It just keeps getting worse - Firefox to "evolve into a modern AI browser"
Just like Google plan with Chrome, Mozilla aren't sitting still on expanding Firefox into something resembling a web browser but with more AI.
WE. DON'T. WANT. THIS.
Mozilla, for the love of god, stop cramming AI into the browser when the vast majority of your users just want a privacy-respecting browser that works.
I've said it before, and I've said it again: I will not donate any more money to the Mozilla foundation until they stop cramming AI into everything, and you should too.
They might be getting money from google that tells them what to do.
Read what the new CEO says, and it doesn't seem as bad. In the interview, he states that they'll be adding AI with options, and since they're not beholden to any one company, the user can choose what is best for them.
My guess: A sidebar chat you can disable, which allows you to pick your provider, and an about:config that let's you customize the URL for local AI.
Would I rather time be devoted elsewhere? Yes. Would this be horrible? Nah.
That being said, I could be totally wrong.
you can sign up to receive updates on our AI Window and be among the first to try it and give us feedback.
I wonder if we all sign up and tell them we don't want it if they would actually listen.
You should actually read their statements, rather than a headline from an article with a clear agenda. They are making these features optional and unobtrusive.
Their statement is "we're incorporating AI into your browser". What "agenda" do you think this author has? Other than informing users?
Mozilla already has limited resources. Using them to incorporate features into their browsers that their users have already made it abundantly clear they do not want, is bad.
That has not at all been our lived experience so far.
Every week it seems like there is a new AI feature snuck in that we have to tell each other about and disable.
The problem is, it's not unobtrusive.
When I right click and I instantly get an option silently added to the list that sends data to an AI model hosted somewhere, which I've accidentally clicked due to muscle memory, it's not good just because there's also the option there to disable it. When I start up my browser after an update and I am instantly given an open sidebar asking me to pick an AI model to use, that's obtrusive and annoying to have to close and disable.
Mozilla has indicated they do not want to make these features opt-in, but opt-out. The majority of Mozilla users do not want these features by default, so the logical option is to make them solely opt-in. But Mozilla isn't doing that. Mozilla is enabling features by default, without consent, then only taking them away when you tell them to stop.
The approach Mozilla is taking is like if you told a guy you weren't interested in dating him, but instead of taking that as a "no." he took it as a "try again with a different pickup line in 2 weeks" and never, ever stopped no matter what you tried. It doesn't matter that you can tell him to go away now if he'll just keep coming back.
Mozilla does not understand consent, and they are violating the consent of their users every time they push an update including AI features that are opted-in by default.
If it's installed and I have to turn it off, then it's intrusive. Don't bullshit me
Is "the vast majority of your users" your display name or something? I have those turned off in my client settings
Every product we build must give people agency in how it works. Privacy, data use, and AI must be clear and understandable. Controls must be simple. AI should always be a choice — something people can easily turn off. People should know why a feature works the way it does and what value they get from it.
Come on, this isn't Reddit, at least skim the article before you start with the performative outrage.
It should be something that people can easily turn ON.
It is opt in, this article is click bait.
Directly from the horses mouth:
"In Firefox, you’ll never be locked into one ecosystem or have AI forced into your browsing experience. You decide when, how or whether to use it at all. You’ve already seen this approach in action through some of our latest features like the AI chatbot in the sidebar for desktop or Shake to Summarize on iOS.
Now, we’re excited to invite you to help shape the work on our next innovation: an AI Window. It’s a new, intelligent and user-controlled space we’re building in Firefox that lets you chat with an AI assistant and get help while you browse, all on your terms. Completely opt-in, you have full control, and if you try it and find it’s not for you, you can choose to switch it off."
It's not needed. Nobody is looking for AI powered shit and they will feel it in their numbers. Why invest the pennies Mozilla can invest in a technology that big monsters are developing with billions and billions of dollars and natural resources? It's not even reasonable, like a Pocket 2.0.
Unfortunate Newsflash:
It's smaller reddit.
The lowest common denominator consumes all. And that denominator includes not being able to read articles or apply critical thought.
Nobody's saying it's mandatory. People don't want their web browsers to be full of bloated AI slop. Why should there be the AI components of Firefox on my hard drive if I'm never going to use them? Why should my web browser be full of low quality features I'll never use? It's enshittification. Not to mention the very quote you're pasting specifies that it's opt-out, not opt-in.
The problem is the "AI" presence in itself. It shouldn't be in Firefox at all, or frankly in any other software.
Also, corporations and their CEOs lie every single day, you know.
Few read the articles around here, like any social media. I could come with a headline that Bill Gates proposed using trans people's brains for AI processing, Matrix style, and harvesting the water of the dead ones, a la Dune. Lemmy would eat it up.
