511
Firefox's beta feature "Smart Window" shared browsing and search history to AI models without prompting
(www.omgubuntu.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2026
511 points (97.9% liked)
Technology
82669 readers
2378 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
And it breaks sooo many sites.
Waterfox, is Firefox that just works.
No it doesn't. I use Librewolf and this common refrain is FUD.
I used it for almost a year.
It took me ~3 months to find and tweak settings until I stopped running into issues with sites at least one every couple weeks.
I've been using Librewolf for about a month now, today I ran into the first problem, a website was blank but that fixed itself when I closed the tab and opened it again. I've been very happy with it so far. Sad to hear you ran into troubles.
I tried Librewolf for a while and found it to be a bit too much for me when all I really want is Firefox without AI. The privacy options are probably great but not for me.
Just installed waterfox. First impression is that I am super happy to be bock to the previous Firefox theme - it takes less space and looks nicer in my opinion. Seems promising. Thanks for the recommendation! :)
The latest Firefox release added a button that does exactly what you want. Turns off AI everywhere.
Yeah, I returned to FireFox after the latest release because of the kill switch. Still I'm uncomfortable with using software that's full of stuff that I hate, even if it's disabled. This is not really rational I guess, just me being weird.
It’s difficult. If people don’t support Firefox then the downstream browsers that everyone in this thread are suggesting are fucked. And we’re stuck with chrome and safari. But if people support Mozilla too much then they’ll just do whatever they want, like this AI nonsense.
Yeah, it's tricky. I donated to Mozilla in the past, will look into making some donations to Servo moving forwards as I really think that's the way things are headed for me. I keep trying to use GNOME Web which is WebKit based and it keeps getting better, but it's not quite there yet for me.
It might be easier to soften Librewolf than harden Firefox, but fair point.
If you're a relatively normal user and you still want to use LibreWolf, I would recommend:
Most of this is easy to find, especially thanks to the LibreWolf menu
Yeah it's all just in the GUI to enable and disable what you don't want.
I don't get what people are complaining about with LibreWolf being "too hard". Like it's 1 minute clicking through menus and you're done. 5 minutes if you need to read and search things up real quick.
But LibreWolf, ublock installed by default, and then set up containers. Just pure bliss.
For us, sure. For the average Joe who doesn't know about the side effects of fingerprinting, not so much.
It broke youtube for me yesterday and mind you I’m a web developer and I didn’t know what broke it exactly to turn it on/off.
It fixed it self today though.
That was almost certainly YouTube breaking itself. They do a lot of public A-B testing without notifying the user of anything, even if it could break functionality.
The chances of Librewolf breaking, and updating in 24 hours is basically zero. Especially if you're on Windows since it doesn't update itself, you have to choose to install the separate updater application when you install Librewolf, otherwise it just doesn't update.
https://codeberg.org/librewolf/librewolf-winupdater
https://librewolf.net/docs/faq/
To be fair, YouTube is a giant piece of shit. On mobile, IronFox and Firefox are terrible with it, but switching to Chrome and everything loads instantly.
We all know Google is purposely slowing down non-chrome browsers.
Maybe, but if you want Librewolf but less extreme, that's what Waterfox is for. May as well just install that and avoid the 5 minute search. And this is coming from a long time Librewolf user.
Yeah Librewolf does go really fucking hard on security/privacy to the detriment of functionality, but the are upfront with that so you shouldn't be going in completely blind. I think Water Fox is a nice happy medium for users that don't want to fuck around with technical stuff.
It only breaks sites because RFP is on by default and some greedy sites dont like RFP. You can just turn it off and use a good user agent mask (if you care about fingerprinting)
https://xkcd.com/2501/
Wait, it does? I've not had site issues with either.
It can cause issues with default settings on the occasional site.
Since I had it on hand, here's a screenshot of what I encountered when playing Jackbox with friends. All images would look like this.