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.
Ok.
But why?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?
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 <random fork>” is spitting upwards: even the most modified forks like Zen still rely on Mozilla’s aging engine.
Firefox actually picked up on good improvements at around the same they started with the AI stuff. Tab groups and vertical tabs were something people wanted forever and they implemented excellently. Firefox does have HDR.
I don’t know if firefox is slower than chromium in benchmarks or something but it’s certainly not noticeable to me in real usage.
By all means criticize AI features, but please don’t lie about everything else.
I am on the latest version of FF on Linux and I don’t have HDR working, not on YouTube, nor on standalone players like Jellyfin. Yes my display is HDR and Wayland+gnome is exposing HDR properly to games and Helium (chromium fork).
Since some govt and utilities sites only work on “chrome” (borked even with user agent switcher set to chrome+win on FF) I had to get this other browser, and the speed difference is noticeable on most sites, even tho theoretically FF should be faster since its stripping a lot of crap with uBlock Origin.
Tried flatpak’d Brave and also runs snappier than FF.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/HDR#Firefox
Brave
Always amusing you people gravitate to the cryptoscam browser.
Kindly fuck off
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.
Why do almost all your comments sound like AI
IMO nothing in that comment sounds particularly AI generated.
Thanks. 🖖
Because they are an AI simp
As long as this is opt-in (i.e. disabled by default), then sure. Otherwise, I’ll just have to find a new browser.
ive been seeing screenshots of the new vibe coded new tab replacement that are totally broken and the redesigned ui has overly rounded components that cover up text components and hard coded “ai” purple gradients that are nearly impossible to turn off with going into about:config…
So I have low expectations of this going well and seeing that second option in my future.
first thing i did when deved updated to the ‘new’ look (157)…
search for ‘nova’ in about:config
turn off the new rounded gradient shit.
dick, hammer, … etc
Mozilla can fuck right off with that forced ai horse shit.
Waterfox is the way.
Try librewolf
No
Ok then
Is it just open weights again?
Mistral isn’t even fully open weights anymore. TBH they are kinda irrelevant in that space now.
Sometimes when I can’t find an answer online I’ll ask the DDG AI assistant. It’s disabled on my PC so I have to ask on a mobile device.
It still gives me answers that don’t make sense. It’s still an LLM, Siri with a tad more oomf.
Honestly I have soured on DDG.
Not specifically over search assist (even though it’s some useless OpenAI model), but its search is just… bad. I never seem to find what I want, yet it just pops up on some other engine.
Its big useful feature is the diffusion-generated image filtering, but even that is spotty at best. I wish they would lean on the spam/SEO suppression angle more.
Huh! I’ll have to try out other search engines and see what works better.
