this post was submitted on 28 Nov 2025
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Anytime I see an anti-mozilla article, it’s abundantly clear that it’s an astroturfing campaign to make Firefox look bad. You NEVER see these articles about chrome, brave, opera, etc which are all much much worse.
Its not astroturfing, it's that people have expectations of them beyond just being a browser that let's you access the web.
Frankly its not that great of a browser (its serviceable. And I use it, or a derivative, pretty much exclusively); generally the reason you use it is because you care about abstract things like not supporting the chromium monopoly, or wanting to pick the project managed with the most care for how it will impact actual humans
And Mozilla has been making kinda crummy choices with respects to those abstract values more and more regularly it feels like 😅
Like I really wanna love and support Mozilla. I'm using their browser cause I think its the best choice by the metrics that are important to me. And more and more I just feel kinda exhausted and kinda frustrated with them 😅
Dear Rust developer,
Not every critique of a technology you like is "FUD". In fact, crypto-bros and AI-bros also made the term "FUD" meaningless.
Eh, I'm not about to stop using Firefox, but the complaint is valid. They nuked a bunch of work from volunteers without notice in favor of shitty auto translate.
I'd say that's because here on Lemmy, we already don't give a fuck about and wouldn't touch Chrome or Edge with a ten foot pole, but some of us trusted Mozzila, which is now starting to do dumb AI shit. And having your trust broken hurts.
Astroturfing would not be recommending LibreWolf as an alternative.
If you look into alternatives, Brave is one that's usually mentioned but there's always someone quickly posting all of the dumb shit they did.
The way they are forcing AI on everyone and into every aspect of their browser especially when a large part of the people who use Firefox hates that shit is going to end Firefox.
The reason you don't hear it about all those other browsers is because people have always known they don't give a fuck what the end user wants.
Firefox used to be different. But all good things deteriorate over time. Watching it happen in real time to a browser we all use and used to love is why you see it so much posted especially in places with like minded individuals like Lemmy.
There’s AI in Firefox? I’m running it as new as I can in Arch and have never seen a hint of it.
Sidebar on the left has one of those star icons that opens an AI chatbot, or you can hit ctrl + alt + x
They keep mentioning AI features, but I haven't really seen anything annoying yet.
Oh ok. I rarely use any browser features beyond bookmarks. Thats pretty much all I need from a browser. So I don’t explore the side bars and stuff.
https://community.latenode.com/t/firefox-users-express-concerns-over-new-ai-features-leading-to-excessive-cpu-usage-and-battery-depletion/33690/2
This is a pretty good summary of the problem.
They've also put it into the right click menu. And I think they integrated into the "click and hold link preview" feature they just added. And, annoyingly, with all this added AI, they made no provisions for locally hosted AI.
They also added AI translation in addition to their old translation system for webpages. I think the old one just used Google Translate, so the AI translation is a privacy win because it is done locally, but I may be wrong on how it used to work.
You actually can set up the sidebar to use a local LLM. In about:config the key is something like “browser.ml.chat.hideLocalhost”
I have it setup to use my local Ollama instance and it works great.
Unfortunately, I don’t see a way to specify an alternate external server, which would be nice.
How nice of them to have easy options for paid third party services, and hide the local options under about:config where I'd have no idea it even exists without a kind stranger letting me know.
Yeah, it’s not great that it isn’t visible by default. Would be nice if they had an “add/remove” option as well.
Glad you were able to get it set up!
Thanks for the tip of checking about:config. You can specify an external server, it is also in the about:config. browser.ml.chat.provider. I'm not sure it's a feature I will ever use, but I tested it with my local Open WebUI and it seemed to work.
Yeah, I am astroturfing. It can't be that I actually believed Mozilla when they said that localizers were heroic.
What an odd comparison. What differentiates Mozilla from others is their close relationship with their community. Just read their manifest and you will see Immediately why they are getting flag for humiliating their own supporters.
If I had to post an article here for each time Chrome did something that worked against privacy, I would just repost Ggle's changelogs. And they would not change.
If we criticise Mozilla harshly enough, there's a chance slightly higher than an snowball's chance in hell to make them change.
What dumb reasoning. Posting anti Mozilla articles only serves to push all of Firefox users to other even less used browsers. See the whole terms of service thing where someone posted an article just like this that was factually incorrect. Many users didn’t bother to research it and stopped using Firefox. Ff didn’t grow, it shrunk and with it every single downstream browser also will suffer because they’re forked from FF
Yes, and I’m guessing what you wrote about was completely incorrect. Browsers must transfer the data, so any terms of service must cover those cases. Because people don’t understand stuff like this, posts exactly like yours get posted, people believe them, and then misinformation spreads like wildfire.
Then people like me are still dealing with the misinformation months later because others didn’t take five minutes to think through what they were posting before they did so.
I’m honestly incredibly sick of it, especially with Mozilla posts because it’s been misinformation numerous, numerous times. At this point if a post about Mozilla isn’t misinformation then I’m surprised.
Almost all Microsoft KB articles are machine translated.
Every time I open a reddit article from a search it attempts to auto-translate which immediately looks and reads very inhuman.
Put it this way, I don't trust a corpo browser and never have. 2008 or whenever it was that everyone switched to Chrome, I stayed with Firefox, which I'd been using for a few years already. I remember upgrading to Firefox 2.0.
I'm interested when Firefox is pulling this shit and don't give a fuck otherwise, because I already assume the others do this.
Idk if we'll ever get anything decent out of the Servo browser engine. That would be ideal IMO. Mozilla is starting to become part of the problem.
Oh. Thank you for reminding me of my shame.
I switched every relative to Chrome before myself switching to Opera Presto.
Did the damage and didn't even dogfood it.
Calling objections to what some unelected jerks in the foundation (which is a supposedly public organization) are doing is not "anti-Mozilla". And I would first suspect of astroturfing everyone pretending it is.
Raising voices and putting pressure about things spoiling something is caring about it. And yes, people who care try to make real effect and not just safely complain to be ignored.
Mozilla honestly has been becoming worse and worse since Australis.
But this is not about Firefox delelopment, but about community getting overthrown for apparently no reason.
This is bullshit. Brave literally have a webpage mentioning their shit. You are trying to gaslight us all.
Lol, bashing that shitty "org" is a civic duty. Fuck Mozilla.
They like that the money goes to activism on African countries instead of the fcking browser. Just until one year ago they started to work again on features.
I left that sinking ship in 2021. Just watching it sink slowly from the river's edge.