Where are the AI features in Firefox? Looking around right now the only one I see is right click tab -> Summarize page (NEW). I googled a bit and see they have some grouping of tabs feature I've never used/seen (or want). The only other maybe AI feature I remember seeing is the odd left hand bar that is there on fresh installs and I usually remove to declutter.
Are those the features this kill switch removes or was there a deeper issue here?
"- Translations, which help you browse the web in your preferred language.
- Alt text in PDFs, which add accessibility descriptions to images in PDF pages.
- AI-enhanced tab grouping, which suggests related tabs and group names.
- Link previews, which show key points before you open a link.
- AI chatbot in the sidebar, which lets you use your chosen chatbot as you browse, including options like Anthropic Claude, ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini and Le Chat Mistral."
I wonder what sort of user testing made them decide that what Firefox users really need is a chat bot in the site bar. Isn't a chat bot in a tab good enough?
And calling translation "AI" seems like deceitful retroactive rebranding. Why is machine translation suddenly "AI" now? It was never branded as such before. Is "AI" here just used to mean machine learning?
I saw someone else using this feature. It does more than just be a chat bot. You can direct it to automate tasks like go to a web page, search for stuff, etc. -- I asked it to go to pinterest and download the top ten images for "cyberpunk," and it succeeded. Nifty I suppose.
IMHO no. Every chatbot has so much wasted space, it really doesn't need to be full-width. Also, what's easier?
Option 1: Being on a tab, copying the URL of the tab, switching to the chatbot tab, pasting the URL and writing some instructions about what to do with that tab.
Option 2: Clicking on the "summarise page" button (whether from the sidebar or from right-click context menu), and having the browser pre-fill the prompt with the URL + the reader view version of the content on that page.
Then you right-click on the AI button and click on "remove", but that's a whole different discussion than what you asked in the previous comment.
It's also why I really don't understand the need for a kill switch to begin with (other than pleasing annoying users), you don't need to wait for it. You can already get rid of the chatbot integration, there's a remove button already. It's also kind of annoyingly easy to misclick it, so they're just gonna remove it from those places and put it away in settings and those same annoying users will consider that a win.
"You people"? Take a look at my comment history and see my takes on AI please, but this is like the least harmful way of integrating it and yet "you people" are the loudest about it.
Can you do the same on Windows? Is it tucked away in settings on macOS? Can you disable it on Google? Can you disable it anywhere else? Why are you the most vocal about the integration that is literally the easiest to turn off? You need two clicks to do it right now, you're gonna need at least three once this kill switch is in settings.
The AI boosting from the likes of you is the reason Mozilla is sinking Firefox by turning it into an "AI browser". I don't want anything to do with that.
I would've been equally outraged about Windows becoming an "agentic OS" if I had been a Windows user. I don't like what Apple is doing to my phone and laptop, but at least they haven't promised to make the iPhone an "AI phone".
More than one thing can be bad at a time, and right now, this conversation is about Mozilla. We can have a conversation about other bad things some other time.
Again, look at my comment history. I'm not discussing AI-as-a-whole because as you've pointed out it's not the topic of this discussion. I'm discussing how trivial it is to turn off as opposed to literally anywhere else, and that's not even discussing the provider choice you don't get anywhere else.
There's a whole section in macOS/iOS settings titled "Apple Intelligence and Siri" with ChatGPT being the only option, and you're seemingly happy with that compromise. Yet here you are complaining about an integration that's even easier to turn off and allows you to pick between 5 providers. There is literally no way of triggering it that doesn't immediately show you the "turn it off" button as it is right now (as in before this update reaches me).
I also invite you to go to firefox.com right now and find me a single mention of AI, since you for some reason are imagining that it is being advertised as an "AI browser".
> There's a whole section in macOS/iOS settings titled "Apple Intelligence and Siri" with ChatGPT being the only option, and you're seemingly happy with that compromise
If you read my comment again, it might occur to you that no, I'm not happy with what Apple is doing to iOS and macOS:
I don't like what Apple is doing to my phone and laptop
> I also invite you to go to firefox.com right now and find me a single mention of AI, since you for some reason are imagining that it is being advertised as an "AI
browser".
Firefox will grow from a browser into a broader ecosystem of trusted software.
Firefox will remain our anchor.
It will evolve into a modern AI browser and support a portfolio of new and trusted software additions.
"It will evolve into a modern AI browser". I don't want an AI browser, modern or otherwise.
They're describing a chat bot side bar as a useful feature that belongs in a browser, as a feature that's enabled by default. That's AI boosting (not boasting).
> I wonder what sort of user testing made them decide that what Firefox users really need is a chat bot in the site bar. Isn't a chat bot in a tab good enough?
If it wasn't because I find myself using the AI-sidebar all the time I would probably have shared your opinion.
I guess it's just quite convenient to have it separated from the "regular" tabs and their history.
Wouldn't be the first time. Google gave an option to turn off gemini in Gmail, and suddenly the inbox tabs they had for over a decade decided to disappear.
On paper yes. The problem is that they clutter the UI, they trigger at weird times and they turn out to be less useful that they may appear.
Then there's also people, like me, who just want the browser to browse the web. I don't want link preview (annoying feature), Firefox isn't my PDF viewer, I don't have that many tabs that I need to group them and I don't use AI chatbots.
So having a single button to disable all of these features is pretty great. I still want a Firefox Lite, that just does browsing and allows me to add the few extension I want to whatever feature I believe is missing.
Page translation is mentioned in TFA. It appears in the address bar on pages detected to be in a foreign language, and is also in the main hamburger menu.
Lol. At first I was thinking it was a AI kill switch on web pages (like Google overview...). I guess was being naive that they would do that, and also weird because there's barely any AI stuff on Firefox indeed...
In addition to completely disabling AI, I found the following setting extremely convinent to disable in about:config. They clutter up my right-click on a link or on text selection.
I wish we could also disable "Send via email" when right clicking a picture, I constantly misclick and userChrome.css does not work for the context menu on macOS since it's natively rendered...
Ironically, I bet that a significant majority of the users that turn on the AI kill switch — which must have some kind of phone-home telematics attached — will also be users who have disabled Firefox metrics collection and so will not have their opinion counted.
