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anecdotal reports are that this makes Firefox noticeably faster

that list of settings to disable:

browser.ml.enable
browser.ml.chat.enabled
browser.ml.chat.menu
browser.ml.chat.page
browser.ml.chat.page.footerBadge
browser.ml.chat.page.menuBadge
browser.ml.linkPreview.enabled
browser.ml.pageAssist.enabled
browser.tabs.groups.smart.enabled
browser.tabs.groups.smart.userEnabled
extensions.ml.enabled
browser.search.visualSearch.featureGate

in reply to David Gerard

My anecdotal reaction is that needing to do all this to turn AI off is deliberately user-hostile. What has Firefox done for me that I should give it the benefit of the doubt and go to all this trouble, only to have to do it again when the AI product manager has a conniption over all the users turning AI off and demands a different dark pattern to keep people chained to the yoke?
in reply to David Gerard

no intention to judge, just curious - this looks like a screenshot from fedi, why did you share a screenshot instead of boosting it?
in reply to sijmen (now on iceshrimp)

@sijmen It's from tumblr

tumblr.com/mckitterick/8007837…

in reply to fleaz

wild tangent: wasn’t tumblr supporting activitypub?
in reply to David Gerard

Not trying to sidetrack again but why use Firefox at all?
in reply to David Gerard

Tech-bro consent basically:

> Yeah, you might go through this
> laundry list of settings to disable, but
> a) our expectation is that most
> people won't bother with it, and
> b) we are going to add new features
> that ignore these settings anyway

in reply to David Gerard

@mozilla has become stupid. I really don't want to see them begging for money ever again.

They must have more than enough when they can do hostile shit like this. Also this attitude of blindly following every shitty trend of silicon valley causes additional points to be withdrawn...

in reply to David Gerard

Just checked LibreWolf and found the following enabled. The rest were disabled.
browser.ml.chat.page
browser.ml.chat.page.footerBadge
browser.ml.chat.page.menuBadge
browser.search.visualSearch.featureGate
in reply to David Gerard

You can just search "browser.ml" and click to turn every one of them off.
in reply to David Gerard

is there any application at all, from any company, that makes genAI opt-in? Why do they all turn the shit stream on by default?

I know why. You don't have to tell me.

But I'm still allowed to be angry about it.

in reply to David Gerard

Reminds me same bullshit as "Here's dozens of things to disable in windoze 11"
in reply to David Gerard

This entry was edited (17 hours ago)
in reply to Julien W.

@julienw @abucci I have to turn off `browser.ml.chat.menu` or `browser.ml.chat.page` I can't remember which, to disable an AI feature that I wanted to turn off, despite both `browser.ml.enable` and `browser.ml.chat.enabled` are already off. It could be bugs, but it's hard to tell if it's fixed or maybe intentional. Now I just turn off everything to be sure and it's annoying.
in reply to Lin Jen-Shin (godfat) πŸ₯

Yes, thanks for verifying this. The only way to be sure is to turn them all off because both the naming and the behavior are inconsistent and confusing. I already pointed this out to @julienw@pouet.chapril.org once before.
in reply to David Gerard

A few of them I had to create before I could turn them off.

Reminds me of being a WindowsAdmin, and not in a good way... πŸ™

in reply to David Gerard

Just search for β€œ.ml.” and set everything you see at FALSE πŸ˜‰

JM2€C

in reply to David Gerard

I tried it, but absolutely nothing happened. I don't see any difference at all.

Is it because I'm running LibreWolf? πŸ€ͺ

in reply to David Gerard

I've lost trust in Mozilla and Firefox. Pains me to see this; I think I've been using Firefox for 20 years now.

But starting with all that Ad nonsense and user tracking provided by Firefox and the hassle of keeping up with disabling features with every update, I decided to put my trust elsewhere. And seeing this, I feel reassured in my decision.

I switched to Brave, because according to some independant tests, it's by far the leader in privacy regards.

in reply to David Gerard

oh, you just hit the nail on the head! nothing like a faster browser to get me to weird corners of the internet faster. speedrun those cursed websites, my dude!
in reply to David Gerard

Follow the Arkenfox project and you'll have a way to apply automatically all of these nice settings: github.com/arkenfox/user.js/wi…
in reply to David Gerard

oh wow, they warned us from the future! everyone go thank this brave time traveller! they deserve to be praised for travelling back in time to save our beloved Firefox!
in reply to David Gerard

- nice. Worth noting most of these (and a whole whack more stuff) are in the Betterfox user.js file - those missing an easy add from your Text app.
Just follow install instructions for the file on the website.
in reply to David Gerard

Thank you. This is very valuable information for me. There were two in this list which I had not caught.
in reply to David Gerard

at one point one will need to write an app to disable all this crap everywhere… 😞
in reply to David Gerard

Thanks so much for keeping us informed as Firefox weasels around with these revisions.
in reply to David Gerard

Thanks! πŸ˜€

With an unmodified Waterfox browser:

- browser.ml.enable = True
- No browser.ml.chat.enabled
- No browser.ml.chat.menu
- No browser.ml.chat.page
- No browser.ml.chat.page.footerBadge
- No browser.ml.chat.page.menuBadge
- browser.ml.linkPreview.enabled = False
- No browser.ml.pageAssist.enabled
- browser.tabs.groups.smart.enabled = False
- browser.tabs.groups.smart.userEnabled = True
- extensions.ml.enabled = True
- No browser.search.visualSearch.featureGate

in reply to David Gerard

Thank you and, in the words of Guillermo del Toro, "Fuck AI"

variety.com/2025/film/news/gui…

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