Super frustrating the AI Chatbots are infecting my Firefox browser now. It looks like malware and pretty much acts like it since it cannot be disabled from the sidebar outside of closing this window. I like vertical tabs, but they require so many other options by default. Even more frustrating that the URL goes to a chrome browser link: chrome://browser/content/genai/chat.html
Alarms very heightened.
chrome:// doesn’t refer to Google Chrome. Way before Google appropriated the word, probably to crowd out any other meaning in search results, “browser chrome” referred to the browser application’s UI.
But yeah, fuck Mozilla for doing this shit.
I am not clicking on it to find out so I’ll take your word for it. None of it is accessible in their settings page and about: URLs would suffice to not trigger alarm bells.
chrome://browser/content/genai/chat.html
You can verify it for yourself. It is a folder inside of your Firefox Profile. It will contain a file called userChrome.css if you made changes to the UI. You don’t need to click on that address to see it. You can look in your Profile folder to see what’s there.
That’s not how UserChrome works.
I’m not saying it isn’t true! I’m familiar.
Been there for a while, look into disabling it via about:config, I’m sure it’s somewhere in there
edit: it’s called
browser.ml.chat.sidebar, or if you want a more futureproof solution, this reddit comment explains how to do it.Go into About:config and set the following to false to disable AI completely.
browser.ml.enable
That only disables the shortcuts. Been there already but good for folks that have not seen it yet.
about:config has all of these set for me. I don’t see anything AI related, but I also use sidebery for tabs/sidebar
browser.ml.chat.enabled false
browser.ml.chat.shortcuts false
browser.ml.chat.shortcuts.custom false
browser.ml.chat.sidebar false
browser.ml.enable false
extensions.ml.enabled false
extensions.ui.mlmodel.hidden trueThe ml stands for machine learning, I think.
Lol yeah, I meant I don’t have the AI junk in firefox’s ui using those settings. Even that chat selection ‘chrome’ page is essentially blank other than a model selector. I don’t know if it usually has anything else, but it’s as local/internal as about:config and the like.
Could someone please enlighten me on what is the companies’ endgame with putting AI chatbots everywhere in their products? (Especially generic ones like this) What are they looking to gain by doing so? And if money, how? Injected ads?
Honest question.
Search is dead. “Content” is dead.
AI is being seen as the portal through which we will access information in future. If so, control of that portal is worth trillions.
It’s a land grab.
This is imo the most succinct way to summarize it.
Are they a 100% sure it’s the future? Maybe not. But they for sure won’t risk missing out on it either, just in case it does end up being the future.
Search engines are getting increasingly harder to use & increasingly showing just AI slop, ads, or propaganda (ofc Google is at the cunting edge of this).
Not any of current big ones, but in the future I hope I’ll be using a personal local open sauce AI just to have it interface with various megacorp AI (eg to do a search for me, or even more dystopian, to eg contact my bank’s AI more efficiently).
And no, we have no idea how it will look like exactly, but they (megacorps) need to monetise AI, and with valuations that high (& atm still basically offering it for free or very cheap for individual consumers) I think that means they need to establish an environment where you won’t be able to function without a few of the big AIs (they are engineering demand & a consolidated/monopolistic market & when they have it the sub prices will skyrocket).
Mozilla is just giving us (albeit shitty/perhaps unwanted) options.
We are not stopping enshitification & neither can Mozilla (and they as a foundation are trying).
I’m still wondering who is going to make the new and updated content for the AI to inaccurately return if it can’t be found using a search. Like if AI summaries replaced all the news sites, where would the AI get the news?
It seems like they took the approach of loading a ton of historical data without any forethought on how AI replacing search would kill the motivation to post anything new on the web at all.
Tech companies: Sounds like someone else’s problem LOL
What if you weren’t concerned about delivering what the user wanted as there wasn’t sufficient competition to force you to, why you could just deliver whatever the highest bidder or your own interests and biases decided?
This used to be a debate Google had with itself, now it’s every single company’s dream to provide what they want you to see.“Splinternet”. What are your options to find other info if there isn’t a functional, reasonably searchable internet to verify, compare, research, debunk, etc.?
It will take a shorter time to ruin the Internet than it did to build it, and I’ll be racing back to the library as long as books are still in print.
Or realizing that sometimes you’re looking for something specific. I remembered an old website that described the seven major metropolises of Antarctica the other day and spent a month trying on and off to coax the result out of Google, which kept serving me results that only matched a few words from my search while Gemini tried alternately to educate me about how there were no real cities in Antarctica and to make up its own stories about imaginary cities there.
That problem is “down the stack” and not their concern
It’s just surveillance capitalism as usual. The basis of free markets only works when all parties have agency and no information assymetries exist. AI chatbots with friendly, conversational tones elicit people to reveal way more personal data than they usually would, and make them more trusting of an algorithm that seems to know them perfectly.
This personal data is then refined and processed to not only profile and identify, but to directly modify the behaviour of users, so that they purchase or do things they wouldn’t otherwise. Every notification, nudge, and inconvenient default setting is the result of billions of A/B tests proven to provide big tech maximum profit.
For some sobering statistics, over 60% of the US has Amazon Prime, the vast majority of which do not even bother to price compare. With Amazon preferencing its own Amazon Basics above competitors at higher prices, this is pure profit.
My take on it:
It’s theorized that innovation is the leading force that makes capitalism go forward and get out of a cycle of crisis, and we’ve been in a crisis for quite some time already, so corporations are desperate for innovation. You might have observed how the word innovation has been used a lot in the last decade, from tech news to universities and investments, all desperate for innovation, pushing anything as innovative.