So, the most effective path here for y’all to be heard is not flipping the switch off yourself (do so anyways!) — anyone who cares at this stage has probably opted out of being counted already, after all — but instead to ensure that news of this switch spreads to absolutely as many non-tech people as possible. Don’t argue that they should run some script that shuts off their metrics and phone home and updates. Just convince them to shut off the AI and explain that this is why their browser got slow about a year ago! They’ll flip off the switch gleefully, their phone-home will count them, and y’all will have the strongest possible impact on the telematics graphs at Mozilla.
I already ran the disable process manually on the computers I have friends and family IT duties towards, so I’ll go back and do the AI switch to be sure it’s counted next week. Yes, this is a crap way to be heard. But making a mark on feature opt-out graphs is probably the only hope we have left to get their executive leadership to stop drowning the browser for its own good.
The other thing people can do is install Firefox and use it. An uptick in user share also serves as a metric to reinforce the move. Let's be honest, most people complaining are using chrome or some flavor.
But current Firefox users could probably temporarily turn on telemetry, activate the kill switch, and turn telemetry back off. Just make sure you wait long enough to ensure the information is sent
They should get the best metrics out of update server communications anyhow, 30% or more users getting update downloads than having AI enabled should be obvious.
I've read this three times now and still don't understand you. Do you think people don't update their software? Are you just counting every update as people happy about the kill switch?
There'll be so much noise in that signal it'll be almost useless. You can't differentiate it from anything else. For all anyone knows it happened because the word Firefox was in the top story on hacker news
Approximately all people update Firefox so you don't need telemetry to count "AI disabled" installations, instead you can derive it as "updates requested" minus "AI enabled".
But the AI and telemetry toggles aren't coupled. While we can assume that users who disable telemetry are more likely to have AI disabled as well this still isn't translating to user numbers.
Hm. I don't think I follow "isn't translating to user numbers", could you elaborate?
Here's my thinking:
There's 100 users getting updates.
There's 40 users sending telemetry with AI enabled
There's 10 users sending telemetry with AI disabled
So we have 50 people not sending telemetry and using or not using AI. If we assume more likely but not overwhelmingly more it's 30 people.
So we end up with 40+20 with AI, and 10+30 without?
If my choice is between a single blatant signal of hostility to AI that can’t be misunderstood, and hoping that a pro-AI company’s executives invested in voluntarily correlating two different sets of logs to prove itself wrong, then I’m taking door number one.
> will also be users who have disabled Firefox metrics collection and so will not have their opinion counted.
Gee. If only there was a way to collect users opinions on things. Welp.. guess we have to live with subtly spying on everything they do with our software.
Most people who are vocal aren't representative of users.
Many vocal people aren't even users.
Don't get me wrong, I turn off telemetry, but you're acting like it's easy to get that information. You act like people don't scream when Firefox prompts people with surveys. You act like there isn't bias in survey takers.
If you just pretend everything is easy we'll just end up reinventing the same evils we're trying to fight today. Unfortunately most evils are created from good intentions. I hear there's an entire road paved that way
> but you're acting like it's easy to get that information.
It is, relatively speaking.
> You act like people don't scream when Firefox prompts people with surveys.
Surveys without proper response and adjustments aren't passing feedback, it's political theatre. People groan about surveys because it takes time and rarely shows results reflectant of the responses.
We know the system is broken. Hard to shame us into thinking we're the ones who broke it.
> You act like there isn't bias in survey takers.
You act like statisticians don't spend half their field accounting around bias.
>we'll just end up reinventing the same evils we're trying to fight today.
Let's have the old evils dealt with before worrying about creating new evils who happen to do the exact same thing as the "old evils" (spoilers: they are the same picture).
If we replaced telemetry with some sort of survey emails and phone calls, we'd get exactly another 500-thread discussion on HN about how "Mozilla is collecting emails to sell to the highest bidder!", "Mozilla is sending us spam!" and whatnot.
Arguing that telemetry is wrong doesn’t seem to have stopped Firefox from using it. If your fight against telemetry is a higher priority than your fight against AI in the browser, good luck and more power to you! I’m just making sure no one makes that decision by accident.
I think at this point they know all these opinions pretty well, but they simply don't care or see better growth options by targeting users who don't belong to that particular bubble. They see OpenAI approaching the same active user counts as Facebook and they want a slice of that pie. And the majority of that pie is non-techies.
The best thing about Firefox telemetry is that it can't be easily disabled. There are many setting that control it. Including an external scheduled task that can't be disabled using Firefox itself. And even if you delete the task it will come back after update.
This is great news. I recently updated AMD Adrenalin, and the "minimal" version doesn't let you change the distribution of unified RAM on Strix Halo. I installed the "full" version, and it wanted me to install a 10GB "local AI assistant" to "help" me configure it. When I opened the program, it showed me a non-dismissable fake chat that occupied 25% of the screen, prompting me to click it and replace it with a real one.
I remember when every other software prompted you to install Bonzi Buddy or some other intrusive search bar. This AI push is even worse.
Much of the content online is already AI generated, and many websites have their code AI generated, so you'd soon be left with nothing but blank pages. :)
And Brave's built-in blocker uses uBO's and other lists, including allowing trusted filters (which can inject high risk scripts into your sites) automatically. So yes, you are using 3rd party scripts already, and no, they can't monitor all of the commits from all those lists.
Good. I was fearing Firefox would also end up having too many AI-Features i do not want. But switching to Chromium-Browsers isnt an option anyways because of their Manifest V3 extension model. Restricting blockers? Whats next?
I don't see the appeal, it takes more "clicks" to do many actions and I had to disable the ridiculous new oversized "rectangle tab preview block" (whatever it's called).
yes exactly, their design was already better than chrome and condensed but now we have these outdated round and padding heavy toy controls again, just why?
This UI is great but do you get this horrible thing where sometimes the browser is shows a white screen and you have to force stop the app? Happens all the time on the latest version for my Pixel 9a. And did on my Pixel 7 too before. It's really horrible and I can't pin down any rhythm or reason other than loosely seeming to happen more often when I'm in battery saver mode.
