Mozilla has made changes that happened by default before. Often I have had to find the setting to put it back to how I wanted. I remember when it moved the URL bar to the bottom.
I don't think it is always an easy call to make. Tabs were a significant user experience improvement, but hiding it behind an opt-in would have limited it to people who knew about it.
I use Firefox as main on desktop and mobile. I have noticed messages on upgrade pointing to LLM features. I haven't engaged with them an from thereon haven't noticed any change because of them.
Saying there are reports of excessive memory or CPU use isn't terribly useful without references to those reports. One such report posted on HN was shown to have been unrelated to the LLM.
Are there any reports actually showing degradation because of LLMs rather than post hoc ergo propter hoc?
AFIK no
nearly all AI features only do any compute if you explicitly ask them to do stuff
the only exception is that when you create a tab group (and only then!) it will auto recommend a name. And while I don't find a very useful for me (and I use tab groups a ton) I also have observed that non technical users get confused with unnamed tab groups and the UI around them so I really understand why they do that. Also while it's "technically" a LLM it's tiny and fast to run and could also have been implemented with just embeddings at a slightly loss of quality (and again only runs if you create a tab group and not at any other time and not if you computer has less then 3GiB of RAM etc. etc.(yes FF disables AI features on very low RAM devices AFIK))
Put people hear AI think LLM get angry and stop thinking.
Or considering that maybe a non negligible amount of people outside of their bubble want exactly that and might leave your browser if you don't supply that.
LLMs are garbage and they add nothing to the browsing experience.
> Are there any reports actually showing degradation because of LLMs rather than post hoc ergo propter hoc?
You can control this option with a setting. It seems like it would be really really easy to just test this. As a result I can't see any reason to doubt this by default or apply a legalistic evidentiary standard when considering it.
The builtin translation feature [0] is LLM-based [1], and that adds a ton to my browsing experience, since it's made web pages in other languages accessible to me.
[0]: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/website-translation
[1]: According to Wikipedia, "A large language model (LLM) is a language model trained with self-supervised machine learning on a vast amount of text, designed for natural language processing tasks" [2]. The translation code is transformer/RNN-based and trained on raw texts [3, 4], and translation definitely qualifies as a natural language processing task, meaning that the translation feature is LLM-based.
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_language_model
Deep search is also extremely useful, it saves me actual days and finds things and cool people I wouldn't be able to find in reasonable time otherwise, a lot of that in isolated communities like discord servers normal search has no insight into. Sure, you have to be aware about things left in the dark, but you also have to be attentive to this with normal search as well.
Video summarization lets me extract the actual message from the pile of clickbait, marketing, and three-hour long interviews - all while pointing at the timecodes for me to verify.
Now, the pressure of bullshit will inevitably shift to LLM training. It's only a matter of time. But that's another question, the tech itself works amazingly well, what the hell are you even talking about?
What evidence do you have that it wasn't tested? Or are you just making an assumption based on one article? Did you do any follow up searching? It might have led you to this:
https://www.neowin.net/news/mozilla-under-fire-for-firefox-a...
Update (August 13, 2025, 03:57 GMT): While the community correctly identified a performance issue, their attribution of the cause was mistaken.
But boy does it not add extra effort removing these features every time there’s a new roll-out and it’s not done the best way IMO. I feel as if these features would go down better if Mozilla actually notified the user that they’re available and then offered whether to enable them or not (could have them enabled by default for new users). That way you’re still giving a choice, but in a more respectful manner.
If anyone is interested I’ve gutted all the more obscene stuff out of Waterfox and have instead left the useful ones such a ML translation, which is opt-in.
Related: I feel like onboarding is a lost art, more software should bring back software wizards and UI tours. Feels like you somehow have to intuitively know how something works (unlikely) or do a web search on how to use everything instead of having it shown to you nicely.
Yes, please! We use Google's online office programs at work and every time it has so far popped up a notification about a new feature I immediately dismissed it by the act of actually doing the work I opened the tab to do. Then I have no idea how to find out what that feature was again, as the popup notification was dismissed.
Sort of related, after reading this I went and checked the Waterfox reddit and saw some people complaining about recent changes. I agree with a person there that one of the most important things is not changing. One of the reasons I use Waterfox is to not be subject to the caprices of Mozilla. I just want the same interface I've been using since back in the days of like Firefox 4.0. If there are changes, they can be introduced in an opt-in, reversible way as you suggest. But the default assumption should be "don't break users' workflows by changing behavior".
I appreciate all you do with Waterfox! I've been using it for years now.
