I installed Firefox on a new computer recently and had to click on no less than ten different “helpful” popups telling me to try AI slop features and begging me to share data before I could actually use it to open a website. No one wants this! Just let me surf the information superhighway in peace!
trying to write some upcoming science lectures and finding images via google or duckduckgo is just a nightmare rabbit hole. It used to be so so much better. Who actually has a subscription to ResearchGate or ScienceDirect? (-> no one)
can't even read CNN headlines online without agreeing to give all your online data to them. fuck em
Yikes! I don't think Edge has any AI specific popups, and it's only three prompts to migrate/share data before you can browse. Never thought I'd see the day that a Mozilla browser had a more intrusive first-run experience than a Microsoft one....
All these companies invested too heavily, and too quickly in AI. Now they have to find use-cases to jam down our throats. To justify their bad investment. Free market and such lmao
This one might interest you too then.
try waterfox. it's firefox with all the mozilla shit removed.
The worst part is having to disable that shit. At least you can in Firefox.
I wouldn't use Microsoft Office when it became a monthly subscription to cloud-based apps sharing your data with an AI. It's either 2007 Office or LibreOffice at home.
I uninstalled Adobe when it was popping up AI and cluttering the screen on a .pdf I'm trying to read, when I learned Firefox can open .pdfs all by itself.
I was looking for the “News” tab on DuckDuckGo yesterday and it was obscured by the “ai search” button and I had to swipe over to find it
At least for ddg it’s a button you have to click and they don’t just do it automatically like google
firefox cannot stop fumbling the bag, they have been somehow managing to goof up non stop for like a decade now
And I'm guessing everyone had "Yes" and "Maybe Later" options. Not a "No" option to be found.
The “helpful” popups you could click out of. At least one of the user data ones opted you in automatically and the popup had a button that said “yes” and another one that led to the settings to change it if you wanted to opt out
Why bother, they'll just re-classify EVERYTHING as "necessary?"
Even VS Code has built in copilot that was a pain in the butt to turn off
I hope every linux distro that ships firefox does so in a way that is less annoying than this.
Fwiw, installed Zen instead and did not have this experience.