But the alt text generation already leverages a self-hosted LLM. So either Mozilla is going to cook in hundreds of extra megabytes of data for their installs, or people with accessibility issues are going to have to download something extra anyway. (IIRC it’s the latter).

We could talk all day about things that Mozilla could add out of the box that would make the user experience better. How about an ad blocker? They can be like Opera, Brave, Vivaldi, even the most ambitious Firefox fork LibreWolf.

But for some reason they went with injecting something into Firefox that nobody was asking for, and I don’t think it aligns at all with the average Firefox users needs or wants. Normies don’t use Firefox. They use a browser that doesn’t raise “switch to Chrome or Edge” messages. And if there was some subset of Firefox users who were begging Mozilla for AI, I never saw them. Where were they?

The alt text generation is done locally. That was the big justification Mozilla used when they announced the feature.

I’m talking about the non-local ChatGPT stuff.

What are they missing? So far, all they’ve added is a sidebar and a couple extra right-click menu additions. Both of these are available for all extensions.

And yet, Mozilla went for the 10% that do violate your privacy and gives your data to the biggest corporations: Google, Microsoft, OpenAI.

What happened to the Mozilla Manifesto?

If it was truly opt-in, it could be an extension. They should not be bundling this with the browser, bloating it more in the process.

AI already has ethical issues, and environmental issues, and privacy issues, and centralization issues. You technically can run your own local AI, but they hook up to the big data-hungry ones out of the box.

Look at the Firefox subreddit. One month ago, people were criticizing the thought of adding AI to Firefox. Two months ago, same thing. Look at the Firefox community. See how many times people requested AI.

Your bank probably wants to make sure your account isn’t being hacked. Either they think you’re using a VPN, and they believe it could be a malicious person from literally anywhere, or they think you’re in Sweden, and they have no idea how you got there.

It’s cases like these where you might want to temporarily disable the VPN or make a special exception for your banking app, but that’s up to you.

I bring up “the email incident” because it’s a reminder that Proton may record stuff that’s not encrypted, which includes the vast majority of emails.

And it’s not to say that you wouldn’t trust it with one individual service, but whether it’s wise to trust it with so many services at once, from a security, privacy, and even monetary perspective.

Not every concern is FUD, and I think you’ll start seeing diminishing returns every time you repeat it.

There’s a lot of metadata Proton passes around, and two of their oldest flagship products (email and VPN) require you to put a lot of trust in one company. For email, you trust them to encrypt them without snooping. For VPN, you trust them to not collect logs about where you’re going.

And in the former case, they were compelled to give up at least a little data in the not-so-distant past.