Comment by Aeolun
Comment by Aeolun 2 days 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…
Comment by Aeolun 2 days 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…
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?
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.
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'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.