The saga continues! A Firefox developer has taken to social media to note there will be some sort of "kill switch" to completely remove AI features in the wake of the news about more AI features coming along with the new CEO.

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[–] 10 points 10 months ago

Shouldn't AI features be added as extensions and not in the main browser? This was the reason they killed live bookmarks, and I have to believe those were way easier to have as a feature. Shoehorning AI into the browser seems like it's going to add a ton of bloat and support effort just to have "Now with AI!" on the tin.

I mean, ya as long as they keep to the "All AI features will also be opt-in." promise, fine whatever. But, this seems like such an odd choice.

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  • [–] 13 points 10 months ago (2 children)

    *until we silently remove it once the outrage dies down

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  • [–] 9 points 10 months ago

    But I do ask that you don't have the opposite of faith. Like, try not to be determined that we're going to do the wrong thing here.

    Well, they've been consistently doing the wrong thing for a long time now, so it's not like it's baseless.

    I do feel bad for some of the developers in Firefox. I imagine lots of them, maybe even the one who answered here, joined because they believed in Mozilla or Firefox. And they might be trying to steer things back, but there's only so much they can do against the direction of the company. And the company has been trying so hard to lose loyal Firefox users...

    I hope we can (re)gain your trust here.

    I'm afraid it's too late for that. The only way I can imagine that happening is Firefox gets moved away from the Mozilla Corporation into a new thing that just focuses on making a decent privacy oriented web browser.

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  • [–] 5 points 10 months ago (3 children)

    It sounds like they're trying to be as transparent as possible while leaving lots of flexibility and freedom for users. I honestly don't understand all the butthurt and hate.

    You get a whole browser for Free (in both senses of the word) FFS. All this contempt is unjustified.

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  • [+] -9 points 10 months ago (2 children)

    The butthurt and hate over AI sounds like a new thing but I think it's basically your 2001: A space odyssey monolith monkey scene ⬛️🐒. It's how we've reacted to every big sudden advance in technology that we weren't quite ready for. There's going to be a whole lot more leaping and screaming and throwing things. There will probably be some big fights over it and then some of the more sensible monkeys will just settle down, decide to just use the useful things and ignore the dumb things. There's probably something much much worse than AI coming up anyway. Guarantee that there will be some people 30 years from now, trying to survive whatever it is and reminiscing about how we thought it was AI that was going to destroy us.

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  • [–] 9 points 10 months ago

    This isn't about AI as a whole. The hatred is over AI being crammed in to a browser that was originally, proudly about privacy and user control. This move towards integrating AI has also had them removing the privacy angle, and admitting they're now selling user data.

    AI is a tool that can be great in the right place. Firefox is not the right place for many people, myself included, and I work in the field of AI.

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  • [–] 3 points 10 months ago

    I think the market will turn out to be the real kill-switch, possibly for Mozilla ss a whole.

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago

    I don't want a kill switch, I want an enable switch (which I will never use).

    Opt-in, not opt-out.

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  • 21 comments in c/gaming@lemmy.zip view that post
    [–] 24 points 10 months ago

    If you're confident in the value of the AI, make the feature Opt In.

    Let the strength of your product speak for itself.

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  • [–] 20 points 10 months ago

    Im already using the "ai killswitch" by using a different browser.

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  • [–] 32 points 10 months ago

    Didn't they say similar shit about tracking, too? Then they backtracked that with later updates?

    It sucks to see, but I think Firefox is going down the shitter.

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  • [–] 8 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    If they could develop F-AI-refox as a separate browser I could be cool with Firefox.

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    [–] 16 points 10 months ago

    Yeah I'm not touching Firefox. Will stick to Librewolf.

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  • [–] 17 points 10 months ago

    Get fucked, Mozilla. Your credibility won't come back.

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  • [–] 4 points 10 months ago

    Like, in general or just that specific browser instance?

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  • [–] 4 points 10 months ago

    God damn better be

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  • [–] 6 points 10 months ago (3 children)

    'oh, don't worry; you can turn it off!'

    That's what they all say. Fucking rapists.

    Fuck you, it's not going on my system. It's sure as hell NEVER being installed in something like a web browser that has access to my password vault when it's unlocked.

    I might(unlikely) have considered it, if it was op-in. But just the fact that it's opt-out means I've got to make a point of turning it off, AND regularly verifying it's stayed off because it will "accidentally" turn on again.

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  • [–] 5 points 10 months ago* (2 children)

    ....

    MAYBE don't trivialize rape by comparing a software you don't like to... rape.

    This captain crunch is genociding my mouth!

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  • [–] 4 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    Perhaps Mozilla doesn't quite fit into this category, as their software is far more optional to the average user than say, Microsoft Edge or Copilot being forcibly installed on every Windows PC; but more and more companies are forcing features on users that don't want them, after being told over and over again:

    NO, WE DON'T WANT THIS SHIT

    Refusing to take 'no' for an answer, and instead doing whatever you want to people IS a rapists mentally and I will not apologize for pointing it out.

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  • [+] 11 points 10 months ago (5 children)
  • [–] 3 points 10 months ago (4 children)

    To make it worse, after a recent update, it's been constantly crashing on my laptop running Linux and the HDD on my desktop still running win10. I can't go more than a minute before it freezes up and crashes. Good thing it's not my main browser anymore.

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago (1 child)

    Sounds like your HDD needs replaced to a fancy SSD

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago

    I don't think it's that since my laptop is a model that only comes with an internal SSD and was having that issue until Firefox decided to refresh itself. If anything, either a new motherboard and/or graphics thingamajig would be in order considering my desktop struggled hard to get through the year review thing in the win10 client without crashing or needing to refresh.

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  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago

    Id prefer an on switch

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  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago

    Mozilla using rapey techbro language.

    Mozilla: "You said you didn't want it, but I know you really do. So shut up and enjoy it. If there is issues you can just kill it and it won't come back."

    So done with their bullshit. After 25 years they have lost my trust.

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