I just want a browser that loads webpages and performs well, keep this ai bullshit for add-on's and away from default installs.
this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2025
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Firefox protects your privacy by running AI models directly on your device, ensuring your sensitive data remains local
Good enough for me. The privacy problem with AI is when they are web services you send all your data to for processing. If that isn't happening, that problem is fully solved.
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I can see people not necessarily wanting suggestions for tab group names, but... The rest of the list is translations and alt text suggestions for images added to PDFs. The most uncontroversial AI features if ever there were any.
I really don't care for this urge to advertise "AI" everywhere. I also don't care much for the knee-jerk reaction just because someone calls something AI.
Firefox doesn't let you use alt text anywhere, except for the most ridiculously niche location.
People who want to see it when they browse webpages get nothing.
It's only if you
- open a PDF in Firefox
- and then choose to edit it
- and then choose to add an image
- and then choose to add alt text to it
- and then choose to generate alt text instead
If Mozilla cares about accessibility, what a weird niche of a niche of a place to put it.
They could be working on that, but we don't know yet.
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all these AI features seem like the most useless waste of GPU I have ever seen implemented! Why the hell do I need recommendations for the names of my tab groups? I freaking love that the tech industries' idea of progress in the 2020's is wasting resources on nothing.
Yeah, translation is the only thing here I have any desire at all to use
There are other practical things to use a browser-based AI for, like accessibility improvements for sites that didn’t provide proper alt text or other accessibility features.
But I think an important one few people are talking about is an AI “babysitter” for my grandma so she doesn’t fall for phishing scams. Ad blocking does a lot to protect people there but some smarter detection would be good for a significant chunk of society. Not that this exists yet.
Yeah, I think accessibility is one of the few potentially actually valuable use cases for generative AI.
If you can generate alt text completely locally in a private open source way that'd be pretty cool. It'd be nice if it funtioned as a extension that only does anything when you intentionally call it, at least by default. Maybe mapped to a keyboard shortcut, but I don't know enough about what visually impaired users need to have a meaningful perspective on how the user experience should be implemented.
But I've yet to see any companies talk about how that's what they're gonna use AI for. To me, AI has hypothetical usefulness specifically for tasks that are really important but that in practice no one actually puts resources into, or has any resource to put into.
I also kinda wonder if local-only AI moderation tools could also make it a lot easier for fediverse mods to cover a lot of ground, or could abstract really disturbing content to reduce the mental load of moderating out the worst content folks post on the internet.
But no one is interested in AI tech so they can build useful things, theyre interested in it because they can steal peoples intellectual labor and build products without having to pay the people who would produce that intellectual labor.
You can make software accessible without Ai, they just don’t want to spend the money on it. It’s a business decision that every company makes to save the money on accessibility. It’s a calculated cost to them
Education is the answer and not creating a nanny state with fucking Ai babysitting and spying on everyone.
This is some big brother lvl of bullshit just because oh no old people might be stupid enough to fuck themselves over. If they are that technically incapable, maybe it’s time to set up a device without any extra options.
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I don't want these features either, but they specifically say up front that the AI runs locally to avoid exactly this disingenuous argument.
I want my browser to render web pages as fast as possible and using as few resources as possible, while complying with W3C standards.
For anything else I might want, there's extensions.
This AI bullshit is costing me RAM, CPU cycles, and electricity without giving me anything of value in return. It's malware, plain and simple.
Soon we'll have every already bloated app running a slightly different local LLM in order to check the AI tickbox.
Can't wait.
The AI may run locally, but is it keeping all of the interactions local too?
Do we trust anyone who is jamming AI bullshit into their products and services?
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It runs. That's enough to not want it, if I don't want to use it in the first place.
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As long as I can disable it, I don't care.
I don't trust AI to catch all the things that interest me on the pages I visit, and I don't want to waste energy on something I won't use.
It should be disabled by default, to avoid the huge energy costs associated with running LLM's.
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So they don't intend on making a profit from it from data gathering, nobody asked for it, and the open source community who would otherwise donate or contributes to Mozilla are so disgusted by the whole thing tgat they are now just holding their noses and waiting for an alternative.
All of this while Google is stepping down as sugar daddy and they need all the help they can get.
Why the hell are they doing this? Is it just a case of moronic leadership and getting stuck in a negative spiral where the whole operation gets stupider and stupider with each new hire?
Well, people were at least asking for translations all the time.
Yeah, I'm honestly happy about local translations, and I was still supporting Mozilla when it was rolled out. There's just been too much bullshit since.
It's good to watch Mozilla pouring their time, effort, and dwindling funds into the most important features - AI ones!
That AI will do that.
So, which browser now? Please advise.
LibreWolf: every time it's forced to pick between privacy and convenience it picks privacy. If you like that, it's the browser for you.
Waterfox: if you just want Firefox with zero ability to send any data to Mozilla, without necessarily "hardening" anti-fingerprinting features, this is that. It's a downstream fork that removes all telemetry and non-local features (it removed Pocket before Mozilla did).
LibreWolf.
I feel bad for the LibreWolf devs who continue to desperately say that it's not designed to be a general use browser.
Hmmmm, should it not be recommended then? It's been my favorite no bullshit Firefox fork for a while now, but I'm open to suggestions.
I mean, I'm not a dev and I haven't dove deep into the forks in a while. I just remember that they added something to their readme on github during one of the recent "firefox is dead" cycles that said that LibreWolf's focus of privacy first makes it poorly suited as a general use daily driver.
They were getting swamped with people looking for help because the defaults caused certain sites to not function or something.
Ohhh that makes sense. Thank you!
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