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Somewhat ironic that the avatar looks AI generated.
It looks like the avatars in the mobile game Hogwarts Mystery.
What i hate about firefox is the fucking wall of links on the home page. It takes forever to remove them, and then they just updated and all that crap is back.
I use an extension called Tabliss and set that as my home page. I have it customized so the links to my most visited pages are set up with an icon so it’s very clean and minimalist.
I tried it out and in some respects it really is excellent, but it loads more slowly than the native “new tab”. So I stick to the native one (having removed much of the default crap, of course; now it’s just a 8x4 table of my “quick links”).
Yeah i should just change my homepage to something else, but I’m not on it for more than a few seconds so … eh
Takes forever? It’s like 2 clicks to remove sponsored links forever.
Unlike edge which likes to switch you back to the MSN landing page and bombarded you with US news articles even though your machine is set to another language in another country each time FSLogix fucks up your user profile.
They’re not talking about sponsored links, they’re talking about the “quick links” that take random sites from your history and put them on your new tab page. They take forever to remove because if you remove one it grabs another website from your history and puts it there instead.
you can just remove that entire feature by clicking the cogwheel in the top right of that page.
Seriously? I’ve been dealing with it for years, why would I have never done that? I think I’m going crazy…
Any time it takes to go down the entire list and click more than once is too much time.
Also:
and then they just updated and all that crap is back.
That’s the opposite of forever.
cogwheel, top right, disable all check boxes you want.
You’re the best, thank you
I have never had FF switch sponsored posts back on after turning them off after first install. It also remembers after a reinstall.
Good for you
For a family member of mine, who has lost most of their site, all of this “AI” has been a blessing. The ability to talk to, summarize, and read back info has made a night and day difference with her ability to communicate with the world.
It’s use cases like this where all the hyper AI hatred loses its appeal to me
I actually would be pretty happy if my browser could detect and block ads.
But they put a fuck ton of work in to not only NOT do that, they expend material efforts fucking with extensions and other tooling that provide that functionality.
Blocklists are a much more efficient way to do this, and TBH many “traditional” adblockers are still huge performance hogs. Ublock is an exception in this regard due to webassembly and its explicit dedication to lightness.
Vision models are a pretty good way to build sponsorblock/adblock databases though, and maybe even engineer HTML workarounds automatically. It would be cool if you, say, encounter an ad or a dysfunctional web page, and you can opt-in to automatically contribute a fix with your own compute.
I always assumed adblocks already were first-passing against known-advertizing patterns and then rewriting the DOM on the fly. I’m surprised that a vision model would be more performant given that it’s still going to have to adjust the DOM anyways.
I’m talking theoretically, heh, I don’t think anyone actually does that yet.
And I am just talking edge cases where existing blockers fail and there’s no manpower to figure out a customization.
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I don’t mind seeing an AI summary of search results as much as I mind sponsored links fucking up page rank. Sometimes it is even nice to see “hey your search doesn’t make sense because you’ve conflated two terms”. But I guess I’m in the minority.
Reminds me of early wikipedia when there was a deep trustworthiness problem. Seeing a wikipedia link on a presentation stole your credibility, but it was still a hell of a lot better starting point than grabbing an encyclopedia and asking jeeves until you found a thread to pull.
AI summaries put another layer of interpretation between the reader and the source material. When having accurate and properly-sourced information matters, it’s just not trustworthy enough. At least with Wikipedia, it tells you when there is potentially biased or improperly sourced material. Search AI will confidently assert their summaries as though they are factual, regardless of how reliable or unreliable their own sources are.
So long as the citations are there I’m not usually taking the summary at it’s word. I find searching “hard to Google” terms easier with AI.
When having accurate and properly sourced material matters, I hope you’re not trusting the descriptions of citations laid out by wikipedia editors who are also just another layer of interpretation. It’s always worth a double check.
So long as the citations are there
AI fabricates citations.
