What happened to just making a damn good browser
this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2026
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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.
On one side, its great that forks exist that strip out a lot of the bullshit. On the other hand if main Firefox dies or goes too far into the deep end, there's no way those forks can take its role
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.
Exactly. The Blender foundation has stated that it is a tool by humans and for humans, so no AI functionality is planned. However, there are still MCP extensions and the like. There’s nothing stopping anyone from using AI with Blender, but the Blender Foundation funding goes to core development. Not sure why Mozilla isn’t doing the same. If I really want a LLM controlling a browser, playwright-cli works fine anyway.
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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?
They should stop doing that, instead
Ok.
But why?
Mozilla execs got an angry phone call from their sugar daddies at Google demanding they drive off the last remaining FF users (allegedly)
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.
I don't believe in IP, so that really doesn't bother me much. The problem is when information gets harvested from the public and suddenly becomes someone else's IP.
So not really theft, more like gatekeeping, but as it stands, its the same result: rich get richer, we can agree on that.
I think that IP may be a good idea on paper, but as it stands it only benefits the powerful, as in "if I pirate content I risk having my life ruined, companies fed their LLMs with everything but the kitchen sink and nothing happened"
I gotta admit, I don't really mind AI as long as it doesn't exist anywhere in any amount
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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.
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The translation feature has been very useful, though it's not an LLM. Still a neural network though. Saves me from going to google translate when browsing websites in e.g Russian (drive2.ru or whatever turns up in google search every so often when looking up obscure information on some cars and european oils that bitog forums don't see as much).
It entirely depends on what the AI does and if it's opt-in, opt-out, or forced on you. Opt-in local AI with sensible features is actually a good thing IMO.
i love the on-device translate. sometimes it can be a little off-the-mark, but overall it works pretty well. it's a great addition to firefox.
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Mozilla can fuck right off with that forced ai horse shit.
Waterfox is the way.
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. )
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