Disable AI in Firefox

I've used Firefox for 15 years and I really don't want to use Chrome. Can Mozilla just, like, make a good browser?

Use Brave. It’s de-googled, privacy-centric chromium with built-in uBlock-style ad/tracker blocking. Best of both worlds!

There are some good reasons to consider not using Brave: https://www.spacebar.news/stop-using-brave-browser/

De-googled Chromium? This does not compute.

De-googled in the "we make some patches to remove things we think are hostile from Google" sense but yes: they're still completely reliant on them for engine development.

I think they make a pretty good browser. It is performant, supports blocking ads easily, standard compatible, customizable and recently even added support for vertical tabs. What are you missing?

Yeah I'm not at all interested in Brave, that's a dumpster fire of it's own. And that still gives control to Google by owning the defacto implementation of browsing the internet. There needs to be an actual alternative to Chrome.

So much about Brave raises scammy red flags every time I look at it.

However, my main reason for ditching Chrome years ago was the fact that I think a browser engine monoculture is bad for the web as a whole, especially if that engine is primarily controlled by a single corporate entity.

Manifest v3 and other Google nonsense came later, and are extra reasons to stay away from Chrome, but I still feel strongly that a good alternative needs to use a different engine.

The ad blocker keeps it viable.

Personally (I’m not the person you asked) I’m missing AppleScript support. Firefox is the only major browser without it, and the bug report for it is old enough to drink in every country.

That lack of capability prevents it from being my daily driver, even if the rest were good enough (I’m not saying it isn’t, I’m saying I have no reason to find out).

I am certain I have inadvertently pushed many people away from Firefox for that reason alone, because when they ask for me to add Firefox support for my tools, I have to tell them it’s impossible.

I have tried to talk to Firefox developers about that a few times, at open-source conferences and such, but they think AppleScript is some power-user feature and fail (refuse?) to understand power users drive adoption and create tools that regular users rely on.

I remember whenever a Firefox story was submitted on HN, multiple people commented “I want to use Firefox but it’s missing <whatever>”. Then Mozilla started doing a lot of questionable stuff (all of which they eventually abandoned) outside their core competency and even pulling distasteful marketing stunts, and at some point people started commenting even that. I presume many got tired and gave up on Firefox entirely. I almost have. I now root for them only conceptually, because browser diversity is good.

I also noticed that no matter how politely someone pointed out on HN “Firefox doesn’t fit for me because of <whatever>”, they always got downvoted. If valid polite criticism is buried, no wonder things stay the way they are.

MacOS, Linux, FreeBSD and everything else squeeze into just 15% of Firefox's user base.

https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/hardware

They're really not going to be able to dedicate resources to something as bijou as AppleScript.

Not defending mozilla adding AI to firefox, but...

If you've tried chrome recently, you'll know that it's jam packed full with even more stuff you don't want. And the article lays out how to easily disable all AI in firefox (which you cant do at all in Chrome)

Interesting! The last time I used a Mac was many years ago, so I'm not sure what would you do with AppleScript in the browser. What are some example use cases?

> They're really not going to be able to dedicate resources to something as bijou as AppleScript.

They don’t need to do it themselves, they could just not stifle the efforts of third-parties who do want to and have worked on it. Multiple people started on it over the years and were simply ignored by the devs.

I recently discovered that the sponsored sites on the homepage I had previously removed have reappeared. I've had similar issues with a few of the buttons on the browser chrome I had also removed. I'll still use it because I don't want to deal with the security and privacy nightmare that is ads. But it's a bit annoying to have to play this game of whack 'a mole.

Still going to use Brave though.

Yes, because as we all know, Google would never shove AI or ads in your face.

I disagree with Mozilla here, too - but you can't cast Chrome as a magic spell. Chrome sucks ass. Google sucks ass. It's trivial to suck less ass than Google.

this is from 2023 and is also mostly wrong on almost all accounts, basically FUD

Probably because they don't want to take on that maintenance burden. Even just letting someone do that and merging it in is opening up a whooooole can of worms.

Firefox focus

I use focus daily, but it’s not a daily driver.

It doesn’t to tabs, and links that the site forces to open in a new tab often don’t work. It also doesn’t do JS well by design.

I use Firefox focus for throw away links I come across, but for everything else I need a full browser

Just so we’re on the same page, you use AppleScript outside the browser, but it interacts with the browser. Some basic use cases:

- Change to first browser tab whose URL or title matches <whatever>.

- Close every browser tab matching <whatever>.

