Just use Librewolf
Grumpy ken thinks “Just use Foo” meming is promoting mindless use and I think should therefore be discouraged. Even in jest I think this affects us subconsciously to feel more comfortable with not thinking deeper for ourselves. Even if X is the right one. “Use Foo already!” is nicer~!
If I may illustrate:
Use Konform Browser1 already!
1: Disclosures: Am dev; is LibreWolf fork
For those interested
https://librewolf.net/installation/
https://codeberg.org/librewolf/issues/issues/1919
Thanks to @acockworkorange@mander.xyz for the context below.
The settings that Mozilla packaged in were the main big ones, Claude, ChatGPT etc, it didn’t look like any of them were locally hosted or even if a locally hosted model could be chose. Local AI… where the model itself and all the token are processed on either your own machine or another machine controlled by you certainly isn’t violating privacy, but as I said the choices on offer were none of these.
LibreWolf by default gets rid of anything that seeks to abuse your right to privacy, you won’t even find Google or Bing in your search engine. Naturally this will also apply to AI providers. Unfortunately, at the moment, we can’t trust Mozilla and by extension with AI items so these things were removed. That doesn’t mean you can’t install third party AI extensions.
Also you can host your own search engine for even more privacy.
As a libreworlf user, I’d have to advise some caution to regular users. A lot of sites are broken as images won’t load and “fancier” web apps don’t work super well either. Yes it’s an easy fix, but expecting someone to go look in the config files to get an image to load is too much for a lot of people
FYI if you want to edit the Firefox policies directly and save it in /etc/firefox/policies/policies.json, this is the file they are using
"policies": { "DisableFirefoxStudies": true, "DisableTelemetry": true, "DontCheckDefaultBrowser": true, "FirefoxHome": { "SponsoredStories": false, "SponsoredTopSites": false, "Stories": false }, "GenerativeAI": { "Enabled": false }, "SearchEngines": { "Remove": [ "Perplexity" ] } } }`This shows how unhinged the whole recent hate on Firefox is. Turning off GenAI is literally one single setting AND Mozilla is doing things infinitely better than others (e.g. the translation feature is completely local, and having a chatbot in the sidebar is opt-in)
I get a lot of hate for it but some AI inclusions are genuinely good.
Firefox’s (local, FOSS) AI translation is infinitely better than scraping all the info and sending it to Google Translate servers, and nobody will convince me otherwise.
The screen reader improvements that use AI are good as well. Has anybody here used screen readers for web pages? They are awful. It’s good that someone is willing to improve them. My sister is blind so this matters a lot to me.
The (locally generated) AI assisted link previews aren’t for me as I imagine they’re unnecessarily taxing on older PCs, but they’re not exactly an evil inclusion. I can see it being a useful feature.
I’m not a fan of the LLM sidebar, but it’s opt-in and you can at least choose open models or even host your own. Plus there’s the unfortunate truth that many people that Firefox is trying to win over (“normies”) now expect features like that.
The hate is so overblown. Everyone is so negative and absolutist about everything all of the time. It’s exhausting.
