> It might be hard to believe for my younger readers, but Mozilla took on Internet Explorer that was just as entrenched as Chrome is now, and they kicked proverbial posterior! They did because they offered a better browser that respected the people who used it, and gave them agency in their browsing experience.
That is revisionist history. Firefox succeeded because MS was sitting on their hands with IE, and it was stagnating. Firefox didnt do the opposite of what IE - you could argue Mozilla was doing what MS should have been.
It wasnt about "respecting users", or "agency" but simply implemented standards properly.
And that's going to be a hard problem with Chrome because you're up against a browser that is moving very, very, fast.
embedding-shape•Dec 1, 2025
Firefox was seriously a better browser, not just "implements standards better". It ran faster, it had tabs (wow!) and at one point it got Firebug which let you have a console INSIDE the browser that showed information you could print with `console.log`, I kid you not.
It was a better browser through and through, maybe because MS slept on IE or maybe not, but in the end it isn't revisionist to say they beat MS's proverbial posterior because the browser was better.
cogman10•Dec 1, 2025
Firebug was a big reason for webdevs to adopt firefox in the first place. Part of what made chrome succeed is it came out with a pretty robust set of webdev tools right from the get-go.
But also, google spent a mountain of money advertising chrome.
evilduck•Dec 1, 2025
Chrome borrowed their webdev tools from Webkit, who borrowed them from KHTML. Chrome launched with dev tools, but they didn't develop their own distinct version of them for many years after launching the browser.
cxr•Dec 1, 2025
> Chrome borrowed their webdev tools from Webkit, who borrowed them from KHTML.
Neither KDE nor OS X ever shipped their built-in Web Inspector prior to the appearance of Firebug in 2006, and by that point WebKit and Safari were already in full swing. The very first iteration[1] of Web Inspector appeared around the same time as Firebug and was an original contribution by Apple; it wasn't borrowed from KHTML.
> Part of what made chrome succeed is it came out with a pretty robust set of webdev tools right from the get-go.
I think this factor isn't given enough weight in the shift to Firefox.
At that time, the largest pain point in web development was (by a long shot) browser compatibility.
When developers fell in love with Firefox, they started pushing business requirements away from IE and towards the browser that didn't feel like it was their enemy. Alongside with this there was also massive shift to start taking web standards seriously, which is another area where IE dropped the ball spectacularly
It took a few years, but eventually pointy haired managers got sick of our whining and gave in.
cogman10•Dec 1, 2025
We, no joke, ultimately were able to drop our support for IE6->8 because of the youtube "we are dropping support for IE" banner. We spun it to our bosses as "If google is doing this, we should be able to."
FridayoLeary•Dec 2, 2025
Some time ago there was a post here about it. The guy claimed he and a few other fed up devs made that banner on their own initiative. The whole thing was a huge bluff because at the time google had no such plan but it gained so much momentum that they went ahead with it eventually.
ghurtado•Dec 2, 2025
That's awesome.
Having lived through the browser wars, this is my new favorite fact about the whole thing.
It really was a very different time, and you couldn't have convinced me back then that I would miss it one day.
fragmede•Dec 2, 2025
Which, if you haven't read it before, the story of how they did that is worth the read.
Chrome has the advantage that they inherited webkits inspector. The chrome team made improvements, yes, but it originated in Safari
hi_hi•Dec 2, 2025
It's hard to state just how much of a game changer Firebug was for web development. Before that your only option was "alert()"ing or outputting directly to the page.
Once Chrome came along with their devtools, improvements quickly escalated between the 2 before Google eventually won out.
I can't recall the exact point in time when my use of Firefox fell off, but it was probably due to the account integrations with Chrome.
boothby•Dec 2, 2025
Around 2006 or 2007, I was working on the Sage Notebook. I did a little JavaScript injection, and managed to make the notebook execute JavaScript instead of sending Python code to the server and printing the result. Lo and behold, I could interact with my JavaScript environment on any browser we supported (ie, ff, safari and Opera). I don't recall if firefox had its JavaScript console yet but it was a game changer on those other browsers.
throwup238•Dec 2, 2025
> But also, google spent a mountain of money advertising chrome.
Not to mention preferential treatment like the Youtube anti-IE campaign [1]
To be fair to Google, they also kicked ass on implementation at the beginning too.
Chrome was a lot faster and a lot lighter (in the beginning)
bigger_cheese•Dec 2, 2025
One big feature at the time was Firefox had a built in popup blocker, IE did not. Popup ads were rife towards the backend of the 90's and the internet felt borderline unusable without a blocker.
chii•Dec 2, 2025
> beat MS's proverbial posterior because the browser was better
not via marketshare. The fact is, only developers (and adjacent) were using firefox. IE, during those days (pre-chrome) was still such a dominant browser that you had to check for IE compatibility.
But today, developers are not checking for firefox compatibility. So, firefox today (and during the firefox heyday) were never truly "beating" IE from a marketshare perspective.
onion2k•Dec 2, 2025
not via marketshare
That's not an entirely fair measure though, considering Microsoft lost an antitrust case that was brought because they were unfairly leveraging their monopoly in operating systems to give them an advantage in browser adoption. The DOJ threatened to break up Microsoft over it, and eventually only stopped when Microsoft added an option for users to pick a difference default browser over IE.
By that time IE's dominance was beyond Mozilla's reach and it was only when Google leveraged their monopoly in online advertising that a real alternative option for users became viable.
There was never a browser choice mandate in the US.
leetnewb•Dec 2, 2025
There was a period of time when our university help desk was installing and recommending Firefox for students and faculty to use over ie6.
cogman10•Dec 1, 2025
I'd also point out that IE won the title from Netscape in the first place, which was the basis for the Mozilla software set (that later spun off into firefox).
Mozilla didn't "take on" IE. Mozilla reclaimed their lost browser position. IE kicked the proverbial posterior of Netscape which both Netscape and Mozilla struggled to reclaim right up until the release of Firefox.
readthenotes1•Dec 1, 2025
Didn't Mozilla reclaim its title after Microsoft stopped its s monopolistic and anti-competitive activities? Or do I have the timing wrong?
biglyburrito•Dec 1, 2025
lol, please tell me at what point in time Microsoft stopped its monopolistic and anti-competitive activities.
ghurtado•Dec 1, 2025
They never did stop, but there was a time when they had to slow down right after being found guilty in a pretty big anti trust case in 2001.
The case was specifically about IE integration in Windows, so it definitely had an impact.
I think this is probably what the comment was thinking about.
raw_anon_1111•Dec 2, 2025
And in the US, there was never a time that Microsoft was forced to ship an operating system without a browser
cogman10•Dec 1, 2025
That was maybe a factor in the EU. In the US, MS never really stopped their anti-competitive activities. IE has been distributed as the default browser for windows in the US since forever.
