Is this guy for real?

Mozilla says that key points are processed locally to protect your privacy in the release notes, but says nothing about leaking your privacy in showing the link preview (and enabling it by default).

As opposed to the case where you don't have a link preview, and you click on a website to see what it contains, and they get your IP. The author seems to think Mozilla should have protected our privacy by having someone act as the proxy for the request. Because involving a thirds party that receives all these requests and does work for us for free is absolutely how we protect our privacy.

The user might also have mobility impairments that makes a fast click harder, resulting in a longer hold time.

Yes, a feature clearly designed for pushing onto that juicy "people with mobility impairments" userbase.

I don't like the direction Firefox seems to be headed in, but damn people really enjoy getting outraged over everything they do. Around here they get ten times more shit than any other comparable project.

Zen figured out link previews without using AI and the solution is really as simple as it gets. Maybe stop trying to manufacture problems for AI to solve?

I'm really grateful for the introduction to deceptive patterns here.
I was not aware of it, and I think it's important to have language that can describe specifically how tech companies are trying to coerce people.

Why won't these pesky peasants shut up and give us our data?

Who could have known that the people who voluntarily use a tiny niche browser mostly for privacy/idealism reasons wouldn't wany just another AI browser?

Honestly, how out of touch with their user base can they be?

If I want a good browser that works with every website, I'd take something chromium based. If I want an AI browser, I'd take one of the many chromium based ones.

Not this seems overly reachy Firefox hate. This feature pushed months ago didn’t it? I managed to turn it off without even having to dig, and I know this because I don’t even remember how to do it.

Firefox defaulting a link preview gesture to on, but making the AI off by default, isn’t a dark pattern. Every new update doesn’t turn this back on if previously disabled. And trying to twist this into “Firefox is using dark patterns to trick you into using AI” just feels like an attempt to shove “Firefox bad” down people’s throats.

I find the amount of Firefox hate Lemmy seems to display so odd, especially when literally every other browser out there, from chrome to brave to opera, and everything in between, barely ever gets even a mention.

This stinks of negative advertising, and I’m getting so fucking tired of it.

Its open source right?

We can just make a “dumbfox” browser without ai

I've switched to IronFox on mobile and Waterfox on computers, personally.

I have been specifically thinking about how big tech keeps manufacturing consent for AI, having it on by default and counting accidental undesired uses for "95% of people adopted our AI features!" and all this… glad to see an article that has a title reflecting my thoughts. Looking up manufactured consent for AI usually brings things on how people can use AI to manufacture consent or change narratives, not on "consent to AI" being manufactured itself.

Wait, is "dark pattern" taboo now?

For me, as long as Debian still packages it and disables these features, I’ll be fine, but LibreWolf looks more and more tempting these days, and having tried it a bit, I can live with the minor annoyances.

I honestly think link previews are a good idea and can be very beneficial for users if done right. It would be good to know if a site could generally be trusted before I click a link. It‘s just hard to do that right, though.