I actually liked the previous UI much more, the new one looks like a baby toy and uses more space because of the control padding. completely unnecessary.
Firefox does what some people want, people complain. Firefox does what other people want, people complain. Firefox does what both people want, people complain.
I'm sorry, but we'll never get corporations to do what we want if we don't throw them the smallest bone when we get our way. You need positive reinforcement too, not just negative. If it's all negative they just stop caring and you get companies lot Google who just don't give a shit anymore.
And yes, there are some AI features I like and I want in the browser. I get a lot of utility out of translation as well as semantic search of my history. I don't want agents in my browser but get, Firefox is giving us choices.
Look, no one needs to like Firefox, but let's also be honest, it's the best we got right now. Google, Apple, and Microsoft are shoving agents down our throats and putting us in walled gardens that are getting harder and harder to break from. I don't care what flavor of chromium you use, Google is still using it to control the way the web works. Everyone loves to say how chromium is has greater coverage of standards but never takes a second to question who sets those standards.
I'm sorry guys, that's the state of things now. You can't fight Google by switching to chromium. It's still their vehicle to eat the internet. Our choices right now are Safari, Firefox, and maybe ladybird. It's slim pickings and nothing is close to perfect. At this point it doesn't even matter if Mozilla is evil, because at least they're the enemy of our enemy. Google is keeping them on life support to avoid monopoly claims but how long will they need that?
So what, we're just going to hand the keys of the kingdom to the guys selling artisian turd sandwiches because what, there isn't enough mayo on your ham sandwich? Because you don't like ham?
We got a win. Celebrate. Take the break from being cynical. There's bigger battles to fight and there'll be more tomorrow. Take the night off and don't be a sore winner
> So what, we're just going to hand the keys of the kingdom to the guys selling artisian turd sandwiches because what, there isn't enough mayo on your ham sandwich? Because you don't like ham?
Firefox is the artisan turd sandwich. They are burning dev time on features barely anyone asked, while bleeding market share for last decade
Who has expressed a desire for Firefox to become "an AI browser"?
Because that's the source of the complaints. I don't want to use an "AI browser", kill switch or not. If this "AI browser" dies because of their mission to destroy community goodwill, good. I'm sick of giving the benefit of the doubt every time they royally fuck up. This situation where they're the steward of the only non-Google browser is not tenable, something needs to change.
> This situation where they're the steward of the only non-Google browser is not tenable, something needs to change.
So what, you're going to help Google shove the knife in deeper? Idk man, seems like a bad way to fight Google.
But honestly it just feels like you didn't even read my comment. I'm sorry that it's a lot, but I'm petty sure people can handle 10-30 seconds of reading. I even said it doesn't matter if Mozilla is evil. How do you turn that into me giving them the benefit of the doubt. I'm literally just arguing that there's slim pickings and to not help our bigger enemy to kill their enemies. It doesn't matter if their enemies ate evil, you're just helping the bigger evil get bigger and consolidate power. I'm saying "there's more important problems right now, not be fucking dumb and get distracted or before you know it you'll lose your head"
Letting Mozilla torpedo the only non-Google browser is also a bad way to fight Google. It's looking bleak. The only hope is that Mozilla dies and someone more serious picks up the mantle. Not sure who that would be though.
But that's not what happened. That's not the context of the thread. The battle was won. So celebrate. The war may not be over but it's not like we lost.
> someone more serious picks up the mantle.
Let's cross that bridge when/IF we get there. But until then, maybe don't set the stage for them to take up that mantle. If all we do is complain then obviously they'll just learn to ignore us.
No battle has been won. Firefox's market share is dwindling, and they're going full steam ahead with turning Firefox into an "AI browser". Yes, they are adding an option to turn off AI features, but I don't want to use an "AI browser with AI features disabled", I want to use a normal web browser. Mozilla is not delivering that.
Note that just not bogging down Firefox with AI features is not enough here. Firefox market share has been going downhill for most of my life, long before they appointed this new AI-crazed CEO. I don't know what the solution is, but it's clear that it's not Mozilla.
I don't mind the AI features per se, but is there a configuration setting to sent the traffic through a local AI Gateway to prevent the AI from receiving private information? At the very least to track what is sent over the wire.
last time when I updated Firefox, the package manager began building ONNX Runtime from source, which my "minuscule" 16GB of RAM couldn't handle. I want that during install time, as I don't like the idea of rebuilding ONNX every time Firefox updates, period.
no, NixOS Unstable. normally, they precompile such stuff, but ONNX decided that it wants to link against my ROCm instance specifically. looks like soon we will have to resort to dirty workarounds akin to those in Blender (HIP, CUDA support)
Maybe it's just me but why is it on by default? Why is this shit not off in the first place? Why can't Firefox just be a browser with great html, css, js rendering and then have a bunch of toggles for extra crap that people want? Do they actually have metrics that show "When we enable this crap by default we make an extra $X Million per year"? I'd put money on that being untrue. I bet it's like the data-driven ad spend - I've yet to see anything that proves that hoovering up bajillions of data points on each person moves the needle on spending beyond just showing a context-relevant ad, e.g. An ad for fishing gear on a blog post about fishing gear!
Honestly, I feel more and more every day like old-man-shaking-fist-at-clouds! Can we not just have something that works without spying, without engagement-driven shit switched on all the fucking time?
I think of the Simpsons Mr Brown meme where he's asking "Is it me that's wrong?".
Before, we did not need to disable AI stuff. Now Mozilla forced us (that is those of us who don't like or use AI) into an extra step. Guess the only thing worse is being given no choice at all though.
the kill switch framing is interesting because it treats AI features as a coherent unit you'd want to disable together. in practice most AI features in browsers are pretty granular -- autocomplete, summarize page, translate. the users who want to disable AI usually mean 'stop sending my browsing data to a model endpoint,' not 'disable the local spell checker.' a per-feature data-flow disclosure might be more useful than a binary kill switch.
Thing is, there's a large (or at least certainly vocal) contingent
of users (and mostly techies, to boot) that view "AI" as the Devil, and transformer models as the original sin, and they want to refuse to partake, wholesale.
This feature seems to be a nod to people with this worldview.
