I don’t think anyone actually read the announcement, just the headline. Here was the new CEOs actual first point.
“First: Every product we build must give people agency in how it works. Privacy, data use, and AI must be clear and understandable. Controls must be simple. AI should always be a choice — something people can easily turn off. People should know why a feature works the way it does and what value they get from it.”
Waterfox, Ironfox, Librewolf
Yeah this ain’t it chief. Hope we can nuke the feature into oblivion, but we all know that won’t be possible as Firefox enshittifies
Come on servo
Never heard about it before, thank you!
Well, older news is: “Firefox has evolved into the first thing I uninstall when I install Fedora, or any other Linux distro for that matter”. Since the first mention of their so-called “anonymous telemetry” I began to actively avoid them. Like someone else mention, thank God for Librewolf, Mullvad and Brave (with Leo disabled).
Thank god for librewolf, they fix most of the new Mozilla bullshit.
They’re going to use AI to identify and block ads for me, right? Or let me set a cookie preference and automatically apply that to every page I visit?
That would be rather useful things to have AI for IMHO.
Well no. They not gonna burn ai credits on that, they need it to identify your interests and sell you ads.
something an adblocker already done, without the unneccsary extra steps.
It ain’t that easy, at least with uBlock Origin. The problem is that websites depend on many elements - ones that aren’t obvious to the human eye and experience. An AI could potentially analyze all of the content and to where it leads, then remove the undesirable elements, such as trackers. For example, when I am making a payment at an unfamiliar website, I wouldn’t know what services are key to a working transaction.
A fair bit of my browsing time is spent on figuring out how to not break a website with my adblocker - which is annoying, error prone, and not as effective as I would like.
I don’t know what websites you’re using, but default uBlock Origin works completely fine with all the websites I visit, and it doesn’t use AI. It just uses blocking rules.
As long as it is open source, it doesn’t matter. Forks like Librewolf will disable it.
It increases the workload for fork devs the more crap they have to remove from upstream and the more the fork deviates from upstream.
It does matter a bit.
Librewolf devs depend on firefox development. They just rip out the stupid bits. They’re not prepared to maintain a hard fork. They could still decide to do it, but it would take more community involvement.
And a shitload of time to keep the fork relevant as web sites keep evolving.
AI and open source don’t really go hand in hand
if google is still the majority of the revenue, it will close it down the line.
Is there a Librewolf for phones? Can I somehow self-host the synchronization services?
Fennec and IronFox.
There’s IronFox
I use fennec on phone
https://f-droid.org/packages/org.mozilla.fennec_fdroid
There is a shiton of browsers for phone but this one is often updated and the icon is cute (the most important feature)
There is also Firefox Focus which us basically a stripped down fennec. I use it as my default browser with JS disabled.
Is there a fennec like on desktop? I find librewolf has changed too much for what I want out of a Firefox fork. Websites just did not run the way I expected them to and I could not be arsed to fiddle with all of the different knobs to get them to work.
Zen is what I use, there’s also Waterfox.
Just why? AI browsers have serious security/privacy implications.
For e.g:Thank you. These are great articles.
As long as there is a easy way to disable it. And clearly communicated what they are doing. I do not begrudge mozilla trying to remain competitive with mainstream.
There won’t be
if they say it will be an AI-only browser somehow i doubt it.
As long as we can remove our mouths from being wrapped around the…
When talking about it earlier, they mentioned the integrated AI would be local-only… Which sounds better, but I doubt is even possible (imagine all the low-end devices attempting to generate a response or analyse the website on their 6-8-year old CPUs…).
FWIW the development is done publicly, so you can check these claims https://blog.ziade.org/2025/12/05/two-years-of-ai-at-mozilla/
Over to Waterfox then.
I don’t care if there is a way to ‘disable it’ (there won’t be) - if it’s there, it not on my PC.
You already can’t disable AI gemerated summaries on mobile.
https://noai.duckduckgo.com/ - yes you can
Remember the way to disable all AI in Firefox.
about:config
browser.ml.enable -> falseFor now…
It’s very sad as I don’t think there’s a proper alternative in short term. In the end, I am afraid that I’ll have to keep using Firefox because it’s essentially the “lesser evil”,
Waterfox, Librewolf, Ironfox
FF was suppose to be alternative to google, until google “captured competition” by making up majority of thier revenue.
It started as an alternative to Internet Explorer and was so much better it actually overtook it.
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I’m currently running Vivaldi and it’s been fine. YouTube is even smoother.
So you switched to a Google controlled ecosystem. To no one’s surprise their own products, which intentionally run worse on competitive browsers, will work more smoothly once you use their backing software…
Google has a long history of abusing their position of power to “punish” users of other browsers and ecosystems by violating web standards, don’t use Google’s browsers or their derivatives.
This is true, however I’ve been cursed with using an iphone for a while and I had to find a decent alternative to firefox and ublock.
Unfortunately Safari is horrendous, like anything software Apple makes really, but it’s the only browser allowed to have extensions and Vivaldi is the only real alternative to it that work, as Firefox is terrible on ios.
Orion browser allows this on iPhone! You can use Firefox or Chrome add ons.
When Firefox started recording key strokes
Source? That’s news to me, and when I tried finding a source myself, all I found were extensions etc. to add that to the browser.
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Better to “send keystrokes” to Google.
