Disable AI in Firefox

https://flamedfury.com/posts/disable-ai-in-firefox/

by speckx • 9 months ago

209 148 9 months ago

dotcoma• 9 months ago

Disable AI, disable targeted ads... What's wrong with you, Firefox ?

In their defense, they're in a bit of a precarious financial situation. Most of their money comes from Google, who happens to also be their largest competitor.

grayhatter2• 9 months ago

The amount of money comes from the number of people willing to use and tolerate their defaults. Surely, burning all the good will they've built up can't possibly improve that, can it?

estimator7292• 9 months ago

Maybe they shouldn't pay their CEO a sizable fraction of the entire company's income and also stop wasting money on AI bullshit and gimmicks like Pocket or whatever their latest obsession is.

Maybe they'd be in a better position if they focused their resources on building their core product? I know that's a wildly radical concept these days...

wiether• 9 months ago

That's why they're launching a FREE VPN?

https://www.techradar.com/vpn/vpn-services/mozilla-is-experi...

corranh• 9 months ago

Thank you I was literally trying to disable that when I saw this :)

sdairs3• 9 months ago

I've used Firefox for 15 years and I really don't want to use Chrome. Can Mozilla just, like, make a good browser?

braebo• 9 months ago

Use Brave. It’s de-googled, privacy-centric chromium with built-in uBlock-style ad/tracker blocking. Best of both worlds!

presbyterian• 9 months ago

There are some good reasons to consider not using Brave: https://www.spacebar.news/stop-using-brave-browser/

protoster• 9 months ago

De-googled Chromium? This does not compute.

sdairs3• 9 months ago

Yeah I'm not at all interested in Brave, that's a dumpster fire of it's own. And that still gives control to Google by owning the defacto implementation of browsing the internet. There needs to be an actual alternative to Chrome.

babypuncher• 9 months ago

So much about Brave raises scammy red flags every time I look at it.

However, my main reason for ditching Chrome years ago was the fact that I think a browser engine monoculture is bad for the web as a whole, especially if that engine is primarily controlled by a single corporate entity.

Manifest v3 and other Google nonsense came later, and are extra reasons to stay away from Chrome, but I still feel strongly that a good alternative needs to use a different engine.

grayhatter2• 9 months ago

Brave, The browser that brags about how they ignore consent!

yoavm7• 9 months ago

I think they make a pretty good browser. It is performant, supports blocking ads easily, standard compatible, customizable and recently even added support for vertical tabs. What are you missing?

PaulHoule3• 9 months ago

The ad blocker keeps it viable.

latexr9• 9 months ago

Personally (I’m not the person you asked) I’m missing AppleScript support. Firefox is the only major browser without it, and the bug report for it is old enough to drink in every country.

That lack of capability prevents it from being my daily driver, even if the rest were good enough (I’m not saying it isn’t, I’m saying I have no reason to find out).

I am certain I have inadvertently pushed many people away from Firefox for that reason alone, because when they ask for me to add Firefox support for my tools, I have to tell them it’s impossible.

I have tried to talk to Firefox developers about that a few times, at open-source conferences and such, but they think AppleScript is some power-user feature and fail (refuse?) to understand power users drive adoption and create tools that regular users rely on.

I remember whenever a Firefox story was submitted on HN, multiple people commented “I want to use Firefox but it’s missing <whatever>”. Then Mozilla started doing a lot of questionable stuff (all of which they eventually abandoned) outside their core competency and even pulling distasteful marketing stunts, and at some point people started commenting even that. I presume many got tired and gave up on Firefox entirely. I almost have. I now root for them only conceptually, because browser diversity is good.

I also noticed that no matter how politely someone pointed out on HN “Firefox doesn’t fit for me because of <whatever>”, they always got downvoted. If valid polite criticism is buried, no wonder things stay the way they are.

tjpnz• 9 months ago

I recently discovered that the sponsored sites on the homepage I had previously removed have reappeared. I've had similar issues with a few of the buttons on the browser chrome I had also removed. I'll still use it because I don't want to deal with the security and privacy nightmare that is ads. But it's a bit annoying to have to play this game of whack 'a mole.

eviks5• 9 months ago

It's poorly customizable, you can't even change keyboard shortcuts (extensions can't do it globally either). Vivaldi is customizable.

