Barring integration with a locally run LLM, AI doesn't make sense for the Tor security posture - you don't want to be routing content to unintended/insecure third parties, period.
I do not want nor need AI in every single aspect of my life. I mean, I've seen AI hygiene products out there. How does that even work? Don't answer that ... I know it's a marketing scheme, akin to the "HD" craze of five to 10 years ago.
The last thing any of these masters of the universe will do is leverage AI to make everyone's life better.
HD as far as I ever saw it used generally referred to 720p and soon after 1080p. Which is a pretty objective, non-marketing definition. And the timeframe of 2015-2020 seems way off. 1080p was pretty standard by like 2010. YouTube started streaming 4K in 2010.
Mozilla needs to bring in the Bobs from Office Space: "What is it you say you do here?"
Just because a modal window exists doesn't mean it's bad for accessibility.
Unless it's a real emergency or the contents don't make sense until you do something, every modal window is an accessibility problem.
It doesn't sound like that's PaulHoule's motivation anyway — he knows that these tickets are not going to be fixed, just closed — the point is to "pour just a little bit of sand in the gears".
I generally approve of subversive actions which are naturally damaging if and exactly if the accusation they are based on is true.
That is, the logic is something like "well, either it gets fixed, in which case it's a victory for good, or they're hypocrites who don't really care, in which case 1. it wastes their time and 2. they deserve to have their time wasted."
Is the point to target Mozilla, or to actually make a difference in accessibility?
And my whole point is that a strategy can have multiple effects. As I understand it:
- Firefox care about usability => the issues get fixed or at least considered.
- Firefox don't care about usability => sand in the gears.
So it's a hybrid strategy whose purpose depends on the situation.
But reporting real problems because you are annoyed that problems keep appearing and don't get fixed doesn't look like a societal hurting behavior to me. It does look like personally hurting, but antagonizing the author because of this is a real societal hurting behavior.
On the opposite side, I'm also unreasonable frustrated when those modals appear and I cannot close it by clicking outside of it.
End results? Modals are horrible in most situations, especially when you want people to actually ingest some information.
Toasts in Windows are a good example -- often I am trying to use the tray but a toast pops up and I have to wait for the toast to clear or a toast pops up that makes me use the tray icons that it covers up if I want to deal with the situation. Of course on Windows there is the problem that clicking on a toast doesn't seem to ever do anything (like take you to the app that made the toast) and there is not a good mechanism to see the toast once it's past, etc.
In the case of Firefox I was particularly annoyed by little panels that floated above bookmark items on the chrome at the top of the page because, I dunno, there is something new I can do with my bookmarks, I guess. What I do know is that I wanted to click on something that was at the top of the web page and that stupid panel was in the way -- it wouldn't have stopped me from clicking on something else, but it's predictable that you're going to load a web page and frequently click on a link on a navbar at the very top.
A human being with some empathy might realize that you're initially in a state where you're not receptive to a message and later realize you are.
If I got a popup advertising a new feature after I completed a task I'd be a lot more receptive to it, particularly in that I'd be feeling the glow of having completed a task, being satisfied with the product, and not feeling so pressured, having some headspace to learn about a new feature.
As it stands, without any example, I for one have no idea what is being talked about, where these popups in FF are, how they affect accessibility.
Do I dislike modals that cover the entire window, yes, absolutely, but I have never encountered such in FF as a browser.
If only Mozilla felt the same about wasting people's time. We wouldn't be having this discussion.
You can file the ticket claiming that the shiny new promoted thing is actually an antifeature and that you hate the popup. You can then hope that the PM or exec who is currently receiving adulations or making speeches in the hope of a bonus or promotion after the rollout gets assigned the ticket, rather than some lowly volunteer. Then, the next time they get asked to make something, they'll think "wait, maybe I shouldn't advertise this new thing by forcing a popup on every Firefox user?" If that happens often enough to become part of the shared zeitgeist at the organization, they may be able to enact a Mozilla-wide policy against such popups and stop building antifeatures. Good luck, I hope it works for you.
Or you can throw sand in the works. When the accessibility department complains that people keep filing tickets and wasting their time whenever a new feature includes a popup, that component of the organization can push back
Every time I inadvertently find myself at a gas station with those horrific advertisement kiosks installed at the pumps, I either look around for a nearby station that doesn't have ads playing, or I stab the "Help" button to page the cashier. I am well aware that the minimum wage employee stocking the shelves and helping people prepay does not have the phone number of the GSTV producers or the executive decision makers at ExxonMobil or whoever, and I have no animus against that person - I'm infallibly polite with the individual. But I ask them to keep the line open to mute the ads, and they usually do. My only hope for eliminating those ads is either shopping at different gas stations - but how are they ever going to distinguish that microscopic boycott from the noise - or hoping that this communication filters up through the organization.
