This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
The speed at which firefox has been enshittified is as impressive as it is sad.
...and we'll all suffer as climate change increases. None of this shit is worth frying for.
Dont worry the US and Israel are starting WW3 as we speak we will all be dead before then any way
Donald Trump is the most environmentalist president ever. With oil prices as they are, can you imagine how much less oil we're burning?
Setting fire to the oil fields, cutting out the middle men. That's American efficiency.
Relevant section:
Smart Window uses ‘memories’, things Mozilla says “…it learns from your activity” to inform its responses.
You can delete memories individually, and you can set any given chat session to not use/store them.
Fine so far.
The problem? My memory list isn’t populated with things Smart Window learned since I enabled it. Oh no.
It has activity going back months. We’re talking searches and website interactions from long before I enabled this. features.
Firefox just handed that history to the AI models to plough from, without telling me upfront.
I found this the creepiest aspect of Smart Window.
Mozilla says this was a flub; it will refine the onboarding around Smart Window to limit memory formation to post-opt-in activity only. That’s obviously the right fix.
Because sharing a user’s prior browsing history with third-party AI models, silently, on feature activation, without any headset? Yeah, a bit icky – but that’s the price of testing features that are finished, I guess.
I'm willing to give them a pass since this was a development build and while someone probably should've thought of it, it's the kind of bug that can happen. If this was the public release it would be a lot more outrageous.
Finding out about this gives me some extra questions, though.
There’s also an option to bring your own LLM, with fields for model name, endpoint, and API token available for entry when the manual option is enabled. However, the page itself warns local models may not work correctly.
It looks like there's an option for people to self-host too. You won't have to send your history to someone else's computer.
If it's anything like how they handled the AI sidebar, this option is going to get hidden before it hits production.
F*** I really dont want to change away from Firefox. Pleas be good Firefox. Please! Don't F this up.
Librewolf is exactly the same browser with all the security features dialed to 11 and all the AI removed.
And it breaks sooo many sites.
Waterfox, is Firefox that just works.
I tried Librewolf for a while and found it to be a bit too much for me when all I really want is Firefox without AI. The privacy options are probably great but not for me.
Just installed waterfox. First impression is that I am super happy to be bock to the previous Firefox theme - it takes less space and looks nicer in my opinion. Seems promising. Thanks for the recommendation! :)
It might be easier to soften Librewolf than harden Firefox, but fair point.
If you're a relatively normal user and you still want to use LibreWolf, I would recommend:
Most of this is easy to find, especially thanks to the LibreWolf menu
Yeah it's all just in the GUI to enable and disable what you don't want.
I don't get what people are complaining about with LibreWolf being "too hard". Like it's 1 minute clicking through menus and you're done. 5 minutes if you need to read and search things up real quick.
But LibreWolf, ublock installed by default, and then set up containers. Just pure bliss.
For us, sure. For the average Joe who doesn't know about the side effects of fingerprinting, not so much.
Yeah Librewolf does go really fucking hard on security/privacy to the detriment of functionality, but the are upfront with that so you shouldn't be going in completely blind. I think Water Fox is a nice happy medium for users that don't want to fuck around with technical stuff.
Its too late, bro. You gotta break it off and start mingling with the forks.
Ai in browsers is stupid
Companies at every layer are competing, from the OS, to the browser, to the website so you can experience triple the spam.
So sad for Firefox. I try to keep using since it’s the only solution free of Chromium, but I guess chromium will control everything only Safari will not be chromium.
I used to enjoy AI a lot, and I still think the technology is really cool, but lately I'm beginning to despise it. It spreads and nestles itself into every corner of our life, and it rots whatever it touches, be it the humans that rely on it or the projects in which it's used. I see so many open source projects that are tainted with it, it's almost impossible to avoid it. It's sad. The generations that will grow up with AI will be fucked.
Seeing AI invade open source is sad. AI slop contributions. AI integration that no one asked for.
For now Firefox derivatives are fine (I use LibreWolf), but many of those derivatives don't work on macOS because it "fails to verify that this executable is actually executable" (what does that actually mean?????????).
I had hopes for Ladybird Browser but now it's being vibe coded (rewritten in rust by ai for no reason whatsoever), and it's not ready yet anyway. Now I'm hopeful for Servo engine. It's in development but at some point it will be ready, and it bans slop contributions.
For now Firefox derivatives are fine (I use LibreWolf), but many of those derivatives don't work on macOS because it "fails to verify that this executable is actually executable" (what does that actually mean?????????)
Not sure if this is what you're experiencing, but it's a common thing. Happens to me too, I have to run a command after I update from Homebrew.
LibreWolf FAQ: why is LibreWolf marked as broken?
It is possible that Apple Silicon users see their recently downloaded LibreWolf flagged as broken or unsafe by the OS.
This happens because we do not notarize the macOS version of the browser: we don't have a paid Apple Developer license and we don't want to support this signing mechanism that is put behind a paywall without providing significant gains.
You can remove the quarantine attribute from the Application using this command:
xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/LibreWolf.app
You should see how AI is being deployed in warfare. Plausible deniability is about to go through the roof.
Back in the day, you get out jail free card was on a scale of "the devil made me do it" to "I was following orders", now we get "It was AI"
Much like Adobe‘s Acrobat which I also have to use for work. At least from what I can tell when it suddenly summarizes a PDF. There‘s no way in hell that happens locally. But the fact that it seemingly automatically processes potentially sensitive data from customers didn‘t even do as little as raising eyebrows when I brought it up.
No thanks.
There's a master "kill switch" for all AI features in Firefox now. I suggest everyone who's concerned about this kind of thing just go and turn it off, and then we need never bother each other over this again.
It's still opt out, not opt in because on first install that LLM garbage is enabled by default. The kill switch should've been for people that chose to try LLM garbage and found it lacking; needing an easy way to disable it all.
I won't stop complaining until Firefox makes their LLM nonsense opt-in, letting a user choose at first boot if they want that shit or not. That would be the most ethical and user respecting way to handle their LLM shit.
"When it comes to privacy, defaults matter."
- Mozilla
Why not remove the AI and offer them as a separate extension? That way you're happy, and everybody else doesn't have crap shoved down their throats.
Or pick a Firefox fork that doesn't have the AI bullshit. Libre Wolf is great for people who take security very seriously,l. I hear Water Fox is a much closer equivalent to Firefox without AI, and also has a focus on privacy. I've also been using Iron Fox on my android with basically no issues.
With Mozilla's current track record I don't trust them to not fuck with the AI "killswitch".
My master AI killswitch was just to switch to Waterfox.
One would think they'd be extra careful not to piss the users off at this point... but no.
Waterfox. Librewolf. Zen. Floorp.
They're all good options in their own ways. Just pick one and go
Have you seen the better browsing experience? It's on Zen. It's literally on Librewolf. It's on Floorp without ads. It's literally on Waterfox. You can probably find it on Ironfox. Dude it's on Ladybird. It's a Servo original. It's on GNOME Web. You can browse on GNOME Web. You can go to GNOME Web and browse it. Epiphany has it for you.
