2d ago

Firefox is really innovating

Toot

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Well, I still haven't seen any AI in my Firefox and I'm planing on using it until I will.
- Hold your click for at least one second on any link and it will show a preview of the link and suggest you to use AI to describe it
  
  I genuinely thought you said "hold your dick for at least one second"
  
  Time to pull out a hammer
  
  STOP! HAMMER TIME!
  
  Can’t touch this.
  
  Haha 😄 funny you.
  
  Settings > scroll down to "General" > look at the options under "Enable link previews". You can turn the previews off altogether or just turn off the AI part
  
  This is a defence only until it isn't - although thank you for the tip.
  That's how Windows has been going for years - adding more and more crap and make it all default enabled, and people are like "Oh just turn it off bro."
  Then every update adds more unwanted options that get increasingly difficult to turn off, or randomly turn themselves back on, and before you know it we've reached a point where every new install soon needs an entire checklist to go through to make things actually usable again.
  That is not how life should be. I want something that respects me by default, and if it wants me to try a feature I might find even slightly objectional, I should have to explicitly opt-in and say YES.
  Firefox is setting a precedent by moving in this direction, and they've showed their hand. There's only more where this came from, and I won't tolerate it, even if I can turn it off.
  When the Firefox terms and conditions drama happened some months back, that was the push I needed to switch to Librewolf. It's a Firefox fork with privacy-respecting settings out of the gate, no sponsored content, no ads, uBlock pre-installed, and absolutely zero AI. If you're a Firefox user, I recommend you try it too.
  
  In my opinion this is one of the main issues. All those features should be disabled by default, and only the user decide if they want to enable them!
  But they are doing the opposite.
  
  Thanks I already did that, but it still ticks me off that I had to find out they added this while using the browser. This shit should be off by default.
  
  Yeah, you can also opt out of your planet being demolished to build the intergalactic highway, the form is in the basement.
  Incidentally, most of the new llm bullshits are on by default and can't be turn off in the settings, you need to go to about:config and search for .ml to do so (not to be confused with .ml instance of lemmy which you also can't easily opt out of). Obviously this settings aren't synchronised between instances by "synchronise all settings" thingy which they need my personal info for, why would it, so you need to do it every time. Also also they sometimes revert back with major updates, because obviously they are.
  
  So it's entirely optional, you only encounter it by interacting with the browser in an atypical way, and the thing it does is a thing that AI is actually pretty decent at (summarizing text)? Sounds like they couldn't stop themselves from joining the dick hammering bandwagon, but decided not to hit it too hard.
  
  This isn't my wheelhouse so take it with a grain of salt, but an argument against link summarizers that I've heard is that it takes views away from websites that could be generating revenue for themselves. Instead an LLM scraped their content and fed a summary directly to the user.
  
  Do people making that argument also find ad blockers even ten percent as horrible as this? They both ultimately have the same effect, which is your web browser not maximizing someone else's profits by denying them a revenue opportunity.
  I'd be curious if the link summarizer in Firefox runs a model locally or calls some remote API. Most current machines ought to be able to run an appropriate LLM model for that task.
  
  That's a good question. I'd personally argue that it's different in that the adblockers are not an inbuilt part of Firefox, they're made by extension developers. This is built right into the browser.
  
  It's more of a concern with google summaries that show up at the top of search results because it completely removes the need to click on any of the websites it pulls from. Ideally a link summary just lets you figure out which link you need without clicking on and looking at each one.
  
  Thanks for adding that detail, makes sense. I was thinking the link previews were yeah more like the google results. Hover over and not have to go to the site.
  
  entirely optional
  No, it's on by default, it has access to everything you're browsing and doing fuck knows what with it, and you need to know that it is doing it and unless you've read it somewhere you don't know that it's there.
  thing that AI is actually pretty decent at (summarizing text)
  That's so not true it's not even funny.
  I mean yeah, it could be worse, everything could be worse. Still, not good, not good at all.
  
  you only encounter it by interacting with the browser in an atypical way
  Leaving my pointer on a random place that happens to be a link is atypical? I don't think it is. I had this pop up to me a couple of days ago and I didn't even understand what could've triggered it, I was wondering if I clicked something or pressed a key unconsciously.
  and the thing it does is a thing that AI is actually pretty decent at (summarizing text)
  Pretty decent? Just passable, if the text is about some run-of-the-mill topic.
  
  Doesn't do that for me. I have to hold left click on a link for over a second to trigger it.
  And yeah, pretty decent. It can produce a basically summary of a fair amount of text pretty quickly and generally accurately. It's not an expert wordsmith, it won't give a deep and thoughtful analysis of the poem you pointed it at or anything, but that's not the use case. The use case is "give me the key bullet points of this article so I can decide if I should give it more attention.", and it does that job pretty well.
  
  generally accurately
  This is absolutely, demonstrably, documentedly not true. It is accurate sometimes, and sometimes it shows you absolute bullshit. When will it be accurate? Who knows. So you can use it only when you don't care about the truth, in which case why even bother, just imagine the article said what you wanted it to say and be done with it
  
  Depends on model tuning. Basically, you can tune a model to hallucinate less, or to write more human-like, but not really both at the same time, at least not for a model you could expect most users to run locally. For this sort of application (summarizing text), you'd tune heavily against hallucination, because ideally your bullet points are going to mostly be made up of direct paraphrase of article text, with a very limited need for fluid writing or anything even vaguely creative.
  
  Basically, you can tune a model to hallucinate less
  You can tune it to hallucinate more, you can't tune it to not hallucinate at all, and that's what matters. You need it to be "not at all" if you want it to be useful, otherwise you can never be sure that it's not lying, and you can't check for lies other than reading the article, which defies the whole purpose of it.
  
  Doesn’t do that for me. I have to hold left click on a link for over a second to trigger it.
  I misunderstood the previous comments, actually, yeah, it's not triggered the way I assumed.
  The use case is “give me the key bullet points of this article so I can decide if I should give it more attention.”, and it does that job pretty well.
  I'll put aside all the other complaints I have on my mind, because we've both probably gone through similar discussions, I don't want to get bogged down in yet another, and just say that I honestly can't imagine this being such a useful or time-saving thing in the first place. Like, did it use to be a frequent problem to you to start reading an article, realise you're not interested, and give up on it?
  
  Holding my click on a volume slider triggered the feature so it quickly became really annoying
  
  *yet
  The new CEO is an AI True Believer, and I don't doubt this will last.
  They'll remove the options to turn it off, and make it full of the AI features, with no opt-out or opt-in
  
  Good I learnt something today. 😏
  
  Solution:
  about:config > browser.ml.enable = false
  
  It doesn't.
  
  Installed Firefox from the Mint repos. It does.*
  *Source: Me, just tried it.
  
  Well, mine doesn't. I'm not going to search how to enable it. I will just keep using the best browser there is and donating to Servo.
  
  It does if you have a default install
- There are a bunch of flags in about:config you can check as well, if you wanna be extra sure they're turned off. Just search for browser.ml. There are more but this was all I could capture in one screenshot. Bold means I had to change it, which means it was on by default. That said I'm using CachyOS repos, not the direct Arch ones.
  
  You only need to set browser.ml.enable to false.
- The article does say that we should always be able to turn off the AI part.
- Arch Linux package maintainers seem to have disabled it by default unless I did something and forgot

247 comments