MS presented the choice for a browser from 2009->2011.
IDK that MS has ever actually fixed the situation since their last fine in 2013.
IIRC, firefox really started taking off around Firefox 3, which was first released in 2006. Looks like they officially beat IE in 2010. That does seem to line up with MS's implementation of the browser choice screen.
thomassmith65•Dec 1, 2025
It wasnt about "respecting users", or "agency" but simply implemented standards properly.
That's the story of how Netscape succeeded against MSIE. Only they didn't. Firefox did.
In November 2007, IE had 77.4% of the browser market, Firefox 16.0%, and Netscape 0.6%
qbrass•Dec 2, 2025
From the same Wikipedia page:
"On July 15, 2003, Time Warner (formerly AOL Time Warner) disbanded Netscape. Most of the programmers were laid off, and the Netscape logo was removed from the building."
Peak Netscape was 1996. By 2003, they had already handed development off to Mozilla, and Netscape the browser was just a thin veneer over Mozilla's browser.
By 2007, it was just Mozilla with AOL branding and almost all of it's users were people still using AOL in 2007.
smileson2•Dec 1, 2025
builds on your point but from what I remember actually having tabs was a really big deal too
umanwizard•Dec 2, 2025
Firefox succeeded because it had tabs and supported extensions. Literally the only reasons IMO.
fragmede•Dec 2, 2025
And it was fast, and small. Back in those days, download size mattered.
nomel•Dec 2, 2025
No, it was larger than many of the other browsers (like Opera), and size wasn't different enough to matter. Back then, download time was entirely quantized by "one night", because the only thing that mattered was that it finished by morning so someone picking up the phone wouldn't sever the dialup connection. A substation piece of software, like a browser, was happening during sleep time, regardless of size, and rare, so two night would also be fine (resuming was trivial with ftp, where these were sourced, usually from university mirrors).
majormajor•Dec 2, 2025
Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox first made was in the 2002-2004 era where a substantial portion of the internet-trendsetting audience that adopted it in the US had broadband.
20% of adult Americans had broadband at home by early 2004 - https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2006/05/28/part-1-broad... - which is not a majority but had heavy overlap with the group that wasn't just settling for IE6. Similar with Facebook - it was driven by the mostly-young tech-forward early-adopter crowd that either had broadband at home or was at university with fast internet.
buu700•Dec 2, 2025
This just reminded me of the time I thought Firefox was cooked when tabs were finally added in IE7. The idea that IE was ever suddenly going to have a huge resurgence is amusing in hindsight, but it really felt like we were stuck with it for a while there.
MallocVoidstar•Dec 2, 2025
I started using Firefox with version 1.5, as did many of my friends, and we were doing it because it was flat out better. We did not care about 'stagnating' or standards.
vondur•Dec 2, 2025
Firefox grew in popularity due to widespread spyware issues at the time. Much of that spyware specifically targeted Internet Explorer’s ActiveX technology, making Firefox the safest alternative browser. I had everyone I know installing it and they all liked it.
leetnewb•Dec 2, 2025
Not just moving very fast. Mobile is bigger than desktop, Google owns the platform, defaults probably matter more, and control is tighter.
IshKebab•Dec 1, 2025
> the majority who don’t use “AI”
Citation definitely needed. ChatGPT has almost a billion users.
I do agree with the main point that this should be easy to turn off, but let's not pretend that everyone hates AI as much as the average HN nerd.
Also, you could argue that Firefox's only remaining users are the average HN nerd and therefore it shouldn't pursue AI, but that's exactly the problem.
Bratmon•Dec 1, 2025
Yeah, that claim killed all credibility of the author for me. I firmly believe that if making your point requires you to invent some statistics that clearly don't pass the smell test, it's time to accept that your point may be wrong.
raincole•Dec 1, 2025
People who hate AI enough to affect their choice of browser are definitely the minority.
However, realistically Firefox is a niche browser now and will stay so. So niche that appealing to the minority becomes a valid strategy again.
cpncrunch•Dec 1, 2025
According to a Pew study, the majority of Americans use AI on a regular basis:
That study only says that most Americans think they interact with AI at least a few times a week (it doesn't say how or if it's intentional). And it also says the vast majority feel they have little or no control over whether AI is used in the lives.
For example, someone getting a google search result containing an AI response is technically interacting with AI but not necessarily making use of its response or even wanting to see it in the first place. Or perhaps someone suspects their insurance premiums were decided by AI (whether that's true or not). Or customer service that requires you go through a chat bot before you get real service.
jrjfjgkrj•Dec 1, 2025
I use Firefox as my main browser.
when the AI tab/sidebar appeared, I just closed it. that's it. and it never appeared again. I didn't need to change any special setting.
maybe there was another dialog or two which asked me to enable AI something which I answered No and dont remember.
this article is written in bad faith, Firefox is not pushing AI at every opportunity like Edge for example
arjie•Dec 1, 2025
Mozilla has the classic problem of a non-profit that achieved its aims. I was around back in the day and my friends and I were avid evangelists of Firefox - a few cogs in the wheel of the marketing installing Firefox on school machines and getting all the elderly people to use it and so on. There were user groups and student ambassador programs and so on. It was an incredible marketing effort combined with an effort to bring standards and compliance to them into the mainstream. And it worked because they added features at a rate that IE simply did not match.
The extension ecosystem, tabs, plugins, and notably whatever effort they did behind the scenes to ensure that companies that did streaming video etc. would work with their browser all played out really well.
I think the ultimate problem is that Mozilla's mission of a standards-compliant web with open-source browsers everywhere ultimately did get achieved. The era of "Works with IE6" badges has ended and the top browsers run on open-source engines. Despite our enthusiasm at the time for it, I think the truth is that Firefox was probably just a vehicle for this, much bigger, achievement.
Now that it's been achieved, Mozilla is in the fortunate place where Firefox only needs to exist as a backstop against Chrome sliding into high-proprietary world while providing the utility to Google that they get to say they're not a monopoly on web technologies.
Mozilla's search for a new mission isn't some sign of someone losing their way. It's just what happens to the Hero of Legend after he defeats the Big Bad. There's a post-denouement period. Sam Gamgee gets to go become Mayor of the Shire, which is all very convenient, but a non-profit like Mozilla would much rather find a similar enough mission that they can apply their vast resources to. That involves the same mechanics as product development, and they're facing the same primary thing: repeated failure.
