Mozilla's latest quagmire
rubenerd.com221 points by nivethan a day ago
221 points by nivethan a day ago
> It might be hard to believe for my younger readers, but Mozilla took on Internet Explorer that was just as entrenched as Chrome is now, and they kicked proverbial posterior! They did because they offered a better browser that respected the people who used it, and gave them agency in their browsing experience.
That is revisionist history. Firefox succeeded because MS was sitting on their hands with IE, and it was stagnating. Firefox didnt do the opposite of what IE - you could argue Mozilla was doing what MS should have been.
It wasnt about "respecting users", or "agency" but simply implemented standards properly.
And that's going to be a hard problem with Chrome because you're up against a browser that is moving very, very, fast.
Firefox was seriously a better browser, not just "implements standards better". It ran faster, it had tabs (wow!) and at one point it got Firebug which let you have a console INSIDE the browser that showed information you could print with `console.log`, I kid you not.
It was a better browser through and through, maybe because MS slept on IE or maybe not, but in the end it isn't revisionist to say they beat MS's proverbial posterior because the browser was better.
Firebug was a big reason for webdevs to adopt firefox in the first place. Part of what made chrome succeed is it came out with a pretty robust set of webdev tools right from the get-go.
But also, google spent a mountain of money advertising chrome.
> Part of what made chrome succeed is it came out with a pretty robust set of webdev tools right from the get-go.
I think this factor isn't given enough weight in the shift to Firefox.
At that time, the largest pain point in web development was (by a long shot) browser compatibility.
When developers fell in love with Firefox, they started pushing business requirements away from IE and towards the browser that didn't feel like it was their enemy. Alongside with this there was also massive shift to start taking web standards seriously, which is another area where IE dropped the ball spectacularly
It took a few years, but eventually pointy haired managers got sick of our whining and gave in.
We, no joke, ultimately were able to drop our support for IE6->8 because of the youtube "we are dropping support for IE" banner. We spun it to our bosses as "If google is doing this, we should be able to."
Some time ago there was a post here about it. The guy claimed he and a few other fed up devs made that banner on their own initiative. The whole thing was a huge bluff because at the time google had no such plan but it gained so much momentum that they went ahead with it eventually.
It's hard to state just how much of a game changer Firebug was for web development. Before that your only option was "alert()"ing or outputting directly to the page.
Once Chrome came along with their devtools, improvements quickly escalated between the 2 before Google eventually won out.
I can't recall the exact point in time when my use of Firefox fell off, but it was probably due to the account integrations with Chrome.
Around 2006 or 2007, I was working on the Sage Notebook. I did a little JavaScript injection, and managed to make the notebook execute JavaScript instead of sending Python code to the server and printing the result. Lo and behold, I could interact with my JavaScript environment on any browser we supported (ie, ff, safari and Opera). I don't recall if firefox had its JavaScript console yet but it was a game changer on those other browsers.
Chrome has the advantage that they inherited webkits inspector. The chrome team made improvements, yes, but it originated in Safari
> But also, google spent a mountain of money advertising chrome.
Not to mention preferential treatment like the Youtube anti-IE campaign [1]
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/4/18529381/google-youtube-in...
> But also, google spent a mountain of money advertising chrome.
That money was also used to increase the user base via drive-by installations, e. g. while installing Adobe Reader you had to deselect the Chrome installation, otherwise you'd find yourself with a new standard browser afterwards.
To be fair to Google, they also kicked ass on implementation at the beginning too.
Chrome was a lot faster and a lot lighter (in the beginning)
Chrome borrowed their webdev tools from Webkit, who borrowed them from KHTML. Chrome launched with dev tools, but they didn't develop their own distinct version of them for many years after launching the browser.
> Chrome borrowed their webdev tools from Webkit, who borrowed them from KHTML.
Neither KDE nor OS X ever shipped their built-in Web Inspector prior to the appearance of Firebug in 2006, and by that point WebKit and Safari were already in full swing. The very first iteration[1] of Web Inspector appeared around the same time as Firebug and was an original contribution by Apple; it wasn't borrowed from KHTML.
1. <https://web.archive.org/web/20070621162114/https://webkit.or...>
You could have a similar console on IE already back then, naturally it only worked on Windows, and MS being MS, the expectation was that either Office Tools or VS would be installed, as it was provided via them in a way similar to Firebug.
There was also the integration with Dreamweaver, Frontpage.
One big feature at the time was Firefox had a built in popup blocker, IE did not. Popup ads were rife towards the backend of the 90's and the internet felt borderline unusable without a blocker.
> beat MS's proverbial posterior because the browser was better
not via marketshare. The fact is, only developers (and adjacent) were using firefox. IE, during those days (pre-chrome) was still such a dominant browser that you had to check for IE compatibility.
But today, developers are not checking for firefox compatibility. So, firefox today (and during the firefox heyday) were never truly "beating" IE from a marketshare perspective.
There was a period of time when our university help desk was installing and recommending Firefox for students and faculty to use over ie6.
I remember friends of same age to also actually switch browsers by themselves, suddenly finding that their computer now used Firefox instead because it was simply faster. Same reason everyone switched to Chrome at a later point.
not via marketshare
That's not an entirely fair measure though, considering Microsoft lost an antitrust case that was brought because they were unfairly leveraging their monopoly in operating systems to give them an advantage in browser adoption. The DOJ threatened to break up Microsoft over it, and eventually only stopped when Microsoft added an option for users to pick a difference default browser over IE.
