In Abrowser 145.0.2 general settings: "Use AI to suggest tabs ..."
Last night updated Trisquel 11.0. Checking the Abrowser settings afterwards, it's now 145.0.2, noted that under "General" - "Tabs", the last box was prechecked(!): "Use AI to suggest tabs and a name for tab groups" In my opinion, this should not be included at all, and certainly NOT prechecked!
Another thing: in "Privacy & Security" - "Permissions" - "Autoplay Settings..." has two things already written in it:
about:welcome Allow Audio and Video
about:welcome^privateBrowsingID=1 Allow Audio and Video
I've pressed "Remove all websites" and pressed "Save Changes", changed it to "Block Audio and Video" for both and pressed "Save Changes", but my preferences don't get saved, when I look at it again after closing this window, the two things are still written in there.
I've looked at "What's new" for Abrowser 145.0.2, which takes one to
https://trisquel.info/en/wiki/abrowser-help
where it mentions Machine Learning: "Machine learning and LLM introduce privacy issues when using third party services, and for local models they need to be vetted and establish some level of trust by the user. This tool is disabled by default, you can manage this by searching for browser.ml in about:config."
When searching for browser.ml in about:config, I count 47 lines that contain browser.ml Do I (not good with tech) need to change anything there to make sure Abrowser won't use AI, or it's all good as entered there?
Thanks in advance to the people looking into these things!
I am a translator!
under "General" - "Tabs", the last box was prechecked(!): "Use AI to suggest tabs and a name for tab groups"
With abrowser 145.0.2 on Ecne, I don't see any such option. Maybe it is because I don't use tab groups?
Do I (not good with tech) need to change anything there to make sure Abrowser won't use AI
From reading https://blog.mozilla.org/en/category/firefox/firefox-ai/, it seems a system called "Transformer" (I find the name "AI" too vague, and generally completely meaningless) is used for these tab group names, to provide alt text for certain images, for link previews (to make a summary) and for translation.
I am not sure about how to control the alt text generation. For the other features, I guess that if you don't use them, no transformer will be used anyway.
Reading how companies train the models for their transformers, this make me think that I should not trust them at all. This trend reminds me of 30 years ago when many people were expecting computers to always say things that are right. However, as my colleagues used to say: garbage in, garbage out.
> With abrowser 145.0.2 on Ecne, I don't see any such option.
This seems to depend on your locale.
I am getting that checkbox (checked by default) on both Trisquel 11 and 12 with the default English US locale, but not on a Trisquel 11 system where the language for Abrowser is set to French.
The AI function initially was avariable in the version 143 to 144, but since the security update of Abrowser 144.0.2 in the Trisquel Aramo build, that option has been hidden for those that uses the locales. However, the AI options seems to be butchered from the source code in the same way than Iceweasel from Parabola GNU/Linux-libre, which makes that function as a mere engraving than a real function.
And about the "AI/fuzzy logic" feature of Transformer, it seems that was a revival of Mozilla Ubiquity that usually serves for that purpose. However, I tested it on my netbook and the performance seems to be lighter than the custom build of a patched Firefox binary for Windows Vista, which the performance seems to be more penalized than running Abrowser for Trisquel. Unfortunately, the AI/Fuzzy Logic feature depends so much of usage and/or browsing history, bringing so much heruistical results more often than pre-scripted history-based features. TL;DR: Even using the LISP engine of Emacs on Abrowser seems to be more useful and transparent than Firefox Transformer engine that could bring you buggy results.