That's just life.
edelbitter•Dec 1, 2025
This new "please accept cookies and scripts to prove you are running Google Chrome without Adblockers" Internet does not exactly look like mission accomplished to me. And that is before we even get to the part of the Internet that goes straight to "please run this Android app so we can ask Google who truly owns your device".
If Mozilla was not busy "offering" (renamed the no-thank-you setting once again) so many "experiences" they could be doing much of the same stuff they did back in the day.
RicoElectrico•Dec 2, 2025
American non-profits seem to be run like corporations, with all disadvantages of it. Bloated, losing focus, growing for the sake of growth (where growth means headcount and income, not necessarily charter goals)
bawolff•Dec 2, 2025
I think its even worse than that. Corporations at least have a bottom line to chase. At the end of the day there is the hard reality of you are either making money or you arent. There is an objective measure of success. American non profits are like the bad parts without the checks and balances of actually having to make money.
bloppe•Dec 2, 2025
I mean, non-profits also have to make money to stay alive, they're just not allowed to pay dividends to investors.
Amezarak•Dec 2, 2025
Mozilla did lose their way. It happened because they abandoned their core users: you. People who loved Firefox so much they practically forced it on everyone around them.
Google released Chrome with a massive advertising campaign, reaching even to television. They put ads for Chrome on the world's biggest web properties. It was packaged in installers. Not to say it wasn't a good browser - but it wasn't obviously better than Firefox. This marketing campaign bought them a ton of marketshare.
Mozilla's response, instead of sticking by Mozilla evangelists, nearly all of whom were power users, was to decide that the browser was too complicated for its users. It needed to be more like Chrome. It needed to be the browser for the proverbial grandma. So they axed features (like Panorama), configurability, and extensibility, alienating everyone who really cared. Only they didn't have the marketing heft of Google, so they didn't get Grandma, either.
Ever since then they've been panicking and grasping at straws and shoving in shovelware like Pocket in obviously vain attempts to regain what they had. And they never will, until they make people like you and me LOVE Firefox again.
creata•Dec 2, 2025
> And they never will, until they make people like you and me LOVE Firefox again.
What are the sorts of features you think they should consider adding?
bbor•Dec 2, 2025
Random thought, but Kagi is acting like I wish Mozilla would. Their main product is a search engine, but they’ve been trying out a slew of other initiatives, all of which seem well thought out and integrate LLMs in an exclusively thoughtful, opt-in way. Surely many of them will end up being failures, but I can’t help but be impressed.
Maybe it’s because I’m a power user and they tend to cater to power users, idk — that’s definitely what the comment above yours is hinting at.
But at this point, I think we can all agree that whatever Mozilla is doing now isn’t working… so maybe power users are worth a shot again?
dralley•Dec 2, 2025
If Mozilla tried to do something like Kagi, they would likely be castigated by half of HN for "yet another side project adventure"
hd4•Dec 1, 2025
It's advisable to use a prefs.js for this sort of thing
prefs.js is modified by browser itself. And it contains lots of stuff by default already.
You can store your custom preferences in user.js file - Firefox will copy those to prefs.js at startup.
From your link:
The user.js[1] file is optional. If you have one whenever the application is started it will overwrite any settings in prefs.js with the corresponding settings from user.js.
Putting the flags in Firefox just seems logical not "Hostile Design". Yes, there could be an easier way to turn it off, such as a menu item, but the flags need to be there first before the menu entry can exist.
The author claims to be an "IaaS engineer", surely, he can figure out how to write a firefox plugin, that can do what he wants, and use that to help non-technical users, and if it becomes popular enough will probably effect the change he wishes to see.
tapoxi•Dec 1, 2025
Why can't the menu entry be created alongside the flags? Surely if it's too complicated, then creating a plugin would also be too complicated for someone who doesn't work at Mozilla and doesn't know the codebase?
anon7000•Dec 1, 2025
It’s probably not too complicated, more a matter of how to expose settings to users in a way that makes sense. Every flag could be automatically turned into a better UI or menu somewhere, but then you have thousands of settings no one cares about which would be easy to use incorrectly. The stuff that shows up in context menus and settings needs to be a least a little bit curated for it to make sense. about:config isn’t exactly hard to use either (there’s an actual UI, not the code shown in the blog post).
In this case, yeah, having a single option to toggle off AI settings makes plenty of sense to curate a settings page for! But it’s probably a prioritization or product problem, not a technical issue.
edelbitter•Dec 1, 2025
Its not just that each new "feature" is unnecessarily difficult to disable, and already active-with-privacy-side-effect by the time you notice.
Most new "features" are by now covered by an existing setting and/or policy. Yet I recognize a pattern of introducing new "but did you opt out of THIS NEW thing?" or "but did you opt out of VERSION TWO of this previously rejected thing?" setting/policy. It has become unsafe to upgrade to new Firefox releases, because each one will disrespect previous user choice in another unexpected way.
hekkle•Dec 1, 2025
If you don't want new features, don't upgrade it, what in the non-sequitur is this? I get the argument that it SHOULD be OPT-IN rather than OPT-OUT, but that would require annoying pop-ups every upgrade that explains the new features and ask if you want to OPT-IN. That is more burden on the developers and will annoy more users than benefit.
If you are concerned, they do have what is called a 'changelog' that will explain all of the new features and how to switch them off if you like.
zzo38computer•Dec 2, 2025
You might want some of the new features (such as TLS 1.3, WebP, some security fixes, etc), but avoid some others (such as HSTS, many new web APIs, secure contexts, AI, some CSS commands, etc), and want to keep some features that are removed in later versions (such as several settings, and many other things).
hekkle•Dec 2, 2025
You're right, you may want some features but not all of them. That is why firefox provides the flags for you to turn features on/off. You mention that a user might wast "TLS 1.3, WebP, some security fixes, etc". I would argue that if a user knows what these are, they are capable of working out a flag.
zzo38computer•Dec 2, 2025
Not all of the functions can be controlled by the flags, though.
acomjean•Dec 1, 2025
I noticed the ai sidebar. Annoying. But left column browser tabs are back, which is a plus.
bbor•Dec 2, 2025
That reminds me that their new tab grouping feature is the first one to really impress me and immediately enter my workflow in… years? Probably since either reader mode or auto-translate first dropped.
Highly recommend everyone check it out. Handily trounces all the tab management extensions I’ve tried over the years on FF and Chrome
danielhlockard•Dec 1, 2025
Another user said this, but I'm going to echo it -- Firefox opened up the LLM chat sidebar one time. I closed it. It's stayed closed. It hasn't asked me to open it again. I don't understand the hatred for something you can just _not use_. People will use it if they want to. Firefox also has a very tiny market share in comparison to other browsers.
barnabee•Dec 1, 2025
I need things I don’t want to use to not appear in the UI.
