. They will stop using the browser.
more in-between like Waterfox
is that one still owned by an advertising company?
The original creator owns it again. That’s why I use it. If he sells it or whatever then I’ll switch to librewolf. I just don’t want ai bs in my browser but I am not a privacy nerd either.
I’d say Mullvad’s browser is more like browsing the net via TOR, but Librewolf is only about 2 steps behind it.
But yeah there are so many others that will still feel usable to someone who doesn’t think the everyone isn’t part of their threat model
How about they just… not include the LLM bullshit in the first place? Just make a browser that strictly renders text and images according to W3C standards?
When chrome came out, it was pretty much that. Super fast, very bare bones. But people loved it because of the speed and the simplicity.
Im curious how Orion will turn out. There is supposed to be an alpha for Linux coming out now this February.
When Chrome came out, a lot of us knew that letting DoubleClick have any control over access to the Internet was a bad idea. This is another part of that.
It was just Safari (WebKit) at that point.
Now, people will complain that pizzaz doesn"t load at all, because Chrome does a vaguely defined JS-thing in a opinionated way. And then they use something Chromium-based.
All ready left that version of Firefox over a month ago.
Thanks for posting, but people will find something else stupid to complain about, because there is pretty obviously a storm of propaganda against Firefox, which I very much suspect is driven by interests that are against an open and free internet.
Blocking these features may calm some people, but in reality, none of these features were used for anything unless specifically used by the user. So the claim of it making Firefox slower or using more resources or being used for telemetry were all outright lies.
A sentiment is tried to be created that Firefox is just as bad as Chrome, Edge, Brave and Safari when nothing could be further from the truth. But even people who consider themselves IT savvy are falling for it. 🙁
Interestingly these attacks on Firefox coincide with Chrome getting steadily worse, forcing Googles own standards and preventing plugins that block advertising, while reducing functionality for Firefox on Google/Alphabet owned sites.
I wish more people realized that using a simple policies.json file can easily transform their Firefox to behave more like LibreWolf out of the box, meaning (as someone else mentioned earlier):
- telemetry disabled by default
- AI features disabled by default
- uBlock Origin enabled out-of-the-box
It is sad (and funny) that people are calling Mozilla and Firefox shady but then installing Firefox-based “forks” from random 3rd parties. I wonder how many people realize that “forks” like LibreWolf are not patching the spooky AI or telemetry source code out of the browser at all, they are pretty much just shipping Firefox with their opinionated custom configurations and a different branding.
I don’t think the proliferation of bad press is anything other than a chronicle of the decline of Firefox.
I’ve been ride or die with Firefox since early, and I’ve never daily driven Chrome. But I’ve had to keep Chrome installed to look at the sites that don’t play with FF. Little by little, FF get’s worse, and most of the “worst” these days are features, not bugs. Though their are plenty of bugs. They certainly deserve praise for keeping faith with ublock. And I appreciate that they respect privacy more than Alphabet.
I want Mozilla to succeed. I just remember when Mozilla made the case with the quality of their software, rather than the quality of their ethics.
Websites not playing nice with Firefox has nothing to do with Firefox itself, and everything to do with lazy web devs only testing with chromium based browsers and maybe Safari.
Websites not playing nice with firefox is website developers fault not bothering to test. Heck, some sites even block you from using firefox even if it would work anyway (ex: some days ago i needed to use a site that said “you are using firefox, it will not work so just use chrome” when i changed my useragent to mimic a chrome browser, the site worked perfectly…that’s just dev lazyness!)
What do you mean “they actually listened to the community”? If they’d listen to the community, there’d be NO AI whatsoever.
With Firefox’s new CEO (Who is a douche canoe) I would not be at all surprised if this is the only development going in to the browser for the last two months.
They plan waste $130 million on AI bullshit. Imagine a fraction of that invested into the actual browser. I can’t even eat as much as I want to vomit.
Hey let’s do the thing no one wants because our management is incompetent.
Fuck this BS.
You don’t like having a toggle to turn off AI?
I don’t want AI in my browser. Period.
One more gotcha in the AI booster arsenal: wrong model, wrong prompt, not enough agents, just don’t look at it. While none of those things addresses the actual issues of watching everyone piss away their money into the pit for no reason other than psychosis.
Personally, I’m going to continue using Zen Browser… Mozilla is too shady, but at the same time, I don’t want to give Google any more power!