I'm one of those web developers who still uses Firefox as my daily driver which means the products I work on work on Firefox. Maybe twice a year a tester uses Chrome and turns up something that's not quite right.
Developers like me are a major reason why Firefox is still a viable web browser and there is someone like me in most organizations. If it wasn't for people like us more and more web pages would work in Chrome only and you just couldn't do things with Firefox. Collectively we probably contribute as much to the success of Firefox than all the people who actually check in changes to the source code but we are not treated accordingly. If they piss all of us off Firefox will become a non-viable web browser.
So far as accessibility I am doing a round of accessibility on my site and found things have gotten way worse for multiple reasons. I used to use NVDA + Firefox but since upgrading to Win 11 NVDA is completely broken for me and I have to pull the power plug on my computer to shut down NVDA.
Narrator + Edge basically works, but Narrator + Firefox is completely spastic. I might have a navigation bar with elements like
-- Choice 1
-- Choice 2
-- Choice 3
in a <nav> and it might read something like "Choice Landmark 1 Navigation Navigation Landmark Choice 2 Landmark Choice Navigation 3 Landmark" where using any ARIA role comes across as website vandalism because it makes Narrator + Firefox blurt out "Landmark" and "Group" and similar words randomly when it is reading stuff.
When something is that broken it doesn't seem worth even putting a ticket it for it.
My reading was "letting them know doing bad choices will not quitely be accepted".
But I may ofcourse read something into it that wasn't meant.
Choices have consequences, and user-hostile choices should have developer-hostile consequences.
I am not seeking out AI features so I don't add them to my browser. Mozilla and google and everyone it seems now is forcing it everywhere down our throats. If a small grain of sand reflects any of the same frustration, I say good. Wish I could do more.
Been a hot minute since I last installed FF from scratch so maybe missing something, but the only popup I could remember in more recent releases was one showcasing Firefox View, which only appeared after setup. And of course the "Change to Default" message every browser shows after first opening, including the ability to never show that again. Since then, nothing.
Using a healthy mix of Chrome, Firefox and Safari depending on device and task and while I have niggles with all three, not aware of this on any, but maybe I am blind on this front.
But it used to be that browser dialogues would start from the chrome, thus being impossible for webpages to mimic.
Bitch at Mozilla, sure, but don't stop using it.
Why? They're actively hostile to me as a user and nor catering to my needs and desires.
>Google does much worse things and is effectively a monopolist
Monopolies are the government's job to tackle so talk to your representative about Google, but leave suers alone to use what they like. When cars polluted we had the government force them to lower emission, not shamed users for buying cars.
>Bitch at Mozilla, sure, but don't stop using it.
How is bitching more effective tool than not using a product I dislike? Not using their product is my only way of protest as that shows in their statistics and analytics while they can and do ignore bitching.
Mozilla is a major corporation not a 15 year old with cancer sewing Knick-Knacks for donations in his bedroom, so it will only improve if the user base goes elsewhere, otherwise if people keep using it out of spite, they have no reason to ever improve.
And yeah, despite your protestations to the contrary, not wanting one company to have a browser monopoly really is a legitimate reason to support alternatives. In fact it's one of the best reasons. That's the problem with ridicule detached from reasons, you're going to look down like Wile E. Coyote and see there's no ground under you.
I'd love for real conversation about, say, keeping Servo, Web Assembly, the fallacy of "privacy preserving ads", how it would be nice to have a Firefox OS now with Android forcing "verified developers", about working with EFF to keep open standards and privacy at the center of the web. There's a rich conversation to be had about the role of Mozilla in the future of the internet, but incredulity and vague generalizations should be left back in the writer's room at Warner Bros.
What is a "real" conversation? And what do those conversations help with here? Do you think Mozilla listens or cares about your conversations when they have all those billions coming from Google and can just sit and do nothing?
>how it would be nice to have a Firefox OS now with Android forcing "verified developers"
A lot of things would be nice, like ending world poverty and wars, but I'm being pragmatic and realistic instead of dreaming about things that won't realistically happen since in our world high level changes only happen, if big money or politics get involved.
