franga2000 9 hours ago

You're complaning that the browser that "puts you back in control" ... put you back in control of which AI features you want to enable/disable? How horrible!

What? They didn't make these 10 distinct features one single all-or-nothing button? They let you switch them on or off individually?? How dare they?!?

What? They shipped new features to the browser...turned on?!? Instead of spending all those development hours and then...hiding them behind a setting by default?

I need "AI" in my browser, so I don't use the AI features. No data was sent anywhere. No 4 GB model was downloaded. Nothing happened, except for a popup saying "hey, by the way, if you want to do X, just press this button here". It's just UI elements. No AI-related code runs, no data is sent to AI companies unless you directly tell the browser to do that.

Imagine if Firefox shipped a brand new GPU-accelerated compositor, improved hardware video decoding and WebGL/WebGPU. You people cry about why they didn't add a big "disable GPU features" button? And that they dared to enable this by default?

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noir_lord 9 hours ago | parent [-]

You either missed the point or deliberately missed the point.

The issue was they shipped AI features built into everything and the only way to switch them off was to "about:config" a bunch of settings, they shouldn't have shipped it without the off switch and "Open about:settings and then disable things manually" isn't control for the average user.

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franga2000 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I know what the point is. But what I don't get is why people are expecting hiding certain features and buttons should be a first-class setting. Again, they're just UI elements, they don't do anything until you tell them to.

The user has the choice to not use these features. It's not like Firefox was sending data to AI companies by default. But if you want to completely make them disappear, so you can live in your fantasy world where LLMs were never invented, then yes, that's a niche personal preference and an advanced customization. That's why it goes under about:config.

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2b3a51 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Well, from version 151 there is now a setting to turn all the built-in AI off. So people in some part of Mozilla disagreed with your position sufficiently to provide a setting.

PS: I do actually find Google's ai thing in the search useful now and again, so no fantasy world.

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skywhopper 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This attitude is exactly why Mozilla is failing. Total contempt and ignorance of the users that are the core of Firefox’s user base. If someone doesn’t want to use AI features, that’s not “living in a fantasy world”. And if Mozilla had any respect for its users, they would have realized the need to make this sort of thing a first class setting. Pretending that their core users are delusional freaks who only deserve “niche” settings is exactly why they are rapidly losing that audience.

	▲	franga2000 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		You're missing the point. If someone doesn't want to use AI features, they can just NOT. USE. THEM. That's it. Just don't press the AI button. Is it that hard? Would you say Mozilla is deleting all your data because there's a "Delete cookies and history" button in the menu? You can just NOT. PRESS. THE. BUTTON. The master AI switch doesn't actually change whether the browser uses AI features - it never does unless you specifically run them. What it does is hides them from the user, pretending they don't exist. Browsers that don't respect their users' choices about using AI do things like automatically download large models in the background, integrate cloud-based speech recognition and synthesis as an API available to any website and make the default search engine which they also own show LLM slop above actual results.

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lostmsu 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

And you missed the question about a GPU composition toggle.