That's all well and good that they give you the ability to turn it off. What's not changing though is that most of their focus will be on integrating AI which most people don't want. As a result the pace of other new features being tested/implemented will probably slow significantly.
this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2026
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Plus, even if you can turn it off, the feature is still in the code, needing updates, etc., even if you don't ever use it. Literal bloat.
Don't forget adding additional surface area for security vulnerabilities. Does the off switch prevent a zero day attack via that code? Of course not.
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What's not changing though is that most of their focus will be on integrating AI which most people don't want.
I agree that AI chatbots are absolutely useless and have no place in a browser, but out of the three ML features in the screenshot, one is great for blind people, and another one is great for making the web more multilingual, so their usefulness is quite self-evident. Regarding ethics, at least for the last one it's using a local model, and was trained using open-source datasets.[1]
What makes so-called "AI" bad is not the amount of users that can benefit from it, but how useful it is to the people that do use the feature, which usually means having experts tailor machine learning unto a single purpose.
I personally use the translation feature at least once a week when looking at news article that are not in English, and now I'm using a lot to translate Japanese webpages to plan a holiday there, so I'm very happy that Mozilla has invested time abd collaborated with universities to make this feature, I wish other people were less flippant about it just because it has "AI" in its name.
[1] https://hacks.mozilla.org/2022/06/training-efficient-neural-network-models-for-firefox-translations/
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Also we have all seen this movie before. They launch with promises of having a choice to turn it on or off… until it’s no longer a choice.
When did Firefox take away a choice that was previously offered?
A lot of these are extensions that are folded into the main Firefox feature set, experimental features or not even related to the browser?
Pocket's dead now.
Like another user said, where's "open image in new tab"? (I notice you didn't reply to them.)
Remember XUL extensions and real browser themes?
Remember when you didn't need a developer account to make extensions and you could distribute them via your own website?
But of course, Firefox never takes away choices that were previously offered.
"Open image..." is still there. If you're not seeing it anymore, it's sites taking it away from you. (I notice you didn't check before getting outraged.)
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This happened quite often for various UI settings etc. Often there were technical reasons for removing the option (e.g. rewrites where they dropped features with low usage), but it is a real thing.
The "open image in new tab" context menu option, off the top of my head, it has been 1000 small things with them, no 1 outrageous removal, but tons of them that didnt make big impacts yet still annoyed people who used them.
Edit: It was actually "View Image", "Open Image in New Tab" was the alternative that remained. It was removed in v88
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I've already moved several family members away from Chrome, Firefox etc
Waterfox, while sharing a basic codebase, doesn't have any of this bullshit and runs like a dream.
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I'll just leave this here
It's FireFox but
- no telemetry/spying-on-you
- no AI
- uBlock Origin enabled
In other words, it's the open source browser Mozilla was always supposed to be.
Plus it's typically not more than 12 hrs behind any FF release.
Accept one of our free tanks ! They get 100 MPG and go 100 MPH over any terrain!
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Can someone please put a responsible adult in charge of that damned organization?
Pepperidge Farms remembers when Firefox had a control like that to turn JavaScript on and off. The rest of you are supposed to have forgotten. Oops.
There is still NoScript, which is arguably much better than that, since it offers more granular control
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How about they just... not include the LLM bullshit in the first place? Just make a browser that strictly renders text and images according to W3C standards?
When chrome came out, it was pretty much that. Super fast, very bare bones. But people loved it because of the speed and the simplicity.
Im curious how Orion will turn out. There is supposed to be an alpha for Linux coming out now this February.
When Chrome came out, a lot of us knew that letting DoubleClick have any control over access to the Internet was a bad idea. This is another part of that.
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Thanks for posting, but people will find something else stupid to complain about, because there is pretty obviously a storm of propaganda against Firefox, which I very much suspect is driven by interests that are against an open and free internet.
Blocking these features may calm some people, but in reality, none of these features were used for anything unless specifically used by the user. So the claim of it making Firefox slower or using more resources or being used for telemetry were all outright lies.
A sentiment is tried to be created that Firefox is just as bad as Chrome, Edge, Brave and Safari when nothing could be further from the truth. But even people who consider themselves IT savvy are falling for it. 🙁
Interestingly these attacks on Firefox coincide with Chrome getting steadily worse, forcing Googles own standards and preventing plugins that block advertising, while reducing functionality for Firefox on Google/Alphabet owned sites.
I don't think the proliferation of bad press is anything other than a chronicle of the decline of Firefox.
I've been ride or die with Firefox since early, and I've never daily driven Chrome. But I've had to keep Chrome installed to look at the sites that don't play with FF. Little by little, FF get's worse, and most of the "worst" these days are features, not bugs. Though their are plenty of bugs. They certainly deserve praise for keeping faith with ublock. And I appreciate that they respect privacy more than Alphabet.
I want Mozilla to succeed. I just remember when Mozilla made the case with the quality of their software, rather than the quality of their ethics.
Websites not playing nice with Firefox has nothing to do with Firefox itself, and everything to do with lazy web devs only testing with chromium based browsers and maybe Safari.
Websites not playing nice with firefox is website developers fault not bothering to test. Heck, some sites even block you from using firefox even if it would work anyway (ex: some days ago i needed to use a site that said "you are using firefox, it will not work so just use chrome" when i changed my useragent to mimic a chrome browser, the site worked perfectly...that's just dev lazyness!)
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And as always... There is no actual "AI" being used here.
It's especially hilarious how translation programs, which have existed for decades, are suddenly considered "AI". Likewise with all of "AI".
It's also pretty funny how mad people get about translations, image classification, grouping... These are just like basic 101 programs with zero "AI" involved. Not much to get mad about.
Agreed that it's not really AI, but forcing a thing that doesn't really do what is promised and uses a lot of energy to do it might might be something to be irritated about.
None of what is considered 'AI' is actually AI, it's just a rebrand of machine learning tech that has been around for a few years now (and is genuinely useful in certain circumstances). It's all 'AI', only the generative AI is worth getting mad about.
With Firefox's new CEO (Who is a douche canoe) I would not be at all surprised if this is the only development going in to the browser for the last two months.
They plan waste $130 million on AI bullshit. Imagine a fraction of that invested into the actual browser. I can't even eat as much as I want to vomit.
Disabled. By. Default.
They actually listened to the community, thats very nice.
No. Listening to the community would involve not polluting the browser with that shit in the first fucking place.
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Hey let's do the thing no one wants because our management is incompetent.
One more gotcha in the AI booster arsenal: wrong model, wrong prompt, not enough agents, just don't look at it. While none of those things addresses the actual issues of watching everyone piss away their money into the pit for no reason other than psychosis.
I mean this was announced months ago. I remember I think it was about a month ago there was articles on here talking about it and I specifically went on both blue sky and Mastodon and roasted Firefox for making this decision.
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