And even if there aren't that many bad AI features now, they've signalled their intent for Firefox to become an "AI browser". I don't know what they mean by that, but I know I don't want it. The chat bot sidebar is surely just the beginning.
It's primarily in response to the backlash from people who don't want an "AI browser" that they're promising a kill switch. But I don't want to use an "AI browser with AI features disabled", I just wanna use a regular web browser...
To save users from copy-pasting to a separate chatbot instance, or installing sketchy extensions? It's clunky, but it's helpful and exposes users to more alternatives. AFAIK it can be made to connect to local models now, too.
LLM side tab is a powerful mode of AI use that most people haven't experienced yet; for some reason this space seems underdeveloped publicly relative to some proprietary/internal solutions at some companies that I have knowledge of.
> I don't want to use an "AI browser with AI features disabled", I just wanna use a regular web browser...
Is there a difference beyond branding? FWIW, branding does matter and I hope Firefox remains a "browser with (optional) AI" and not "AI browser".
I don't know what Mozilla means by "AI browser", but one would assume it means more than "regular browser with an optional chat bot sidebar". I don't wanna figure out what it means, I don't wanna use anything that could fairly be described as an "AI browser".
> I don't know what Mozilla means by "AI browser",
Well it's not like they're being quiet about it. They've openly discussed what features they're working on and planning. So maybe start there.
> "regular browser with an optional chat bot sidebar". I don't wanna figure out what it means
It's not a hard thing you figure out. Optional means you don't have to use it. In fact, if you never open it you'll never know it exists and you'll never have to interact with it. It is an opt in system. No one is making you do anything so stop acting like it.
Fwiw, I don't use the AI sidebar. I'd have forgotten it existed if HN didn't bring it up as if it's shoved in your face like some chatbot in an IDE. But I guess if it was the latter people wouldn't be angry
Your quote doesn't make sense, you can't just rip a sentence fragment out of its context and criticize it. The thing I don't wanna figure out what means is the term "AI browser". I know what a chat bot sidebar is.
My code editor has a built-in chat bot sidebar that I use every day. It's not a huge stretch that people who use chatbot sidebars in other applications would also want one in their browser.
ChatGPT is the #6 most popular website in the world, why wouldn't a browser want tighter integration with such a popular kind of service?
Funfact: Firefox already had a Facebook sidebar and integration back in 2012! https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/firefox-introduces-new-s...
The Social API was later removed though because it was wildly unpopular (unrelated but man look at the good macOS and Firefox design in the screenshot...)
The way users use Facebook and LLMs are so massively different, it almost seems like a bad faith argument to equate them.
Facebook is mostly scrolling the timeline and passive consumption. It doesn't benefit from being on the side because the content you interact with on Facebook is completely separate from the content on your other tabs.
In contrast, LLMs have ongoing conversations that the user can come back to, and each conversation might relate to multiple tabs that the user is working on. On top of that, it's a very common occurrence that the user has questions about, or a task to be done using the content of the current page. This makes LLM and chatbot integration much more useful than a Facebook integration.
Also if you have the Facebook Messenger installed, Firefox already gives you an integration to share things with your Facebook contacts.
They kinda already do. Google is built in, just search right in there url bar. You also got DDG, Bing, Wikipedia, Amazon, EBay? They make it easy to add YouTube, I wouldn't be surprised if you could add Facebook.
And like every browser does that. It's been that way for like over a decade...
Okay, and? Is anyone complaining about being able to search your favorite search engine from within Firefox?
Do you genuinely think this is comparable to Facebook integration? Do you believe that it Mozilla announced Facebook account integration and a Facebook side bar tomorrow, people's reaction to that would be, "oh this is just like what they did with search, this is fine"?
If not, isn't your comment a tiny bit disingenuous?
> My code editor has a built-in chat bot sidebar that I use every day.
Even as a vim user I don't get why an AI chat bot shoved into an IDE is endlessly praised while an optional hidden chatbot in a browser is treated like some grave insult. Last I checked, OpenAI was the 5th most visited website. No one complained that browsers made it easier to interface with the most popular website (Google) by directly typing into the url bar. FFS you can also do that with the 8th most popular website, Wikipedia.
I seriously don't understand why everyone is upset about that. Do what I do and just don't open it or interact with it. No one is making you use it. It's trivial about if bytes because it's literally just a wrapper. So it doesn't affect you, why let it live rent free in your head and make you angry? Just sounds like you're looking for things to complain.
I ... am not convinced that the people who praise Microsoft for shoving Copilot into VS Code are the same people who criticize Mozilla for shoving ChatGPT into Firefox
Personally I dislike both, and VS Code marketing itself as an "AI code editor" is one of many reasons why I would never consider using VS Code.
Why is there a search bar? A browser is more than a URL bar and a rendering engine.
Search is a common operation for many people and having a unified entrypoint for different search providers in the browser makes sense.
Chatbots are also quite common now and having a single chat box that users can use with any chatbot provider (even local ones!) is a good feature. If anything it helps break the big players' chances at a monopoly, since it makes switching between providers easier.
Why is it so hard for people to just...not use a feature they don't like. Sure, the popup was annoying, but I still like that it let me know this feature exists. I don't use it now, but it might be useful to me in the future or so I can recommend it to someone who needs something like that.
The chatbot sidebar is lacking one important feature, the ability to use your locally running LLMs. I had to install "Page Assist" to reproduce its functionality using my local ollama instance.
I figure, hey, at least Mozilla listened and provided the opt-out. It could be worse. I also happen to be in the "food defecating analogy" camp, and I can give the developer an unenthusiastic thumbs up for at least listening to the peanut gallery this time.
Ideally they wouldn't make the product bad, with a badness opt-out, in the first place, but everyone in Silicon Valley's got to feed the AI monkey. So I guess this is the best we can expect.
FWIW, I may be in the other camp but I strongly respect them for providing this feature. It perhaps wouldn't be necessary if the pro-AI push wasn't so ham-fisted and utterly disrespectful of users for the past years.
(Also I didn't realize how bad this push got until I visited California recently, and saw every other billboard - that's physical ad over a road - pushing some unqualified form of AI magic on me).
