We recently shared how we are approaching AI in Firefox — with user choice and openness as our guiding principles. That’s because we believe AI should be built like the internet — open, accessible, and driven by choice — so that users and the developers helping to build it can use it as they wish, help shape it and truly benefit from it.
AI should be built like the internet — open, accessible, and driven by choice
If they really wanted to give you a choice, they would allow the option of saying no, don’t install any of it.
They give you the option to disable it. What more do you want? Custom builds where only the features you want built just for you?
A choice allows for saying no. Installing it anyway takes away your choice. Having to disable something you didn’t want to begin with puts the responsibility on the person that didn’t want it. Then you are responsible for keeping up with it hoping it doesn’t turn itself on in an update or send information somewhere regardless of being disabled.
A separate update/download for AI would actually give the user a choice.
Why does Firefox need an integrated LLM?
Noteworthy, Librewolf pre-disables the AI nonsense for you. (Local offline translations, the only actually useful feature that uses LLMs, is kept.)
Even that offline translation is annoying to me. I speak more than one language and Firefox constantly offering to translate for me.
There is an option for “Never translate website X.” and “Never translate language Y.” But there is no option for “Never translate anything. Fuck right off!”
You speak every language?
Even if I understand french and English, and both are disabled from suggesting a translation; I don’t speak German and I find using it to translate in place without giving my data to Google is pretty good.Wait, this is LibreWolf we’re speaking about. Have you unchecked these two? (see screenshot)
UPDATE: The upper checkbox seems to flip
browser.translations.enableinabout:config. Librewolf even demands you do a full browser restart after unchecking. Combined with the name of the property, I think it’s a win for you! I mean, that this thing really disables translations from ever executing.UPDATE 2: Admittedly it’s not pre-disabled though. But clearly exposed in the settings.
Wait, I was talking about Firefox.
Thanks for the information. I will switch over someday.
In my opinion the resulting translations aren’t of very high quality. I like the idea of the feature, but the execution is lacking.
It will improve over time, and it’s still infinitely better than giving google translate your data
Hell no. I don’t even use Proton’s AI.
AI is going to put people out of work, the data centers are going to use too much water and electricity.
Karl Marx never said “destroy the means of production”. Even if AI will put people out of work it’s not the technology that does that but our economic system. And the concerns about water and electricity are overblown, it is having major impacts on the local level but globally it’s not that large a share of the pie. And it’s image and video that consumes the most water and electricity so definitely stay away from those, especially AI video because if that takes off that WILL be a problem.
Obligatory “I absolutely think AI will make the world a worse place”. I also would never use AI myself because it cedes control over my thoughts to whoever owns it and undermines my critical thinking. Nevermind the hallucinations.
About the electricity https://sh.itjust.works/post/49804056 apparently, power rates are going up for people living near data centres.
Why are people downvoring a Firefox blogpost on a Firefox community ?
People in this community (and Firefox communities in general) tend to simply not to read and downvote when Mozilla is releasing a completely optional¹ and deactivatable features to their browser, but also this is Lemmy, where “AI” = BAD.
In Firefox, you’ll never be locked into one ecosystem or have AI forced into your browsing experience. You decide when, how or whether to use it at all.
It’s just a shame to downvote blogpost. They will be less visible.
Should be opt in.
Otherwise it is like CISA – you are always having to stay vigilant for the next incarnation to fight against or AI feature to detect and disable. It is exhausting and Mozilla hopes people will just give up and accept it if they keep including more unwanted features…
Opt-in features never get used.
Remember when apple asked people to opt into privacy for apps and 90%+ people said yes?
If it is a feature people want to use they will opt in given the choice clearly presented.
Gut reaction to disheartening news, most likely.
boooo
I’m already seeing sites telling how to block FF’s AI baby steps … which I discovered were already present in the FF I use. https://equk.co.uk/2025/10/28/firefox-forcing-llm-features/
Who knows how badly they’ll mess themselves up by not being -completely tranparent- about this stuff and -not- making it really easy to disable. It’s still possible to download older versions of FF to fall back on … in case they lose their minds.
In Librewolf there is no AI ^^
At least not out-of-the-box. Dunno if you can dig it up via about:config. Not via normal Settings I think.
I wish there was a fork of librewolf almost exactly the same, but focused on website compatibility > privacy.
Basically librewolf but preconfigured for ease of use as much as possible.
That way I could have both installed on my system side by side.
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