I don’t fill my house with tools and products I don’t want and I’m not willing to have them on my computer screen either.
arp242•Dec 2, 2025
Different people want different features. Insisting Firefox never shows you anything you personally don't use is a bizarre unworkable demand.
bawolff•Dec 2, 2025
Why not? That is how firefox got popular in the first place. Mozilla sea monkey was bloated, firefox cut out all the crap nobody wanted.
jjpones•Dec 2, 2025
> I need things I don’t want to use to not appear in the UI.
Couldn't have said it better myself. Similarly, current youtube is unusable without element blocking and custom CSS editing. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a way to remove UI elements from Firefox, no?
Krssst•Dec 2, 2025
It does not show up in the UI once disabled, does not re-enable again and does not pester the user into enabling it again as proprietary software often does.
I can understand criticism on the development time that may have been better spent, but less criticism against the existence of something that is fairly easily disabled and not user-hostile in intent.
I disabled the AI stuff immediately on my side (through the regular UI, not about:config settings) and never saw anything AI-related in Firefox afterwards.
It's worrying seeing Firefox getting so much more criticism than all the more user-hostile browsers that end up benefiting from such somewhat unwarranted criticism against the most popular non-hostile browser.
cyberrock•Dec 2, 2025
I can't speak for everyone but the fact that it appears suddenly at all is rather annoying. It's like a blast of cosmic rays aimed right at my Error-Producing memory. You can tell me that I won a billion dollars and the solution to the Kryptos puzzle and I would still seethe over forgetting the what band I was about to look up.
That said Firefox is pretty good at obeying its own "Recommend me new features" option.
tartoran•Dec 2, 2025
I don't like shoved down user throats features but i feel that Firefox has to evolve with times or simply wither. It's important how they do proceed with that tough. So far they're not abusive in behavior. I'm back to Firefox after giving up in Chrome and I'm quite pleased with it. Firefox is best for me.
arp242•Dec 1, 2025
I think I disabled "Use AI to suggest tab group names" and "enable link previews" in settings (not about:config), and I don't really see any AI anywhere else? I can add/remove some chat thing from the sidebar, but you can just remove that button and you don't need to use it. It's like any other feature one may choose to not use.
I now see there's also a "Create alt texts automatically" for pdfjs. This actually seems one of the more useful AI features I've seen. But I've never noticed it exists as I don't need this accessibility feature. You can disable it in the pdfjs (no about:config needed).
In short, Firefox is not forcing anyone to use AI and ways to disable it are not that obfuscated.
Aeolun•Dec 1, 2025
The latest quagmire is Firefox adding a completely optional AI sidebar? Seriously, some people are impossible to please. Just don’t open it if you don’t like it…
tumult•Dec 1, 2025
No. There is a lot more than that. The AI stuff appears in places in the UI where other things used to, like in right-click menus and when you are entering text into fields. And it's not opt-in. It's on by default. Unless you are willing to search for how to turn it off and open the non-GUI about:config stuff and modify raw settings in a text table (with no descriptions or help text next to them) then you can't even turn it off. Also, the AI stuff takes up disk space.
abdullahkhalids•Dec 2, 2025
The default Right Click Menu in Firefox is
- Icon bar: Back, Forward, Reload, Bookmark
- Save Page As...
- Select All
- Take Screenshot
- Ask An AI Chatbot
- View Page Source
- Inspect Accessibility Properties
- Inspect
I would bet that 99% of Firefox users have never ever even once clicked on any of the options besides the first one (icon bar).
petesergeant•Dec 2, 2025
> No. There is a lot more than that.
There's not really though. The most annoying thing was when highlighting text a weird icon showed up. I clicked on it, and one of the most prominent buttons on it was "turn this shit off". So I did.
This will probably be a bit useful for me when I want to copy web pages into Gemini for data extraction.
sfRattan•Dec 1, 2025
I've added a room to your home.
Sometimes, there's a butler in there who seems absentminded and can only remember things up to a few thousand words. He once stacked all your dishes in the refrigerator and dumped all the food into the sink.
Other times, there's a demon in there who seems hellbent on destroying the innocence of your children and ripping apart your family. He once gave your children snuff films and instructions to build a bomb.
Just don't open the door if you don't like it... Some people are impossible to please.
Aeolun•Dec 1, 2025
No, no.
> I've added a room to your home.
They’ve added a room to their home. That they let you live in, for free.
I’ll also mention that the room right next to it had all the contents you claim to take issue with.
The problem here is that you shouldn’t leave children home alone, not that it has two potentially dangerous rooms. There’s several more such rooms in your house, and you wouldn’t let them cook or use your power tools by themselves either (not until they prove they can be trusted with that anyway).
sfRattan•Dec 1, 2025
Yes, this is why we routinely fill council homes (or public project housing) with amnesiac butlers to rearrange the residents' possessions, and also with demons for, um, reasons.
Completely reasonable things to do.
How else would we recoup our investment in the hugely expensive, unpredictable butler/demon spawning machines?
>The problem here is that you shouldn’t leave children home alone, not that it has two potentially dangerous rooms. There’s several more such rooms in your house, and you wouldn’t let them cook or use your power tools by themselves either (not until they prove they can be trusted with that anyway).
Depends on age, and the children in question. Also, if I have power tools it's because I chose them. And neither amnesiac butlers nor stochastic demons are necessary to not starve in the way that cooking food is, so the assessments of risk and basic good sense are not comparable.
mvdtnz•Dec 2, 2025
> They’ve added a room to their home. That they let you live in, for free.
They don't let you stay there for free. They let you stay there because the world's biggest advertising company pays them to.
NicuCalcea•Dec 2, 2025
> Just don't open the door if you don't like it... Some people are impossible to please.
I mean... yeah? Do you use every feature of every piece of software you have installed?
sfRattan•Dec 2, 2025
Until the last few years, most features added to software I use haven't:
...had functionally nondeterminstic, unpredictable results in response to how I use them.
...written in long-form English text with confidence and no guarantee of factual accuracy.
...coaxed children into codependent pseudo-relationships with ML models or encouraged suicide.
AI isn't a new feature; it's a new category. And the people who don't understand why some of us don't want it everywhere don't understand that distinction, or else are financially motivated to ignore it and gaslight everyone about the categorical boundaries crossed.
I use LLMs and diffusion style image generators... Where I understand the model I've chosen, can control it locally, and have enough tacit knowledge to double check the outputs before I go ahead with something. I don't trust Mozilla to ensure any of those things anymore. They've long since burned that credibility.
