Mozilla's latest quagmire(rubenerd.com) |
Mozilla's latest quagmire(rubenerd.com) |
The author claims to be an "IaaS engineer", surely, he can figure out how to write a firefox plugin, that can do what he wants, and use that to help non-technical users, and if it becomes popular enough will probably effect the change he wishes to see.
Most new "features" are by now covered by an existing setting and/or policy. Yet I recognize a pattern of introducing new "but did you opt out of THIS NEW thing?" or "but did you opt out of VERSION TWO of this previously rejected thing?" setting/policy. It has become unsafe to upgrade to new Firefox releases, because each one will disrespect previous user choice in another unexpected way.
If you are concerned, they do have what is called a 'changelog' that will explain all of the new features and how to switch them off if you like.
In this case, yeah, having a single option to toggle off AI settings makes plenty of sense to curate a settings page for! But it’s probably a prioritization or product problem, not a technical issue.
That is revisionist history. Firefox succeeded because MS was sitting on their hands with IE, and it was stagnating. Firefox didnt do the opposite of what IE - you could argue Mozilla was doing what MS should have been.
It wasnt about "respecting users", or "agency" but simply implemented standards properly.
And that's going to be a hard problem with Chrome because you're up against a browser that is moving very, very, fast.
It was a better browser through and through, maybe because MS slept on IE or maybe not, but in the end it isn't revisionist to say they beat MS's proverbial posterior because the browser was better.
But also, google spent a mountain of money advertising chrome.
not via marketshare. The fact is, only developers (and adjacent) were using firefox. IE, during those days (pre-chrome) was still such a dominant browser that you had to check for IE compatibility.
But today, developers are not checking for firefox compatibility. So, firefox today (and during the firefox heyday) were never truly "beating" IE from a marketshare perspective.
The big thing about firebug was that you could see/edit the DOM, CSS, and at some point Network requests, etc.
There was also the integration with Dreamweaver, Frontpage.
Mozilla didn't "take on" IE. Mozilla reclaimed their lost browser position. IE kicked the proverbial posterior of Netscape which both Netscape and Mozilla struggled to reclaim right up until the release of Firefox.
It wasnt about "respecting users", or "agency" but simply implemented standards properly.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape:
In November 2007, IE had 77.4% of the browser market, Firefox 16.0%, and Netscape 0.6%"On July 15, 2003, Time Warner (formerly AOL Time Warner) disbanded Netscape. Most of the programmers were laid off, and the Netscape logo was removed from the building."
Peak Netscape was 1996. By 2003, they had already handed development off to Mozilla, and Netscape the browser was just a thin veneer over Mozilla's browser.
By 2007, it was just Mozilla with AOL branding and almost all of it's users were people still using AOL in 2007.
The extension ecosystem, tabs, plugins, and notably whatever effort they did behind the scenes to ensure that companies that did streaming video etc. would work with their browser all played out really well.
I think the ultimate problem is that Mozilla's mission of a standards-compliant web with open-source browsers everywhere ultimately did get achieved. The era of "Works with IE6" badges has ended and the top browsers run on open-source engines. Despite our enthusiasm at the time for it, I think the truth is that Firefox was probably just a vehicle for this, much bigger, achievement.
Now that it's been achieved, Mozilla is in the fortunate place where Firefox only needs to exist as a backstop against Chrome sliding into high-proprietary world while providing the utility to Google that they get to say they're not a monopoly on web technologies.
Mozilla's search for a new mission isn't some sign of someone losing their way. It's just what happens to the Hero of Legend after he defeats the Big Bad. There's a post-denouement period. Sam Gamgee gets to go become Mayor of the Shire, which is all very convenient, but a non-profit like Mozilla would much rather find a similar enough mission that they can apply their vast resources to. That involves the same mechanics as product development, and they're facing the same primary thing: repeated failure.
That's just life.
The AI stuff is the perfect example. Are there people who like AI? Certainly. Will they use firefox? Probably not.
At this stage firefox is the anti-establishment choice. That crowd hates AI. Betting on AI might make sense if you are chrome. It doesn't make sense if you are firefox.
The idea that LLM have been successful and useful for significant things is naturally confused with the idea LLMs needed to bolted on to literally anything.
