Mozilla is still the only company maintaining an alternative to Chromium (there’s also webkit if you count Apple). Without Firefox you can’t have Librewolf or other alternatives.

Mozilla is not perfect but people really need to stop treating them in a purely binary fashion (you are either horrible or are perfect).

You can criticize Mozilla for the direction they are taking with Firefox, but also you can argue that being a hardcore privacy-centric browser will kill interest for Firefox even faster.

I’ll try to give an out-of-the-loop answer to this, if that helps. Concerning “AI” tools, I think the chunk of people who don’t want it included in the browser on any level come in one or both of two forms. One is a moral opposition – for example, a pro-environmental or pro-artist stance. I don’t think those need much explanation, but feel free to say otherwise.

The other is in my opinion is in response to exhaustion. Pro-“AI” features have proven themselves to be untrustworthy at nearly every turn with thoughtless or downright irresponsible implementations. A worthwhile use-case is the exception rather than the norm and It’s tiring to have to constantly check if this time I want it on or not. As a result of opt-in-by-default changes to privacy policies or account settings, my trust in any site or app publishing an “AI” implementation has been broken and it’s nice to have options I don’t have to worry about wherever I can get them. I found it irritatingly tone-deaf that Mozilla wasn’t considering a kill-switch with their first swing at this.

If it seems unreasonable or hard-to-understand, I think taking a step back and looking at the broader software industry rather than just Mozilla will help.

Firefox is not the devil, but “ideologies aside”, the basic idea is:

1. (Just like microsoft), They could have just decided to put it in one of the “many” variant of the product, name it FoxAI, let the users decide and call a day. Instead, they’ve chosen to force a very heavy component like that on the main version out of blue.

2. Switched or not. Now, you’ll have ‘way’ more bloat on a browser, who should be focused on speed and performance.

3. The whole thing about AI on free stuff is to get as much data as possible to train. You have to trust them to switch it off completely.

You can even disable these features if you do not like them at all

As a smart person said:

BETTER IT NOT EXIST AT ALL

If I went to a restaurant, they placed a hot steaming stinky turd sandwich on my table and then went “oh, but you don’t have to have it”, I still wouldn’t fucking eat there.

Why should we be okay with the Turd Sandwich that is crypto being served by Brave LLM features served by Mozilla being opt-in???

-gwl@lemmy.blahaj.zone

Yeah, the AI- free Firefox browser is normal firefox with the AI slider set to “off”

The other day I watched this video and I think it makes a very good case. https://subscribeto.me/w/7qSsYEPM2aC3D6stdZ54nq (the website is the author’s peertube instance)

I’m not particularly horrified about the availability of AI features, but I’d rather see Mozilla focus most of its resources on core competencies. Firefox lags behind Chrome in web standards feature support, e.g. the browser scores on https://caniuse.com/. It’s also prone to making my laptop fan spin more than Chromium browser do, and people often complain about speed.

They should make the core browser better, and maybe task a couple developers to build some LLM support as an extension.

Mozilla might be the only company trying to provide privacy first AI features.

They are not. There are boatloads of privacy friendly “AI” implementations, they just aren’t very high profile.

But I do think people are over-reacting. This is a less bad approach. And if you can turn it off and leave it off, what’s the big deal?