>There's a rich conversation to be had about the role of Mozilla in the future of the internet
Conversations that would be a waste of time since Mozilla won't act based on our conversations. HN is full of such conversations. I'm being pragmatic, not entertaining some shallow philosophies of "wouldn't it be nice if" that don't lead anywhere since if 'ifs' were cookies I'd be fat.
Moreover they've revised their Terms of Use following criticism, added a rollback option for extensions to previously approved versions in response to requests, wound down Pocket and Fakespot in response to feedback about these being outside of their core mission, implemented visual search in response to community requests, made it easier to switch between different profiles, brought back night mode on iOS after having removed it because the community asked for it, changed the design of the iOS toolbar to get rid of the share button, centralized developer support tools in an all-in-one add on hub. And offered extensive explanations when choosing not to implement or maintain features (e.g. Live Bookmark took).
The trouble with the real work of responding to requests is it's often granular and unsexy, even when examples abound, and it's easy to not know what they're really doing and reach for the pitchfork.
A good place to start is this explainer on all the community feedback they've been taking in: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/about-mozilla-connect/
If you want to boycott Mozilla, cool, stop using it and go to Ladybird or at least Waterfox. But if your solution to "this thing is hostile to me" is "so I'll switch to this other thing that is more hostile to me" and you don't see the flaw in that logic, I don't know how to explain it to you...
Mozilla get >80% of its revenue from Google, by making Google Search as default search engine on Firefox.
While Mozilla pretends to be a non-profit, its CEO makes millions of dollars annually.
Mitchell Baker: Stepped down as CEO of Mozilla in February 2024. Her salary for 2023 was reported to be $6.9 million. Laura Chambers: Became interim CEO of Mozilla in February 2024. Mozilla has not disclosed her salary for 2024 yet.
As of October 2025, the average annual salary for employees at Mozilla in the United States is ~$115k.
Not bad for a "non-profit", eh?
Yup, Mozilla and Firefox are surviving (nay, thriving) due to Google.
But Google's hand on the Mozilla tiller, is merely the top of the proverbial iceberg. Google has a monopoly on the browser market, encouraged by Apple Safari slipping down to <14% market share amongst the leading browsers.
Google's Chrome (>71% market share) and the other Chromium forks (>9% market share: Edge ~4.5%, Samsung Internet Browser ~2%, Brave/Vivaldi/etc. ~1%) dominate the browser market. Opera (~1.75% market share) is not a Chromium fork, but it is based on Chromium Project.
through many standards today are unilaterally pushed by Google, and standardized by a committed mostly influenced by Google and often only implemented by Google until there is enough pressure for Safari to maybe implement it way later....
and while in the past the standards where mostly pushing for a open, compatible, powerful web priorities seem to have shifted to focus more on pushing Google (Ad,App Focused) then Chrome interests
and it's not uncommon that standards aren't made in a generic simple easy to implement for anyone way but in a "that works well with how Chrome currently works internal way" and if your browser works different bad luck.
to make that even worse in the cases where Chrome/FF/Safari worked together there had been enough cases where Chrome had last minute forced changes to standards, or simple implemented them differently. I.e. the whole CORS having issues in FF isn't caused by FF not complying with standards but by Chrom last minute adding an exception to the standard as they implemented it slightly different and websites testing against chrome not against web standards.
which is the other problem, most websites implement "whatever works with Chrome" not web standards
so the whole open standards things is currently kinda not working, not for FF and neither for Safari (which to be fair is the new IE in the aspect of surprisingly lacking features everyone else has or having diverging buggy impl. Like pretty much every web dev team I have worked with had to do extra testing for Safari and frequently "doesn't work in Safari" tickets where FF mostly "just worked" as long as you didn't try to use the lasted grates chrome pushed web features.)
> Forget pocket, AI, and all that other junk. That is not your mission!
for pocket and a bunch of other projects they did shut them down, pocket is gone as you might not have noticed
but the mission is a browser which provides a good usage experience, and if there are features people expect from "alternative not Chrome" browsers you have to compete. If we look at what "AI" FF has this is mostly what you are seeing and many of the things aren't any of the "bad" things people associate with AI:
- site translation, chrome had that a long time and people start expecting it to exist
- automatic alt text generation, a very based UX/accessibility feature
- some "AI" auto grouping for tab groups, unneeded but you can do it with 2015th level of "AI" (i.e. pre LLM) and it shouldn't have bound much additional dev resources. Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if it was mainly surprised to bootstrap the local AI internals needed for useful features like local AI based site translation.
