Who the fuck asked for a Firefox AI browsing mode?
this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2025
36 points (89.1% liked)
Linux and Tech News
3352 readers
10 users here now
This is where all the News about Linux and Linux adjacent things goes. We'll use some of the articles here for the show! You can watch or listen at:
You can also get involved at our forum here on Lemmy:
Or just get the most recent episode of the show here:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Dunno, but I'll be asking for a way to completely disable it.
Probably LibreWolf.
Which they will provide without being asked for it.
What the fuck does that even mean, "AI browsing"?
Prolly like if you look up something that doesn't actually exist, it'll find you results anyways.
This ought to be fun for Rule 34...
There is an AI browser war going on right now, see Comet (Perplexity), Atlas (ChatGPT), Claude AI Agent from Chrome etc.
They work by letting the AI continuously see everything your browser can see, such as your emails, banking details, financial habits, online shopping accounts, etc.
By doing so, they promise to be better digital assistants, so that you ask just ask the browser to do tasks such as online shopping, booking holidays, etc.
Even ignoring the severe privacy concerns, AI browsers are significantly prone to prompt injection. That is, any random webpage with hidden text can override the instructions you give it to carry out malicious attacks.
Thanks for the explanation. I hate it.
Today, when you search for something you get a handful of ads, SEO-optimized bullshit, and maybe the 6th link will be what you were actually looking for.
When you tell the AI agent (in your browser) to search for something, not only do you get the most relevant results (because you can make your prompt vastly more specific and detailed), you completely skip all that other stuff that you didn't want.
I've been saying for some time now that AI is going to kill free search engines because it's such a better way to search for stuff. Free search engines like Google and SEO-optimizing companies are hindrances to efficient browsing and drowning the web in bullshit. Poisoning search results.
An AI agent will skip past all that stuff and give you just what you want; you never see any ads!
An AI agent will skip past all that stuff and give you just what you want; you never see any ads!
You're wondering, "Why is my cat sneezing?"
While you ponder that, why not treat yourself to something delicious? At Carl's Jr., our Charbroiled Burgers are made with 100% Angus beef, grilled to perfection, and packed with bold flavors. Treat yourself today—you deserve a meal that satisfies!
Now, back to your question: Sneezing in cats can be caused by allergies, respiratory infections, or irritants. It’s always a good idea to consult with your veterinarian to ensure your feline friend is healthy.
Let me know if you have more questions!
You've obviously never used an open source AI model (running locally on your PC) if you think that's how it'd go.
Likewise, a properly set up and locally hosted searx instance should not be returning ads and "SEO-optimized bullshit". You're comparing "free" corporate owned services to privately owned ones. OFC corporate owned is going to feed you ads.
The takeaway here is: Open source doesn't suffer from enshittification.
Learn and contribute to FOSS or stop bitching 🤣
That's assuming the AI won't look at the results and still make shit up. I've used AI-assisted search and i know that it's not reliable.
Ok how would that work:
find me some good recipes for hibachi style ginger butter
AI model returns 10 links, 4 of which don't actually exist (because it hallucinated them)? No. If they didn't exist, it wouldn't have returned them because it wouldn't have been able to load those URLs.
It's possible that it could get it wrong because of some new kind of LLM scamming method but that's not "making shit up" it's malicious URLs.
If they didn’t exist, it wouldn’t have returned them
And yet I've had Bing's Copilot/ChatGPT (with plugins like Consensus), Gemini, and Perplexity do exactly that, but worse. Sometimes they'll cite sources that don't mention anything related to the answer they've provided because the information they're giving is based on some other training data they can't source. They were asked to provide a source, but won't necessarily give you the source. Hell, sometimes they'll answer an adjacent just to spit out an answer--any answer--to fulfill the request.
LLMs are simply not the appropriate tool for the job. This is most obvious when you need the specificity and accuracy.
Yeah... The big commercial models have system prompts that fuck it all up. That's my hypothesis, anyway.
You have to try it with an open source model. You tell it to turn the titles, URLs, and nothing else. That seems to work fantastic 👍
I'm doing it with Open WebUI and ollama cloud which is open source models that you could run locally—if you have like $5,000 worth of hardware.
Interesting. I have a couple automations in mind, I'll have to try it out, then.
ah yes, because there's no way the programmers won't induce bias in their AIs
If you don't like your current open source AI, just use a different one or an embedding that works around whatever bias you don't like. Maybe open a ticket?
Ewww. Talk about being tone deaf with their userbase…
With their user base, or with this particular social media bubble we're in right now?
You probably already live in some sort of bubble if you're a Firefox user. Most people straight up don't care about the things Firefox offers, and what it offers (better privacy, a functioning extension system including adblockers) is diametrically opposed to using LLMs IMO.
You can have fully private AI, it can run locally on your own computer with no data leaving it. This is one of the things I'm looking forward to from Firefox AI support, since other browsers come from organizations that have their own AI they'd rather you use instead of local ones.
I have no idea how this would interfere with the extension system, or adblockers in particular. They're completely separate things.
I suppose it's fundamentally an issue of trust, and in recent years Mozilla did a lot to erode that. Even if an AI could theoretically be private and local, I'm not willing to believe that it's actually going to be.
Firefox is open source, you can see for yourself what it's doing. You don't have to trust them.
Mozilla needs to die and be reborn under the wing of better management and community drive, because they seem to have been captured by money hungry fucks. They dont give a shit about opensource. It's just a pipe through which they can get Google money.
Are they jonesing for openai giving them another google-sized payout? Otherwise I don't get the rationale, the overlap of their users and people wanting ai browser is one freshman from California? Not to mention Firefox has nowhere near enough cash to burn on this thing to compete with AI companies doing the exact same thing.
(obligatory "ai, ew")
I hate it
And it's gonna be shiiit
Not just browsers ... Take a look at what Microsoft has in mind for Windows 11. https://www.windowslatest.com/2025/11/18/windows-11-to-add-an-ai-agent-that-runs-in-background-with-access-to-personal-folders-warns-of-security-risk/
They made a version of windows after 2000?
No, that's Windows 11 - older version than 2000. The good one was 1736.
Fun fact about 1736, it was the birth year of Patrick Henry, who famously said “Give me liberty, or give me death!”
I wonder if I could use this to just browse for me. like 24 hour, round the clock browsing. see a link, click the link. see an ad, click the ad.
just really fuck up all their metrics.
Auto-clicking ads to fuck up metrics is already a thing: https://adnauseam.io/
true, but it wouldn't fuck up Mozilla's metrics.
Ah, I thought that "they" referred to ad corporations...
You're on to something here.
You can ask it anything... Ask it to fuck off.
i like mullvad's browser
🤮
Uninstalled