Mozilla choosing Mistral for Firefox Smart Window feels like a rare AI partnership that actually fits the product. Privacy, zero data retention and multilingual models are a much better match for Firefox than turning the browser into another Big Tech AI funnel.

Why do almost all your comments sound like AI

Because they are an AI simp

IMO nothing in that comment sounds particularly AI generated.

Thanks. 🖖

Maybe not AI, but that specific comment does read like marketing copy. Then again, there is that list of three in there. That, plus just sounding like marketing, it could be AI. But I also concede that we, people that is, think in patterns of threes, so that’s not a strictly an AI behavior, but I can see how someone could reach that conclusion.

Why do you say privacy and zero data retention? Has there been any proof of this? What we have learned from the last few years of investigations is companies lie and lie and lie through their teeth about anything regarding privacy.

Personally I trust Mozilla and Mistral a lot more than any of those big tech bros.

Mistral makes a lot of local models you can run yourself, assuming that’s what this is about. Nothing would leave your computer

As long as it’s easy to turn off, I’m okay with it.

It’s still code bloat. A lot of these new “features” should have been plug-ins.

@reddig33 @mintiefresh I think a local translate is useful, better than sending it all to the web.

This isn’t about local translate, we already have it.

@MrSoup It doesn't matter, it is relevant because it uses a local AI so if you switch off all AI then you won't ever see it.

You should have to download it is the point. It shouldnt come in the base browser package. Its bloat.

I’m not. I’ve donated to Mozilla before but I won’t ever again if this is how they’re choosing to spend their money.

As long as this is opt-in (i.e. disabled by default), then sure. Otherwise, I’ll just have to find a new browser.

ive been seeing screenshots of the new vibe coded new tab replacement that are totally broken and the redesigned ui has overly rounded components that cover up text components and hard coded “ai” purple gradients that are nearly impossible to turn off with going into about:config…

So I have low expectations of this going well and seeing that second option in my future.

first thing i did when deved updated to the ‘new’ look (157)…

search for ‘nova’ in about:config

turn off the new rounded gradient shit.

yeah no thanks. luckily librewolf strips this shit out.

or you can just turn it off from settings

Or they can stop trying to force it through their users throat and just accept that the biggest part of their users don’t want it.

I mean, they do give a single toggle that disables every AI feature (new and old) at once… I think that’s pretty good

and you can go back and re-enable just a bit you actually do want… like the on-device translations, while keeping the main switch ‘off’ so there’s no new surprises.

But why isn’t it a toggle that turns these features on instead?

It’s bullshit that we’re expected to constantly opt-OUT of these features that we supposed want. If we wanted them, we would turn them on.

accept that the biggest part of their users don’t want it.

Where did you find this data?

Not but seriously, lots of users not only on Lemmy but also on reddit(and under news articles etc etc) made their opinion pretty clear.

(Sadly) i think it’s just a loud minority, lotta of people do use and want those

“You can turn it off in settings” "You can turn it off in

Mozilla can fuck right off with that forced ai horse shit.

Waterfox is the way.

Try librewolf

No

Ok then

Is it just open weights again?

Mistral isn’t even fully open weights anymore. TBH they are kinda irrelevant in that space now.

I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla Nov 2025.

The translation feature has been very useful, though it’s not an LLM. Still a neural network though. Saves me from going to google translate when browsing websites in e.g Russian (drive2.ru or whatever turns up in google search every so often when looking up obscure information on some cars and european oils that bitog forums don’t see as much).

It entirely depends on what the AI does and if it’s opt-in, opt-out, or forced on you. Opt-in local AI with sensible features is actually a good thing IMO.

On principle I only want a pure FOSS program. I wouldn’t want to use a binary-only browser even if it was a great browser with good privacy. I do use the built in Firefox translate feature but I’ve been wanting to get around to seeing where its model comes from. The Mistral stuff is completely proprietary except for the final weights as far as I can tell. I’d rather resist that since I want to be able to build and modify it myself.

The Mistral stuff is completely proprietary except for the final weights as far as I can tell

Same as most open weight models. There are very few truly open source models, particularly if your definition requires distributing the whole training dataset.

I’d rather resist that since I want to be able to build and modify it myself.

