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Comment by danielhlockard | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

Different people want different features. Insisting Firefox never shows you anything you personally don't use is a bizarre unworkable demand.

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.

I insist all software I regularly use is configurable (and with very few exceptions, it is), why should Firefox be different?

> 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?

You can with userStyles.css

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.

My recollection is that without the about:config changes there were still unwanted bits of UI like menu items. If that’s fixed then great.

As it is I have switched to Zen as it appears more clearly user-aligned and works better for me as a result of their improvements and UI tweaks.

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.

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.

If this was the only feature FF has ever shoved down my throat I would be fine with it, but without the disabling the feature recommendation option, every other time I open a tab I get hit with a pop-up for some minor UI change. The worst part is that it stops typing so sometimes I was just typing into the abyss for 5 minutes before I realize it lost everything I typed.

I've been using since 3 and I don't think it's a miracle browser or anything. Anecdotally I've observed plenty of folks try FF for bit in the wake of Manifest v3 then switch to Edge/Brave, and it's not because of a lack of AI. They need this sidebar but it's not the only reason they're losing.

I don't have the same experience as you with FF and nothing like losing what I type ever happened to me. That would indeed be nasty bug and make it very unreliable/untrustworthy. It's possible you have something corrupted? Try a reinstall or try on a new machine and see if you can replicate the bug? I'm not 100% with Firefox but it's really the least bad option to me. I found, for example, quite irritating how FF was playing shenanigans with the new tab/homepage settings, eagerly recommending things I never asked for but luckily I was able to disable that. So far FF is quiet, not obnoxious and working.

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