No AI is a nice feature; Chromium is not. For those who feel like I do, LibreWolf is a version of Firefox that appears to strip most if not all AI, and being a Firefox fork means that it’s also not Chromium. It also uses more privacy-conscious settings by default.
You are aware translation services are available that are neither a local LLM nor Google-owned, yes? We had machine translation before ChatGPT existed, and I don’t think that tech evaporated in a sudden fire just because a more harmful option appeared.
The appropriate option for Mozilla would’ve been to not include AI at all. If they really, really couldn’t have swung that (they could’ve), then the second best option would be having all AI features set to off-by-default. Instead, we’ve got on-by-default. That is unambiguously a terrible idea.
Considering the negative impacts LLMs have on so many facets of life today, that’s kinda the problem. Running it locally only solves some of those.
Fundamentally though, I just don’t want the tech involved in my life at all anymore. I don’t care if it has a niche use here or not. It can just fuck off.