Good for you. The point is that a lot of Firefox users actively didn't want these sorts of features enabled and pushed on them. That was clear and obvious to anyone paying attention to general reactions to unsolicited AI helper tools, going back decades. For Mozilla to turn this on without any respect for those users’ preferences was a huge mistake that they keep making over and over again.
More specifically: they chose Firebox because it doesn't have those kind of features. If the just wanted a (sorta-kinda) open-source browser filled with all the latest hype features they would've simply used Chromium.
Using Firefox is a political choice. People use it because it's one of the few remaining traditional browsers which isn't a tentacle of Big Tech. Chasing the competition and adding the stuff your users are actively trying to avoid isn't going to work.
This attitude is exactly why Mozilla is failing. Total contempt and ignorance of the users that are the core of Firefox’s user base. If someone doesn’t want to use AI features, that’s not “living in a fantasy world”. And if Mozilla had any respect for its users, they would have realized the need to make this sort of thing a first class setting. Pretending that their core users are delusional freaks who only deserve “niche” settings is exactly why they are rapidly losing that audience.
You're missing the point. If someone doesn't want to use AI features, they can just NOT. USE. THEM. That's it. Just don't press the AI button. Is it that hard? Would you say Mozilla is deleting all your data because there's a "Delete cookies and history" button in the menu? You can just NOT. PRESS. THE. BUTTON.
The master AI switch doesn't actually change whether the browser uses AI features - it never does unless you specifically run them. What it does is hides them from the user, pretending they don't exist.
Browsers that don't respect their users' choices about using AI do things like automatically download large models in the background, integrate cloud-based speech recognition and synthesis as an API available to any website and make the default search engine which they also own show LLM slop above actual results.
You can also argue the opposite, that due to her working with a particular interest in proving the organic industry wrong, she is finding factual information about it. As usual, information should be dismissed or confirmed with more information, not with fallacies
The principle of charity suggests we should assume good intentions about others and their ideas, and give them the benefit of the doubt before criticising them.
The thing about AI-generated “solutions” is that they often go down bad rabbit holes and need to be re-run, or since they are so “cheap” to create they are often just thrown away and rebuilt when requirements evolve. Plus, just more stuff is created and needs to be maintained. So in the end, your efficiency gains go out the window.
In the US, over and above salary, payroll taxes add 7.65%, pension contributions might be up to 5%, and employer healthcare and other insurance contributions can be in the thousands, plus other benefits, equity compensation, and per-employee software licensing, and lots of people just estimate 2x salary as the “total cost” of an employee, although that probably overstates it a bit.
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