In 2025, we rolled out one update after another, all aimed at making your browsing better — with more flow, speed, choice, and control over your information and experience. Your window to the internet, whether on desktop, mobile, or across all your devices, has gotten an upgrade this year.
Quit shoving this AI stuff down our throats, Mozilla. Even a simple opt out is missing.
I get the sentiment but it does not seem appropriate in this case‽
2/14 features in the article are related to slop. The other 12 are actual, genuine improvements; some of them quite significant if you ask me.
Blame where blame is due but please don’t forget to praise where praise is due too.
I counted one more, and there’s a couple others I take umbrage at.
AI-only features:
- AI Chatbots
- Perplexity
- Shake to Summarize (iOS)
Monopoly-only features:
- Visual Search (a Google version of an extension with better options)
AI-“enhanced” features:
What AI did you get opted into?
(As someone not particularly into AI, I’m happy to see that the majority of the features listed here are not AI, and many of them are actually useful. I love vertical tabs and tab groups.)
That just removes some buttons, but AFAICS no AI would have been running if you did not toggle those settings?
I don’t know what you are defending here. ML = “machine learning”. The first one enables or disables machine learning: a broad strokes API that plugs generative models into Firefox. It is the first step. Yes: a sidebar is innocuous. I still use it myself. However, I have the machine learning chat sidebar disabled so that they cannot shove whatever generative prompts, etc in my face based on their contractual agreement with Google.
I’m mostly questioning the statement that “opt in is missing”, as I haven’t needed to opt out of anything. The only ML that’s enabled for me is something I opted into, which implies that that’s not missing.
the way i see it: all companies are being showered w money if they adopt AI somehow and mozilla could use it; i’m good w this keeping mozilla afloat for longer until the ai hype goes away.
You can shut them down from config. But yeah
In twelve obfuscated steps! This is dark pattern design, not even simply poor usability design of opt-out.
the right-click menu has “disable ai features” in it. it’s the button below “ask an ai”
That’s a decent place, I guess! I probably don’t see that in the right click menu because I have everything disabled.
yeah it disappears when you click it.
Tab groups are one of the best features to come to modern browsers the past few decades. Especially the ability to save and close them greatly aided me as a rehabilitating tab hoarder.
Haven’t tried vertical tabs yet but it’s great to see them implemented in Firefox properly now.
Great to see that PWAs finally coming back, even if it’s only on Windows now. Didn’t catch that they are working on that again!
I find the link previews to be distracting but they’re easy enough to turn off.
Great to finally be able to undload tabs manually. That would have been extremely useful back in my tab hoarding days. Tab unloading is generally quite a neat feature.
The LLM shit can go away for all I care but it’s not really that invasive IME. It’s one entry in the right click menu that’s easy enough to turn off right from said menu for me.
PDF editor upgrades are very welcome.
Right click to search for an image sounds like such an obviously good UX feature; great to see they’re thinking about such things again. Sad to see it’s Google-only for now but that makes sense given how small and non-standardised the market for reverse image search is.
@kagihq@mastodon.social could you perhaps get in contact with Mozilla so they can implement your endpoint for this too?genuine question, what’s the difference between tab groups and containers?
Tab groups only provide a visual way of grouping tabs purely for organization & tab management considerations. Containers actually separate things like cookies, browsing history, etc. so that the APIs that let you query that in a web app only see things related to the domain of that container, i.e. the sites you have open in it. Containers are actually less of a protection now that Firefox separates cookies and stuff even outside of containers, but they still help break up tracking cookies, etc, so that you maintain a little more privacy than you’d have otherwise. Tab groups do nothing for privacy
right so the auto-grouping of containers that TST has had for years is basically the same thing.
that TST has had for years
Just curious, what is TST?
[EDIT: oh, tree-style-tabs, got it. Given that, the rest of my comment is superfluous]
But I think there’s more to tab groups than what containers provides. You can’t collapse all the tabs in one container down into a small representation of that group, for instance. Nor does it provide for a mechanism to move all the tabs in one group together along the tab bar, and reorder entire groups among other groups.
I think their concerns are orthogonal. The only really similar thing about them is that containers use a color coding visual style similar to tab groups. They lack a lot of the niche features that make tab groups really sing
I don’t care most of the stuff that they added or changed. And I don’t like having so much ai integrated into the browser. However there is one ai feature I wish would be included: automatic adding keywords for search, when saving bookmarks. It could lookup the content and try to add some keywords on its own, that would be helpful. I’m really bad at adding keywords myself, usually I don’t do that.
Edit: BTW I don’t mean just some keywords found on the page, but trying to logically understand the text and add other keywords not found on the page.
