One of the top stories on Hacker News today was a post arguing that Mozilla shouldn't accommodate any usage of AI in Firefox because (understandably) people were mad at Big AI companies for all the horrible things they've done to users and the internet and society. But I think people are ignoring the reality that *hundreds of millions of users* are using LLMs today, and they need to have tools from platforms that will look out for their interests. https://www.anildash.com/2025/11/14/wanting-not-to-want-ai/
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@anildash
Adding automatic misinformation to Firefox is in no way is looking out for user interests.
@anildash Your argument appears to be, "Well, everyone *else* is jumping off the Empire State Building, so..."
You basically lost me in paragraph four, with, "Hundreds of millions of users are choosing to go to these websites, of their own volition, and engage with these tools."
"Choosing?" Really? The same way people "choose" to use Edge, or "choose" to use Bing, or "choose" to use the Mob's protection services?
What role do you see any browser having in protecting users against LLMs?
@ewhac are you unaware that ChatGPT is in the top 10 websites in the United States, from *direct input* — meaning people typing in the website address themselves so that they can use it? That Sora has been at the top of the App Store chart for _weeks_? How did I lose you by talking about a factual thing? Is everyone on Mastodon in a complete bubble where they don't have access to reality, isolated from the actual internet?
@anildash I'm not disputing your figures; merely what appears to be your stance of inevitability. In the 1960's over 40% of US adults had taken up smoking, which was also very dumb.
My question still stands: What role do you see Web browsers having in mitigating/preventing users being harmed/exploited by abusive LLMs?
@anildash - As one of the many people who posted in the Mozilla thread, I agree that the "nobody wants AI in Firefox" sentiment expressed by the majority is incorrect. Clearly *someone* wants it. *I* don't want it, and made an account just to say so, along with urging that any AI features be *fully opt-outable*.
@NIGHTEN It's a complex topic fraught, rightly, with fear and emotion. There are some professional LLM tools I have used that are ethical and game changers but when those outside intended audience see them, there is only rage and a lack of stepping back and viewing them as tools and nothing else. We have a long way to go in this discussion....
I think within the next 5 years or so corporations will escalate the internet so much that society will just stop using the internet in complete, and it'll just end up into one of those phases we don't like to talk about while being in public spaces communicating with real people again.
@anildash I mean yeah, that's the same solution people have been asking for since all this started. It's been in Mozilla's mentions here, it's in the comments of news articles, it's on the Mozilla forums, there's been posts about it on their feature request site...people have been telling Mozilla to add that "disable AI" button since they started adding AI. They don't care.
Consider how they handled this in the past. There was a similar level of anger when they were adding playback of DRM content. And that's why if you open your Firefox settings, you'll see a checkbox to disable DRM playback. Been there for years. Doesn't change every time they push a new release, doesn't silently renable itself, you turn it off and it's off. They know how to do this, they just aren't a company that gives a shit about the freedom of their users anymore.
And it's obvious why all the big AI companies are trying to shove this shit down our throats -- following the model of companies like Amazen and Uber, they want to become "too big to fail" before they go bankrupt, and they're burning money FAST. But what the hell is the justification for Mozilla giving us all the middle finger here? That's the question that needs an answer...
> But I think people are ignoring the reality that *hundreds of millions of users* are using LLMs today, and they need to have tools from platforms that will look out for their interests.
Where are you getting those numbers from? Is it from the marketing departments of the AI companies pushing AI into everything? You know, those with a vested interested in juicing their numbers to, for example, secure further investments for services that don't seem to actually make money?
@anildash Then why not just make this a purely optional extension? Ask users whether they want to have this during installation. If they don't, just do not install the extension – problem solved for every user!
@anildash Why should it be a "shut _off_ all AI features" button? Why not have it off by default and put in a "turn _on_ AI" button? I suppose that won't boost some executive's metrics, though.
@anildash On Earth 2, hundreds of millions of people are injecting bleach to ward off infection , just like Earth 2 Trump told them to, so Earth 2 CVS and Earth 2 Walgreens need to accommodate them.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cly17834524o
https://www.sanders.senate.gov/op-eds/ai-must-benefit-everyone-not-just-a-handful-of-billionaires/
Lots of people advocated for slavery, disenfranchised women, fossil fuel use, and DDT for the "benefits" too.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/nov/03/wealth-billionaires-increase-trump
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/10/ai-artificial-intelligence-billionaires-wealth.html
@anildash Thank you for this. I use iOS Firefox’s one-click on-device AI summary feature almost every single day.
In situations when I’d normally hit the back button, it actually gets me to engage with content for longer than I would have otherwise.
It’s possible to both use these tools, and still be skeptical of big AI.
@anildash I do appreciate your article and your point of view.
Hello from France :)
@anildash Browsers already allow you to do anything including using LLMs by opening the respective website and there also is a way of extending the browser's features with extensions. Why do LLMs need to be part of the core browser features?
No matter how often I use a hammer I still don' want a hammer attached to every other tool I use.
@anildash I would really like an option to not have AI in my software or devices.
@anildash I fear you are largely right.
@anildash then, why not make a separate browser? they won’t gain new users but will lose those of us left, their core users.
@anildash Haven't we seen enough evidence yet that "everyone else is doing the dumb thing so if we don't join in we'll be left behind" is a shortsighted argument? Would also be interested to see any data you have suggesting that people who enthusiastically use AI and want it in the browser are among a majority of browser users.
@anildash I use a desktop LLM separate from the browser. If I wanted anything AI related from a browser it would be to 'a new type of view source' , what websites and content I am viewing came from an LLM (a way to filter content by model)?), the openness of that a model, its training data? ways I could improve it. Firefox can do whatever with AI; but what I personally want is to have control and influence not another way to passively consume and hope for the best.
