i think you just blocked things you already blocked. that button is for blocking all at once, as per their statement

if chrome added a toggle to turn off ai features?

it's what i use for a 'chromium' but it's got even more defaults to flip than firefox does and has some other issues that just simply get in the way too often. but i do like how you can completely rearrange the toolbar like in firefox.

... and it was turned on by default and had misleading language as to what the button actually does, yes.

firefox is a spring garden filled with wildflowers and honeybees going about their business compared to the hellscape that is windows group policies.

Most features in most software are either opt-out or unremovable, though. It's clearly not about that to you, it's about the association with AI

As they say, no AI is a feature.

Luckily, due to the nature of Firefox, this feature is free

I'm also largely against opt-out in other uses, too. The fact that this is AI only makes it that much worse.

Someone has been studying up on the Microsoft Group Policy way of wording things.

i grew up calling them semaphores and i'll die calling them semaphores.

At least they are brave enough to make the switch for free.

I have to go into chrome://flags and disable AI in Chrome too. Fuck that “CIA sniffer” on my “typing.”

And I believe my Firefox… eh, I gotta check because why this opt-in to disable?

As soon as someone forks a “AI free” browser, I’m switching. Goddamm, this is all a setup for “too big to fail” (or get a Y2K disaster thingy) so gimme a bail out. Thieves in a few years.

Use librewolf

most people want/are indifferent to local translation

This is proper UI design. What they're doing is defaulting to have AI updates installed automatically. If you don't want that to happen you can stop it.

Chrome idek gives you option to disable or you're just left modifying their registry keys

I'm okay with this one, since it's effectively an opt-in/opt-out toggle. One click on the toggle, then confirm and all the AI features get disabled as a result. Two clicks versus five is easier in my book, and at least it wasn't one of those awful, non-compliant cookie popups where there's no "reject all" button and you have to manually go through each toggle if it's on a site you actually need to access.

No one's against a feature being opt-out unless they actively dislike that feature. You're not going to make a post about the context menu items you don't use unless you have some political opposition against them.

Nobody complains about the ¤ key on their phone's English QWERTY keyboard, or the "generate QR code from tab" feature in Firefox that I'm sure you've never used. Neither of these features is opt-in, and yet you're content with them. It's because you don't have any political opinions about the features themselves. You don't actually care about opt-out when the feature doesn't bother you.

Thanks for telling me what I believe in spite of me laying it out in plain English for you. I was confused for a minute there.

I think whoever coded that views toggles as a yes/no.

Mistaaaaake

I don't recommend disabling the on-device translations and speech to text feature. Yes, they are "AI" but they are the good on-device offline AI services that are actually useful. Without the on-device translation feature, you'll have to rely on web based Google Translate. Same with the speech to text feature.

Librewolf is AI free their default search engine is even ai free duck duck go. You can also easily opt into some of the functions that usually break web pages when they arent enabled at the cost of some privacy

The "AI translation" feature here has been on Firefox for years now. It was once an extension then just baked in to Firefox. So it was always enabled by default that automatically translates a site if it found a compatible language and it is on-device so doesn't use the cloud. They just added the "AI" label recently I guess to appease a certain demographic. I guess there are other people who really relate AI to being bad. But guys, these have been ON firefox for a long time, just renamed as an AI feature.

Depends on the browser. Many have it built in now, so your argument still fails.

hey, just be happy there is an option at all, and a granular one at that.