Perhaps so, but Mozilla has a long history of shooting itself in the foot by repeatedly making ill-considered decisions that annoy users (and add-on developers) which have driven them away. Many problems were clearly avoidable, and with Google's juggernaut Chrome towering over Firefox, Mozilla's most important decision should have been to focus on keeping its user base intact at all costs. Clearly, that didn't happen.
Instead, Mozilla plowed on making changes to Firefox with seemingly little consideration of the impact they'd have on users. And Mozilla's still at it. Everyone makes mistakes and one should be forgiven for making them but it's hard to feel sorry for Mozilla given it's made so many and repeated them so often. The article says Firefox has 2.17% of the browser market, my response is if it were not for the doggedness of a small percentage of users who value not being locked into Google's and Microsoft's ecosystems Firefox would have died at least half a decade or go.
It's not possible here to provide a comprehensive survey of these mistakes and annoyances so I'll mention just a few of my pet peeves (there are many more). First, I'll preface this by saying that for most users a web browser ranks amongst their most important utilities, it should be a 'transparent' interface between them and the web, and it should function without hindering users and be malleable to suit users' needs. Unfortunately, that's so often not the case, and Firefox is not alone in not fulfilling that purpose. OK, let's start:
• Annoyingly, just about every major version of Firefox comes with changes that affect its operation. Often they introduce time-wasting and usability gotchas that are more impositions than feature improvements. For example, the Australis UI, for me it put constraints on how I could configure the UI (toolbars were more restricting and less flexible—e.g. the default spacing between icons had been increased limiting their maximum number).
• I had no objection to the Australis UI per se except that Mozilla made its use compulsory. Why didn't Mozilla provide a simple fallback option to the previous UI to protect compatibility?
(It's 40-plus years since the PC revolution, so you'd think by now developers would at least know that when they alter a UI, they force millions of users around the world to lose millions of manhours futzing around and relearning everything/developing new muscle memory and so on. In many instances these changes are unnecessary. Moreover, users find having to adapt to them damned annoying!)
• Mozilla also applied the same UI nonsense to options/preferences, the original interface (as still used by say the Palemoon fork) wasn't perfect but it's replacement was worse, its large font forced it to dribble over to the next screen and finding options wasn't as clear. It is now easy to lose focus—one can miss seeing say the About:config option even when looking for it. Improving the earlier interface would have been preferable (just think of the amount of time developers lost redeveloping that work—work that wasn't really necessary).
• Another UI annoyance is the new minimalist look, hiding toolbars and like. More development wasted on a feature that only reduced usability. Right, it's another instance of ergonomics bedamned, again, we've more user time unnecessarily wasted looking for menu items/options not to mention time taken up by add-on developers who've had the job of rectifying the Mozilla-induced problem.
• FIREFOX'S BIGGEST AND MOST LONGSTANDING PROBLEM—BROKEN ADD-ONs AND PLUGINS. Almost every new version of Firefox has broken them. It was so fucking annoying that years ago I switched to the Palemoon fork for my default browser on both Windows and Linux; it was the only way I could achieve operational stability. And I'm just a user, many add-on developers left the Firefox platform as Mozilla's changes forced them to redo work that had been completed previously.
It's been a nightmare, Mozilla kept offering excuses, new software paradigms, security reasons and so on but as a user it disrupted my workflow to the point where I gave up. The other issue was that important add-ons upon which I depended were no longer being developed for the same reasons. Why didn't Mozilla take a leaf out of MS's Windows development where backward comparability was absolutely paramount? Anyone at Mozilla reading this will be screaming security issues and such, but why didn't you offfer those in the know with at least a fallback position?
• Mozilla invented a very useful webpage format called Mozilla Archive Format, MAFF (.maff), which allowed a webpage to be saved as a single file as opposed to the traditional way of saving HTML and ancillary files separately (as per MS Windows etc.), however it is not available in Firefox, nor is the MHTML/MIME (.maf) format which is the other way of saving a webpage to a single file (as used by IE for years).
Why fucking not, as it's so damn usefull? Moreover, MAFF is so simple, it's just a zip file in disguise, unzip it and one ends up with a HTML file and a separate directory for the other files which can then be viewed by any browser. Moreover, MAFF was simpler than the MIME format and was particularly useful in the days when IE saved nonstandard HTML in its .mht files. For years, there was a MAFF plugin for Firefox but its developer gave up because Mozilla kept changing the requirements for add-ons. In the absence of an absolute necessity, such action is suicide for a program.