SECProto• 9 months ago

Not defending mozilla adding AI to firefox, but...

If you've tried chrome recently, you'll know that it's jam packed full with even more stuff you don't want. And the article lays out how to easily disable all AI in firefox (which you cant do at all in Chrome)

ASalazarMX3• 9 months ago

I'm very pleased that disabling browser.ml.enable doesn't disable local translation. I don't need a dedicated UI for chat bots, but I find local translation very useful.

array_key_first4• 9 months ago

Yes, because as we all know, Google would never shove AI or ads in your face.

I disagree with Mozilla here, too - but you can't cast Chrome as a magic spell. Chrome sucks ass. Google sucks ass. It's trivial to suck less ass than Google.

sdairs3• 9 months ago

Chrome does suck ass, hence why I use Firefox and said I don't want to use Chrome, lol. But I want Firefox to be a good browser in its own right, not just "not Chrome". Firefox is just about over the "acceptable" line for me, as a power user for 15+ years (and under that line for most normal users) so I continue to use it, but they're neglecting it in favor of these useless AI features.

iberator• 9 months ago

Firefox focus

mingus88• 9 months ago

I use focus daily, but it’s not a daily driver.

It doesn’t to tabs, and links that the site forces to open in a new tab often don’t work. It also doesn’t do JS well by design.

I use Firefox focus for throw away links I come across, but for everything else I need a full browser

akomtu• 9 months ago

Being good doesn't pay well these days. Being evil, on other hand, does.

move-on-by• 9 months ago

Longtime Firefox user here too. After the new privacy policy terms, I jumped to waterfox. I’m hoping it can last long enough for Ladybird to become stable enough to use as a daily driver. It’s very sad to watch Mozilla’s demise at the hands of advertisers.

ephaeton• 9 months ago

To my surprise, in Librewolf this was also enabled. To how much effect, I wouldn't know (I hadn't noticed any shenanigans, then again, I just updated my librewolf and don't know if that brought it in).

WolfeReader• 9 months ago

I just checked my Librewolf settings for this and they were already disabled. Not sure why we had different experiences.

stronglikedan• 9 months ago

Didn't entirely work for me. I still had the little popup when I selected text, even after restarting. However, it did go away and stay away when I selected "hide chatbot..." at the bottom of the popup.

jerhewet• 9 months ago

about:config, type ".ml." in the search (no quote marks), set everything to false / zero / blank.

I don't want anything even vaguely related to spicy autocomplete on any of my machines, and I go to great lengths to kill anything that even resembles it with fire.

hyghjiyhu2• 9 months ago

I should figure out how to turn off ai in acrobat reader. It offers to summarize my sheet music every time I open it...

jherdman• 9 months ago

I'm curious to know what the AI does when it encounters sheet music. Does it do anything intelligible?

hyghjiyhu2• 9 months ago

It summarizes the lyrics iirc. There are ai programs specifically for sheet music and I actually use one that I'm happy with, play score 2.

moritzwarhier• 9 months ago

Just use non-enshittified software, for example SumatraPDF, unless you need some special Adobe stuff that it doesn't support?

sgloutnikov• 9 months ago

Was shocked last night seeing a quite annoying Acrobat Reader with AI commercial during the NBA game.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5M1a7zY5iVM

PaulHoule3• 9 months ago

Should be a bill of rights that you ask the chatbot how to disable it no it presents you a checkbox to permanently disable it and you click and you are done.

mentalgear• 9 months ago

Personally, I do not mind it if it's on-device, especially small specialised models (e.g. overview generation, audio generation, etc) with no internet access.

OneDeuxTriSeiGo2• 9 months ago

That was the original intent. They only recently added the "chatbot-y" kind of stuff since the infra is all already there. The main uses were for their translation tools and PDF alt-text generation (which I believe disabling ML will disable as they rely on the on-device transformer tools to do).

ASalazarMX3• 9 months ago

I disabled browser.ml.enable and local translation was still working. In my case, that's all I need, but it looks like it still allows on-device transformers.

