Technology

What happened to just making a damn good browser

Mozilla is in the sweet spot of basically being the only available browser that isnt chrome, that has adblocking.

and they are doing everything in their power to fuck it up by chasing this bullshit AI trend thats already dying on the vine.

yeah no thanks. luckily librewolf strips this shit out.

I don't really mind AI features where it makes sense. That being said, as someone else commented, this should have been a plugin.

I'll add on top of that: this should have been a plugin wholly developed by Mistral. Mozilla should stop spending time and money on side features and focus on the browser and its engine. It still is way slower than any chromium based browser, lacks features that have been standard on chromium for years (eg. HDR video playback) and it's way less efficient on battery than the competition.

Complaining about Firefox doing this and groveling on "I'm good, I'm on " is spitting upwards: even the most modified forks like Zen still rely on Mozilla's aging engine.

I don’t trust any feature that uses the word “AI.”

Ideally, such things should be transparent to the user. As in features that are useful without having to understand the underlying programming mechanisms.

Take FF’s local translation. That’s an immensely useful feature. No one cares that it uses a language model or about any of the details, because it just works well enough, and is useful enough to stand on its own as an advantage over Chromium.

…If they have to brand a feature to make it appealing, that’s a bad sign. Otherwise why TF would I want expensive tab sorting or things like that?

Ok.
But why?

They should stop doing that, instead

Even if LLMs were environmentally and socially sustainable they would still be a massive IP theft meant to make the rich even richer. Mozilla and Mistral can go eat a bag of dicks.

Mozilla choosing Mistral for Firefox Smart Window feels like a rare AI partnership that actually fits the product. Privacy, zero data retention and multilingual models are a much better match for Firefox than turning the browser into another Big Tech AI funnel.

I gotta admit, I don't really mind AI as long as it doesn't exist anywhere in any amount

As long as this is opt-in (i.e. disabled by default), then sure. Otherwise, I'll just have to find a new browser.

How do you disable it?

It doesn't say anything about how this works. "No data retention" suggests that data is going to a server that's processing it but then not retaining it. That's bad, this type of feature should run entirely on the client.

Also, there's a proprietary AI model doing the work, even if inference is in the client. It says "open weight" but that's like letting people download a program as a compiled binary, the exact opposite of what FOSS is supposed to mean. It's an open/free model only if the training data and algorithms are also public, not just the trained weights.

As long as it's easy to turn off, I'm okay with it.

I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla Nov 2025.

tbh i would not mind it that much if its local LLM or if its opt-in (opt out as bare minimum)
i also wonder if they are gonna use this for the built-in translator (if you think about it technically most translator software are AI,DEEPL uses a hybrid between LLMS and NMT IIRC. )

Mozilla can fuck right off with that forced ai horse shit.

Waterfox is the way.