Every citation is not fake or irrelevant. In wikipedia it’s “citation needed” or “page does not exist”. Same problems.
All you have to do is click it or search again.
But hey, of you prefer the old fashioned way of opening every returned search result starting with page 1 to page 6 until you just search again anyway, go ahead and do that. I’ll deal with sifting through occasional bad advice in an eighth of the time.
they make them up, and they dont source it properly.
Go ask perplexity.ai a question about programming or troubleshooting FAQ and then follow a cited link. I assure you they are not all made up.
This ^.
I think people forget the fabled “old” internet was actually a pile of trolls where one had to double check what they read.
Basic sanity checks really aren’t that hard. But its a forgotten habit, I guess.
“oh my god, AI makes shit up!”
- Proceeds to follow instructions from “experts” in reddit or Lemmy comments *
I’ve been an editor on Wikipedia for decades now. I’ve followed sources to clarify information, fix broken links, and remove inaccurate information. I know how it works.
It’s always worth a double check.
That’s exactly my point. Wikipedia is transparent about where it gets its information. You can double-check citations, and if the citations don’t exist or don’t support a relevant claim, you can discard them (or edit them to flag that fact, or go above and beyond to provide a new source, if you’re so willing.) With AI summaries, you can’t do any of that. You’re given a summation without automatic citations (or sometimes, with bogus made-up ones), and you can’t do anything to correct any misinformation you encounter. Maybe you can report it, but you can’t do anything in real time to prevent others from finding that same inaccurate information - not in the way that you can to immediately correct an inaccuracy on Wikipedia.
Same. But now this is a different topic.
For something like perplexity under brave where you’re given inline citations, yeah, go follow them and get to an authoritative source faster.
We didn’t start with “I can’t submit an updated review if I find mistakes”, we started at “there’s another unnecessary layer of indirection”. Which, sure, but it’s hardly different than getting a start with a medium article of “best xxx of 2025” or, yes, a wikipedia page. It may not be to your taste, but I’ve had some occasions where it’s convenient.
I’ve never had a result that helpful. I’ve seen it make up sports results in advance though.
I suppose I’m mostly using it for programming, movie look up, vocab, and so on. Not sports/weather/news kinds of things.
This is how I felt when Windows 3.1 dropped
This is so me
DDG started with this bs yesterday and it drove me nuts.
At least it is easy to disable in ddg. Read your comment opened browser. 10seconds later all ai features disabled.
Yeah. Still pissed me off I had to do it at all.
If I want AI, I will search and dl. It shouldn’t be added to any browser without permission.
Oh don’t get me wrong. I hate it as well!
There’s a massive difference between AI being used to help the user, and AI being used as a method to spy on users, collect data, monetize from, and weaponize.
I’m happy with using local AI tools, if needed. For example, using local AI contextual search on my self-hosted IMMICH photos is awesome.
But I absolutely do not need or want AI features that have to connect somewhere. Because that just means I’m being data harvested and profiled for someone else to profit from.
Agreed. I’ve also been very impressed with Perplexica (linked to a self-hosted LLM on Ollama). It ties into SearXNG and will perform web searches, dive into the results, and summarize what it finds. Not just the pages themselves, but the specific information on those pages that addresses your original questions, including references which link back to the pages that were used to generate the summary. It’s easy to identify hallucinations when it links to the specific page where it got the information from (though I have yet to experience any hallunications with Perplexica yet).
I think Lemmy’s userbase is a bit predisposed to that. Unfortunately, that sentiment isn’t common enough, and while most people don’t want to be monetized if asked, with the convenience the reaction is a collective shrug.
But another thing we are predisposed to is dev bugs, and I think the average person won’t like how unreliable many such features are.
Most people do want to be monetised as long as they don’t have to pay money for anything.
right now AI is mostly used for spying, and stealing data, thats why all the tech bros are pushing it. For spying in general, something like thiels palintir is doing for evil purposes, and probably musks AI too.
