https://vivaldi.com/blog/technology/why-isnt-vivaldi-browser...
(The Mullvad guys took Tor browser for its resistance to fingerprinting and removed the connection the Tor network. You don't need Mullvad VPN to use the browser)
The UX is not polished, and not responsive. No indicator that translation is happening, then the interface disappears for the translation to materialize, with multisecond delays. All understandable if the model is churning my mobile CPU, but it needs a clear visual insicator that something happening
Honestly, is anybody reading what's getting written anymore? If it gets taken seriously it would ship with an enable-AI button, not the other way round.
Whatever they do, they simply cannot win. I'm personally starting to suspect the main issue with Mozilla is its users.
[citation needed]
What numbers? Have Mozilla published any numbers showing their AI experiments have been warmly received by users?
New CEO says they've run the numbers and decided to not kill adblockers, leading to people asking why exactly they were running those numbers (if it was an actual ideological commitment, the numbers wouldn't matter).
> Mozilla says they'll add a killswitch for all AI features (so that the tiny but vocal anti-AI minority will be happy), and people blame them for not having it as an enable-switch.
Yes, opt-in vs opt-out is kinda an important distinction. And you're assuming that opposition is a "tiny but vocal", which - especially among people bothering to use firefox - seems unfounded. Which brings use neatly to,
> Whatever they do, they simply cannot win. I'm personally starting to suspect the main issue with Mozilla is its users.
Well, yes. If you build a userbase out of power users and folks who care about privacy and control... then you have a userbase of power users and folks who care about privacy and control. If Mozilla said up front that they were only interested in money and don't care about users, then fair enough, but don't go trumpeting how you fight for the user and then act surprised when the user holds you to that.
Communicating about what you're knowingly rejecting is a point of pride, not a confession. But since there's no such thing as an OBS, or Nextcloud, or VLC Derangement syndrome, nobody grabs the pitchforks in those cases.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Graham%27s_Hierarchy...
The second one doesn't sound like real conviction.
Real argument: "they said they're doing "privacy preserving" ads, look at this post where they announce it". Real argument "they say they're putting AI in the browser, I don't like that. Here's the statement!" Real argument: " they purchased Anonym and are dabbling in adtech, here's the news article announcing the acquisition!"
Not real argument: "They said they didn't want to take money to kill ad blockers but if you squint maybe it kinda implies they considered it, at least if you don't consider other reasons they might be aware of that figure." At best it's like 0.001% circumstantial evidence that has to be reconciled with their history of opposing the Manifest changes. If reading tea leaves matters so much, then certainly their more explicit statements need to matter too.
The thing that's unfortunate here is I would like to think this goes without saying, but ordinary standards of charitable interpretation are so far in the rear view mirror that I don't know that people comfortable making these accusations would even recognize charitable interpretation as a shared value. Not in the sense of bending over backwards to apologize or make excuses, but in the ordinary Daniel Dennett sense of a built-in best practice to minimize one's own biases.
But they've never done this. There is a very vocal group of Firefox power users but the browser has always targeted a general audience, marginalization by Chrome over the years not withstanding.
If you have any ambition to regain some of that market share listening to the average vocal Hackernews or Reddit commenter, who is not the median user, even just among the current ~150 million users is not a good idea.
Is that their core user base, or just the vocal user base online? Only 5-10% of their user base have UBO installed (FF has almost 200 million users, extension store reports ~10 million UBO installs).
Firefox isn't LibreWolf, it's user base are just average people, not much different than that of Chrome, Safari, or Edge.
Look at the point that op made instead of the tone: the AI feature should be opt-in not opt-out.
That's a good point. Let's talk about that. It seems like it's a simple thing to do to show good faith that this won't be a normal corporate AI push.
This is not true, and is easily verifiable for yourself.
https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/hardware
The vast majority of Firefox usage is on Windows.
Arch pkgstats (opt-in): ~64% FF, ~41% Chromium, ~17% Chrome
https://pkgstats.archlinux.de/fun/Browsers/current
Debian popcon (opt-in): 2.2% Firefox, ~10.3% Chromium
https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=firefox
https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=chromium
Flathub installs: 10kk Firefox, 10kk Chrome, 1.8kk Chromium
https://flathub.org/en/apps/org.mozilla.firefox
https://flathub.org/en/apps/com.google.Chrome
https://flathub.org/en/apps/org.chromium.Chromium
snapcraft statistics isn't public, afaik.
That's not the fault of their users, at least not directly. If you want to argue that Firefox users are stifling innovation or trying to steer the product in a direction that would threaten the future viability of Firefox/Mozilla, I would be open to hearing that argument out even though I don't think that's the issue.