Terr_2• 9 months ago

In the long term, on-device won't save us from a biased assistant. It might notice we seem tired and insinuate that we could use Mococoa, all natural beans straight from the upper slopes of Mount Nicaragua.

Or—and this happens—it "summarizes" the same text differently, depending on whether the author's name happens to fit a certain ethnicity.

KetoManx64• 9 months ago

On the inverse of this, it can also save us from biased content because it can point out all the ways that the article we are reading is trying to manipulate our perspective.

With how inexpensive trainings are starting to get, it will not be long until we can train our own specialized models to fit our specific needs.

dingnuts• 9 months ago

Modern local models make it pretty easy to imagine a future where this would be useful, but they also make extremely apparent that the future has not arrived.

Maybe in five years they will be useful enough that it would have been worth including these features

cachius• 9 months ago

Funny, the style sheet breaks the text on mobile and a inserts a hyphen so the setting name appears as

brow-ser.ml.enable

porphyra• 9 months ago

Mozilla could have had the no-nonsense, high performance browser backend that everyone uses to build their own browsers (like the recent glut of AI browsers), instead of everyone using Chromium/Blink. In the past, Gecko was really the go-to choice for this. They almost had a second shot with Servo. But they kinda really dropped the ball on the technical capability of the browser while continuing to be distracted by all sorts of random gimmicks like Pocket and then this. Sad!

bitpush5• 9 months ago

Mozilla could have had the no-nonsense, high performance browser backend that everyone uses to build their own browsers

I agree with the sentiment, but you underestimate the level of engineering, coordination, design work, testing it is to do this.

It is admirable that they even have a half-decent browser, but to compete at the top you need soooo much money and motivation.

doublerabbit• 9 months ago

It is admirable that they even have a half-decent browser, but to compete at the top you need soooo much money and motivation.

Let's not forget the CEO who paid herself a $6.9m salary in 2022, $5.6m in 2023.

rudedogg2• 9 months ago

It is admirable that they even have a half-decent browser, but to compete at the top you need soooo much money and motivation.

I’m guessing Ladybird will prove you wrong in due time

ZenoArrow7• 9 months ago

Time to switch to Waterfox, it's basically Firefox with the privacy features that Firefox should have by default:

https://www.waterfox.net/

latexr9• 9 months ago

That doesn’t address the larger complaint your parent commenter is making that Mozilla dropped the ball on Firefox development.

SoKamil• 9 months ago

The amount of money and research put into Chromium is nuts and it's borderline impossible to compete.

blackhaz• 9 months ago

We had Netscape Navigator which began bloating after version 3 eventually becoming Netscape Communicator with various sorts of useless bullshit. When it became so fat it couldn't even start without causing machines to swap, I remember Phoenix came out - a lightweight, fast Mozilla browser. It was a godsend, an immediate hit. I remember all my friends switching to it when it was, like version 0.x, because it was so much faster. A proper no-bullshit WWW experience. Then Phoenix became Firefird, then Firefox. Now Firefox is the new Netscape. Cycle continues.

wvenable• 9 months ago

Mozilla is a C-suite vanity organization disguised as software company. I love Firefox (I'm using it write this comment) and I really appreciate the developers who continue to work and improve it -- I just wish they were given far more resources to do it.

slig• 9 months ago

I doubt the Mozilla C-suite even uses FF on their macbooks/iPhones.

dontlaugh3• 9 months ago

Gecko was always hard to embed, which is why WebKit was developed by Apple and then widespread in open source projects.

mionhe• 9 months ago

More accurately, why WebKit was forked from khtml by Apple.

deanishe• 9 months ago

I'm not sure that was ever realistic.

It's been 20 years since Apple decided they needed a browser of their own, and even then they chose to throw their weight behind KDE's KHTML, not Gecko.

coldpie3• 9 months ago

Good to know. I tried to find an off switch in the settings for the AI junk when it first popped up and didn't find one. It's mostly unobtrusive, so didn't bother me too much, but it's nice to have a way to get rid of a feature I'm not going to use.

ape4• 9 months ago

Yeah, just searching for "AI" in settings find some choices. eg "Use AI to suggest tabs and a name for tab groups" And far more false positives - eg dAIly

roschdal• 9 months ago

It's time to fork Firefox

bitpush5• 9 months ago

Step 1: Fork Firefox

Step 2: ??

