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MuteDog
Making moves
Status: New idea

Instead of forcing AI stuff down your users throats, just put it into an add-on that users can install on the browser if they want it. If it's as great as you seem to believe, then what's the problem with making it opt-in by default instead of having to opt-out?

39 Comments
Konrad1998
New member

Im sure 25% of people use this browser to stay away from ai slop. This browser users arent target audience for ai. Google/Opera/Edge this browsers are target audience but NOT! Firefox

hbaber
Making moves

Considering they have already had at least one (known) security issue regarding the AI Chatbot, I would rather they have this separate from the base installation.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1952268

While this bug requires you to set-up the chatbot first, it's evident that for some reason something outside the chatbot sidebar can be leaked to the AI bot. It's just waiting for the inevitable exploit/malicious extension that abuses any of the currently available and future AI features or a similar bug leaking all sorts of private information to the AI chatbot.

New features = More code = Increased possibility of bugs/exploits.

Firefox developers have stated they're invested into making Firefox an "AI browser", and while I don't think they mean going as far as something like Comet Browser (https://www.perplexity.ai/comet), it is still worrisome that a browser's AI functionality will have increasingly more features. Especially if you consider Comet's variant being capable of taking control of your tabs using a simple command as can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bj1e6F4h9Vc

Don't get me wrong, I have used and will use certain AI chatbots or stuff like Stability Diffusion, but that is on my own accord and in a controlled environment. I want full control, I don't want something pseudo-deactivated with people claiming it doesn't do anything until you set it up, I don't want it there in the first place because of the added security risk. Same as I didn't see any use in Pocket before they removed it some time ago.

By adding these features you will be increasing the attack vector of the browser, while also increasing the privacy risk. These decisions will inevitably lead to people using forks instead of the base product.

Worst case scenario is some new CEO/Leader of Mozilla deciding that we should just accept privacy invasive features just like everyone else does... and when Firefox becomes less private and less secure, why should I be using it over Chromium/Brave/Edge? Those browsers give me better performance out of the box, those browsers don't have a crippling memory leak issue on Youtube causing it to fill 50GB+ RAM on a single tab while I have some game open in the background, have HDR support and typically don't lag behind with web standards.

As a matter of fact I can use every extension/userscript I want on Ungoogled Chromium, so at the moment it's me just not liking the base UI of Chromium browsers and not wanting to adjust to it, that's keeping me with Firefox.

There is also no question at launch if you want to have it Enabled or not, they just enable it for you and the killswitch for that comes months later. Some developer on Reddit said Q1 2026, but that can be 2 months from now if not delayed and the same dev wasn't even sure if setting the about:config option browser.ml.enable to false is enough to disable all AI/ML features. So yeah that is also reassuring.

kkdavs09
Making moves

yes!! This!! I hate -- HATE -- the extra effort and work it takes to turn off all of the AI features on the software and other tools I rely on. I don't enjoy the feeling that we're mere guinea pigs to feed data into the AI Slop Machine. 

omurice
New member

+1

alcyonepleiades
Strollin' around

Like many of the posts here, I do NOT want anything to do with AI. To call it intelligent is a misnomer, it is at best intrusive pattern recognition. That's it. 

For a browser built on privacy of it's users, AI completely undermines that - it doesn't work properly if it doesn't. This should be either a forked browser, or a downloadable extension to the features.  Watch as less than half of users download.  You force this drivel that no one has asked for, whether disabled by default or not (easy for some idiot to activate by mistake), then this is a step I, along with many others, will simply not accept.  Another browser it will be.

December
New member

how do I turn it off

December
New member

yeah how do I turn it off. I don't want to leave firefox but the memory leak is already killing me

Wakota
Strollin' around

Just voicing my support for this. I hate seeing a pop-up asking me if I want the computer to regurgitate information from a video I'm already watching (I have my own brain, thank you very much). I thought I disabled as much of the AI crapware as I could via about:config, but it still shows up in some spots. It seems really buggy. Sometimes the "dive deeper" prompt shows up and then disappears before I can figure out what "feature" I forgot to disable.

veryconcerned
New member

I flat out made an account just to say how concerned I am that the "privacy focused" Mozilla wants to add AI into everything, despite that not only being the opposite of privacy but also slows down the browser by a ton.  Make them opt in at worst, extra downloads or extensions at best, or just don't do the completely useless gimmick that wrecks the whole reason I use mozilla!