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Firefox's beta feature "Smart Window" shared browsing and search history to AI models without prompting
(www.omgubuntu.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2026
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F*** I really dont want to change away from Firefox. Pleas be good Firefox. Please! Don't F this up.
Librewolf is exactly the same browser with all the security features dialed to 11 and all the AI removed.
unfortunately forks depend on FF, and chrome to survive.
And it breaks sooo many sites.
Waterfox, is Firefox that just works.
It only breaks sites because RFP is on by default and some greedy sites dont like RFP. You can just turn it off and use a good user agent mask (if you care about fingerprinting)
https://xkcd.com/2501/
I tried Librewolf for a while and found it to be a bit too much for me when all I really want is Firefox without AI. The privacy options are probably great but not for me.
Just installed waterfox. First impression is that I am super happy to be bock to the previous Firefox theme - it takes less space and looks nicer in my opinion. Seems promising. Thanks for the recommendation! :)
It might be easier to soften Librewolf than harden Firefox, but fair point.
If you're a relatively normal user and you still want to use LibreWolf, I would recommend:
Most of this is easy to find, especially thanks to the LibreWolf menu
Yeah it's all just in the GUI to enable and disable what you don't want.
I don't get what people are complaining about with LibreWolf being "too hard". Like it's 1 minute clicking through menus and you're done. 5 minutes if you need to read and search things up real quick.
But LibreWolf, ublock installed by default, and then set up containers. Just pure bliss.
It broke youtube for me yesterday and mind you I’m a web developer and I didn’t know what broke it exactly to turn it on/off.
It fixed it self today though.
That was almost certainly YouTube breaking itself. They do a lot of public A-B testing without notifying the user of anything, even if it could break functionality.
The chances of Librewolf breaking, and updating in 24 hours is basically zero. Especially if you're on Windows since it doesn't update itself, you have to choose to install the separate updater application when you install Librewolf, otherwise it just doesn't update.
https://codeberg.org/librewolf/librewolf-winupdater
https://librewolf.net/docs/faq/
Yeah I agree it was probably a/b testing since I use ublock origin as well so I’m use to this kind of stuff.
But the point I’m trying to make that I didn’t know at that time librewolf would have settings turned on that could break some websites.
To be fair, YouTube is a giant piece of shit. On mobile, IronFox and Firefox are terrible with it, but switching to Chrome and everything loads instantly.
We all know Google is purposely slowing down non-chrome browsers.
Maybe, but if you want Librewolf but less extreme, that's what Waterfox is for. May as well just install that and avoid the 5 minute search. And this is coming from a long time Librewolf user.
For us, sure. For the average Joe who doesn't know about the side effects of fingerprinting, not so much.
I just enable canvas on sites that need it.
Thats the only part of RFP that I find problematic.
Yeah Librewolf does go really fucking hard on security/privacy to the detriment of functionality, but the are upfront with that so you shouldn't be going in completely blind. I think Water Fox is a nice happy medium for users that don't want to fuck around with technical stuff.
Wait, it does? I've not had site issues with either.
It can cause issues with default settings on the occasional site.
Since I had it on hand, here's a screenshot of what I encountered when playing Jackbox with friends. All images would look like this.
Its too late, bro. You gotta break it off and start mingling with the forks.
I remember having ff and then switching to chrome because it was better, and then switching back to ff because it was better. I’m ok leaving ff again.