But how could the trolls enrage well meaning people into moving to a less privacy respecting browser if the post wasn't designed for performative outrage?
Nnnoooooo you dumb bastards
Jfc. The stupidest timeline, I fucking swear.
It's the natural progression of capitalism and market force fundamentalism.
It's a sort of religion.
Ew ew ew.
No one is asking for AI, you weirdos!
I don't think our Lemmy comments are going to reach Googles...I mean Mozilla's boardroom.
Yall saw Microsoft push stupid Copilot on everyone and fail miserably and said, "hold my beer!"
Bros, take the hint! No one wants AI bullshit. Firefox was the goto switch when Google Chrome was using 37 processes and 98% memory for one website... yall are fuckin up!
WTF man, I just want a fucking browser.
No you don't, now suck down your government mandated AI slop and say thank you — you philistine.
I recommend waterfox and the DuckDuckGo browser, at least those 2 are good at least
Remember the way to disable all AI in Firefox.
about:config
browser.ml.enable -> false
For now...
I don't think anyone actually read the announcement, just the headline. Here was the new CEOs actual first point.
"First: Every product we build must give people agency in how it works. Privacy, data use, and AI must be clear and understandable. Controls must be simple. AI should always be a choice — something people can easily turn off. People should know why a feature works the way it does and what value they get from it."
there is absolutely zero reason to put ai in firefox
First, there should be a survey on what users actually want, no?
Because if no one wants AI and it's "always a choice", what you really do is waste considerable resources with as the only results, more settings users have to go through before starting using their browsers.
First: Every product we build must give people agency in how it works. Privacy, data use, and AI must be clear and understandable. Controls must be simple. AI should always be a choice — something people can easily turn off. People should know why a feature works the way it does and what value they get from it.
That's a good idea to put first. Of course, like do no evil, priorities change, so we'll need to keep a close eye on this.
Second: our business model must align with trust. We will grow through transparent monetization that people recognize and value.
Transparent is good, but if he things he's going to add value to monetization, he's smoking crack. There's nothing we want from a browser that's not already provided by a plugin.
Third: 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.
Nobody wants that. We already had all we wanted from them in trusted software.
I don't know if that is the reason but I wonder if the recent ruling that made Firefox loose on the cash income from Google as a default search engine has them doing a similar type of deal with AI companies, even Google, like, Firefox has a built-in interface for AI and the backend you can choose but the default one is one that some AI company pay a fee to be.
If that is the case I think it is fine, it is like a wink-wink situation, you have to have it enabled by default and with a default provider for it to be worth something for someone to pay for the privilege, and then the users can simply change it be gone with it without affecting the payout. (Unless the pay or renew pay has some metric like use statistics)
They're going to use AI to identify and block ads for me, right? Or let me set a cookie preference and automatically apply that to every page I visit?
That would be rather useful things to have AI for IMHO.
Well no. They not gonna burn ai credits on that, they need it to identify your interests and sell you ads.
something an adblocker already done, without the unneccsary extra steps.
It ain't that easy, at least with uBlock Origin. The problem is that websites depend on many elements - ones that aren't obvious to the human eye and experience. An AI could potentially analyze all of the content and to where it leads, then remove the undesirable elements, such as trackers. For example, when I am making a payment at an unfamiliar website, I wouldn't know what services are key to a working transaction.
A fair bit of my browsing time is spent on figuring out how to not break a website with my adblocker - which is annoying, error prone, and not as effective as I would like.
So, AI will do the same thing as what light extensions already do, but consuming 4GB of RAM and maxing out CPU load?
Can't wait for ladybird to arrive to leave all this current browser crap behind me.
If you're going to add AI shit it should be something people can easily turn on. It should be off by default.
Not only the setting off, but any sort of behind the scenes stuff related to it disabled as well. No automatic updating, no background processes to "keep it ready, just in case". Do that when it's enabled.
The idea is nice, but they all trail behind when it comes to updates and that includes security updates. The browser is just the biggest attack vector on my system and I really don't want that bit of software to be outdated.
the browser is just the biggest attack vector on my system and I really-
Want to add another 8 software suites worth of vulnerabilities to that...
They should be pretty on it for security updates. Librewolf is also hardened compared to upstream Firefox so if security is a concern, you're probably better off using the fork anyway.
As long as there is a easy way to disable it. And clearly communicated what they are doing. I do not begrudge mozilla trying to remain competitive with mainstream.
if they say it will be an AI-only browser somehow i doubt it.
Did we read the same article? Where was the ai-only part?
There won't be
As long as we can remove our mouths from being wrapped around the...
Waterfox, Ironfox, Librewolf
Floorp
Netscape Navigator 4
Zen?