I hope you’ve got some damn beefy hardware then. Even small models are a pain to train from scratch. You CAN still fine-tune it or train with LoRA.

Same as most open weight models. There are very few truly open source models, particularly if your definition requires distributing the whole training dataset.

Yes exactly. Open weight is like a compiled binary. Misleading terminology made that sound desirable.

I hope you’ve got some damn beefy hardware then. Even small models are a pain to train from scratch. You CAN still fine-tune it or train with LoRA.

It’s ok I can manage without AI.

i love the on-device translate. sometimes it can be a little off-the-mark, but overall it works pretty well. it’s a great addition to firefox.

It is a language model.

The Firefox translation is “oldschool” ML, but it is the same family of stuff that chat-tuned LLMs sprouted from.

It doesn’t say anything about how this works. “No data retention” suggests that data is going to a server that’s processing it but then not retaining it. That’s bad, this type of feature should run entirely on the client.

Also, there’s a proprietary AI model doing the work, even if inference is in the client. It says “open weight” but that’s like letting people download a program as a compiled binary, the exact opposite of what FOSS is supposed to mean. It’s an open/free model only if the training data and algorithms are also public, not just the trained weights.

Issue is that local AI hog vram, are slow and small models. Or if you don’t have a compatible GPU, it uses the CPU which is even slower.

If AI is the future, I really hope it’s local, but with the equipment people have at home, local AIs are a non-starter.

IMO it’s enough to justify not shipping those AI features at all but I guess that’s where FF execs disagree.

AI inference is doable on home equipment. AI training is less feasible, but nobody builds their whole Debian distro from source either. It’s enough that the source is available and you can rebuild any component if you want ot do so.

I don’t really mind AI features where it makes sense. That being said, as someone else commented, this should have been a plugin.

I’ll add on top of that: this should have been a plugin wholly developed by Mistral. Mozilla should stop spending time and money on side features and focus on the browser and its engine. It still is way slower than any chromium based browser, lacks features that have been standard on chromium for years (eg. HDR video playback) and it’s way less efficient on battery than the competition.

Complaining about Firefox doing this and groveling on “I’m good, I’m on <random fork>” is spitting upwards: even the most modified forks like Zen still rely on Mozilla’s aging engine.

IMO the browser wars have been lost, and Mozilla isn’t a competent web browser anymore. 30% of sites I visit, straight up don’t function at all on Firefox. They don’t even satisfy their original mission statement of privacy focus.

I switched to Vivaldi and didn’t look back. I don’t want some LLM “assistant” scanning every webpage I visit.

I’m sorry, I call bullshit.

I’ve been using Firefox for many many years, and the only sites that haven’t worked were M$ sites explicitly coded to break on Firefox, or were using a technology that Firefox simply doesn’t implement like web serial api, which is admittedly more than one, but it’s an extreme minority.

Yeah I wondering if I was just lucky because I never have problems on Firefox or librewolf (which is Firefox).

Usually when I’m asked for computer help by friends or family, I can often save us both a lot of time by just asking, “you’re using chrome again aren’t you?” Or edge?

But sometimes in a great while Firefox is the “culprit” because it doesn’t let abusive sites spy on them and collect so much telemetry.

There are plenty of over-designed, heavy “Web apps” which don’t work correctly in Firefox. My college’s Web portal is one.

If you create a support ticket, they tell you to use a supported browser

You’re college Web admin sucks. I would use a jailed chromium browser in that case or have a separate cheap computer for browsing shitty websites that I “have to” use.

Yep, it does. All the websites that don’t work in Firefox also tend to suck

1. Web Serial is available now. Recently flashed an esp32
2. Another site not supported is business.apple.com.

• Buuut if you switch the user-agent everything I found neccessary suddebly works ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Yeah, if switching user agent fixes it then it just means the website developers are piece of shits not even bothering to check if the site work on gecko

1. Web Serial is available now. Recently flashed an esp32

Oh, I have to teat this! It’s one of the only reasons I keep Chromium around.

Used it yesterday to test an xiao esp32 s3. Workes a treat :)

Yeah 90% of sites that “don’t work” definitely work with a user agent change. Didn’t realize they added web serial, that’s awesome.

