Rich.
Bold of them when they put enabled by default AI garbage in firefox without the communities consent.
This would be a lot more meaningful if mozilla leadership was positioned strictly against this shitty tech.
In firefox they are enabled by default in the sense that you can get to them via the UI unless you flip some settings, but they don’t do anything unless you use them, including not even downloading the models until first use. So yes, I would prefer firefox not have them (except local translation which uses a local model instead of shipping it off to a remote service, which is a useful feature that is better then the alternative ways to do it), but I wouldn’t say it’s as far as hypocrisy.
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.
- 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.
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.
I’d rather they let me know that there is an add-on I “could” add that will add AI tools to my browser, if I wanted
They twisted my arm trying to get my consent for the new ToS.
Luckily I was able to get itoabout:configand set the flag to disable the ToS-banner.
Fuck that.Wait, you can disable the banner without accepting your new terms? Do teach.
in the adress bar enter
about:config. The flag which seems to control the banner were:termsofuse.bypassNotification->true(very sure about that)browser.termsofuse.prefMigrationCheck->true(not sure about that)
It’s worse than that. I have uninstalled that shit every day for the past month off the same computer, and it just pops right back on within 24 hours.
I had to boot up windows for the first time in a while now and holy shit what an absolute mess that is. Install this, no, remind me again in 3 days. Pop up, pop up, pop up. Opens xbox game center randomly. What in the world is xbox game center, why is it on my computer and opens every other time i hit the windows key? I had to watch a youtube video on how to disable/delete it. I hope that whole company burns down to tge ground
This is performative.
Where’s the Spider-man pointing at himself meme?
Mysticpickle…
Hmmm…what about the VPN plugin I didnt ask for?
Why again did you put this in the UI front and center without just asking me “Hey, we’ve got our own VPN. Want to pin it to your tool bar?”
No we need to figure out how to tell our clients what to do with it or findout how to automatically get rid of it.They need to earn money to pay developers. The Google deal isn’t going to hold forever and has been a pain point for a long time.
Why again did you put this in the UI front and center without just asking me “(…)”
Man…Reading comprehension really took a nose dive on lemmy.
You don’t understand business. Your own reaction is the best display for why they should not and did not implement this as a one-time question just as you proposed. As you proposed, notably, so that you have the easiest possible way to disregard it.
“Close your window.”
Personal data breaches… using users’ information without their permission… Installing something on a user’s device without their consent… Forcing a user to buy something, forcing them to acquire a license… Making things difficult for the user when they try to install an application that is not part of Windows’ own ecosystem… So on…
Bill “Magic” Gates at 1984:
I had to use regedit to get rid of it. I still have a win11 boot disk, but I mostly run kubuntu now. Forty years of Microsoft being my primary operating system has come to a close. One drive and Copilot drove me away.
Funny hearing this criticism from Mozilla though.
That won’t work. You need a cron job.
/M$
Go fuck yourselves.
Great now do Apple
Oh man. I used to work for Apple.
My best advice… Don’t give the advisor™ any reason to believe you’re gonna dsat their ass. You’ll get passed off to another department (they won’t help you, either) ASAP.
And they don’t have good troubleshooting scripts… So tuck in.