Step 3: Profit

Sometimes HN commenters are so funny.

ZenoArrow7• 9 months ago

[flagged]

pRusya• 9 months ago

You can fork the source code, but you cannot fork engineers and paychecks from Google and other interested parties.

ekr____• 9 months ago

You also can't fork the update channel, so you're starting from scratch with 0 market share.

righthand• 9 months ago

I had to do this in Librewolf too.

mihaaly• 9 months ago

This is the last I pressed the update button (I only allow notification, no automation). And will speed up the study of other browsers (like Brave, Orion). This sneaky delivery of unnecessary but questionable privacy nonsense, also pushing on you enabled, is revolting.

spoaceman7777• 9 months ago

Why do people care? It's nice, been using it since Nightly. And you have to actually hook it up to a service for it to do anything.

The toggle for the popup is in (as you might expect) the settings hamburger menu in the AI Panel. There's even a remove button! Lots of new things have been added to browsers over the years, and these AI features are becoming incredibly popular as more users recognize the utility (and what they actually are).

This just seems like some more anti-AI hysteria.

coldpie3• 9 months ago

Why do people care?

It's clutter for a feature that I'm not going to use. I'm not upset it's there for those who want it, but it's also nice to be able to get rid of it.

Y-bar2• 9 months ago

I don’t store passwords in Firefox, nor do I use the ”Save page as”, I have never used the ”Report broken site” feature, and never activated ”Troubleshooting Mode”. I have never needed to configure network settings in my browser, and so on… As far as this discussion is concerned all these are bloat because they are not used. Seems like a strange yardstick to keep, when it cannot be properly applied, no?

grep_it• 9 months ago

I'm actually not all that opposed to some of these features, but the way it's implemented is so clunky. The UI make it feel like a half baked browser extension.

panzi• 9 months ago

"automatically group and label your tabs" is the only thing out of those that sound at all interesting to me, though I don't know how AI comes into play here. And is it all local AI?

Y-bar2• 9 months ago

It’s local and it tries to group the tabs based on what seems to be URL and title, and what seems to be a semantic content of the page (eg it understands to group shopping sites together).

flerchin• 9 months ago

I like seeing new features in Firefox even though I won't use nearly any of them. It indicates new ideas and investment into software that I very much want to continue to exist, that I use everyday.

interloxia• 9 months ago

It looks like it should be possible to use a local model with a custom prompt.

Selecting text and having a action with a custom prompt/tool without needing a browser extension might be nice. It need not even be a llm.

https://nilsheuman.github.io/TIL/2025-04-17-custom-firefox-a...

yoavm7• 9 months ago

Feels like people making a big deal out of it. You can also just, you know, not use these features. I can't remember the last time I use the "Print" dialog, the "Manage bookmarks" or the "Homepage" button. But these things don't have AI in their name, so people aren't so obsessed with removing them.

IMHO just like many companies are obsessed with adding AI features, some users are obsessed with rejecting them. Both seem mostly senseless to me, especially when it's a local-first AI implementation.

PaulHoule3• 9 months ago

Even if you don’t use them they still keep popping up popups which are distracting and make them violate WCAG for people with attention problems such as ADHD.

yoavm7• 9 months ago

Not sure what I'm doing differently, but using Firefox Dev Edition on Linux, I don't recall ever seeing a popup.

prashantsengar• 9 months ago

And honestly it seems ironic that a lot of people on HN want Firefox to be used by everyone but don't want Mozilla to add features that the "normies" want.

dragonwriter• 9 months ago

A lot of people on HN do not want people to use, or want, a lot of features that “normies” want. In part because they think that “normies” desire for those features is based in substantial part on misunderstanding of the benefits and costs of the features.

zynovex• 9 months ago

Not using firefox anymore. Uninstalled it few days ago. Switched to qutebrowser. It's not perfect, but hell I love using this browser.

flurdy• 9 months ago

The article is actually good. The title is a little click-baity even if that is actually what it covers. It is mostly about tweaking the AI options which is actually helpful as I don't mind some of the new features.

