Time to pull out a hammer

This is a defence only until it isn't - although thank you for the tip.

That's how Windows has been going for years - adding more and more crap and make it all default enabled, and people are like "Oh just turn it off bro."

Then every update adds more unwanted options that get increasingly difficult to turn off, or randomly turn themselves back on, and before you know it we've reached a point where every new install soon needs an entire checklist to go through to make things actually usable again.

That is not how life should be. I want something that respects me by default, and if it wants me to try a feature I might find even slightly objectional, I should have to explicitly opt-in and say YES.

Firefox is setting a precedent by moving in this direction, and they've showed their hand. There's only more where this came from, and I won't tolerate it, even if I can turn it off.

When the Firefox terms and conditions drama happened some months back, that was the push I needed to switch to Librewolf. It's a Firefox fork with privacy-respecting settings out of the gate, no sponsored content, no ads, uBlock pre-installed, and absolutely zero AI. If you're a Firefox user, I recommend you try it too.

In my opinion this is one of the main issues. All those features should be disabled by default, and only the user decide if they want to enable them!

But they are doing the opposite.

Thanks I already did that, but it still ticks me off that I had to find out they added this while using the browser. This shit should be off by default.

Yeah, you can also opt out of your planet being demolished to build the intergalactic highway, the form is in the basement.
Incidentally, most of the new llm bullshits are on by default and can't be turn off in the settings, you need to go to about:config and search for .ml to do so (not to be confused with .ml instance of lemmy which you also can't easily opt out of). Obviously this settings aren't synchronised between instances by "synchronise all settings" thingy which they need my personal info for, why would it, so you need to do it every time. Also also they sometimes revert back with major updates, because obviously they are.

This isn't my wheelhouse so take it with a grain of salt, but an argument against link summarizers that I've heard is that it takes views away from websites that could be generating revenue for themselves. Instead an LLM scraped their content and fed a summary directly to the user.

entirely optional

No, it's on by default, it has access to everything you're browsing and doing fuck knows what with it, and you need to know that it is doing it and unless you've read it somewhere you don't know that it's there.

thing that AI is actually pretty decent at (summarizing text)

That's so not true it's not even funny.

I mean yeah, it could be worse, everything could be worse. Still, not good, not good at all.

you only encounter it by interacting with the browser in an atypical way

Leaving my pointer on a random place that happens to be a link is atypical? I don't think it is. I had this pop up to me a couple of days ago and I didn't even understand what could've triggered it, I was wondering if I clicked something or pressed a key unconsciously.

and the thing it does is a thing that AI is actually pretty decent at (summarizing text)

Pretty decent? Just passable, if the text is about some run-of-the-mill topic.

Holding my click on a volume slider triggered the feature so it quickly became really annoying

*yet

The new CEO is an AI True Believer, and I don't doubt this will last.

They'll remove the options to turn it off, and make it full of the AI features, with no opt-out or opt-in

Installed Firefox from the Mint repos. It does.*

*Source: Me, just tried it.

It does if you have a default install