After Donald Trump’s second election, I realised the insidious hold my phone had over my life. So I turned to something I’d loved in childhood to better occupy my attention

I’m currently working on the KCNA Kubernetes Certification. This might come as a surprise to anyone who knows me, given that I’ve – hopefully subtly – eye-rolled when clients say they’re using…

Firefox is my web browser of choice. It does a lot of things right. In particular, with the uBlock Origin add-on, it’s got the best ad blocking you can get on desktop and Android. Firefox is run by a charity, Mozilla. Unfortunately, the AI bros have found their way to the top of Mozilla. And over the past year, Firefox has been adding as much chatbot garbage as they can get away with. In January, Mozilla AI product lead Jolie Huang posted about a great new extra feature in Firefox: [_Mozilla_] > after an initial soft launch, we’re gradually rolling out the AI Chatbot access to everyone. They seeded the comments with Mozilla employees being really excited about the feature! The astroturf didn’t work. The users were not happy. A lot of users pointed out the obvious thing — if you want to add a chatbot to Firefox, why not make it an … add-on? You could do all the chatbot stuff in Mozilla with add-ons. So people could _opt in_ to using the chatbot. If you cared about user choice. Finally this month, Mozilla got a new CEO, Anthony Enzor-Demeo. Anthony is a product manager with an MBA, not one of those _programmers_. What’s Anthony’s vision for Firefox? [_Mozilla_] > It will evolve into a modern AI browser. Enzor-Demeo’s already done deals with Perplexity, and he’s got AI plans for the next three years. Enzor-Demeo did a puff piece interview with the Verge, where he floated the idea of blocking ad blockers in Firefox. You could sure make money that way! [_Verge_] > He says he could begin to block ad blockers in Firefox and estimates that’d bring in another $150 million, but he doesn’t want to do that. Enzor-Demeo has been running the Firefox team for the last year. The AI stuff is his doing. And we’ve experienced his attitude to user consent. When Anthony says he definitely won’t do something, he means “maybe later”. So we should expect Firefox to break the adblockers some time next year. Firefox has heard the backlash to the CEO’s comments — that is, everyone hates this. So they sent Jake Archibald, a Developer Relations guy — a job title that means PR damage control — to reassure us that Mozilla’s going to make AI opt-in! And they’ll put in an AI kill switch! Now, you might think for two seconds and go “if it’s opt in … why do I need a kill switch?” And you’re right to think that! Because here’s Jake asking, well, what does opt-in _mean, really,_ when you _think_ about it? [_Bluesky_ _,__archive_] > I’ve spoken to a lot of folks about what counts as opt-in. Some say a toolbar button that does nothing until pressed is opt-in. Some say the only acceptable opt-in is a build-time flag that would need manually compiled. So it’s a grey area. That’s the words of a guy you need to watch your drink around. Well, if you don’t like all this rat poop in your food, you can just pick it out! There’s a pile of browser settings. They’re in the hidden settings, under about:config, which Firefox warns you not to touch. You search on “browser.ml” and you disable them all. So guess what Mozilla did? When you update Firefox, tt re-enables the AI! And if you disable the AI again, it re-enables it again next update! Choose correctly, user! Jake also made out he didn’t know about the AI switching itself back on with every update. He’s lying. The users have been yelling about it for months. He knows. Meanwhile, Firefox updates, and deploys another new AI feature — “Use AI to suggest tabs.” A perfect dumb AI feature, when you have no idea what to do with the chatbot and make up something to solve a problem that doesn’t exist. But guess what? Firefox _defaults it to enabled!_ Very opt-in! [_Bluesky_] Firefox has fallen to AI brain rot. But David — what can we do? Is there something we can use instead of Firefox or Chrome? No. Your alternatives all suck. There’s two browser engines that work — Chrome and Firefox. They’re your choices. Anything Chrome-based has bad adblocking, because Google made it that way. Look up Manifest v3, which Google added to Chrome to sabotage ad blockers. The least-worst of the Chrome reskins is Vivaldi, which has no AI. It has its own adblocker, but it’s not as good a blocker as FIrefox with uBlock Origin. And Vivaldi’s not open source. But they’re relatively non-evil. I’m going to get a bunch of gullible fools recommending Brave. Brave was founded by Brendan Eich, the inventor of JavaScript, after he was kicked out of Mozilla for being a massive homophobe. Brave is into weird cryptocurrency nonsense and I’ve written up their dodgy behaviours in the past. Brave also has a whole webpage about how much they love AI. So Brave is not the non-AI option. Stop recommending people use Brave. [_Brave_] Some bozo’s going to say Ladybird, which is an unfinished experimental browser that doesn’t work. Project leader Andreas Kling has a number of bad opinions, like his endorsement of the white replacement conspiracy theory. [_Twitter_] But almost as bad, Andreas Kling vibe-codes Ladybird with Copilot. Yeah, Ladybird’s going to go great. Feel the _vibe shift_. [_YouTube_] Servo’s another unfinished experimental browser. Servo is progressing well, but it doesn’t work yet either. Send them some money. But they’re not a browser yet. [_Servo_] So what I’m actually going to do is stay on Firefox until the AI is intolerable. Then I’ll move to one of the spinoffs. If you cannot tolerate the AI in Firefox, there’s a lot of good and noble spinoffs of Firefox, like Librewolf and Waterfox, or IronFox on Android. All of these three have stated very loudly they’re not using generative AI. They don’t have the resources to run a whole browser engine, so they still depend on Firefox. But they seem pretty nice. On my phone, I stick to Firefox with uBlock Origin. It’s the best mobile browser with ad blocking. Even gets the YouTube ads. If you watch Pivot to AI with uBlock Origin, feel free to drop me some pennies if you have any. * _Video_ _—_ _Podcast_ ### Share this post: * Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) Facebook * Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window) LinkedIn * Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window) Reddit * Click to share on X (Opens in new window) X * Click to share on Mastodon (Opens in new window) Mastodon * Click to share on Bluesky (Opens in new window) Bluesky * Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window) Email * ### Like this: Like Loading... ### _Related_