NicuCalcea•Dec 2, 2025
Still, just don't use them? I have no interest in AI in my browser and have had no difficulty avoiding it in Firefox.
johncolanduoni•Dec 2, 2025
Maybe I’m using the wrong web browsers - mine have always had those problems (except that the pseudo-relationships were with real, horrifically bad people).
cdrini•Dec 2, 2025
> the people who don't understand why some of us don't want it everywhere don't understand that distinction, or else are financially motivated to ignore it and gaslight everyone about the categorical boundaries crossed.
This is such a common fallacy that I think it should be given a name. When you believe that the people who disagree with you must either be ignorant or malicious. Leaves no room for honest disagreement or discussion. Maybe the "dumb-or-evil" fallacy?
sfRattan•Dec 2, 2025
It's a specific case of the false dilemma, sure.
But, in life, when you meet enough AI evangelists, what was formally a logical fallacy becomes informally a useful, even necessary heuristic.
cdrini•Dec 2, 2025
Perhaps; but I would argue talking to many AI evangelists is a form of selection bias. Which makes the false dichotomy conclusion reasonable given the inputs, but still inaccurate given reality.
True, it's a form of false dichotomy, but I think this specific instance is particularly interesting in that it allows the holder to dehumanise their opponent to an extent, and justify lack of discussion. It's also an incredibly common conclusion in politics after people gain a somewhat superficial understanding of both sides. I wonder if it might play a key role in social polarization.
For me the strongest arguments are the ones that can argue the opponent's side as effectively as the opponent, and then show why it's weak. And that feels entirely incompatible with a dumb-or-evil argument.
sfRattan•Dec 2, 2025
>I think this specific instance is particularly interesting in that it allows the holder to dehumanise their opponent to an extent, and justify lack of discussion.
That's a wild take and a wild leap. For my own part, I see the failure or refusal to comprehend someone else's preferences, values, or boundaries as itself a profoundly human quality, even if it's a quality I don't love, rather than one which would cause me to see someone as less human.
I will admit that, when there's enough nonsense money being thrown after a vaunted object, sensible discussion can feel pointless. Prudence goes deaf amid the din of hype.
And yes, steelmanning can be highly persuasive, but not when premises are radically different enough between two parties. It's really a more productive tool to improve your model of someone else.
jabbywocker•Dec 2, 2025
lol
throwaway1389z•Dec 1, 2025
Based on the article, you have to disable a whole heap of AI features, not a simple optional AI sidebar.
This include things like using AI to assist with rendering/processing of PDF, looking at the flags.
As a Firefox users, this seems very troubling to me.
Aeolun•Dec 1, 2025
That’s what the flags seem to have as a subject sure, but my firefox hasn’t spammed AI in my face even once, and I’ve looked at a lot of PDF’s, so clearly it’s not mandatory.
throwaway1389z•Dec 2, 2025
Did you check your network logs when opening PDFs? Why these flags are there to begin with?
sunaookami•Dec 2, 2025
>This include things like using AI to assist with rendering/processing of PDF, looking at the flags.
Firefox is downloading a local model and using that to add alt-text to images inside PDFs which is great for accessibility. You can see all models that Firefox downloaded at about:addons. Every AI feature besides the (optional) sidebar (obviously) are local modals that run completely on-device.
phyzome•Dec 2, 2025
And added Perplexity to the search engines, and did the tab grouping thing, and took away keyboard shortcut space for the sidebar...
einpoklum•Dec 1, 2025
People should also know that Firefox (and Thunderbird) collect _quite a bit_ of information about your interaction via their telemetry mechanisms.
Here are instructions on how to disable all of it:
(and no, you can't do it with just a few checkboxes in the prefs, you have to go into the advanced pref editor and look up some stuff.)
Fnoord•Dec 2, 2025
I guess Mozilla also wants to jump on the AI bandwagon.
Out of the five options available, only one is European (the one I am using). What I don't like is how I cannot add my own custom endpoint. What if I run Mistral locally (with Ollama, for example) and want to use that?
Also, I really do think there should be a fat warning about uploading data from browser to a third party. Yes, every bloody time. Not everything the browser shows is publicly available data. There are people who are going to break the law with this tool (ie. using PII with LLM), and the people who are damaged are going to be innocent third parties who didn't opt-out or opt-in anything.
The BS with not being easily able to disable a feature like this is probably to deter, or because 'user studies' showed people don't want to disable it. Well, fuck that. It isn't rocket science to have a checkbox which just deals with these values in about:config.
denismi•Dec 2, 2025
> Out of the five options available, only one is European (the one I am using). What I don't like is how I cannot add my own custom endpoint. What if I run Mistral locally (with Ollama, for example) and want to use that?
Set up your preferred self-hosted web interface (OpenWebUI or whatever, I haven't looked into this for a while), point it at ollama, and then configure it in Firefox:
browser.ml.chat.provider = http://localhost:3000/
At home I point this at Kagi Assistant, at work I point it to our internal GenAI platform's chat endpoint.
denkmoon•Dec 2, 2025
Out of curiosity, for the AI inept, how does this work? I can just point firefox at "https://kagi.com/assistant" and it can use it? Is that using MCP or is there some other standard interface for this?
jeroenhd•Dec 2, 2025
Most of these AI providers use a similar kind of common query structure. OpenWebUI is a mostly consistent copy of ChatGPT so that's what the browser seems to default to when you configure something custom.
The formatted prompt is something like "The user is on the page 'Stories about Cats'. The user wants you to summarize the following text: <text you have selected goes here>". You can configure your own prompt in about:config if you want, there are a bunch of examples here: https://github.com/mozilla-l10n/firefox-l10n/blob/main/en-GB...
There are prompts optimised for specific AI providers but the generic ones should work with any provider your choose.
When the web page opens at that URL, you're either going to get redirected to login and then redirected back, or the AI frontend will start executing the prompt.
KetoManx64•Dec 2, 2025
It's functions as a mini browser window without a URL bar
Animats•Dec 2, 2025
It's been all downhill for Mozilla since Brendan Eich was fired.
tartoran•Dec 2, 2025
He went on to develop Brave!
whatshisface•Dec 2, 2025
Mozilla is a search traffic vendor with one client, not a combination of the EFF and the FSF. That's their behavior and motives in a nutshell. How big of a fraction of the Google traffic comes from power users? How would they find an alternative? Those are the questions the (rational) high-paid execs at Mozilla ask about us.
bawolff•Dec 2, 2025
The biggest problem with mozilla is they are trend chasing instead of finding a niche.
The AI stuff is the perfect example. Are there people who like AI? Certainly. Will they use firefox? Probably not.
