Remember when I did not have to turn off all of these opt-out settings?

- Firefox home
- Search, Weather, Shortcuts(sponsored), Stories(sponsored)

- Firefox Search
- Perplexity, Bing, Ebay, Google, DDGAI -- only disable can't remove these anymore.
- Trending search suggestions
- Suggestions from Firefox
- Suggestions from Sponsors

- Privacy and Security
- Suggest Firefox Relay email masks
- DNS over HTTPS -- I provide my own secure DNS
- Show breach messages (they hash your saved passwords and send to off to 3rd party sites for comparison)
- Block dangerous and deceptive content -- again only possible because using Google's local site blacklists OR sending details about files you downloaded to Google.... this is not opt-in.
- Saved Passwords are not encrypted in any way by default and ofcourse on by default.

- Tabs and Browsing
- Use AI to suggest tabs and a name for tab groups -- still on even if you have already opt'd out of 'AI controls'
- Recommend extensions as you browse
- Recommand features as you browse

- AI Controls
- I've disabled this at least 5 times but it keeps re-enabling itself with subsequent updates...

- Permissions and data
- Location, Camera, Device apps and services(recently added and opt-out), Local network devices(recently added and opt-out), Microphone, Virtual Reality
- Send technical and interaction data to Mozilla
- Allow personalized extension recommendations
- Allow Firefox to run feature studies
- Allow Firefox to improve features, performance, and stability between updates (recently added and opt-out) -- remember when this was called an 'update'...?
- Send daily usage ping to Mozilla
- Automatically send crash reports -- which will contain lots of details about you, your computer, whatever site you were visiting, files you were downloading and maybe even a crash dump which would have passwords, etc in it.

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Even when you turn all of this shite off Firefox will still ping push.services.mozilla.com every few minutes along with a half-dozen other sites like example.org, dns-cloudflare.com and others.

The thing that most people USED to love about Firefox was that it had tabbed browsing and kick ass extensions that let you start with a basic browser and add whatever pieces of functionality that YOU wanted.

putting SMB code into the kernel ... but why!?

I had to setup a fresh Firefox profile a few days back and I was astonished by how many user-hostile checkboxes that I had to uncheck. AI, sponsors in home page, firefox studies, un-removable search engines, malware protection that sends every site that I visit to google, the list is just endless. After all of that I still have to dive into about:config to find and disable at least a half-dozen other opt-out features. The whole thing feels exactly like the endless hoops that one has to jump through when installing Windows or using Edge or Chrome. I used to choose Firefox because Mozilla felt like a much more user-friendly option. I am not sure that this is still the case.

To boast that the browser has no AI built-in but then use Claude to write it.

Fei-Fei Li famously created ImageNet using Amazon mechanical turk slaves to label the images. At least until they figured out that they could lock the Internet behind captchas and have everyone be their slaves.

Even if you assume that AI is all of the things these frauds, liars and thieves say it is. It would an obvious conflict of interest for AI companies to have any say in writing the rules that govern it which is exactly why they are asking for these controls. They want to write rules that diminish China's competitive edge and locks in their monopolies while also granting them complete immunitity to all of the direct and indirect crimes that AI has previously commited and those it will commit in the future.

A story about spam concerning a group that no one cares about from a site that carries a reputation for low-effort AI slop.

They'll just make you agree to a EULA that frees them of liability like virtually every other product on sale today.

+1

The fact that Microsoft is able to do this alone, with no government involvement other than the injunction is ALL KINDS OF BAD precident.

This. You are the product, not the customer. Get used to it.

They are only crying because this a market they don't have cornered. Actual competition is terrifying to "free market capitalists". NADA can fuck right off.

So the ear owns all of his collective works?