Brendan Eich was the Director of Mozilla. This is the guy who invented Javascript in 10 days, at Netscape, and then co-founded Mozilla, and became the technical lead. He was Chief Architect of Mozilla, then CTO of Mozilla Corporation, then CEO. He made Firefox great. This was when Mozilla was in its heyday, and passed IE in marketshare.
Then he was fired in 2014 because a bunch of people went crazy that he made a $1,000 political donation for a California ballot proposition that had nothing to do with computers.
This sent a signal that Mozilla doesn't reward technical improvements to its software — it rewards following political trends.
All of the bad stuff in Firefox started then.
Brendan was in charge of a company built on LGBT people. For him to turn around and donate to anti-LGBT political causes was not appropriate. The company fairly lost faith in him. How can you work somewhere your boss hates you so badly he campaigns against your basic human rights?
However, Brendan also did not increase his own pay by hundreds of percent while laying off over a quarter of the staff, which is what the executive teams since Brendan have done.
The bad stuff in Firefox started when the C-suite, now lead by an ex-McKinsey CEO, started lining their own pockets instead of running a technology company.
LLM integration: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/ai-chatbot
Would it though?
Which is chromium
It attracted a relatively narrow audience, but that audience was special: active and future founders, CEOs, CTOs, VPs of engineering, blogosphere and YouTube celebrities, etc. Each of these disgruntled users communicated their disappointment to hundreds and thousands of other, less affluent users. Most of them, once in positions of engineering power, now would think twice before relying on something from Google.
Same with Firefox. It may serve a relatively more narrow audience, but it's not necessarily the same kind of audience, on average, which Chrome or Edge or even Safari serves.
Here are instructions on how to disable all of it:
https://github.com/Aetherinox/firefox-telemetry-block
(and no, you can't do it with just a few checkboxes in the prefs, you have to go into the advanced pref editor and look up some stuff.)
I now see there's also a "Create alt texts automatically" for pdfjs. This actually seems one of the more useful AI features I've seen. But I've never noticed it exists as I don't need this accessibility feature. You can disable it in the pdfjs (no about:config needed).
In short, Firefox is not forcing anyone to use AI and ways to disable it are not that obfuscated.
Opting out of AI would be like saying that you don't use JavaScript because you don't like the moral position of the guy who wrote it. That's a reasonable moral position to take (I totally get not wanting to use LLMs for reasons of copyright, art, or even just capability), but a completely unreasonable technical position to take, functionally impossible.
Why does Mozilla not give you a convenient opt out? Because it's hard, low impact, and functionally no-one wants it.
I really don't get folks who defend tech paternalism - where features are pushed on users because "daddy knows best".
You can store your custom preferences in user.js file - Firefox will copy those to prefs.js at startup.
From your link:
The user.js[1] file is optional. If you have one whenever the application is started it will overwrite any settings in prefs.js with the corresponding settings from user.js.
XUL was very good, but then it was no more. And as soon as it was gone, Electron apps appeared. It's a tragedy. Mozilla had everything to be in that place instead, with a better product.
Once that was gone, Firefox became just another browser, doing what any browser does. It's still very good, and my first choice, but damn I miss XUL.
How do you suggest Electron makes money for OpenJS?
You can still make PWAs backed by Firefox:
https://github.com/linuxmint/webapp-manager
This has not made Linux Mint any richer.
What Electron does is project presence. It's not huge, but also not insignificant.
If Mozilla controlled "the thing developers use to make desktop webapps", they would have more presence. I also think their solution was nicer, and developers would have loved it.
Firefox was a thing for developers for a while. And that made it healthy.
I guess everyone would agree that web browsers would come to our mind when we hear "user-agent" in general context. After years of forward and backward evolution of web extensions, AI powered web browsers inevitably will move forward the meaning of the term "user-agent" and deliver the value it actually promises.
Together with the advance of "browser-use" optimized local LLMs, current M4 powered Macbook Air can provide enough juice to aid users' web browsing needs. I believe soon AI hubs installed at homes, or cloud based private AI inference engines will become much more accessible offerings to help with mobile browsers as well. Overall, I think it's ridiculous to criticise Mozilla for introducing optional AI features on Firefox.
