Firefox is becoming an AI browser and the internet is not at all happy about it

https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/firefox-is-becoming-an-ai-browser-and-the-internet-is-not-at-all-happy-about-it/

by HelloUsername • 7 months ago

133 149 7 months ago

pcgamer.com

cranberryturkey3• 7 months ago

Man is there anything left that isn't a total invasion of privacy??

ranger_danger2• 7 months ago

living off-grid

cranberryturkey3• 7 months ago

You got me there lol

jqpabc1235• 7 months ago

Yes.

Brave

Helium

LibreWolf

MangoToupe5• 7 months ago

Brave

Did brave's attempt to provide an alternative funding model to ads actually go anywhere?

SirFatty• 7 months ago

Tor

ekjhgkejhgk12• 7 months ago

Brave

I'm not interested in crypto right now, thanks for asking.

cranberryturkey3• 7 months ago

Brave??? lol wtf

I use librewolf

godelski11• 7 months ago

  > Brave

Chromium

  > Helium

Chromium

  > LibreWolf

  WaterFox
  MullvadBrowser

stalfosknight• 7 months ago

Safari

Der_Einzige• 7 months ago

This is what you get for not caring about projects like thorium or the Firefox version of it.

I’ve still got my ublock origin in a far faster version of my web browser than what normies use.

cpuguy83• 7 months ago

If "not caring" == "never heard of it" then I'm with you. Not like I don't pay attention either.

zb32• 7 months ago

How is it funded? Is that just some guy doing this for fun? What if there's an offer to buy it? How sustainable this is?

ranger_danger2• 7 months ago

Speedrunning to the grave it seems.

zb32• 7 months ago

It's the governments' fail.. this kind of software can't be profitable, so it should be funded via grants for common good.. these did not arrive though.

MangoToupe5• 7 months ago

Seriously. All things considered, browsers are extremely cheap to fund. The fact that no government has come forward to spearhead this movement is damning to the concept of the state.

And no, I obviously don't want to fund Mozilla, a hilariously incompetent entity that hates its users.

apercu• 7 months ago

The U.S. isn’t anti-socialism, it’s anti-public benefit.

We’ll socialize losses for banks to pay bonuses, but funding shared infrastructure that serves citizens is a bridge too far.

cogman102• 7 months ago

is damning to the concept of the state.

Not really.

It's a web browser and from a non-tech politician they already have the internet.

It's pretty hard to get a government to understand why the 1000 webkit browsers aren't actually competitive.

They'd rather send money and regulations towards something they can better understand like healthcare or right to repair. Heck, even "AI".

jayd16• 7 months ago

What does the military use?

jMyles• 7 months ago

Yes, this seems to suck. But I've been wrong about plenty before. I'll keep an open mind.

harrygeez• 7 months ago

Ladybird can't arrive sooner

guizadillas2• 7 months ago

ladybird can take all the time they need, servo is the one I'm waiting for

redkoala• 7 months ago

Servo is pretty well run, and their regular donations have been improving. Details below if you want to also help https://servo.org/blog/2025/12/15/november-in-servo/#donatio...

grimblee• 7 months ago

Same, ladybird's devs have expressed far-right opinions, can't trust them with my data

mghackerlady• 7 months ago

made this exact comment earlier lol

ekjhgkejhgk12• 7 months ago

So guys. What do I replace firefox with?

I'm on Debian, and my requirements is that I'm able to run uBlock Origin. In addition containers and vertical tabs would be nice to have.

What are the options here?

philipwhiuk• 7 months ago

Waterfox.

boplicity• 7 months ago

Why replace Firefox? The headline and linked article don't seem to match reality at all. It's just a bunch of clickbait nonsense.

ekjhgkejhgk12• 7 months ago

This person also said in an interview that he'd consider blocking uBlock Origin from Firefox. Evidence is piling up against this person.

belorn• 7 months ago

Initially, I would wait and see what Debian does. They might not package the browser with the same defaults as Mozilla.