I use AI for coding, I don't want it on my browser. Actually I don't want it on Firefox. Let Brave be the AI browser. They could have used AI themselves to actually make their pathetic new split tab view usable.
> For those who wish to maintain some AI functionalities, a selective blocking option is available, enabling users to retain useful features like on-device translations while avoiding cloud-based services.
I think a lot of people are simply sick of seeing "HEY NEW AI FEATURE LOOK AT ME" popups everywhere. Shove something into people's faces often enough and it becomes like a red rag to a bull. That's probably not the only thing, but it's one big motivation why some people want it.
Sure, but then the people complaining would need to recognize that that's not happening. All the AI features are local models. The only thing not local is that side window you can open that can connect to a chatbot. It's also easy to disable.
Honestly, I think people just like complaining. I think they like complaining about Firefox even more. There's plenty to complain about, but aren't there bigger fish to fry right now? Seems like complaining about some minnows while we're being circled by a bunch of great whites
People vehemently asked for a kill switch that does exactly that - kill off all AI-related features. I quite like the local LLM translations etc., but jedem Tierchen sein Plaisierchen, as they say over here.
I don't think AI features in a browser are bad, and I think people who tut-tut it are overboard.
However, I think data control is critical and any kind of implicit cloud service such as transmission to remote AI servers should be toggle-able clearly, just like search autocomplete can be done.
All:
(1) Generated comments aren't allowed on HN - this rule predates LLMs but obviously applies even more now: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20%22generated%20comments%22&sort=byDate&type=comment
(2) If you see accounts that look like they're mostly posting genAI comments, please let us know at hn@ycombinator.com. That's how I found my way to these cases.
>"But I use it to help my English!!!! Who cares if it's AI if the comment is good??????????"
Please don't post generated or AI-filtered posts to HN. We want to hear you in your own voice, and it's fine if your English isn't perfect.
If you don't flag this shit when you see it, HN is fucked. The commons is fucked. And you all keep upvoting and replying to comments from accounts that start posting 30 comments a day after 2 years of silence that are all one tightly packed paragraph of pablum with the same structure and tells that are harder to fix than replacing the em dash with a double hyphen.
---
P.S. The actual comment is (surprise!) completely wrong. Visit Settings -> AI Controls and you will see a granular set of feature switches under the master kill switch. Each has a clear title and description and is independent.
I wish there were some updates about PWA support.
Haven’t heard about progress on this since last August.
Is it still in beta and only available on Windows?
I'm torn on whether to see this "AI Kill switch" as a win on respecting the users, or something to keep us distractewd while they ship through "Trusted Types" API that sounds like further restriction of end-user computing freedoms.
I would absolutely love to hear your reasoning that leads to type systems being considered a "restriction of end-user computing freedoms".
For those that don't know what trusted types are: Simply put, it splits the string type in to unsanitised_string_from_user and safe_escaped_string where unsafe strings can not be used in function parameters that only take a safe string That's heavily simplifying of course, but it's the basic idea.
Skimming the API docs on MDN, it makes sure the site vendor gets to run filtering code over anything you'd want to inject via e.g. user script or console, securing it with CSP. I expect this to make user scripts work as well as they do on Chrome now. If there's a workaround, I'd love to hear about it.
You may be thinking of the much-hated "Trusted Computing" initiative. "Trusted" here means that the JavaScript dev picks a sanitizing library they trust, not that Mozilla decides what software is trustworthy.
Nah, my issue isn't with users vs. Mozilla, but users vs. "JavaScript dev", specifically the difference of opinion on who should have final say on what gets executed and what doesn't.
Question is, can you sidestep or disable them in user scripts or in developer tools, without disabling CSP entirely or doing something even more invasive (and generally precluding use of that browser instance for browsing)?
It's basically ungoogled-chromium with manifest v2 support. Chromium is just technically superior than Firefox. It's a simple fact. The problem is the telemetry and AI features they added in it, which Helium or ungoogled-chromium doesn't have.
Why wasn't this there from the get go? Many people dislike the AI spam; I do too. I use chrome-based browsers usually (I also hate how dependent I have become on Google; default firefox refuses to play audio on my linux system as they claim we need pulseaudio, chrome instead makes no such assumption and audio plays just fine, so one can go and figure out why mozilla acts worse than Google here - all the google-bribe money killed its THINKING ability), so when I do, I use a few extensions such as "disable AI overview" or similar. It is annoying that we have to invest time in order to uncripple the world wide web. Browser vendors should be much more responsible, from the get go. But they all want to jump on the hype train, to milk out more money. Greed is the driving theme nowadays. (They could offer AI based on people who want or need that, rather than cram it down onto everyone.)
Quite a few of the LLM features actually add value for a certain group of users. Automated image descriptions for the visually impaired, automatic translation, ... Running those on local models is a net benefit for quite a few people, but they get a bad rep because they're "AI" and the current trend of shoving AI everyplace and with no means of escape means that AI in general has a - well deserved - bad reputation.
Firefox is the only holdout against the ad companies, and I'm counting Microsoft amongst those. It's a very good browser, independent with its own renderer, with decent ad blocking and decent performance.
It continually amazes me how people use a Google product on their desktop, as if they don't send enough data to an ad company. Actually, I'm not sure why I type this, any rational arguments are definitely not winning them over.
In theory you are not incorrect, but Google bribes Firefox and Google makes most money via ads. Mozilla gave up on firefox a long time ago.
> It continually amazes me how people use a Google product on their desktop, as if they don't send enough data to an ad company.
I'd love to have alternatives, but which ones are there? Firefox is not an alternative; audio does not work for me as I am pulseaudio free here. On chrome-based browsers audio works fine, out of the box, so it is not my system that is at fault; it is mozilla that is at fault. I also reported this, the lazy firefox dev said all Linux users use pulseuaudio these days. Well ...
I could recompile it but compiling firefox is a pain in the ...:
I am not going to use a build system that is +20 years old and only exists because Mozilla is too lazy to switch to cmake or meson/ninja as primary build tool.
> Actually, I'm not sure why I type this, any rational arguments are definitely not winning them over.