I'm genuinely shocked people are driving around in Atlas right now, showing OpenAI how to click buttons and how to login to their bank accounts.
There was one shot however, "Firefox OS" on mobile. Of course they gave up early when they should have been investing in it continuously and plugging that google money away into an endowment instead of leadership salaries. Had they done that they'd at least have a chance now.
Highly recommend everyone check it out. Handily trounces all the tab management extensions I’ve tried over the years on FF and Chrome
Needs to cease to exist at this point. It is part of the cancer.
Out of the five options available, only one is European (the one I am using). What I don't like is how I cannot add my own custom endpoint. What if I run Mistral locally (with Ollama, for example) and want to use that?
Also, I really do think there should be a fat warning about uploading data from browser to a third party. Yes, every bloody time. Not everything the browser shows is publicly available data. There are people who are going to break the law with this tool (ie. using PII with LLM), and the people who are damaged are going to be innocent third parties who didn't opt-out or opt-in anything.
The BS with not being easily able to disable a feature like this is probably to deter, or because 'user studies' showed people don't want to disable it. Well, fuck that. It isn't rocket science to have a checkbox which just deals with these values in about:config.
Set up your preferred self-hosted web interface (OpenWebUI or whatever, I haven't looked into this for a while), point it at ollama, and then configure it in Firefox:
browser.ml.chat.provider = http://localhost:3000/
At home I point this at Kagi Assistant, at work I point it to our internal GenAI platform's chat endpoint.
when the AI tab/sidebar appeared, I just closed it. that's it. and it never appeared again. I didn't need to change any special setting.
maybe there was another dialog or two which asked me to enable AI something which I answered No and dont remember.
this article is written in bad faith, Firefox is not pushing AI at every opportunity like Edge for example
Mozilla love re-enabling stuff you've explicitly turned off a hundred times. Terrible hamburger menus, threaded messages in thunderbird. I've seen it so many times.
I don’t fill my house with tools and products I don’t want and I’m not willing to have them on my computer screen either.
I can understand criticism on the development time that may have been better spent, but less criticism against the existence of something that is fairly easily disabled and not user-hostile in intent.
I disabled the AI stuff immediately on my side (through the regular UI, not about:config settings) and never saw anything AI-related in Firefox afterwards.
It's worrying seeing Firefox getting so much more criticism than all the more user-hostile browsers that end up benefiting from such somewhat unwarranted criticism against the most popular non-hostile browser.
Couldn't have said it better myself. Similarly, current youtube is unusable without element blocking and custom CSS editing. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a way to remove UI elements from Firefox, no?
That said Firefox is pretty good at obeying its own "Recommend me new features" option.
I'm still a happy Firefox & Thunderbird user because ultimately it's still the only one that has at least a modicum of respect for its users, but all the recent AI pushes is making me annoyed with Mozilla because it's just so pointless.
Citation definitely needed. ChatGPT has almost a billion users.
I do agree with the main point that this should be easy to turn off, but let's not pretend that everyone hates AI as much as the average HN nerd.
Also, you could argue that Firefox's only remaining users are the average HN nerd and therefore it shouldn't pursue AI, but that's exactly the problem.
https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2025/09/17/ai-in-america...
For example, someone getting a google search result containing an AI response is technically interacting with AI but not necessarily making use of its response or even wanting to see it in the first place. Or perhaps someone suspects their insurance premiums were decided by AI (whether that's true or not). Or customer service that requires you go through a chat bot before you get real service.
However, realistically Firefox is a niche browser now and will stay so. So niche that appealing to the minority becomes a valid strategy again.
If Mozilla was not busy "offering" (renamed the no-thank-you setting once again) so many "experiences" they could be doing much of the same stuff they did back in the day.
Google released Chrome with a massive advertising campaign, reaching even to television. They put ads for Chrome on the world's biggest web properties. It was packaged in installers. Not to say it wasn't a good browser - but it wasn't obviously better than Firefox. This marketing campaign bought them a ton of marketshare.
Mozilla's response, instead of sticking by Mozilla evangelists, nearly all of whom were power users, was to decide that the browser was too complicated for its users. It needed to be more like Chrome. It needed to be the browser for the proverbial grandma. So they axed features (like Panorama), configurability, and extensibility, alienating everyone who really cared. Only they didn't have the marketing heft of Google, so they didn't get Grandma, either.
