Mozilla has publicly criticized Microsoft for deploying its AI assistant, Copilot, onto Windows systems without user consent, a practice the Firefox maker describes as prioritizing corporate revenue over user rights.
this condemnation coming after they enabled the link preview popup by default because “it’s not ai” and having a big “activate ai now!!!” button take up half of it, and then doubling down when people rightfully pointed out to them that this is a textbook dark pattern, makes it hypocritical.
they added an ai summary section. it’s disabled by default but it consists more than half of the popup and if disabled has a big blue button on it that activates ai features, the only big blue button on the popup, and it says “continue”. or, it does now. it used to be bigger and say “See more with AI” or some shit.
I feel like there’s a gap in the understanding of this situation. Firefox is struggling for user as is. Imagine you sit at the wheel, everyone and their grandmother are implementing AI everywhere, the average user expects to have AI at their fingertips believe me. Do you choose to stick with the very few who fully reject AI, or at least provide the option to make sure you don’t fall further behind?
This is a question of survival for every product out there, like it or not.
severalstudiesoverthe past few years have shown that a majority of people do not use ai and actively pick products without ai when given the choice. going after the majority feels like a better business decision.
You have to long click or open from the control menu to get link preview
The link preview itself has a direct link to the settings page where you can disable it
It’s true that the link preview content that shows before you activate the AI summary is not AI. It is just showing the open graph content, same as any chat app or whatever
If you like the open graph content, but don’t want the AI summary, you can hit the chevron to fold the summary panel to window decoration size, and it stays folded for all future link previews even through reboots.
The AI model doesn’t download until first use
I don’t like that link preview is how they spent their time, but the misinformation and subsequent overreaction to it is insane. I only even know this stuff or that it exists at all because I thought surely it wasn’t as egregious as people were saying so I checked it out and boy was I right.
I’d be surprised if users that don’t talk about firefox on the internet even know link previews exist.
all of that is correct and also basically what i said. the reason it became a big deal was because of accessibility. the definition of a “long press” is short enough that older users, who tend to hold the mouse button down for longer after a click, were suddenly seeing popup windows everywhere and, believing it to be an issue of the site they were on, assumed their popup blocker was broken. the timing was adjusted to one second in an update and also the long press shortcut was made optional.
when it was pointed out to mozilla that having a popup containing one big blue button in a popup with fancy graphics around it might also be harking back to the popup ads of yore, and that it might compel people to click on the only visible button on instinct, their head of firefox did an interview with pc world where he countered this with, and i’m paraphrasing here, “nuh-uh”. this was in reference to an ama they did where several interaction experts weighed in with frankly pretty standard stuff: don’t surprise the user, don’t shove things in their face, don’t draw attention needlessly.
for reference, here is the popup post-fixing:
before they pushed an update the button didn’t say “continue”, it said “Summarize with AI ✨” and didn’t have a “cancel” option.
oh believe you me i am incredibly concerned about all of it. but they didn’t listen to feedback, is the point. it’s still there, it still pops up randomly due to no accessibility research, it’s still blue.
this condemnation coming after they enabled the link preview popup by default because “it’s not ai” and having a big “activate ai now!!!” button take up half of it, and then doubling down when people rightfully pointed out to them that this is a textbook dark pattern, makes it hypocritical.
Is there an issue with the link preview pop-up thing? I’m pretty sure librewolf has it on by default
they added an ai summary section. it’s disabled by default but it consists more than half of the popup and if disabled has a big blue button on it that activates ai features, the only big blue button on the popup, and it says “continue”. or, it does now. it used to be bigger and say “See more with AI” or some shit.
I feel like there’s a gap in the understanding of this situation. Firefox is struggling for user as is. Imagine you sit at the wheel, everyone and their grandmother are implementing AI everywhere, the average user expects to have AI at their fingertips believe me. Do you choose to stick with the very few who fully reject AI, or at least provide the option to make sure you don’t fall further behind?
This is a question of survival for every product out there, like it or not.
several studies over the past few years have shown that a majority of people do not use ai and actively pick products without ai when given the choice. going after the majority feels like a better business decision.
I don’t like that link preview is how they spent their time, but the misinformation and subsequent overreaction to it is insane. I only even know this stuff or that it exists at all because I thought surely it wasn’t as egregious as people were saying so I checked it out and boy was I right.
I’d be surprised if users that don’t talk about firefox on the internet even know link previews exist.
all of that is correct and also basically what i said. the reason it became a big deal was because of accessibility. the definition of a “long press” is short enough that older users, who tend to hold the mouse button down for longer after a click, were suddenly seeing popup windows everywhere and, believing it to be an issue of the site they were on, assumed their popup blocker was broken. the timing was adjusted to one second in an update and also the long press shortcut was made optional.
when it was pointed out to mozilla that having a popup containing one big blue button in a popup with fancy graphics around it might also be harking back to the popup ads of yore, and that it might compel people to click on the only visible button on instinct, their head of firefox did an interview with pc world where he countered this with, and i’m paraphrasing here, “nuh-uh”. this was in reference to an ama they did where several interaction experts weighed in with frankly pretty standard stuff: don’t surprise the user, don’t shove things in their face, don’t draw attention needlessly.
for reference, here is the popup post-fixing:
before they pushed an update the button didn’t say “continue”, it said “Summarize with AI ✨” and didn’t have a “cancel” option.
I’d be way more concerned about other things in that interview than nitpicking the language when firefox checks notes listened to feedback
oh believe you me i am incredibly concerned about all of it. but they didn’t listen to feedback, is the point. it’s still there, it still pops up randomly due to no accessibility research, it’s still blue.