By that time IE's dominance was beyond Mozilla's reach and it was only when Google leveraged their monopoly in online advertising that a real alternative option for users became viable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....
I'd also point out that IE won the title from Netscape in the first place, which was the basis for the Mozilla software set (that later spun off into firefox).
Mozilla didn't "take on" IE. Mozilla reclaimed their lost browser position. IE kicked the proverbial posterior of Netscape which both Netscape and Mozilla struggled to reclaim right up until the release of Firefox.
Didn't Mozilla reclaim its title after Microsoft stopped its s monopolistic and anti-competitive activities? Or do I have the timing wrong?
That was maybe a factor in the EU. In the US, MS never really stopped their anti-competitive activities. IE has been distributed as the default browser for windows in the US since forever.
MS presented the choice for a browser from 2009->2011.
IDK that MS has ever actually fixed the situation since their last fine in 2013.
IIRC, firefox really started taking off around Firefox 3, which was first released in 2006. Looks like they officially beat IE in 2010. That does seem to line up with MS's implementation of the browser choice screen.
lol, please tell me at what point in time Microsoft stopped its monopolistic and anti-competitive activities.
They never did stop, but there was a time when they had to slow down right after being found guilty in a pretty big anti trust case in 2001.
The case was specifically about IE integration in Windows, so it definitely had an impact.
I think this is probably what the comment was thinking about.
And in the US, there was never a time that Microsoft was forced to ship an operating system without a browser
It wasnt about "respecting users", or "agency" but simply implemented standards properly.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape:
In November 2007, IE had 77.4% of the browser market, Firefox 16.0%, and Netscape 0.6%From the same Wikipedia page:
"On July 15, 2003, Time Warner (formerly AOL Time Warner) disbanded Netscape. Most of the programmers were laid off, and the Netscape logo was removed from the building."
Peak Netscape was 1996. By 2003, they had already handed development off to Mozilla, and Netscape the browser was just a thin veneer over Mozilla's browser.
By 2007, it was just Mozilla with AOL branding and almost all of it's users were people still using AOL in 2007.
Yes, that's the point.
Back in the naughties, testing a web page with Netscape seemed miraculous because if it rendered correctly with a PC, chances are it would with a Mac, and with Linux.
Microsoft didn't care about standards. If a page rendered incorrectly in other browsers than Windows MSIE they didn't care (even if it was Mac MSIE).
But that difference wasn't enough to save Netscape because, as a web browser, Netscape was a bloated mess.
When Firefox came along, it was popular with web designers, for the same reasons as Netscape was - but its streamlined design catered to regular users.
Not just moving very fast. Mobile is bigger than desktop, Google owns the platform, defaults probably matter more, and control is tighter.
Firefox grew in popularity due to widespread spyware issues at the time. Much of that spyware specifically targeted Internet Explorer’s ActiveX technology, making Firefox the safest alternative browser. I had everyone I know installing it and they all liked it.
This just reminded me of the time I thought Firefox was cooked when tabs were finally added in IE7. The idea that IE was ever suddenly going to have a huge resurgence is amusing in hindsight, but it really felt like we were stuck with it for a while there.
Firefox succeeded because it had tabs and supported extensions. Literally the only reasons IMO.
And it was fast, and small. Back in those days, download size mattered.
No, it was larger than many of the other browsers (like Opera), and size wasn't different enough to matter. Back then, download time was entirely quantized by "one night", because the only thing that mattered was that it finished by morning so someone picking up the phone wouldn't sever the dialup connection. A substation piece of software, like a browser, was happening during sleep time, regardless of size, and rare, so two night would also be fine (resuming was trivial with ftp, where these were sourced, usually from university mirrors).
Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox first made was in the 2002-2004 era where a substantial portion of the internet-trendsetting audience that adopted it in the US had broadband.
20% of adult Americans had broadband at home by early 2004 - https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2006/05/28/part-1-broad... - which is not a majority but had heavy overlap with the group that wasn't just settling for IE6. Similar with Facebook - it was driven by the mostly-young tech-forward early-adopter crowd that either had broadband at home or was at university with fast internet.
Yes, 90% in 2002 and 80% in 2004 had dialup.
No, having broadband had nothing to do with desire back then. It was entirely based on availability and how quickly your local telecom/cable monopoly deployed it, being so bad that the government had to step in many times to motivate them. Everyone I knew purchased broadband (some cloning cable modem to get it for free) the day it was available. For broadband users, the difference in browser size was entirely negligible.
Facebook required that you were at a universities to register. Its not a reasonable thing to compare to web browser use.
I started using Firefox with version 1.5, as did many of my friends, and we were doing it because it was flat out better. We did not care about 'stagnating' or standards.
Mozilla has the classic problem of a non-profit that achieved its aims. I was around back in the day and my friends and I were avid evangelists of Firefox - a few cogs in the wheel of the marketing installing Firefox on school machines and getting all the elderly people to use it and so on. There were user groups and student ambassador programs and so on. It was an incredible marketing effort combined with an effort to bring standards and compliance to them into the mainstream. And it worked because they added features at a rate that IE simply did not match.
The extension ecosystem, tabs, plugins, and notably whatever effort they did behind the scenes to ensure that companies that did streaming video etc. would work with their browser all played out really well.