I would also guess that there will be alternative packages for Firefox if there are enough people interested. Tor Browser is a example of Firefox being packaged using different defaults and plugins. In theory one could take Tor Browser, remove Tor, and have a hardenized version of Firefox with saner defaults.

ekjhgkejhgk12• 7 months ago

Hey I made the same observation about Tor elsewhere in this thread. Great minds think alike (and get downvoted together).

binary1323• 7 months ago

I’ve been using librewolf for a while and it’s fine. Hopefully ladybird gets there eventually.

roldie• 7 months ago

Am I happy about it? No. But I don't understand the huge backlash in all the comments yesterday. It felt like everyone overreacted. For me, Firefox still checks off the most boxes of what I want in a browser.

ceejayoz• 7 months ago

To me it's a bit like when your favorite fancy restaurant stops making its own bread in-house. The change itself isn't huge, and isn't all that surprising… but it's not a great sign for how the place will look in a decade.

zdragnar• 7 months ago

It's more like your favorite fancy restaurant has a few dishes that suck. Instead of putting time into improving table service, fixing up the menu, maybe getting some aspects of service up to standards, they decided that every meal now comes with a back massage. That's not their core competency.

Firefox is good, but it could be great. Adding AI features aren't what will move the needle on their core competency.

jfindper3• 7 months ago

But I don't understand the huge backlash in all the comments yesterday.

Well, it was an excuse to get the pitchforks out! We love to do that around here. Especially if I can say "AI", "slop", "crypto", "MBA", etc.

ConceptJunkie2• 7 months ago

I've come to the conclusion that anyone who uses the term "AI slop" probably doesn't have anything meaningful to say. Not that "AI slop" isn't a thing, but its use is just a buzzword that doesn't mean anything and is becoming less and less relevant as the tools improve.

thesuitonym4• 7 months ago

Firefox still checks off the most boxes of what I want in a browser.

Same here, but lately it seems like Mozilla will stop at nothing to get me to stop using Firefox. At what point should I say enough is too much?

freehorse4• 7 months ago

What exactly changed fundamentally in your experience? I have been using firefox for more than 10 years now, nothing changed that much to feel like complaining about.

godelski11• 7 months ago

  > It felt like everyone overreacted

I think it is trendy to hate of Mozilla. I'm not sure why, but it is. I mean you get tons of people who will even say they haven't tried it since before the qantum days. Or people that tried it once and just gave up.

I seriously don't get it and I understand why there's conspiracies about disinformation campaigns. But on all places I don't understand how HN users are just happily giving the keys to the internet to a singular company, let along Google.

  > Firefox still checks off the most boxes of what I want in a browser.

Honestly, what doesn't it do? Everyone says chrome is better but other than a few niche things I have been entirely unconvinced.

Why are browsers even "sticky"? There's no social network. Bookmarks are trivial to migrate. It's like the easiest thing to switch out there...

etempleton2• 7 months ago

I think it is trendy to hate on Firefox because of how cool Firefox felt in 2002 and how dominant they became in the mid 2000s before Chrome and so everything feels like a fall from grace from that.

I do think there have been missteps. I think Firefox is good and is my browser of choice but most of their new features feel superfluous.

frm883• 7 months ago

Firefox has made some shady choices of late. The settings functionality is getting ever more unreliable and they are moving more essential settings to about:config and then you have to go and dig around in there and hope you find all interdependent parameters. That is one thing that has definitelybdeclined: be open to your users and enable them to customise the software. All the ML settings can only be changed via editing the profile. How many non-techies go and dig around in the profile?

ConceptJunkie2• 7 months ago

It's seen as cool to hate on AI right now. I haven't used Firefox in about 10 years, and this is definitely not a feature I would want, but if I were still using it I wouldn't get all exercised over it.

lawlessone• 7 months ago

I think it's just trendy now to say "it's seen as cool to hate AI right now"

etempleton2• 7 months ago

I think it was just one of those throwaway lines. I raised an eyebrow when I read it. It seems like something written to appease some idiot on the board or something. If I thought there was a strong vision there it would be fine, but no one seems to have any vision for AI beyond some controlled tech demos that never quite work as advertised—at least not enough for you to use it in the way advertised.

