Jon von Tetzchner, CEO and founder of Vivaldi Technologies, refuses to integrate AI features in its browser and wants human engineers, not AI, to write its code.
Jon von Tetzchner, CEO and founder of Vivaldi Technologies, refuses to integrate AI features in its browser and wants human engineers, not AI, to write its code.
Firefox has locally run AI features you can turn off easily. I don’t see the harm. Occasionally I use the translation feature for foreign websites.
If you ask me, Firefox gets a lot of shit and it’s blown completely out of proportion. Are they without flaw? Of course not, but it’s not nearly as bad as people want you to believe.
AI features should be opt in, not opt out. Every time it updates it also often turns those features back on (at least a couple times for me)
I turned it off once and it stayed off.
The AI features are why I switched to Waterfox, as they promised to not implement the Firefox’s AI-stuff. That promise has held, at least so far.
Good to know. I see they are available both on Linux and android, so all bases covered.
Instead I switched to Waterfox which is just Firefox with all of the bullshit excluded.
The problem isn’t what is in Firefox now, it’s what will be in Firefox in the future. It’s their clearly established predilection for mindless trend-chasing and willingness to ignore their users’ clearly stated wishes in order to pack the damn thing full of crap nobody wants anyway rather than actually utilize their comparatively meager resources towards actually developing the actual browser part of the browser. That’s a huge issue.
It’s a purity race to oblivion : people who know and care use Firefox. They switched away from the default and by that very action they are in the tiny minority who actually has a grasp at problems and dare try to do something about. They are vocal about it, put efforts into the process so they in general want “more” and “better” according to their own criteria. It doesn’t stop there though, once they have moved away for privacy or open source or sovereignty or whatever else, they want the other criteria and it won’t stop.
It is recursive though, people who care a lot about some criteria move away from Firefox, the now “mainstream” within that community, then use e.g. Waterfox or LibreWolf. You can see this in any community which moves away from the mainstream choice really. There is a vocal minority within the minority and they do have genuine reasons and concern.
Once you use LibreWolf I bet there are other forks, etc, etc.
For those people what Firefox is doing is actually very bad because it goes back to what they wanted to move away from.
I will add, that enshittification is a big part of the process. Money drives companies do things users do not like, and the only power we hold against that, is to walk away. If we do not use that power, things will only get worse, or end up in a monopoly situation, where you lose most of that power, and all of it, if it is something, you must use.
What often happens is, that the wave kind of starts as a small movement away, and when the enshittification goes too far (and competition has not been killed successfully yet), it gets bigger and bigger. And that wave brings money, which either starts or hastens the enshittification process of the product people moved to. And the cycle repeats.
the problem with Firefox AI implementation was more of a communication issue.
Firefox keeps adding stuff like this to its browser and it keeps messing up a good thing. I don’t mind them adding experiments, but they keep trying to add stuff that places them as intermediaries in some kind of convenient “service” that is offered.
for whatever reason they just can’t stop from shoving all that stuff into their main product instead treating it as a side project