Then generative Ai appeared and is something that can look impressive at the surface. Corporations believe it to be THE INNOVATION. The one they have been seeking for a long time, that will change the world and create an economic boom just like post-war usa. So they invested as hard as they could and are pushing it as hard as they can.
People in positions to influence product direction must always be demonstrating that they’re “innovating” like this to justify their existence and typically inflated salaries.
I remember when big data was the buzz. Everyone had to have big data, but nobody knew what to do with it. I would do presentations to rooms full of execs, and they would brag about how much data they had, but none could tell you how it added any value.
For the large part it’s speculation, because very few of these companies would reveal such long term plans to the general public.
From my understanding it may be a set of several reasons for doing this, each reason feeding off one another:
- Engagement with an AI chatbot by the user generally leads to them engaging with the chatbot rather than the open web, bestowing more control and mindshare for the companies providing the chatbot interfaces at the expense of everyone else, including search engines and independent websites scraped of their content.
- Holding user data, personal or not, within that walled ecosystem allows for data profiles tailored for each user to be targeted, bundled, and sold in a more efficient and high quality way through these AI chatbots rather than through traditional browsing and tracking (one or two companies control every step of the user’s browsing experience, leading to higher quality and more intricate datasets).
- Once a more “dominant” chatbot emerges as the winner of this competitive race, they will have the benefits of a massive economy of scale, being the gatekeeper of knowledge for the overwhelming majority of users seeking information (even with active dissent by the tech savvy and the privacy concious).
- Investor expectations are built upon the other reasons to be hyped for investing in this “big winner” and fearful of being left investing in the “losers”, leading to opportunistic companies and providers taking advantage of of the economic environment to include these features to attract funding and indicate their willingness to “keep up with the times” to the financial world.
They don’t have one IMO.
There’s the FOMO of “AI is the future. Why? I dunno, everyone is saying it.” And of course all the AI companies jamming their chatbots into everything in the hopes they find something, anything that will make them profitable in the long term.
A lot of internet searching is switching to AI. It’s the equivalent of pointing your browser bar directly to google.
About:config
Search “ml”
disable ml functions and chat.
It’s weird, yes, but there’s no AI interaction by default, it’s basically just a thing that lets you set up your favorite AI if you wish. I played around with it, found it not useful and switched it off. It’s really no harm done, and if it gets some people to stick with firefox, all the better.
LibreWolf is the Firefox that Firefox used to be.
+1 for LibreWolf. been using it for 3 years.
I don’t really care as long as I can turn it off. Having more options are always good, even if the average Lemmy user will most likely never use this feature.
Yes, not sure why there are complaints. I would actually use this feature if they supported duck.ai, but it doesn’t so I just hide the button from my menu.
And this is why I switched to LibreWolf. LibreWolf doesn’t try to be anything but a web browser.
I wish there was LibreWolf for Android. Right now I’m happy with Fennec, but people also recommend Ironfox.
I also kinda wish LibreWolf worked better on MacOS. Luckily this was the perfect excuse to get my parents on Linux. The stupid AI crap and other enshitification really adds usability burdens to less tech literate users.
Librewolf for the win!
And regarding Linux, it’s pretty ironic right? I also moved my Dad to Linux, because it’s easier to support him on what was historically a “less user friendly” operating system than Windows, because Linux isn’t screwing around and pushing unwanted and user-hostile changes. It remains exactly as you set it up to be, and that’s perfect.
Does Ublock origin work with LibreWolf?
It’s preinstalled
Librewolf/Waterfox have sync between mobile and PC? And the send tab to device feature. It’s literally the only things I use. I can selfhost a sync server if necessary.
Yes. I’m syncing between Librewolf and Ironfox.
Waterfox and LibreWolf still exist and are very good.
Firefox forks it is lmao.
Or just customize your user.js.
I switched to Waterfox a few months ago and have no complaints about it. I also signed up for their new, paid search engine ($5/month) literally about 15 minutes ago in order to support them. (Plus, be the customer not the product and all that.)
I think I might also subscribe to either Firefox Relay or MDN Plus too, though, since I do want Mozilla to still survive. Firefox forks need Firefox to still be around.
(Plus, be the customer not the product and all that.)
This is a fine and noble notion that is undermined by, you know, capitalism.
“Why not make them both the customer and the product?” ← if not now, soon, and forever thereafter
I believe this has been here for about a year now. Though they are making it more prominent.
If only Mozilla wasn’t so desperate to take money from any tech company.
Their sources of income outside of that are pretty minimal, so it’s understandable why they are doing it. Luckily, we can just use the forks and benefit from their work.
I understand it but also lament it.
Has it been made more prominent in some way? I believe I toggled off the button in my menu so I dom’t see it anymore.
Edit: Oh looks like they crammed it into settings
It’s also in the context menu, and I think they highlight it with tooltips on a new install.
Seems like they’re pretty good about honoring the opt-out, though. I haven’t seen anything about it since I said no to it, except when I was installing it last month on a new machine.
So what’s the leading alternative browser that doesn’t have AI and is more privacy focused?
Firefox’s forks, since the MPL 2.0 (Mozilla Public License) allows their work to be forked.
The current most popular one is LibreWolf, as it doesn’t include anything extra like this out of the box (Apart from the Ublock Origin adblocker), and has many privacy-conscious settings enabled by default.
Plus for librewolf, note that the only issue I’ve had with it is cockpits terminal doesn’t render correctly
Yeah it can be quite aggressive with visual elements to fool fingerprinting tactics, but you can change to a different fork if it’s something critical to you :)
Yeah, I personally turn some of the fingerprinting protection stuff off to get faster refresh rates. That’s the only downside for me, but I understand why it’s default locked at 60Hz.
Thanks for the info … I’ve been meaning to switch over to librewolf and now I’ll do it.
Eww.