Yes but all of these depend on the development team at Firefox. I don’t know what the solution is, but I do know that those three browsers would not continue if Firefox didn’t also continue. There’s still a lot of development work from Firefox.
At this point I think the safer route would be to just accept the Chromium hegemony and build a free browser from that.
Firefox still at least have a far far far more permissive OSS license than Chromium, so I'd say stick with that
Thank god for librewolf, they fix most of the new Mozilla bullshit.
I'm an old man browsing this on LibreWolf on a Linux Mint desktop. If I can do it, anyone can.
Having said that, running across a FOSS app that only runs on Windows that I want to run, has me thinking I need to rebuild and dual boot Win 10 IOT. Frustrating. I just learned that while installing Linux next to Windows works, because of course it does, installing Windows next to Linux does not. Because, again, of course, Windows is an asshole. So, that means I'd need to nuke Linux, install Windows, then reinstall Linux. And, that seems like... a lot. I might still do it, though.
EDIT: The app I want to run needs access to my nvidia card. So a VM won't work, I already tried it.
you could run a virtual machine on linux with windows on it, dual boot can be a pain in the ass to use.
I was recently wiping data out of one of my disks intending to sell it. There was a windows system installed there, which I wanted to get rid off anyway, so I let the process run while I was taking a nap. When I woke up and restarted the system I was very surprised to see that now my Linux system is missing and nothing works anymore except BIOS. Turns out I deleted my bootloader. I managed to fix it but It was stressful as hell (remember to backup your system, I didn't).
Weird things can happen during dual booting but it's all a life lesson, a lot of fuckery especially with windows, which likes to mess things up.
librewolf is good but they're just a profile wrapper for uplink firefox with limited developers.
Yeah, they are doing everything they can to fix that mess, but there are some things that are impossible to fix. Mozilla kinda sucks now, but the alternatives suck even more so I'm staying with Librewolf, for now
Hey tech companies. Consumers do not want more AI, they want less of it. Maybe we just need to get the word out?
Exactly this. I would love to see just one tech company stand up and say we are not doing AI, our AI budget is $0 and our product will not ship with AI. If you really want to use AI with our system you can download a plug-in or something but we won't waste our time writing one.
They would get a million users overnight.
But 'AI' is the cool word of the moment! All the AI peddlers say so in their sale pitches!
I want it
It's very sad as I don't think there's a proper alternative in short term. In the end, I am afraid that I'll have to keep using Firefox because it's essentially the "lesser evil",
Waterfox. LibreWolf. Fennec.
Just use a fork; rawdogging Firefox is already a bit crazy.
IronFox over Fennec
As long as it is open source, it doesn’t matter. Forks like Librewolf will disable it.
It does matter a bit.
Librewolf devs depend on firefox development. They just rip out the stupid bits. They're not prepared to maintain a hard fork. They could still decide to do it, but it would take more community involvement.
And a shitload of time to keep the fork relevant as web sites keep evolving.
It increases the workload for fork devs the more crap they have to remove from upstream and the more the fork deviates from upstream.
Is there a Librewolf for phones? Can I somehow self-host the synchronization services?
I use fennec on phone
https://f-droid.org/packages/org.mozilla.fennec_fdroid
There is a shiton of browsers for phone but this one is often updated and the icon is cute (the most important feature)
There's IronFox
Fennec and IronFox.
You can actually host your own firefox sync service. It's kinda a pain to configure auth but it is entirely possible.
AI and open source don't really go hand in hand
If Luddites get their way, that will become the case forever. It is okay if you don't want AI in your personal life, but I worry that opposition like yours will ensure that only wealthy jackasses have ownership over AI.
The important thing is to support efforts to create truly open AI and make it a public good available to all. Projects such as LlamaCPP, Olmo, Apertus, Heretic, and others will be key to allowing ordinary people to become masters of the technology.
Ollama + Mistral models is pretty open. All the code and weights are open with a permissible licenses.
if google is still the majority of the revenue, it will close it down the line.
Very unfortunate development, which seems par for the course from Mozilla these days.
I'm jumping ship. Which browser would y'all recommend at this point? Preferably something I can get on android as well as linux.
LibreWolf is a great alternative on Linux. It’s Firefox with all the bs stripped out and out-of-the-box privacy settings turned on.
This is what I have used for the last few years (after being a Firefox user for almost 2 decades), and yeah we're probably safe for a little while, but it seems the writing is on the wall. The LibreWolf team can only do so much when the core browser is constantly being enshittified. I hoped this was a flash in the pan thing and LibreWolf would save us until Mozilla regained its senses, but it seems they've gone batshit.
I too will be keeping my eyes peeled for what to use next.
