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Firefox's beta feature "Smart Window" shared browsing and search history to AI models without prompting (www.omgubuntu.co.uk)
submitted 6 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 93 points 6 months ago (22 children)

And it breaks sooo many sites.
Waterfox, is Firefox that just works.

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  • [–] 37 points 6 months ago (4 children)

    I tried Librewolf for a while and found it to be a bit too much for me when all I really want is Firefox without AI. The privacy options are probably great but not for me.

    Just installed waterfox. First impression is that I am super happy to be bock to the previous Firefox theme - it takes less space and looks nicer in my opinion. Seems promising. Thanks for the recommendation! :)

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  • [–] 4 points 6 months ago (3 children)

    The latest Firefox release added a button that does exactly what you want. Turns off AI everywhere.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (2 children)

    Yeah, I returned to FireFox after the latest release because of the kill switch. Still I'm uncomfortable with using software that's full of stuff that I hate, even if it's disabled. This is not really rational I guess, just me being weird.

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  • [–] 0 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    It’s difficult. If people don’t support Firefox then the downstream browsers that everyone in this thread are suggesting are fucked. And we’re stuck with chrome and safari. But if people support Mozilla too much then they’ll just do whatever they want, like this AI nonsense.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago*

    Yeah, it's tricky. I donated to Mozilla in the past, will look into making some donations to Servo moving forwards as I really think that's the way things are headed for me. I keep trying to use GNOME Web which is WebKit based and it keeps getting better, but it's not quite there yet for me. So for now Mozilla is my best bet in spite of everything.

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  • [–] 22 points 6 months ago (8 children)

    It might be easier to soften Librewolf than harden Firefox, but fair point.

    If you're a relatively normal user and you still want to use LibreWolf, I would recommend:

    • disable fingerprinting
    • not clearing history on exit

    Most of this is easy to find, especially thanks to the LibreWolf menu

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  • [–] 13 points 6 months ago (6 children)

    Yeah it's all just in the GUI to enable and disable what you don't want.

    I don't get what people are complaining about with LibreWolf being "too hard". Like it's 1 minute clicking through menus and you're done. 5 minutes if you need to read and search things up real quick.

    But LibreWolf, ublock installed by default, and then set up containers. Just pure bliss.

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago

    Maybe, but if you want Librewolf but less extreme, that's what Waterfox is for. May as well just install that and avoid the 5 minute search. And this is coming from a long time Librewolf user.

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago (3 children)

    It broke youtube for me yesterday and mind you I’m a web developer and I didn’t know what broke it exactly to turn it on/off.

    It fixed it self today though.

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  • [–] 9 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    That was almost certainly YouTube breaking itself. They do a lot of public A-B testing without notifying the user of anything, even if it could break functionality.

    The chances of Librewolf breaking, and updating in 24 hours is basically zero. Especially if you're on Windows since it doesn't update itself, you have to choose to install the separate updater application when you install Librewolf, otherwise it just doesn't update.

    https://codeberg.org/librewolf/librewolf-winupdater

    https://librewolf.net/docs/faq/

    How often do you update LibreWolf?

    LibreWolf is always based on the latest version of Firefox. Updates usually come within three days from each upstream stable release, at times even the same day. Unless problems arise, we always try to release often and in a timely manner.

    It should however be noted that LibreWolf does not have auto-update capabilities, and therefore it relies on package managers or users to apply them.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago

    Yeah I agree it was probably a/b testing since I use ublock origin as well so I’m use to this kind of stuff.

    But the point I’m trying to make that I didn’t know at that time librewolf would have settings turned on that could break some websites.

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  • [–] 3 points 6 months ago

    To be fair, YouTube is a giant piece of shit. On mobile, IronFox and Firefox are terrible with it, but switching to Chrome and everything loads instantly.

    We all know Google is purposely slowing down non-chrome browsers.

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  • [–] 21 points 6 months ago

    Yeah Librewolf does go really fucking hard on security/privacy to the detriment of functionality, but the are upfront with that so you shouldn't be going in completely blind. I think Water Fox is a nice happy medium for users that don't want to fuck around with technical stuff.

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    And it breaks sooo many sites.

    No it doesn't. I use Librewolf and this common refrain is FUD.

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  • [–] 0 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

    I used it for almost a year.
    It took me ~2 months to find, understand, and tweak settings until I stopped running into issues with sites at least one every couple weeks.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago

    I've been using Librewolf for about a month now, today I ran into the first problem, a website was blank but that fixed itself when I closed the tab and opened it again. I've been very happy with it so far. Sad to hear you ran into troubles.

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