Well I gave one rational argument: can't play audio on my linux box if I use firefox (by default that is). I can give many more reasons too. You seem to make the point that Google is worse, so we should also use a bad product (firefox). I think we really need better browsers in general. Firefox simply isn't one and that is Mozilla's fault. There is a reason why it went into decline. Mozilla gave up the fight - the ad-money made it weak.
> Firefox is not an alternative; audio does not work for me. I could recompile it but compiling firefox is a pain in the ...
Obviously I don't have any data backing me up here, but I'm going to guess that that isn't the main reason why so many people choose Chrome over Firefox.
Firefox has been my main browser lately, and in my experience it covers pretty much every latest spec: no issues with Web Audio, WebGL (as well as WebGPU, I think), CSS features, etc. There are some select cases where Chrome has deployed something and Firefox is lagging (Background Fetch, for example) but that affects me more as a developer than a user. I cannot remember a single time when I opened something and it didn’t work in Firefox.
> I could recompile it but compiling firefox is a pain in the ...
Would second this. Mach uses Python, and the dependencies they use are a pain whenever no pre-built wheels are available. Especially so when you see that an "optional" Mach dependency for build system telemetry is what busting the configuration (not build) stage...
Do you mean you disable pipewire-pulse? Why? Or does audio not work for you with pipewire-pulse? I've never had issues with firefox and pipewire-pulse on my system.
I daily drive FF in desktop and Android but Brave has doubled in users the last few years, and my mildly tech-conscious acquaintances have settled on it after Manifest v3, while FF has been flat. That has been the greatest vote of no confidence against it ever.
It was discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46858492
Are those the features this kill switch removes or was there a deeper issue here?
"- Translations, which help you browse the web in your preferred language.
- Alt text in PDFs, which add accessibility descriptions to images in PDF pages.
- AI-enhanced tab grouping, which suggests related tabs and group names.
- Link previews, which show key points before you open a link.
- AI chatbot in the sidebar, which lets you use your chosen chatbot as you browse, including options like Anthropic Claude, ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini and Le Chat Mistral."
And calling translation "AI" seems like deceitful retroactive rebranding. Why is machine translation suddenly "AI" now? It was never branded as such before. Is "AI" here just used to mean machine learning?
Option 1: Being on a tab, copying the URL of the tab, switching to the chatbot tab, pasting the URL and writing some instructions about what to do with that tab.
Option 2: Clicking on the "summarise page" button (whether from the sidebar or from right-click context menu), and having the browser pre-fill the prompt with the URL + the reader view version of the content on that page.
It's also why I really don't understand the need for a kill switch to begin with (other than pleasing annoying users), you don't need to wait for it. You can already get rid of the chatbot integration, there's a remove button already. It's also kind of annoyingly easy to misclick it, so they're just gonna remove it from those places and put it away in settings and those same annoying users will consider that a win.
This is the grudging half-measure.
Many would have preferred the updates to come with a form asking for on or off. It didn't, so they complained, and this was the answer.
Can you do the same on Windows? Is it tucked away in settings on macOS? Can you disable it on Google? Can you disable it anywhere else? Why are you the most vocal about the integration that is literally the easiest to turn off? You need two clicks to do it right now, you're gonna need at least three once this kill switch is in settings.
I would've been equally outraged about Windows becoming an "agentic OS" if I had been a Windows user. I don't like what Apple is doing to my phone and laptop, but at least they haven't promised to make the iPhone an "AI phone".
More than one thing can be bad at a time, and right now, this conversation is about Mozilla. We can have a conversation about other bad things some other time.
Again, look at my comment history. I'm not discussing AI-as-a-whole because as you've pointed out it's not the topic of this discussion. I'm discussing how trivial it is to turn off as opposed to literally anywhere else, and that's not even discussing the provider choice you don't get anywhere else.
There's a whole section in macOS/iOS settings titled "Apple Intelligence and Siri" with ChatGPT being the only option, and you're seemingly happy with that compromise. Yet here you are complaining about an integration that's even easier to turn off and allows you to pick between 5 providers. There is literally no way of triggering it that doesn't immediately show you the "turn it off" button as it is right now (as in before this update reaches me).
I also invite you to go to firefox.com right now and find me a single mention of AI, since you for some reason are imagining that it is being advertised as an "AI browser".
If you read my comment again, it might occur to you that no, I'm not happy with what Apple is doing to iOS and macOS:
> I also invite you to go to firefox.com right now and find me a single mention of AI, since you for some reason are imagining that it is being advertised as an "AI browser".Is mozilla.com OK? If so, here you go: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/leadership/mozillas-next...
"It will evolve into a modern AI browser". I don't want an AI browser, modern or otherwise.If it wasn't because I find myself using the AI-sidebar all the time I would probably have shared your opinion.
I guess it's just quite convenient to have it separated from the "regular" tabs and their history.
Then there's also people, like me, who just want the browser to browse the web. I don't want link preview (annoying feature), Firefox isn't my PDF viewer, I don't have that many tabs that I need to group them and I don't use AI chatbots.
So having a single button to disable all of these features is pretty great. I still want a Firefox Lite, that just does browsing and allows me to add the few extension I want to whatever feature I believe is missing.
So, the most effective path here for y’all to be heard is not flipping the switch off yourself (do so anyways!) — anyone who cares at this stage has probably opted out of being counted already, after all — but instead to ensure that news of this switch spreads to absolutely as many non-tech people as possible. Don’t argue that they should run some script that shuts off their metrics and phone home and updates. Just convince them to shut off the AI and explain that this is why their browser got slow about a year ago! They’ll flip off the switch gleefully, their phone-home will count them, and y’all will have the strongest possible impact on the telematics graphs at Mozilla.
I already ran the disable process manually on the computers I have friends and family IT duties towards, so I’ll go back and do the AI switch to be sure it’s counted next week. Yes, this is a crap way to be heard. But making a mark on feature opt-out graphs is probably the only hope we have left to get their executive leadership to stop drowning the browser for its own good.