Apology rejected. I’m glad you still enjoy Firefox, but I’m not lying about my experience. So many websites kept breaking constantly, and in extremely bad ways.

Things like, the final step of a 40 page government form failing, and I then need to call them and wait on hold for 90 minutes for them to fix it. Or, payments being charged, but not receiving the product; again having to call support. Or more subtle things, like specific features on websites not working, weird canvas glitches, you get the idea.

In comparison, the amount of problems I’ve had in Vivaldi is zero, compared to daily. I cannot recommend Firefox to average users anymore. I think using Firefox is admirable, but it’s increasingly similar to trying to play games on Linux without Proton. Good luck.

I have not ever had any of those issues you’re describing, but it sucks that that happened to you. (If it actually did and you’re not just some paid troll to poison public opinion)

You got me. My code of honour dictates that if someone correctly calls me out, I must acknowledge it. I was paid A$10,000.00 by Vivaldi themselves to spread discord and lies on Lemmy, the most popular social media platform; for maximum outreach.

I had to take the money, though. I deeply wanted to reject it, but I had to. My pet unicorn needs rainbow replacement surgery, and my magical beasts insurance wouldn’t cover it. I can’t go on in a world without Captain Sparkles.

I can only hope the community will forgive me one day. I’ll build my renowned reputation back up, brick by brick.

It’s either a problem with extensions you’re using or you’re straight up lying, and everyone knows it.

I don’t appreciate being called a liar

Then don’t?

Did you know that it’s possible to disagree with someone, and have a different experience than them, without calling them a liar? It’s pretty cool, you should try it out sometime. People usually learn this skill earlier in life, but better late than never :)

Lol you’re not fooling anyone

Ah, I see. You’re just a troll, here to start arguments; apologies for the confusion. Very clever disguise you have, though.

You’re the one coming in here telling obvious falsehoods and calling me a troll? Hilarious. Anyway I don’t think this is going anywhere so have a nice day!

Well, there is (edit:are idiot) issues on the mobile ff (which I still use), but the desktop version has no issues (if you don’t block scripts).

I admit I didn’t have mobile Firefox in mind when I made that comment. I will point out though that iOS Firefox isn’t their proper engine, it’s essentially just safari under the hood.

I’m glad you found a browser that you love, but you’re still stuck with chromium base and Manifest v3 with Vivaldi, and any further upstream abuses.

I have run ironwolf, waterfox, fennec, floorp. And several other variants of mozilla’s Firefox browser over the past two and a half years of deGoogling, and I would say that less than 2% of the sites I visit give me trouble , less than 1% actually have me falling back to using Safari if I’m on a mac, or spinning up a VM that has Vivaldi installed on it for use with a PC. .

Privacy costs. I’m now paying for my email services and self hosting several others. It’s taking me literally years to do Google 90% of my life, but it would have been I impossible if Mozilla is tech stack wasn’t mature and extremely available

Again, Vivaldi is a very sexy browser and I’m glad that you are satisfied with it, but it’s not going to meet the needs of those of us that want to be free to use full fat third party ad blockers and tracker privacy solutions.

Exactly. The Blender foundation has stated that it is a tool by humans and for humans, so no AI functionality is planned. However, there are still MCP extensions and the like. There’s nothing stopping anyone from using AI with Blender, but the Blender Foundation funding goes to core development. Not sure why Mozilla isn’t doing the same. If I really want a LLM controlling a browser, playwright-cli works fine anyway.

It still is way slower than any chromium based browser, lacks features that have been standard on chromium for years

I don’t think its slower at all. Most of the time same if not faster. Maybe it depends on where you go?

Features in chromium are often there because they are going their own way and not being standard, is that Mozillas fault?

HDR video is in Firefox, HDR images is experimental. Personally I don’t care, why would I watch videos in a browser that I think should have HDR?

I will agree that Mistral should have done the lifting, and Firefox need not be working so hard on adding AI. However, if they don’t people on the other side of the fence will complain that Chrome gets all the AI, why is Firefox so lazy?

Firefox actually picked up on good improvements at around the same they started with the AI stuff. Tab groups and vertical tabs were something people wanted forever and they implemented excellently. Firefox does have HDR.