Macha• 7 months ago

Nah, if you read into the strategy doc, then compared to the relatively measured press release, it’s entirely gungho on AI

ycombinator_acc• 7 months ago

That's modern social media for you. Turn everything into ragebait.

freehorse4• 7 months ago

People who have strong takes would probably comment more and quicker in such threads, and people without such strong takes not as much. It kind of makes sense, but often creates a weird, and possibly non-representative, impression. I am not overly happy over how mozilla handles stuff, but it all also feels like an overreaction to me.

PaulKeeble2• 7 months ago

If I can turn it off as they claim I don't care too much other than it's development time wasted towards something I won't be using. They could have spent time fixing some of the sites that don't work correctly, implementing standards that are missing or just improving performance and memory usage. All of those things would be welcome as would some improvements on the mobile version it's not super usable I find it kind of irritating.

godelski11• 7 months ago

  > If I can turn it off as they claim

Why wouldn't you be able to turn it off?

You can already do so with the current AI stuff and it is an open source browser so they couldn't stop you if they wanted to.

simulator5g• 7 months ago

They’ll let you turn it off until people don’t care as much, then it will quietly become mandatory. Only some of the nerds will even care, since by then the panopticon will probably be fully constructed.

PaulKeeble2• 7 months ago

You can turn the existing AI off if you learn the magic incantation for about:config, its not very usable. I would hope they will provide some proper switches in the settings menu for each of the AI features they intend, including the one for automatic tab grouping (which so far is total garbage and a complete waste of CPU).

estimator7292• 7 months ago

The setting exists, but may or may not actually be respected based on user reports.

Just like their auto-updates, you can turn the option off, but whether the feature is actually disabled is another question entirely.

I don't trust Mozilla enough. For one, not giving UI options and hiding all the settings in about:config where non-technical users can't access is a shitty thing to do. Second, I have zero trust that the settings actually do anything since many don't.

I don't believe for one moment that turning off their AI features actually 100% prevents that code from running.

binary1323• 7 months ago

Why isn’t the framing “the user may choose to turn it ON”? Just chew on that.

freehorse4• 7 months ago

I think when they added some "AI feature" last days or so, there was a popup asking me if I want it or not. As far as I recall opting in seemed as easy as opting out.

Fairburn• 7 months ago

Because it wouldn't work. What is the point of having some flagship feature among the fanfare to just leave it off by default? They start the race by never having gotten off of the starting line. I agree the framing is messed up.

Zaskoda• 7 months ago

I have been not happy about it up until this post. While reading the article, I thought about it differently.

What Firefox provides today isn't drawing in new users. Those of us who use Firefox do so for a number of reasons related to privacy or security or what not.

I simultaneously like being able to use ChatGPT to look stuff up and I hate that I'm feeding the machine a profile of me. I don't use ChatGPT nearly as much anymore mostly because of that sick feeling I get in my stomach knowing whatever I tell it will absolutely be abused in some way some how.

Nobody is building a very good "thing" that lets you use AI services with a solid layer of protection. That is a new market that deserves a product. I'm not saying that I think putting AI in Firefox is a good idea. Just that I can finally see the motivation.

Personally, I think the "solution" should be some kind of stand alone product that maybe has integrations into Firefox if you have both of them installed. Keep it in it's own cage. Make the only possibility of it existing on my system be me choosing to install a specific app. And if I'm going to do that, let me also use it outside of Firefox if I want.

But at least now I see a reason for what seems like such a bone headed decision.

nativeit• 7 months ago

I’ve never understood why Firefox doesn’t just make an extension with first-party support, instead of bloating their browser with gimmicks that a large cohort of users don’t want, and that probably shouldn’t be included by default at this point anyway. Or, shit, they came up with “Focus” for a “privacy browser”, do that and leave Firefox alone. Better yet, implement any of the litany of fixes and features your users actually requested.

saltcured• 7 months ago

This gets off topic of Firefox, but I don't see how any middleware can address your concern.

It is the very information you feed to the AI to get results that is in danger. No matter how you mask some metadata or account info, the actual in-band content is a problem.

