Background Mozilla launched Tab Grouping in early 2025, allowing tabs to be arranged and grouped with persistent labels. It was the most requested feature in the history of Mozilla Connect.
More bloat and AI that I neither need nor want.
Gross. How the mighty have fallen.
I think they’re on the right path with this; developing small models than run locally, are purpose specifc, and don’t require sending data to a server farm is a good thing. I think they deserve credit for investigating a sustainable path for this technology to be useful.
I will hold it against them that the training data was generated by ChatGPT, that’s problematic for many reasons. But that’s not my point.
A lot of people seem to be freaking out like Mozilla simply embeded ChatGPT and gave it access to all your data, which they haven’t.
This gives me hope that Mozilla is coming back as a technology innovator because they are clearly taking steps to address the many significant concerns with this technology. It seems to me the plan is to start small (tab groups, and alt text generation) and establish a roadway forward on a good foundation.
To me (reading this article) the difference is clear. OpenAI is creating technology to replace you with a climate burning machine, Mozilla is trying to make your tools better and not senselessly waste resources.
🤷
Proper, URL-barless webapp support seems much more important a priority than implementing AI features that needlessly increase browser resource usage.
What a nightmare Firefox has become, my experience going to a bog-standard de-googled chromium browser has shown me truly how much I’ve given up all in the name of open standards and free software. After roughly 20 years with Firefox I don’t think I’m ever coming back. The decline is accelerating.
On desktop? With a few flags to disable stuff like this, it’s fine. I switch between Firefox and Cromite, and Firefox still feels better with a lot of content.
Not to speak of how neutered Chromium’s adblocking is getting, without a whole-browser mod (like Cromite).
…On Android through, it’s not even close. You’d be crazy to use FF.
I’m not satisfied with merely disabling, I want it gone. I’m not satisfied with having to edit flags to disable it.
I have not seen a single case of FF outperforming or providing a better experience on desktop compared to other browsers.
FF smooth scrolls better on chunkier pages to me, and (though I have no technical understanding of how), ad/annoyance blocking extensions seem to result in cleaner pages.
There’s also little niceties in FF, like no forced audio resampling, clean side tabs, more flexible theming and such.
For me, Cromite has much better anti fingerprinting, though. When I use it to shop, it’s clear sites have a much harder time following me around on Cromite than FF with extensions. And it’s still quite fast.
That’s fair, though my experience is almost directly the opposite of you when it comes to page rendering and fingerprinting. I do miss the video player pop-out though.
