Tor browser removing various Firefox AI features

What else does Waterfox remove? Does it still support signining in with a Mozilla account to enable sync features? Would be nice to see a comprehensive list somewhere; I couldn't see anything on the Waterfox homepage or the GitHub README.

Thank you! Downloading Waterfox now and spreading the word! This AI jamming its way into everything needs to end.

Thanks for maintaining Waterfox. For me it has been working without issues, basically Firefox but with reasonable defaults, and I don’t have to constantly look for and manually disable “features” like these.

cough Avast "secure" cough dies of cringe

fr Tor did a good job

I’ve found it super nice.

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.)

Not mentioned is the ability to setup custom prompts. [1]

I enjoy reading technical blogs from the global south and the slavic world. I've found that LLMs do a far better job at translation than Google Translate/DeepL, etc. in these niche domains, so I added a translate prompt to my context menu and that converted me over to using it.

[1] https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/advanced-configur...

Thankfully they are unconnected by default. Unfortunately the sidebar can get triggered accidentally with keystrokes from muscle memory (Emacs) and then one has to deal with the side bar. It would have been nicer if by default nothing existed in the first place.

Didn't know about it either, until it got pushed in my face a few days ago, for whatever reason. Didn't leave a great taste in my mouth.

I have a Gemini sidebar, it just appeared out of nowhere one day, but I find it useful though. You can give it a URL and it can summarize it or whatever.

It was weird when it just showed up one day, but after using it a bit, I like it.

It's super useful for power users. You can connect any model you like through ollama (or similar services) and use your own pre-defined prompts to run against the selected text on websites simply from right click context menu.

Any info about planned open sourcing? I have not heard about it.

Orion is a WebKit fork which is nice to have but Linux support seems so far off (is there a modern project that builds WebKit on Linux or windows at all?)

I have been satisfied with moving to Zen, a Firefox fork that behaves like the late Arc browser

I use it on my iPhone because I can actually get ad blocking but it is also the glitchiest browser I've ever used. Worth it for no ads, but that's kinda Apple's issue.

I'd love to be able to open up an arbitrary web page in this sidebar. It would be super valuable for research. They can obviously do it, since the AI sidebar also loads a web page, but the functionality is locked for some reason, and vertical splitting extensions are pure jank.

I really wish Mozilla would focus on addressing some of the numerous user feature requests, rather than whatever the current trend is.

Not only that, AI providers shouldn't be a hardcoded list.

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?

Exactly. Firefox probably owes almost all of its remaining market share to its extension ecosystem, but it is rotting away in neglect.

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.

It should if you try to fly off the radar. Not that Tor browser isn't a fucken emmentaler.

The AI integrations, AFAIK, work only if you provide an API key.

Reminds me of the story of the ice tea company that changed their name to include "Blockchain" and saw their value shoot up a few years ago

I'm waiting for the day we get microwaves with an AI that turns them off once the timer reaches zero.

It feels like we are going to need a lot of volunteer effort to help remove all the AI garbage out of all these projects that insist on jamming AI into themselves.

What "HD craze" was there from 2015-2020?

The HD craze was more like 20 years ago, you're getting old :)

Agereed. Sadly, we're on the wrong planet, my friend. AI will be shoved into every available orifice and more. It's a great tool for "them" to gather even more info on you to sell to anyone with a handful of nickels.

The last thing any of these masters of the universe will do is leverage AI to make everyone's life better.

[flagged]

    browser.urlbar.trimURLs         false  to display http:// in the address bar
    browser.fixup.alternate.enabled false  to enable adding www. and .com to urls

and for any malicious mfs, you dont want AI in your browser.

Tor browser's philosophy is that everyone should be fingerprinted and it's fine since they do everything they can think of to try to make that fingerprint identical to everyone else using Tor browser.

This is kind of crazy since there are new fingerprinting techniques all the time and if they miss even one data point the whole game is lost. The smarter movie would be to make sure that fingerprints are unique/randomized so that even the same person looks like different people but for some reason they're confident they can account for every possible identifying metric 100% of the time.

Tor Browser? Perhaps, but their stated justification is that they were always leaking that via JavaScript and other ways, that Cloudflare was detecting the discrepancy and blocking you a lot more, that they're still spoofing just one of three values (Windows, Mac, Linux) which now matches the JS property, and that they'd like to redo it properly in the future. Seems reasonable to me.

The one "AI" feature that genuinely helps the user and preserves privacy is the Translation feature. (Yes, machine translation is in fact AI)

- Creating alternate sources of revenue.

- 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.

Pointy haired bosses heard about AI, and now you have AI everywhere.. you know, just in case, if you wanted an AI chatbot in your image resizing software or your pdf reader. Before that it was "cloud", where every app had to have a cloud-something, even if it didnd't need one.

This is wasting the time of accessibility engineers who are doing very important work. Please don't.

This is a huge pet peeve of mine, and not even specifically in Firefox or even browsers. It's in applications and OS's as well. I don't know if it's actually increased recently, or I've become more sensitized, but it harkens back to the web 1.0 pop-up misery of yore..

Why would you brag about that? Honestly, to what end? If your goal is to put sand in the gears what difference is there between this and trolling, spamming or just good ol' fashioned DOS?

this would be admirable if it's done in earnest to try and increase accessibility, but you say explicitly it's done specifically to "pour sand in the gears". please don't

Could you link some? Would love to see what dialogs are meant, whether they can actually cause accessibility issues or are just "unwanted" and how the maintainers comment/decide on that front.

