people please actually read the article not the headline; this is literally about accessibility improvements for blind and visually impaired people for generating alt text inside of documents and pdfs.
That’s one of the things, but it’s also adding a dedicated sidebar for AI. That’s the sort of thing that should just be an extension, there’s absolutely no reason at all why that needs to be something built into the browser.
Developers should be providing alt text themselves, but in cases where they aren’t having a local image recognition model running to provide a description isn’t terrible as long as it’s either 100% local or completely opt-in.
The dedicated sidebar on the other hand feels very much like a cheap attempt to cash in on the AI fad.
That’s the sort of thing that should just be an extension
It most likely is on the technical level, just shipped by default and integrated into standard settings instead of the add-on ones. And it’s going to be opt-in, so you won’t have to go into about:config to disable it. Speaking of: You’re looking for extensions.pocket.enabled, it should be false. And before you say “muh diskspace” it’s probably like 5k of js and css or such.
Many of the people complaining about a feature they would just disable and never use are also the same kinds of people who would complain about basic accessibility features and call them “unnecessary bloat”.
Blind people shouldn’t need to give up their privacy to Microsoft and Google to have a web page read to them.