Mozilla is the equivalent of a petrostate in the tech sector. They have a bunch of revenue coming in that they didn't really earn, and they have no idea what to do with it to improve their current condition. To me, that's the core issue.
When they re-wrote Firefox for Android, they were unable to give the simple, obvious answer to the effect of "yes, we understand extensions are a core feature of our browser and we plan to fully support extensions on Fenix and won't consider it done until we do". Instead, they talked about whitelisting a handful of extensions, and took three years from shipping Fenix as stable before they had a broad open extension ecosystem up and running again.
Earlier this year Mozilla couldn't provide the simple, obvious response of "we will never sell your personal information". Instead, they tried to make excuses about not agreeing with California's definition of "selling personal information".
A few days ago, we find out that their new CEO can't clearly and emphatically say "we would never take money to break ad blockers, because that goes against everything we stand for".
Now, they seemingly can't even realize that having a "kill switch" calls into doubt whether they actually know what "opt-in" means.
Even when they're trying to do the right thing, they're strangely afraid to commit to doing the right thing when it comes to specifics. They won't say "never" even when it should be easy.
That answer is not as obvious to me as you claim it is. I don't use any browser extensions except 1password, which I would have no reason to use on a phone (at least assuming Android has builtin password manager functionality like iOS does).
I think you overestimate what fraction of people care about extensions.
I would guess that of people that would ever go out of their way to use a non-Chrome browser on Android, the fraction who care about extensions is pretty significant.
> Has Add-on shows the percentage of Firefox Desktop clients with user-installed add-ons.
> December 8, 2025
> 45.4%
https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/usage-behavior
Note that language packs are counted as extensions.
Some have disabled telemetry, of course, but how many? Here we can only rely on our own observations, and of all Firefox users I know, it's zero.
(I keep it enabled because I want my voice to be counted — people who have never lived in an autocracy tend to have peculiar views on this.)
Honestly, and it's hard for me to say this: I've come around. I still use and love Firefox, but emotionally I'm detaching from it, because fundamentally: all the other FOSS I use is an actual, factual, open source project. And Firefox the browser is FOSS, but Firefox the corporation isn't, and the problem is the corporation seems to be in charge, not the project, which means all their priorities are to make money and drive donations, not what's best for the user necessarily. It means all their communications are written in Corporatese, with vague waffling about everything they're asked and non-committal statements because the next quarter might demand they about-face, as they've done numerous times.
I love the browser. I increasingly find myself disillusioned with the business entity that rides on it's back, and frankly wish it would sod off. Take the money they're getting, and give it to the people actually building the product. Defaulting AI features to off costs Firefox absolutely nothing and they still won't do it, because of this irrational FOMO that has gripped the entirety of the executive class in charge of seemingly every business on earth. It's pathetic, and it lacks vision.
A lot of people remember the Mozilla of old, and are just completely depressed at the state of where it has ended up over the last 10 years. They were once a non-profit founded to promote the web and put users first. Now it's just this weird zombie company monetizing the work and good will of a prior generation of engineers that cared about that mission.
What I honestly fear is that while AI-features are disabled, popups inviting me to enable them again. That, or them auto-enabling them on every update like sometimes has happened with `browser.ml.enable` flag on `about:config`.
But as an old-school Firefox user, with a slieu of mobile extensions installed and a healthy cynicism about our swan dive into the dark sea of AI ... I have no problem at all with the statements from Mozilla. Outsiders can argue all day about intent, it's the actions that count.
Like the one described in the subsequent toot?
> All AI features will also be opt-in. I think there are some grey areas in what 'opt-in' means to different people (e.g. is a new toolbar button opt-in?)...
It's not a gray area, and "opt-in" isn't something to be weasled-worded around. If the browser has the capability, I don't want it. I want to be able to add it with a plugin, and that's it. Plugins should have full control to whatever is necessary (same as adblock stuff; plenty of security but enough "user beware" to allow truly useful utilities). And AI features should all be plugins. Separate ones, if I had my way, but bundles if that makes more sense. I do not and will not need AI to browse. It's an enhancement. The core product (or at least ONE OF the products offered) should allow me to do without the enhancement. And opt in if I want to. There's nothing gray there, and I'm so fucking sick of mozilla trying to pull this "we disagree with common terminology" horseshit.
How about "Translate" button?
And, if I'm being honest, "translation" is the only feature I would even consider splitting the builds for. At least in that feature I can see why a "default" version of the browser might benefit more people than not by including it. But that doesn't mean that a "clean" version shouldn't be provided. Build the core app, and then include as many plugins as you think "average users" will benefit from in the "default" version. I don't mind being the minority, I just don't think it's inappropriate to ask for only what I need instead of "all the bullshit you want to force me to have".
