Firefox 141 relieves chronic Linux pain in the neck Mozilla has delivered the latest version of its web browser, alleviating a long-standing irritation for Linux users… but making its "AI" integration even more pervasive. Firefox 141 is the latest normal release of the Moz browser, and along with it come point-releases for the last two ESR versions, as well. Last month we …
I don't have that option, I assume because of the progressive rollout, but "browser.tabs.groups.smart.enabled" and "browser.tabs.groups.smart.optin" are still present in about:config. So if you don't have the option in Settings, you can disable it in about:config.
I just disabled the grouping feature entirely with "browser.tabs.groups.enabled".
"The announcement says that this is on-device, so at least it won't spin up a rackful of servers in a datacenter somewhere to full speed just for this."
Oh cool. so now Mozilla foundation and crypto miners get to 'borrow' my battery life too? I love the future where this is what the 'good' guys are doing.
The inference power is run on your dime, but all that delicious user profiling that continually extends its fingers into your browsing habits and preferences will dutifully box your data up and ship it off to the highest warehouse & collection bidder. Why do we even bother with HTTPS if every web request is ultimately going to be screen-read and safari-photographed six times over by every on-device AI agent whose handler wants a piece of your consumer pie?
...is there no web address block list that can be customised to pull a set of addresses from somewhere that block interaction with all known AI data snaffling servers.
Better, all raw data from AI snaffling could be corrupted and automatically rerouted to random Microsoft e-mail addresses as lengthy e-mails of gibberish with workplace-friendly subjects.
Expressing our displeasure to Microsoft and others really does need to be automated in such a way that when they do something unpleasant to us all, the result is an automated tsunami of crap landing at their door. And given the number of users they have, it really would be an absolute mountain of e-poop.
It would seem that UBO/Pihole, or similar, armed with a nice block list should help - I couldn't find anything specifically to block the slurp since a lot of that is already blocked by tracker lists and the like.
It's not what you're after, but I did find this which will block gen AI sites, which is handy if you're trying to improve search results:
https://github.com/laylavish/uBlockOrigin-HUGE-AI-Blocklist/blob/main/noai_hosts.txt
If you blend both kinds of host lists, you should be able to get by without too much AI bothering you.
Why would even I want something moving my tabs around and renaming them, on device or off it? The whole point of grouped tabs is they go where I want them to go and then I go back to them later by finding them in the same place I left them.
What next? Tomorrow we mix up your tool bar and menus... with AI.
From the release notes:
A local AI model identifies similar tabs, automatically organizes them into groups, and even suggests group names.
Churn for the sake of churn -- who needs it? The safest and most productive tool is in general the one you're most familiar with. OK, so given current dev methodologies (AKA sloppy coding practices) we may need regular bug fixes, but new "features" every month? WTF.
"Don't update if your system is wayland-free"
Worked perfectly fine here on a wayland an systemd garbage free Devuan Excalibur system. But then again it is like the energizer bunny for me it just keeps going and going no matter the problems I see others complaining about. I never seen them in going on three decades of use since the Netscape fork. I should buy lottery ticket I must have incredible luck, either that or only having tiny handful of extensions and only dozen or so tabs instead of the hundreds open keeps it stable day after day year after year....
When does it start doing that? Mine's always just popped a notification saying it would need to be closed before it could update, never implied I 'had' to do it or stopped me working. I tend to turn my machines off at the end of the day rather than standby, so maybe it's just I've never left it long enough for it elevate it's nag level?
> How about Linux versions picking the OS's theme settings for icons?
It can't, because the OS is Linux and Linux has no concept of themes or icons. It's a 100% text-mode OS.
That kind of stuff is down to the desktop, and that's a target way too diffuse to aim for.
Firefox uses Gtk, I believe version 3.4 or above, and that might be doable -- but it would only cover MATE and Xfce. I think nothing else much uses Gtk 3 any more. LXDE never moved off Gtk 2, and as a result LXQt uses Qt, the same as KDE. Cinnamon, Budgie and GNOME are on Gtk 4.
Don't blame this on Linux! This is a matter of the limitations imposed by Gnome's UI, which makes it extremely difficult to adjust things like font face, icon size and many other "user" preferences, as well as Firefox's opaque about:config settings, which ignore some of the Gnome settings, and whose documentation seems to be a Mozilla secret.
I don't like throwing in AI features without a care either but...
* Language translation works well and now does it locally. Pick your poison, use AI or send it to Google Translate which is what they did before. I prefer local translation.
*Alt text description of images. If someone didn't follow those web accessibility requirements and provide alt text this should be genuinely useful for visually impaired users. Run locally.
* 'AI enhanced tab groups' sound diumb.
* AI summary of a web link. i don't trust this to work right but you have to hit some combo of keys to run it anyway.
* Put a chat bot in a sidebar. This runs remotely. Dumb but iit's not there unless you turn it on and there are those who LOVE their chat bots.
In other words, no fan of just throwing AI in but I do think seveal of these features are genuinely useful and they run locally so they are privacy respecting, and none are 'in your face.'
I use 1 a lot, have disabled 3 and 5, and I think 4 is an experiment and I'm not included in it.
I didn't even know 2 existed, and I'm not sure how it's evolved since the initial announcement of it working just for PDFs, or what about:config toggle is required to enable/disable it. If Mozilla were on the ball they would include a settings page with a toggle switch for each AI feature and another switch for 'shut it all off' for those who don't want anything, but they rarely are these days.
"Yes, an LLM bot will kick in and try to suggest an appropriate name for groups of tabs."
It's not really AI though is it? Especially if it's running locally like that with no specific hardware support required. It's no different to the iOS ability to suggest a name for a folder when you group a bunch of apps together, which has been done since long before LLM was a buzzword.
But hey, they need to be seen to be jumping on the bandwagon don't they? Microsoft will be retrospectively calling Clippy an AI/LLM tool soon.
There is an old saying (from the last AI hype cycle in the 80s? or the previous one in the early 70s?). I cannot cite the author anymore because the internet is now AI swill.
"If it is useful, it isn't AI".
Grouping and naming tabs is not useful. Therefore, it could be AI?
> Snaps.... Just.... no
They were sluggish when they were new. They're all right now. They work, they're quick on my mostly 111-12 year old kit, and perfectly usable on ~15 year old kit of Core 2 Duo level.
They're both much simpler in implementation _and_ more versatile than Flatpak.
I once cleared all the snapd stuff out of my Ubuntu and had this machine I'm typing on 100% snap-free, using native .deb packages and Appimages for everything, the former managed by deb-get.
But then I realised I was wasting time doing it, and it caused me much more pain every time I upgraded to a new release of Ubuntu. So I binned all my custom natively-installed programs except Chrome and installed snap versions instead. I can't tell the difference, and this is a Core i5 and no particular powerhouse.
If you do things like routinely opening HTML files from your local filesystem then a natively-packaged browser is worth it. For the rest, I don't care if Slack or Spotify are sandboxed: it doesn't affect how I use them.