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.

Dialogues are supposed to pop over content. There is not enough chrome for anything else.

But it used to be that browser dialogues would start from the chrome, thus being impossible for webpages to mimic.

That's childish and sad. Don't do that please

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The Mission is to make enough money to keep existing.

> focus on open standards

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.

Yeah, I will say I don't understand the value add here. I used to be able to have a webpage in a sidebar with Opera back in like 2009. That version of Opera, imo, is still more satisfying browsing experience to me even than modern browsers.

They make such strange choices though.

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...

Maybe the Firefox team should stop doing bad things if they don’t want people saying bad things about them.

There was a whole experiment with this "Tab Candy" thing a few years ago. And it failed and Mozilla disabled it and it got silently removed, well, almost, because a fair amount of people complained. I wouldn't be surprised if today's tab groups go the same way. Browser innovation is hard and at this point most of the innovation is in forks of Firefox, rather than Firefox itself.

I gave up on Firefox, sadly. I still use Thunderbird (which is apparently no longer part of Mozilla), but I couldn't deal with FF and Mozilla screwing around anymore.

I switched to Orion which has been working great for me. I'm happy to pay money for my browser and be confident that the money is actually being put towards maintaining and improving the browser.

I want Firefox to succeed, I just... can't justify it.

I wonder if they'd do better by charging $10 for a compiled binary and distributing it on Linux as an AppImage. I'd be happier to pay for that than send an unrestricted donation to the Mozilla foundation. Normally I frown on unrestricted donations, but something seems really off over there.

>building useful features like tab groups

wow what an achievement. Vivaldi which has 1% of there budget had that feature for almost 10 years. Despite almost half a billion dollar budget almost all there good UI changes come years late being the last to add them for example profile management.

It is honestly embarrassing to compare Mozilla to companies like brave that actually created a private ecosystem without subsidization from there competitors.

Am I the only one who remembers the old tab groups that were removed before these new tab groups were added?

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)

Lots of nonprofits have CEO comp in the millions. Firefox is a large company with lots of employees and tens of millions of users. They have to offer compensation that is somewhat close to market rates to be able to hire people capable of managing that kind of scale. Mozilla isn't funded by individual donations and doesn't charge its users for Firefox, so what does it matter what the execs get paid?

I did but I don't see FF splitting from Mozilla (by whatever mechanism) either sadly and if you lose the name it becomes hard to get adoption for the forked one - see IceWeasel.

Welp, here we go again. The CEO pay is slightly more than 1% of their revenue, which sure, I don't love, but they're not like secretly poisoning kittens or something which is how you're making it sound.

Those salaries actually seem pretty normal, and I don't think anything other than ordinary information literacy is necessary to understand they have a non-profit foundation side by side with the corporation, it's not a hidden conspiracy.

Also, on HN I think people are largely familiar with these data, so sharing numbers with an air of dramatic revelation seems tonally inappropriate. Though I love that, of the random accusations thrown at Mozilla, one of them is constantly pingponging back and forth between claiming they're running out of money or that they are awash in profits.

I do think there are real issues: killing Servo was a tragedy, "privacy protecting ads" I think is conceptually fallacious, it seems like with Android forcing developer certification that the world could have used a FirefoxOS right about now which they unfortunately abandoned many years ago. But the community phenomenon of reeling off ordinary pay figures like they're a conspiracy feels more like an inadvertent confession of functional illiteracy when interpreting financial data.

I wish we talked about the real stuff (pushing back on their dabbling in ads) instead of breathlessly sharing misunderstood graphs of browser market share to try and imply that side bets made from 2020-2025 retroactively caused the market share losses of 2010-2015.

Non-profits are headed but also staffed with the same ambititious types as for-profit businesses. If you think only Mozilla pays its CEO attractively, you are misinformed. Managerial talent costs, and non-profit CEOs, in my direct experience, use the same lateral pay package comparisons to other non-profit CEOs to justify their comp packages.

The whole point of carving out an alternate rules space for non-profits in a capitalistic economy is that some business functions are both necessary and very unlikely to be profitable.

The assumption that employees would work in non-profits at an uncompetitve wage is a widespread fallacy. In the end a non-profit is either:

1. unprofitable but so necessary it finds subsidies to continue unprofitable operations

2. breaks even

3. runs well enough to generate an operating surplus which by NP tax regs must be either distributed to employees as a bonus or put forward to organisational growth.

In any of these three revenue scenarios, underpaying critical staff is an org death spiral by loss of requisite talent.

CEOs in the US often make much more in the US than other countries, and US non-profit are not nearly immune to the larger forces responsible for that trend.

I've been a Firefox user since it launched (and a Netscape Navigator user before that). In addition to Desktop, I use Firefox on iOS with my 3-year old iPad Pro, which of late exhibits the same sluggishness that you describe after a while. It goes away if I force restart, but not if I just close tabs.

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.

That last delay bit might not be a Firefox bug but rather something in the Debian/Ubuntu stack. I get that same type of freeze up about once a week. I typically have FF open but it can happen while I’m working in something else.

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.

This is an opinion, yet you state it like fact. While I'm hesitant to want any AI features in my browser, what a "browser" does isn't necessarily a settled debate.

> Mozilla's beginning to lose its way.

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.