This comment under the article gave me a chuckle.
this post was submitted on 26 Feb 2025
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Good thing LibreWolf and other forks exist, including hard forks like the Goanna browsers.
Privacy policies should legally be called surveillance policies.
Or "Invasion of Privacy" Policy
Oh, that last paragraph doesn't give me hope at all. Fucking AI chatbots.
The actual addition to the terms is essentially this:
- If you choose to use the optional AI chatbot sidebar feature, you're subject to the ToS and Privacy Policy of the provider you use, just as if you'd gone to their site and used it directly. This is obvious.
- Mozilla will collect light data on usage, such as how frequently people use the feature overall, and how long the strings of text are that are being pasted in. That's basically it.
The way this article describes it as "cushy caveats" is completely misleading. It's quite literally just "If you use a feature that integrates with third party services, you're relying on and providing data to those services, also we want to know if the feature is actually being used and how much."
The problem is the inclusion of the feature to begin with. It should be an opt in add install.
I agree to a point, but I look at this similar to how I'd view any feature in a browser. Sometimes there are features added that I don't use, and thus, I simply won't use them.
This would be a problem for me if it was an "assistant" that automatically popped up over pages I was on to offer "help," but it's not. It's just a sidebar you can click a button in the menu to pop out, or you can never click that button and you'll never have to look at it.
It's not a feature that auto-enables in a way that actually starts sending data to any AI company, it's just an optional interface, that you have to click a specific button to open, that can then interface with a given AI model if you choose to use it. If you don't want to use it, then you ideally won't even see it open during your use of Firefox.
Please let them not ruin Firefox with some bullshit AI. I can't take much more of this, Firefox is one of the last things I have left.
It's two things:
- Sidebar you can open from the hamburger menu that is basically just a tiny chat UI
- Right click to paste the selected text into the sidebar
If you don't want it, they don't seem to be pushing it any further than that. Just don't click the option in the menus and you'll be fine. (I believe you can also fully disable the option from appearing in settings too)
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That's good to know actually.
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Where's the gofundme for the firefox fork project?
Was this from google turning off the funding tap?
Overhyped AI is going to fail, and it can't happen soon enough. The Mozilla leadership really needs to pay attention to that reality.
i think MS? admitted AI isnt generating useful profit for them, yea its hype like crypto is.
Mozilla leadership needs to be removed
It just became bigger: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-leadership-growth-planning-updates/
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It's not going to disappear, it has its place, but its not going to be shoehorned into every single thing.
Sorry, I realized I'm using my personal jargon in public again. When I said "AI," I meant this overhyped put-it-in-your-mouse garbage. When I'm talking about the actually useful stuff, I usually call it "ML."
Of course you have no reason to know that or care. My apologies.
Well, we had a good run lads, enshitification is here.
Any recommendations for open source alternatives that are convenient and also have an android app supporting ublock origin.
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does this affect forks?
Man all this makes me want to just use Links2 for everything and being a luddite. Complete with cabin in the woods. So frustrating.
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