- Grab all your tabs and backup their URLs to a file.

- Join all tabs from all windows into a single window.

- Execute JavaScript on a page and get results back.

- Grab the URL of the current tab and open it in a different browser in a Private window.

- And many more things.

I'm very pleased that disabling browser.ml.enable doesn't disable local translation. I don't need a dedicated UI for chat bots, but I find local translation very useful.

Brave, The browser that brags about how they ignore consent!

Then they should just say so and close the open issues, instead of letting them linger for literal decades and have people waste time on them then ignore them. That’s just bad stewardship.

Anyway, the reasons are irrelevant and I’m frankly tired of explaining this to Firefox defenders. Someone asked “what about Firefox are you missing” and I responded with what it’s missing for me. Plugging your ears and coming up with excuses doesn’t move the needle. Accept it or don’t, it makes no difference. In the meantime I’ll continue being honest with my users that I would like to support Firefox but I can’t, and many of them will keep switching browsers.

Being good doesn't pay well these days. Being evil, on other hand, does.

Given how much resources they've dedicated to lower %, this is not true

It's poorly customizable, you can't even change keyboard shortcuts (extensions can't do it globally either). Vivaldi is customizable.

You can’t open a new tab yourself, but you can open it by long-pressing a link.

If you’re running in a Custom Tab on Android, you need to switch to the full Focus if multiple tabs are involved.

Chrome does suck ass, hence why I use Firefox and said I don't want to use Chrome, lol. But I want Firefox to be a good browser in its own right, not just "not Chrome". Firefox is just about over the "acceptable" line for me, as a power user for 15+ years (and under that line for most normal users) so I continue to use it, but they're neglecting it in favor of these useless AI features.

Got it. Last time I attempted to do this kind of things, I used TabFS (https://github.com/osnr/TabFS). I think you might like it!

I was mainly thinking about userChrome.css changes, which allow you to more or less rebuild the whole UI with code. Can't think of many other browsers that let you do that.

That requires installing a third-party tool which doesn’t look to be under development, and is an entirely different interaction. Thank you, but that’s not adequate.

Longtime Firefox user here too. After the new privacy policy terms, I jumped to waterfox. I’m hoping it can last long enough for Ladybird to become stable enough to use as a daily driver. It’s very sad to watch Mozilla’s demise at the hands of advertisers.

Just wait until someone has the bright idea to expose Apple Events over an MCP server or something. Then everyone will be scrambling to integrate applescript into their applications so they can cash in on the computer-use model craze.

Those are browser automation tasks. Most of them can be done with Playwright/Puppeteer/Selenium.

I don't see why a browser should have to support AppleScript specifically. The Chrome DevTools Protocol and WebDriver BiDi are the standard protocols for interacting with browsers programmatically. Firefox supports WebDriver BiDi. Just use any tool that supports it, or talk to it directly. Maybe AppleScript can do that, I wouldn't know.

No, those are not the same thing. The capabilities and integrations are different, and AppleScript works in a vanilla installation.

I'm really surprised no one has done this.

You don't even need an mcp server. Claude Code can just run osascript. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44492369

Directly writing applescript is kind of terrible syntax (I doubt there is enough high quality data, even humans find it hard to write) and lacks the discoverability portion. The good part of AppleScript is the self-discovery (via scripting dictionary) and the general graphql-RPC-esque nature of apple events.

The features that firefox does not support are few and far between, and, IME, usually things you do not necessarily want supported.

As a user, I do not want nor need my browser to support AppleScript. AppleScript is something that should not exist. In somewhat typical apple fashion, it's some NIH platform-specific bullshit that nobody really cares about and is only half-assed supported even on it's native platform. The only way to deter Apple from creating these sisyphus-ian pieces of software is to just stop supporting them and force their hand to use something less bespoke. Although, Apple is not the only culprit of this - nor are they even the worst about it.

If I had my way, Mantle would not exist, iMessage would not exist, and some others. We would live in a perfect utopia and then we'd all hold hands and sing Kumbaya.

Can you do vertical tabs in userChrome.css? Add tab groups/stacks/side-by-side views/workspaces/custom tab context menus?

(not to diminish the css, it's great for theming and correcting the many usability mistakes in browser defaults, and wish all the browsers used that)

Vertical tabs are a native feature of Firefox for a few months now, and before that they were supported with an extension. userChrome.css was (then) used for hiding the original tabs.

I'm not sure what you mean with the context menus, but Web Extensions can add things to context menus.