The only solution is self-hosting of a model so the input and output cannot be monitored. And this also means running it offline, since a "black box" model that can do RAG or MCP or anything like that could also use covert channels to leak the information you are trying to control.

devsda• 7 months ago

What does it take to make a rebranded fork of Firefox popular similar to Brave or Edge?

Ideally the fork should compete with Chrome and not Firefox for market share while acting as a hedge/warning against bad decisions from Mozilla and its leadership.

guitcastro• 7 months ago

To be honest, I think librewolf will gain traction with firefox continue their journey to enshitification.

echelon_musk• 7 months ago

Sadly the name is junk so I doubt it will ever take off outside of technical circles, which will ensure its irrelevance. I think Brave did a decent job of naming their browser.

alfiedotwtf• 7 months ago

No shit

TheJoeMan• 7 months ago

Are there any suggestions for a minimal browser to use to interface with embedded / IoT? The firefox devs assume it is only used to access The Internet. For example, SSL scare-screens when connecting to a local 10.0.x.x address, or it trying to autofill a password for 192.168.1.1 which is nonsensical as the end devices are different in different (physical) locations. Don’t get me started on Apple devices auto-disconnecting from ad-hoc wifi networks without internet access.

treis3• 7 months ago

This is like people railing against images in their webpages or that run their browsers without JavaScript. Like that LLMs are a fundamental paradigm shift in how we interact with computers and the web. How it all plays out is up for debate but there's no doubt that 10 years from now LLMs will play a role in nearly every interaction we have with a computer. The only way that's not true is if something better comes along.

Pining for pre-AI world is like wanting families to gather around the radio. Those days are gone.

conartist6• 7 months ago

I can doubt that!!!!

Xerox9213• 7 months ago

I think a lot of families actually restrict or eliminate screen time altogether, and gather round using either no technology, old technology, or new technology that imitates old technology, e.g. Yoto. There is value found in reducing our technology use. Some people may want to avoid AI on ethical grounds, or may be cautious about the cognitive effects of its use.

JumpCrisscross5• 7 months ago

there's no doubt that 10 years from now LLMs will play a role in nearly every interaction we have with a computer

I tend to agree with you. Doesn’t make what Mozilla is doing sensible.

In 1995, one could correctly observe that the internet would “play a role in nearly every interaction we have with a computer.” It would not follow that every app must reïnvent the network stack.

An AI helping out can be useful. Every app being a tiny AI is a cacophony of idiots.

treis3• 7 months ago

If they were training their own foundational model your analogy would be on the mark. But this is more like porting a command line application to a GUI.

lenerdenator• 7 months ago

No one's "Pining for pre-AI world". Many people use some amount of AI every day, whether they know it or not. I use Claude Code extensively, for example.

I know it's a paradigm shift. That's not the problem. The problem is that it's often wedged into workflows in ways that aren't helpful to me or are actively harmful. And then there's the question of what is done with the data. I don't need another tech company, non-profit or not, getting a hold of my chatbot conversation history and doing God knows with it.

Mozilla should be a better facilitator of the ecosystem around AI than just putting it in Firefox. Take care of the concerns before just shouting "me too" on a bunch of LLM features, which, to be honest, shouldn't even be a concern for FLOSS.

If someone wants GenAI in Firefox, they can create a branch, design it, implement it, and put it up for discussion. I don't need some CEO telling me the direction of the project. It's the cathedral vs the bazaar, which has been a major part of the FLOSS ethos for decades now.

Mordisquitos• 7 months ago

No, it is nothing like people railing against images or JavaScript in webpages. Those are features of websites that the browser needs to support to provide the full intended experience to the user of websites that use them. In what way is integrating an LLM, let alone an agentic AI, needed to provide the full intended experience of which websites?

treis3• 7 months ago

Why would my browser that is used to display static HTML need high performance 3D rendering or a low level assembly target?

The websites that use LLMs don't exist yet. Think of something like meetup.com. Instead of that you ask your LLM for something to do this weekend. It finds events, other people looking for something to do, and you have an ad hoc meetup.