- (experimental) link preview with AI summaries, that looks pretty goated if it works as advertised tbh. and might bring new people to FF.
- integration with an AI search engine, but, it's basically just another search engine choice so no issue here
- allow integration of 3rd party chat bots. No technical people (which can afford it) have started using chat bots _en mass_ (for daily life stuff like grocery lists etc.) Sure a lot of people on HN love to pretend that AI is only used by enthusiasts but that (sadly) just isn't true. ChatBot integration is becoming quite a must have for browsers, no matter how much I don't like it.
So all in all maybe except the tab group suggestions feature are all reasonable choices which make people use/stay with Firefox. Some being outright basic features commonly expected (site translate).
Lastly outside of telling you it exists when its added FF doesn't seem to try to push it onto people. And if you think that it's not okay if a software tells you about a new features less then once a month in average then IMHO that is a you problem.
But yes, your point is valid. For Tor, if you enter an API key, you could be identified. Still, does the Tor Browser prevent you from installing addons which are no more secure than these AI features? It didn't years ago - not sure if that's changed.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/ai-chatbot
Seems to be unconnected to any model and off by default.
Similar to the “AI should be an assistant programmer, not an independent dev”, having Claude there and being able to ask questions about specific topics while I read is fantastic. Especially for scientific papers that are outside my specialty (i.e. all of them.)
Mozilla have taken into consideration doing things locally, such as tab organisation and the likes (one would assume pre-GPT era and with regard to features not utilising LLMs this would’ve been branded as ML functionality) but I’m not fully convinced this still won’t open up potential security issues in the future[for users of AI browsers].
For Tor users this seems even more of an issue as one would expect nation-state actors targeting undesirables would look for any potential weak spot to exploit.
Separately I suppose this brings into light how utterly crazy it seems having AI features in the browser chrome versus limited to the website content process/sandbox. It seems like a privacy and security nightmare and now everyone and their gran are releasing “AI browsers”, even the Firefox-based ones inspired by browsers such as Arc and Dia which seem like absolute privacy nightmares.
Seems like slick branding and marketing gets you a pass today when in the past such egregiousness would receive a load of flack cough Avast “secure” browser cough…
Either way good job to the Tor team, I sympathise with how much extra load this adds to each rebase.
fr Tor did a good job
I really wish Mozilla would focus on addressing some of the numerous user feature requests, rather than whatever the current trend is.
Vivaldi has that. (When Opera got bought out by some Chinese company, one of the original founders created Vivaldi. It's Chromium-based, so Chrome extensions work, and Chrome extensions not using Manifest V3 might end up not working soon).
Now that I'm back in my home country, I've gone back to Firefox, which I prefer from a philosophical standpoint. But there's one simple feature keeping me from using it full-time: the ability to rename windows.
My workflow relies on having one window per project. I name the windows Project1, Project2, Project3, and so on, so it is very simple to find each one.
There are a few Firefox extensions that allow renaming windows, but the names disappear every time I restart Firefox, and they don’t sync across devices.
So, unfortunately, I’m back to using Chromium.
The idea that Mozilla doesn't focus on user feature requests seems unfounded? [1]
[1] https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/idb-p/ideas/tab/most-ku...
https://windowsreport.com/hands-on-firefoxs-new-split-view-l...
First-party extensions are a nice way to test out ideas and features without increasing the core product's maintenance burden. I wouldn't even mind if Mozilla heavily promoted their own extensions, because it would help draw attention to the extension library as a whole.
Firefox used to be the most configurable, everything plugable browser, what happened on that?
If a 1.0 was released today, would they have a hardcoded list of search engines?
(But I don't know what methods the Firefox translation uses. I assume it's a local model but don't even know that for sure.)
- Chrome and Edge are going to do it as well sooner or later, and Mozilla's modus operandi has been to largely copy feature sets from Chrome to stay relevant.
Tor is my daily browser btw.
Seems about time someones does the "I use Tor btw" trend.
- Perplexity query (w/ sources)
Unfortunately they're the kinds of problems that are really hard to submit tickets for: gradual degradation of performance over the course of a week until I kill the process and start it again, the occasional crash that I can't seem to associate with anything in particular, a bizarre bug where every once in a while firefox slows down and typing letters into any input field has a ~30 second delay...