At this stage firefox is the anti-establishment choice. That crowd hates AI. Betting on AI might make sense if you are chrome. It doesn't make sense if you are firefox.
killjoywashere•Dec 2, 2025
I think something people should take a hard look at is Firefox's crypto libraries. Firefox's implementation of cryptography in NSS is fundamentally in the browser. Chrome works with the OS. One could argue which implementation is better, but as a user, it's really helpful to have Firefox laying around from time to time. For all sorts of reasons.
danpalmer•Dec 2, 2025
Opting out of "AI" is performative and pointless for companies to support. "AI" has been woven throughout most of the tech products we use for decades at this point. We're in a brief period where people are noticing the new crop of AI features, but AI is an implementation detail that will disappear into the background. Even just looking at modern transformer-based language models, most of it is happening in the background and not visible.
Opting out of AI would be like saying that you don't use JavaScript because you don't like the moral position of the guy who wrote it. That's a reasonable moral position to take (I totally get not wanting to use LLMs for reasons of copyright, art, or even just capability), but a completely unreasonable technical position to take, functionally impossible.
Why does Mozilla not give you a convenient opt out? Because it's hard, low impact, and functionally no-one wants it.
AlexandrB•Dec 2, 2025
I think it's unfortunate that everything gets called AI, but people are clearly upset by the LLM stuff, which has not been around for decades. Also, it's still pretty easy to disable JS AFAIK so that comparison kind of proves the point that this should be an option.
I really don't get folks who defend tech paternalism - where features are pushed on users because "daddy knows best".
danpalmer•Dec 2, 2025
Opting out of a specific feature is completely reasonable, I can get behind the push back on tech paternalism, but opting out of a basically unconnected set of features based on an implementation detail is the bit that I think is unnecessary.
evrenesat•Dec 2, 2025
“A user-agent is software that performs communication or interaction with another system on behalf of the user, historically stemming from earlier messaging systems, and literally meaning 'the user’s representative actor'.”
I guess everyone would agree that web browsers would come to our mind when we hear "user-agent" in general context. After years of forward and backward evolution of web extensions, AI powered web browsers inevitably will move forward the meaning of the term "user-agent" and deliver the value it actually promises.
Together with the advance of "browser-use" optimized local LLMs, current M4 powered Macbook Air can provide enough juice to aid users' web browsing needs. I believe soon AI hubs installed at homes, or cloud based private AI inference engines will become much more accessible offerings to help with mobile browsers as well. Overall, I think it's ridiculous to criticise Mozilla for introducing optional AI features on Firefox.
AlexandrB•Dec 2, 2025
This sounds like a marketing shpiel rather than a prediction. I think the primary value offered by AI browsers will be to the AI vendors - as they will have far more control over user behavior as well as far better ability to surveil and monitor for marketing purposes.
evrenesat•Dec 2, 2025
This is what I have believed and expected since I first heard the term 'user agent' 25 years ago.
conqrr•Dec 2, 2025
For those who have worked or work at Mozilla, how is it to be employed there?
19 Comments
That is revisionist history. Firefox succeeded because MS was sitting on their hands with IE, and it was stagnating. Firefox didnt do the opposite of what IE - you could argue Mozilla was doing what MS should have been.
It wasnt about "respecting users", or "agency" but simply implemented standards properly.
And that's going to be a hard problem with Chrome because you're up against a browser that is moving very, very, fast.
It was a better browser through and through, maybe because MS slept on IE or maybe not, but in the end it isn't revisionist to say they beat MS's proverbial posterior because the browser was better.
But also, google spent a mountain of money advertising chrome.
Neither KDE nor OS X ever shipped their built-in Web Inspector prior to the appearance of Firebug in 2006, and by that point WebKit and Safari were already in full swing. The very first iteration[1] of Web Inspector appeared around the same time as Firebug and was an original contribution by Apple; it wasn't borrowed from KHTML.
1. <https://web.archive.org/web/20070621162114/https://webkit.or...>
I think this factor isn't given enough weight in the shift to Firefox.
At that time, the largest pain point in web development was (by a long shot) browser compatibility.
When developers fell in love with Firefox, they started pushing business requirements away from IE and towards the browser that didn't feel like it was their enemy. Alongside with this there was also massive shift to start taking web standards seriously, which is another area where IE dropped the ball spectacularly
It took a few years, but eventually pointy haired managers got sick of our whining and gave in.
Having lived through the browser wars, this is my new favorite fact about the whole thing.
It really was a very different time, and you couldn't have convinced me back then that I would miss it one day.
https://blog.chriszacharias.com/a-conspiracy-to-kill-ie6
Once Chrome came along with their devtools, improvements quickly escalated between the 2 before Google eventually won out.
I can't recall the exact point in time when my use of Firefox fell off, but it was probably due to the account integrations with Chrome.
Not to mention preferential treatment like the Youtube anti-IE campaign [1]
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/4/18529381/google-youtube-in...
Chrome was a lot faster and a lot lighter (in the beginning)
not via marketshare. The fact is, only developers (and adjacent) were using firefox. IE, during those days (pre-chrome) was still such a dominant browser that you had to check for IE compatibility.
But today, developers are not checking for firefox compatibility. So, firefox today (and during the firefox heyday) were never truly "beating" IE from a marketshare perspective.
That's not an entirely fair measure though, considering Microsoft lost an antitrust case that was brought because they were unfairly leveraging their monopoly in operating systems to give them an advantage in browser adoption. The DOJ threatened to break up Microsoft over it, and eventually only stopped when Microsoft added an option for users to pick a difference default browser over IE.
By that time IE's dominance was beyond Mozilla's reach and it was only when Google leveraged their monopoly in online advertising that a real alternative option for users became viable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....
Mozilla didn't "take on" IE. Mozilla reclaimed their lost browser position. IE kicked the proverbial posterior of Netscape which both Netscape and Mozilla struggled to reclaim right up until the release of Firefox.
The case was specifically about IE integration in Windows, so it definitely had an impact.
I think this is probably what the comment was thinking about.
MS presented the choice for a browser from 2009->2011.
IDK that MS has ever actually fixed the situation since their last fine in 2013.
IIRC, firefox really started taking off around Firefox 3, which was first released in 2006. Looks like they officially beat IE in 2010. That does seem to line up with MS's implementation of the browser choice screen.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape:
"On July 15, 2003, Time Warner (formerly AOL Time Warner) disbanded Netscape. Most of the programmers were laid off, and the Netscape logo was removed from the building."
Peak Netscape was 1996. By 2003, they had already handed development off to Mozilla, and Netscape the browser was just a thin veneer over Mozilla's browser.
