Please be more careful with how you add things to the browser?

icemasta — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 01:42:44 GMT

Hello, I've been a Firefox user since it came out in 2004. I remember back in high school, I would install it instead of IE. To me, all I want is a simple web browser, with some extension capability, that is now. Right now, for the first time in more than 20 years, I am feeling like dropping Firefox because I feel the mission of being a browser is being sidelined to "being more" than a browser.

It started recently when, for some reasons, I clicked a link and had a big white box saying Link summary and a bunch of stuff about AI. I wasn't sure if it was a genuine firefox feature, or some ads, so I closed firefox and restarted, and looked it up, and yeah, turns out it's a feature that was either previewed or I accidentally triggered. I did not like that.

Then today, I was browsing a website while doing a couple other things and suddenly I saw, bottom right, a windows toast notification saying the website had been successfully installed and if I wanted to pin it to the taskbar. I was like "What the hell is this?" It showed up in start menu, doing right click, uninstall, opened the program manager and pointed to nothing. I looked at where the file was located and that's when I saw it under firefox as a "Web App". I googled it, and luckily at least for me, it wasn't malware, it was just firefox behaving like malware. It "installed" something with no prompt on my part. It was just a simple shortcut to the start menu, but for windows this is no different than a new software being installed. Turns out there is a big issue that if someone hits the "Add to taskbar" button by accident and closes the tab, it's stuck as "installed."

Now as far as I am aware I am not on a preview version, I am on version 146.0.1 which is the latest stable version. Now, I am sure some people want those features, but seriously, please put a bit of thought into your users that just want a normal browser? Twice in a week where I think something is wrong with my browser and it was just unwanted features.

Re: Please be more careful with how you add things to the browser?

Agentvirtuel — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 05:13:45 GMT

Hello

Is it the subject Firefox Link Previews.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/use-link-previews-firefox
On-device AI models in Firefox.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/on-device-models

Is it the subject Use web apps in Firefox for Windows.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/web-apps-firefox-windows
You can try.
1 - Go to configuration editor https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/about-config-editor-firefox
2 - Enter a search term browser.taskbarTabs.enabled
You can double-click on the preference to set the value to false

topic Re: Please be more careful with how you add things to the browser? in Discussions

Please be more careful with how you add things to the browser?

Re: Please be more careful with how you add things to the browser?