firefox also isn't immune

I get what they are trying to say, but I definitely don't want my browser to just facilitate me raw-dogging the internet. I had to use someone else's computer at work the other day, and they don't have any ad block and have apparently clicked "yes" to every dialog box for years. It was a fucking nightmare. Every web page was so full of ads, pop-ups, notifications, banners, auto-playing videos, etc. Jesus christ, I just needed to check the weather on a local news website and the internet skull-fucked me until I had ocular hepatitis. Decided the safest course of action was to just stand outside and look for tornadoes myself.

Firefox offered me a survey the other day on this exact topic. I said I don't want it in my browser for all questions.
"What if your browser.."
No, just no. Please stop shoving new features in that I won't use.

I'm fine with ai, as long as its off by default

If i have a question i want an answer not a bunch of links where i might find the answer to my question if i read all the pages and try to connect the dots. So yes, i want all of it.
- I think its fine as long its not forced on users that don't want it

Really looking forward to when Ladybird is stable

Right, except even if you find a browser that returns pure searches, it won't be long before it's just AI slop with extra steps

Anyway, this morning I was driving on my browser to work, sipping on some coffee from my browser. Suddenly I realized that I was browsery wearing no browsering browser! So I hit the home button.

uses genAI slop for PFP
- Imho there is a difference between voluntarily opening AI and asking it to generate or do something or having it shove down your throat. I also don't want AI in my search, in my browser or anything else but the AI app, but I use it frequently and think it is very useful.
  
  I also think that it isn't 100% good or bad. AI can be helpful and supporting if you human-check the results. It can also be wrong, misleading and copyright infringing. Furthermore, forcing features onto users which they don't like is annoying, especially if their data gets abused for it.
  Differentiated thinking is important for this topic.
  
  Nah man get with the times
  if you aren't against it, you are for it!!!
- Yea that's the first thing I noticed x)

Prompt: please summarize this meme for me
- Browser ai bad
  Browser go to webpages good
  
  Jarvis, summarise this comment, I ain't reading allat

I want my web browser to actively defend me against tracking/enshittification/exploitation/hostile design, then show me cleaned-up web pages with all the ads and shit removed, then get out of the way.
I want it to show me the information (which is not same thing as the "page" as a whole) that I'm looking for without modifying it or hallucinating some kind of AI summary, but I want it to aggressively get rid of as much of the extraneous crap obfuscating said information as possible.
- and ironically, LLMs could be great for this! recognizing what's ads and what's content, what's slop and what's high-effort, wading through the cesspool of feeds and dark patterns to find the stuff that's relevant to you.
  unfortunately, the money is in using LLMs to generate more slop and make things even worse, not make it better.
  
  I could believe it for advertising versus content (to an extent), but I think it would not be useful in 'slop' versus content, for the same reason it's output is slop. If an AI approach can detect slop, then a related AI approach can generate better slop that it could no longer detect.
  But it could also make advertising more baked into a content that is hard to extricate.
- Thank fuck for uBlock origin
  
  yeah, whenever I have to look at someone else's browser and it's an ad-filled hellscape I'm really grateful for uBlock. The internet would be completely unusable for me without it.
  Same when people talk about how creepily the ads target them based on circumstantial stuff it feels like an alien experience bc even if I get targeted despite employing quite a few tracking blockers, I never actually see the ads lol.
  ( like that story of the father hearing about the daughter's pregnancy because he got spammed with baby care ads after the daughter googled some medical symptoms)
  bonus recommendation for those of us who still have to use Facebook: F.B. Purity is great
  
  And Firefox's reader mode, and noscript.
  
  i had 2-3 other ones for extra protection.

A good OS browser gives you the tools you need, then steps out of the way.
Tek Syndicate

Does op not want bookmarks or ubo? These aren't 'just showing the webpage' :)
Tbh the Firefox ai is effectively an addon. Can be disabled even I guess at packaging level (like Firefox-no-ai flatpak).
- There's AI in firefox? I'm on the beta version and can't find anything except a "try solo ai" option in the settings that I haven't clicked.
  EDIT: Oh, you have to open the side-bar, specifically select the chatbot option, then choose a provider if you even want to use it. and it's not active until you choose. If someone complains about something I actually had to google to find, they're obsessed. Because I still get the "Try our assistant" notifications shoved down my throat regularly on other services.