I think the ultimate problem is that Mozilla's mission of a standards-compliant web with open-source browsers everywhere ultimately did get achieved. The era of "Works with IE6" badges has ended and the top browsers run on open-source engines. Despite our enthusiasm at the time for it, I think the truth is that Firefox was probably just a vehicle for this, much bigger, achievement.
Now that it's been achieved, Mozilla is in the fortunate place where Firefox only needs to exist as a backstop against Chrome sliding into high-proprietary world while providing the utility to Google that they get to say they're not a monopoly on web technologies.
Mozilla's search for a new mission isn't some sign of someone losing their way. It's just what happens to the Hero of Legend after he defeats the Big Bad. There's a post-denouement period. Sam Gamgee gets to go become Mayor of the Shire, which is all very convenient, but a non-profit like Mozilla would much rather find a similar enough mission that they can apply their vast resources to. That involves the same mechanics as product development, and they're facing the same primary thing: repeated failure.
That's just life.
This new "please accept cookies and scripts to prove you are running Google Chrome without Adblockers" Internet does not exactly look like mission accomplished to me. And that is before we even get to the part of the Internet that goes straight to "please run this Android app so we can ask Google who truly owns your device".
If Mozilla was not busy "offering" (renamed the no-thank-you setting once again) so many "experiences" they could be doing much of the same stuff they did back in the day.
American non-profits seem to be run like corporations, with all disadvantages of it. Bloated, losing focus, growing for the sake of growth (where growth means headcount and income, not necessarily charter goals)
I think its even worse than that. Corporations at least have a bottom line to chase. At the end of the day there is the hard reality of you are either making money or you arent. There is an objective measure of success. American non profits are like the bad parts without the checks and balances of actually having to make money.
I mean, non-profits also have to make money to stay alive, they're just not allowed to pay dividends to investors.
Mozilla did lose their way. It happened because they abandoned their core users: you. People who loved Firefox so much they practically forced it on everyone around them.
Google released Chrome with a massive advertising campaign, reaching even to television. They put ads for Chrome on the world's biggest web properties. It was packaged in installers. Not to say it wasn't a good browser - but it wasn't obviously better than Firefox. This marketing campaign bought them a ton of marketshare.
Mozilla's response, instead of sticking by Mozilla evangelists, nearly all of whom were power users, was to decide that the browser was too complicated for its users. It needed to be more like Chrome. It needed to be the browser for the proverbial grandma. So they axed features (like Panorama), configurability, and extensibility, alienating everyone who really cared. Only they didn't have the marketing heft of Google, so they didn't get Grandma, either.
Ever since then they've been panicking and grasping at straws and shoving in shovelware like Pocket in obviously vain attempts to regain what they had. And they never will, until they make people like you and me LOVE Firefox again.
> - but it wasn't obviously better than Firefox.
Ah, but Chrome was obviously better than Firefox.
When Chrome was released, the advertising I recall focused on one killer feature that Firefox didn't get for many years after that: Speed.
Chrome's JIT JavaScript was so much faster than everyone else's interpreted JavaScript that you could run a materially different kind of software in the browser. It was like the difference between a slow interpreted language and a fast compiled one. Chrome's rendering was also fast.
There was even a cartoon explaining how the new JavaScript engine worked.
Chrome felt like the next generation of browser.
I say this as someone who remained a fan and user of Firefox throughout. I stuck with Firefox through its relatively slow years.
Firefox caught up, but it took years. It got its own JIT JavaScript, but there were a few years after that where Firefox's rendering was relatively slow by the new standards. However, Firefox has excellent performance all round by now.
I was disappointed when Chrome came out that JIT JavaScript could even be a marketable feature and wasn't already the default in the best open source browsers, because it seemed like such an obvious thing to do for many years prior, and not particularly difficult. I guess market forces resulted in nobody deciding to do it in Firefox, or any other open source browser, until competition made it a necessity. I was quite surprised, because Firefox seemed like the product of passionate technology nerds, and performance JITs are very fun and satisfying things to make, with visible results.
Firefox performance seemed like it really varied for some people. I never noticed any difference.
This, 1000%.
I've been saying for over a decade that Mozilla decided to abandon their core demographic - power users, instead going after people who "really like chrome, but think that it’s just too fast and doesn’t use enough memory".
I always questioned how big that demographic was. Looking at a chart of Firefox's market share would seem to indicate that I might have been on to something.
But Mozilla just keep doubling down on trash. They're not actually interested in hearing what people want. People like me tried to tell them before we abandoned Firefox. But they weren't interested in listening. It's been this way for 10 years or more now.
I've long been of the opinion that the best thing for Mozilla would be for it to die, so that some other FOSS group (maybe the FSF, or debian, someone like that) could take its place with a firefox fork. And maybe even start actually improving the software again.
> that some other FOSS group...could take its place with a firefox fork
What stops them from contributing improvements now?
The state of mess the code is in?
To be fair, Mozilla-affiliated developers have accomplished some serious cleanup in recent years. New & redesigned features are fake tabs with special permissions instead of that unholy intertwining of web standards and local UI in C++. Storage is almost-proper sqlite3. Dynamic linking against system libraries old&new just works(tm). Even the vendored Rust packages more or less build fine, now even across multiple compiler versions. Plus, AMDs new-ish CPUs with ginormous L3 brought recompile (and thus, bisect) times to almost reasonable levels, so that is not as pressing of an issue any more. I would guesstimate only 25 years left at the current speed till Firefox can be considered maintainable again.
