I just want a browser that loads webpages and performs well, keep this ai bullshit for add-on’s and away from default installs.
Lynx remembers
Firefox protects your privacy by running AI models directly on your device, ensuring your sensitive data remains local
Good enough for me. The privacy problem with AI is when they are web services you send all your data to for processing. If that isn’t happening, that problem is fully solved.
We’ll see how often telemetry about your usage patterns is sent to Mozilla after this change…
Don’t they publish the source code?
Yes, they do. So, we should look into that.
Absolutely
I can see people not necessarily wanting suggestions for tab group names, but… The rest of the list is translations and alt text suggestions for images added to PDFs. The most uncontroversial AI features if ever there were any.
I really don’t care for this urge to advertise “AI” everywhere. I also don’t care much for the knee-jerk reaction just because someone calls something AI.
Firefox doesn’t let you use alt text anywhere, except for the most ridiculously niche location.
People who want to see it when they browse webpages get nothing.
It’s only if you
- open a PDF in Firefox
- and then choose to edit it
- and then choose to add an image
- and then choose to add alt text to it
- and then choose to generate alt text instead
If Mozilla cares about accessibility, what a weird niche of a niche of a place to put it.
I’m afraid the reason for that is that is that it’s the only place where Firefox has full control over the upload experience. Like, how would Firefox even be able to insert an alt text when e.g. I’m uploading a pic to Mastodon, without adding special cases for every website (which would break whenever the websites update)?
Though I wouldn’t be surprised if at least some “copy suggested alt text to clipboard” feature would be added at some point.
In any case, sure it’s an edge case, but it’s still weird to be angry about “AI” for it. It won’t even download the model if you don’t use it, AFAIK.
They could be working on that, but we don’t know yet.
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Alt text is an accessibility feature. Do you really want to be exclusionary to anyone who’s remotely blind?
The place for it is in screen reader software.
all these AI features seem like the most useless waste of GPU I have ever seen implemented! Why the hell do I need recommendations for the names of my tab groups? I freaking love that the tech industries’ idea of progress in the 2020’s is wasting resources on nothing.
Yeah, translation is the only thing here I have any desire at all to use
There are other practical things to use a browser-based AI for, like accessibility improvements for sites that didn’t provide proper alt text or other accessibility features.
But I think an important one few people are talking about is an AI “babysitter” for my grandma so she doesn’t fall for phishing scams. Ad blocking does a lot to protect people there but some smarter detection would be good for a significant chunk of society. Not that this exists yet.
Yeah, I think accessibility is one of the few potentially actually valuable use cases for generative AI.
If you can generate alt text completely locally in a private open source way that’d be pretty cool. It’d be nice if it funtioned as a extension that only does anything when you intentionally call it, at least by default. Maybe mapped to a keyboard shortcut, but I don’t know enough about what visually impaired users need to have a meaningful perspective on how the user experience should be implemented.
But I’ve yet to see any companies talk about how that’s what they’re gonna use AI for. To me, AI has hypothetical usefulness specifically for tasks that are really important but that in practice no one actually puts resources into, or has any resource to put into.
I also kinda wonder if local-only AI moderation tools could also make it a lot easier for fediverse mods to cover a lot of ground, or could abstract really disturbing content to reduce the mental load of moderating out the worst content folks post on the internet.
But no one is interested in AI tech so they can build useful things, theyre interested in it because they can steal peoples intellectual labor and build products without having to pay the people who would produce that intellectual labor.
You can make software accessible without Ai, they just don’t want to spend the money on it. It’s a business decision that every company makes to save the money on accessibility. It’s a calculated cost to them
Education is the answer and not creating a nanny state with fucking Ai babysitting and spying on everyone.
This is some big brother lvl of bullshit just because oh no old people might be stupid enough to fuck themselves over. If they are that technically incapable, maybe it’s time to set up a device without any extra options.
You might make software accessible without AI but I sure as heck don’t trust everyone else to do it right. Unless you control all software (spoiler, you don’t) then your point is merely theoretical.
Automated browser level accessibility to cover for other people’s errors is a perfectly reasonable solution to the problem that most developers are fucking lazy.
Plus, there is no “big brother bullshit” when it comes to locally run AI. Your data never leaves your device, and the model weights are freely auditable. You seem to fundamentally misunderstand how this works.
And you are fucking gullible to think giving Ai Agents root level access for the sake of accessibility is reasonable or that the big companies are even going to allow local models in the future.
Ai apologists get blocked
Don’t put words in my mouth. Root level access is obviously stupid. AI doesn’t have to be owned by corporations. If you think all AI is the same, you are the gullible one - open your eyes and actually look at the options out there. Apache licensed models exist out there, and no corporation can control that.
You could say the same thing about all software - when it’s run by corporations it’s almost certainly there to harvest your data. But there is a ton of ethical software too!
