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Comment by PaulKeeble | Hacker News Reader

If I can turn it off as they claim I don't care too much other than it's development time wasted towards something I won't be using. They could have spent time fixing some of the sites that don't work correctly, implementing standards that are missing or just improving performance and memory usage. All of those things would be welcome as would some improvements on the mobile version it's not super usable I find it kind of irritating.

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Why isn’t the framing “the user may choose to turn it ON”? Just chew on that.

I think when they added some "AI feature" last days or so, there was a popup asking me if I want it or not. As far as I recall opting in seemed as easy as opting out.

Because it wouldn't work. What is the point of having some flagship feature among the fanfare to just leave it off by default? They start the race by never having gotten off of the starting line. I agree the framing is messed up.

It seems simple enough to offer the user a button to activate the feature when they want it to run. If it has to be “given” to the user without activation, maybe it’s not as desirable as they are pretending it is. Maybe users just want a web browser for web browsing.

  > If I can turn it off as they claim

Why wouldn't you be able to turn it off?

You can already do so with the current AI stuff and it is an open source browser so they couldn't stop you if they wanted to.

They’ll let you turn it off until people don’t care as much, then it will quietly become mandatory. Only some of the nerds will even care, since by then the panopticon will probably be fully constructed.

I repeat

  >> it is an open source browser so they couldn't stop you if they wanted to.

And there are already forks doing just this

You can turn the existing AI off if you learn the magic incantation for about:config, its not very usable. I would hope they will provide some proper switches in the settings menu for each of the AI features they intend, including the one for automatic tab grouping (which so far is total garbage and a complete waste of CPU).

The setting exists, but may or may not actually be respected based on user reports.

Just like their auto-updates, you can turn the option off, but whether the feature is actually disabled is another question entirely.

I don't trust Mozilla enough. For one, not giving UI options and hiding all the settings in about:config where non-technical users can't access is a shitty thing to do. Second, I have zero trust that the settings actually do anything since many don't.

I don't believe for one moment that turning off their AI features actually 100% prevents that code from running.

This is not a position based on anything factual. If you have evidence of a setting not being honoured it will be treated as a bug and fixed, there is no evidence of bad faith about that that I can recall.

As for about:config, if you submit working patches to better expose options you care about I'm pretty sure they'll be considered, but every complex software has obscure options not exposed through a polished UI and frankly it's OK...

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