Beyond that it's like looking at a blackberry and predicting what it'll be used for in the future. Hard to say "oh gay men will use that for casual hookups and it'll be called Grindr".

epidemian• 7 months ago

Five years ago, we could've read this same comment but with "LLMs" replaced with "blockchain" or "crypto".

Yes, it might totally be the case that in 5 years this comment reads as correctly predicting the future that is to come. But it's also possible that it doesn't.

It's not at all clear to me which things will persist in time at the moment they are getting popular. There are lots of technologies that look promising in the beginning and up fizzling out.

Browsers are useful now, and they have been useful for a while. It seems to me like a safer bet to invest on them still doing what they are useful at, in the case that the web keeps being a thing for a while still :)

bigstrat20032• 7 months ago

there's no doubt that 10 years from now LLMs will play a role in nearly every interaction we have with a computer

There is a great deal of doubt about that. I think that's a very unlikely prediction you're making.

shadowgovt• 7 months ago

Unfortunately, the Internet doesn't really pay the bills, and that's the issue.

willvarfar2• 7 months ago

I desperately want the kind of success we used to have searching on google back over a decade ago. Relevant results. A few annoying ads started appearing with paid placement, but we all ignored them.

Nowadays google search results are so cluttered with paid promotion that the genuine content creating websites and blogs are drowned. So we turn to AI not because it's better than the old straightforward search, but because it is better and currently less ad-laden than the current search?

thesuitonym4• 7 months ago

Ads are coming to AI, too. At the risk of sounding like a shill, Kagi offers a better search experience than even Google back in the day.

EA-3167• 7 months ago

Part of the issue is the search tech itself, but part of the issue is how the web has been warped by SEO. Search and what was being discovered weren’t always in such an adversarial relationship.

For me though the closest I can get to the good old days is Kagi. Not a sponsor.

willvarfar2• 7 months ago

It's also that Google brought Doubleclick and that completely flipped their incentives. Now they get money sending you to the content farms and what is good for their business isn't necessarily aligned with what is good for you...?

BizarroLand• 7 months ago

And because of Googles search system, almost every result comes from a content farm or some other page that has "optimized for google search" i.e., filled their pages with so much pointless dreck that finding the information you came for becomes nearly impossible.

LLMs that are trained off of that dreck give you the answer you were looking for (sometimes, when they don't make it up).

And they've gotten to the point where they do so more quickly than trying to find it yourself in many cases, but I would much rather websites and search results being faithful stewards of the functions they are intended for and to get the information from the tap rather than having an AI butler deliver it to me.

soundworlds2• 7 months ago

Try Kagi - it is literally the search experience you are talking about. I've been using it for 6 months, and will use it for majority of searches. The only time I need AI "search" is for follow-up questions.

afavour2• 7 months ago

I’m an AI skeptic. I think a lot of these pronouncements about how AI is going to revolutionize the workplace and/or society itself are made by snake oil salesmen who are looking out for their own profits. And yet. I think skepticism can go too far.

One area I really do think AI is going to take over is web search. Primarily because web search these days is so shitty but that’s besides the point. AI is absolutely going to be a core feature used by the users of web browsers, and a web browser is the core of what Mozilla offers. They absolutely should be present in this space. And I hope, even though it’s an immense challenge, they might be able to offer an alternative to the aforementioned snake oil salesmen.

nemomarx• 7 months ago

What's the use case of an ai chat built into the browser instead of just going to a web page that has it? I would think ai browser integration should be about automating it or something instead

strict9• 7 months ago

Primarily because web search these days is so shitty but that’s besides the point.

Obviously there are a lot of reasons for this. But I think one of the most important reasons is that there is so few organic interesting content destinations anymore.

Sure there are some neat shopify stores, news sites, and a few dedicated souls keeping up blogs. But so much of the casual browsing that the web once was has been obliterated by the move to social media.

And what hasn't moved is now a mess of AI generated fluff or link farms.

I used to think Google made search worse to increase ad revenue. And maybe it's tangentially related. But the stuff I used to search for and find and get inspiration from has moved to walled gardens. Reddit is one of the few remaining open web destinations left.