I don’t know if firefox is slower than chromium in benchmarks or something but it’s certainly not noticeable to me in real usage.

By all means criticize AI features, but please don’t lie about everything else.

I am on the latest version of FF on Linux and I don’t have HDR working, not on YouTube, nor on standalone players like Jellyfin. Yes my display is HDR and Wayland+gnome is exposing HDR properly to games and Helium (chromium fork).

Since some govt and utilities sites only work on “chrome” (borked even with user agent switcher set to chrome+win on FF) I had to get this other browser, and the speed difference is noticeable on most sites, even tho theoretically FF should be faster since its stripping a lot of crap with uBlock Origin.

Tried flatpak’d Brave and also runs snappier than FF.

wiki.archlinux.org/title/HDR#Firefox

Brave

Always amusing you people gravitate to the cryptoscam browser.

Kindly fuck off

LOL very mature! Have a nice day, friend

I gotta admit, I don’t really mind AI as long as it doesn’t exist anywhere in any amount

I don’t really mind AI as long as it lives in a ai.megacorp.bs, and I have to go there to use it, and it stays there.

Sometimes when I can’t find an answer online I’ll ask the DDG AI assistant. It’s disabled on my PC so I have to ask on a mobile device.

It still gives me answers that don’t make sense. It’s still an LLM, Siri with a tad more oomf.

Honestly I have soured on DDG.

Not specifically over search assist (even though it’s some useless OpenAI model), but its search is just… bad. I never seem to find what I want, yet it just pops up on some other engine.

Its big useful feature is the diffusion-generated image filtering, but even that is spotty at best. I wish they would lean on the spam/SEO suppression angle more.

Huh! I’ll have to try out other search engines and see what works better.

How do you disable it?

about:config

browser.ml.enable => false

Settings -> AI Controls

path a: toggle “block AI enhancements” which turns them all off and blocks future ones by default. You can scroll down and enable specific ones if you like even with block on

Path b: scroll down and disable the specific ones you don’t want

Mozilla is in the sweet spot of basically being the only available browser that isnt chrome, that has adblocking.

and they are doing everything in their power to fuck it up by chasing this bullshit AI trend thats already dying on the vine.

On one side, its great that forks exist that strip out a lot of the bullshit. On the other hand if main Firefox dies or goes too far into the deep end, there’s no way those forks can take its role

Even if LLMs were environmentally and socially sustainable they would still be a massive IP theft meant to make the rich even richer. Mozilla and Mistral can go eat a bag of dicks.

I don’t believe in IP, so that really doesn’t bother me much. The problem is when information gets harvested from the public and suddenly becomes someone else’s IP.

So not really theft, more like gatekeeping, but as it stands, its the same result: rich get richer, we can agree on that.

I think that IP may be a good idea on paper, but as it stands it only benefits the powerful, as in “if I pirate content I risk having my life ruined, companies fed their LLMs with everything but the kitchen sink and nothing happened”

dick, hammer, … etc

Oh yeah, great, sounds awesome. Can I get in line now to not use it?

about:config

browser.ml.enable => false

I don’t trust any feature that uses the word “AI.”

Ideally, such things should be transparent to the user. As in features that are useful without having to understand the underlying programming mechanisms.

Take FF’s local translation. That’s an immensely useful feature. No one cares that it uses a language model or about any of the details, because it just works well enough, and is useful enough to stand on its own as an advantage over Chromium.

…If they have to brand a feature to make it appealing, that’s a bad sign. Otherwise why TF would I want expensive tab sorting or things like that?

What happened to just making a damn good browser

Money

They should stop doing that, instead

tbh i would not mind it that much if its local LLM or if its opt-in (opt out as bare minimum)
i also wonder if they are gonna use this for the built-in translator (if you think about it technically most translator software are AI,DEEPL uses a hybrid between LLMS and NMT IIRC. )

They have the option to use a local llm but default to online inference. Local is not good enough for most people and people would be really unhappy having their browser use 10gb of ram and spin their fans every query.

Minstrel is working on specialist small models. Maybe one day they are small enough to run in the background no worries.

i see, thanks for the information.