Multiple factors, e.g the perceived lack of an immediate need, and also Mozilla's control of the firefox codebase.
For instance, one improvement that a more user-respecting group might contribute is ripping out all the AI slop. But as pointed out in the article, Mozilla like the AI slop and wouldn't accept those changes.
If Mozilla was to disappear, orgs like those I mentioned would likely see a more urgent need to take over in order to break the chrom(ium) monoculture.
> And they never will, until they make people like you and me LOVE Firefox again.
What are the sorts of features you think they should consider adding?
Just copy librewolf/mullvad Browser and become actually a private browser. Create self hosted alternative to Google services like Brave has.
Random thought, but Kagi is acting like I wish Mozilla would. Their main product is a search engine, but they’ve been trying out a slew of other initiatives, all of which seem well thought out and integrate LLMs in an exclusively thoughtful, opt-in way. Surely many of them will end up being failures, but I can’t help but be impressed.
Maybe it’s because I’m a power user and they tend to cater to power users, idk — that’s definitely what the comment above yours is hinting at.
But at this point, I think we can all agree that whatever Mozilla is doing now isn’t working… so maybe power users are worth a shot again?
If Mozilla tried to do something like Kagi, they would likely be castigated by half of HN for "yet another side project adventure"
No because that would actually be a feature worth adding and actually make it a privacy browser instead of a funnel for data to Google.
Search is quite the undertaking, so I'm not really hoping that Mozilla takes that on in particular. I'm just pointing out the odd reality that I tend to trust Kagi (a for-profit) to fight the general good fight in a way I agree with more than I trust Mozilla (a non-profit).
The biggest problem with mozilla is they are trend chasing instead of finding a niche.
The AI stuff is the perfect example. Are there people who like AI? Certainly. Will they use firefox? Probably not.
At this stage firefox is the anti-establishment choice. That crowd hates AI. Betting on AI might make sense if you are chrome. It doesn't make sense if you are firefox.
I use Firefox to access ChatGPT. I wouldn't want AI suggestions or slop appearing on random pages.
The idea that LLM have been successful and useful for significant things is naturally confused with the idea LLMs needed to bolted on to literally anything.
It's been all downhill for Mozilla since Brendan Eich was fired.
This.
Brendan Eich was the Director of Mozilla. This is the guy who invented Javascript in 10 days, at Netscape, and then co-founded Mozilla, and became the technical lead. He was Chief Architect of Mozilla, then CTO of Mozilla Corporation, then CEO. He made Firefox great. This was when Mozilla was in its heyday, and passed IE in marketshare.
Then he was fired in 2014 because a bunch of people went crazy that he made a $1,000 political donation for a California ballot proposition that had nothing to do with computers.
This sent a signal that Mozilla doesn't reward technical improvements to its software — it rewards following political trends.
All of the bad stuff in Firefox started then.
Brendan Eich then went on to develop a browser (a set of Chromium patches, rather) with cryptocurrencies, NFTs, LLM integrations, and all other trend-chasing junk. I'm not sure Firefox would be any better with him in the team - it'd probably be worse.
Crypto: https://x.com/mozilla/status/1476951030638260225
LLM integration: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/ai-chatbot
Would it though?
He went on to develop Brave!
> Brave
Which is chromium
I've always wondered why he didn't use Firefox as the base for Brave.
They did use Gecko as the base originally:
"In 2015, before we released to users, the Brave browser actually was built on the Gecko engine. However, early on our engineering team realized that Gecko lacked important product features, led to more Web compatibility (webcompat) issues, and overall had poorer performance." (1)
Mozilla is a search traffic vendor with one client, not a combination of the EFF and the FSF. That's their behavior and motives in a nutshell. How big of a fraction of the Google traffic comes from power users? How would they find an alternative? Those are the questions the (rational) high-paid execs at Mozilla ask about us.
Google once already has decided that certain Web property brings in too little traffic, and shut it down, which was probably the largest blunder in their history, burning immense amounts of goodwill. They shut down Google Reader.
It attracted a relatively narrow audience, but that audience was special: active and future founders, CEOs, CTOs, VPs of engineering, blogosphere and YouTube celebrities, etc. Each of these disgruntled users communicated their disappointment to hundreds and thousands of other, less affluent users. Most of them, once in positions of engineering power, now would think twice before relying on something from Google.
Same with Firefox. It may serve a relatively more narrow audience, but it's not necessarily the same kind of audience, on average, which Chrome or Edge or even Safari serves.
What killed Firefox was Electron. There, I just said it.
XUL was very good, but then it was no more. And as soon as it was gone, Electron apps appeared. It's a tragedy. Mozilla had everything to be in that place instead, with a better product.
Once that was gone, Firefox became just another browser, doing what any browser does. It's still very good, and my first choice, but damn I miss XUL.
I think something people should take a hard look at is Firefox's crypto libraries. Firefox's implementation of cryptography in NSS is fundamentally in the browser. Chrome works with the OS. One could argue which implementation is better, but as a user, it's really helpful to have Firefox laying around from time to time. For all sorts of reasons.
Opting out of "AI" is performative and pointless for companies to support. "AI" has been woven throughout most of the tech products we use for decades at this point. We're in a brief period where people are noticing the new crop of AI features, but AI is an implementation detail that will disappear into the background. Even just looking at modern transformer-based language models, most of it is happening in the background and not visible.
