I have been a Firefox user for many years, due to concerns about privacy with using chrome or chrome-based browsers, and because I liked the ethos I understood Firefox to… (ďalšie informácie)
I have been a Firefox user for many years, due to concerns about privacy with using chrome or chrome-based browsers, and because I liked the ethos I understood Firefox to have, of prioritising what is best for users instead of what's best for corporations.
But with every new Firefox update these days, there are new "AI" tools and integrations. Generative "AI" is created based on access to ordinary people's data in ways that are coercive at best or illegal at worst. This is inherently a privacy concern, of course. But beyond that, the current "AI" bubble in tech is bad for internet users and for humans on planet earth as a whole, in many ways that have been elucidated in detail by people who are much more knowledgeable than me. Whatever small benefits "AI" can provide within a user's experience of Firefox are not worth this whole heap of trade-offs.
Watching Firefox go down this route is starting to make me think that maybe it's no better than the megacorps that mediate most people's experience of the internet, and if that's the case, then why would anyone bother to put up with the hiccups that Firefox users semi-regularly experience, where a webpage does not work as intended because the developers didn't bother to make sure it was Firefox compatible.
And as a side-bar, until I found guides online for how to fully shut down certain "AI" features of Firefox, my laptop was behaving with SO much lag whenever Firefox was open that it was becoming nearly unuseable. The modern unmodified Firefox is incompatible with cheaper or older computers, with the amount of computing resources required.
This whole thing just smacks of Firefox jumping on the popularity train for "AI" because it's what all the other companies are doing and Firefox leadership is afraid of being left behind, instead of making decisions based on what is best for the actual community of ordinary users.
I don't expect my post here to actually change anything, but I do feel it is my responsibility to say something, so that my silence cannot be taken as tacit approval for Firefox's current direction.
Thanks,
Soph