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Quick post about AI-free FireFox Based Browsers (Keep your Addons and avoid the Bloat)
(infosec.pub)
Just pick one - All the Fox functionality without bloatware
Librewolf - https://librewolf.net/
Waterfox - https://www.waterfox.com/
Zen Browser - https://zen-browser.app/
More browsers here - https://alternativeto.net/category/browsers/firefox-based/
You can also use this add to disable the ~~shitload~~ ai function in many search engines in one go
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/disable-ai/
GitHub page - https://github.com/jruns/disable-ai
You can find all the links on Mastodon<
And at some point someone will tell me what is so horrifying about these new features? Mozilla might be the only company trying to provide privacy first AI features. What exactly is so bad here? You can even disable these features if you do not like them at all.
I'm not particularly horrified about the availability of AI features, but I'd rather see Mozilla focus most of its resources on core competencies. Firefox lags behind Chrome in web standards feature support, e.g. the browser scores on https://caniuse.com/. It's also prone to making my laptop fan spin more than Chromium browser do, and people often complain about speed.
They should make the core browser better, and maybe task a couple developers to build some LLM support as an extension.
As a smart person said:
-gwl@lemmy.blahaj.zone
Firefox is not the devil, but "ideologies aside", the basic idea is:
(Just like microsoft), They've could just decide to put it in one of the "many" variant of the product, name it FoxAI, let the users decide and call a day. Instead, they've decided to force a very heavy component like that on the main version out of blue.
Switched or not. Now, you will have 'way' more bloat on a browser, which should be focused on speed and performance.
The whole thing about AI on free stuff is getting as much data as possible to train. You have to trust them to switch it off completely.
Mozilla is still the only company maintaining an alternative to Chromium (there's also webkit if you count Apple). Without Firefox you can't have Librewolf or other alternatives.
Mozilla is not perfect but people really need to stop treating them in a purely binary fashion (you are either horrible or are perfect).
You can criticize Mozilla for the direction they are taking with Firefox, but also you can argue that being a hardcore privacy-centric browser will kill interest for Firefox even faster.
Yeah, the AI- free Firefox browser is normal firefox with the AI slider set to "off"
A sports car is a van where you weld the back doors shut.
I'll try to give an out-of-the-loop answer to this, if that helps. Concerning "AI" tools, I think the chunk of people who don't want it included in the browser on any level come in one or both of two forms. One is a moral opposition -- for example, a pro-environmental or pro-artist stance. I don't think those need much explanation, but feel free to say otherwise.
The other is in my opinion is in response to exhaustion. Pro-"AI" features have proven themselves to be untrustworthy at nearly every turn with thoughtless or downright irresponsible implementations. A worthwhile use-case is the exception rather than the norm and It's tiring to have to constantly check if this time I want it on or not. As a result of opt-in-by-default changes to privacy policies or account settings, my trust in any site or app publishing an "AI" implementation has been broken and it's nice to have options I don't have to worry about wherever I can get them. I found it irritatingly tone-deaf that Mozilla wasn't considering a kill-switch with their first swing at this.
If it seems unreasonable or hard-to-understand, I think taking a step back and looking at the broader software industry rather than just Mozilla will help.
These are all valid reasons. I'll also add that I personally desire manual control over my computing experience. A huge part of the reason I run Linux is that it does exactly what I tell it to and nothing more. When you start introducing other agents to my user agent, it ceases to be a user agent. Something else is arranging my tabs. Something is popping info up into in my face that I didn't ask to see (and which might be incorrect). I just want these things to go away so my browser can be my browser again and not be under the control of a random word guesser.
Yes, I have turned these features off, but I don't even want them installed. They've been force-installed onto my system through software that didn't used to do that. If I lose my config, I have to go turn it all back off again. I'd rather just not have the feature anywhere in the software. I'd rather Firefox just not smuggle AI features onto my PC at all.
The problem is that they're pushing it without any way for those of us who really don't want that crap to strip it out of the browser. I don't want all this ai garbage, never asked for it, and am harassed at every corner by every fucking company thinking it's somehow going to change the world.
Sure, Mozilla allows you to turn off some of these features, but I've already had it reenabled in updates after previously disabling it. Further, many of the settings are buried in about:config, which is not a user-friendly way to make those changes. At best, these functionalities should be opt-in and presented as addons that can be installed, rather than being a core part of the browser that cannot be removed.
It is opt in. Or will be. And they're adding an AI switch.
Not disagreeing with you, just adding context.
The bigger problem is that they're wasting their finite resources on this crap instead of adding actually cool features like their forks are doing.
You should add a maybe. The will try to push it. You can't do that with an off by default feature.
They keep saying their ai features will be opt-in, and yet everything they've rolled out so far is opt-out. I struggle to believe future 'features' will be any different. Maybe it's opt-in in the sense that I'm not required to click whichever button activates it, like whatever they added to the context menu, but that's not really what opt-in means and degrades my trust in Mozilla.
I'm also frustrated by their seeming inability to focus on their core browser product and building a popular competitor to chromium browsers instead of going off on side quests.
I do not want the dev tools and neither the Extension framework, can I get rid of those? No? Being able to completely disable the features is not enough how? How does the code laying bare on your harddisk get in your way of using FX? They already promised a kill-switch. And you saying it turned on after an update is but an anecdote.
You asked, and I gave my opinion. All this AI bullshit has done and continues to do significant damage to the global economy and ecology, god forbid I have a problem with that or any company contributing to it.
Dev tools doesn't require a data center to run. Your comparison is flawed and suggests an ill-informed opinion about this topic.
I feel like you're just here to piss into the wind.
Do you hear people screaming to disable the extension frame work or devtools?
No?
If you don't want those features you can compile your own version of Firefox and remove them.
But lots of people are anti-AI. And there are people willing to provide a browser that keeps it out.
If you want it, have at it. But don't piss on people just because they don't.
The other day I watched this video and I think it makes a very good case. https://subscribeto.me/w/7qSsYEPM2aC3D6stdZ54nq (the website is the author's peertube instance)
There is no such thing as a privacy first AI, unless you’ve the hardware to run the model yourself (and, you don’t).
There different kinds of AI and some run just fine locally or even on mobile. Not everything is a big LLM.
They are not. There are boatloads of privacy friendly "AI" implementations, they just aren't very high profile.
But I do think people are over-reacting. This is a less bad approach. And if you can turn it off and leave it off, what's the big deal?
The big deal is that development time is put into these... Uh... "features".
Considering Windows is basically saying “we’re going to switch what we’ve always been and become an agenic OS, you will just talk to it and Microsoft Cloud will interpret your will (only $89 a month!)”, people are rightly scared about having all technology rug-pulled from under us.
Mozilla was one of the shining beacons of FOSS that allowed users choice and stability against corporate greed. Are you surprised that people are angry that they’re caving to the same toxic greedy behavior?
They should be worried. It's pretty clear Mozilla's leadership has "AI fever" that every CEO seems to be going mad with.
Still though, people need to take a breath. This isn't Microsoft. And Mozilla's "local first" approach is not bowing to Big Tech and the AI conmen like everyone else is (though the reality is that hardware isn't ready for stuff outside of lightweight tasks).