We are a quarter-century into the 21st Century and Firefox is 21 years old so why is Firefox still so devoid of many basic web necessities/features—ones that ought to have been fully integrated into the base product thus avoiding the need for add-ons (the same also applies to Thunderbird). It's long been such a puzzling question.
Again, I use the Palemoon (PM) fork to avoid Firefox's limitations especially its failure to integrate Mozilla's own MAFF format. Importantly for me PM still has a MAFF add-on. (On Android, I use Privacy Browser (PB) because it fully integrates the MIME/.mht webpage save facility within the body of the program, moreover, it's one of the best implementations I've used.)
• Mozilla's dictatorial authoritarian attitude and JS. I spend much of my web browsing time doing so with JavaScript disabled as webpage rendering is just so much faster, also ads and pop-ups disappear and much website spying is nuked. Firefox used to include an option to disable JavaScript but Mozilla killed it off without warning. Why? Such bloodymindedness makes me want to send Firefox's developers off to the stocks for necessary 'reeducation'. The fucking hide of them—we do need Mozilla whistleblowers to leak why the organization acts in such an autocratic manner.
Right, such dysfunctional decisions simply mean that I am unable to use Firefox even if I wanted to (and again it's PM and PB that have come to the rescue).
• Mozilla markets Firefox as a having good privacy credentials yet it's always been overly secretive about Firefox's telemetry—its defaults, how users should go about disabling its various aspects, etc. This double standard doesn't fit well with many users, myself included.
• Moreover, on that last point, Mozilla often wants users to provide feedback on various aspects of Firefox but it has a longstanding policy—which it never offers any satisfactory explanation about—of not saying why certain decisions about the program were or weren't made—why certain features were or weren't included and so on—just as we're now witnessing again with these new AI features. In short, that Mozilla is not open with its users breeds mistrust.
• There are many other problems with Firefox (such as with printing) that I cannot address here but from what I've said it's clear that in the light of the Chrome onslaught Mozilla failed to carve out a nitch for itself in places not filled by Chrome (why it's so is most curious, perhaps it's pressure from Google threatening less funding if Mozilla doesn't tow the line).
Whatever the reason, Mozilla over many years not only failed to grasp the significance of having the tech-savvy and those with special requirements amongst its loyal Firefox users but it often invoked hostile policies that alienated them. Mozilla could have easily integrated important features for technical users and still kept Firefox simple for neophytes and beginners but it failed to do so. The penalty has been harsh, Firefox nowadays is almost an irrelevancy.
Perhaps someday we'll learn reasons why Mozilla both alienated its niche market of tech-savvy users as well as throwing away an excellent opportunity to foster and encourage privacy-minded users who would have much preferred not to use Chrome or Edge.
What? I have yet to meet a single person who has any interest in "AI powered browsers"
All of those were, as far as I know, enabled by default and released in browser updates.
Who asked for this? Who wants it? Certainly not the Linux / open-source crowd, and they're just about the only ones who are keeping Firefox alive.
If there's anybody from Mozilla or the Firefox dev team in this thread, I'd be interested to hear the thinking behind this addition.
At least the local AI features, being able to translate or summarize a page without sending it off to Google, seem like they'd appeal to this crowd the most.
I don't really understand the article's complaints (like "high cpu & ram usage with firefox local ai features" and "forcing [...] without asking the user") when to my understanding they're something you have to intentionally decide to use and are not using any resources otherwise - unless there's some feature I've missed.
I have no problem with it announcing new features and asking if I wish to enable them after an update, but I'd really rather prefer it not to force enable new features (regardless of proximity/relevance to AI) whether it tells me about them up front - and especially don't want it to if they aren't even notifying me of it.
Yes I would like more local translation support! (Faster, better, more languages, sometimes it fails on mobile for unknown reasons). Also Firefox history could use refresh (like suggested here https://community.brave.app/t/improvements-for-browser-histo... and 5 can be AI enhanced)
That being said, I'm a FF user interested in exploring what LLM features in webbrowsers could bring. I would hate it if lack of them would make me switch to chromium-based browsers. So I'm happy Mozilla is exploring these.
Telemetry should always be opt in not opt out - I don't care how you justify it but especially I don't care when you've marketed yourself with "Firefox is built with privacy and protection as the default."[1]
[1] https://www.firefox.com/en-US/user-privacy/
When it comes to on by default - If what you are doing amounts to "I Am Altering the Deal, Pray I Don't Alter It Any Further." then you might have to ask yourself whether you should be doing it.