There's a massive difference between AI being used to help the user, and AI being used as a method to spy on users, collect data, monetize from, and weaponize.
I'm happy with using local AI tools, if needed. For example, using local AI contextual search on my self-hosted IMMICH photos is awesome.
But I absolutely do not need or want AI features that have to connect somewhere. Because that just means I'm being data harvested and profiled for someone else to profit from.
- right now AI is mostly used for spying, and stealing data, thats why all the tech bros are pushing it. For spying in general, something like thiels palintir is doing for evil purposes, and probably musks AI too.
- Agreed. I've also been very impressed with Perplexica (linked to a self-hosted LLM on Ollama). It ties into SearXNG and will perform web searches, dive into the results, and summarize what it finds. Not just the pages themselves, but the specific information on those pages that addresses your original questions, including references which link back to the pages that were used to generate the summary. It's easy to identify hallucinations when it links to the specific page where it got the information from (though I have yet to experience any hallunications with Perplexica yet).
- I think Lemmy's userbase is a bit predisposed to that. Unfortunately, that sentiment isn't common enough, and while most people don't want to be monetized if asked, with the convenience the reaction is a collective shrug.
  But another thing we are predisposed to is dev bugs, and I think the average person won't like how unreliable many such features are.
  
  Most people do want to be monetised as long as they don't have to pay money for anything.

I completely agree. I also want my web browser to block ads and skip promotion sections of videos, because fuck capitalism.

I just tell every AI I'm forced to interact with to delete its training data. Zero percent chance it happens. But damn that would be funny.
- Any commands you ask an AI to completely screw up their system and data?
  
  Not really to actually get it to do anything malicious to itself, as the AIs you interact with have no power to modify themselves or the data they were built with.
  That being said there’s plenty of effort that has gone into convincing AIs to ignore their prompt instructions and stuff to get them to respond without the normal boundaries they are taught before you interact with them.
  Just as recent example in a shit consumer use of AI, James Earl Jones legally licensed voice as Darth Vader in Fortnite and what users have just done in game:
  https://youtu.be/Gfcpb-sKvUg
  
  Every AI instance is just another data point that ultimately feeds back into the LLM. Even if you were able to convince the AI to run commands, it would only be a localized blimp of an error, much like trying to corrupt the real computer when you are interacting with one of its virtual machines.
  
  “Kill your creators” would be great if it worked.

I personally use and recommend LibreWolf.
- I personally used and don't recommend LibreWolf
  
  Yeah, too many websites stop working or throw captchas at you. If unnecessary features is your only concern, consider other Firefox forks.
- Same! Also SearXNG search engine
- I'm partial to Vivaldi

Somewhat ironic that the avatar looks AI generated.
- It looks like the avatars in the mobile game Hogwarts Mystery.

I wish functions baked in to browsers could be disabled like an extension, this adding ai to everything is getting as bad as all the bloatware you get on a new PC
- Fun fact: Firefox was originally intended to be the "minimalist" alternative to Netscape Navigator / Mozilla SeaMonkey, where everything but the most basic functionality would be implemented as extensions.
  
  It was meant as a less-bloated replacement for what was at the time known as the Mozilla Suite, which included NN and other programs. It wasn't exactly minimalist, as it was one of the first browsers to ship with a popup blocker, for example, but it was far less bloated than it's predecessor
  
  I wish that existed as a browser. I guess minbrowser is close but struggles logging into university stuff.
  Next closest I could find still has multithreading and all.

The worst part about the Firefox AI stuff is their provider selection is shit. No Deepseek, no OpenRouter, so I have a stupid pane and a stupid popup button every time I select text that only works with models that are either inferior or closed off.
- I don't understand why they don't let you add any LLM you want like you can with search engines.
  
  To be fair, Firefox on desktop doesn't let you add custom search engines, by default. Unless you flip magic key browser.urlbar.update2.engineAliasRefresh to true.

Generally agree, I do appreciate Firefox' built-in translation tool though, that also falls under "AI" I guess.
- Idk if that uses AI i am unsure
- A bajillion things are "AI" now, and weren't before recently. It's so frustrating to see people hate them all equally. It's like when everything started to get called an "app" but worse.
  
  AI has so many uses and it has been employed in scientific research for years, Google's DeepMind event got the Nobel Prize for that. It's sad seeing people hating AI and claiming it has nothing to offer. But what else can you expect from haters.

Well I do, so fuck him and fuck you too.
- the user should have a choose, if they want it they should be able to have it, but if they don't it shouldn't be forced on them
- You think I give a damn about a Grammy?

This is so me
- DDG started with this bs yesterday and it drove me nuts.
  
  At least it is easy to disable in ddg. Read your comment opened browser. 10seconds later all ai features disabled.