The past 15 years has been a slow decline while they were trying to prove some relevancy outside of their core product. With mobile browsers being locked down a decline was going to happen anyways but if they stuck to their guns at least they wouldn't have wasted a bunch of money and maintained more of their base.
Who knows, their position sucks, but they're not going to win anyone by being the worst AI focused browser which happens to have an off switch.
With the bonus that you also get a set of great (and per fork different yet handy) features.
These include:
Waterfox (Firefox) - https://www.waterfox.com/
Zen Browser (Firefox) - https://zen-browser.app/
Librewolf (Firefox) - https://librewolf.net/
Helium (Chrome/Chromium) - https://helium.computer/
Ungoogled Chromium (Chrome/Chromium) - https://github.com/ungoogled-software/ungoogled-chromium
Also as one of the major players, Vivaldi already made a stand against AI and forcefully including (agentic) AI in the web browser: https://vivaldi.com/blog/keep-exploring/. It's a Chromium based browser with a lot of nice features and deep customization options: https://vivaldi.com/
That's why it should ask - once. And offer a "FUCK OFF NEVER ASK ME AGAIN" button rather than "Ask me again later".
./configure --disable-aiIf it was an extension it would be nice if people could fork it with other models. Just like their AI Tab Grouping feature would be much better forked with a deterministic non-AI grouping system.
I want my non-tech family members/friends to install Firefox not because I come over at Christmas, but because they want to. Because it's a browser that "just works." We can't have this if Firefox stays in the pre-ai era.
I know Mozilla doesn't have much good will right now, but hopefully with the exec shakeup, they will right the ship on making FF a great browser. While still staying the best foil to Chrome (both in browser engine, browser chrome, and extension ecosystem).
Imagine you have an AI button. When you click it, the locally running LLM gets a copy of the web site in the context window, and you get to ask it a prompt, e.g. "summarize this".
Imagine the browser asks you at some point, whether you want to hear about new features. The buttons offered to you are "FUCK OFF AND NEVER, EVER BOTHER ME AGAIN", "Please show me a summary once a month", "Show timely, non-modal notifications at appropriate times".
Imagine you choose the second option, and at some point, it offers you a feature described as follows: "On search engine result pages and social media sites, use a local LLM to identify headlines, classify them as clickbait-or-not, and for clickbait headlines, automatically fetch the article in an incognito session, and add a small overlay with a non-clickbait version of the title". Would you enable it?
Especially since we know very well that they won't be locally running LLMs, everyone's plan is to siphon your data to their "cloud hybrid AI" to feed into the surveillance models (for ad personalization, and for selling to scammers, law enforcement and anyone else).
I'd prefer to have entirely separate and completely controlled and fire-walled solutions for any useful LLM scenarios.
There are more, those are just the ones I can recall.
The non mozilla people in that thread are so petty. Maybe it'd be better to have them go use another browser and stop dragging down firefox's reputation.
1. Pocket/etc is not even ancient history,
2. At this point I don’t think Firefox or Mozilla ought to be taken without a truck of salt.
A bonus third :D
3. People bleeding their hearts out for Mozilla and calling others out for constantly criticising Mozilla — it’s history baby, history!
I don't use bookmarks. Should those be opt-in? What about the other 85% of the browser's features I don't use?
At least when I last checked (months ago), none of those features that involve communicating with external servers would work unless you configure them to (i.e. provide credentials to an LLM provider).
Was I wrong? Have things changed?
I should have to manually install this AI stuff.
jamesgill•2h ago
RegnisGnaw•2h ago
al_borland•2h ago
nemomarx•2h ago
reidrac•2h ago
al_borland•2h ago
I want the AI agent to act more like a fiduciary, an independent 3rd party acting in my best interest. I don't need an AI salesman interjecting itself into my life with compromised incentives.
lawtalkinghuman•1h ago
That way, the users who want them can download them, and the users who don't, don't.
HelloUsername•1h ago
"All AI features will also be opt-in"
jamesgill•55m ago
netsharc•1h ago
I suppose if - after you click away the popup that says "Thank you for loving Firefox"(1) - a popup shows that says "Hey, hey, look at me, look we have this new feature, it'll blow you away. Do you want to enable it?" would be obnoxious but satisfies the idea of "opt-in".
(1) https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1791524 - I still remember how icked I was seeing this popup.
bigstrat2003•1h ago
Why exactly should I, a user, care about this? I don't want useless crap shoved in my face, period. I don't care that people might not turn on someone's pet feature if they don't enable it by default.
dzikimarian•52m ago
eps•1h ago
If it's off be default it will stay off unless the user is somehow made to try it. Default opt-in is one option to do that, the simplest one, but it's not the only one. The rest require explaining clearly what the user will get out of enabling it ... and that often is difficult to do succinctly, or convincingly. So shovelling it down everyone's throat it is.