Ever since then they've been panicking and grasping at straws and shoving in shovelware like Pocket in obviously vain attempts to regain what they had. And they never will, until they make people like you and me LOVE Firefox again.
I've been saying for over a decade that Mozilla decided to abandon their core demographic - power users, instead going after people who "really like chrome, but think that it’s just too fast and doesn’t use enough memory".
I always questioned how big that demographic was. Looking at a chart of Firefox's market share would seem to indicate that I might have been on to something.
But Mozilla just keep doubling down on trash. They're not actually interested in hearing what people want. People like me tried to tell them before we abandoned Firefox. But they weren't interested in listening. It's been this way for 10 years or more now.
I've long been of the opinion that the best thing for Mozilla would be for it to die, so that some other FOSS group (maybe the FSF, or debian, someone like that) could take its place with a firefox fork. And maybe even start actually improving the software again.
Ah, but Chrome was obviously better than Firefox.
When Chrome was released, the advertising I recall focused on one killer feature that Firefox didn't get for many years after that: Speed.
Chrome's JIT JavaScript was so much faster than everyone else's interpreted JavaScript that you could run a materially different kind of software in the browser. It was like the difference between a slow interpreted language and a fast compiled one. Chrome's rendering was also fast.
There was even a cartoon explaining how the new JavaScript engine worked.
Chrome felt like the next generation of browser.
I say this as someone who remained a fan and user of Firefox throughout. I stuck with Firefox through its relatively slow years.
Firefox caught up, but it took years. It got its own JIT JavaScript, but there were a few years after that where Firefox's rendering was relatively slow by the new standards. However, Firefox has excellent performance all round by now.
I was disappointed when Chrome came out that JIT JavaScript could even be a marketable feature and wasn't already the default in the best open source browsers, because it seemed like such an obvious thing to do for many years prior, and not particularly difficult. I guess market forces resulted in nobody deciding to do it in Firefox, or any other open source browser, until competition made it a necessity. I was quite surprised, because Firefox seemed like the product of passionate technology nerds, and performance JITs are very fun and satisfying things to make, with visible results.
What are the sorts of features you think they should consider adding?
Sometimes, there's a butler in there who seems absentminded and can only remember things up to a few thousand words. He once stacked all your dishes in the refrigerator and dumped all the food into the sink.
Other times, there's a demon in there who seems hellbent on destroying the innocence of your children and ripping apart your family. He once gave your children snuff films and instructions to build a bomb.
Just don't open the door if you don't like it... Some people are impossible to please.
> I've added a room to your home.
They’ve added a room to their home. That they let you live in, for free.
I’ll also mention that the room right next to it had all the contents you claim to take issue with.
The problem here is that you shouldn’t leave children home alone, not that it has two potentially dangerous rooms. There’s several more such rooms in your house, and you wouldn’t let them cook or use your power tools by themselves either (not until they prove they can be trusted with that anyway).
I mean... yeah? Do you use every feature of every piece of software you have installed?
- Icon bar: Back, Forward, Reload, Bookmark
- Save Page As...
- Select All
- Take Screenshot
- Ask An AI Chatbot
- View Page Source
- Inspect Accessibility Properties
- Inspect
I would bet that 99% of Firefox users have never ever even once clicked on any of the options besides the first one (icon bar).
There's not really though. The most annoying thing was when highlighting text a weird icon showed up. I clicked on it, and one of the most prominent buttons on it was "turn this shit off". So I did.
This will probably be a bit useful for me when I want to copy web pages into Gemini for data extraction.
This include things like using AI to assist with rendering/processing of PDF, looking at the flags.
As a Firefox users, this seems very troubling to me.
Firefox is downloading a local model and using that to add alt-text to images inside PDFs which is great for accessibility. You can see all models that Firefox downloaded at about:addons. Every AI feature besides the (optional) sidebar (obviously) are local modals that run completely on-device.
As it is I have switched to Zen as it appears more clearly user-aligned and works better for me as a result of their improvements and UI tweaks.
All the AI toolbar really does is open http://ai.url.com/some-query?prompt=${formattedPrompt} and display it next to the web page you have open.
