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Comment by echelon_musk | Hacker News Reader

The browser with a sidebar AI chatbot? What a simple solution.

You don't have to have the sidebar chatbot thing. When mozilla added these AI features, after the update the browser prompted me to whether I want it or not, with the "yes" and "no" being equally easy to select. It did not add them without consent. You can disable all AI features altogether, or you can completely remove chatbot sidebar specifically (with 2 clicks) and have the rest of the features if you want them.

Gosh most of the time when I read people complain about firefox, it gives me the impression they have not even used firefox.

That's neat. Firefox has never prompted me on any of my instances and the sidebar is still present. Wish they would ask everyone for consent.

If you accidentally skipped it, go to Preferences -> AI Controls -> toggle on Block AI Enhancements, it disables everything.

He’s not saying he accidentally skipped the prompt, he’s saying he didn’t get any.

Firefox does not even have a default provider. It is not like the chatbot panel itself can even exist without a user actively choosing a provider and potentially having to log in. The default is to have a selection menu, which then basically loads the interface of the llm provider themselves. So when they introduced it I remember been prompted to select a provider or close it.

Similarly with their separate summarisation etc features I was prompted whether I wanted a local model, online model (I think), or not at all. It did not download 4gb of data without consent.

We can keep complaining about details forever but it is like missing the forest completely.

This is article about Chrome doing something undesirable with AI. Which can be easily disabled by going into chrome://flags. And suggestion is to download Firefox which is also doing something undesirable with AI. Which is also can be easily disabled. Seems both browsers are quite similar in this regard, so suggestion to replace one with another is not very helpful?

ff doesn't download models unless you so opt in.

"Undesirable" means without consent (as per the title also). You can disable the flag (not that trivial in the first place to find it etc), but that can only be after you know of it, and after you get to know of the flag, which is probably after it already has downloaded the models. FF asks before if you want to download them or not.

I would prefer a browser without any ai slop.

Firefox lets you disable all AI features with 1 setting switch.

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