Opting out of AI would be like saying that you don't use JavaScript because you don't like the moral position of the guy who wrote it. That's a reasonable moral position to take (I totally get not wanting to use LLMs for reasons of copyright, art, or even just capability), but a completely unreasonable technical position to take, functionally impossible.
Why does Mozilla not give you a convenient opt out? Because it's hard, low impact, and functionally no-one wants it.
I think it's unfortunate that everything gets called AI, but people are clearly upset by the LLM stuff, which has not been around for decades. Also, it's still pretty easy to disable JS AFAIK so that comparison kind of proves the point that this should be an option.
I really don't get folks who defend tech paternalism - where features are pushed on users because "daddy knows best".
Opting out of a specific feature is completely reasonable, I can get behind the push back on tech paternalism, but opting out of a basically unconnected set of features based on an implementation detail is the bit that I think is unnecessary.
It's advisable to use a prefs.js for this sort of thing
prefs.js is modified by browser itself. And it contains lots of stuff by default already.
You can store your custom preferences in user.js file - Firefox will copy those to prefs.js at startup.
From your link:
The user.js[1] file is optional. If you have one whenever the application is started it will overwrite any settings in prefs.js with the corresponding settings from user.js.
Mozilla suggests policies [1] (which, in turn are capable of default-setting or enforcing most prefs and has proper release notes) and has removed a bunch of pages that previously recommended directly editing prefs.js or shipping user.js (which had been changed in backwards-incompatible ways before when the parser was swapped).
For those who have worked or work at Mozilla, how is it to be employed there?
Firefox must add one single button in settings to disable all AI nonsense at once. It can be on by default, but if user turns this off - it must be kept off.
“A user-agent is software that performs communication or interaction with another system on behalf of the user, historically stemming from earlier messaging systems, and literally meaning 'the user’s representative actor'.”
I guess everyone would agree that web browsers would come to our mind when we hear "user-agent" in general context. After years of forward and backward evolution of web extensions, AI powered web browsers inevitably will move forward the meaning of the term "user-agent" and deliver the value it actually promises.
Together with the advance of "browser-use" optimized local LLMs, current M4 powered Macbook Air can provide enough juice to aid users' web browsing needs. I believe soon AI hubs installed at homes, or cloud based private AI inference engines will become much more accessible offerings to help with mobile browsers as well. Overall, I think it's ridiculous to criticise Mozilla for introducing optional AI features on Firefox.
This sounds like a marketing shpiel rather than a prediction. I think the primary value offered by AI browsers will be to the AI vendors - as they will have far more control over user behavior as well as far better ability to surveil and monitor for marketing purposes.
This is what I have believed and expected since I first heard the term 'user agent' 25 years ago.
The latest quagmire is Firefox adding a completely optional AI sidebar? Seriously, some people are impossible to please. Just don’t open it if you don’t like it…
I've added a room to your home.
Sometimes, there's a butler in there who seems absentminded and can only remember things up to a few thousand words. He once stacked all your dishes in the refrigerator and dumped all the food into the sink.
Other times, there's a demon in there who seems hellbent on destroying the innocence of your children and ripping apart your family. He once gave your children snuff films and instructions to build a bomb.
Just don't open the door if you don't like it... Some people are impossible to please.
No, no.
> I've added a room to your home.
They’ve added a room to their home. That they let you live in, for free.
I’ll also mention that the room right next to it had all the contents you claim to take issue with.
The problem here is that you shouldn’t leave children home alone, not that it has two potentially dangerous rooms. There’s several more such rooms in your house, and you wouldn’t let them cook or use your power tools by themselves either (not until they prove they can be trusted with that anyway).
Yes, this is why we routinely fill council homes (or public project housing) with amnesiac butlers to rearrange the residents' possessions, and also with demons for, um, reasons.
Completely reasonable things to do.
How else would we recoup our investment in the hugely expensive, unpredictable butler/demon spawning machines?
>The problem here is that you shouldn’t leave children home alone, not that it has two potentially dangerous rooms. There’s several more such rooms in your house, and you wouldn’t let them cook or use your power tools by themselves either (not until they prove they can be trusted with that anyway).
Depends on age, and the children in question. Also, if I have power tools it's because I chose them. And neither amnesiac butlers nor stochastic demons are necessary to not starve in the way that cooking food is, so the assessments of risk and basic good sense are not comparable.
> Just don't open the door if you don't like it... Some people are impossible to please.
I mean... yeah? Do you use every feature of every piece of software you have installed?
Until the last few years, most features added to software I use haven't:
...had functionally nondeterminstic, unpredictable results in response to how I use them.
...written in long-form English text with confidence and no guarantee of factual accuracy.
...coaxed children into codependent pseudo-relationships with ML models or encouraged suicide.
AI isn't a new feature; it's a new category. And the people who don't understand why some of us don't want it everywhere don't understand that distinction, or else are financially motivated to ignore it and gaslight everyone about the categorical boundaries crossed.
I use LLMs and diffusion style image generators... Where I understand the model I've chosen, can control it locally, and have enough tacit knowledge to double check the outputs before I go ahead with something. I don't trust Mozilla to ensure any of those things anymore. They've long since burned that credibility.
Still, just don't use them? I have no interest in AI in my browser and have had no difficulty avoiding it in Firefox.