AI can't solve that problem.

danaris• 7 months ago

there is so few organic interesting content destinations anymore.

Are there really?

Or are they out there, just impossible to find, because search is fully captured by ad-related interests, and they're not running ads?

And if it were the latter, how would you even know if you weren't already aware of these little islands of organic discussion?

soundworlds2• 7 months ago

Web Search isn't shitty. Google and Bing have become shitty. I use Kagi and it is exactly the seamless experience you are talking about.

afavour2• 7 months ago

I use Kagi as well. Search is still shit because so many of the underlying pages are ad riddled shit. We might not be using Google but so much of the web still targets it.

davidgerard• 7 months ago

I'm an AI Moderate, with much more sensible opinions - you can tell, I used a sensible-sounding name for myself! - and it's clear that the moderate position is to set it on fire. The only reason it seems useful for search is because AI vendor Google deliberately made their search worse to increase time on the search page. It's not actually in any way a use case for "AI".

ifh-hn• 7 months ago

As long as I'm still in control, and it's actually useful, I don't see any issues with this direction, especially given the competition.

In fact I regularly use the summarize page functionality in one of my profiles and find in very convenient.

This seems like the usual Firefox criticism, where they get schtick for doing the same as all the others who don't.

prophesi• 7 months ago

I would normally say I’m fine with it if I can turn it off, but making agentic browsing secure is currently an unsolved problem, so I’d have concerns with the risks this will pose for people unaware of the lethal trifecta.

ChrisArchitect• 7 months ago

[dupe] Lots of discussions:

Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46288491

Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46299934

No AI* Here – A Response to Mozilla's Next Chapter

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46295268

godelski11• 7 months ago

Can we just not be irrationally mad at Mozilla for once?

It is beyond me that here, on HN, of all places people do not understand the criticality that FF is to the free and open internet. Use WaterFox or whatever, but stop picking a different color of Chrome.

It doesn't take a genius to figure out Mozilla is trying everything they can to stay relevant. Literally everything they do ends up with tons of HN comments making complaints. Tons of complaints coming from people who haven't even used FF in a decade! It feels like a disinformation campaign but I'm pretty sure you all just like to hate on Mozilla and justify your usage of Chrome.

We're just fucking ourselves over here. Yes, there's reasons to complain about FF. There's no shortage. But are they truly big enough reasons to hand over the keys to the internet to a singular entity? And to Google of all companies?! Who the fuck cares about this AI browser stuff, you can opt out or use a fork like WaterFox who makes that the default. Guess who's AI stuff you can't opt-out of?

Is it really worth it?

Is 3 clicks to uninstall AI seriously enough justification to give Google the internet?

What are we even doing...

mnls2• 7 months ago

Firefox holds about 2.25% of the global browser market share. There is absolutely no "criticality" at all. Google won and also they are the ones who pay for your favorite browser to remain somewhat alive.

godelski11• 7 months ago

It isn't over till its over[0].

  > your favorite browser

Why aren't you using it?

Honest question. What does Chrome do that FF doesn't?

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBxMPqxJGqI

cornonthecobra• 7 months ago

As long as I can deploy a pkg with the AI features completely disabled administratively, I'm fine with it.

I'd like it a lot more if it was strictly opt-in, and they made non-AI LTS releases, but I understand that's at odds with eyeball acquisition

josefritzishere• 7 months ago

You can largely disable it in Firefox in about:config. I'd prefer a one clicn setting for ease of use. https://askubuntu.com/questions/1556081/how-to-disable-all-t...

devinprater• 7 months ago

AI features you say? They could start by taking the alt-text generation model and making it browser-wide if blind people want it, not just for PDF's.

frm883• 7 months ago

This. Why do features like this always get swept under the rug? Accessibility could be a major feature Firefox gains revenue on. Make it paid, if absolutely necessary. Instead of hopping on the latest hype train.

IAmGraydon• 7 months ago

What exactly is an “AI browser”?

Firefox is becoming an AI browser and the internet is not at all happy about it

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