You can make software accessible without Ai
How do you propose generating alt text for images without some form of machine learning?
I believe their point was that site developers should just include alt text, without ai ever being needed.
But in practice, sometimes they don’t, and that’s been an issue for ages. And in practice, a lot of images on the internet are user generated/submitted, and most sites don’t have a culture of users writing alt text for their images. Mastodon does, but even lemmy doesn’t really.
this education thing has been said and said again since what, the 90s? and guess what, people still fall for scams! for the same reasons that an antivirus is a crucial security component for the non-tech enthusiasts crowd, an AI scam detector that runs locally will likely be a crucial tool in the next few years.
TBF, I love my tab groups, and honestly having to come up with and type out a name for each of them is the biggest hurdle. It’s a small thing, but I can imagine myself using tab groups even more because of it.
I, on the other hand, don’t keep many tabs open normally, and the groups I use are of temporary convenience if I’m doing a lot of things at the same time.
I can easily spend a few seconds typing the group name in because I already know what the group is used for. I already have a name in mind, I don’t need the AI to slowly second-guess me.
…and if you don’t know what the group is used for, maybe allowing groups to remain initially unnamed would be a good design choice?
Oh speed is definitely going to be the make-it-or-break it here. I do usually know the name without thinking, but it’s having to type it (and preferably without typos) that’s the effort that would be nice to save.
It feels really stupid, because it’s really not that much effort. But I know myself - I also really like contactless payments, even though it really wasn’t that much effort to insert my card and type in my PIN. Yet it’s a small convenience for something that I do with some regularity. I imagine the same for this feature.
This feels like satire (but I worry it isn’t).
Tab group 1
tab group 2
…Honestly if it prefilled something like that that would already be an improvement, at least to create temporary ones (though in practice, they’re probably never temporary).
I don’t want these features either, but they specifically say up front that the AI runs locally to avoid exactly this disingenuous argument.
I want my browser to render web pages as fast as possible and using as few resources as possible, while complying with W3C standards.
For anything else I might want, there’s extensions.
This AI bullshit is costing me RAM, CPU cycles, and electricity without giving me anything of value in return. It’s malware, plain and simple.
Soon we’ll have every already bloated app running a slightly different local LLM in order to check the AI tickbox.
Can’t wait.
The AI may run locally, but is it keeping all of the interactions local too?
Do we trust anyone who is jamming AI bullshit into their products and services?
I won’t use any of these features, but this comment is pure FUD
Being skeptical due to trends is not FUD.
What about the trend of Firefox being the only alternative entity to the massive public corporations that definitely don’t have your best interests at heart that actually has the resources to develop and maintain a modern browser? Everytime Firefox posts anything you have people running around screaming that the sky is falling, and while they have made some missteps,
I don’t see how local LLM models that you don’t have to use is something to panic about, and I don’t see how throwing the baby out with the bathwater is supposed to make the webbrowser landscape better. In fact, it would be giving all of the cards to Google.
Being skeptical isn’t the same thing as trashing them. Mozilla are not above reproach, and should be questioned thoroughly to ensure that they are being completely clear and honest and not using weasel words to gloss over some common trends with implementations of AI.
Honestly the only reason I even engage is because Mozilla/Firefox are the most respecting of privacy or the big players and I want that to continue.
Being skeptical isn’t the same thing as trashing them. Mozilla are not above reproach, and should be questioned thoroughly
This is true, but it is not what you’re doing when you make comments like the one I originally replied to. Firefox putting local models in the browser for people that want to use models but don’t want to send their data to cloud providers is directly a privacy forward option, and somehow you are twisting that into them selling your data.
Sorry, but that is not reasonable criticism. It is FUD.
Local models doesn’t guarantee that all data stays local. Do you assume that local AI models in Firefox will NOT send any telemetry data as the default setting?
Wouldn’t it be better to know for sure that they will have that either disabled or have telemetry as an opt in?
It runs. That’s enough to not want it, if I don’t want to use it in the first place.
So true - data mining is performed by Firefox’s PPA, not its AI!
Show me where the data is sent back to Mozilla. It’s all open source. I’ll wait.
I don’t need to be a source code expert to understand what Mozilla has done, thankfully. That’s not a technological hurdle the average person should have to overcome. I know more than most people have the privilege to know, and further gatekeeping (any gatekeeping) is unnecessary.
If that was not your intent, or for other people who are genuinely interested:
https://noyb.eu/en/firefox-tracks-you-privacy-preserving-feature
If gatekeeping my comment was your intent, I would be happy to track down the source code as long as you made an extensive effort to get Mozilla to remove the code that collects your data…
So my bad, I didn’t clock the PPA abbreviation being about the experimental adtech bullshit they pulled.
But I feel like my point still stands. Claims that Mozilla is harvesting user data should be (relatively) easily proven by audits of the source code. Disproving things tends to be harder, and I’m not the person making the claim.