That makes zero sense. How do you have no difficulty ? Are you going ahead and disabling like the below ? If not, then I am afraid you are hallucinating like an AI and not really "avoiding it" in Firefox. Doing the below also improves performance, memory consumption and battery life.
about:config
user_pref("browser.ml.enable", false);
user_pref("browser.ml.chat.enabled", false);
user_pref("browser.ml.chat.sidebar", false);
user_pref("browser.ml.chat.menu", false);
user_pref("browser.ml.chat.page", false);
user_pref("extensions.ml.enabled", false);
user_pref("browser.ml.linkPreview.enabled", false);
user_pref("browser.tabs.groups.smart.enabled", false);
user_pref("browser.tabs.groups.smart.userEnabled", false);
user_pref("pdfjs.enableAltTextModelDownload", false);
user_pref("pdfjs.enableGuessAltText", false);> the people who don't understand why some of us don't want it everywhere don't understand that distinction, or else are financially motivated to ignore it and gaslight everyone about the categorical boundaries crossed.
This is such a common fallacy that I think it should be given a name. When you believe that the people who disagree with you must either be ignorant or malicious. Leaves no room for honest disagreement or discussion. Maybe the "dumb-or-evil" fallacy?
It's a specific case of the false dilemma, sure.
But, in life, when you meet enough AI evangelists, what was formally a logical fallacy becomes informally a useful, even necessary heuristic.
Perhaps; but I would argue talking to many AI evangelists is a form of selection bias. Which makes the false dichotomy conclusion reasonable given the inputs, but still inaccurate given reality.
True, it's a form of false dichotomy, but I think this specific instance is particularly interesting in that it allows the holder to dehumanise their opponent to an extent, and justify lack of discussion. It's also an incredibly common conclusion in politics after people gain a somewhat superficial understanding of both sides. I wonder if it might play a key role in social polarization.
For me the strongest arguments are the ones that can argue the opponent's side as effectively as the opponent, and then show why it's weak. And that feels entirely incompatible with a dumb-or-evil argument.
>I think this specific instance is particularly interesting in that it allows the holder to dehumanise their opponent to an extent, and justify lack of discussion.
That's a wild take and a wild leap. For my own part, I see the failure or refusal to comprehend someone else's preferences, values, or boundaries as itself a profoundly human quality, even if it's a quality I don't love, rather than one which would cause me to see someone as less human.
I will admit that, when there's enough nonsense money being thrown after a vaunted object, sensible discussion can feel pointless. Prudence goes deaf amid the din of hype.
And yes, steelmanning can be highly persuasive, but not when premises are radically different enough between two parties. It's really a more productive tool to improve your model of someone else.
It’s kinda weird, because I have the exact same feeling about people who seem to categorically reject it based on what appear to be mostly emotions.
Maybe I’m using the wrong web browsers - mine have always had those problems (except that the pseudo-relationships were with real, horrifically bad people).
No. There is a lot more than that. The AI stuff appears in places in the UI where other things used to, like in right-click menus and when you are entering text into fields. And it's not opt-in. It's on by default. Unless you are willing to search for how to turn it off and open the non-GUI about:config stuff and modify raw settings in a text table (with no descriptions or help text next to them) then you can't even turn it off. Also, the AI stuff takes up disk space.
The default Right Click Menu in Firefox is
- Icon bar: Back, Forward, Reload, Bookmark
- Save Page As...
- Select All
- Take Screenshot
- Ask An AI Chatbot
- View Page Source
- Inspect Accessibility Properties
- Inspect
I would bet that 99% of Firefox users have never ever even once clicked on any of the options besides the first one (icon bar).
> No. There is a lot more than that.
There's not really though. The most annoying thing was when highlighting text a weird icon showed up. I clicked on it, and one of the most prominent buttons on it was "turn this shit off". So I did.
This will probably be a bit useful for me when I want to copy web pages into Gemini for data extraction.
Based on the article, you have to disable a whole heap of AI features, not a simple optional AI sidebar.
This include things like using AI to assist with rendering/processing of PDF, looking at the flags.
As a Firefox users, this seems very troubling to me.
That’s what the flags seem to have as a subject sure, but my firefox hasn’t spammed AI in my face even once, and I’ve looked at a lot of PDF’s, so clearly it’s not mandatory.
Did you check your network logs when opening PDFs? Why these flags are there to begin with?
>This include things like using AI to assist with rendering/processing of PDF, looking at the flags.
Firefox is downloading a local model and using that to add alt-text to images inside PDFs which is great for accessibility. You can see all models that Firefox downloaded at about:addons. Every AI feature besides the (optional) sidebar (obviously) are local modals that run completely on-device.
This is bad. Very bad. AI models hallucinate and can make big mistakes. No browser should try to alter content without explicit user consent.
I noticed the ai sidebar. Annoying. But left column browser tabs are back, which is a plus.
That reminds me that their new tab grouping feature is the first one to really impress me and immediately enter my workflow in… years? Probably since either reader mode or auto-translate first dropped.
Highly recommend everyone check it out. Handily trounces all the tab management extensions I’ve tried over the years on FF and Chrome
I guess Mozilla also wants to jump on the AI bandwagon.
Out of the five options available, only one is European (the one I am using). What I don't like is how I cannot add my own custom endpoint. What if I run Mistral locally (with Ollama, for example) and want to use that?
Also, I really do think there should be a fat warning about uploading data from browser to a third party. Yes, every bloody time. Not everything the browser shows is publicly available data. There are people who are going to break the law with this tool (ie. using PII with LLM), and the people who are damaged are going to be innocent third parties who didn't opt-out or opt-in anything.
