Wonder if they also removed the local AI translation, which I find very useful, but it’s also another black box.
Correct, Tor browser doesn't include the local translation feature.
Are all of these AI features not transparent?
More or less. I think it's a fork of Project Bergamot, so not a black box in the usual sense (anyone can inspect it), but perhaps still inscrutable for most people.
it appears I have to make Tor my baseline browser :( lot's of stuff that doesn't require tor-connections, too - so it's gonna feel like a dial-up modem again. Fuck LLMs
Mullvad browser is probably the most restrictive non-Tor browser. I like Librewolf; has a good compromise on usability and privacy, IMO. I've been using Tor a bit more lately, and it wasn't extremely slow like I remember either, just have to deal with a lot of Captchas and Cloudflare. The NSA and CIA must have beefed up the network :)
I don't want TOR or anything that even remotely has to do with it. What other AI-free alternatives are out there?
Librewolf, only has an offline machine translation
other alternative, Mullvad browser but I haven't tried.