I'm a fan of Vivaldi browser. Works great on Linux and Android. Bonus: Their leadership has gone on record stating there will be no AI in their browser.
I found their roadmap for 2026 to be pretty inspiring.
Floorp, brave, fennec
Come on servo
Well hopefully the different forks have their ducks in a row to strip all these “features” out down the road. So glad I use LibreWolf and not Firefox proper anymore
I said it before but they are really excelling at alienating their users in (failed) attempts at attracting new ones.
It pains me to see, I don't want to use chromium, but there is a limit...
Just why? AI browsers have serious security/privacy implications.
For e.g:
Thank you. These are great articles.
Well, older news is: "Firefox has evolved into the first thing I uninstall when I install Fedora, or any other Linux distro for that matter". Since the first mention of their so-called "anonymous telemetry" I began to actively avoid them. Like someone else mention, thank God for Librewolf, Mullvad and Brave (with Leo disabled).
Librewolf is still Firefox, but with the settings modified.
Ok so where do I go? Waterfox?
Floorp is good
I can vouch for zen browser! It’s been really good (so far)!
In my experience, Zen's design and customization is really nice but it's also extremely buggy. Maybe to be expected, as I think they are still in their alpha release.
I was also concerned about maybe getting fingerprinted more easily since it's a very niche browser.
compare to vivaldi flat out refusing ai, keeping mv2, and actually building a blocker and tracker into the browser.
Too bad Vivaldi is still based on Chrome.
Yeah this ain't it chief. Hope we can nuke the feature into oblivion, but we all know that won't be possible as Firefox enshittifies
LibreWolf all the way
I'll consider using Mozilla once Anthony Enzor-DeMeo is fired or fucks off.
My decision has been rammed through in the exact same uncaring and unilateral way that Tony wants to ram AI down Mozilla users throats.
Make sure you keep a list of all of these companies pushing ai bullshit. When the bubble pops, do not go back to them, do not give them anything, fuck them for being greedy idiots
I will gladly support initiatives that are anti-ai.
I like to imagine that these CEOs just get like a million AI emails a day from alt accounts of Sam Altman begging them to put AI in everything and they're all too stupud to realize it.
I've been using Firefox for longer than i can remember. That said, I'm ready to make the leap if necessary. What's the next browser to succeed Firefox? Suggestions??
imo anything firefox-based until servo or ladybird matures
i use waterfox, i know a lot of people use librewolf
remember that switching to anything chromium (like vivaldi, brave) still gives google power. on web standards at least, mozilla still fights for us (and is arguably the only one protecting us from shit like putting tracking stabdards directly into the web spec)
Thank you for this! I'll be looking into those options.
Next browser on desktop will be one that has intentionally no JS support. If I'm making compromises I might as well go all the way through. 😅
I "switched" last night (just to poke about) LibreWolf for PC and Fennec for phone.
So, let me get this straight. You've been using Firefox forever, but you're willing to switch immediately over obvious sensational clickbait?
Over to Waterfox then.
I don't care if there is a way to 'disable it' (there won't be) - if it's there, it not on my PC.
You already can't disable AI gemerated summaries on mobile.
https://noai.duckduckgo.com/ - yes you can
Nope, time for a new browser.
Welp, time to move to waterfox for good
When talking about it earlier, they mentioned the integrated AI would be local-only... Which sounds better, but I doubt is even possible (imagine all the low-end devices attempting to generate a response or analyse the website on their 6-8-year old CPUs...).
FWIW the development is done publicly, so you can check these claims https://blog.ziade.org/2025/12/05/two-years-of-ai-at-mozilla/
"Company does AI bullshit, fails miserably."
Countdown to the part of the headline after the comma.
They have pushed me back to Vivaldi.
Not open source.
how would this afffect the forked versions like Waterfox, LibreWolf, IronFox? The AI part is a separated feature from mainline Firefox branch, so forks can choose not to include it?
The AI browsers took my Arc they better leave my Zen Browser TF alone with these shenanigans.
I just want to be able to group tabs on mobile 🥲
That a way yo beat dead internet theory. Get IA hallucinate the web you browse and no need to webbrowser to have internet access.
How long until the forks get deprecated? Is that even a possibility? I don't really know what goes into making this but I would imagine if it depends on some chunk of the mozilla source code, eventually it will be out of sync with the major releases or current browser standards. What does that mean for the TOR browser since its based on firefox right?
I ask that as someone moving from firefox to libre/waterfox.
It’s a bit more complex than that. The straight forks are fine for now, but the real concern would be if Gecko gets changed significantly.
They are just fork + patches, I think only one is maintained by the company that forked it but it's an esr version and it's an ad company.
A non beneficial mutation at best.
