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.”
AI should always be a choice — something people can easily turn
offon. That’s how it should be.First, there should be a survey on what users actually want, no?
Because if no one wants AI and it’s “always a choice”, what you really do is waste considerable resources with as the only results, more settings users have to go through before starting using their browsers.
there is absolutely zero reason to put ai in firefox
exactly it should be a firefox extension, anyone can install if they want it.
Local ML translation was pretty cool
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.
That’s a good idea to put first. Of course, like do no evil, priorities change, so we’ll need to keep a close eye on this.
Second: our business model must align with trust. We will grow through transparent monetization that people recognize and value.
Transparent is good, but if he things he’s going to add value to monetization, he’s smoking crack. There’s nothing we want from a browser that’s not already provided by a plugin.
Third: Firefox will grow from a browser into a broader ecosystem of trusted software. Firefox will remain our anchor. It will evolve into a modern AI browser and support a portfolio of new and trusted software additions.
Nobody wants that. We already had all we wanted from them in trusted software.
compare to vivaldi flat out refusing ai, keeping mv2, and actually building a blocker and tracker into the browser.
Waterfox, Ironfox, Librewolf
Floorp
Yes but all of these depend on the development team at Firefox. I don’t know what the solution is, but I do know that those three browsers would not continue if Firefox didn’t also continue. There’s still a lot of development work from Firefox.
At this point I think the safer route would be to just accept the Chromium hegemony and build a free browser from that.
Firefox still at least have a far far far more permissive OSS license than Chromium, so I’d say stick with that
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!
Its the hope for better browsing and I am excited about it :)
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).
Librewolf is still Firefox, but with the settings modified.
The fact that so many users go to a fork just because FF can’t get the settings right from the start should be telling! At this stage, every new version, I go through the settings to double check there is no “new feature” I don’t want enabled by default… So yes, I am tempted by Librewolf.
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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.
you could run a virtual machine on linux with windows on it, dual boot can be a pain in the ass to use.
I was recently wiping data out of one of my disks intending to sell it. There was a windows system installed there, which I wanted to get rid off anyway, so I let the process run while I was taking a nap. When I woke up and restarted the system I was very surprised to see that now my Linux system is missing and nothing works anymore except BIOS. Turns out I deleted my bootloader. I managed to fix it but It was stressful as hell (remember to backup your system, I didn’t).
Weird things can happen during dual booting but it’s all a life lesson, a lot of fuckery especially with windows, which likes to mess things up.
librewolf is good but they’re just a profile wrapper for uplink firefox with limited developers.
Yeah, they are doing everything they can to fix that mess, but there are some things that are impossible to fix. Mozilla kinda sucks now, but the alternatives suck even more so I’m staying with Librewolf, for now
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.
So, AI will do the same thing as what light extensions already do, but consuming 4GB of RAM and maxing out CPU load?
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 Luddites get their way, that will become the case forever. It is okay if you don’t want AI in your personal life, but I worry that opposition like yours will ensure that only wealthy jackasses have ownership over AI.
The important thing is to support efforts to create truly open AI and make it a public good available to all. Projects such as LlamaCPP, Olmo, Apertus, Heretic, and others will be key to allowing ordinary people to become masters of the technology.
Is there a Librewolf for phones? Can I somehow self-host the synchronization services?
Fennec and 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)
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 now 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.
There is also Firefox Focus which us basically a stripped down fennec. I use it as my default browser with JS disabled.
There’s IronFox
if google is still the majority of the revenue, it will close it down the line.
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.
Did we read the same article? Where was the ai-only part?
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/
