Posted by twapi 12/18/2025
(The Mullvad guys took Tor browser for its resistance to fingerprinting and removed the connection the Tor network. You don't need Mullvad VPN to use the browser)
There are more, those are just the ones I can recall.
Waterfox, Librewolf and Mullvad Browser are worth considering.
Librewolf is nice but breaks a lot of stuff, sites that use webrtc or canvas related things, lots of banking sites refuse to load, and some other issues I can't remember.
https://sizeof.cat/post/web-browser-telemetry-2025-edition/
As for webapps breaking in Librewolf, IME those can be fixed by selectively unblocking canvas (or whatever) for the site in question.
At least when I last checked (months ago), none of those features that involve communicating with external servers would work unless you configure them to (i.e. provide credentials to an LLM provider).
Was I wrong? Have things changed?
Getting to the discussion at hand, which of those pings are AI related? I didn't say FF isn't making network calls.
How is it "easy" if nothing is sent unless you configure the AI?
What I'm asking is: If I do a brand new profile, default configuration, how can any AI related feature send anything that is of privacy concern? If you don't set up an LLM provider, it has nowhere to send to.
I may be wrong, which is why I'm asking in the thread. So far, no one has shown what the problem is.
But it also doesn't matter, because that's the kind of distinction that I've seen go back and forth elsewhere.
I agree with:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46316763
278 comments, many very angry, and no one can clearly articulate how privacy is being compromised because of the AI features.
On a project whose source is available.
Insane.
"Open source" doesn't help when it's a huge project and users aren't actively auditing all of the changes. (And in general we want to trust the developers; if you're having to audit all features, trust has already been lost.)
If it was an extension it would be nice if people could fork it with other models. Just like their AI Tab Grouping feature would be much better forked with a deterministic non-AI grouping system.
>We didn't make the back button an extension even though we could have.
The back button isn't even a KB of extra data and and I'd put navigation as the primary job of a web browser.
I'm not against a built in translator, but it's a strange comparison to a back button.
On a slight tangent, I think there's an under talked about boon yo machine translation: it's widely agreedbti be a comoromise and not a source of truth. That wariness has been missing as of late.
This would tap into the insight that not everyone dislikes the same AI features. For many AI isn't a dirty word, but rather they've seen plenty of examples where it's simply annoying or over-taxing resources.
For example some like AI to build a quick reference summary from a set of web results, but don’t want a full agenic-style AI to extend beyond that.
This could potentially entice users not to throw the baby out with the bathwater, and maybe even make a few converts.
https://youtube.com/shorts/FObvkFtr2ZU?si=U6fCphjmGcNMb5ac
Until they change this back they are not trustworthy at all.