this post was submitted on 07 Jan 2026
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122
Architecting Consent for AI: Deceptive Patterns in Firefox Link Previews (www.quippd.com)
submitted 1 day ago by yoasif@fedia.io to c/technology@lemmy.world
12 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

TL;DR: Mozilla has a new CEO and a new mission: transform Firefox into an AI browser. That has run into some snags, as Firefox users don’t seem that interested in AI. Mozilla is forging ahead, utilizing deceptive patterns (previously known as dark patterns) to nag and annoy people into enabling AI features. You can see this in the introduction of Link Previews, an extremely invasive anti-feature that exists solely to push AI into your experience.

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[–] KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com 37 points 22 hours ago (3 children)

Not this seems overly reachy Firefox hate. This feature pushed months ago didn’t it? I managed to turn it off without even having to dig, and I know this because I don’t even remember how to do it.

Firefox defaulting a link preview gesture to on, but making the AI off by default, isn’t a dark pattern. Every new update doesn’t turn this back on if previously disabled. And trying to twist this into “Firefox is using dark patterns to trick you into using AI” just feels like an attempt to shove “Firefox bad” down people’s throats.

I find the amount of Firefox hate Lemmy seems to display so odd, especially when literally every other browser out there, from chrome to brave to opera, and everything in between, barely ever gets even a mention.

This stinks of negative advertising, and I’m getting so fucking tired of it.

[–] UnityDevice@startrek.website 5 points 18 hours ago

I tried the link preview feature as well, and to say the response to it is overblown is putting it mildly. I haven't looked at the source code, but based on how it appears to work I'm not sure it even qualifies as AI. It basically selects 2-3 sentences from the reading mode version of an article, but the selection is so bad it might as well be random. Not surprising as it's a tiny model that runs locally and is only given a second to make the selection.

I actually laughed when I saw it - this is what all the weeks of fuss were about?

[–] surewhynotlem@lemmy.world 0 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

Within the group of people who would use Firefox, you have tech folks, security folks, people who do their research on topics, and you have a load of generic "I hate big companies" contrarians. It's that last group who enjoy complaining.

[–] selokichtli@lemmy.ml 1 points 16 hours ago

Mozilla is not a big company, put in context.

[–] Deestan@lemmy.world 15 points 21 hours ago

[–] squaresinger@lemmy.world 24 points 1 day ago

Why won't these pesky peasants shut up and give us our data?

Who could have known that the people who voluntarily use a tiny niche browser mostly for privacy/idealism reasons wouldn't wany just another AI browser?

Honestly, how out of touch with their user base can they be?

If I want a good browser that works with every website, I'd take something chromium based. If I want an AI browser, I'd take one of the many chromium based ones.

[–] 2910000@lemmy.world 20 points 1 day ago

I'm really grateful for the introduction to deceptive patterns here.
I was not aware of it, and I think it's important to have language that can describe specifically how tech companies are trying to coerce people.

[–] termaxima@slrpnk.net 4 points 19 hours ago

I've switched to IronFox on mobile and Waterfox on computers, personally.

[–] Nioxic@lemmy.dbzer0.com 13 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Its open source right?

We can just make a “dumbfox” browser without ai