By 2007, it was just Mozilla with AOL branding and almost all of it's users were people still using AOL in 2007.
20% of adult Americans had broadband at home by early 2004 - https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2006/05/28/part-1-broad... - which is not a majority but had heavy overlap with the group that wasn't just settling for IE6. Similar with Facebook - it was driven by the mostly-young tech-forward early-adopter crowd that either had broadband at home or was at university with fast internet.
Citation definitely needed. ChatGPT has almost a billion users.
I do agree with the main point that this should be easy to turn off, but let's not pretend that everyone hates AI as much as the average HN nerd.
Also, you could argue that Firefox's only remaining users are the average HN nerd and therefore it shouldn't pursue AI, but that's exactly the problem.
However, realistically Firefox is a niche browser now and will stay so. So niche that appealing to the minority becomes a valid strategy again.
https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2025/09/17/ai-in-america...
For example, someone getting a google search result containing an AI response is technically interacting with AI but not necessarily making use of its response or even wanting to see it in the first place. Or perhaps someone suspects their insurance premiums were decided by AI (whether that's true or not). Or customer service that requires you go through a chat bot before you get real service.
when the AI tab/sidebar appeared, I just closed it. that's it. and it never appeared again. I didn't need to change any special setting.
maybe there was another dialog or two which asked me to enable AI something which I answered No and dont remember.
this article is written in bad faith, Firefox is not pushing AI at every opportunity like Edge for example
The extension ecosystem, tabs, plugins, and notably whatever effort they did behind the scenes to ensure that companies that did streaming video etc. would work with their browser all played out really well.
I think the ultimate problem is that Mozilla's mission of a standards-compliant web with open-source browsers everywhere ultimately did get achieved. The era of "Works with IE6" badges has ended and the top browsers run on open-source engines. Despite our enthusiasm at the time for it, I think the truth is that Firefox was probably just a vehicle for this, much bigger, achievement.
Now that it's been achieved, Mozilla is in the fortunate place where Firefox only needs to exist as a backstop against Chrome sliding into high-proprietary world while providing the utility to Google that they get to say they're not a monopoly on web technologies.
Mozilla's search for a new mission isn't some sign of someone losing their way. It's just what happens to the Hero of Legend after he defeats the Big Bad. There's a post-denouement period. Sam Gamgee gets to go become Mayor of the Shire, which is all very convenient, but a non-profit like Mozilla would much rather find a similar enough mission that they can apply their vast resources to. That involves the same mechanics as product development, and they're facing the same primary thing: repeated failure.
That's just life.
If Mozilla was not busy "offering" (renamed the no-thank-you setting once again) so many "experiences" they could be doing much of the same stuff they did back in the day.
Google released Chrome with a massive advertising campaign, reaching even to television. They put ads for Chrome on the world's biggest web properties. It was packaged in installers. Not to say it wasn't a good browser - but it wasn't obviously better than Firefox. This marketing campaign bought them a ton of marketshare.
Mozilla's response, instead of sticking by Mozilla evangelists, nearly all of whom were power users, was to decide that the browser was too complicated for its users. It needed to be more like Chrome. It needed to be the browser for the proverbial grandma. So they axed features (like Panorama), configurability, and extensibility, alienating everyone who really cared. Only they didn't have the marketing heft of Google, so they didn't get Grandma, either.
Ever since then they've been panicking and grasping at straws and shoving in shovelware like Pocket in obviously vain attempts to regain what they had. And they never will, until they make people like you and me LOVE Firefox again.
What are the sorts of features you think they should consider adding?
Maybe it’s because I’m a power user and they tend to cater to power users, idk — that’s definitely what the comment above yours is hinting at.
But at this point, I think we can all agree that whatever Mozilla is doing now isn’t working… so maybe power users are worth a shot again?
https://kb.mozillazine.org/Prefs.js_file
You can store your custom preferences in user.js file - Firefox will copy those to prefs.js at startup.
From your link:
[1] https://kb.mozillazine.org/User.js_fileThe author claims to be an "IaaS engineer", surely, he can figure out how to write a firefox plugin, that can do what he wants, and use that to help non-technical users, and if it becomes popular enough will probably effect the change he wishes to see.
In this case, yeah, having a single option to toggle off AI settings makes plenty of sense to curate a settings page for! But it’s probably a prioritization or product problem, not a technical issue.
Most new "features" are by now covered by an existing setting and/or policy. Yet I recognize a pattern of introducing new "but did you opt out of THIS NEW thing?" or "but did you opt out of VERSION TWO of this previously rejected thing?" setting/policy. It has become unsafe to upgrade to new Firefox releases, because each one will disrespect previous user choice in another unexpected way.
If you are concerned, they do have what is called a 'changelog' that will explain all of the new features and how to switch them off if you like.
Highly recommend everyone check it out. Handily trounces all the tab management extensions I’ve tried over the years on FF and Chrome
I don’t fill my house with tools and products I don’t want and I’m not willing to have them on my computer screen either.
Couldn't have said it better myself. Similarly, current youtube is unusable without element blocking and custom CSS editing. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a way to remove UI elements from Firefox, no?
I can understand criticism on the development time that may have been better spent, but less criticism against the existence of something that is fairly easily disabled and not user-hostile in intent.
I disabled the AI stuff immediately on my side (through the regular UI, not about:config settings) and never saw anything AI-related in Firefox afterwards.
It's worrying seeing Firefox getting so much more criticism than all the more user-hostile browsers that end up benefiting from such somewhat unwarranted criticism against the most popular non-hostile browser.
That said Firefox is pretty good at obeying its own "Recommend me new features" option.
I now see there's also a "Create alt texts automatically" for pdfjs. This actually seems one of the more useful AI features I've seen. But I've never noticed it exists as I don't need this accessibility feature. You can disable it in the pdfjs (no about:config needed).
In short, Firefox is not forcing anyone to use AI and ways to disable it are not that obfuscated.
- Icon bar: Back, Forward, Reload, Bookmark
- Save Page As...
- Select All
- Take Screenshot
- Ask An AI Chatbot
- View Page Source
- Inspect Accessibility Properties
- Inspect
I would bet that 99% of Firefox users have never ever even once clicked on any of the options besides the first one (icon bar).
There's not really though. The most annoying thing was when highlighting text a weird icon showed up. I clicked on it, and one of the most prominent buttons on it was "turn this shit off". So I did.
This will probably be a bit useful for me when I want to copy web pages into Gemini for data extraction.
Sometimes, there's a butler in there who seems absentminded and can only remember things up to a few thousand words. He once stacked all your dishes in the refrigerator and dumped all the food into the sink.