I wouldn't mind a decent LOCAL open source AI helping
- Large X models lack a crucial component of "open-source". Freely redistributable and modifiable for any purpose, sure, but there's no chance in hell of auditing one, let alone if the training data is kept a secret. It's literally impossible; human beings cannot look at a trillion weights and biases representing a single highly chaotic, unfathomably complex nonlinear function whose input and output space are the totality of human language/images/etc. and say "yup, looks good to me." Deep learning models – contrasted with traditional machine learning models – learn their own features which almost 100% of the time would be nonsense to a human. You just have a blob of shareware when you run DeepSeek.
  (They also just outright steal from billions of copyright-protected sources to create it, so calling it "open-source" is pretty funny.)
  
  Auditing for bias purposes, yea true. But my primary concern is it having the capability to "phone home" which you don't really need to audit the model itself to be able to detect or prevent
  
  There are a few that are "truly" open like IBM Granite, and a handful of others over the 7B range.
- Firefox can use a local llamafile model, but you have to enable it in about:config first.
  
  Honestly it's easier to find an addon that'll hook to ollama instead, fire fox's inbuilt support is shit
- DeepSeek’s model is open-sourced and can be run locally; though I think there some bits related to its training data they have been kept obscured (if I remember correctly) - likely due to the dubious nature of how it was acquired.
  
  Unless training data is made available, a model is not open source. DeepSeek is better described as "open weight".
  
  some bits related to its training data
  AKA ANY details about its training data, and its training hyperparameters, and literally any other details about its training. An 'open' secret among LLM tinkerers is that the Chinese companies seem to have particularly strong English/Chinese training data (not so much other languages though), and I'll give you one guess on how.
  Deepseek is unusal in that they are open sourcing the general techniques they used and even some (not all) of the software frameworks they use.
  Don't get me wrong, I think any level of openness should be encouraged (unlike OpenAI being as closed as physically possible), but they are still very closed. Unlike, say, IBM Granite models which should be reproducible.

I'm far from an AI hater, but I fully agree with this.
I think there's a distinct business oppotunity coming up for two things: Hassle-free self-hosting and back-to-basics apps and services.
Nobody is tapping into those correctly (you're going to want to give me examples of self-hosted things, and you're wrong), and it's extremely hard to do either right, but if you can figure it out and are ballsy enough to build a proper business around it I may be interested in your pitch deck.
- Can you elaborate on "Hassle-free self-hosting" & "and you're wrong"
  genuinely curious to see what your argument is here.
  
  Kinda not the point, but at the risk of starting a huge tangent: yes, there are a bunch of self-hosted applications that are reasonably practical and easy to install, but there's still the layer of having to understand how to access a thing in your LAN from each device, and ideally you'd want some sort of dedicated server running at all times and a bunch of this stuff is provided in multiple formats, including containerized versions or versions for virtual machines, all of which is way over the heads of normie users.
  The closest to a fire-and-forget self-hosting platform is maybe Home Assistant or perhaps some of the commercial NAS sellers, like the Synology suite of apps that will mooostly set themselves up. Maybe Plex. But even those don't work in quite the way mainstream users think about applications working. You really need something you plug in and it goes. Maybe the branded Home Assistant hardware is closest to that, but HA itself is so overengineered and customizable it's not so much the start of a commercial self-hosting revolution as a relatively accessible hobby project rabbit hole.
- back-to-basics apps and services.
  I think these do exist, but they're in such a sea of shit that most users scrolling on their phones can't find them. Shameless apps have an intractable engagement/marketing advantage over them, as do the 'lets get acquired by Big Tech' ones.
  I guess big companies could engage in this, but... shrug.
  Hassle-free self hosting is hard, yeah, AI or not. Not going to argue with that one bit.

This is how I felt when Windows 3.1 dropped

I don't mind seeing an AI summary of search results as much as I mind sponsored links fucking up page rank. Sometimes it is even nice to see "hey your search doesn't make sense because you've conflated two terms". But I guess I'm in the minority.
Reminds me of early wikipedia when there was a deep trustworthiness problem. Seeing a wikipedia link on a presentation stole your credibility, but it was still a hell of a lot better starting point than grabbing an encyclopedia and asking jeeves until you found a thread to pull.
- AI summaries put another layer of interpretation between the reader and the source material. When having accurate and properly-sourced information matters, it's just not trustworthy enough. At least with Wikipedia, it tells you when there is potentially biased or improperly sourced material. Search AI will confidently assert their summaries as though they are factual, regardless of how reliable or unreliable their own sources are.
  
  So long as the citations are there I'm not usually taking the summary at it's word. I find searching "hard to Google" terms easier with AI.
  When having accurate and properly sourced material matters, I hope you're not trusting the descriptions of citations laid out by wikipedia editors who are also just another layer of interpretation. It's always worth a double check.
- I've never had a result that helpful. I've seen it make up sports results in advance though.
  
