given what “edge” means among the teens these days, microsoft really should go back to the old browser name…microsoft goon
FYI if you want to edit the Firefox policies directly and save it in /etc/firefox/policies/policies.json, this is the file they are using
"policies": { "DisableFirefoxStudies": true, "DisableTelemetry": true, "DontCheckDefaultBrowser": true, "FirefoxHome": { "SponsoredStories": false, "SponsoredTopSites": false, "Stories": false }, "GenerativeAI": { "Enabled": false }, "SearchEngines": { "Remove": [ "Perplexity" ] } } }`This shows how unhinged the whole recent hate on Firefox is. Turning off GenAI is literally one single setting AND Mozilla is doing things infinitely better than others (e.g. the translation feature is completely local, and having a chatbot in the sidebar is opt-in)
I get a lot of hate for it but some AI inclusions are genuinely good.
Firefox’s (local, FOSS) AI translation is infinitely better than scraping all the info and sending it to Google Translate servers, and nobody will convince me otherwise.
The screen reader improvements that use AI are good as well. Has anybody here used screen readers for web pages? They are awful. It’s good that someone is willing to improve them. My sister is blind so this matters a lot to me.
The (locally generated) AI assisted link previews aren’t for me as I imagine they’re unnecessarily taxing on older PCs, but they’re not exactly an evil inclusion. I can see it being a useful feature.
I’m not a fan of the LLM sidebar, but it’s opt-in and you can at least choose open models or even host your own. Plus there’s the unfortunate truth that many people that Firefox is trying to win over (“normies”) now expect features like that.
The hate is so overblown. Everyone is so negative and absolutist about everything all of the time. It’s exhausting.
This shows how unhinged the whole recent hate on Firefox is. Turning off GenAI is literally one single setting
We heard of that “kill switch” way, way after the general outrage. Also, other software and services have an “AI killswitch” that conveniently fails to work from time to time, and is fixed only when people notice it.
It’s not unhinged to point finger at someone doing something that, from experience, as always turned bad. Also, if you think the hate (I use your word, I’d say distrust) for Firefox is only related to the recent “AI” push, you’re severely misinformed.
I literally got banned from the “awfulsystems” Lemmy instance for suggesting that Firefox isn’t horrible. No exaggeration, there was nothing else to my comment than a polite suggestion that Firefox is pretty good actually.
If that ban isn’t driven by hate, I don’t want to see how real hate looks like.
I switched to Watefox myself. It is comfy and no AI.
Same
Shopping features: coupon codes
This feature doesn’t seem like the others.
If you’re familiar with the controversy around the Honey coupon addon, there are a lot of parallels in terms of privacy, ethics etc.
Would anyone know if this would work for all Firefox derivatives as well? Zen browser in my case. Also would it work for flatpak installations as well?
Or just use Waterfox.
I learned how to turn off the AI search mode and chrome immediately logged me out and pretended not to know my device. C’mon bro, just give it up already, we do t want your shitty product shoved down our throats. Waterfox it is, and they easily let me transfer all my bookmarks and passwords.
