I don’t think anyone actually read the announcement, just the headline. Here was the new CEOs actual first point.
“First: Every product we build must give people agency in how it works. Privacy, data use, and AI must be clear and understandable. Controls must be simple. AI should always be a choice — something people can easily turn off. People should know why a feature works the way it does and what value they get from it.”
there is absolutely zero reason to put ai in firefox
Waterfox, Ironfox, Librewolf
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Yeah this ain’t it chief. Hope we can nuke the feature into oblivion, but we all know that won’t be possible as Firefox enshittifies
Come on servo
Never heard about it before, thank you!
Well, older news is: “Firefox has evolved into the first thing I uninstall when I install Fedora, or any other Linux distro for that matter”. Since the first mention of their so-called “anonymous telemetry” I began to actively avoid them. Like someone else mention, thank God for Librewolf, Mullvad and Brave (with Leo disabled).
Thank god for librewolf, they fix most of the new Mozilla bullshit.
I’m an old man browsing this on LibreWolf on a Linux Mint desktop. If I can do it, anyone can.
Having said that, running across a FOSS app that only runs on Windows that I want to run, has me thinking I need to rebuild and dual boot Win 10 IOT. Frustrating. I just learned that while installing Linux next to Windows works, because of course it does, installing Windows next to Linux does not. Because, again, of course, Windows is an asshole. So, that means I’d need to nuke Linux, install Windows, then reinstall Linux. And, that seems like… a lot. I might still do it, though.
EDIT: The app I want to run needs access to my nvidia card. So a VM won’t work, I already tried it.
They’re going to use AI to identify and block ads for me, right? Or let me set a cookie preference and automatically apply that to every page I visit?
That would be rather useful things to have AI for IMHO.
Well no. They not gonna burn ai credits on that, they need it to identify your interests and sell you ads.
something an adblocker already done, without the unneccsary extra steps.
It ain’t that easy, at least with uBlock Origin. The problem is that websites depend on many elements - ones that aren’t obvious to the human eye and experience. An AI could potentially analyze all of the content and to where it leads, then remove the undesirable elements, such as trackers. For example, when I am making a payment at an unfamiliar website, I wouldn’t know what services are key to a working transaction.
A fair bit of my browsing time is spent on figuring out how to not break a website with my adblocker - which is annoying, error prone, and not as effective as I would like.
I don’t know what websites you’re using, but default uBlock Origin works completely fine with all the websites I visit, and it doesn’t use AI. It just uses blocking rules.
As long as it is open source, it doesn’t matter. Forks like Librewolf will disable it.
It increases the workload for fork devs the more crap they have to remove from upstream and the more the fork deviates from upstream.
It does matter a bit.
Librewolf devs depend on firefox development. They just rip out the stupid bits. They’re not prepared to maintain a hard fork. They could still decide to do it, but it would take more community involvement.
And a shitload of time to keep the fork relevant as web sites keep evolving.
AI and open source don’t really go hand in hand
if google is still the majority of the revenue, it will close it down the line.
Is there a Librewolf for phones? Can I somehow self-host the synchronization services?
Fennec and IronFox.
There’s IronFox
I use fennec on phone
https://f-droid.org/packages/org.mozilla.fennec_fdroid
There is a shiton of browsers for phone but this one is often updated and the icon is cute (the most important feature)
There is also Firefox Focus which us basically a stripped down fennec. I use it as my default browser with JS disabled.
Is there a fennec like on desktop? I find librewolf has changed too much for what I want out of a Firefox fork. Websites just did not run the way I expected them to and I could not be arsed to fiddle with all of the different knobs to get them to work.
Zen is what I use, there’s also Waterfox.
I liked Zen but it was a nightmare to deal with on multiple devices and dealing with multiple windows broke a lot of the essential stuff like them being unpinned on one window but not the new one but the new one has the original window essential note also as a standard tab. And they kept changing the way you switch between workspaces without the necessary customisation options to change it back and any of the mods that “fixed” those issues would then break unless updating the files manually because their fixes had to be merged into the main repo that zen uses for mods which didn’t happen fast enough. So I gave up and and actually switched to edge briefly for it’s implementation of vertical tabs (which i still think is done the best) until Firefox proper gained a good enough vertical tab implementation and I’ve been there since.
As long as there is a easy way to disable it. And clearly communicated what they are doing. I do not begrudge mozilla trying to remain competitive with mainstream.
There won’t be
if they say it will be an AI-only browser somehow i doubt it.
As long as we can remove our mouths from being wrapped around the…
Just why? AI browsers have serious security/privacy implications.
For e.g:Thank you. These are great articles.
When talking about it earlier, they mentioned the integrated AI would be local-only… Which sounds better, but I doubt is even possible (imagine all the low-end devices attempting to generate a response or analyse the website on their 6-8-year old CPUs…).
FWIW the development is done publicly, so you can check these claims https://blog.ziade.org/2025/12/05/two-years-of-ai-at-mozilla/
Remember the way to disable all AI in Firefox.
about:config
browser.ml.enable -> falseFor now…
Over to Waterfox then.
I don’t care if there is a way to ‘disable it’ (there won’t be) - if it’s there, it not on my PC.
You already can’t disable AI gemerated summaries on mobile.
https://noai.duckduckgo.com/ - yes you can