Honestly im not sold yet on the AI in the browser meme but I see a lot of normies at my office say the cant live without google chromes AI integration. Maybe I just hate AI summaries.

My dream is AI navigating websites I hate like facebook marketplace and finding me deals i might like.

Ok.
But why?

Mozilla execs got an angry phone call from their sugar daddies at Google demanding they drive off the last remaining FF users (allegedly)

The obsession with multilingual is ruining internet.

If you look at Reddit now you have posts which are written in several different languages because everyone relies on backend automatic translation or browser automatic translation. But those content become hard read by anyone not using these technologies. Harder to properly archive in a readable manner, and dependent on expensive tech as AI translation.

This multilingual, everything is in your language, internet is one of the worse things that has happen to the net. I’m tired of having to change my settings all the time to be able to see what the original person wrote, or spoke in the case of automatically translated videos".

On a paranoid note, this might be a plan so people stop learning english so we won’t be able to communicate with each other without their translation technologies.

Totally!

We all should be white, blond with blue eyes and speak German, am I reich?

Nicht Deutsch, sondern Englisch (oder nicht einmal Englisch, sondern nur die Sprache, in der die Website geschrieben ist, ohne viele Sprachen zu mischen). Zudem spielt die ethnische Herkunft der Menschen für die gesprochene Sprache kaum eine Rolle. Die meisten Englischsprechenden stammen nicht aus dem Land, in dem das Englische ursprünglich entstanden ist. Würde jeder von uns seine eigene Sprache verwenden (meine ist übrigens gar nicht Englisch), müssten Foren ständig Echtzeitübersetzungen einsetzen. Das würde all die zuvor genannten Probleme verursachen und uns für die Kommunikation von solchen Übersetzungstools abhängig machen. Ich weiß, es gibt Leute, die nicht wollen, dass Menschen über einen kleinen, leicht kontrollierbaren Kreis hinaus miteinander kommunizieren können. Aber ich gehöre nicht dazu. Ich betrachte Kommunikation als etwas Positives; deshalb halte ich eine Lingua franca für sinnvoll. Es könnte auch Esperanto sein, aber für mich ist Englisch völlig in Ordnung. Als Gegenbeispiel habe ich diesen Kommentar automatisch ins Deutsche übersetzt, um leichter verständlich zu machen, worum es mir geht.

As you say: “use the same language if the website”.

Therefore, people going there regularly aren’t using the translator. If you aren’t a regular, but the information you are looking for might be there, you use a translator.

There is no “obsession for multilingual internet” here, nor should it ruins the Internet".

What I meant for “multilingual internet” is what companies like Reddit or Google are doing. Forcing automatic translates to the user language automatically.

For Reddit this means that, as people write there in whatever language instead of the language of the subreddit, when you use the site outside of the official frontend you see a mix of languages. This means that you search for things in one language and get results written in another language, and you might have been looking for something in a specific language, but as automatic translated websites take over they take away your ability to choose in what language do you want to search things. On youtube for instance I cannot longer know in what language the video is going to be spoken. I might look for videos in one language and get mislead by the automatically translated title, and click into the video and get a shitty AI voiceover instead of the original voice of the video.

For instance I used to search things in Spanish to get “local” websites. Now I search in spanish and I see a bunch of Reddit post about the USA, because reddit forces the translated results into googles feed, and google accepts it. Searching something in a specific language is becoming harder and harder because more and more websites are going multilingual, taking in and serving out any and all languages and doing a bunch of automatic translations in the middle.

Maybe your perception is different. But for me this forced multilingual internet (and what I mean to this is that the frontends automatically translate the content in the business layer) makes for a poor experience with far less freedom and power over the content I choose to see, compared to what I had before.

And also the appreciation, that this might lead to more people not seeing the need of learning a second international language. Which, for me, is one of the most important skills in life, as it gives you the ability to communicate with so many people without being dependant on intermediates.

Oh I totally agree we should see the site in its original language, and that we should have the choice to translate it or not.

Now, what companies accept in their index and what the site owner is doing with automatic translation or not are unrelated.

Anything not to use Chinese model huh. Aren’t Mistral’s models woefully outmatched by literally everyone else in the AI field, by every metrics?

no thanks you can keep the slop machine.