But current Firefox users could probably temporarily turn on telemetry, activate the kill switch, and turn telemetry back off. Just make sure you wait long enough to ensure the information is sent
There'll be so much noise in that signal it'll be almost useless. You can't differentiate it from anything else. For all anyone knows it happened because the word Firefox was in the top story on hacker news
Here's my thinking: There's 100 users getting updates. There's 40 users sending telemetry with AI enabled There's 10 users sending telemetry with AI disabled
So we have 50 people not sending telemetry and using or not using AI. If we assume more likely but not overwhelmingly more it's 30 people.
So we end up with 40+20 with AI, and 10+30 without?
When you disable telemetry you are declaring you don't want to be tracked.
Gee. If only there was a way to collect users opinions on things. Welp.. guess we have to live with subtly spying on everything they do with our software.
Most people who are vocal aren't representative of users.
Many vocal people aren't even users.
Don't get me wrong, I turn off telemetry, but you're acting like it's easy to get that information. You act like people don't scream when Firefox prompts people with surveys. You act like there isn't bias in survey takers.
If you just pretend everything is easy we'll just end up reinventing the same evils we're trying to fight today. Unfortunately most evils are created from good intentions. I hear there's an entire road paved that way
It is, relatively speaking.
> You act like people don't scream when Firefox prompts people with surveys.
Surveys without proper response and adjustments aren't passing feedback, it's political theatre. People groan about surveys because it takes time and rarely shows results reflectant of the responses.
We know the system is broken. Hard to shame us into thinking we're the ones who broke it.
> You act like there isn't bias in survey takers.
You act like statisticians don't spend half their field accounting around bias.
>we'll just end up reinventing the same evils we're trying to fight today.
Let's have the old evils dealt with before worrying about creating new evils who happen to do the exact same thing as the "old evils" (spoilers: they are the same picture).
As a complete contrast, there's a lot more enthusiasm over Valve surveys.
I remember when every other software prompted you to install Bonzi Buddy or some other intrusive search bar. This AI push is even worse.
The feature I would really want here is a switch that blocks AI summaries, overviews, etc. on any websites you browse.
Eg here's a list
https://github.com/laylavish/uBlockOrigin-HUGE-AI-Blocklist#...
While I do not think that the gap narrowed when measured in CPU-cycles, it's just not very noticable when Firefox doesn't feel slow.
It's not perfect, but it works, and unlike Chrome you can have full ad blocking with uBlock Origin.
Firefox for Android has been killing it for me with the latest ux updates, I didn't expect major improvements there and was pleasantly surprised.
I'm sorry, but we'll never get corporations to do what we want if we don't throw them the smallest bone when we get our way. You need positive reinforcement too, not just negative. If it's all negative they just stop caring and you get companies lot Google who just don't give a shit anymore.
And yes, there are some AI features I like and I want in the browser. I get a lot of utility out of translation as well as semantic search of my history. I don't want agents in my browser but get, Firefox is giving us choices.
Look, no one needs to like Firefox, but let's also be honest, it's the best we got right now. Google, Apple, and Microsoft are shoving agents down our throats and putting us in walled gardens that are getting harder and harder to break from. I don't care what flavor of chromium you use, Google is still using it to control the way the web works. Everyone loves to say how chromium is has greater coverage of standards but never takes a second to question who sets those standards.
I'm sorry guys, that's the state of things now. You can't fight Google by switching to chromium. It's still their vehicle to eat the internet. Our choices right now are Safari, Firefox, and maybe ladybird. It's slim pickings and nothing is close to perfect. At this point it doesn't even matter if Mozilla is evil, because at least they're the enemy of our enemy. Google is keeping them on life support to avoid monopoly claims but how long will they need that?
So what, we're just going to hand the keys of the kingdom to the guys selling artisian turd sandwiches because what, there isn't enough mayo on your ham sandwich? Because you don't like ham?
We got a win. Celebrate. Take the break from being cynical. There's bigger battles to fight and there'll be more tomorrow. Take the night off and don't be a sore winner
Thanks for staying positive. I like Firefox, I think it's a very nice holdout against adware.
Firefox is the artisan turd sandwich. They are burning dev time on features barely anyone asked, while bleeding market share for last decade
Got a source for that? HackerNews is *not* representative of the average browser user.
Because that's the source of the complaints. I don't want to use an "AI browser", kill switch or not. If this "AI browser" dies because of their mission to destroy community goodwill, good. I'm sick of giving the benefit of the doubt every time they royally fuck up. This situation where they're the steward of the only non-Google browser is not tenable, something needs to change.
But honestly it just feels like you didn't even read my comment. I'm sorry that it's a lot, but I'm petty sure people can handle 10-30 seconds of reading. I even said it doesn't matter if Mozilla is evil. How do you turn that into me giving them the benefit of the doubt. I'm literally just arguing that there's slim pickings and to not help our bigger enemy to kill their enemies. It doesn't matter if their enemies ate evil, you're just helping the bigger evil get bigger and consolidate power. I'm saying "there's more important problems right now, not be fucking dumb and get distracted or before you know it you'll lose your head"
So don't sour the victory, it'll cost you the war
Note that just not bogging down Firefox with AI features is not enough here. Firefox market share has been going downhill for most of my life, long before they appointed this new AI-crazed CEO. I don't know what the solution is, but it's clear that it's not Mozilla.
Honestly, I feel more and more every day like old-man-shaking-fist-at-clouds! Can we not just have something that works without spying, without engagement-driven shit switched on all the fucking time?
I think of the Simpsons Mr Brown meme where he's asking "Is it me that's wrong?".
I can't be the only person that thinks this way!
Before, we did not need to disable AI stuff. Now Mozilla forced us (that is those of us who don't like or use AI) into an extra step. Guess the only thing worse is being given no choice at all though.
This feature seems to be a nod to people with this worldview.
EDIT: See e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47133786 liking AI features to defecating on your food. It's not a technical objection, it's a principled one.
Do they have any good kind?
What's the ratio?
And even if there aren't that many bad AI features now, they've signalled their intent for Firefox to become an "AI browser". I don't know what they mean by that, but I know I don't want it. The chat bot sidebar is surely just the beginning.
It's primarily in response to the backlash from people who don't want an "AI browser" that they're promising a kill switch. But I don't want to use an "AI browser with AI features disabled", I just wanna use a regular web browser...