How do I 10x my upvote for a post?
I want my web browser to actively defend me against tracking/enshittification/exploitation/hostile design, then show me cleaned-up web pages with all the ads and shit removed, then get out of the way.
I want it to show me the information (which is not same thing as the “page” as a whole) that I’m looking for without modifying it or hallucinating some kind of AI summary, but I want it to aggressively get rid of as much of the extraneous crap obfuscating said information as possible.
Thank fuck for uBlock origin
yeah, whenever I have to look at someone else’s browser and it’s an ad-filled hellscape I’m really grateful for uBlock. The internet would be completely unusable for me without it.
Same when people talk about how creepily the ads target them based on circumstantial stuff* it feels like an alien experience bc even if I get targeted despite employing quite a few tracking blockers, I never actually see the ads lol.
(* like that story of the father hearing about the daughter’s pregnancy because he got spammed with baby care ads after the daughter googled some medical symptoms)
+ bonus recommendation for those of us who still have to use Facebook: F.B. Purity is great
i had 2-3 other ones for extra protection.
And Firefox’s reader mode, and noscript.
Actual proof of good in the world
also consent-o-matic and canvas blocker
Reader mode is great, though I’ve seen some sites that seem to have taken deliberate steps to make their articles unviable with it by making all the text disappear as soon as you turn it on
Reader mode on mobile is a let down because there’s no way to force it.
and ironically, LLMs could be great for this! recognizing what’s ads and what’s content, what’s slop and what’s high-effort, wading through the cesspool of feeds and dark patterns to find the stuff that’s relevant to you.
unfortunately, the money is in using LLMs to generate more slop and make things even worse, not make it better.
I could believe it for advertising versus content (to an extent), but I think it would not be useful in ‘slop’ versus content, for the same reason it’s output is slop. If an AI approach can detect slop, then a related AI approach can generate better slop that it could no longer detect.
But it could also make advertising more baked into a content that is hard to extricate.
Laughs in LibreWolf user
I have Firefox on my PC but I gotta say, Safari on my MacBook and iPhone hase been solid. It has, so far, done exactly what the post wants. Safari doesn’t just stay the hell out of my business but it also seamlessly shares tab groups with my phone and that’s super nice, too.
I’m sure there are many more hidden things that I will learn are bad about it after posting this comment but on the surface it has been a perfectly unexciting, simple, and easy to use browser. I didn’t even think about it right away and had to come back to this post because of how delightfully boring it is despite using it every day.
I’m a web developer and I always get shit on for actually loving Safari. I don’t know why it’s a crime to love a web browser that stays out of the way.
If you need Chrome or Firefox-style extensions there’s always Orion.
Orion my beloved
Generally agree, I do appreciate Firefox’ built-in translation tool though, that also falls under “AI” I guess.
Idk if that uses AI i am unsure
A bajillion things are “AI” now, and weren’t before recently. It’s so frustrating to see people hate them all equally. It’s like when everything started to get called an “app” but worse.
AI has so many uses and it has been employed in scientific research for years, Google’s DeepMind event got the Nobel Prize for that. It’s sad seeing people hating AI and claiming it has nothing to offer. But what else can you expect from haters.
Says the AI post. Okay ChatGPT. You can go to bed now. The humans have it from here.
Go touch grass, that’s obviously not an AI post lmao.
Oh, fuck off, idiot.
It’ll get to a point where you just have to work on your critical thinking skills and just be a pessimist because everything that’s going to be presented to you is just bullshit lies. So just acknowledge that this relationship is adversarial. Listen to other people talk about work cited, maybe dig into the unknown, the abyss. They will take everything away from you. And they’ll make you feel bad for being angry. You are the product. There is no escaping capitalism until you’re ready to do something about it. At this point it’s just the game of cat and mouse and you’re getting closer to the corner. Please, I know, I’m super fucking negative. Don’t stop doing things. I’m just saying. Half of the battle is being aware.