The formatted prompt is something like "The user is on the page 'Stories about Cats'. The user wants you to summarize the following text: <text you have selected goes here>". You can configure your own prompt in about:config if you want, there are a bunch of examples here: https://github.com/mozilla-l10n/firefox-l10n/blob/main/en-GB...
There are prompts optimised for specific AI providers but the generic ones should work with any provider your choose.
When the web page opens at that URL, you're either going to get redirected to login and then redirected back, or the AI frontend will start executing the prompt.
And sandboxing. Browser sandboxing was rare due to the memory required, and Chrome released right around when it started being practical to run tabs in separate processes.
Back in the naughties, testing a web page with Netscape seemed miraculous because if it rendered correctly with a PC, chances are it would with a Mac, and with Linux.
Microsoft didn't care about standards. If a page rendered incorrectly in other browsers than Windows MSIE they didn't care (even if it was Mac MSIE).
But that difference wasn't enough to save Netscape because, as a web browser, Netscape was a bloated mess.
When Firefox came along, it was popular with web designers, for the same reasons as Netscape was - but its streamlined design catered to regular users.
"In 2015, before we released to users, the Brave browser actually was built on the Gecko engine. However, early on our engineering team realized that Gecko lacked important product features, led to more Web compatibility (webcompat) issues, and overall had poorer performance." (1)
Completely reasonable things to do.
How else would we recoup our investment in the hugely expensive, unpredictable butler/demon spawning machines?
>The problem here is that you shouldn’t leave children home alone, not that it has two potentially dangerous rooms. There’s several more such rooms in your house, and you wouldn’t let them cook or use your power tools by themselves either (not until they prove they can be trusted with that anyway).
Depends on age, and the children in question. Also, if I have power tools it's because I chose them. And neither amnesiac butlers nor stochastic demons are necessary to not starve in the way that cooking food is, so the assessments of risk and basic good sense are not comparable.
They don't let you stay there for free. They let you stay there because the world's biggest advertising company pays them to.
I've been using since 3 and I don't think it's a miracle browser or anything. Anecdotally I've observed plenty of folks try FF for bit in the wake of Manifest v3 then switch to Edge/Brave, and it's not because of a lack of AI. They need this sidebar but it's not the only reason they're losing.
That's not an entirely fair measure though, considering Microsoft lost an antitrust case that was brought because they were unfairly leveraging their monopoly in operating systems to give them an advantage in browser adoption. The DOJ threatened to break up Microsoft over it, and eventually only stopped when Microsoft added an option for users to pick a difference default browser over IE.
By that time IE's dominance was beyond Mozilla's reach and it was only when Google leveraged their monopoly in online advertising that a real alternative option for users became viable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....
20% of adult Americans had broadband at home by early 2004 - https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2006/05/28/part-1-broad... - which is not a majority but had heavy overlap with the group that wasn't just settling for IE6. Similar with Facebook - it was driven by the mostly-young tech-forward early-adopter crowd that either had broadband at home or was at university with fast internet.
No, having broadband had nothing to do with desire back then. It was entirely based on availability and how quickly your local telecom/cable monopoly deployed it, being so bad that the government had to step in many times to motivate them. Everyone I knew purchased broadband (some cloning cable modem to get it for free) the day it was available. For broadband users, the difference in browser size was entirely negligible.
Facebook required that you were at a universities to register. Its not a reasonable thing to compare to web browser use.
MS presented the choice for a browser from 2009->2011.
IDK that MS has ever actually fixed the situation since their last fine in 2013.
IIRC, firefox really started taking off around Firefox 3, which was first released in 2006. Looks like they officially beat IE in 2010. That does seem to line up with MS's implementation of the browser choice screen.
The case was specifically about IE integration in Windows, so it definitely had an impact.
I think this is probably what the comment was thinking about.
Maybe it’s because I’m a power user and they tend to cater to power users, idk — that’s definitely what the comment above yours is hinting at.
But at this point, I think we can all agree that whatever Mozilla is doing now isn’t working… so maybe power users are worth a shot again?
What stops them from contributing improvements now?
For instance, one improvement that a more user-respecting group might contribute is ripping out all the AI slop. But as pointed out in the article, Mozilla like the AI slop and wouldn't accept those changes.
