Submitted 23 hours ago by umbraroze@slrpnk.net to mildlyinfuriating@lemmy.world
https://slrpnk.net/pictrs/image/46c11948-efec-4935-ae8f-527f3043dde4.png
I’m sorry, I’m not someone to whine about Firefox UI. Usually their changes have been for good actually. BUT! But but but. Proper UI design would require AI features to be disabled if the toggle is disabled. This is both highly silly and very confusing.
At least they are brave enough to make the switch for free.
I don’t see the problem. The paragraph of text explains exactly what it’s doing. Do you also have a problem with the “enabling” of your ad blocker “disabling” the ads? There’s nothing “dark pattern” about this at all.
I could see that, but I think the key difference.
Adblocker is an active block of something from outside.
AI block is telling firefox not to use any of it’s own.
Kind of a do this, versus don’t.
“Do protect me from attackers.”
“Don’t attack me”
It should not be turn on to disable
Hehe. 47 people think “enabling the disable-ation of ads” is clear language?! I like me the Linux distributions which include uBlock per default so there’s less spying. And if you want to enable that, you’d go to the top right and press uBlock’s power button (to turn uBlock off - and ads on). I think that’s a clear and straightforward UX.
As they say, no AI is a feature
Someone has been studying up on the Microsoft Group Policy way of wording things.
On device translation is amazing and exactly what this software should be approved for, I think it’s good that they let you pick this separately. I don’t care for surrendering my cognitive functions to an advertising panopticon machine, but translating pages without letting Google know what sites I’m looking at? Yes please
Especially since Google translate is just a front for Gemini these days (and not in an “LLMs were made for translating” way, you can literally prompt inject it)
Agreed. It’s the only one I leave turned on and use rarely. I do appreciate that it runs locally.
This is just my opinion, but I think it’s reasonable to require your user to go to the settings if they want to remove a context menu item.
In fact, I think they’re going above and beyond here. Most people never use “Inspect Accessibility Properties”, yet they added it here and no one’s complaining.
I think the cause of this outrage is people reading too much into Firefox’s AI features. Firefox doesn’t bundle an LLM or make requests without your permission. It doesn’t put AI overviews on your pages. It didn’t remove existing functionality to make room for the new buttons. And it doesn’t shove any of the features into your face. It’s just a context menu item that opens a website in the sidebar if you choose to click on it.
I think thats not what OP is mildly infuriated about though. If I understood correctly its that you have to enable the setting “disable AI” instead of having a setting “use AI” (possibly enabled by default), which you would disable. Its just counterintuitive semantics
If it's not an opt-IN feature, then it's malicious, anti-consumer design. Full stop.
The lengths people will go to defend Mozilla are astounding. If Chrome did this, you'd be throwing a fit.
Most features in most software are either opt-out or unremovable, though. It’s clearly not about that to you, it’s about the association with AI
if chrome added a toggle to turn off ai features?
I hate inverted booleans with an agenda
i think you just blocked things you already blocked. that button is for blocking all at once, as per their statement
If you refer to a traffic light as a "stop" light then you can interpret red as "do not stop".
i grew up calling them semaphores and i’ll die calling them semaphores.
Also, why does it say “blocked” instead of “disabled”? This kinda leads me to imply that their AI features are spyware
When they first announced this they called it the “AI kill switch”, so they already toned it down.
The fact that they announced that instead of an "AI ON switch" tells you where Mozilla's interests lie these days.
i would say it’s an intentional dark pattern
Yes but I would argue that its function is properly described. I mean, it says what it does and if you want you can enable what it actually says.
It’s intentional.
Using Librewolf solves the issues.
I moved to librewolf a few days ago. Got sick of Mozilla fucking with shit. Yes, I’m aware librewolf is Firefox underneath.
Anything is better than using yet another Chromium wrapper and pretending to use a real alternative to Chrome 😀
I’m using Zen and I haven’t seen any of this nonsense yet 🤷
What exactly is this disabling? Firefox's built-in AI tools? Or is it disabling AI tools on websites you visit? Because "blocking" seems like a very misleading term to be using if it's an internal presence being turned off. We typically only "block" things we know to be harmful to our experience.
This is honestly some selfawarewolves shit at this point, Mozilla.
Only the built in tools
Blocks the news too, because they know its all ads so they built in the adblocker
For the record, I know it was marketed as “AI killswitch”. I know it functions as one.
But it’s still hella confusing as presented in the configuration! Don’t do double negatives! If your design goal is “disable everything”, maybe give the users the option to, I don’t know, “disable everything”.
Isn’t that what it does? Except in your mind it would say “enable ai” and you’d have to enable it to access the options below.
That makes sense to me
It’s a dark pattern to confuse those who don’t read word by word. In daily life, if i have to turn on the switch to switch off the light, it just wouldn’t make sense, unless when it’s intentionally want to confuse and make you switch on the light.
An On/Off switch for AI Enhancement reads significantly better than On/Off switch to block AI Enhancement, the first one is just basic intuition.
As someone who has gone through Windows group policy, the amount of weird policies and regedits we have to do to disable AI, recall, anayltics, etc. it’s insane and the process flip flops with tricky wording. Enabling something here and disabling stuff somewhere else, it gets annoying
You are comparing it to the worse of the worse
firefox is a spring garden filled with wildflowers and honeybees going about their business compared to the hellscape that is windows group policies.
its a kill switch to disable everything otherwise you can enable or disable the things you don’t want
It’s functionally a killswitch, yes, but it’s presented as a confusing mess. Enabling a disabling is still silly no matter what.
You and your post makes no sense. You have to enable ad blocking, so why wouldn’t you enable ai blocking? It’s even well explained in the screenshot and blocked by default.
the ai stuff is disabled by default, you toggle it to enable it, this isn’t rocket surgery.
Pushing the opt out responsibility on the user is why I left Windows and never looked back. I recommend Waterfox which I started using a couple months back when Firefox started going in this direction. Waterfox is great on desktop and Android (which I’ll hopefully shed soon too when my current phone stops working).
Some dynamic text under the toggle that reads “AI Anti-Feature ‘X’ is on/off” could ensure absolute double-certain clarity.
There is in fact a “what these options mean” at the bottom of the page that does that.
We’re talking about Mozilla here. What metaphor can you even use to accurately describe what they do? “Snatch defeat from the jaws of victory”? “Dumpster Fire”? , “Clown Car Orgy”?. The open sourcing of Netscape was brilliant… But every single last thing since then has been like a parody… There’s never been one episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm that can even touch the absurdity of any and every decision Mozilla makes. They are clownish.
So, was it blocked by default?
If so I wouldn’t read too much into it.
heartSagan5@lemmy.zip 18 minutes ago
I have to go into chrome://flags and disable AI in Chrome too. Fuck that “CIA sniffer” on my “typing.”