@anildash Sure. But where are they to find them?
@anildash try #Lumo from #Proton. i use it sparingly & support wikipedia first for instance, as a first option. for very complex questions i use lumo, & turn all other #AI off in my browsers. as with everything, you need to have your moral compass out before you make a decision to use a service or buy a product. do AI have morals yet?
@anildash
L take. Why does anyone still trust Mozilla?
@freediverx "L take" is the last bastion of the person with no argument. What trust, exactly, have you lost? What's the _actual_ harm that you've suffered — not "I don't like the way this was communicated", but an actual harm that you have suffered, and in what way did you engage with taking agency to remedy that harm? What platform do you use now?
@anildash The harm is already all around. The web is drowning in a sludge of fake sites. Half the videos people send me are fake rubbish. My friend doesn't see the point in being an artist anymore.
Mozilla pushing that all as a positive with exciting new features that they make hard to disable is insulting.
By all means, use Firefox and don't use AI. I don't give a damn about that, that's great. But think about this question deeply: What browser do you want your friends and family to use when they're using AI tools? We told people "social media from big companies is bad, get on Mastodon and Bluesky". And that works — provide useful alternatives. But if we simply say "stop using this thing you find useful, and I won't give you any alternatives", they'll just ignore us. And Big AI will win.
@anildash Big AI will win either way, whether we destroy Firefox for it or not. That's not the point. The point, as with all these questions, is whether there is ONE alternative left for people who don't want all their data to be hand delivered to American fascists.
@anildash I personally have had no issue not using AI in Firefox without changing any settings. People seem to be looking for stuff to be upset about with a lot of this.
@anildash @codinghorror I left Firefox when they couldn't say they weren't selling user data.
Brave seems like a great alternative. There are quite a few others like Vivaldi & Orion for example.
Yeah - saying “Stop Using Amazon” and do random searches to find things has definitely NOT worked with relatives.
@anildash is there a possible middle ground? Perhaps a good plug-in for ai that could fulfill that need? Without it being in every part of the browser?
@anildash Thank you for articulating this.
I am so, so tired of self-righteous folks here proclaiming that literally no one, not a single soul, wants these features, and that the same literally no one will ever again recommend Firefox as a result. It's arrogant posturing on their part, and detracts from a reasoned conversation.
I've struggled with how to respond to those posts, and you succinctly and clearly articulated every half-formed thought I've had about the topic, and plenty I hadn't. 🙂
@anildash I think it's rather a matter of explaining them why something they find useful (AI) is actually not that useful because it's all smoke and mirrors and bad at the tasks they assign it. There are usually AI-free alternatives for their use cases that do the job better.
@anildash How is a browser from Mozilla an alternative after the ToS ruckus?
@anildash i don't want my friends and family to use "ai" tools — and if they find them useful, that says more about them than it does the tools.
@anildash I find it ironic that one of the things I find LLMs most useful for is helping me with the documentation gap on getting FOSS things to work.
Before, if I was trying to install something, following the instructions, and I got an error because my distro was ever so slightly different than the one the instructions had been written for, my choices were:
1. Spend a month reading the code to understand how the thing actually works
2. Spend a week reading obscure forums
3. Give up
@anildash And in that context an option "4. Typing the error into Co-pilot and getting an explanation of how it has gone wrong and how to fix it" is incredibly useful. Sure, sometimes the answer is off. So is 90% of the advice given in obscure forum posts!
@anildash One argument I've seen against using an LLM for this is that "this isn't what they're being advertised as for or funded for". So the fuck what? Just because my use case will never justify the bubble valuation doesn't mean it's not a use case.
Horse, water, drink.
I can proselytize about the dangers of 'AI' until the cows come home. If they won't listen to me on the matter of a world-killing mind virus which will never produce anything of meaningful value, they're certainly not going to listen to me when it comes to changing their desktop wallpaper -- or anything in between.
@anildash yes. do not say "don't use this" without providing an alternative.
@codinghorror I mean, I have sympathy for "Don't do this, and let's figure out what to do instead!" Because sometimes it's hard to solve problems and we have to band together to find alternatives. But "don't do this bad thing, dumbass, be smart like me" sure is guaranteed to fail.
@anildash ok but smart.. like how? what do the "smart" people do, exactly? Can you describe it? Just move to a remote island in the pacific and sit motionless doing nothing? I mean.. what?
@anildash “what brand of cigarettes do you want your kids smoking when they light up?”
@anildash If we don’t have a smoking section in our restaurant, people will eat somewhere else and Big Tobacco will win.
@anildash We want an alternative without any AI bullshit at all, which is what Firefox used to be and what it should be.
> What browser do you want your friends and family to use when they're using AI tools?
None at all. Or rather the one where it’s opt-in. Nobody *needs* to use these.
@anildash All indications are that Mozilla plans to roll out more integrations with existing AI platforms.
How does that help the situation exactly? You say that "social media from big companies is bad" -- what is the corollary here with AI? Is there a "good" AI that Mozilla is secretly working with?
You say Big AI will win.
What is little ai?
@anildash I really wish we had a LARGE button to turn off all AI in Firefox, or at least a clear choice how to use it - explicitly.
I think not allowing users to choose is a huge underestimation of users. Designers know how to help people in this kind of decisions if it’d be a priority. AI has its uses, but currently putting everything under one single label of “AI” makes choosing and discussing about it difficult.
@anildash really? There is no shortage of options *with* AI. Only *without*. It feels like you are barking up the wrong tree.
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