I'm not thrilled it isn't open source. But it works, it has the best out of the box experience I've seen in any browser, and they don't shove AI features in my face.
Appealing to that crowd is not big enough to grow it's market share from 2%.
Do you really think AI features are going to move the needle here? Is your grandma going to think "Wow, Firefox can summarize my emails!" and switch web browsers?
>Do you really think AI features are going to move the needle here?
It's better than doing nothing at least.
Most prominent thing is chat in sidebar. It's iframe + a few shortcuts. Optional, harmless, using zero resources. Actually quite convenient.
Another is perplexity being one of the search providers. This is literally config not code. I wonder how many people actually removed or even looked at the list of the default search providers before that.
I think only real one is ml naming for tabs. Just meh.
Honestly people who deny any usefulness of AI are getting dangerously close to flat-earthers by now.
How do you propose they finance development if we consider simple integrations with zero privacy or customization impact "selling out"?
They would need to finance a lot less development if they stopped changing things and just worked on maintaining a limited core functionality including a nice extension system. That's it. Most of their "development" over the last 10 years has been a total waste of time.
Can you really say with a straight face, that not doing vertical tabs or chat shortcut would allow them to operate on much smaller budget?
Either way, all I'm saying is when I look at the UI changes that have been made to Firefox over a period of years, I believe their value to me is closer to zero than their development cost is.
I'd like to see (opt-in) automatic grouping. The kinda-sorta grouping it does still requires you to manually engage with it.
But you could bring up the same argument about vertical tabs, tab groups, Firefox Sync or many other things that interfere with the browser on much deeper level than shortcut to open page in the sidebar.
Is there argument to single out this specific feature apart from "AI bad"?
What made you jump to that conclusion? My guess about someone who's using a non-mainstream browser and figuring out how to configure it to their liking is that they're likely also using AI in more ways than the standard Chat-Webinterface, eg Agents, CLI tools, MCP,... To give an analogy, rolling your eyes over brainrot memes isn't denying the usefulness of smartphones or messengers either. The underlying sentiment is being critical of things that get pushed down our throats through A/B-optimized patterns that ultimately serve other interests than your own, profits or darker.
Please don't compare it to Google or Microsoft products that give you "Enable now/Remind later" or just no option at all.
This is a remarkably useless argument; "any" could be anything whatsoever, for example that the fuzzy logic of some prior AI craze ended up in certain rice cookers, while ignoring that the remaining 99.8881118881118883479075520881451666355133056640625 (or so) percent of AI is some combination of grift, wishful thinking, or both.
I think this is why they keep shoving new features at users whether they want them or not, making them incredibly difficult to disable, rather than presenting an option try something new, or even making opting out of features easy and intuitive.
The latter two would lead to fewer users of the feature, which means it risks being removed for not being used by most users. Not to mention having an easy opt-out functionality means its usage can be tracked, which could generate unwanted statistics and make a stakeholder lose face.
I also think that we in the long run will probably let machines do most tedious browsing for us-- digesting ad-ridden websites, digesting interfaces. The LLM navigates the actual web, presented to maximize revenue and maximize user engagement, time spent on the website etc., but we only see actual content, carefully arranged to be as comprehensible as possible, and if we want to communicate with somebody through a website controlled by others we formulate the message and the LLM submits it.
I'm so confused, they have a whole page that starts with how they run everything on device[0]. But the page ends telling you how great it is that you can choose your AI service which then leads to a page where ... all the options are hosted AI providers and half the page is about you have to read their terms of service and they all invade your privacy[1]. I stupidly enabled Gemini at some point and now there's no obvious way in the UI to disable it. I can only switch to a different hosted service provider.
I searched in settings for AI, model, LLM, nada.
Whatever good things they did here they totally screwed up the comms and UI execution of it.
[0] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/firefox-ai/ai-browser-fe...
I don't feel opposed to them changing the browser in principle--certainly there have been many improvements to web browsers over the years. Is privacy the concern here?
Searching for "AI" shows one other setting: "Quickly access bookmarks, tabs from your phone, AI chatbots, and more without leaving your main view." But I'd already disabled that apparently. Despite that, there are plenty of flags that were enabled mentioned in the article.