The BS with not being easily able to disable a feature like this is probably to deter, or because 'user studies' showed people don't want to disable it. Well, fuck that. It isn't rocket science to have a checkbox which just deals with these values in about:config.
> Out of the five options available, only one is European (the one I am using). What I don't like is how I cannot add my own custom endpoint. What if I run Mistral locally (with Ollama, for example) and want to use that?
Set up your preferred self-hosted web interface (OpenWebUI or whatever, I haven't looked into this for a while), point it at ollama, and then configure it in Firefox:
browser.ml.chat.provider = http://localhost:3000/
At home I point this at Kagi Assistant, at work I point it to our internal GenAI platform's chat endpoint.
Out of curiosity, for the AI inept, how does this work? I can just point firefox at "https://kagi.com/assistant" and it can use it? Is that using MCP or is there some other standard interface for this?
Most of these AI providers use a similar kind of common query structure. OpenWebUI is a mostly consistent copy of ChatGPT so that's what the browser seems to default to when you configure something custom.
All the AI toolbar really does is open http://ai.url.com/some-query?prompt=${formattedPrompt} and display it next to the web page you have open.
The formatted prompt is something like "The user is on the page 'Stories about Cats'. The user wants you to summarize the following text: <text you have selected goes here>". You can configure your own prompt in about:config if you want, there are a bunch of examples here: https://github.com/mozilla-l10n/firefox-l10n/blob/main/en-GB...
There are prompts optimised for specific AI providers but the generic ones should work with any provider your choose.
When the web page opens at that URL, you're either going to get redirected to login and then redirected back, or the AI frontend will start executing the prompt.
I use Firefox as my main browser.
when the AI tab/sidebar appeared, I just closed it. that's it. and it never appeared again. I didn't need to change any special setting.
maybe there was another dialog or two which asked me to enable AI something which I answered No and dont remember.
this article is written in bad faith, Firefox is not pushing AI at every opportunity like Edge for example
I wish there was a way to fund nothing but Firefox development without the rest of the bloated mess that is Mozilla getting a cent from me. I don't want their moronic CEO who is chasing trends like this LLM idiocy to get a fucking dime while the browser itself is starved of money and resources. Fuck, I'm more than happy to pay a monthly subscription fee for FF, and I'm sure I'm not the only one, just look at something like Kagi!
I'm still a happy Firefox & Thunderbird user because ultimately it's still the only one that has at least a modicum of respect for its users, but all the recent AI pushes is making me annoyed with Mozilla because it's just so pointless.
Another user said this, but I'm going to echo it -- Firefox opened up the LLM chat sidebar one time. I closed it. It's stayed closed. It hasn't asked me to open it again. I don't understand the hatred for something you can just _not use_. People will use it if they want to. Firefox also has a very tiny market share in comparison to other browsers.
I need things I don’t want to use to not appear in the UI.
I don’t fill my house with tools and products I don’t want and I’m not willing to have them on my computer screen either.
It does not show up in the UI once disabled, does not re-enable again and does not pester the user into enabling it again as proprietary software often does.
I can understand criticism on the development time that may have been better spent, but less criticism against the existence of something that is fairly easily disabled and not user-hostile in intent.
I disabled the AI stuff immediately on my side (through the regular UI, not about:config settings) and never saw anything AI-related in Firefox afterwards.
It's worrying seeing Firefox getting so much more criticism than all the more user-hostile browsers that end up benefiting from such somewhat unwarranted criticism against the most popular non-hostile browser.
My recollection is that without the about:config changes there were still unwanted bits of UI like menu items. If that’s fixed then great.
As it is I have switched to Zen as it appears more clearly user-aligned and works better for me as a result of their improvements and UI tweaks.
> I need things I don’t want to use to not appear in the UI.
Couldn't have said it better myself. Similarly, current youtube is unusable without element blocking and custom CSS editing. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a way to remove UI elements from Firefox, no?
Different people want different features. Insisting Firefox never shows you anything you personally don't use is a bizarre unworkable demand.
I insist all software I regularly use is configurable (and with very few exceptions, it is), why should Firefox be different?
Why not? That is how firefox got popular in the first place. Mozilla sea monkey was bloated, firefox cut out all the crap nobody wanted.
I can't speak for everyone but the fact that it appears suddenly at all is rather annoying. It's like a blast of cosmic rays aimed right at my Error-Producing memory. You can tell me that I won a billion dollars and the solution to the Kryptos puzzle and I would still seethe over forgetting the what band I was about to look up.
That said Firefox is pretty good at obeying its own "Recommend me new features" option.
I don't like shoved down user throats features but i feel that Firefox has to evolve with times or simply wither. It's important how they do proceed with that tough. So far they're not abusive in behavior. I'm back to Firefox after giving up in Chrome and I'm quite pleased with it. Firefox is best for me.
If this was the only feature FF has ever shoved down my throat I would be fine with it, but without the disabling the feature recommendation option, every other time I open a tab I get hit with a pop-up for some minor UI change. The worst part is that it stops typing so sometimes I was just typing into the abyss for 5 minutes before I realize it lost everything I typed.
I've been using since 3 and I don't think it's a miracle browser or anything. Anecdotally I've observed plenty of folks try FF for bit in the wake of Manifest v3 then switch to Edge/Brave, and it's not because of a lack of AI. They need this sidebar but it's not the only reason they're losing.