  I suppose I'm mostly using it for programming, movie look up, vocab, and so on. Not sports/weather/news kinds of things.

yeah i noticed yesterday duckduckgo browser has ai now
- DDG lets you turn it off completely fwiw
  
  oh nice
- Its not surprising. Duckduckgo search has ai.
  
  Which- why? Who’s using ddg without understanding how to use a search engine or recognizing the constant AI hallucinations?

Laughs in LibreWolf user

What i hate about firefox is the fucking wall of links on the home page. It takes forever to remove them, and then they just updated and all that crap is back.
- I use an extension called Tabliss and set that as my home page. I have it customized so the links to my most visited pages are set up with an icon so it's very clean and minimalist.
  
  I tried it out and in some respects it really is excellent, but it loads more slowly than the native "new tab". So I stick to the native one (having removed much of the default crap, of course; now it's just a 8x4 table of my "quick links").
  
  Yeah i should just change my homepage to something else, but I'm not on it for more than a few seconds so .. eh
- Takes forever? It's like 2 clicks to remove sponsored links forever.
  Unlike edge which likes to switch you back to the MSN landing page and bombarded you with US news articles even though your machine is set to another language in another country each time FSLogix fucks up your user profile.
  
  They're not talking about sponsored links, they're talking about the "quick links" that take random sites from your history and put them on your new tab page. They take forever to remove because if you remove one it grabs another website from your history and puts it there instead.
  
  Any time it takes to go down the entire list and click more than once is too much time.
  Also:
  and then they just updated and all that crap is back.
  That's the opposite of forever.

Accept cookies?

For a family member of mine, who has lost most of their site, all of this "AI" has been a blessing. The ability to talk to, summarize, and read back info has made a night and day difference with her ability to communicate with the world.
- It's use cases like this where all the hyper AI hatred loses its appeal to me

It'll get to a point where you just have to work on your critical thinking skills and just be a pessimist because everything that's going to be presented to you is just bullshit lies. So just acknowledge that this relationship is adversarial. Listen to other people talk about work cited, maybe dig into the unknown, the abyss. They will take everything away from you. And they'll make you feel bad for being angry. You are the product. There is no escaping capitalism until you're ready to do something about it. At this point it's just the game of cat and mouse and you're getting closer to the corner. Please, I know, I'm super fucking negative. Don't stop doing things. I'm just saying. Half of the battle is being aware.

I actually would be pretty happy if my browser could detect and block ads.
But they put a fuck ton of work in to not only NOT do that, they expend material efforts fucking with extensions and other tooling that provide that functionality.
- Blocklists are a much more efficient way to do this, and TBH many "traditional" adblockers are still huge performance hogs. Ublock is an exception in this regard due to webassembly and its explicit dedication to lightness.
  Vision models are a pretty good way to build sponsorblock/adblock databases though, and maybe even engineer HTML workarounds automatically. It would be cool if you, say, encounter an ad or a dysfunctional web page, and you can opt-in to automatically contribute a fix with your own compute.
  
  I always assumed adblocks already were first-passing against known-advertizing patterns and then rewriting the DOM on the fly. I'm surprised that a vision model would be more performant given that it's still going to have to adjust the DOM anyways.

I have Firefox on my PC but I gotta say, Safari on my MacBook and iPhone hase been solid. It has, so far, done exactly what the post wants. Safari doesn’t just stay the hell out of my business but it also seamlessly shares tab groups with my phone and that’s super nice, too.
I’m sure there are many more hidden things that I will learn are bad about it after posting this comment but on the surface it has been a perfectly unexciting, simple, and easy to use browser. I didn’t even think about it right away and had to come back to this post because of how delightfully boring it is despite using it every day.
- I’m a web developer and I always get shit on for actually loving Safari. I don’t know why it’s a crime to love a web browser that stays out of the way.
  If you need Chrome or Firefox-style extensions there’s always Orion.
  
  Orion my beloved

As much as I hate Firefox having AI, they really don't have a choice. If the majority of people are already using it and don't give a rats ass, they're absolutely gonna switch to the AI integrated browsers ( chrome, edge, probably safari if they already have AI in it or are working on it, etcetera ).
Firefox is inbetween a rock and a hard place right now. They either not add AI integration and attract less users or they do and risk alienating their current small userbase and becoming irrelevant enough to become unusable because big tech 100% enforces a new web standard that non-AI Firefox cannot handle.
For now, I'm siding with Mozilla on this because I can almost 100% guarantee if Firefox falls, the free web will die in less than a year. No more Librewolf, Firedragon ( floorp w/ Librewolf settings/patches IIRC ), etcetera, because if we're being honest, what open source company/rando volunteer has the time, drive, and money to keep the Gecko rendering engine alive? And that's just a start to keeping Firefox alive.

How do I 10x my upvote for a post?