I’m not “gatekeeping” shit. I’m saying that bold claims should have facts backing them up, and so far I’ve not been shown anything to back it up.
(Edit: to be clear, the claim that these local AI features would be an increase in user data being harvested)
You appear to have strong feelings about this, so I was hoping you had more than specious claims based entirely off a major gaffe.
I’m not saying that Firefox and Mozilla should get trust by default. I’m saying that if they are doing shit as heinous as what you claimed, there should be evidence that can be pointed to.
Even something as simple as “hey, their prepackaged versions aren’t reproducable by compiling the source code”.
There are enough people who care a lot about this, and the source code is right there. No one should have to speculate on any of what Mozilla is or isn’t doing here as it’s all out in the open.
So they don’t intend on making a profit from it from data gathering, nobody asked for it, and the open source community who would otherwise donate or contributes to Mozilla are so disgusted by the whole thing tgat they are now just holding their noses and waiting for an alternative.
All of this while Google is stepping down as sugar daddy and they need all the help they can get.
Why the hell are they doing this? Is it just a case of moronic leadership and getting stuck in a negative spiral where the whole operation gets stupider and stupider with each new hire?
Well, people were at least asking for translations all the time.
Yeah, I’m honestly happy about local translations, and I was still supporting Mozilla when it was rolled out. There’s just been too much bullshit since.
As long as I can disable it, I don’t care.
I don’t trust AI to catch all the things that interest me on the pages I visit, and I don’t want to waste energy on something I won’t use.
It should be disabled by default, to avoid the huge energy costs associated with running LLM’s.
Yeah but then nobody would turn it on and how can poor them gather and sell your data?!
Just like DuckDuckGo it should be opt in but that’s not gonna happen.
It’s good to watch Mozilla pouring their time, effort, and dwindling funds into the most important features - AI ones!
That AI will do that.
So, which browser now? Please advise.
LibreWolf: every time it’s forced to pick between privacy and convenience it picks privacy. If you like that, it’s the browser for you.
Waterfox: if you just want Firefox with zero ability to send any data to Mozilla, without necessarily “hardening” anti-fingerprinting features, this is that. It’s a downstream fork that removes all telemetry and non-local features (it removed Pocket before Mozilla did).
LibreWolf.
I feel bad for the LibreWolf devs who continue to desperately say that it’s not designed to be a general use browser.
Hmmmm, should it not be recommended then? It’s been my favorite no bullshit Firefox fork for a while now, but I’m open to suggestions.
I mean, I’m not a dev and I haven’t dove deep into the forks in a while. I just remember that they added something to their readme on github during one of the recent “firefox is dead” cycles that said that LibreWolf’s focus of privacy first makes it poorly suited as a general use daily driver.
They were getting swamped with people looking for help because the defaults caused certain sites to not function or something.
Ohhh that makes sense. Thank you!
You seem knowledgeable on browsers, so when you acted ignorant of Firefox collecting your data via PPA, was that intentional or an authentic knowledge gap on your part?
Dude what the fuck?
It’s a fair question but people must remember that there are no good options if they leave Firefox: the Gecko-based (i.e. non-Chromium FOSS) alternatives like LibreWolf rely on the Mozilla team upstream to keep them secure. In a sense they’re freeloading. IMO that is generally not a sustainable path to be on.
Oops. Back to Pale Moon or SeaMonkey for me.
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Its run locally on the device. Did you even read it?
Run locally doesn’t mean it isn’t sending telemetry data about the inputs and outputs.
AI also doesn’t mean that it has to send data to a backend. Your basis for accusing Mozilla of doing something questionable is that they put technologies to use which happen to also be used by data-harvesting companies. This is like saying they’re evil, because they use programming languages or databases. It entirely depends on how these technologies are used.
It would be like saying they want to harvest data because they switched the code base to Chromium, not programming languages in general.
Ok, I disagree.
why would adding a local AI make them more likely to use telemetry data without user consent? it’s not like they couldn’t already have access to your entire browsing history if they wanted to
I am saying that the phrase ‘run locally’ does not guarantee that the data will remain local. If they don’t make telemetry defaulted to off then many people will trust the ‘we respect your privacy’ message and assume the data is staying local without searching out an opt out setting.
I am not saying Firefox will send data if telemetry is turned off. I am saying that adding AI is associated with sneaky ways of collecting data and yes that is a reason to be suspicious about motives.
This is the FUD you were accused of and frankly it’s a valid accusation. You didn’t need to say this. The only purpose it serves is fear mongering
Don’t be suspicious, don’t be suspicious!
If they said that AI related telemetry would not exist or would be off by default I wouldn’t be suspicious. Not directly making that clear and focusing on ‘locally run’ is why I am suspicious. Not presuming guilt, just being wary.
Trust me bro.