I don't have the same experience as you with FF and nothing like losing what I type ever happened to me. That would indeed be nasty bug and make it very unreliable/untrustworthy. It's possible you have something corrupted? Try a reinstall or try on a new machine and see if you can replicate the bug? I'm not 100% with Firefox but it's really the least bad option to me. I found, for example, quite irritating how FF was playing shenanigans with the new tab/homepage settings, eagerly recommending things I never asked for but luckily I was able to disable that. So far FF is quiet, not obnoxious and working.
People should also know that Firefox (and Thunderbird) collect _quite a bit_ of information about your interaction via their telemetry mechanisms.
Here are instructions on how to disable all of it:
https://github.com/Aetherinox/firefox-telemetry-block
(and no, you can't do it with just a few checkboxes in the prefs, you have to go into the advanced pref editor and look up some stuff.)
I think I disabled "Use AI to suggest tab group names" and "enable link previews" in settings (not about:config), and I don't really see any AI anywhere else? I can add/remove some chat thing from the sidebar, but you can just remove that button and you don't need to use it. It's like any other feature one may choose to not use.
I now see there's also a "Create alt texts automatically" for pdfjs. This actually seems one of the more useful AI features I've seen. But I've never noticed it exists as I don't need this accessibility feature. You can disable it in the pdfjs (no about:config needed).
In short, Firefox is not forcing anyone to use AI and ways to disable it are not that obfuscated.
I wasn't aware people were still using Mozilla after they changed their terms a year ago in a user-adversarial way. That's when I dropped them and never looked back myself. They basically removed a line in their terms saying they will never sell your information to third parties. It's gone now. So they will. And with this announcement with AI, they're just jumping on the 'get as much information from the user as possible and sell it'.
Needs to cease to exist at this point. It is part of the cancer.
Just leaving this here. I switched to Librewolf when this happened and never looked back:
I have a feeling Mozilla deliberately inflicts the wounds on itself, or they are not allowed to compete. There are no other excuses for what they do.
> the majority who don’t use “AI”
Citation definitely needed. ChatGPT has almost a billion users.
I do agree with the main point that this should be easy to turn off, but let's not pretend that everyone hates AI as much as the average HN nerd.
Also, you could argue that Firefox's only remaining users are the average HN nerd and therefore it shouldn't pursue AI, but that's exactly the problem.
According to a Pew study, the majority of Americans use AI on a regular basis:
https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2025/09/17/ai-in-america...
That study only says that most Americans think they interact with AI at least a few times a week (it doesn't say how or if it's intentional). And it also says the vast majority feel they have little or no control over whether AI is used in the lives.
For example, someone getting a google search result containing an AI response is technically interacting with AI but not necessarily making use of its response or even wanting to see it in the first place. Or perhaps someone suspects their insurance premiums were decided by AI (whether that's true or not). Or customer service that requires you go through a chat bot before you get real service.
Putting the flags in Firefox just seems logical not "Hostile Design". Yes, there could be an easier way to turn it off, such as a menu item, but the flags need to be there first before the menu entry can exist.
The author claims to be an "IaaS engineer", surely, he can figure out how to write a firefox plugin, that can do what he wants, and use that to help non-technical users, and if it becomes popular enough will probably effect the change he wishes to see.
Its not just that each new "feature" is unnecessarily difficult to disable, and already active-with-privacy-side-effect by the time you notice.
Most new "features" are by now covered by an existing setting and/or policy. Yet I recognize a pattern of introducing new "but did you opt out of THIS NEW thing?" or "but did you opt out of VERSION TWO of this previously rejected thing?" setting/policy. It has become unsafe to upgrade to new Firefox releases, because each one will disrespect previous user choice in another unexpected way.
If you don't want new features, don't upgrade it, what in the non-sequitur is this? I get the argument that it SHOULD be OPT-IN rather than OPT-OUT, but that would require annoying pop-ups every upgrade that explains the new features and ask if you want to OPT-IN. That is more burden on the developers and will annoy more users than benefit.
If you are concerned, they do have what is called a 'changelog' that will explain all of the new features and how to switch them off if you like.
You might want some of the new features (such as TLS 1.3, WebP, some security fixes, etc), but avoid some others (such as HSTS, many new web APIs, secure contexts, AI, some CSS commands, etc), and want to keep some features that are removed in later versions (such as several settings, and many other things).
You're right, you may want some features but not all of them. That is why firefox provides the flags for you to turn features on/off. You mention that a user might wast "TLS 1.3, WebP, some security fixes, etc". I would argue that if a user knows what these are, they are capable of working out a flag.
Why can't the menu entry be created alongside the flags? Surely if it's too complicated, then creating a plugin would also be too complicated for someone who doesn't work at Mozilla and doesn't know the codebase?
It’s probably not too complicated, more a matter of how to expose settings to users in a way that makes sense. Every flag could be automatically turned into a better UI or menu somewhere, but then you have thousands of settings no one cares about which would be easy to use incorrectly. The stuff that shows up in context menus and settings needs to be a least a little bit curated for it to make sense. about:config isn’t exactly hard to use either (there’s an actual UI, not the code shown in the blog post).
In this case, yeah, having a single option to toggle off AI settings makes plenty of sense to curate a settings page for! But it’s probably a prioritization or product problem, not a technical issue.