If Mozilla was to disappear, orgs like those I mentioned would likely see a more urgent need to take over in order to break the chrom(ium) monoculture.
...had functionally nondeterminstic, unpredictable results in response to how I use them.
...written in long-form English text with confidence and no guarantee of factual accuracy.
...coaxed children into codependent pseudo-relationships with ML models or encouraged suicide.
AI isn't a new feature; it's a new category. And the people who don't understand why some of us don't want it everywhere don't understand that distinction, or else are financially motivated to ignore it and gaslight everyone about the categorical boundaries crossed.
I use LLMs and diffusion style image generators... Where I understand the model I've chosen, can control it locally, and have enough tacit knowledge to double check the outputs before I go ahead with something. I don't trust Mozilla to ensure any of those things anymore. They've long since burned that credibility.
about:config
user_pref("browser.ml.enable", false);
user_pref("browser.ml.chat.enabled", false);
user_pref("browser.ml.chat.sidebar", false);
user_pref("browser.ml.chat.menu", false);
user_pref("browser.ml.chat.page", false);
user_pref("extensions.ml.enabled", false);
user_pref("browser.ml.linkPreview.enabled", false);
user_pref("browser.tabs.groups.smart.enabled", false);
user_pref("browser.tabs.groups.smart.userEnabled", false);
user_pref("pdfjs.enableAltTextModelDownload", false);
user_pref("pdfjs.enableGuessAltText", false);This is such a common fallacy that I think it should be given a name. When you believe that the people who disagree with you must either be ignorant or malicious. Leaves no room for honest disagreement or discussion. Maybe the "dumb-or-evil" fallacy?
But, in life, when you meet enough AI evangelists, what was formally a logical fallacy becomes informally a useful, even necessary heuristic.
I think this factor isn't given enough weight in the shift to Firefox.
At that time, the largest pain point in web development was (by a long shot) browser compatibility.
When developers fell in love with Firefox, they started pushing business requirements away from IE and towards the browser that didn't feel like it was their enemy. Alongside with this there was also massive shift to start taking web standards seriously, which is another area where IE dropped the ball spectacularly
It took a few years, but eventually pointy haired managers got sick of our whining and gave in.
Once Chrome came along with their devtools, improvements quickly escalated between the 2 before Google eventually won out.
I can't recall the exact point in time when my use of Firefox fell off, but it was probably due to the account integrations with Chrome.
Not to mention preferential treatment like the Youtube anti-IE campaign [1]
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/4/18529381/google-youtube-in...
Chrome was a lot faster and a lot lighter (in the beginning)
That money was also used to increase the user base via drive-by installations, e. g. while installing Adobe Reader you had to deselect the Chrome installation, otherwise you'd find yourself with a new standard browser afterwards.
Neither KDE nor OS X ever shipped their built-in Web Inspector prior to the appearance of Firebug in 2006, and by that point WebKit and Safari were already in full swing. The very first iteration[1] of Web Inspector appeared around the same time as Firebug and was an original contribution by Apple; it wasn't borrowed from KHTML.
1. <https://web.archive.org/web/20070621162114/https://webkit.or...>
Having lived through the browser wars, this is my new favorite fact about the whole thing.
It really was a very different time, and you couldn't have convinced me back then that I would miss it one day.
True, it's a form of false dichotomy, but I think this specific instance is particularly interesting in that it allows the holder to dehumanise their opponent to an extent, and justify lack of discussion. It's also an incredibly common conclusion in politics after people gain a somewhat superficial understanding of both sides. I wonder if it might play a key role in social polarization.
For me the strongest arguments are the ones that can argue the opponent's side as effectively as the opponent, and then show why it's weak. And that feels entirely incompatible with a dumb-or-evil argument.
That's a wild take and a wild leap. For my own part, I see the failure or refusal to comprehend someone else's preferences, values, or boundaries as itself a profoundly human quality, even if it's a quality I don't love, rather than one which would cause me to see someone as less human.
I will admit that, when there's enough nonsense money being thrown after a vaunted object, sensible discussion can feel pointless. Prudence goes deaf amid the din of hype.
And yes, steelmanning can be highly persuasive, but not when premises are radically different enough between two parties. It's really a more productive tool to improve your model of someone else.