Other times, there's a demon in there who seems hellbent on destroying the innocence of your children and ripping apart your family. He once gave your children snuff films and instructions to build a bomb.
Just don't open the door if you don't like it... Some people are impossible to please.
> I've added a room to your home.
They’ve added a room to their home. That they let you live in, for free.
I’ll also mention that the room right next to it had all the contents you claim to take issue with.
The problem here is that you shouldn’t leave children home alone, not that it has two potentially dangerous rooms. There’s several more such rooms in your house, and you wouldn’t let them cook or use your power tools by themselves either (not until they prove they can be trusted with that anyway).
Completely reasonable things to do.
How else would we recoup our investment in the hugely expensive, unpredictable butler/demon spawning machines?
>The problem here is that you shouldn’t leave children home alone, not that it has two potentially dangerous rooms. There’s several more such rooms in your house, and you wouldn’t let them cook or use your power tools by themselves either (not until they prove they can be trusted with that anyway).
Depends on age, and the children in question. Also, if I have power tools it's because I chose them. And neither amnesiac butlers nor stochastic demons are necessary to not starve in the way that cooking food is, so the assessments of risk and basic good sense are not comparable.
They don't let you stay there for free. They let you stay there because the world's biggest advertising company pays them to.
I mean... yeah? Do you use every feature of every piece of software you have installed?
...had functionally nondeterminstic, unpredictable results in response to how I use them.
...written in long-form English text with confidence and no guarantee of factual accuracy.
...coaxed children into codependent pseudo-relationships with ML models or encouraged suicide.
AI isn't a new feature; it's a new category. And the people who don't understand why some of us don't want it everywhere don't understand that distinction, or else are financially motivated to ignore it and gaslight everyone about the categorical boundaries crossed.
I use LLMs and diffusion style image generators... Where I understand the model I've chosen, can control it locally, and have enough tacit knowledge to double check the outputs before I go ahead with something. I don't trust Mozilla to ensure any of those things anymore. They've long since burned that credibility.
This is such a common fallacy that I think it should be given a name. When you believe that the people who disagree with you must either be ignorant or malicious. Leaves no room for honest disagreement or discussion. Maybe the "dumb-or-evil" fallacy?
But, in life, when you meet enough AI evangelists, what was formally a logical fallacy becomes informally a useful, even necessary heuristic.
True, it's a form of false dichotomy, but I think this specific instance is particularly interesting in that it allows the holder to dehumanise their opponent to an extent, and justify lack of discussion. It's also an incredibly common conclusion in politics after people gain a somewhat superficial understanding of both sides. I wonder if it might play a key role in social polarization.
For me the strongest arguments are the ones that can argue the opponent's side as effectively as the opponent, and then show why it's weak. And that feels entirely incompatible with a dumb-or-evil argument.
That's a wild take and a wild leap. For my own part, I see the failure or refusal to comprehend someone else's preferences, values, or boundaries as itself a profoundly human quality, even if it's a quality I don't love, rather than one which would cause me to see someone as less human.
I will admit that, when there's enough nonsense money being thrown after a vaunted object, sensible discussion can feel pointless. Prudence goes deaf amid the din of hype.
And yes, steelmanning can be highly persuasive, but not when premises are radically different enough between two parties. It's really a more productive tool to improve your model of someone else.
This include things like using AI to assist with rendering/processing of PDF, looking at the flags.
As a Firefox users, this seems very troubling to me.
Firefox is downloading a local model and using that to add alt-text to images inside PDFs which is great for accessibility. You can see all models that Firefox downloaded at about:addons. Every AI feature besides the (optional) sidebar (obviously) are local modals that run completely on-device.
Here are instructions on how to disable all of it:
https://github.com/Aetherinox/firefox-telemetry-block
(and no, you can't do it with just a few checkboxes in the prefs, you have to go into the advanced pref editor and look up some stuff.)
Out of the five options available, only one is European (the one I am using). What I don't like is how I cannot add my own custom endpoint. What if I run Mistral locally (with Ollama, for example) and want to use that?
Also, I really do think there should be a fat warning about uploading data from browser to a third party. Yes, every bloody time. Not everything the browser shows is publicly available data. There are people who are going to break the law with this tool (ie. using PII with LLM), and the people who are damaged are going to be innocent third parties who didn't opt-out or opt-in anything.
The BS with not being easily able to disable a feature like this is probably to deter, or because 'user studies' showed people don't want to disable it. Well, fuck that. It isn't rocket science to have a checkbox which just deals with these values in about:config.
Set up your preferred self-hosted web interface (OpenWebUI or whatever, I haven't looked into this for a while), point it at ollama, and then configure it in Firefox:
browser.ml.chat.provider = http://localhost:3000/
At home I point this at Kagi Assistant, at work I point it to our internal GenAI platform's chat endpoint.
All the AI toolbar really does is open http://ai.url.com/some-query?prompt=${formattedPrompt} and display it next to the web page you have open.
The formatted prompt is something like "The user is on the page 'Stories about Cats'. The user wants you to summarize the following text: <text you have selected goes here>". You can configure your own prompt in about:config if you want, there are a bunch of examples here: https://github.com/mozilla-l10n/firefox-l10n/blob/main/en-GB...
There are prompts optimised for specific AI providers but the generic ones should work with any provider your choose.
When the web page opens at that URL, you're either going to get redirected to login and then redirected back, or the AI frontend will start executing the prompt.
The AI stuff is the perfect example. Are there people who like AI? Certainly. Will they use firefox? Probably not.
At this stage firefox is the anti-establishment choice. That crowd hates AI. Betting on AI might make sense if you are chrome. It doesn't make sense if you are firefox.
Opting out of AI would be like saying that you don't use JavaScript because you don't like the moral position of the guy who wrote it. That's a reasonable moral position to take (I totally get not wanting to use LLMs for reasons of copyright, art, or even just capability), but a completely unreasonable technical position to take, functionally impossible.
Why does Mozilla not give you a convenient opt out? Because it's hard, low impact, and functionally no-one wants it.
I really don't get folks who defend tech paternalism - where features are pushed on users because "daddy knows best".
I guess everyone would agree that web browsers would come to our mind when we hear "user-agent" in general context. After years of forward and backward evolution of web extensions, AI powered web browsers inevitably will move forward the meaning of the term "user-agent" and deliver the value it actually promises.
Together with the advance of "browser-use" optimized local LLMs, current M4 powered Macbook Air can provide enough juice to aid users' web browsing needs. I believe soon AI hubs installed at homes, or cloud based private AI inference engines will become much more accessible offerings to help with mobile browsers as well. Overall, I think it's ridiculous to criticise Mozilla for introducing optional AI features on Firefox.