After 25 years building sites for global brands, I kept seeing the same pattern appear. A team ships new features, users quietly begin to struggle, and only later do the bug reports start trickling…

A collection of bad practices in HTML, copied from real websites.

When I explain the difference between lab (aka synthetic) and field data to people, one of the things I mention is that the lab allows for testing under repeatable, controlled conditions. Each test…

A collection of bad practices in HTML, copied from real websites.

Most HTML documents are relatively small, providing a starting point for other resources on the page to load. But why do some websites load several megabytes of HTML code? Usually it's not that…

A collection of bad practices in HTML, copied from real websites.

If you have a statically generated website hosted on a CDN, it’s probably very fast (unless you add too much client-side JavaScript). However, for dynamically generated pages that load content from a…

A collection of bad practices in HTML, copied from real websites.

Move by firm, owned by US group Avis Budget, will remove access to shared fleet across London at end of year

The Apple Calculator leaked 32GB of RAM.

Scott Galloway is a lead developer and software engineer with a passion for building web applications.

A minimal static web server written in COBOL. Contribute to jmsdnns/webbol development by creating an account on GitHub.

npm author Qix’s account was compromised, with malicious versions of popular packages like chalk-template, color-convert, and strip-ansi published.

llms.txt is an emerging standard for making content such as docs available for direct consumption by AIs. We’re proposing a convention to include such content directly in HTML responses.

Images in long-form content can (and often should) do more than illustrate. They help set the pace, influence how readers feel, and add character that words alone can’t always convey.

Chrome turns 17 this week, and it feels like a good time to reflect on how far we have come in terms of Chromes guiding principles

The singer, who later became famous on reality TV show The Osbournes, dies less than three weeks after retirement concert

Research papers found carrying hidden white text giving instructions not to highlight negatives as concern grows over use of large language models for peer review

Aaed Musa built a wrist-mounted launcher for Mini CDs that fires 5 discs per second for some real-life Fruit Ninja fun.

Until now, Google's Android XR glasses had only appeared in carefully curated teaser videos and limited hands-on previews shared with select publications. These early glimpses hinted at...