Example: Put this expression(using lockPref to hardcode the config values) in environment.systemPackages(assuming "with pkgs"):
(wrapFirefox firefox-unwrapped {
extraPrefs =
(
''
lockPref("browser.ml.enable", false);
lockPref("browser.ml.chat.enabled", false);
lockPref("browser.ml.chat.hideFromLabs", true);
lockPref("browser.ml.chat.hideLabsShortcuts", true);
lockPref("browser.ml.chat.page", false);
lockPref("browser.ml.chat.page.footerBadge", false);
lockPref("browser.ml.chat.page.menuBadge", false);
lockPref("browser.ml.chat.menu", false);
lockPref("browser.ml.linkPreview.enabled", false);
lockPref("browser.ml.pageAssist.enabled", false);
lockPref("browser.tabs.groups.smart.enabled", false);
lockPref("browser.tabs.groups.smart.userEnable", false);
lockPref("extensions.ml.enabled", false);
''
);
})It's of course totally fine to be annoyed if Firefox doesn't have a supported preference to disable them (though from the discussion below it sounds like they do) or if you set that preference and then they change it.
What is the supported way?
> you shouldn't complain that Mozilla changed the prefs and reenabled these features.
Then they should provide a reliable way of getting what I want. This notion that software developers know better than me is poisonous.
The settings UI.
> > you shouldn't complain that Mozilla changed the prefs and reenabled these features.
> Then they should provide a reliable way of getting what I want.
As I said in the comment you are responding to, it's perfectly legitimate to complain if Mozilla didn't provide a setting to disable these features (though it seems they have done so in at least some cases). However, if they don't do so, and you decide to disable them in some unsupported way, you shouldn't be surprised that you get unexpected results.
> This notion that software developers know better than me is poisonous.
I don't think this is really a reasonable proposition as a general matter. A browser is a very complicated piece of software and each individual configuration point is additional development and testing burden, both separately, and in combination with other configuration points. Developers need to make all kinds of decisions in order to manage engineering complexity. In some cases, where developers know that people will want to configure things, they'll provide configuration options but it's not practical to do so for every feature, and inevitably in some cases they'll get it wrong (see "legitimate to complain" above).
From the posted article: "The main problem with this is users are having this forced on them with no gui option to disable these features."
> and you decide to disable them in some unsupported way
The preferences file is "unspported?" Why? Is firefox intentionally making their browser hard to distribute? All the settings, even in the UI, have simple textual names. Is there some reason they need to have this support envelope be so underwhelming? What advantage does that actually bring? If there is none, then why _shouldn't_ I complain? The alternative is I can stop using the project and recommend to everyone that they do so as well.
Here's the awesome support you get through the UI:
"If you are also dealing with CPU spikes and battery drain from Firefox's new AI features, you can disable them through the browser's advanced settings. Head to about:config in a new tab, accept the risk warning, and use the search bar to find the controls. To kill the AI chatbot feature, search for browser.ml.chat.enabled and set it to false. To stop smart tab grouping, search for browser.tabs.groups.smart.enabled and set it to false."
Give me a break.
> I don't think this is really a reasonable proposition as a general matter.
Then I won't use your software. I will recommend against it. I will ensure that everyone understands it's faults. That's the only reasonable response as an irritated user.
These sort of perfs in user.js or about:config are clearly labeled as not having those guarantees and therefore "unsupported".
As someone who extensively customizes the look, feel and way that firefox works I think this makes sense. I of course would like mozilla to make a lot more options "officially" supported, especially turning off anything that contacts a remote server without explicitly wanted.
In the comment section here I see lot of people complaining about the fact it's enabled by default as well as some concerns about resource usage. Could someone experienced in desktop app architecture explain if disabling them functionalities makes Firefox that much faster or using less resouces? I'd assume that those functionalities are kind of loaded on demand?
"AI" became such a keyword that seem to instantly give either positive or negative response, it's also an advertised feature of every second app with many of them just forcing AI into you just because of hype. This doesn't seem to be a case in Firefox - so I highly disagree with the title - the features are there but they don't go into your way if you don't want them, therefore it's easy to just use it, only when needed
To be more transparent about it and foster further innovation, they should simply move the AI parts out of the browser altogether (to an external engine like ollama) and provide sane defaults, easy ways to launch them and options to try out different models. Such models and engines can perhaps be shared with other browsers or applications without duplication. Why must they instead be separately integrated so tightly into every single traditional application?
When I go to about:config and enter "browser.lm", there's nothing displayed. That's on the latest 144.0.2 release.
Is any of it somehow related to this? https://www.heise.de/en/news/One-API-for-all-Mozilla-ends-LL...
I would think most users would ignore the features they don't like? Idgi
user_pref("browser.ml.chat.hideLocalhost", false);
user_pref("browser.ml.chat.provider", "http://localhost:3000");OpenGL is disabled by default but you can enable it AFAIK (gfx.webrender.software.opengl in about:config).