I've never cared about AI or Pocket or anything like that, I just want firefox to be reliably snappy. And I really, really don't want a browser ecosystem dominated by two for-profit companies.
In my case I’ve chalked it up to running Debian on a MS Surface device. I’m using the standard kernel though since the Surface kernel only adds touchscreen for my device and I don’t really want it.
I speculate that it has to do with keeping alive closed pages. Something related that I first started noticing a few months ago is that if I mistime the closing of a YouTube tab, the sound will keep playing and the only way to stop it is to force quit the app.
I haven't noticed the issue on Firefox Desktop, but my MacBook Pro is reasonably beefy and maybe that helps.
There is no technical reason that I can figure out that there can't be a commandline top-like for Firefox that keeps up with every worker started up by a tab or extension; or for that matter logs every use of a granted permission by an extension; or of course to manage cookies, local storage, and memory allocations, and allows you to set alerts for them, block them, kill them, etc..
I've been bullying AI into constructing a minimal architecture that would do just that, and not touch much in order to keep it easy to maintain the fork. If anybody else has or knows of an existing solution, I'm all ears. If the browser is supposed to be an OS now, why is the one that claims to be free also a monolith with no process control?
Firefox just decided around the time they got rid of the ability to easily disable js that they wanted the web to be impenetrable magic. I decided that their motive is that they didn't want you touching their bosses' ads, or their strange experiments.
I'm selfish. If firefox has been pinning a core at 100% for the last hour, I'm greedy enough to want to know what tab is doing it (especially if it is a long-closed tab that left behind a little gift, could it be?) I know it's not my place.
Make the fucking old and ugly browser interface customizable. And expose this to webpages, so banks could force you to use the default view.
There are far too many "luminaries" in the tech industry who've had the last 20 years of "must create value!" go to their heads, even in the FLOSS space.
When profit motive does not exist (and it shouldn't in FLOSS) then you need to stick to things like the UNIX philosophy and KISS (keep it simple, stupid) in order to create good software. Trends mean nothing when you're in this mindset.
It's Firefox. It's a browser. It does browser things; namely, it sends HTTP requests, possibly executes JavaScript, and renders the resulting computed data on a screen as HTML. It does not need to have AI integrated. At best, AI should be a downloadable extension.
If the group's leadership cannot comprehend this, then they need to be removed immediately and blacklisted from leadership at future organizations in the future.
Beginning?
> If the group's leadership cannot comprehend this, then they need to be removed immediately and blacklisted from leadership at future organizations in the future.
You have no power to do this. They would have to remove themselves, or Google would have to make a phone call.
Telemetry is on by default in FF.
Edit: Ah, it seems Mozilla remembers: https://web.archive.org/web/20151112023150/https://support.m... (linking archive.org in case they take it down, this is the first copy I can find)
Like `Firefox Data Collection and Use` which includes `Send technical and interaction data to Mozilla` and some other stuff is on by default. [1]
Glean data is here [2]
Historically I don't think FF would have made that decision - now I have to periodically check what else they turned on without me asking.
I generally don't like telemetry but I really don't like telemetry that is on by default - that very much should always be a "Would you like to?" question.
[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/technical-and-interacti...
[2] https://dictionary.telemetry.mozilla.org/apps/firefox_deskto...
Mozilla get >80% of its revenue from Google, by making Google Search as default search engine on Firefox.
While Mozilla pretends to be a non-profit, its CEO makes millions of dollars annually.
Mitchell Baker: Stepped down as CEO of Mozilla in February 2024. Her salary for 2023 was reported to be $6.9 million. Laura Chambers: Became interim CEO of Mozilla in February 2024. Mozilla has not disclosed her salary for 2024 yet.
As of October 2025, the average annual salary for employees at Mozilla in the United States is ~$115k.
Not bad for a "non-profit", eh?
Yup, Mozilla and Firefox are surviving (nay, thriving) due to Google.
But Google's hand on the Mozilla tiller, is merely the top of the proverbial iceberg. Google has a monopoly on the browser market, encouraged by Apple Safari slipping down to <14% market share amongst the leading browsers.
Google's Chrome (>71% market share) and the other Chromium forks (>9% market share: Edge ~4.5%, Samsung Internet Browser ~2%, Brave/Vivaldi/etc. ~1%) dominate the browser market. Opera (~1.75% market share) is not a Chromium fork, but it is based on Chromium Project.
`Git can be a right git` is a valid sentence here.
some_furry•2h ago