To save users from copy-pasting to a separate chatbot instance, or installing sketchy extensions? It's clunky, but it's helpful and exposes users to more alternatives. AFAIK it can be made to connect to local models now, too.
LLM side tab is a powerful mode of AI use that most people haven't experienced yet; for some reason this space seems underdeveloped publicly relative to some proprietary/internal solutions at some companies that I have knowledge of.
> I don't want to use an "AI browser with AI features disabled", I just wanna use a regular web browser...
Is there a difference beyond branding? FWIW, branding does matter and I hope Firefox remains a "browser with (optional) AI" and not "AI browser".
Fwiw, I don't use the AI sidebar. I'd have forgotten it existed if HN didn't bring it up as if it's shoved in your face like some chatbot in an IDE. But I guess if it was the latter people wouldn't be angry
My code editor has a built-in chat bot sidebar that I use every day. It's not a huge stretch that people who use chatbot sidebars in other applications would also want one in their browser.
ChatGPT is the #6 most popular website in the world, why wouldn't a browser want tighter integration with such a popular kind of service?
I wouldn't.
Facebook is mostly scrolling the timeline and passive consumption. It doesn't benefit from being on the side because the content you interact with on Facebook is completely separate from the content on your other tabs.
In contrast, LLMs have ongoing conversations that the user can come back to, and each conversation might relate to multiple tabs that the user is working on. On top of that, it's a very common occurrence that the user has questions about, or a task to be done using the content of the current page. This makes LLM and chatbot integration much more useful than a Facebook integration.
Also if you have the Facebook Messenger installed, Firefox already gives you an integration to share things with your Facebook contacts.
And like every browser does that. It's been that way for like over a decade...
Do you genuinely think this is comparable to Facebook integration? Do you believe that it Mozilla announced Facebook account integration and a Facebook side bar tomorrow, people's reaction to that would be, "oh this is just like what they did with search, this is fine"?
If not, isn't your comment a tiny bit disingenuous?
I seriously don't understand why everyone is upset about that. Do what I do and just don't open it or interact with it. No one is making you use it. It's trivial about if bytes because it's literally just a wrapper. So it doesn't affect you, why let it live rent free in your head and make you angry? Just sounds like you're looking for things to complain.
Personally I dislike both, and VS Code marketing itself as an "AI code editor" is one of many reasons why I would never consider using VS Code.
Search is a common operation for many people and having a unified entrypoint for different search providers in the browser makes sense.
Chatbots are also quite common now and having a single chat box that users can use with any chatbot provider (even local ones!) is a good feature. If anything it helps break the big players' chances at a monopoly, since it makes switching between providers easier.
Why is it so hard for people to just...not use a feature they don't like. Sure, the popup was annoying, but I still like that it let me know this feature exists. I don't use it now, but it might be useful to me in the future or so I can recommend it to someone who needs something like that.
Ideally they wouldn't make the product bad, with a badness opt-out, in the first place, but everyone in Silicon Valley's got to feed the AI monkey. So I guess this is the best we can expect.
(Also I didn't realize how bad this push got until I visited California recently, and saw every other billboard - that's physical ad over a road - pushing some unqualified form of AI magic on me).
> For those who wish to maintain some AI functionalities, a selective blocking option is available, enabling users to retain useful features like on-device translations while avoiding cloud-based services.
Honestly, I think people just like complaining. I think they like complaining about Firefox even more. There's plenty to complain about, but aren't there bigger fish to fry right now? Seems like complaining about some minnows while we're being circled by a bunch of great whites
However, I think data control is critical and any kind of implicit cloud service such as transmission to remote AI servers should be toggle-able clearly, just like search autocomplete can be done.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46747998, by dang, 1 month ago:
If you don't flag this shit when you see it, HN is fucked. The commons is fucked. And you all keep upvoting and replying to comments from accounts that start posting 30 comments a day after 2 years of silence that are all one tightly packed paragraph of pablum with the same structure and tells that are harder to fix than replacing the em dash with a double hyphen.---
P.S. The actual comment is (surprise!) completely wrong. Visit Settings -> AI Controls and you will see a granular set of feature switches under the master kill switch. Each has a clear title and description and is independent.
Read every comment made since the account started posting again.
Tell me what you think about those comments.
For those that don't know what trusted types are: Simply put, it splits the string type in to unsanitised_string_from_user and safe_escaped_string where unsafe strings can not be used in function parameters that only take a safe string That's heavily simplifying of course, but it's the basic idea.
BiasScanner - Firefox Plug-In https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/bias-scanner/
Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.10829
I'd love to hear why you say this.
Even better, why was the AI feature ever added in the first place?
It continually amazes me how people use a Google product on their desktop, as if they don't send enough data to an ad company. Actually, I'm not sure why I type this, any rational arguments are definitely not winning them over.
> It continually amazes me how people use a Google product on their desktop, as if they don't send enough data to an ad company.
I'd love to have alternatives, but which ones are there? Firefox is not an alternative; audio does not work for me as I am pulseaudio free here. On chrome-based browsers audio works fine, out of the box, so it is not my system that is at fault; it is mozilla that is at fault. I also reported this, the lazy firefox dev said all Linux users use pulseuaudio these days. Well ...
I could recompile it but compiling firefox is a pain in the ...:
https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/view/svn/xsoft/firefox...
I am not going to use a build system that is +20 years old and only exists because Mozilla is too lazy to switch to cmake or meson/ninja as primary build tool.
> Actually, I'm not sure why I type this, any rational arguments are definitely not winning them over.
Well I gave one rational argument: can't play audio on my linux box if I use firefox (by default that is). I can give many more reasons too. You seem to make the point that Google is worse, so we should also use a bad product (firefox). I think we really need better browsers in general. Firefox simply isn't one and that is Mozilla's fault. There is a reason why it went into decline. Mozilla gave up the fight - the ad-money made it weak.
Obviously I don't have any data backing me up here, but I'm going to guess that that isn't the main reason why so many people choose Chrome over Firefox.
Would second this. Mach uses Python, and the dependencies they use are a pain whenever no pre-built wheels are available. Especially so when you see that an "optional" Mach dependency for build system telemetry is what busting the configuration (not build) stage...