NOTE: Some settings might block too much, edit and use as you please.
https://rentry.co/browserconfigs / https://rentry.org/browserconfigs
Any setting where there's a difference between "disabled" and "fully disabled" is user hostile. And, for a company that advertises itself as all about respecting the user, Mozilla sure does love their user-hostile decisions.
https://hacks.mozilla.org/2014/05/reconciling-mozillas-missi...
I don't want my browser to be "helpful". I don't want my browser to be "smart" or "featureful" or ""modern"" or """beautiful""".
Firefox has precisely one job: navigate to a URI and display the website or file it describes.
End. Of. Experience.
You're a browser company, please just make a goddamn browser. I'm begging you. I just want to browse the internet in peace and quiet.
I use LibreWolf because IMO vanilla Firefox is just as disgusting and useless as Google Chrome. Using bare Firefox instead of Librewolf is about the same level of disgust and annoyance as browsing without uBlock.
I don't want Mozilla to fail, but Jesus Christ they need to jettison the entire c-suite into the nearest active volcano.
>I would think most non technical users would just use a different browser.
I would think they would list one or two of them under the “alternatives” section…?
LibreWolf in general is a browser you need to enable things if you want them rather than have to disable spyware like for mainline firefox
Three dots -> Settings -> Page Summaries to disable that.
You can search for the configuration options mentioned in the article (e.g. browser.ml.enable) in there.
You just don't understand the eleven-dimensional chess that you have to play to get from 30% marketshare to 2% marketshare. They have to think they have a winning strategy, judging by the way they talk to everybody who criticizes their decisions.
I disable a ton in default FF and even run the unbranded versions so that it's not trialware (FF branded builds all expire when their baked in add-ons CA TLS certs expire). But the LLM translation? That's finally a good feature.
It isn't clear what browser.ml.chat and browser.ml.pageAssist are associated with in terms of features. Does anyone know? I tried disabling all shown in the write-up and local LLM translation still seems to work so I assume it's something else.
but I don't understand why people make such a deal about it
it looks a loot like "I don't like this so it mustn't even exist even if some people like it" mentality
like
- all of this features are opt in, they don't just randomly send your data somewhere or randomly eat your CPI resources (without you having enabled them)
- the smart tab group features(1) are the only very visible and kind dump/useless one, and you can disable them without tweaking internal configs unser "Addons > On-device AI" (but it won't disable the button in the group tabs menu which is used to enable that feature in the first place)
- for many users side translations is an important must have feature, it's one of the AI features, and having a local on-device no data send to servers translation is very desirable (to be fair US users probably don't care nor realize it matters, but it really matters) (To be fair the OP didn't disable this either)
- for increasingly many users integration with chat bots (e.g. ChatGPT) is a must have browser feature(2). The integration is also only visible in a context menu(3) and hidden in the a selector for the side bar and needs to be explicitly setup before it does anything. So a feature some people want and treat as must have and now can have and for everyone else it's pretty much out of the way and not pushed onto you at all. So why insists that it's not okay to have it even in a selector hardly any power users will ever use (because the other options there are bookmarks, and history, both with well known widely used keyboard shortcuts)
- the preview was a "Labs" (i.e. experimental preview) feature you have to explicitly enable and then use the right hot key to use, and it's one of this "some people expect this feature in 2025" features (but not sure what happened to it, it's neither in Labs nor enabled in any FF browser I have, so maybe they discontinued it)
(1): They IMHO are pretty dump and seem more like a way to setup the whole infrastructure around them with a trivial to implement feature then a in depth feature mozilla cares about. I guess.
(2): On HN it often seems like only enthusiasts and not many non-tech people use ChatGPT and co. _That is not true at all_. When it comes to "simple" ChatGPT usage far more non technical users use it then technical one. Like for dump stuff like shopping list, holiday check lists, etc. The problem OpenAI has isn't that they don't have a lot of users, it's that they need a absurd amount of high paying users. But the tasks most non-tech people use generic ChatGPT for aren't worth a lot. Like even the Plus plan is a "only if you are wealthy enough to burn 20 bucks every month without caring" option in such a context and the Pro plan just absurd.
(3): Is anyone except non technical users still using browsers context menus in a way where a "Ask AI Chat-Bot" entry matters???? Like copy, past, undo, redo, select all have trivial short cuts. Language/spell check is rarely touched and inspect has a short cut where you press Q after right clicking.
but not on my machine