IAmBroom• 9 months ago

The title is a little click-baity even if that is actually what it covers.

Your comment is a bit self-contradictory in that it doesn't say what it says.

The_President• 9 months ago

Here's the link to the official archives of Firefox browser:

https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/

You're on your own running these in the wild; at least use a few other layers of security protection. Later versions of Firefox will not run unsigned addons unless you're running a development build, without running it from the debugger page. (Maybe someone can chime in with a workaround.)

__fst__• 9 months ago

Apart from the browser.ml.* config the newest update also adds and activates the @perplexity search shortcut.

Deleted it in my config. I'm solely relying on DuckDuckGo.

lucideer2• 9 months ago

I'm solely relying on DuckDuckGo

I've been fully on DDG for years but becoming slowly skeptical & looking for alternatives.

1. They're leaning heavily into "responsible AI", much like Mozilla

2. Might be just me but I feel like their algorithm became significantly worse recently. Over the years they've gone from being worse than Google in the early days to steadily improving & overtaking Google on quality (I made heavy use of !g until I started slowly realising it was no longer giving me better results). But now I feel like they've reversed & regressed again.

mikae1• 9 months ago

https://startpage.com is a Google proxy instead of a Bing proxy (like DDG).

frm88• 9 months ago

For now you can still try noai.duckduckgo.com - not sure it will stay, but it still works.

scuff3d• 9 months ago

After sticking to Firefox since it first came out, I finally switched to Vivaldi. Not happy it's Chromium based but it's the next best option I could find.

grigio• 9 months ago

it's easier to change browser

roscas• 9 months ago

Still, don't forget to install uBlock Origin on Firefox. If you don't have a Pi-hole, considerer installing one. If you use Windows (or android/ios/macos), there is no way MicroDollar won't know what you do or go, even if you have a VPN it still goes around the VPN. But if you use Linux, install OpenSnitch so you can control some other nasty connections.

username135• 9 months ago

Can you elaborate on what you're talking about regarding microdollar? Or provide some more information about your claim?

smartbit• 9 months ago

The Firefox Chat window doesn't allow running a LLM is a different container. At least I couldn't find a way, tried several plugins but failed. Now running my LLM of choice just like the author inside a pined & containerized tab.

josefritzishere• 9 months ago

It would be nice if there was a one-click "No AI" option, but I appreciate the OP. I have disabled these flags. Firefox is my main browser but AI is my nemesis.

pr3dr492• 9 months ago

I've started using https://mullvad.net/en/browser for exactly that reason. No AI shibboleth.

pr3dr492• 9 months ago

If you want some DNS blocking without running pi-hole or AdGuatd, try something like https://mullvad.net/en/help/dns-over-https-and-dns-over-tls

I found family to do a decent job of not resolving ads and crapware. Other providers are available.

rsync• 9 months ago

"If you’d like to turn these features off, open about:config in the Firefox address bar, search for browser.ml.enable, set it to false, and that should disable everything."

This is nice to know but in future versions of Firefox that single config switch (browser.ml.enable) will both change names and split into multiple sub-switches, most likely appearing in different pages of about:config.

These sub-switches will then not remain consistent.

Bank on it.

1vuio0pswjnm7• 9 months ago

Mozilla's default setting is true. This is the tired, old "opt-out" tactic

Almost no one changes defaults, according to the experts

It's perverse to think about:config is doing favours for anyone except Mozilla and its business partners

Otherwise the defaults would be false, i.e., opt-in

snapplebobapple• 9 months ago

Its easier to just go to a bfirefox rowser flavor that has better defaults like librewolf or maybe zen browser.

tom_alexander• 9 months ago

It's already not true. I had browser.ml.enable and browser.ml.chat.enabled set to false but I was still getting an option to ask an AI Chatbot about stuff in my right-click context menu. I had to also set browser.ml.chat.menu to false.

Also pick a lane mozilla. Either use "enable" or "enabled", don't use both.

crnkofe• 9 months ago

Gotta say I'm super annoyed by getting spoon-fed AI popups in every piece of software I'm using. How about fixing bugs and optimizing mem and perf? Whatever happened to caring for end users. Empathy is aparently dead in the era of VC capital.

Disable AI in Firefox

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